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TRICKSTERS AND HUCKSTERS: SHOW BIZ ARCHETYPES
by Addison De Witt
“The Tragic Victim”
"Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory qualities," wrote C.G. Jung in The Spirit In Man, Art and Literature (p. 101). "On the one side," Jung continued, "he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal creative process. As a human being...his personal psychology can and should be explained in personal terms. But he can be understood as an artist only in terms of his creative achievements."
In his recent book, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and An Early Cry For Civil Rights, David Margolick invites us to see the legendary jazz singer as someone other than the archetypal tragic victim. He asks us to look at the classic Billie Holiday song "Strange Fruit," with its stark and poetic depiction of a lynching, as a metaphor for Holiday’s struggle as a woman, an African-American, uneducated, raised in poverty, using courage, raw talent and a passion for music to navigate her way in an often brutal, unforgiving world.
All her life, Billie Holiday took kernels of truth and reinvented them for the press and for her book, Lady Sings The Blues (Penguin, 1956), upon which the glossy, Hollywood fantasy film version of her life is based. Billie’s struggle to survive as a woman and to grow as an artist in a society that simultaneously adored and villified her is indeed the stuff of legend, but the real Billie Holiday was not your typical G-rated movie-musical heroine. She wasn’t sweet and adorable. She was sexy and fleshy and earthy and she swore a lot. Both tough and vulnerable, she could be sardonic and nasty, even violent.
Billie’s mother was only 13 when her daughter was born. Billie’s father – a jazz musician who played guitar and banjo – rejected her, and Billie spent the rest of her life looking for a man to protect her, a man who’d never abandon her. She was raped as a child, in and out of trouble, put in a reform school. Billie’s whole life became a search for power and control of her life.
Billie grew up around hustlers in the speakeasies and whorehouses of Baltimore and became one herself. She adopted an attitude toward sex from the women around her – “make ‘em pay for it.” She listened to and sang along with Bessie Smith on the Victrola every chance she got, and at 14 she made her way to New York to join her mother, who was working as a domestic. Determined to make-up for the mistakes of her youth, Billie’s mother tried to be as proper and respectable as she could. Billie called her “Duchess,” her mother called her “Lady.”
Billie made her way around to all the jazz clubs in New York, looking for her father,
singing any chance she could get, gradually getting noticed. Billie’s father didn't want her to tell anyone she was his daughter, afraid it would hurt his success with the ladies.
By her late teens, Billie started to have success of her own, touring with bands. What attracted fellow musicians to Billie was the way she saw herself as a musical instrument in a jazz ensemble. She was never happier than when she was with musicians. They spoke her language. Still, it was a grueling, itinerant lifestyle, going from one job to the next, and not always in hospitable circumstances. Besides the rejections by whites-only hotels and venues, Billie was even forced to put on “black-face” because she wasn't considered black enough for an all-Black band.
Despite some early recordings, Billie’s career wasn’t firmly established until she appeared at Café Society in Greenwich Village in 1939. With the country still in the throes of depression and the world on the brink of war, Café Society was a haven for liberals and lefties and was, most significantly, the first nightclub that mixed races. Patrons were greeted by doormen in deliberately shabby tuxedoes with torn white gloves. John Hammond, a young white millionaire, was Billie’s champion. Celebrities, politicians, the entire east coast intelligentsia soon flocked to see her perform in the intimate, smoke-filled room.
One night, Billie stunned even this hip audience by ending her set of mostly upbeat jazz tunes with the oddly stark and powerful “Strange Fruit.” As David Margolick so powerfully illustrates in his book, it is impossible to underestimate the impact of this song on Billie’s audiences, and on Billie herself. For the rest of her life, Billie ended every show with “Strange Fruit” and walked off the stage in the dark, often leaving audiences in stunned silence. Nothing could possibly have followed it. As the years went by, “Strange Fruit” came to embody all of Billie’s struggles, all of her rage, all of her sorrow, and her defiance. More than merely being sung by her, the song gradually became about her.
I’m reminded of how Lena Horne, in her autobiographical one-woman Broadway show, “The Lady and Her Music,” sang her signature song, “Stormy Weather,” twice. In the first act, as she recalled her early film career, Lena Horne sang “Stormy Weather” as gloriously as her fans remembered. But near the end of the second act, after sharing the traumatic ups and downs of her life as a Black woman in show business, she audaciously sang “Stormy Weather” again. But this time, every ounce of 50 years of pain and rage was injected into the performance, completely free of self-pity, and it became a profound and moving statement that brought the audience to its feet, in tears.
In spite of the impact of her performances at Café Society, Billie Holiday’s label refused to record "Strange Fruit." A leftist storefront record label agreed to record it, instead. John Hammond, Billie’s champion, abandoned her after she began performing “Strange Fruit.” He didn’t want her to keep singing it, felt she was betraying her talent as a jazz entertainer. Some audiences felt the same way, but she continued to sing it, defiantly.
Before performing “Strange Fruit,” Billie sometimes related the circumstances of her father’s death. He’d been struck with a life-threatening illness while on tour in the South. Refused care at a white hospital, he had to be driven several hours out of the way to a hospital that would treat Negroes. Had he received medical attention sooner, he would have lived.
Billie Holiday’s father died in 1937, but it was with her mother’s death in the early 40’s that Billie lost her anchor and began a downhill emotional spiral from which she was never able to recover.
Much has been written about Billie Holiday’s drug use and her victimization by a series of abusive men. But it's too simple an explanation for the paradox that Billie Holiday's life suggests. Her story does not so much follow the trajectory of the Tragic Victim, about an artist destroyed by drugs, as it tells us how Billie Holiday became and stayed an artist in spite of it.
To understand Billie’s drug use, it’s crucial to see it in the context of the music scene at the time. Besides alcohol, the recreational drug of choice for the hip jazz crowd Billie circulated in was marijuana. Marijuana use naturally led to the even cooler opium, but when opium became scarce during World War II, Heroin was sought as a replacement and gradually hooked and helped destroy a generation of brilliant musicians.
All her life, Billie Holiday relied on men to love her, manage her, and to fight for her. To be her father. Club owner John Levy, dandy Jimmy Monroe, Louis McKay – all were users, abusers and pimps. To his credit, McKay (played in a whitewashed version by Billy Dee Williams in “Lady Sings The Blues”) was the only one who tried to get her off dope.
Because of her celebrity, Billie was continually entrapped by police and arrested. It was considered a badge of honor for cops, and often got them in the newspapers. One police captain set her up, arrested her and then, after she was released on bail, went to her show that night, where he posed for photographers. After numerous highly-publicized court appearances, Billie eventually spent over a year in a reformatory for women. Because of her convictions, she lost her license to perform in places that sold liquor, so nightclubs – the only venue she ever performed in – were now off limits.
A three-week Broadway run was sold-out: People were fascinated by the legend Billie had become. A Carnegie Hall concert a few days after she got out of prison was also a triumph, but it wasn’t long before Billie started using again. Her life had now become a series of well-publicized tragedies and comebacks until she finally died in 1959 at the age of 44. By this time, most of her real friends had abandoned her or passed away. When Lester Young – a pianist who had accompanied her from her earliest days, and was her closest platonic male friend – died, his widow didn’t allow Billie to sing at his funeral because of the shape she was in. Billie was devastated, and found the closest bar and got smashed. At the end, she was living alone in a tiny apartment, skin and bones, waiting for her next fix. She was afraid of going to the hospital, even though she was terribly ill and dying, because she knew she wouldn't be able to get her fix. But at the end, even in the hospital, heroin was smuggled in for her.
Though Billie Holiday made hundreds of recordings, and is still today a favorite of jazz fans, she never had a hit record in her entire career. Her life and career stands in sharp contrast to her contemporary, Ella Fitzgerald, who survived the same kind of difficult childhood, but ended up living the lush life in Beverly Hills.
All her life, Billie contributed to and perpetuated the legend, the myth, and lived it out. Off stage, she struggled to survive until the next gig. But on stage, she was sheer artistry personified. That’s where her power derived from. The only place she had control over her life was in front of a microphone. She held the audience in the palm of her hand and kept it riveted.
As Jung explained in The Spirit In Man, Art, and Literature, "Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him...It is sometimes so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being" (101).
"Strange Fruit"
(Lyric by Abel Meeropol – a.k.a. "Lewis Allen," better known for later adopting the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg)
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
Bibliography
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. New York: Vintage, 1998.
Holiday, Billie with William Dufty. Lady Sings The Blues. New York: Penguin, 1956.
Jung, C.G. The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1966.
Margolick, David. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and An Early Cry For Civil Rights. New York: Running Press, 2000.
Nicholson, Stuart. Billie Holiday. Northern University Press, 1995.
O' Meally, Robert. Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday. Da Capo Press, 1991.
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