Billie Holiday: There was Never a Federal Campaign against "Strange Fruit"—Finale, Part 4 of 4
Other Falsehoods in the Movie, and Closing Thoughts
The “Strange Fruit” myth is far from the only fabrication in the movie The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The script is such a chaotic mess that it gives the impression of having been written in tremendous, careless haste. Most of the examples that I give below cannot be the result of “poetic license,” because there is no artistic reason for them—they are just plain careless errors. And it would take me forever to document every falsehood in the film—because just about everything in it is false. So this will just be a sampling.
Director Lee Daniels has noted in printed interviews that the 1972 movie Lady Sings the Blues, starring Diana Ross, is what inspired him to go into filmmaking. His film is a kind of sequel, picking up slightly before the film with Ross ended, which was at Billie’s March 1948 concert at Carnegie Hall. He managed to get a similar look, and similar colors, to the 1972 film. He includes some silly, giggly scenes that appear to have been improvised, as did the earlier film.
He also borrowed from the earlier movie the idea that it was just fine to totally make things up if they fit his concept. Remember, the 1972 film began with the onscreen words “New York City, 1936,” and then showed an apparently very high, nodding out Billie entering the women’s prison. But her stint in a women’s prison actually took place in Virginia in 1947! Not even close! (And she wasn’t nodding out.) The Daniels movie is just as far off from reality as that one was.
But now, almost fifty years later, things have changed greatly. Today many films are “based on a true story,” and audiences tend to take what they see in movies as reality, especially if the film is advertised that way. They tend to assume that films have been somehow “vetted” or researched. I’m not sure why—people easily “get” that movies based on, say, Marvel comics, are not true stories! So why did you believe this Billie Holiday movie? Zero research went into this script—they simply took a few ideas that the discredited UK journalist Johann Hari made up, and then they invented some more.
The PR for the film suggested that it would show how courageous Billie was. But in fact it depicts her in the worst possible light. In the movie, she has a torrid affair with the narcotics agent who previously sent her to jail; she caves in to pressure and agrees not to sing “Strange Fruit” at Carnegie Hall; and more. None of this ever happened! Yes, I said None! In reality she was a brilliant, funny person (you’d never ever guess that from this film), and a thoroughly professional musician. The movie is a thoroughly demeaning portrayal of one of our greatest Black musicians, and it’s no accident that some of the worst reviews this movie received were from Black critics: Hilton Als in The New Yorker, Naomi Obeng in Sight and Sound, and Greg Bryant at WBGO.
Right from the start of this film, there are problems. The first thing one sees is text on the screen, saying that a proposed bill to “ban lynching” was not passed. That is wrong—that is not what this and other similar bills were about. Lynching was murder, which is illegal everywhere—it was always banned. But the Southern states usually let the guilty murderers get away with it, and that is what these bills hoped to end. For more information go back to Part One of this series please.
How about the love affair between Holiday and Black narcotics agent Jimmy Fletcher? He was the man, remember, who had been on her case in 1947. According to the film, they had a long and torrid affair after she was released from jail, even though she knew that he was largely responsible for sending her there. Just on the face of it, the idea is laughable—but even more so when one knows the source. As reported in both Donald Clarke and Julia Blackburn’s books, Fletcher told the late journalist Linda Kuehl about Holiday, “She was the type that would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type.” That is all he said on that subject! But Johann Hari had the nerve to conclude, from that single sentence, that “the man Anslinger sent to track and bust Billie Holiday had, it seems, fallen in love with her.” Based on this, and nothing more, the movie shows Fletcher, after Billie has served her sentence thanks to him, touring with her and having sex—and heroin—with her! Apparently, in their frantic rush to complete this mess of a script, Hari and the filmmakers never read the rest of the published part of the interview, where the real Fletcher said he never saw her again after she went to prison. That is a crucial omission—don’t you agree?
Did Holiday’s manager Glaser work as a kind of “second in command” to Anslinger, as depicted throughout the film? How absurd! Glaser was one of the biggest managers in jazz, and was too busy working with Louis Armstrong (who was devoted to him), and many others, to drive around the country spying on Billie and participating in drug busts. The source of this is just as thin as everything else in the film. As Stuart Nicholson documents in his well-researched Holiday biography, Glaser was concerned about Holiday’s drug use because it was hurting her “bookability,” to the point where he cooperated with the Narcotics Bureau in her 1947 arrest. Apparently, he believed that would break her drug habit. This is reprehensible, but it has nothing to do with her singing “Strange Fruit.” And, contrary to the movie, he couldn’t have cut the song from her set at Café Society even if he wanted to (which he did not!). As Holiday says to the Glaser character, people came there to see her sing it. In fact, the 1939 Time magazine article mentions “Strange Fruit,” “which she had been singing at a new downtown hotspot called Café Society.”
There are so many other errors in the film that I barely know where to begin. Here are just a few:
The “news clippings” flashed onscreen are absolutely fictional. For example:
At 1:28:35, a fake newspaper clipping dated May 21—no year—says that she defied the Klan and went ahead and sang “Strange Fruit” in Greensville, South Carolina. No such incident ever occurred.
At 1:42:49, we are told that she is performing at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago on September 16, 1954:
But on that date she was performing in Los Angeles. And Mister Kelly’s was not yet presenting “name” acts like Billie in 1954. Hello, filmmakers—seriously? You just made up dates and locations out of your imagination and put them up on the screen?
The answer is yes, they randomly made up dates and places. Another example: At 1:12:14, she is said to be on stage in Baltimore on April 3, 1949. On that date she was at Club Bali in Washington, D.C., towards the end of three “record-breaking” weeks (according to the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper).
At 1:48:43, there is another fake news item, saying that on May 26 (no year) in Phoenix, Arizona, she stumbled and left the stage:
She was never in her life in Phoenix, Arizona, to my knowledge. But she did appear at the Phoenix Theater in Greenwich Village in Manhattan on May 25 (not 26), 1959! This gives you an idea of how carelessly the film was slapped together. Somebody said “Hey, I read something about her being in sad shape in Phoenix,” and another person replied “Great, let’s put that in.” End of research.
In fact her appearance at the Phoenix Theater in New York City (I repeat, not Arizona) was her last performance. It was a fundraiser attended by some celebrities. The hosts, Leonard Feather and Steve Allen, both expressed concern about her frail condition. But her performance, although it was just two songs, went ahead with no “stumbles.”
Let’s move on to other matters:
The meeting shown at 12:07 with Harry Anslinger, Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy and other racist government figures never happened, despite the fake date “April 3, 1947” flashed on the screen. Besides, Cohn was not even a lawyer until 1948, and he didn’t meet McCarthy until 1953. Plus, the entire idea of a government campaign against the song “Strange Fruit” is false, as I’ve shown throughout this 4-part series.
In the movie, Holiday is warned against singing “Strange Fruit” at Carnegie Hall in 1948, and she cooperates, and actually tells the audience that she won’t be singing it. But when the concert was reviewed in the Amsterdam News, the important black newspaper still active today in Manhattan, that song was called the “high point” of the concert! Also, according to her own book, she did sing it. Filmmakers, did you not even have a copy of Billie’s own book handy to check your work?! Is this your idea of showing how brave she was?
The film also shows Holiday coming up with the idea to have “Blacks and whites sitting together” at Carnegie Hall in 1948. But, from the day it opened in 1891, the hall never had a segregation policy (as was true of many New York City venues), and there are photos of integrated audiences there from 1947. Billie knew this well, because, contrary to the film, she’d already performed there seven times (!) with a variety of other artists. This was her first concert there as the sole act, but far from her first time at Carnegie Hall.
Hari wrote that the loss of Billie’s cabaret card “meant she wasn’t allowed to sing anywhere that alcohol was served—which included all the jazz clubs in the United States.” The film seems to support this, as she struggles for gigs after Carnegie Hall. But the cabaret card was a local New York City requirement. Its loss did keep her from performing at the few Manhattan nightclubs that were big enough to present her, including Café Society and the Royal Roost, but she still maintained a very busy schedule. In fact, press reports from July 1948 claim that her nationwide tour was breaking attendance records, and as noted above, she broke records in D.C. the next year. (Of course, it was unfair that her card was taken away, and this in no way is meant to forgive or excuse that action.)
Of the many other falsehoods in the film, some have been noted by journalists and critics (for example, read Steve Provizer’s review here), so I needn’t go into detail about all of them. Here are a few:
-Billie never came across the aftermath of a lynching. That scene is directly borrowed from the film with Diana Ross, and in both films it is used to sort of “explain” why she sang “Strange Fruit,” and perhaps even why she did drugs. But as a Black woman in America, she did not need to see a lynching to know about the many wrongs experienced by Black people. And she wrote about them quite openly in her book.
-It’s ridiculous and anachronistic to show her exercising with barbells and Lester “Pres” Young jumping rope at 42:15.
-Speaking of Lester, he never toured with her, and certainly never would have done so as an anonymous sideperson!
--Insanely, she is shown “crowd-surfing” over a rowdy audience in the fake 1949 Baltimore scene. “Crowd surfing” (being passed by the audience members over their heads) did not exist until around 1980. Besides, Billie performed to Listening audiences, not loudly partying ones!
--The musical arrangements, especially the big orchestra at Carnegie Hall, have nothing to do with how she actually performed, which was in small and intimate settings.
--Her entire entourage is completely invented, as is Reginald Lord Devine, the radio journalist.
I’ll stop here--I assume that’s enough to make my point. But I have already received some responses that are on the order of, “OK, the film is not true, nothing in it is true--I now understand that. But the film is a contribution to Black Lives Matter—it gets at some truths about racism in America.” I’m going to state my response to this loudly and clearly:
You can never get at any truths by telling lies!
I say to teachers, scholars, and journalists who are disseminating the events in this movie as though they are true: How unprofessional! Is that your idea of research—that you watched a movie on Hulu?
And because I powerfully support Black Lives Matter, let me conclude by saying this: A real contribution to Black Lives Matter would be a motion picture that has never yet been created—one that shows the true brilliance of Billie Holiday, a brilliance that is completely ignored, even demeaned, by this irresponsible film.
All the best,
Lewis
P.S. Thank you, dear readers, for putting up with this lengthy four-part series. Again, as I said in Part 1 of this series, I want to be very clear—I mean what I say, and Only what I say. Am I saying that the government’s campaign against narcotics wasn’t all that bad? No. In my opinion, drugs should never have been criminalized. Am I saying that Black people like Holiday weren’t unfairly targeted by the police in this country? Of course not. It’s crystal clear that they got worse treatment, and still do. I am Only saying that “Strange Fruit” had nothing to do with that, that everything in this film is fiction, and that it is thoroughly irresponsible to add these fictional events to our lists of complaints against the federal government. We can point to plenty of problems with the past actions of our government, without fabricating things, and without getting our “facts” from Hollywood movies!
P.P.S. This series is an expanded version of my article that was originally published in Jazz Times magazine, and I thank the editor Mac Randall for his fine work. Here is the original article, winner of the 2022 Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism in the pop music field.
Special thanks to Julia Blackburn, Kevin Whitehead, Stuart Nicholson, Donald Clarke, David Margolick, Daniel Peterson, Aidan Levy, Loren Schoenberg, Rob Hudson (Manager, Carnegie Hall archives), and Tab Lewis (Archivist of the National Archives and Records Administration).