Billie Holiday by John Szwed

performs the Billie Holiday song again as an encore to a classical concert, with the white Woody Herman band and a symphony orchestra and a chorus behind her, only this time to great applause.Jazz had somehow become a lady, and a white one at that.
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    Work on the film began in early September 1946, when a crew was sent to New Orleans to film local sites and a jazz funeral, while prerecording of the music began in Los Angeles.Holiday arrived late, twelve days after production began, and was in no mood for hanging out with her colleagues. Her addiction was taking its toll, and she was angry at her manager, Joe Glaser, for having signed her up for a part she didn’t want. Much of what she had accomplished to that point had been aimed at avoiding domestic labor, yet she was haunted by it. Her mother had been in domestic service, at one point for Ethel Waters and later as a maid for the singer Mildred Bailey. Her stepmother had been Tallulah Bankhead’s maid. Shortly after she came to New York, Billie had a part as a maid on a Shelton Brook soap opera on radio. The transition from playing mammies to playing maids did not represent much progress for black women in fifty years of filmmaking. Granted, the role of a maid who is commanded to take her white mistress slumming did signify a shift in the female racial paradigm in the postwar era: from mammiesand their feckless young white charges to maids and their headstrong employers. In daytime these maids were underlings in the world of upper-class young white ladies, while at night they might serve as guides to the underworld. An intimacy existed between maid and mistress, but it was an awkward one, in which the maid was asked to share the secrets of her own life with her white employer at the same time she was asked to protect her mistress by lying about their nocturnal adventures. But a maid for a white woman was still a maid: Billie complained that her drama coach for the film was making her try out twenty-three different ways of saying, “‘Yes, Miss Miralee’ and ‘No, Miss Miralee’ in order to get the right kind of Tom feeling into it.” Years later, that role was still on her mind. When journalist Murray Kempton visited her shortly before her death, he found her ironing a shirt for her husband. She stopped, took a look at her work, and then started over again, remarking, “I suppose that’s why I never made it as a maid in the movies.I’m just not the maid type.” She apparently never agreed with Ethel Waters’s sentiment that it was better to play a maid than to be one.
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    As with the Welles film, RKO once again objected to so many people of color being featured in
New Orleans
. Producer Jules Levey, siding with the studio, also took issue with the script and edited out the most important scenes, according to director Herbert Biberman and screenwriter Paul. One of the first drafts of the script for the film contained a quite different ending: All of the principal actors moved on to Café Society in New York, where the opera singer improvised words to a tune played by jazz musicians, and Billie Holiday and the Golden Gate Quartet both sang. In the concert hall ending, LouisArmstrong played in front of the Woody Herman band and a symphony orchestra.
    Biberman said that “Levey was scared to death that too many Negroes will come to the theaters to see this picture because there will be too many Negro artists in it.” In order to change the direction of the filmBiberman was replaced by Arthur Lubin after Busby Berkeley wasruled out. The resulting movie shows signs of ambivalence toward its subject and of drifting off course throughout, with Billie portrayed at some moments as a servant and at others as a stylish singer. One character is interrupted just as he begins giving an explanation of the history of jazz;