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Anyone pick this up yet? Sound very interesting ...

'With Billie': The Lady Sang Jazz Ballads

By JOHN LELAND

Published: April 24, 2005

N April 1959, three months before her death at the age of 44, Billie Holiday complained about having to compete with her lurid public image. ''Every time I do a show I'm up against everything that's ever been written about me,'' she told an interviewer. ''I have to fight the whole scene to get people to listen to their own ears and believe in me again.''

Nearly half a century later, Holiday remains swaddled in myths and misconceptions, many of them of her own devising. Among friends she invented stories, and her quickie autobiography, ''Lady Sings the Blues,'' written with William Dufty, began its fabrications with its famous first lines: ''Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was 18, she was 16 and I was 3.'' (As Robert O'Meally has pointed out, public records show that Billie's mother was 19 when she gave birth, and the couple never married.) And for the record, the lady mostly sang jazz ballads, not blues.

The challenge for Holiday's biographers has been to extricate her not just from these myths but from the woman we think we know: the suffering black woman, beaten by a hard life and no-good men, drinking and drugging her way to oblivion. Especially in her later years, Holiday traded on her public image, singing in a voice that stood as proof of her bruises. For the most part, her audiences didn't know the difference. As one of her producers remarks in Julia Blackburn's new biography, ''With Billie,'' her audience ''didn't give a damn what her voice was like because she was Billie Holiday, with a style and a sound like no other woman ever had anywhere, and what she once was would carry her through.'' Along the way, Holiday left contradictory impressions on the people who traveled with her: the reform-school classmates, pimps, musicians, lovers, narcs, abusers, enablers and hangers-on, who nourished their own stories of her life and their roles in it.

''With Billie'' compiles some of these stories, using interviews conducted in the 1970's by a researcher named Linda Kuehl, who committed suicide before she could finish her own book. Blackburn promises less a unifying biography than ''a documentary in which people are free to tell their own stories about Billie and it doesn't matter if the stories don't fit together, or even if sometimes they seem to be talking about a completely different woman.'' The results feel like table scraps snatched from a particularly rich table. Blackburn's approach doesn't bring Holiday into particularly new focus, nor, since we rarely hear Holiday's voice, does it bring us inside her psychological fortress.

Blackburn doesn't have a theory. What she has is a method, an appreciation for loose ends -- ''order has never been one of my strong points'' -- and boxes full of tapes and transcripts. The interviews circle around questions that divided Holiday's associates. Was she a masochist? Was she crazy? How deep was her addiction? What did she want? Blackburn pursues only what Kuehl asked and prints only the answers she received. The subjects alternately describe a maternal Holiday who wanted children and a sexually casual one who entertained guests naked backstage, her pubic hair dyed red. From childhood, Holiday sought violent men and goaded them to escalating levels of abuse. The pianist Carl Drinkard describes her third husband, Louis McKay, as ''the real true man she always dreamed of,'' who would ''knock her unconscious with a single blow of his fist.'' This tells us as much about Drinkard as Holiday.

Blackburn nicely evokes the players around Holiday. Some flirt with Linda Kuehl; some wax nostalgic; many have since followed Kuehl and Holiday to the grave. Their often self-serving stories are fascinating for their ordinariness. We meet Bobby Tucker, the pianist who fetched Holiday after she was imprisoned for drug possession, and learn offhand that his light-skinned father turned down a chance of ''becoming a white man''; we meet Jimmy Fletcher, a narc assigned to jazz musicians because of his race, who laments that ''when you form some sort of friendship with anybody, it's not pleasant to get involved with criminal activities against that person.'' The most striking speaker, McKay, who is described variously as a stabilizing force, a pimp and a drug supplier, is captured in a profane telephone conversation with Maely Dufty, the wife of William Dufty. In the transcript, McKay talks about Holiday as if she were a prostitute not earning money for her pimp and promises violence in return: ''Ain't going to let nobody make a fool out of me, good as I've been to this woman.''

Biography, like fiction, aims to liberate its protagonists from such characters, to create autonomous subjects rather than objects. Holiday has so far resisted this treatment. For literary purposes she remains, as Farah Jasmine Griffin has written, a tragic figure without much personal or artistic intent, someone who ''feels but does not think.'' Blackburn, who has written two novels, does present one fully autonomous character -- herself, extrapolating scenes from photographs or interview transcripts. After the lawyer Earle Zaidins talks about encountering Holiday, dressed in a mink coat as she walks her dog, Blackburn muses, ''Perhaps she muttered in her dark and rasping voice'' that a dog ''was more faithful than any of the goddamn men she had come across.'' Or perhaps she just commented on the weather.

This is a difference between biography and documentary. The former seeks to strip away myth; in the latter, it's often enough to reconstruct it. Both have incomplete truths to tell, so it's important to know what you're getting. And with documentary, you may want a soundtrack to fill in the gaps.

John Leland is a reporter at The Times and the author of ''Hip: The History.''

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