is jennifer holliday related to billie holiday

Billie Holiday never stopped being addicted. And that pretty little thing took off from that stage like a beautiful little birdShe rushed up, took me in her arms, hugged me, looking at me, smiling and weeping at the same time. But she worked for free for Alice, the madame of the neighborhood brothel: When it came time to pay me, I used to tell her she could keep the money if shed let me come up in her front parlor and listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on her victrola. The couple divorced, but Holiday kept her addiction. Holiday and the band worked themselves ragged, playing rough dance halls, hotels and a whole string of riffraff joints throughout the country. Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Most of my other songs just about love. She carries the movie with conviction and looks kind of like the real Holiday, with those gardenias in her hair. He said he found opium in her garbage can and a heroin kit in her bathroom. All rights reserved. 5. She was the type who would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type, Fletcher remembered of Holiday in an interview. Youve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn bodys sermons on how to behave.. Here are some facts about the life and music of the great Lady Day: Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan, though some sources say the name on her birth certificate was "Elinore Harris." I hope you can join us. Holiday ended up releasing the song on the Commodore label in 1939, and it went on to sell a million copies. DAY: (As Billie, singing) Southern trees. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Playing Holiday was Days first-ever acting role. Her parents, Sadie Fagan and Clarence Holiday, were both teenagers when she was born, and her musician father took off when she was still a baby. For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies. Who loves you, sweetheart? Also at the club that night is undercover federal agent Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes). It's not your fault. RHODES: (As Jimmy) Love is important, too, right? Who's there for you from the start? When she's 15, the police raid the brothel, says Hari. Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, and grew up in Baltimore. Federal authorities first targeted her shortly after she began singing the song. Neither of these two characters are real, though Daniels told Variety that Devine was based on a fusion of Quentin Crisp and Skip E. Lowe. Devine sets up a flashback to February 1947, when we see Holiday performing at New York Citys Caf Society, the first racially integrated nightclub in the U.S. and the venue where Holiday had debuted Strange Fruit eight years prior. January 12th 1954 (Live) Billie Holiday Let's Do It Vol. However, she had two godchildren who she cared about deeply. The United States vs. Billie Holiday focuses on the later period of the legendary jazz singers career up until her death in 1959and the U.S. governments relentless persecution of her throughout that time. Anslinger took a break from Holiday's case but later returned with a different narcotics agent, Colonel George White. Black Americans love this country, often at our peril.". And like the Diana Ross movie, this one invents a good and loving man who faithfully stands by her. The image so deeply disturbed him that he penned the poem in protest of racial violence. | In the 1990s, Holliday lost a substantial amount of weight and talked about her health battles with clinical depression. While she lay dying, a by-then retired Fletcher attempted to visit Holiday in the hospital. All Rights Reserved. There's more anecdotal than hard evidence of any such campaign. There is, however, one curious part of the sequence that rings true to life: a mention of Orson Welles waiting at the club for Holiday. Hope Davis Has Done Everything, and Shes Finally Everywhere. The name "Billie" came from silent movie star Billie Dove, whom Holiday adored. However, Carnegie Halls own website mentions Strange Fruit in the setlist for Holidays March 27, 1948, concert. She completed a week in Philly without incident. When she was finally released, she had lost her cabaret license, prohibiting her from performing where alcohol was servedmeaning she couldn't perform at jazz clubs. A later scene shows Levy planting drugs on Holiday and setting her up for another arrest by Fletcher and the feds; although an old Oakland Tribune article reports that Holiday and Levy were both arrested during the early-1949 raid, the setup does appear to have been coordinated by Levy. (It is worth mentioning, while citing the memoir, that its account is full of fabrications, though this in particular doesnt appear to be one of them.) [September 2002], She sang "This is the Moment" at the 2004 July 4th Boston Pops Concert for Independence Day. Director Lee Daniels told the Hollywood Reporter that The U.S. vs. Billie Holiday isnt a biopic, and as longtime Canadian journalist Robert Fulford once wrote in the National Post, it is difficult for anyone to attempt to chronicle an authoritative Life of Billie Holiday anyway, because the documents dont exist, and the witnesses have often lied. People pay good money to come here and hear me sing it. The song is central to Hulu's new biopic, "The United States Vs. Billie Holiday." But I kept driving right on.I pulled away through a rain of bullets. As in "Lady Sings The Blues," she plays Carnegie Hall in 1948 with a big band and strings, not a quartet as in real life. Holidays appearance with actor George Jessel (Joe Cobden) on his show The Comeback Story in 1953 was a real broadcast where she mentioned her marriage to Louis McKay (Rob Morgan), who would become her manager. Before she found fame as a singer, Holiday did whatever it took to survive, including working a prostitute for a while. And every night theyd bring me the white gardenias and the white junk, Holiday writes of her years during World War II. I went out once to a birthday gathering for me, and the New York Post wrote that I had broken the chair because I was so big. At worst, "The United States Vs. Billie Holiday" is as heedless of the facts as "Lady Sings The Blues" was, even restaging that movie's fictitious episode where Billie comes on the scene of a lynching down South, as if she needed to see it to truly sing it. And also, she was resisting white supremacy.". But Holidays world was shattered at the age of 10 when a man she calls Mr. Dick attempted to rape her. By Don Hunstein/Columbia Records/Getty Images. When she was ten years old, she was raped by an adult neighbor. Still, Anslingers team arrested her on her hospital bed, Hari revealed. Ask a real person any government-related question for free. If someone had dropped a pin, it would have sounded like a bomb. Two years after losing her insurance, Jennifer Holliday finally got the operation she needed to regain the use of an arm mangled in a shotgun blast. In real life, Anslinger served as the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration, from 1930 to 1962. She was handcuffed to her bed, and law enforcement kept a tight watch over her quarters, even as fans gathered outside the hospital to wish her well. But the humiliation was terrible." Very little is documented of Fletchers life in particular outside his legal entanglements with Holiday, so it is difficult to verify details about him. GARRETT HEDLUND: (As Harry Anslinger) Hoover says it's un-American. She became one of jazz's great stars, performing with the likes of Count Basie and Artie Shaw. Billie Holiday deserves better, a biopic that, say, shows how her voice changed over her quarter-century recording career, from girlish to mature to brittle, And the raid scene in which she strips naked before him demanding to be searched for drugs is based on Fletchers memory of the incident, which Hari says suggests that the interaction between them became intense., After her autobiography was published, Holiday sent a copy to Fletcher. All dope can do for you is kill youand kill you the long slow hard way. BILLIE HOLIDAY: (Singing) Southern trees bear a strange fruit. 1937 was the year a teachers union journal published Bitter Fruit, a poem written by Jewish educator and anti-racist activist Abel Meeropol in protest of the continued lynching of Black Americans. And I expected shed be glad to see me. Bornto teenage parents and named Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, Holiday grew up poor and suffered a rape at just 10 years old by a neighbor, according to Legacy. Since then, Holiday struggled to get better, though she continued to sing "Strange Fruit." Baby, darling, why, oh why didnt you come backstage to see me? Honey, dont you know? I told her. This newspaper does serve as an introduction to another major figure: Harry J. Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund), then head of the Treasury Departments Federal Bureau of Narcotics and one of the primary leaders of the governments effort to stifle Holiday. From how she got the nickname "Lady Day" to the origins of "Strange Fruit," here are some facts about the famed jazz singer. Billie had passed away in 1959 after she was hospitalized due tocirrhosis of the liver. Things werent much better when she arrived in Hollywood. Then we'd have something closer to the real Billie Holiday story. When she reunited with her mother, Sadie Gough, in Harlem, where Gough was doing sex work, Billie was forced into prostitution. The United States vs. Billie Holiday depicts the FBI chasing Holiday for her drug use and locking her away on narcotics charges as a roundabout way to suppress her musical activism. According to Biography, White busted Holiday at San Francisco's Mark Twain Hotel, even though she claimed to have been clean for a year. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman and Julian Herzfeld. Her romantic tastes were equally iconoclastic; allegedly, she had affairs with Charles Laughton, Tallulah Bankhead, and Orson Welles, the finest cat she ever met. She told The Hollywood Reporter, "I could see this love affair that she has with Jimmy Fletcher, because it tells the story of the love affair that Black Americans have with America. Biography and associated logos are trademarks of A+E Networksprotected in the US and other countries around the globe. "And his whole life, he felt really guilty about what he did. In 1959, she collapsed and was hospitalized. Her father was often out of the picture, himself a jazz musician. Jennifer Yvette Holliday is an American singer and Tony Award-winning actress. She started her career on Broadway in musicals such as Dreamgirls (1981-85), and later became a successful recording artist. A damn woman let out a scream. The two had a well-documented affair in the early 40s. We encountered an issue signing you up. All rights reserved. Billie Holiday was born Eleanor Fagan in Philadelphia, PA on April 7, 1915. McKay batters Billie so badly that sometimes she has to tape up her ribs before performingnot to mention, he attempts to wrest control of her estate and works with Anslinger to arrest Holiday for her drug use yet again. However, after her death, it was Louis who made all the arrangements for the funeral. All I expected was a little helloafter all, she was working. Police were stationed at her door to stop her visitors from seeing her. Copyright 2021 NPR. As a child, she even took a job doing chores and running errands for a local madam in exchange for a chance to play records on the madam's Victrola. You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation, Holiday notes wryly. 3 Billie Holiday The genre represented a threatening meld of Black and white musical traditions, and he wrote that the music sounded like the jungles in the dead of night. That the music attracted both Black and white audiences, furthering its dangerous race mixing potential, was even more alarming to Anslinger. Cocaine supposedly made Black people almost superhumanly strongNEGRO COCAINE "FIENDS" ARE A NEW SOUTHERN MENACE blared a 1914 New York Times headline. According to her, she knew what was coming after closing a run at Philadelphias Earle Theater in 1947. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. After moving to New York with her mother in the late 1920s, she endured another sexual assault at 14. Billie had been three times. All contents For years, American pharmacists sold a product called Mrs. Winslows Soothing Syrup, which contained morphine and alcohol. But meanwhile, decades before the protest songs of the 1960s, Holiday shouldered massive personal risks by performing Strange Fruit. Even though some white audience members left her shows when she performed the song, Holiday wrote it into her contracts that she would sing it each night. Unless I feel something, I cant sing, she writes. Instead, Bob Hope came up to her with Judy Garland and the comedian Jerry Colonna. After she and a white friend had car trouble by the beach, Holiday was grateful when a familiar-looking man fixed their car and took them for a drink at a country club. His Anslinger is even worse than the real one, who was happy to crack down on drug-using jazz musicians, Black ones in particular, a surefire way to make headlines. Holiday died on July 17, 1959. In the 1947 feature "New Orleans," she played a white opera singer's housemaid. She was raised in Baltimore, mostly by her mothers half-sister Eva Miller and her relatives. Tragically, her personal life was marked by horrifying abuse. Louis McKay, played by Rob Morgan, is no angel in this picture. There were high-profile incidents, such as the 1933 axe murder of the Licata family by their 21-year-old son, Victor. The same on-screen text also mentions that Billie Holiday rose to fame in part due to her song Strange Fruit, a lyrical, horrifying description of a lynching, which is true to the record. Portrayed the role of Effie Melody White in the original musical version of "Dreamgirls", giving one of the most triumphant singing performances ever committed to Broadway. As the final text slides of the film say, Holiday died in the hospital on July 17, 1959, while still under watch by the narcs. And it seems like their dalliance didn't just exist on-screen. Well, spot the difference.. By the early 1940s she was hooked on heroin. Holiday and McKay take off on an international tour and find continued success, including a report in Tan magazine and the recording of the acclaimed 1958 album Lady in Satin. WHITEHEAD: Later, after he's exposed, Jimmy shoots heroin with her one time, which somehow makes him flash back to her unhappy childhood, a narcotic mind-meld. Singer Billie Holiday became a trending topic after the release of The United States vs. Billie Holiday. Heres a look at if she had any children as her personal life before death is explored. When she arrived back at her hotel, cops were already swarming the lobby. [It's about a] Black American woman living in America who's been in love with her country her whole life. I was glad to see her. Her label, Columbia, wouldn't allow it, but let her record with the Commodore label, pairing the record with the ballad "Fine and Mellow." We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. Over the next decade, Holiday continued drinking heavily, smoking, and abusing heroin. The conviction also cost Holiday her cabaret performers license, which prevented her from singing at nightclubs for more than 10 years. 7 Things You May Not Know About Billie Holiday, Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images, Joan Baez Sings with Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. Rick Ross's Beloved Buffalo Annoy Neighbors. According to several reports, she started using heroin in the early 1940s during her marriage to Monroe. This is heartbreaking. The case against Holiday begins at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, with Judge James Cullen Grady presiding. Holiday's song, "Strange Fruit," is a central point of the film. Pretty soon there were plenty of lights, cameras, and action. The phrase "Don't Explain" is what Holiday uttered to her first husband, Jimmy Monroe, when he came home with lipstick on his collar. This is hardly the first biopic to invent stuff when the real story is dramatic enough. View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro. The film's big bad is federal anti-drug czar Harry Anslinger, played by Garrett Hedlund in a grim one-note performance. But singing songs like The Man I Love or Porgy is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck., Many of Holidays signature songs were born of moments in her life both traumatic and trivial. And she kept singing "Strange Fruit" (posted on YouTube). Biographer Farah Jasmine Griffin described Young as Holiday's "creative soulmate.". The United States vs. Billie Holiday: What Really Happened, The Weeknd's 'The Idol' to Premiere in 2023, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. WHITEHEAD: In some ways, "The United States Vs. Billie Holiday" offers a corrective to "Lady Sings The Blues." He learned of Anslinger's That is indeed a heroic story and everyone in that position should be really proud of themselves, but one of the things I really learned from this is, that is not the only heroic story about addiction. READ MORE: The Tragic Story Behind Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit". She had a rough childhood, moving to Baltimore to live with her aunt while her mother worked long hours on passenger trains. Things had happened to me that no amount of time could change or heal, she writes. But her dog, Mister, had other plans. Toward the end of one tour, Holiday despaired about coming back to her mother broke.

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