Cape £17.99 pp354

Billie Holiday famously led a chaotic, dissolute life that has attracted biographers like rubberneckers to a car crash. Because she surrounded herself with chancers, druggies and a succession of boyfriends and husbands who fed her dope, beat her up and stole her money, the testimony of her nearest and dearest has been untrustworthy at best. And because she was so often out of it, and also had what her last lawyer, Earle Zaidins, called “a fantastic imagination”, her credentials as a narrator were pretty questionable.

Top of the list of unreliable memoirs is the ghosted autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, which Holiday cobbled together with a tabloid reporter, William Dufty, in 1955. The idea, according to Dufty, was “to cash in on the confessional book vogue . . . pronto”. The first three chapters were hacked out in 24 hours and the completed book delivered to the publisher less than two months later. This speedy, sensationalist portrait of the artist as a lesbian junkie supplied a template that has been eagerly recycled in many books as well as prompting an eponymous film.

Julia Blackburn sidesteps the verification issue. Her book is based on a series of more than 150 interviews conducted in the early 1970s by Linda Kuehl, an American writer. Kuehl contacted everybody she could find who had known Holiday and who had a story to tell. She also assembled an archive of cuttings, court transcripts and other personal bits and pieces. Faced with the huge task of converting this painstaking research into a biography, Kuehl seems to have lost heart. When she finally jumped out of a window, there was nothing to show for all her work.

Blackburn’s approach to Kuehl’s shoeboxes of fascinating but often contradictory material (“this babbling mountain of voices”, as she calls it) is quite different. Instead of trying to boil them down into a unified account, Blackburn lets them stand as separate, loosely chronological chapters. With brief introductions from the author, these often reveal as much about the speakers and their social contexts as they do about the subject. As an oral history of the black experience of apartheid in mid-20th-century America, With Billie is a gripping read, even without its wild and wildly talented heroine.

We start out hearing from the companions of Billie’s semi-abandoned childhood, people such as Christine Scott, who met her aged nine at the House of Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, a brutal reform school in East Baltimore where bullying and sexual abuse by the older girls was rife. Thirty something chapters later, there is Alice Vrbsky, her last personal assistant, explaining that Billie wasn’t the hopeless heroin addict of popular repute. The final drug bust, while she was lying in a New York hospital with cirrhosis of the liver, must have been a fit-up, according to Vrbsky. “By June 1959 she was mainly drinking Gordon’s gin and Seven-up,” Vrbsky remembers. “Her only bad habit was that she would fall asleep while smoking a cigarette.”

Aside from the alcoholism, which more or less killed her, Billie’s worst habit was her addictive fondness for violent, manipulative men. Plenty of musicians claim to have loved the big-boned, flamboyant singer known, for her imperious manner, as “Lady Day”. Nearly all of them report seeing her naked, as she liked to be in her dressing room, sometimes with all her body hair dyed red. But she could only be intimate with men who behaved like or were pimps. The most chilling chapter here largely comprises a transcript of a telephone conversation between Billie’s last husband, Louis McKay (a foul-mouthed thug who makes your average gangster rapper sound like a proper gent) and her friend Maely Dufty, the wife of her ghost autobiographer.

McKay, who bought a number of properties with his wife’s money, all of which he registered under his own name, is furious about a sum of $700 he feels she owes him. “If I got a whore,” he reasons, “I get some money from her or I don’t have nothing to do with the bitch.”

At first McKay seems to be contemplating hiring a hitman to kill Holiday, then he softens and vows instead “to do her up so goddam bad she’s going to remember as long as she lives”. Holiday accepted, even welcomed, this sort of treatment. She would often be knocked down by some husband/manager type and promptly pick herself up and appear on stage that night with a black eye, or worse. Her wretched upbringing is generally assumed to have set her on this path. Her teenage mother unloaded her onto an elderly relative at birth and soon decamped to a brothel in New York. Her absentee father, a banjo player whose surname she adopted, never felt comfortable with her calling him “Daddy” on the few occasions they met on the grounds that it made him look old. Illegal drinking dens, whorehouses, reform school and prison were where young Billie did most of her growing up. She was raped at 11; the view of most of the witnesses here is that she turned to prostitution soon after.

Thankfully, With Billie never loses sight of the fact that it was her supreme artistry that made her shambolic life interesting, and not the other way round. Her hypnotic effect on audiences derived, many suggest, from an intuitive musical gift that the self-administered avalanche of drugs, booze and fags never fully buried. She could get right inside the sad heart of any song and turn it into a gesture of defiance. According to one of her sidemen, “When Ella (Fitzgerald) sings ‘My man he’s left me’, you think the guy went down the street for a loaf of bread. But when Lady sings, you can see he ain’t never coming back.”

Another memorable testimonial comes from Blackburn herself. “Even the saddest songs were full of courage. It was as if the fact of singing was itself a triumph and a way of dealing with despair.”

MAN TROUBLE

Billie Holiday often ended up in very public brawls with the men in her life. In 1954, for instance, after a chaotic performance at Carnegie Hall during which she tripped over the microphone wire and forgot the name of her opening song, she became involved in a fight with her husband, Louis McKay, in the street outside. Although Holiday’s friend Memry Midgett tried to fend off McKay by flourishing a bottle at him, he reportedly hit Holiday right across the street with a single blow of his fist.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £14.39 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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