Excerpt From "Billie Holiday" by John Szwed

8/9/2019 Excerpt From "Billie Holiday" by John Szwed.

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“From Billie Holiday by John Szwed, to be published on March 31, 2015 by i!in", an imprint o# $en"uin

$ublishin" %roup, a di&ision o# $en"uin 'andom (ouse ))*+ *opyri"ht by John Szwed, 2015+

When Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings t he Blues was published in 1956, it received a surprising amount of attention for a a!!

sin

ger ’s autobiography" #t was written in a direct and often streetwise style, and its apparent openness and honesty was

shoc$ing to many" %he boo$ was widely reviewed, but often condemned for ust those &ualities"

By 1956 a!! had moved from being the popular music of 19'(s )merica to a more rarefied place in the public’s view" #t

was on its way to becoming a minority music in every sense of the word" #ts stars could still occasionally be f ound in the

news, but it was now being guarded by a new breed of critics who were promoting a!! as )mer ica’s only tr ue art form"

*ost of the writers were closet high modernists who wanted no mention of drugs, whorehouses, or lynching brought into

discussions of the music" %o them the content and even the style of Holiday’s boo$ seemed misguided, and they saw the

financial motivation for it as a per+ sonal affront" #t was more than they wanted to $now about Billie Holi+ day" ,alph

-leason in the San Francisco Chronicle &uestioned the .pseudo+fran$ness laced with profanity that made it

sensationali!ed reading, and the blind resentment that made it compelling"/ %he Satur - day R ev i ew ’s Whitney Balliett

&uestioned the .high decibels in which the reader is given only a superficial picture of the author and virtually nothingabout her art"/ Harvey Breit in the New York Times regretted that the tragic sense she so powerfully demonstrated in her

songs was

lac$ing in her boo$" Her integrity and sincerity were not enough to move a sensitive reader0 .%he hard surface of her

manner prevents *iss Holiday from pausing in her narrative to discuss, say, a song, a deliver y, an esthetic response, a

disinterested observation"/ rrin 2eepnews in Record Changer critici!ed the boo$ as a betrayal of the whole cause of

a!! and of those who fought the .constant negative battle to $eep a!! f rom being so completely publicly misunderstood"/

W hen Holiday wrote, .# guess that #’m not the only one who heard their first good a!! in a whorehouse,/ she was

spea$ing the tr uth, but it was a clich3 that a generation of a!! writers had attempted to forget" 4inda 2uehl ’s un+ published

udgment of the boo$ was the harshest" .he was writing for money to support a drug habit, and for publicity to ma$e it

appear that she was off the habit and to get her bac$ her cabaret card"/ %he cab+ aret card was a license re&uired of allperformers who wor$ed in show+ places that served alcohol, and one for which they were finger pr inted and

photographed when they applied for it" Holiday had lost hers in19'7 after conviction on drug charges and had not

appeared in a 8ew or$ :ity nightclub for the previous eight year s"; 8at Hentoff was one of the few willing to accept the

boo$ as a cautionary tale and observed in Down Beat maga!ine that it would .help those who want to under+ stand how

her voice became what it was<the most hurt and hurting singer in a!!"/

4ater, attentive readers began to discover that some of the events and dates in the boo$ were wrong, or, worse, possibly

fabricated, and Lady Sings the Blues has been clouded by doubt ever since" %he trouble began in the first paragraph0 .*om

and =op were ust a couple of $ids when they got married" He was eighteen, she was seventeen, and # was three "/

,eaders shoo$ their heads in dismay at the vision of little Billie as a flower girl at her parents’ wedding, but her accoun

was not cor rect" W hen Billie was born, her mother was nineteen, her father seventeen" %hey never married and had neverlived together in a little house with a pic$et fence on >urham treet in Baltimore" he was born not in Balti+ more but in

=hiladelphia" ome &uestioned her claim of having been raped at age ten" *usic world insiders too$ issue with some of he

rough comments about fellow singers and managers" ) number of songwriters were angry over her claims of partial

authorship of their wor $"

)s time went by, newly discovered evidence supported some of her claims" But the f undamental &uestions remained0 W hy

should an auto+ biography cause so much discomfort and suspicion? W hat could be reasonably e@pected from an

autobiography? houldn’t an author have the right to create a self diff erent from what readers thin$ they already $now about



her? #f an autobiography is an account of a woman’s e@per iences, those e@periences may be felt in one way as they

happen, but in a completely diff erent way later in li f e"

W hat was perceived by some as lies or e@aggerations in Holiday’s boo$ were largely matters of interpretation,childhood

memories, and slips of fact, not the sort of self+serving rewritings of personal history common in many autobiographies

of the famous" Arench chanteuse dith =iaf, for e@ample, lived a life that paralleled Holiday’s own in its poverty,

alcoholism, and abuse by men" =iaf also developed a persona of tragedy and sorrow that radiated from her songs, wrote two

autobiographies that apparently fabricated stories of childhood blindness and li f e+ long destitution, and answered chargesthat she was a collaborationist by claiming heroics in helping prisoners escape from the 8a!is"

ne response to the &uestion of truth in Holiday’s boo$ was to regard hers as diff erent from other autobiographies"

,obert ’*eally, in Lady Day The !any Faces o" Billie #oliday , viewed what she had written as .a dream boo$, a collection of

Holiday’s wishes and lies,/ a boo$ that had to be interpreted in that light, as one of many faces she presented to the public"

)s a vocal ar tist, ’*eal ly suggests, she had approached songs as a series of .confrontations,/ in which she creatively

reshaped the musical material and the traditions that lay behind it" %he power she discovered in doing so became her

way of capturing an audience’s attention and belief" *ore recently, Aarah -riffin, in $" You C an% t Be Free& Be a !ystery ,

as$ed how those who believe the boo$ was written entirely by her coauthor can also accuse her of lying"

)nother way of putting it is to see Lady Sings the Blues as a form of autobiographical fiction" *uch of what we read about

her elsewhere tells us that this was really Billie Holiday spea$ing in the boo$" But a certain amount of withholding of certainaspects of her life or changing of f acts was a form of editing on her part" )lthough the >oubleday editors struc$ out

some passages in fear of potential lawsuits, Holiday’s own changes or omissions were perhaps a means of preventing

readers f r om $nowing too much, of distancing herself to $eep from being too closely identified with how others saw her, and

especially from what the press had written about her" he chose not to see herself as others did, and what might appear

to be a pr ivate communication between the writer and the reader is ultimately as illusory as believing a singer is

communicating directly to a listener in her audience"

Arom the beginning, Billie posed for photographers together with William >ufty, her collaborator on Lady Sings the Blues, as

coauthors" >ufty gave interviews on his own before and after the boo$ came out, address+ ing many issues concerning it in

interviews and newspaper articles, including &uestions about particular facts and his own role in the wr iting" )t the time,

Harry 5" %ruman was publishing the first of his memoirs with >oubleday, and >ufty responded to the matter of errors orlies in Holiday’s autobiography by as$ing what cowriter was going to tell =resident Harry %ruman that he should chec$ his

facts" )re the sub ect’s memories of e@periences not sufficient to create an autobiography? Who was responsible for ma$ing

the decision about tr uthf ulness when a subect’s memories failed to s&uare with those of others? #f the uni&ueness of an

autobiography is that it is built on the personal memories and observations of the subect, should the cowriter or

ghostwriter &uestion the subect or urge her to change her thoughts on her own past?

>ufty said he was not going to be a fact+chec$er for BillieC the words were hers" But that was part of the problem, for whenerrors were discovered in the boo$ or material was f ound obectionable, many chose to believe they were not, in fact, herwords" ome have insisted that she couldn’t write, and she sometimes did apologi!e for not being able to write better"et she did compose some lyrics, and sent letters to music business people, her editor, and friends, though many to thelatter were unpunctuated" thers even &uestioned her ability to read, and &uoted her one remar$ about never having

read her own boo$<which has in fact been a standard dodge of many celebrities when they don’t wish to discuss or ust ifya topic in a coauthored boo$" he had certainly read Lady Sings the Blues, since she commented on many portions of it,both in galleys, at the insistence of >oubleday, and in published form, in her letters and in comments to the >uftys and to

ournal ists" he also read reviews of the boo$ and complained about some of them in detail"

%here was also the issue of >ufty’s being a white coauthor, an issue that has plagued )f rican )merican autobiographical

writing at least since olomon 8orthup wrote Twelve Years a Slave in 1D5E, when other+ wise sympathetic readers

suspected that the truth of his narrative was clouded by the conventions of antislavery writing and the e@pectat ions of

abolitionists" ) hundred years later, some of the same doubts arose about the autobiographies of a!! musicians such as

idney Bechet and 4ouis )rmstrong, who also had white cowr iter s"



ome of those suspicious of Holiday’s boo$ point out that Wil liam >ufty was a tabloid ournalist, and thus a .hac$"/ >ufty

did indeed write for a tabloid+si!e newspaper, but it was the New York 'ost , when that publication was still staffed by

some of the best ournal ists in the city" He came to the paper with a bac$ground as a labor organi!er for the Fnited

)utomobile Wor$ers, an editor of the union newsletter The C$( News, and a publicity director for enator Hubert

Humphrey" He had won awards for his 'ost articles on G" Hdgar Hoover ’s troubled leadership of the AB#, the plight of new

=uerto ican immigrants in 8ew or$ :ity, and the failures of drug laws and medical treatment<a twelve+part se+ ries

called .>rug )ddicts, F)"/ When he ended his career at the 'ost , he was assistant to the editor" He coauthored over fortyboo$s, including biographies of the 4ehman brothers, -loria wanson, and the son of d+ ward -" obinson, as well as

those of an e@+model and an e@ I:atholic priest" He contributed to You )re )ll San*aku, the bible of macr obiotics, and wrote

Sugar Blues, two boo$s that fed the fears of those in the si@ties who saw conventional f ood as an enemy, boo$s that also

landed him in the company of f ood cultists Gohn 4ennon, o$o 1no, and -loria wan+ son, whom he later marr ied"

>ufty met Billie Holiday through his first wife, *aely >aniele, a Gewish war camp refugee who f ound her way into several

diff erent lives in )merica<a wr iter, a %J tal$ show hostess, and a civil rights activist who boo$ed a!! musicians and

wor$ed to get their drug charges dropped" 4ater she was involved with various social action groups in Harlem and the

8avao 8ation" When she met >ufty, she had ust divorced the former child film actor Areddie Bartholomew of Little Lord

Fauntleroy fame, for whom sh

e’d

been a press agent" #n 1955 *aely invited Billie to use the >uftys’ fifth+floor apartment onWest ighty+si@th treet ust as she had used some other apartments in 8ew or$ :ity; for a place of refuge from the

police, her husband 4ouis *c2ay, report+ ers, and the various unsavory figures who haunted her life" .# $new enough to

$eep my trap shut about anything she was doing in my place or anywhere,/ >ufty recalled" .he was always involved in

some love tr iangle"/

Both Billie and Bill were raised as :atholics, and >ufty felt that they shared enough #rish in their >8), religious e@periences,

and senses of humor that despite their very diff erent bac$grounds they could wor$ well together" Billie was staying with

the >uftys when their son Bevan was born, and she became the child’s godmother "

#n the mid+195(s Holiday was in financial trouble0 he owed money to her record companies and the #, she was still

unable to wor$ in 8ew or$ :ity nightclubs, and her reputation as an unreliable per f ormer reduced the offers she receivedfrom venues in other cities and countries" Boo$s by stars who revealed their afflictions and miseries were then selling

well and brea$ing the hold that publicists had long had on what the public could $now about them" 4illian oth’s $ % ll Cry

T omor row and >iana Barr ymore’s Too !uch& Too Soon had been successf ul enough to be turned into movies" everal

people had already approached Billie about writing her own boo$, the latest one a writer from *iami she’d met while

appearing at the Janity Aair :lub, but Billie f ound him impossible to wor$ with, as she had the others" he was especially put

off by the writers at +,ony who had ghosted first+person articles under her name and, according to >ufty, had her

.sounding li$e a freshman at arah 4awrence"/

W hen Billie returned from some performances in Alorida in Gune 1955, Bill began handling correspondence for her,writing to boo$ers and club owners on her behalf and sometimes finding musicians for her gigs" W hile she was staying inhis apartment, she read a bit of a manuscript he was wor$ing on, and they began to tal$ about it and her own story, andthe trouble she had had with previous writers" He suggested that he could write it for her, to which she agreed, and whenhe as$ed her how she wanted to approach the proect, she replied, .9ou’re the wr iter , #’m the singer" ou write it"/ ) contractwas drawn up in which she got 65 percent and he E5 percent, with his e@penses .securing court records and other datafor the wor $ / to be ta$en from the first royalties" Billie retained 9( percent and >ufty 1( percent of all other rights" heagreed to wor$ ointly with him and give him her life story" )ny diff erences be+ tween the two of them on content and stylewere to be resolved by the publisher" #t was agreed that .no agent or bro$er brought about the >oubleday agreement"/

With this understanding, they began to get together at regular hours after he came home from wor$ at the 'ost " Billie

made it clear that she did not want to have her conversations recorded on tape" .he would al+ ways reprimand you for not

paying attention" ou had to go along with her way of doing things" %hat ’s ust the way she was" " " " 5he had an air of total



dignity, her wit was situational " " " she was absolutely, def ensively, herself" " " " )t times it was very frustrating" he wouldn’t

be in the mood and would get angry at something # said, and leave my apartment " " " but as she stepped into the elevator

the remar$s she made in anger to me would illumine a whole passage"/

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Excerpt From "Billie Holiday" by John Szwed