BEFORE: We're getting closer to the end of this year's Doc Block, and I can see the extraneous links are falling away, the missed connections are being forgotten, and I'm down to just a couple links left, and I couldn't change the order of the films remaining now, even if I wanted to. It's going to fall to a few Broadway legends to get me to the end - they can do it, I know they can - they'll be swell, they'll be great, gonna get my Doc Block finished on the right date.
But first, it's Dick Cavett who carries over one more time from "Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer", so let's thank all the talk show hosts who made this year's linkage possible. Not just Dick Cavett, but the late Johnny Carson, David Letterman (still the favorite to win the year), and Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore, Arsenio Hall, Tom Snyder, Ed Sullivan, Larry King, and you newer guys, Jon Stewart, Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah - really, thanks, guys, I couldn't have done what I did without you guys doing what you do. Err, did. Special thanks to guest hosts Joan Rivers, Rob Reiner and sure, Burt Reynolds for sitting in for Johnny while he was off getting divorced.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" (Movie #4,530)
THE PLOT: Documentary on the famed jazz singer Billie Holiday.
AFTER: If you watched the Lee Daniels bio-pic on Billie Holiday, then you might already know some of the facts about Billie Holiday's life that this doc is going to try to get around to, namely Billie Holiday being the target of an undercover drug sting because of her insistence on performing the song "Strange Fruit" which was a song that used imagery to protest the lynching of Black Americans in the South. And also that Billie had an affair/relationship with the narcotics agent who was undercover and assigned to get the goods on her. Well, boy, did he ever. Look, I'm sure that sleeping with the subject you're supposed to be investigating is a very unorthodox method, but seeing as how Billie slept with men, women, and basically everyone she encountered, well, really, it was just the simplest way to get familiar with her very quickly. Sometimes an agent has to take one for the team, as painful as that may be.
But you might walk away from that biopic thinking in a very linear, literal way, like that maybe the narcotics sting came about BECAUSE she kept singing the song "Strange Fruit". Or that Jimmy Fletcher lost his job as a narcotics agent because he slept with Billie and/or did drugs during the course of the investigation. But then along comes this documentary that suggests, in its own roundabout way, that perhaps nothing is quite that simple - just because one thing happened before another, it doesn't mean that the first thing CAUSED the second thing. Correlation is not causation. And so to prove it, it jumbles up all of the major and minor events of Billie Holiday's life to the point where we the audience can't properly understand what happened when, and therefore time is meaningless and nothing is in order and nothing could have ever caused anything else. See? Forget what you know about Billie Holiday, because we're about to replace it with a whole bunch of random stuff so that once you watch the documentary, you'll know even LESS about her than you did before! Won't that be fun?
We know that Billie was born on April 7, 1915 in the poor part of Philadelphia (which at the time. was called "Philadelphia") and her family was poor because everyone was poor, the middle-class had not been invented yet. But they were happy poor, not sad poor, and the experience led to Billie writing the song "God Bless the Child", so something good came out of her very difficult childhood. She was named Eleanora Fagan at the time because nobody had yet thought up the cool name "Billie Holiday", even though her father was Clarence Halliday, who left shortly after she was born to go play jazz anywhere else. Her mother remarried but it didn't last long, because her mother wanted her to be unhappy so she'd grow up to sing the blues.
As soon as she was old enough to break child labor laws (14), she moved to Harlem to find her mother and maybe look for her father by singing in nightclubs. Because what could possibly go wrong if a girl is 14 years old and singing in adult clubs late at night? She was headlining clubs by the time she was 17 and that's when she gave up looking for her parents, and started looking for a recording contract. Talent agent John Hammond signed her to Brunswick Records and cut two jazz records without signing any written agreements, but who ever heard of a recording company stiffing a black artist for royalties? I'm sure everything probably worked out fine...
In 1937 (age 22) she went out on the road with Count Basie and his band - and she got to pick her songs, which all seemed to be about being unlucky in love. Total baller move, the way for a woman to attract more men is to be available, or to, you know, just be a woman, that works too. But her "lovelorn" act drew in the men, and apparently some of the women, too. The way for a woman to attract women is to be a lesbian, or to, you know, just be a woman, that works too. Billie wanted to experience it all - men, women, alcohol, cocaine, heroin - and sometimes all in the same night and in every possible combination. Well, that's life on the road, isn't it? Bille was touring like a rock star before there even was rock music, that's how far ahead she was for her time. Something got her fired from the Count Basie band (gee, I can't imagine why but go ahead, take your pick...) and was believed to be "tempermental and unreliable" (gee, do you think the grain alcohol and heroin might be to blame?). But a month later she got hired by Artie Shaw and was back on tour, so there's a lesson that was never learned.
Then came the recording of "Strange Fruit", which was a song based on a poem about lynching in the South, and the song was so controversial that she only kept singing it for another 20 years after it was released. But the world wasn't ready for racism to end, and it was much easier for people to just complain about her complaining about racism than to, you know, fix the problem or maybe look into stopping the lynching. It's almost a precursor to today's social media conundrums, like if you complain about what's wrong with society on Twitter or Facebook then people will call you every nasty name they can think of and then remind you that there's no room on social media for negativity. And sure, they might have a point but then they've also created a paradox. "Listen, you complete utter moron, the internet is no place for your negative attitude and name-calling. Also, you should go eat a bag of dicks."
Anyway, time went by for Billie Holiday and she recorded on a few more labels and even appeared in a film, "New Orleans" although her part and Louis Armstrong's part were greatly reduced because the producers didn't want to give the public the false impression that black people somehow invented jazz, which they kind of did. So, OK, agree to disagree. Anyway it was ROCK AND ROLL that was "black music sung mainly by white people", not JAZZ. Stupid morons, they should go eat a bag of dicks.
Then in 1947, eight years AFTER releasing "Strange Fruit", Billie Holiday was arrested for possession of narcotics. The DEA is very slow, but thorough. Seriously, though, I'm not seeing the connection between the song and the arrest, have we considered that maybe she was arrested for drug possession because she was a drug addict? Just a thought. Then came the comeback concert at Carnegie Hall, and really, you can just switch over to the bio-pic "The U.S. vs. Billie Holiday" at this point, because the documentary doesn't even COVER that event. The doc switches its focus over to Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who was a journalist who was working on a biography of Holiday, and she interviewed all of Billie's friends, bandmates and lovers (and woof, there were a LOT of lovers...) but she died before she could complete writing the book. However, many of her audio interviews were used to make this documentary. Near the end of "Billie", Linda's story is interwoven with Billie's, which I think is kind of a mistake. The story should never be about the story-teller, the interviewer who researched all of the information and formed a close friendship with Count Basie.
UNLESS, somebody thinks that Linda Kuehl's death was not an accident, and her sister, Myra Luftman, comes pretty close to suggesting this. But why? Is somebody still upset about the anti-lynching song? Did Linda get TOO CLOSE to Count Basie and learn too much? Come on, you can't just leave me hanging, here. Oh, you're just going to leave me hanging here, aren't you. OK, well, that's that, I guess, and the world may never know. Me, I would have kept the focus on Billie Holiday, you know, because the movie is called "Billie" and all that, but hey, that's just me.
Quick update - Linda Lipnack Kuehl was found dead on a sidewalk after falling from a Washington DC hotel in February 1978, shortly after a Count Basie concert. Officially it was listed as a suicide, but Linda's sister and parents believe that there was foul play because of the research she was doing for her book. Make of that what you will. Still, I think the film should have stuck with Billie Holiday and mentioned how she died and how her husband, alleged mobster Louis McKay, swindled her out of all of her money. OK so it's a bit sad but it's what happened.
With archive footage of Billie Holiday (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Jean Allen, Harry Anslinger, Louis Armstrong (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Al Avola, Tallulah Bankhead (last seen in "Cruella"), Tony Bennett (last seen in "If These Walls Could Sing"), Chuck Berry (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Tom Jones (ditto), Marie Bryant, Count Basie (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), James "Stump" Cross, Skinny Davenport, Ruby Davies, Billy Eckstine, Harry Edison, Ray Ellis, John Fagan, Ella Fitzgerald (last seen in "Beauty"), Jimmy Fletcher, Milton Gabler, Benny Goodman, James Hamilton, John Hammond, Roy S. Harte, Milt Hinton, Jo Jones, Barney Josephson, Mary Kane, Barney Kessel, Irene Kitchings, Linda Lipnack Kuehl, Peggy Lee (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Melba Liston, Myra Luftman, Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham, Virginia McGlocken, Louis McKay, Carmen McRae, Memry Midgett, Charles Mingus, Otis Redding (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?"), Les Robinson, Jimmy Rowles, Artie Shaw (last seen in "Second Chorus"), John Simmons, Bessie Smith, Barbra Streisand (last seen in "Mike Wallace Is Here"), Robert Tucker, Mae Weiss, Sid Weiss, Orson Welles (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), George H. White, Paul Whiteman, Dorothy Winston, Sandy Williams, Lester Young, Earle Warren Zaidins,
RATING: 4 out of 10 Jim Crow laws
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