Billie Holiday by John Szwed Page B

autobiography was published in 1956, plans for a film about her emerged, shaped by Lester Cowan, whose long career as a director included such films as
One Touch of Venus
,
My Little Chickadee
, and
The Story of G.I. Joe
.The script for
The Trial of Billie Holiday
, by songwriter Ann Ronell, Cowan’s wife, begins in 1938 with Holiday traveling with the Artie Shaw band in the South and follows her as she returns to her mother’s apartment in Harlem, tracks her time in federal prison, and dwells on her 1949 trial for narcotics and her defense by lawyer Jake Ehrlich. It was as close to film noir as a biopic about a musician could be, but there were no takers for the project.
    Cowan tried again by optioning the film rights to
Lady Sings the Blues
to serve as the basis of a script by Ronell and William Dufty. To encourage Billie to agree to the project,Dufty wrote her of his good impression of Cowan:
    This was the first guy who had faced the basic reason why there can’t be honest movies about people who stay brown all year round. Loot. Because, it is said, a third of the box office gross of any movie comes from the South, everybody has to trim and trim. Cowan starts with that. He says it’s not true, except for cowboy pictures. He starts out with the premise that you write the South off. You tell the people down there that they aren’t ready for this movie yet. And when they are, it can be shown down there. In the meantime, he works on the basis that the southern gross can be made up by Europe . . . I hope I’m right, and I think I am, that after Cowan has done your life story in this movie, this cat is going to have to do a new ending for this book. And a happy ending, too. If I’m not, I want you to keep this letter and make me eat it next year.
    The lead was to be played by Dorothy Dandridge, a black actress and singer who had fought her way into Hollywood and nightclubs but wasdesperately in need of a starring role.United Artists advanced money for production, the government of Puerto Rico agreed to fund construction of sets for filming on the island, and Anthony Mann (who had directed
The Glenn Miller Story
a few years before) was hinted to be the director.
    When Cowan wrote Holiday to introduce himself and his film about her, he stressed that his movie would avoid the sensational. Unlike some of her autobiography’s reviewers, he said he found her book inspirational, a great saga of survival, a universally moving account. It carried the same forceful message as that of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” His film, he promised her, would not be banned for its drug, sexual, and racial content—a real concern, given the rough treatment censors had given
The Man with the Golden Arm
several years before. With the moral message he saw in her life, it might even lead to New York City’s dropping its ban on her performing at clubs that served alcohol.More than that, it would lead to millions becoming aware of “the staggering cost we pay in this country for the foolish notion of treating the narcotic addict as a criminal, and driving sick people through punishment to crime.”
    As Cowan began to think about casting, he changed his mind about Dorothy Dandridge and let it be known that he was considering actress Diahann Carroll for the role of Billie. But in an article in the
New York Times
, he also said that Holiday might be portrayed by a white actress: “My principal concern as a producer,” he explained, “is to find for the role an actress who can do justice to it.”Asked if he had discussed the casting with the singer, Mr. Cowan said her only comment was, “I’m not prejudiced.” In fact, Holiday had wondered why
she
wasn’t playing herself, and “even if they get a white actress the character she plays will still be colored.If they change that there’s no story.” There was recent precedent for casting a