Free Billie Holiday by John Szwed Page B

and whites cannot be accepted by Iowa, Missouri, not to mention all the people the other side of the Mason/Dixon line. You probably know the feeling of RKO better than I on all these things. But your doings are certainly stirring them up.
    Filming was halted abruptly within a day or two, and though Welles tried to keep the project alive with his own money, he was unable to finish it. Orson never completed his jazz film but kept the idea alive by hiring the same New Orleans musicians (minus Armstrong, whom even he couldn’t afford) as house band for his radio show in the early forties, and by producing
Years of Jazz
,
a weekly history of jazz for Armed Forces Radio Service in 1944.
    New Orleans
Without Welles
    After World War II ended, Majestic Pictures, an independent film company working under the RKO umbrella, decided to adapt
The Story of Jazz
using parts of Elliot Paul’s jazz script and casting for
It’s All True
and merge it with another Paul script, “Conspiracy in Jazz,” but without Orson Welles and Duke Ellington. The new film was intended as a conventional history of jazz, jazz then understood as having been invented in New Orleans, with Louis Armstrong as its most important figure. It was aimed at predominantly white audiences in all parts of the country with a story with which they could identify, and if there was enough black presence in the film to pick up an African American audience, all the better. It was a tricky formula, and one that had already produced some bad Hollywood films.
    Whenplans for the film, now titled
New Orleans
,
were announced, there was immediate excitement among jazz writers and African American journalists, who foresaw a movie that celebrated black contributions to America and, through its casting, would not involve segregation or dilution of the music. Despite the popularity of jazz in the early 1940s, there was still only a vague grasp of its history and meaning. Was it high art or folk art? Music for dancing or close listening? Vulgar trash or spiritually redemptive? Best when played by blacks or whites? All of these issues were raised by the story line of
New Orleans
.
    The script that producer Jules Levey chose centered on Miralee, the daughter of a wealthy New Orleans family who returns from studying opera in Europe and finds her mother’s maid (played by Billie) secretly playing the piano and singing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” in their palatial home. This apparent infraction of household rules was more significant then than it may now seem: An African American maid in the 1940s should not have been discovered playing the piano and singing while at work, and most certainly should not have been singing a love song. Fascinated by what she hears, the daughter then orders her maid to take her to Storyville, where she witnesses Holiday singing with the Louis Armstrong band in the cellar of a gambling establishment, and is instantly converted to jazz and life in the underworld. Wringing of hands follows among the whites, but there is no stopping the young woman, who, in the throes of discovery, decides that she will become a jazz singer herself, especially after she falls in lovewith the club owner and finds the conductor of the New Orleans Symphony also secretly attending these nightly jam sessions. Against better judgment, she insists on performing one of Holiday’s songs as an encore at her first concert of classical music in the city and watches the audience walk out in disgust.
    When Storyville is closed, the black performers of the district march out together, with Billie singing in the lead (with what is said to be the voice of an uncredited Ethel Waters dubbed in for Holiday’s). A diaspora of New Orleans’s black musicians follows, and Chicago soon becomes the magnet that draws jazz musicians to the city. Then, in a strange ending, all the African Americans who populated the film disappear; the opera singer