That year’s kisses

Billie Holiday would die at the age of just forty-four on July 17, 1959, from heart failure caused by cirrhosis of the liver as a result of years of excessive drinking. Born Eleanora Fagan, after a particularly difficult early life she rose to fame in the 1930s as a jazz singer, becoming most known for the proto-civil rights protest song “Strange Fruit”. In Paul Alexander’s biography, Holiday’s final year provides the framework through which he explores her life. Flashbacks are triggered by novelistic scenes imagining her thoughts. Alexander writes: “At times like tonight as she lay in bed, her mind sometimes drifted back to all the men for whom she had fallen”. From here he delves into three of Holiday’s toxic heterosexual relationships. (She was bisexual.) Her first husband, Jimmy Monroe, was imprisoned for drug smuggling. It was while Holiday was dating John Simmons, the bass player who violently abused her, that she first used heroin. And it was while dating jazz trumpeter Joe Guy in 1947 that she was arrested in New York for heroin possession.

There are some downsides to this meandering method, something that Alexander indirectly acknowledges when, halfway through the fourth chapter, after explaining how the film adaptation of her memoir, Lady Sings the Blues (1956), fell apart, he suddenly gives a whistlestop partial biography of Holiday from her birth – in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania rather than Baltimore, Maryland, as she had misleadingly maintained – to her early career success as a teenager. It is framed as a response to the biographical myths (that her parents were married teenage sweethearts, for example) conjured up by Holiday and written by her loyal co-author William Dufty, a trade unionist and journalist whose wife was Holiday’s close friend. But it feels like an info dump necessitated by the book’s unusual form. Bitter Crop is not a book for someone who is reading about Holiday for the first time, but rather for those who are familiar with the popular narratives surrounding her life and curious to see them in new contexts, with attention paid to underexplored details such as Holiday’s relationships with the actor Tallulah Bankhead and the philanthropist Louise Crane.

Today the idea of deliberate image-crafting is often viewed with suspicion and met with accusations of inauthenticity, but while Alexander is keen to establish the facts of Holiday’s life, he writes about her mythmaking without accusation. When she is sentenced to a year and a day in a West Virginia federal prison and rehabilitation centre in 1947, she concocts a fantasy about an idyllic childhood, one in which she was “deeply attached to her parents” and “happy though economic circumstances were not good” for the federal agent processing her. Twelve years later, as she lay hospitalized on what would ultimately be her deathbed, Dufty would fabricate details for a news article, claiming that the ailing artist was surrounded by flowers sent by famous well-wishers: “I put in the names to shame people into sending things”, he would later say. She was seriously ill, but “still shaping her image … in the way she wanted herself to be seen”, writes Alexander.

The lens of Holiday’s final year inevitably creates a sense of foreboding, but while the author does not shy away from detailing her physical deterioration, the tone is not macabre. This can be attributed to his focus on her persistent hope for a future. Musical and professional ambition kept her going. It motivated her to record Lady in Satin, released in June 1958. Inspired by her friend Frank Sinatra, she wanted to create an album with a full orchestra that told “a kind of narrative instead of constituting merely a collection of songs”. The reaction to the work was mixed, the repeated refrain being that she was a shadow of her former self. A month later she was attempting to get the biopic deal through to “enjoy … the professional benefits afforded the subject of a major Hollywood picture”. She would find disappointment there too, but she was not deterred.

The book is a rebuke to the narrative that the last months of Holiday’s life were nothing but decline. Much of the last page consists of commendatory quotations about her cultural impact, which Paul Alexander makes clear is the result of graft and ambition that lasted until the moment she died. For him her legacy is as an “iconoclastic artist who made a timeless contribution to American art” in the vein of Walt Whitman and Georgia O’Keeffe, an innovator who earned her place as a revered figure in the American cultural pantheon. It may have been what Holiday originally wanted to title her biography, it may have been the last words she would sing on television, but it is ultimately a shame that the book is named Bitter Crop, so enthusiastically does it convey her legacy, the fruit her tenacity bore.

Aida Amoako is a freelance writer based in London

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