Some biographies of artists take in the whole life—preferably with equal attention to the work, and integrating the two elements to the extent that the work invites it. Others offer a bio-slice or synecdoche, centered on one particular period, relationship, or field of activity to provide an exemplary angle on the life and work. John Szwed’s brief but revelatory new book, “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth” (Viking), which comes out this week—just under the wire for her centenary (Holiday was born April 7, 1915)—is in another category. It’s a meta-biography, about the creation of Holiday’s public image in media of all sorts: print, television, movies, and, of course, her recordings, but with special attention to the composition of her autobiography, “Lady Sings the Blues,” which was published in 1956.
Szwed, whose other books include a superb biography of Sun Ra, “Space is the Place,” reconstructs, through ardent archival research as well as his own interviews, the circumstances of the making of Holiday’s book. In the process, he both evaluates the first-hand significance of “Lady Sings the Blues” as Holiday’s factual and emotional account of her own life—as a record of Holiday’s experiences and ideas—and also, secondarily, treats the writing and the publication of the book as important events in Holiday’s life. She died on July 17, 1959, at the age of forty-four, and had been suffering from liver disease and heart disease. She was, as she writes, addicted to heroin “on and off” since the early nineteen-forties. Szwed says that, when she went to the hospital in 1959, “No one at the hospital knew who she was, and with needle marks on her body, she was left in the hall for hours, since the institution was not allowed to treat drug addicts.”
Holiday’s recording career was precocious: she made her first records in 1933, with a small group headed by Benny Goodman (who wasn’t yet a big-band leader). On the very first page of the first chapter, Szwed writes wisely about the timing of Holiday’s own book, nothing that at the time it was published, “jazz had moved from being the popular music of 1940s America to a more rarefied place in the public view.” This fact, for Szwed, mitigated the response that Holiday’s book received. The critics now defending jazz were mainly “closet high modernists who wanted no mention of drugs, whorehouses, or lynching brought into discussions of the music.” And those are among the subjects addressed, in unsparing detail, in Holiday’s book. (Among the critics who attacked the book was Whitney Balliett, this magazine’s longtime jazz critic, who wrote about it in the Saturday Review.)
The first section of Szwed’s book is one of the most briskly revealing pieces of jazz biography that I’ve read. First, he establishes the bona fides of William Dufty, Holiday’s collaborator on the book, rescuing him from charges of being a hack. Dufty was an award-winning journalist at the New York Post at a time when it was a leading liberal paper; he and his wife, Maely Daniele, a longtime friend of Holiday’s, welcomed her to their apartment as “a place of refuge from the police, her husband Louis McKay, reporters, and the various unsavory figures who haunted her life.” Dufty did the actual writing, based on long and detailed conversations with Holiday augmented by archival research that sparked her recollections.
Szwed sketches a handful of the book’s divergences from the independently established biographical record, starting with the legendary first sentences: “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was seventeen, and I was three.” Szwed explains, “When Billie was born, her mother was nineteen, her father seventeen. They never married . . . She was born not in Baltimore but in Philadelphia. Some questioned her claim of having been raped at age ten.”
Holiday’s book is unstinting in its depiction of the hardships she faced. As a child, she heard from her great-grandmother about life as a slave; she grew up away from her mother, in the home of a cousin who beat her; she scrubbed floors in a “whorehouse” in order to hear music on the record player; and the man who raped her when she was ten was a neighbor. She quit school at twelve and travelled to New York alone, where she worked first as a maid and then as a prostitute. Jailed and released, she moved in with her mother, who lived in Harlem. They were on the verge of eviction when Holiday, who was about fifteen, got a job singing—more or less by accident—at a local nightspot. Holiday details the roughness of the world of music, exacerbated by relentless racism—travelling through the South in the age of Jim Crow, being forced to darken her skin with makeup in order to perform in Detroit. She describes in detail her addiction to heroin, her resulting troubles with the law, and its impact on her career.
For all its confessional frankness and accusatory clarity, there is, as Szwed reveals, much more to her story—and the circumstances of the composition of “Lady Sings the Blues” are an exemplary part of it.
Delving into earlier drafts of “Lady Sings the Blues” and other archival materials, Szwed finds echoes of the book in other published sources to which Holiday had referred Dufty as particularly reliable. Holiday told Dufty some stories that were ultimately kept out of the book, including the agonizing home abortion that her mother forced her to undergo as a teen. But Szwed finds that the book’s most important omissions were demanded by lawyers (including one representing Holiday and McKay) and by many of the public figures who played major roles in Holiday’s life and autobiography.
In particular, Szwed traces the stories of two important relationships that are missing from the book—with Charles Laughton, in the nineteen-thirties, and with Tallulah Bankhead, in the late nineteen-forties—and of one relationship that’s sharply diminished in the book, her affair with Orson Welles around the time of “Citizen Kane.”
In 1941, Welles wanted to make a film called “The Story of Jazz,” in collaboration with Duke Ellington. It would be set in the nineteen-teens and twenties, centered on the rise of Louis Armstrong, playing himself. He wanted Holiday to play Bessie Smith. Welles’s movie, Szwed writes, was “intended to be radically innovative, mixing together different styles of jazz, using the surrealist drawings of Oskar Fischinger.” It was put off, Szwed reports, due to the start of the Second World War. When Welles went to Rio to make “It’s All True,” he thought that the jazz story could be woven into it—but his filming of “the everyday interaction of races in Brazil” soured Welles’s studio, RKO, on the entire production.
Holiday and Bankhead (whom she called “Banky”) had an intense, stormy relationship that lasted a few years. “Bankhead seemed obsessed by her,” Szwed writes, and the extent of her devotion is revealed in a section that was cut from Holiday’s book, an extraordinary story of Bankhead’s attempt to intervene personally with J. Edgar Hoover to exonerate Holiday of the drug charges that played havoc with her career. Yet they were driven apart by the same sorts of pressures that induced Bankhead to insist on being kept out of the book: Bankhead feared that her career would be destroyed by the revelation of their relationship.
Szwed makes a strong case for the autobiography’s authenticity—if not absolute veracity—as Holiday’s self-representation, or her representation of her self-image, especially in the light of all that it originally contained: “Shouldn’t an author have the right to create a self different from what readers think that they already know about her? If an autobiography is an account of a woman’s experiences, those experiences may be felt in one way as they happen, but in a completely different way later in life.” He interprets her book “as a form of autobiographical fiction” and suggests that “Holiday’s own changes or omissions were perhaps a means of preventing readers from knowing too much, of distancing herself to keep from being too closely identified with how others saw her, and especially from what the press had written about her.”
Nonetheless, he suggests that “Lady Sings the Blues” is “Dickensian”:
I’d characterize the book’s Dickensian aspect more simply: it depicts a life lived in a pathologically, brazenly, unrepentantly, systematically, and casually racist country. Those are Holiday’s formative and constant experiences—racism and the hardness, the ugliness, the danger that it imposes as her unrelenting daily lot, and from which her ideas, her career, and her art are inseparable.
Her book details the exhausting physical and mental cruelty of racism—of the overt and institutionalized Southern kind that she sang about in “Strange Fruit,” and of the inflictions and duplicities of Northern life, such as segregation in the Fifty-Second Street clubs and in hotels; of the capriciousness and raw indifference of the law to blacks, to the poor, to women; of the degree of control exerted by police and judges and the lack of oversight of their authority; and of the use of drug policy as a mode of discrimination, social control, and racial injustice:
I’m inclined to see this ambient fear as the source of any fudging in Holiday’s life story. “Lady Sings the Blues” may not be the whole truth, it may not even be nothing but the truth, but it’s all the truth that 1956 could handle. The times were censorious; much that had to do with sex couldn’t be published, and much that was deemed immoral wouldn’t be published. But, more important, Holiday offers, in “Lady Sings the Blues,” a picture of a world in which speaking the truth could get her slaughtered or imprisoned. In fact, many of the most awful experiences that she recounts were the result of merely trying to tell the truth—as when, at age ten, she admitted to being raped and was herself put in a home for wayward girls.
When Holiday spoke frankly of her drug addiction in the hope of being cured, she was, instead, imprisoned and stripped of her New York cabaret card, a license to perform where liquor was sold. She couldn’t work in nightclubs, effectively denying her access to her main source of income. As a result, she likens herself to a European postwar “D.P.”—displaced person—in New York. She specifically cites the troubles caused by her plain speaking in the ostensibly integrated and sophisticated downtown milieu, centered around Café Society, where she became a celebrity in the early forties.
Holiday’s unsparing depiction of her own activities is matched by an unsparing view of American society. “Lady Sings the Blues” is an exemplary report of the corruption and self-deception on which the country ran, and the constant threat of violence by which racist policies and practices were enforced. Whatever minor dodges or fudges the book may contain, the creation of a slightly skewed image for public consumption was, above all, a survival instinct in the face of relentless persecution.
Szwed goes further, delving into the other aspects of Holiday’s public persona—television and movies—to reveal just how resistant to harsh truths the media, especially audiovisual media, were at the time. (He includes, as a tantalizing aside, mention of the original plan for a movie adaptation of “Lady Sings the Blues,” which would have starred Dorothy Dandridge and been directed by Anthony Mann—whose 1954 film “The Glenn Miller Story” is among Hollywood’s best musical biopics.)
The second part of the book, centered on the music, is a much tougher nut for Szwed—or anyone—to crack. Though Holiday’s music, like all music, defies description, it doesn’t defy analysis, and Szwed, joining musicological precision to historical insight, traces the course of Holiday’s career through recordings. The account of Holiday’s music is insightful—he provides a diagrammed example of how she lags behind the beat, for instance, and an examines her melodic transformations of songs, showing that she “virtually recomposed” the songs that she sang. (He cites her 1937 recording of “I’ll Get By,” where “she reduces the melody’s range by repeating the same note (A) twenty-six times.")
The basic idea is the crucial one: of all jazz singers, Holiday is the one who is a jazz musician, the equal in musical invention of the epoch-making instrumentalists who played alongside her. Szwed picks up on the negative effect on her career that her style risked when she was starting out. He quotes one club manager who told her, “You sing too slow . . . sounds like you’re asleep!” Music publishers—who still made lots of money from the sale of sheet music—didn’t like her singing, which didn’t present the melodies clearly enough. His analysis shines all the more brightly when he goes behind the scenes of the recordings to unfold the life of performance—her initial experience as a cabaret singer, going table to table for tips in the Prohibition-era cabarets on 133rd Street, where she got her start; the peculiarities of the Fifty-Second Street clubs where she performed in the late thirties, which fostered a casual musical intimacy ("They were small, maybe fifteen feet by sixty feet, and were located in the basements of brownstone residences. They featured miniature tables for a few dozen people."). He also explains the painful conditions of some of her later recordings, when her health and her voice were in bad shape (“The on-the-spot rehearsals, the false starts, retakes, and overdubs began to pile up on the tape reels”).
Szwed looks closely at her choice of songs and the origins of ones with which she’s closely associated, including “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child.” He details the life-threatening conflicts that she faced on the road in the South, where she performed as a member of the (white) Artie Shaw band. And he carefully considers the specifics of performance later in her career, when she sang at Carnegie Hall and recorded with far more elaborate arrangements than she had used in her youth—and focusses on the musical implications of these circumstances.
Above all, in analyzing her art, Szwed argues for the difference between the performer and the life—between the on-stage persona and the person: “Her ability to communicate strong and painful emotions through singing led many to believe that she was suffering and in real pain. But real suffering is not necessary for great singing, only the ability to communicate it in song . . . Like actors, singers create their identities as artists through words and music. . . . All we can know for certain is the performance itself.”
In general, the desire of even the most discerning critics, such as Szwed, to separate art and life, to analyze the formal traits of works as if they were dissociable from the experience and the emotions that inspire them and that they convey, is both noble and doomed—noble, because artists deserve to be honored for their achievements, and doomed, because the formal and systematic nature of those achievements isn’t what makes them endure. The individuality, the immense complexity of inner life that art conveys—including Holiday’s seemingly straightforward and instantly appreciable art—doesn’t occur in a laboratory-like isolation.
Holiday herself, in “Lady Sings the Blues,” took care to depict the unity of her personal life and her musicianship, starting with the haphazard circumstances under which she began her career, as a teen-age ex-prostitute in need of a fast way of making rent for herself and her mother. She specifically connects the way she sings with her experiences—and with her readiness to face them. ("Maybe I’m proud enough to want to remember Baltimore and Welfare Island.")
Holiday, like all great artists, is as distinctive, as idiosyncratic, as original off-stage and off-mike as on. The life doesn’t explain the art; rather, life is an art in itself—whether a creation of sublime moments and fascinating gestures, or of terrifying confrontations and mighty endurances—that is illuminated by the same inner light, inspired by the same genius, inflected by the same touch that makes the works of art endure on their own. The biographer of an artist is a critic in advance, in acknowledging and appreciating the actions of an artist’s life and recognizing what’s personal and distinctive in their being—in discerning the artistic aspect of the life. Szwed, in his brief book, accomplishes this goal, perhaps even better than he intended.
