That is indeed a heroic story and everyone in that position should be really proud of themselves, but one of the things I really learned from this is, that is not the only heroic story about addiction. To me, this is all about how we love this country and it dismisses Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. Laugh? We may earn a commission from these links. Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture. The singer grew up poor, spending time in brothels with her mother, and. . She died on July 17th, 1959, at the age of 44. How come I got to take this from this bitch here? . He is a retired FBI agent and best known for his role in the UNABOM investigation, which resulted in the arrest and conviction of Ted Kaczynski. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. It just is what it is., Billie Holidays life story reemerging in 2021 feels almost willed to be. She was, her friend Annie Ross told me, as strong as she could be.. The next time he saw her, it was in a brothel in Harlem, doing exactly the same. Whether or not they actually had a physical relationship is hard to say, but it does seem that Fletcher and Holiday did have some sort of relationship, though it may have involved a sense of betrayal. Billie Holiday never stopped being addicted. Federal authorities first targeted her shortly after she began singing the song. WebOn June 25, 1975, the evening before the murders, Agents Ron Williams and Jack Coler were on the reservation attempting to locate and arrest Jimmy Eagle. As The Guardian writes, "Maybe he had [fallen in love with her]. I had to take a break to sit back. Via wire-tapping, undercover agents and even assassination, King, Hampton and Holiday were followed and harassed by government agencies, especially the FBI Along with Esquire, his work has appeared in NYLON, Vulture, and USA Today. Theres not a lot known about the condition, but it affects approximately three percent of the worlds population. Immediately after, Billie Holiday received her first threat from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Thats just what I keep saying. The full sourcing for this article can be found in the books endnotes. While she lay dying, a by-then retired Fletcher attempted to visit Holiday in the hospital. Justin Kirkland is a Brooklyn-based writer who covers culture, food, and the South. They grilled her on her hospital bed without letting her talk to a lawyer. Not long after, he ran into her in a bar and they talked for hours, with her pet Chihuahua, Moochy, by her side. She was given it for ten days and began to recover: she put on weight and looked better. This is heartbreaking. Fletcher shadowed Holiday for years, and became protective, eventually, it seems, writes Hari, fall [ing] in love with her. He is bent in such a way that his body is contorted, as if hes carrying something we cannot see. Maybe they would have been kinder to me if theyd been nasty; then I wouldnt have trusted them enough to believe what they told me.. Amid all of that came Moonlight. Thats thats thats sad man. He trails off. Because in one of the books I read [I found] that's something that he really prided himself on, his ability to really maneuver and be whoever he needed to be in any situation, whether it was with someone who was the ritziest or someone who was in the slums., At times in the movie, Fletcher is our entry point into Holidays world. When she reunited with her mother, Sadie Gough, in Harlem, where Gough was doing sex work, Billie was forced into prostitution. She let him in. CNN . Johann Hari is a London and New York-based journalist. Billie Holiday - "Strange Fruit" Live 1959 [Reelin' In The Years Archives], 'The United States vs. Billie Holiday' True Story, 35 Classic Photos from the Academy Awards, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. The story explores the roots of Holiday's song "Strange Fruit" and the extensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to stop her from singing the song in public. They are going to arrest me in this damn bed.. So I was like, Yo, I have to work with Lee.. But he remembered Moonlight and its colors. We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. Rhodes was immediately interested. In reality, Anslinger had assigned a different agent, one who hadn't "gone soft," to hound Holiday, and Fletcher didn't hear from her again until she sent him a signed copy of her 1956 autobiography, according to Politico. That's something that [director] Lee [Daniels] wanted to embellish a little bit to show that aspect of a rich Black family during that era, because we don't see too many depictions of that, Rhodes explains. It was all she had left. According to an article written for Politico by Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Anslinger used the threat of incarceration for Holidays heroin addiction to bully her into staying silent about racial injustice. I did not think much of Ms. Holidays performance, he told her manager sternly. Hulus Oscar-nominated The United States vs. Billie Holiday is a fictionalized take on the life of the legendary jazz singer, played in the film by Rise Up singer and (now Academy Award nominated) actress Andra Day in a .css-umdwtv{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:.0625rem;text-decoration-color:#FF3A30;text-underline-offset:0.25rem;color:inherit;-webkit-transition:background 0.4s;transition:background 0.4s;background:linear-gradient(#ffffff, #ffffff 50%, #d5dbe3 50%, #d5dbe3);-webkit-background-size:100% 200%;background-size:100% 200%;}.css-umdwtv:hover{color:#000000;text-decoration-color:border-link-body-hover;-webkit-background-position:100% 100%;background-position:100% 100%;}Golden Globe-nominated performance. No matter what they did to her, she sang her song. Since then, Holiday struggled to get better, though she continued to sing "Strange Fruit." That's, he says, shaking his head. Follow him @johannhari101. So, just keep fighting, man. Holiday arriving at a court hearing in 1947. Jimmy Fletcher was the answer. WebIn 2019, they searched a parcel of land in Hillsdale Township, Michigan. We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. (This racist belief was behind the removal of the drug from Coca-Cola.) One of his victims was a young actress who happened to live in his building, while another was a pretty blond waitress in a bar. But meanwhile, decades before the protest songs of the 1960s, Holiday shouldered massive personal risks by performing Strange Fruit. Even though some white audience members left her shows when she performed the song, Holiday wrote it into her contracts that she would sing it each night. Daniels was inspired to make the film, he says in the press notes, after learning the truth about the 1972 Diana Ross film Lady Sings the Blues. Strange Fruit was a musical lament against lynching. Some of the nicer ones have feelings enough to hate themselves sometime for what they have to do . Neither Holiday nor Fletcher ever admitted to having a relationship on the record but there is strong evidence to support that Fletcher was in love with her. They held up signs reading Let Lady Live. Callender had built a clinic for heroin addicts in his church, and he pleaded for Billie to be allowed to go there to be nursed back to health. Its a lot to contend with, and Rhodes found a way to connect. Maybe they would have been kinder to me if theyd been nasty; then I wouldnt have trusted them enough to believe what they told me. She was right: Jimmy told the writer Linda Kuehl that he never stopped feeling guilty for what hed done to Lady Day. I think in this story, we were able to empathize with him because we understood he was just someone who was just caught up.. Rhodes had a custom painting done of 2018a three part series titled A Soldiers Story, (a nod to role model Denzel Washington), highlighting each of his films. She had a heroin addiction because shed been chronically raped as a child and she was trying to deal with the grief and the pain of that. Maybe they would have been kinder to me if theyd been nasty; then I wouldnt have trusted them enough to believe what they told me. Not until much later did Fletcher realize how damning his role in Holidays life was. Perhaps the most important song Holiday would ever sing was Strange Fruit. Written by communist poet and teacher Abel Meeropol after he saw a photo of lynched Black men, the song describes the bodies of lynching victims hanging from southern trees like the strange fruit of its title. To be able to be hip with the cats when he was hip. The 1967 film Guess Whos Coming to Dinner starred Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton as a ne, As the open-hearted matriarch Hattie Mae in Tyler Perrys 2022 film A Jazzmans Blues, Amirah Vann demonstrates a great tenderness and fierce love to b, This story includes spoilers for Saint Omer. Dont let them. The police threw the friend out. The day after the Academy Awards, you likely saw Rhodes on your timeline, wearing nothing but a pair of Calvin Klein briefs. Declassified FBI files quote an agent inside the narcotics bureau (possibly Anslinger) as saying that 'because of the importance of Holiday, it has been the policy of his bureau to discredit individuals of this caliber using narcotics. In the film, now streaming on Hulu, singer Andra Day dons the dresses and the vocal vibrato of the late singer. He was fond of pretending to be an artist and luring women to an apartment in Greenwich Village where he would spike their drinks with LSD to see what would happen. In our culture, there's one heroic story we tell about people with addiction problems, which is that sometimes they recover from their addiction, Hari says. Holiday was busted again, arrested, and put on trial. Its when your senses kind of overlap. . The United States vs. Billie Holiday portrays the two as having a romance, but not all is as it seems. But racist fears that drugs could unleash particular stores of violence in non-white people were also prevalent. This young lady was gifted by her creator with tremendous talent . There was a distinct question that the interviewer had about their love, and it was just his response that really gifted me a unique answer, he told Refinery29. Nothing works as fast as you would like. '", Enter Agent Jimmy Fletcher, a Black federal officer who was assigned to infiltrate Holiday's personal inner circle. But I'm the kind of person, bro, I got to see where I'm going. Just to imagine what he felt like after that, you know what I mean? Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldnt treat them, she wrote in her memoir, then sent them to jail. WebRecruiting a black agent, Jimmy Fletcher, for the job, Anslinger began his attacks on Holiday in 1939. Like my great-grandmother raised nine children by herself in Backwoods Louisiana, he says. Rhodes' resurgence is marked by a story sopped in everything good and bad from the South, about a woman who reckoned with the norm until the moment she died. He said he found opium in her garbage can and a heroin kit in her bathroom. Laugh? He was a Black man assigned with taking down a Black woman who was actually, vocally, standing up for her community, particularly with her anti-lynching song Strange Fruit." When finally a friend was allowed in to see her, Billie told her in a panic: Theyre going to kill me. To be able to do that, it's just such a uniqueit's energy. The two discussed a few different options for Rhodes in the early parts of 2019, but it was later in the year that Daniels landed squarely on the Holiday biopic. They explained that the problem had been solved: they had taken her off the critical list. She never lost faith in her musics ability to capture and persuade. Whites men declared they had found opium stashed in a wastepaper basket next to a side room and the kit for shooting heroin in the room, and they charged her with possession. Two FBI agents were killed and three others were injured in a shooting Tuesday morning as authorities were executing a search warrant at a home in Sunrise, Florida. We talked to Chasing the Scream author Johann Hari about the role jazz legend Billie Holiday played in the early days of the drug war. The morning he first raided her, Jimmy took Billie to one side and promised to talk to Anslinger personally for her. While he knew something special was on the horizon, Rhodes says the experience wasnt incredibly different. ", Screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks said that when she was approached for the film, she could see the story "right away." It's not your fault. Then we wont be searching around, pulling out your clothes and everything. If I got a whore, I got some money from her or I dont have nothing to do with the bitch. He had heard that Harry Anslinger wanted information on her, and he was intrigued. Holiday has died. Hari talked to Esquire about the true story behind The United States vs. Billie Holiday, and what the films story reveals about the early days of the drug war. The Woman Nikole Hannah-Jones Credits With Her Career Success, Everything You Need To Know About 'Mean Girls: The Musical', The 2023 SAG Awards Will Be Streaming-Only For The First Time Ever, Get Even More From Bustle Sign Up For The Newsletter. You dont have to do that. In his eulogy for her, the Reverend Eugene Callender told me he had said: We should not be here. She stripped and stood there, and then she pissed in front of them, defying them to watch. [2] [3] Law enforcement career [ edit] As soon as they took her off oxygen, she lit a cigarette. But did it really happen that way in real life? 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At the moment, Rhodes is best known for his starring role in Best Picture winner, I read a few books, the 31-year-old actor said. Then to continue working for them. As is depicted in the film, however, that trauma didn't stop once she became famous. That part of the story is fictionalized, but the agent did speak of her notable affection. That said, its just as easy to view Fletcher as a traitor. You watch, baby, Billie warned from her tiny gray hospital room. As the film notes, an anti-lynching bill was introduced to Congress in the 30s. Billie paid her debt to society, one of Holidays friends wrote, but society never paid its debt to her.. And he at least to me seemed like someone really trying to find themselves in the world and doing that through this job where people were taking advantage of him.. 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