After stints performing with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, Holiday opened the Café Society, the first non-segregated nightclub in New York City, and did the two-year residency there that shot her to fame. The surveillance of Holiday by the FBI and the BNE (Bureau of Narcotics) started not long after she began her residency there. It intensified after she began singing "Strange Fruit," a song about a lynching. Barney and Leon Josephson, who owned the club, were considered shills for the Communist Party and were later prosecuted.
Holiday's political views, as well as her drug use, made her a target for surveillance. Talking about "Strange Fruit" and "the Jim Crow–sanctioned racism that motivated her to sing it," she publicly said, "That's what made me a communist. Everybody should be a communist—not like the communists you meet at benefits and rallies, though. Not that stuff, at all. But we should all believe in treating each other as human beings. Everybody should have the chance to eat and sleep in peace." Like others in the African-American community at the time, it was the Communist Party's stance on racial equality that won her support, writes Alexander.
Bitter Crop recounts that Holiday "had smoked marijuana since she was a teenager" and that "she particularly enjoyed sneaking off from Café Society between sets to smoke a reefer while driving around the city in a taxi." It was mostly men who took her down into heroin, starting by smoking opium with her husband Jimmy Monroe, whom she married in 1941. When Truman Capote saw her perform at the time, he wrote of "my most beloved American singer—then, now, forever....Billie, an orchid in her hair, her drug-dimmed eyes shifting in the cheap lavender light, her mouth twitching out the words."
Monroe's drug bust in May 1942 and one-year jail sentence ended their marriage. She wrote her song "Don't Explain" about a night he'd come home with lipstick on his collar, and began a liaison with Orson Welles. Her next involvement was with a musician named John Simmons, who introduced her to heroin. But when she got hooked on it, he left her, not wanting to get addicted himself as he had in his teens. In 1945, she was dependent on the drug and when she hooked up with trumpet player Joe Guy, she was "less interested in his musical proficiency than she was in the drug connections he was known to have," writes Alexander.
In May 1947, Billie was returning to her hotel after a gig with Louis Armstrong in Philadelphia when she realized that narcotics agents were raiding the premises. Her driver sped away, and an agent who had been trailing her fired several shots at the car. She made it to New York, where her appearances were staked out by narcotics agent Jimmy Fletcher, who convinced her manager Joe Glazer into talking her into giving herself up in Philadelphia, where drugs and paraphernalia were found in her hotel room. The toll that took on her, and her career, was something she could never recover from.
Holiday's affair with Tallulah Bankhead is covered in the book. "Early on, Tallulah relied on marijuana and cocaine—one reason she was trolling Harlem when she first crossed paths with Billie—before she moved on to an assortment of barbituates and amphetamines. All the while, she indulged in alcohol, usually whiskey or bourbon," Alexander writes.
As Alexander tells it, in January 1949, at Room 602 at the Mark Twain hotel in San Francisco, her then-lover and manager John Levy took a phone call, then tossed Billie a packet of drugs and told her to flush it down the toilet. When a knock came at the door, Levy opened it and FBN agents rush in, chasing Billie to the bathroom and saving just enough evidence---a few fragments of glass from an opium pipe with residue on them--to charge her and Levy and drag them to court. Bankhead tried to intercede with J. Edgar Hoover for her (for better or worse).
Bitter Harvest touches on Holiday's long and fruitful working and personal relationship with saxophonist Lester Young, who was court martialed and imprisoned by the Army over his marijuana use. The book also covers Billie's relationship with British jazz singer Annie Ross, who was also turned onto heroin by a man, in her case Lenny Bruce. Ross bonded with her idol Holiday after the Scottish singer replaced her when she was too ill to perform one night at the Apollo Theater.
The hounding of Holiday by federal drug agents is well covered in Johann Hari's 2015 book Chasing the Scream, but in Bitter Harvest we see that put into the context of her artistry, life and relationships in a way that illuminates her story and makes it even more tragic. The book is beautifully presented with photographic treasures opening each chapter, including her mug shot when she was incarcerated at a women's penitentiary in West Virginia. By the time a photo of her funeral casket opened the last chapter, I was moved to tears.
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