Billie Holiday: Problems with the documentary "Billie" (2020)

I’ve been a Billie Holiday fanatic since the age of 15, and have done quite a lot of research on her life and on her brilliant art. As with Miles, I’ll be posting all my research here, bit by bit.  To begin with, here is my short response to the documentary Billie that came out in 2020 and is on Hulu:

Until the 1980s, documentaries were probably the least popular of all movies. People remembered having to sit through educational documentaries in school that had pompous narrators. But after the success of such innovative films as The Thin Blue Line (1988) by Errol Morris, and Michael Moore's Roger & Me (1989), the field took off. It seems that everybody is making a documentary these days. And I find that audiences are strangely uncritical—just about every documentary is declared to be “interesting,” and to say “I saw it in a documentary” is like saying “I read it in a reference work—it’s a fact.” Well, that is not the case. Just as reference works are made by fallible and biased humans, so are documentary films. A case in point is Billie.

When freelance writer Linda Kuehl died in 1978, she left behind taped interviews with 125 people who knew Billie Holiday.  This archive is owned by Toby Byron, producer of jazz documentaries, among other projects. The documentary Billie lets us hear excerpts from them. The film’s trailer states that all of these were previously “unheard,” but that’s not exactly true. Byron long ago produced his own documentary (Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, 1990) that drew upon these audiotapes, and additional audio excerpts are on the DVD release of that film.

And the interviews were certainly not unknown: At least three books have quoted heavily from the transcripts that Byron provided (although obviously not from the audio): Robert O'Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1991); Donald Clarke, Wishing on the Moon (1994; second edition 2000); and Julia Blackburn, With Billie (2005). Of these, Blackburn has the longest extracts from the transcripts. The book has many chapters that are entirely devoted to just one, two or three of the interview transcripts.

In any case, while the promotion for the film Billie sold it to us as our opportunity to hear the interviews, it really doesn’t make sense to build a film, a visual experience, around an audio collection. To try and break up the visual bleakness, we see many images of rotating cassette tapes while the interviews are playing, which doesn’t help at all. To be fair, we also see some photographs while listening, and there are a few excerpts from Billie’s filmed performances, colorized. But, seriously, if you’re wanting to make something out of a cache of audio tapes, you should think podcast, not film!  (Which reminds me—a 13-hour podcast series on Billie’s music is due soon from Savage Content. I wrote the scripts and chose the music examples for two of the episodes. Willard Jenkins, the main writer for the series, created all the others, working with veteran producer Steve Robinson.)

There is no voice-over narrator in many modern documentaries, a trend that started in the 1960s with directors such as the late D.A. Pennebaker (who I had the pleasure of interviewing at the New York Film Festival in October 2006). There are many good reasons for this, but one difficulty it presents is that if an interviewee makes a false statement, for whatever reason--by mistake, or due to being misinformed, etc.—that falsehood doesn’t get corrected or challenged. And the creators have chosen some error-filled moments from the audiotapes. For example, Mingus says about the song “Strange Fruit,” “There used to be riots when she’d sing that in New York,” which never happened. In fact, there was never a riot anywhere that she sang “Strange Fruit.” On the contrary, people lined up and paid good money to hear her sing it.  (The feature film starring Andra Day is entirely fictional—and I do mean entirely. I’ve addressed that in Jazz Times magazine, and I’ll be presenting all of that information here, in installments. Be patient, and in the meantime, be skeptical!)

But perhaps the most wrong-headed choice made by the director is to focus on Kuehl herself, taking up a valuable 10 or 15 minutes of this 98-minute film, time that could have been devoted to Billie. The film begins and ends with Kuehl. It’s thoughtful of the director to work with the family of the person who created the archive, but it’s a distraction from Holiday’s story.  What’s worse, we get a highly skewed version of Kuehl’s story.  It’s vaguely hinted that friends of Count Basie murdered her by pushing her out of a window!

In reality, her death was ruled a suicide, and it was probably not, despite rumors, because she was forlorn about being unable to produce the Holiday book for which she had conducted so much research. The late jazz historian Chris Albertson wrote on his blog that he and Linda had become friends, and that she kept him updated on her progress.  One publisher eventually turned her down, but Kuehl told Chris that her agent had negotiated a deal with another publisher. This is confirmed by Blackburn on her p.6. So she certainly had not given up on the book (even though Albertson said it was clear that she would need help to assemble her research into a book). And Chris was later told that she left a suicide note that said “Love ya, babe,” referring, apparently, to an unknown personal relationship (not with Basie, although I'm told she did have a crush on him). Blackburn’s book also mentions the suicide note (on p.7). These crucial details aren’t mentioned in this documentary, which therefore leaves viewers with misleading perceptions about Linda Kuehl --as well as about Billie Holiday herself.

P.S. A little of the above information was published in September 2021 in a short review that I wrote for the journal Jazz Perspectives:

https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/doi/full/10.1080/17494060.2021.1970344

P.P.S. My Jazz Times piece is here—I’ll be sharing all of its contents in these posts eventually, with updates:

https://jazztimes.com/features/profiles/the-united-states-vs-billie-holiday-vs-the-truth/

P.P.P.S. Chris Albertson’s post was “My friend, Linda Kuehl” http://stomp-off.blogspot.com/2009/08/my-friend-linda-kuehl.html (accessed through the Wayback Machine at Archive.org).