Documentary offers look at darker side of singer Billie Holiday’s life

Billie Holiday’s tumultuous life story surely has been told more often, and in more ways, than that of any other female jazz singer.

Books, f i l ms, plays, articles — the avalanche was underway long before her death in 1959 at age 44. The combination of a singular art and a dramatic narrative ( complete with prostitution, drug abuse, crime, imprisonment and more) never seems to lose its drawing power.

Which may make the prospect of another Holiday documentary seem redundant. Yet “Billie,” written and directed by James Erskine, takes us deeper and more unflinchingly than most into the darker corners of Holiday’s life.

The f i l m al s o offers a most unusual and fascinating approach, interweaving Holiday’s epic tale with a smaller but similarly disturbing one: the life and death of a writer on whose mountain of recorded interviews the film is based.

“I n t he early hours of Feb - ruary 6th, 1978, the body of a young journalist was discovered on a street in Washington, D. C.,” reads a supertitle at the film’s start. “Her name was Linda Lipnack Kuehl. For the past decade, she’d devoted her life to uncovering the true story of legendary singer Billie Holiday.”

Of course, there is no one “true” story of Holiday or any other artist. Instead, these great figures i nvite endless contemplation, especially as new information emerges. Writer Kuehl contributed more than her share, through the audio interviews excerpted in the film.

Though Holiday’s prostitution in her youth is well known, for instance, we learn how she viewed this part of her autobiography toward the end of her life.

“She would call me up, maybe 3, 3: 30, 4 o’clock in the morning,” says pianist Memry Midgett in one of Kuehl’s recorded interviews. “It seemed like she was almost hallucinating. And she would say: ‘ Oh, I’m here all by myself.’

“Like she would talk to me for hours and t ell me about how she got started in prostitution. She was 13 years old ... ( eventually) she had her own girls on the street. She was terribly worried about whether or not God would forgive her.”

Holiday went on to become a legendary jazz singer, of course, routinely getting involved with men who abused her, among them a manager.

Even after a triumphant 1950s Carnegie Hall concert — years after Holiday’s conviction and imprisonment for narcotics possession — she was pummeled again, this time by a future husband.

“He literally knocked her across the street,” remembers pianist Midgett in Kuehl’s interview. The man “had a technique going of trying to control her mind. There were days when he just kept her under lock and key.”

Why an artist of Holiday’s stature, achievement and fame would subject herself to such abuse, all the while mixing heroin and cocaine i n ample amounts, i s open to interpretation. We can only speculate whether Holiday’s impoverished, harsh childhood set the tone for troubles yet to come.

Lest all this seem relentlessly bleak, the film also offers illuminating video clips of Holiday performances, plus analysis from the likes of Tony Bennett, Sylvia Syms and lesser known artists Kuehl interviewed. Amid all this material, meticulously edited to intertwine Holiday’s and Kuehl’s stories, we also encounter Holiday’s own words as recorded by others.

“I always wanted to sing like Louis Armstrong played,” says Holiday in one segment. “I always wanted t o sing l i ke an i nstrument.”

Asked by one interviewer why so many jazz greats die young, Holiday summed i t up as well as anyone:

“The only way I can answer that question i s: We try to live 100 days in one day. I myself have tried to please so many people. I guess we all suffer.”