Singer, activist, sex machine, addict: the troubled brilliance of Billie Holiday

There’s an electrifying moment in Billie, a new documentary about Billie Holiday, when Jonathan “Jo” Jones, a tempestuous, influential African American drummer who played with Holiday from the 1930s to 50s, challenges his white interviewer. “You don’t know what we was going through then,” he says, referring to travelling through the deep south on Count Basie’s tour bus. “What were you going through?” asks the interviewer, Linda Lipnack Kuehl. “We was going through hell!” he shouts. “Miss Billie Holiday didn’t have the privilege of using a toilet in a filling station. The boys at least could go out in the woods. You don’t know anything about it because you’ve never had to subjugate yourself to it. Never!”

James Erskine’s film is constructed entirely from such interviews by Kuehl, a high-school teacher and Holiday fan with a sideline in arts journalism. In 1971, she began plans for a biography: Holiday had died aged 44 in 1959 and, 11 years on, Kuehl wanted to speak to those who were there throughout her life. She interviewed and interviewed and was still finding people in 1978 – almost 200 of them in all. The project overwhelmed her and she never finished it, and in 1979 she was found dead on a Washington sidewalk. Police deemed it suicide, Kuehl having supposedly jumped from her hotel room, although there was no proof of this.

Her interviews found their way to a private collector and were later used in other writers’ biographies of Holiday. More recently, documentary director Erskine bought the rights to Kuehl’s tapes. His film is a journey through Holiday’s life, narrated by the voices on those tapes – eyewitnesses to one of the 20th century’s most remarkable artists.

“The first tape we put on was Charles Mingus,” Erskine says now of hearing Kuehl’s interviews. “Immediately we were transported back to the 1950s through that deep voice. A way of talking that’s like music itself, an unguardedness, but also a documentary eye. It really felt like you were back there in Chicago in the 50s, with all the greats of jazz there, Ella [Fitzgerald] waiting in the wings as Billie performs. It was intoxicating.”

Listening to musicians, lovers, pimps, childhood friends and FBI agents recounting their time with Holiday is an evocative and transportive experience. We hear Kuehl, too, a great interviewer who cut through the gloss. It is a raw, unsanitised character study, in which Holiday is both combative and vulnerable, coy and revolutionary: a fiery, foul-mouthed thrill-seeker who never sacrificed her integrity. This is all the more refreshing considering that Holiday’s estate, acquired in 2012 by music company Concord, came on board as producers. “What I love about the film is we’re not changing who she was,” says Michele Smith, who manages the estate. “We’re not changing her flaws. She’s unapologetically Billie. She only knows how to be her.”

The testimonials are riotous. “She came down one night between shows and said, ‘Pick me up tonight!’” says John Simmons, who played bass with her, took drugs with her and slept with her. “And, as I was walking in the door, she was walking out the door with a chick. But the next night … she collected me. She would go off with a chick, or something like that; she’d probably make them perform a three-ring circus. After that she’d probably go off and get a prostitute. She was a sex machine.”

The film doesn’t shy away from such material, or the lifetime of abuse Holiday suffered. This is vital, says Smith. “A lot of people just think of her addictions but don’t know about her upbringing. You cannot judge her without knowing who she really is. She was born in the United States in 1915 as a poor black girl, growing up to be a woman who has been sexually assaulted, raped at 10 years old, then tried to find a place for herself in this world.”

Through Kuehl’s interviews we hear first-hand about Holiday’s awful husbands and boyfriends, a rogues’ gallery of exploiters and abusers, men who would knock her out in the street. Holiday would fight back: “She hit him over the head with a Coke bottle or something and kinda laid his head open, and they both went to the hospital,” says trombonist Melba Liston of one such episode. But these men squeezed the life out of her, chipping away at her confidence, physically and mentally beating her down.

“She did not make all the best choices,” Smith says. “But you have to understand why she was a certain way.” As well as her childhood trauma, “she wasn’t allowed to go to restaurants, to use restrooms, because she wasn’t treated as a full human”.

The film documents this racism. She wasn’t allowed to enter venues via the front doors, lest she offend the white clientele who were there to see her; she spent months touring the south with Artie Shaw’s white band, in which she had to hunt down hotels to sleep in, barred from the ones the rest of the band stayed in. “After we would eat she always ordered an extra hamburger and she’d put that in her purse, because she never knew when she would not be able to be served,” a friend says in the the film.

This was compounded by Holiday’s decision to sing Strange Fruit, the protest song presented to her by writer Abel Meeropol in 1939. In the film, Barney Josephson, the owner of the non-segregated club Café Society, where she first performed it, details how some white people, “one party after another”, would file out of the place as she did so. Holiday had it written into her contract that she would be singing the song, at every concert, everywhere. The FBI began chasing her – ostensibly for drug offences – soon after that.

“From 1939 to her death in 1959 the government went after her because she was black, she was wealthy and she dared to sing Strange Fruit,” Smith says. Holiday herself said that, in May 1947, she was ordered not to sing it at a concert in Philadelphia. That night, narcotic agents raided her hotel room and, as she returned from the gig, shot at Holiday’s car as she saw them and sped off. She was later arrested and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.

FBI files in 1949 stated that Holiday has been discredited to set an example to others. One of the agents, Colonel George White, told Kuehl that Holiday’s “fancy coats and fancy automobiles and her jewellery and her diamonds” generated much resentment.

“They made her public enemy number one and destroyed her life in a lot of ways,” says Smith. Literally, some would say. Holiday died due to cirrhosis of the liver, caused by alcohol abuse, but, arguably, she was driven to death by two decades of persecution. Even at the end she was arrested in her hospital bed for possession of narcotics.

Sadly, it all seems relevant. “We finished the film last year and I didn’t see it again until September,” says Erskine. “I was shocked at how political it felt. When we were making it, we felt that we were presenting truths about things that everybody understood, the white man’s power, structural racism. I was setting out to make a film about Billie, and one of the joys of it is that you get to really see her. But I guess it tells us that we haven’t really addressed any generational wounds in society.”

Mostly though, he says, “if the film feels relevant it’s because she feels relevant. She talks about sex, about race, about violence, issues that are right at the heart of how we communicate today, and she doesn’t talk about them on the back foot. Billie Holiday got up and sang Strange Fruit in 1939, then pretty much every night of her life for 20 years. She was incarcerated for it, and she sang it to white audiences, and this was 16 years before Rosa Parks.”

Holiday had no idea of what the long-term effects of singing Strange Fruit would be: imprisoned for a year because of a drug charge; permanently banned from singing in venues that served alcohol, thus wiping out a vast amount of future income and forcing her to tour endlessly until she died. Yet, says Smith, she would not compromise. “She knew by singing it that she was going to lose a lot. And she did. With the civil rights movement in the 60s people lost their lives, and in essence she lost her life by singing this song.”

That, she says, on top of the music, is why Holiday’s legacy has endured. “She knew her place. And sometimes she didn’t want to stay in her place. That’s why she’s Billie Holiday – she was a fighter. And, as an icon, she has survived.”

Jo Jones summed it up. “How did she take it?” he replied, when Linda Kuehl asked how Holiday dealt with segregation. “Fuck it! She’d go in and sing! Go and fuck ’em! She did what she did until she died.”

• Billie is available digitally from 16 November on Amazon and iTunes. A Q&A with James Erskine is on 15 November as part of London Jazz festival.