Free Billie Holiday by John Szwed Page A

numbers of Hollywood’s elite who were excited about the mixing of social and political themes in a Broadway-type setting. When Orson Welles saw the piece, he approached Ellington after the show and asked to meet with him the next morning at RKO. Orson had been planning a film, to be called
The
Story of Jazz
, that would be one section of a sprawling four-part anthology movie. He proposed to Ellington that they write it together, with Duke acting as musical director and composer. Louis Armstrong would appear as himself and be the focus of the film; pianist and singer Hazel Scott would play Lil, Louis’s wife; and a long list of New Orleans musicians were to appear as themselves, speaking in their own vernacular. When he met Holiday three months later and struck up an affair with her,he asked herto play the role of Bessie Smith, and invited her to come to the studios with him where he was preparing to start production on
The Magnificent Ambersons
.
    Welles began his own research on jazz, songs were selected, the musicians were interviewed for ideas, and Armstrong wrote him a short autobiography. The script was written by Elliot Paul, a writer for Welles’s radio shows and a pianist who had studied boogie-woogie with one of its masters, Albert Ammons. In the script that emerged, a young Louis Armstrong is discovered by trumpeter Joe “King” Oliver and develops into the spark that brought jazz into full flower in New Orleans. But then Storyville, the city’s entertainment district, is closed by the secretaries of the army and navy in 1917 to protect recruits heading for Europe in World War I from vice and corruption. Now out of work, Armstrong leaves town by a Mississippi riverboat and relocates to Chicago, where jazz flourishes and spreads across the country.It soon becomes a worldwide phenomenon, and Armstrong travels to London and Paris, where he is celebrated as an
artiste
.
    What might have been material for a conventional musical biopic was instead intended to be radically innovative, mixing together different styles of jazz, using the surrealist drawings of Oskar Fischinger, and becoming the first film to celebrate the life of an African American.
    Before the film could begin production, though, the United States was attacked by Japan on December 7, and priorities shifted everywhere. Even the movies changed almost overnight. Two days after the attack, RKO stockholder Nelson Rockefeller and the director of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, John Hay Whitney, approached Welles with the idea of going to Brazil as a goodwill ambassador, where he would produce films with the cooperation of the Brazilian government to help stave off the rise of fascism in Latin America. Welles’s first thought was to make a film of Brazilian Carnival that could be connected to
The Story of Jazz
and would show the social and cultural importance of the Afro-Brazilian event by paralleling it in the film to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Both could be a part of the anthology filmthat he was planning to call
It’s All True
. RKO agreed to fund it, with the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs picking up any losses. But as shooting of the Rio Carnival got under way, and the studio saw that Welles was highlighting the origins of the event in the poorest sections of the city and focusing on the everyday interaction of races in Brazil, the moguls feared the material would come as an unwelcome surprise to white Americans, and became uneasy with the project. Dr. Maurice Bernstein, Welles’s guardian after his parents died, wrote Orson on May 14, 1942, that RKO was on the verge of shutting down the film and not renewing his contract:
    Today, I was at your studio and got an earful. First, that RKO is frantic about your expenses, both personal and in making the picture in South America. One million feet of color film when only 12,000 can be used. And in addition, your mixing of the blacks