DISGRACELAND - Billie Holiday: Heroin Hounds, ‘Whorehouse Music,’ and the Queen of Jazz

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

Billie Holiday ascended from the rough and tumble streets of Baltimore and Harlem, through reform school, brothels, and Welfare Island, right to the top of the music game. Her childhood fascination with “whorehouse music” filled a void in her lost innocence, but she soon found a second stabilizer: Heroin. Just when her sensational “Strange Fruit” brought her to Columbia Records, her dependency on hard drugs landed her behind bars. Her mesmerizing voice ensnared listeners unlike any other jazz singer of her day, but in the end, it was narcotics that eventually ensnared Billie Holiday and sealed her fate. This episode contains themes that may be disturbing to some listeners and includes descriptions of sexual assault. To see the full list of contributors see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTER Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: Instagram YouTube X (formerly Twitter)  Facebook Fan Group TikTok  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Please check the show notes for more information. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about Billy Holiday are in... sane. She was institutionalized for being raped. She ran errands for call girls at just six years old and was later imprisoned for refusing to prostitute herself. She had a heroin hound that inconspicuously delivered packets of dope to her front door. Her double-crossing manager helped the feds bust her for narcotics anyway. She was a master of her own sensuality, despite the trauma inflicted upon her as a young girl. Billy Holliday grew up fast.

but her voice was slow, sweet. She sang jazz in a way that hung in the air that mesmerized millions of people. She could bring a room to a hush or a roar with a single syllable because Billy Holiday made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music.

That was a loop from my Melotron called Shortcake Strut MK1. I played you that loop Because I can't afford the rights to Moneana is soon enough for me by Peggy Lee. And why would I play you that specific slice of sultry cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on March 27, 1948. And that was the day Billy Holiday performed to a sold-out Carnegie Hall, proving that no prison sentence, no betrayal, and no drug habit could keep her down.

On this episode, call girls, heroin hounds, betrayal, bringing down the house at Carnegie Hall and Billy Holiday. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Ten days out of prison. Nothing tasted as sweet and strange as this. Freedom. On stage, again, lost in song, literal blood, sweat, and tears. Blood from the hat pin she used to fasten her trace. trademarked Gardinias to her hair, sweat from giving her all on stage and tears of joy.

Ten months in prison and there was no telling whether she'd have a career at all afterward, never mind a rabid and supportive audience, just ten days removed from the shame of incarceration. The Carnegie Hall concert wasn't her idea. It was the promoters. He must have known what he was talking about. Promoting was his business. Singing and doing time was Billy Holiday's business. Tickets moved like Harlem numbers runners. Quick. Billy Holiday's triumphant return was barely announced before it sold out. 3,500 capacity seat sold,

including standing room only tickets, which extended to the actual stage. Come showtime, 2,000 people jammed 7th Avenue in 57th Street in hopes of finding their way in to see the woman they called Lady Day. Billy hadn't sung a stitch in prison, not a no, but you wouldn't know it from listening to her on stage at Carnegie Hall that night. She was in possession of all her powers commanding sensual sultry,

the most unique and experienced voice in the business. You listened to Billy Holiday, and you knew the woman who owned that voice had seen some things. It was sultry and sensual, yes, and it was also experienced. Billy Holiday would rather have done without some of that experience. It was what led her to this point tonight. She tried blocking it out. She dug into the feel. She sang one of the first songs she wrote.

God bless the child. The title was only half of it. The whole phrase, God bless the child that's got his own, hinted at the full story. And the full story started with this. As a child, Billy Holiday, didn't have much of her own anything,

save for her mother's love. Her father, a working musician, split early. He left Billy for a life playing the banjo, but he also left behind a shared love of music. Billy had a fend for herself most days while her mother worked as a maid, cleaning rich people's homes in Baltimore's white neighborhoods. There was a man, a neighborhood man, 40 and big, Mr. Dick. Billy was 10 years old. Physically, she had started developing early before most of the other young girls in her neighborhood. Mr. Dick noticed.

He told Billy her mom had asked him and his wife to watch Billy until her mom returned later that night, and that Billy was supposed to go with a couple to their home down the street. Billy Holiday was 10 years old and innocent. She believed the two adults who then brought Billy into their home, locked her in their bedroom, held her down, and proceeded to rape her. She screamed, she scratched, she saw her mother and a policeman break down Mr. Dick's door. And Mr. Dick was arrested. Billy and her mom gave their statements at the station and incredibly,

young Billy Holiday, at age 10, a rape victim, was thrown in jail. The cops didn't believe her. Look at her. She must have enticed Mr. Dick. It couldn't have been all his fault. Look at this girl developed beyond her years. Surely she deserved some of the blame as well. So went the incredibly ignorant and insensitive thinking from authorities at the time.

Billy spent two nights in jail, then court. Mr. Dick got five years and something approaching justice. Billy Holiday, on the other hand, got sent to Catholic girls' reform school. She needed to be sorted out, taught a lesson, broken of whatever wild spirit brought on this terrible incident for it couldn't happen again. It was Billy Holliday's first taste of institutional injustice, and it was horrifying. The Reform School was its own type of prison. The treatment of the young girls was barbaric. They were beaten, isolated, mentally abused,

and inside the walls of the school, physical abuse wasn't beyond the realm of possibility if Billy wasn't careful. In short, it was dangerous, danger around every corner, even in the most seemingly innocent of places. On the playground, Billy sat on a bench kicking her shoes, watching one of the other girls on a swing. The girl kept pushing it, pumping her legs and propelling herself higher and higher and higher.

Until she swung so high, she was dead even on a line with the crossbar that the swing's chain swung from. She pumped some more, higher, more higher still until the swing's chains broke from the crossbar and the girl in the swing flew through the air. The girl screamed in horror. As Billy watched the girl fly high over the school yard and what seemed like slow. motion. Then over the yard's fence, the girl screamed the whole way. She flew out of the yard, into the yard next door, and crashed down violently. The scream went dead. So too did the girl. Her neck broken. She died instantly. Billy saw most of it, heard it all. Something in her that day died a little, too. It was traumatic, upsetting to say the least. She mouthed out to the mother

superior and for her punishment they threw Billy in here locked in the front room of the reform school with the body of the dead girl it would be a day or so before the morgue could make it out to collect the body in for tonight anyway 10-year-old Billy Holiday will be keeping the body company dead girls don't make much noise but every little sound within and in earshot of that room every spin of the overhead fan every creek and every floorboard of the house every found foundational shift, every scurry from every rodent inside the old home's walls, the scattering cockroaches, every distant voice, every scuffle outside on the sidewalk, every random car horn, all of it conspired to come together in a symphony of horror that soundtracked the living nightmare

playing out in Billy's head at the moment. She screamed, bloody murder, banged on the door, pleaded, cried, none of it mattered. All of it went unheard, unnoticed, unattended to. Young Billy Holliday might as well have been as dead as that girl. No one cared. Not like they did now, anyway. Billy Holiday was somebody, a bold-faced person of note. The thousands of fans and attendance before her at Carnegie Hall cared. Her fellow musicians cared, the press, the reporters who wrote about not only her music,

but her legal troubles cared. And of course, just like they did back when she was 10 years old, the authorities cared. In their own way, that is. Except now, it wasn't backward-thinking local cops who had Billy Holiday on the brain. It was federal agents, and unlike the press or the fans who obsessed over Billy's music, her records, her stunning on-stage performances and appearances on screen, the feds cared about one thing. The same thing Billy cared about.

The thing that supplanted the music. Music was great, sure, music was the only thing that came close to restoring that innocence. That innocence that was ripped away from Billy when she was raped and subsequently institutionalized for the first time, As a 10-year-old, the music transported Billy out of herself and into another place completely. It was sublime. But that was on stage. Offstage, Billy needed something else to transport her, to take her away, to free her, to make up for that loss of innocence.

And for Billy Holiday, in 1948, going as far back as her addled brain would take her, that one thing was indeed the thing that federal agents cared so much about as well. Heroin. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends.

I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no.

I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests,

like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an act or whatever, my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary.

I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises. And his entire, the Kardashians family over there, everybody's going, And the air marshes trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been at sleepwalking.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things.

Tana Monsu. Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone.

These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. you know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

They were there in the audience that night. Federal agents. Clocking Billy's new post-prison moves, as always. If she was high on stage, they couldn't tell. Compared to themselves, every jazz musician seemed at least a little high. The feds didn't understand. What made these junky musicians tick? What made heroin so appealing?

The drug wiped you out, rendered you unable to do anything except gnaut and vomit. If it was good anyway. Then, when the high wore off, all you wanted was more. More drugs, more that high. And you spent nearly every waking moment chasing it, scheming for it, stealing for it, fucking over your friends and your family for it. Except Billy Holiday hadn't hit that sort of bottom yet. She wasn't fucking over anyone for heroin.

Before prison, she was living large from fat paycheck to fat paycheck. She wasn't in the position of having to steal for her drugs. Quite the opposite. She was the one being worked over. On stage, she leaned into the effortless chill of my man. The song cut deep, made her think of Joe. Like most men, Billy Holiday involved herself with, Joe Glazer, her manager, manipulated her.

But unlike John Levy before him or Louis McKay after, Joe's con was more complicated. He wasn't after Billy's hard-earned money that she generated as one of the country's premier singing talents. Joe was up to something else. Always up to something else. Joe also represented another artist, one of Billy's favorite artists, megastar of stage and scream Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was no doubt the bigger of the two artists on Glazer's roster and definitely his priority. Billy felt this. She didn't like it, but she accepted it. Billy accepted a lot of things, as far back as she could remember.

She accepted the fact when she was 13 years old that if she were going to make any money that there was unfortunately only one job available to her at the time. The oldest profession in the world, prostitution. Billy Holiday was drawn to the whorehouse. as a young child. It was a hub of activity in the neighborhood. Good-looking men coming and going at all hours, fancy cars pulling up and pulling out, off towards some other reality far away from the grind of the Baltimore grime Billy and her mom were struggling through. But more than the promise of something different, something else there was the music. The madam kept a big Victrola record player

pumping around the clock and out of its big horn speaker, the sounds of Bessie Smith and Billy Holliday's future colleague Louis Armstrong filled the air. The music was infectious. It flowed through the Horhouse windows onto the street. It called out to Billy Holiday. And by the age of six, Billy was running errands for the madam, washing basins, putting out towels and soap. Billy didn't even want to get paid. She just wanted to be around the music. It knocked her out. It was jazz music, but Billy Holiday didn't know it at the time. She called it what everyone else in the neighborhood called it. Horhouse music. By the time Billy turned 13 and had relocated to Harlem from Baltimore with her mother,

she knew where the action was in her new neighborhood, the whorehouse. Billy quickly found employment, once again as an errand girl, and then quickly elevating herself to working girl or to the status of what was commonly referred to at that time as $20 girl. Two regulars a week, white dudes, 20 spots of pop, five each to the madam. And now, instead of doing laundry for other people as her mother did, Billy at 13 had housegirls who also worked for the madam doing her laundry. Billy vived on her suddenly flush purse. The sex, however, scared the hell out of her.

Two times a week with nice polite white dudes running around behind the backs of their wives was one thing. In her autobiography, Billy told a story about a man she called Mr. Dick. She said she was still terrified from her experience with him a few years earlier. Even though he was paying for it and paying for it well, a 50 spot for Billy alone, it was way worse. He nearly put Billy in the hospital. She said she couldn't walk for two days. Her mother called the ambulance and the ambulance man gave Billy a crooked smile,

but Billy remembered the rumors. Young black girls in the late 1920s being admitted into the hospital for pneumonia and coming out sterile, having had their ovaries involuntarily removed. No thank you. Billy told the ambulance man she wasn't going anywhere. She'd take the pain and heal on her own in her mother's home. And from then on, Billy wrote, she made a pact to herself,

that she'd only take work from white guys. Now, I realize that in 2021, that sounds a lot like a stereotype that we'd rather not talk about. But to understand Billy Holiday, you need to understand who she thought she was in that moment. Because that's what she told a neighborhood gangster named Big Blue Rainier.

There was no way she was taking his trick, Not for 20, not for 50, not for 100. But Big Blue didn't want to hear it. He had connections, and he wasn't about to take this humiliation from a $20 whore. So he had Billy arrested for prostitution, because she wouldn't take his money to sleep with him. Incredibly, the Hippocratic Fink Move worked, and Billy at 15 years old was sent off to Welfare Island. Welfare Island, New York City, 1929. Lunatics, the insane, the infirm, criminally bent, ill-fit for society, isolated off in the middle of the East River to keep the five boroughs safe.

If real reform was actually part of the plan, you couldn't tell from the facilities. Institutional drab bordering on horror, trash, filth, rats, the size of house cats, violence imbued into every nook and cranny of the island. Predatory guards, predatory inmates, predatory patients. Billy kept her head down, did her time, and when she was released four months later, she slid past the predatory pimps waiting for her and the rest of the recently freed young women who hit the shore in Manhattan to get back to their lives. Billy Holiday had other plans. Recently released from incarceration as a teenager, it was clear to her that whoring wasn't the way, but maybe, just maybe Horhouse music was. Billy jumped into her singing career the only way she knew how, headfirst. She started at

pods and jerrys, an integrated club in Harlem where the gin flowed freely and the reefer smoke permanently hung in the air. Cruning down on 133rd Street earned her $18 a week. She was 16 years old and already soaking in the speakeasy spotlight. As she branched out to Covens in the Harlem Alhambra, her social circle mushroomed. Count Basie and Artie Shaw became fans. Better yet, it became her bandmates. She took the work where she could even if it meant she had to walk through the kitchen to enter a venue, even if she had to sleep on the bus while touring with Artie's white band who slept in the white motel. She endured it all. By 1939, she had signed with Columbia Records, and they knew her potential, saw the way the crowds hung on her every low, lewd

syllable. Her voice mesmerized people. It lured people in, ensnared them, just like the way that cocaine and heroin had suddenly ensnared her. Billy Holliday was on top, one of the country's biggest stars. With that feeling didn't do enough, Billy needed more. Call it senses numbed, call it stolen youth, call it some twisted idea of freedom, whatever it was, stardom, adoring fans, the rush of live performing. None of it did what Getting High did, liberated her. First, it was reefer, then alcohol, cocaine, then heroin, then cocaine and heroin at the same time. By the time Billy Holiday was 25 years old, getting high was a daily thing. Performing didn't matter. Billy could do the gig while stoned, and then after the gig she'd do some more.

Billy Holiday's constitution was Depression-era tough. There was no fucking with her. But that meant she needed drugs regularly. And for a woman of her profile, that was no easy task. She knew she was being watched. Cops, locals, feds, whoever, she knew she was a potential prize scout, a bold-faced name capable of putting a shine on the name of the arresting officer in the papers. She couldn't be holding, ever. It was too risky. She could be searched at any moment. Without cause, she was a black woman in a very white man's world at the time.

So, a plan was hatched. Mr. was Billy's dog. A boxer. Mr. was smart. Smarter than some of the men in Billy's life and definitely smarter than some of the drummer she'd known. Mr. was capable. Mr. was trained.

Mr. loved Billy. Mr. was obedient. Mr. was crooked as fucked. Mr. got recruited by Joe Guy. Joe Guy was recruited by Billy, first to blow a trumpet in her band, then to blow her away in the sack, then to run Mr. for her.

Joe Guy, every day, every day, bought an ounce of heroin, up on 8th Avenue. Then he'd find Mr. Give Mr. a treat. Mr. would sit. Joe Guy would attach that ounce of heroin to Mr.'s collar inconspicuously.

Next, time for Mr.'s daily walk, down Morningside Drive, over to the Braddock Hotel. With the Braddock sign in his sights, Mr. would know what time it was. Time to see the man in the funny hat who operated the elevator for another treat. Mr. would run around the back of the Braddock. Joe Guy, his work done, would bounce. Mr. would scratch the door.

The man in the funny hat would appear. Mr. would follow him into the hotel and into the elevator he'd go and have his new treat tossed to him before the doors would close. Up then. The doors would open, and that meant another treat. This treat from Billy, who'd be waiting for. for Mr. on the other side of the opening elevator doors on the top floor. Out of the elevator and into Billy's arms, Mr. would go.

First, he'd get his treat. Then he'd get smothered with love from his mistress. Then she'd detach the special package Mr. had brought her. She'd sit. She'd shoot. She'd sail away. She was a star. A very high...

She descended from the rough and tumble streets of Baltimore, then Harlem, through Reform School, Horhouse's Welfare Island, to the top of the music game with a bad habit. but able to satiate that habit from a penthouse suite via a trained canine who ran drugs for her on orders from a man who worked for her. Billy Holiday, stone cold, surreal. We'll be right back after this word, word, word.

There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends. either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no.

I vowed, I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me

and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up. And I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance,

like he's about to attack me, like, making karate noises. And the entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been asleepwalking. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships, or religion, or sex, or addiction, or you just go straight, for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kimman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a

country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you You get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters.

He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it, and you're like, I can't believe that really happened.

Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It was time. A time in the set everyone was always waiting for. Would she or wouldn't she? Play it, that is. Strange Fruit. The song became her trademark, its words written by Abel Mirapol. Billy first performed it back in 1939 at Cafe Society. It brought the house down then and it would bring the house down now. Strange Fruit was loaded. It was Billy Holiday's most powerful weapon, more potent than her sexuality. Billy loaded that weapon every night with hard emotion. The sting of racism she experienced daily, be it in prison, on the streets of New York, on tour

throughout the Jim Crow South, being led in through the back doors of clubs, she'd headline, forced to always pack a sandwich in her purse because you never knew when whichever restaurant you were forced to stop that wouldn't serve you. The countless trips into the woods on the side of the road as a woman, traveling in bands that were almost entirely made up of men to relief. yourself. So humiliating. It stung. So too did the thought of her daddy. In the wrong part of the country when his lung disorder worsened. Ballast, Texas, they wouldn't see him at the White Hospital. And by the time he found his way to the Black Hospital, it was too late. He was a goner,

dead. And there was the fear, the lynchings. She knew how prevalent they still were. So prevalent, in fact, that the NAACP's fight for anti-lynching legislation was still going strong. And they were. in 1939 and facing fierce resistance from Congress. She knew how white men were still peddling postcards depicting lynchings like door-to-door candy salesmen. It sickened her almost as much as it scared her. The song captured the outrage and the horror of seeing black bodies swinging from southern trees, strange fruit. Billy channeled every ounce of fear and disgust into her performance of strange fruit. The audience loved it, most of them anyway. Some didn't want politics mixed.

up into their cosmopolitan nights on the town, but they were a minority. Oddly, Count Basie was a part of this minority. Back when Billy was coming up and touring in Bacy's band, Bacy wouldn't let her perform the song. It was too political, he reasoned. But Bacy was a bit backward. He doubled down on that Mammy bullshit, pleased the white crowd. Even, incredibly, had Billy wear blackface because she was so light-skinned. And that fucked her up. That made it into the performance of strange fruit to the day. Harry Ainslinger was also part of the minority that didn't love Strange Fruit. The commissioner

of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics didn't want politics mixed up into anything social. At least of all, politics he didn't agree with. And that's exactly what he and his federal agents intended on stopping. Strange Fruit was a protest song at a time when popular protest songs barely existed. Not in the mainstream anyway. Of course, this was before Bob Dylan, before Nina Simone, before Chuck deep. Shit, when it was performed, it was even before Woody Guthrie. What angered Angziger more was the fact that this particular song was being sung by a black, junkie musician, and a popular one at that. Except that's where the rub was. A Billy Holiday bust meant headlines. Headlines meant Harry got his name and maybe even a square mug in the papers.

He saw an in. Joe Glazer, Billy's manager. Joe also managed Louis Armstrong. Louis was a chronic Riefer Man, smoked 24-7, carried constantly. He was an easy target in a massive name, almost too big to bust, beloved in some ways too. Blacks and whites worshipped Louis Armstrong. They'd come up with him, and not just cosmopolitan whites, Middle America whites as well. Louis was practically an institution. Busting him would bring on more headaches than was necessary. So Harry aimed lower to just a ring or two below the bull's eye and set his sights on Joe Glazer's other client. Billy Holiday. A big enough name to carry the bust on the wires, a small enough name to avoid any long legal hassles or result in bad PR. In the genius move was he could leverage Louis Armstrong's

reefer madness against the manager of both Louis Armstrong and Billy Holiday, Joe Glazer. Give us the fucking girl, Joe, or we're taking Louis down. So in thinking. Cooperate with us on Busting Billy Holiday and we won't bust your bigger client, your cash cow Louis Armstrong. Joe Glazer had no choice. He rationalized it as he was doing Billy a favor. It was the only way to get her clean to bust her, off of the stage and off to prison to get down with the cold turkey quartet. Philadelphia, 1947, the plan was to bust Billy Holiday with the heroin.

The heroin was in Billy's Cadillac, two ounces, but the warrant was late. Waiting on the judge, the agent stued. Someone tipped off Billy's chauffeur. Time to bounce out of the city of Brother Love, Billy and Co. Van Moost, the agents freaked. There goes their target. There goes their heroin. There goes their headlines. They pulled their pieces and fired off round after round. Billy ducked into the back seats. Bullets lodged into the passenger side door. The chauffeur gunned. The agents gave pursuit. The chauffeur ran back street hop routes. The agents couldn't keep up north to NYC

into Harlem free for the night. Billy breathed the sigh of relief until she was busted the next day. Billy pleaded guilty, possession of narcotics. The judge brought down to gavel, a year and a day, an Alderson federal correctional facility. Billy did her time. She bounced. And now, ten days later, she was back in the spotlight. On stage. Free.

If for only a moment. Billy Holiday's Carnegie Hall concert, just ten days after being released from prison, was a success. The headlines screamed, Billy is back, but her time in prison did have negative ramifications. For one thing, it resulted in the loss of her cabaret card, effectively the piece of bureaucratic paper that allowed her to perform in New York City. It was small-time local politics bullshit, but it mattered. It meant Billy had a fine work out of town, which was easy, but still, not being able to work in town was humiliating. Billy's reputation followed her wherever she went. so too did federal agents.

Nothing changed. There was no presumption of rehabilitation and there was no real rehabilitation. Billy went back to performing and went back to getting high, this time in lockstep with her new man and manager John Levy. He was married and had a kid, but that didn't seem to stop him or Billy from taking up an affair. Levy managed Billy as well,

and there was no fine romance. It was piss and vinegar from the start pretty much. The two fought endlessly. Levy drank, Levy scam, side trim, Levy ignored Billy's ire, Levy beat Billy, Levy pushed Billy back up on stage. Levy collected checks at the end of the night. Levy let Billy have just enough. Levy, like Joe Glazer before and was an informant but from way back. The feds sponsored Levy. The feds let Levy be Levy in exchange for Bo Kinkter.

Billy was small time and addict a user, not a trafficker, but she had that name that Levy kept in lights. Levy routed his woman out in San Francisco. Billy Holiday got busted again, this time for smoking hop, opium. Levi Vamused, Billy got shrink jail, Billy got out, Billy got a new man, worse than the fur, slightly better than less. Louis McKay, he may have been her husband, but he managed Billy, doped up and working, work, work, and more work. Billy's health deteriorated before everyone's eyes.

Didn't matter, those performance fees were large. Louis McCain knew how to get his girl to earn. Billy may have dodged the pimps coming off a welfare island years ago, but she worked as hard or harder for the predatory men in her life ever since, even as of late in her mid-40s. At least horrors got to retire after a while, and there was no retiring for Billy Holiday. Just work, tours, sessions, press, repeat.

Through it all, she somehow remained irrelevant and impactful artist appearing numerous times on television, Steve Allen, Mike Wallace, Art Ford, even with that old pain in the ass, Count Basie. Billy Holliday's trademark sensual performance style was now perforated with hard-earned experience. You can see it on screen and hear it on record. Billy's last recordings are some of her best,

particularly 1958's All or Nothing at All. You can still hear in Billy's recorded performance, that movement, that freedom, that dizzying high effect her voice was capable of conjuring. Whether or not she felt that freedom, That feeling she felt on stage when things were really clicking. Pods and jerrys back when she was getting her start, Carnegie Hall after prison, was something that only she knew.

Regardless, she kept using drugs, kept searching for that feeling, that freedom in the needle. And it was no secret. America was wise, and America was watching and listening to see if their junkie pop songs would nod out right there in front of them on screen and on record. It was a slow-moving, train wreck the Billy Holiday story. Everyone knew how it was going to end, and they knew it was going to end soon.

But no one knew it was going to end like this. May 31st, 1959, Billy Holiday's few remaining close friends checked her into New York's Metropolitan Hospital. Billy was 44 years old and in bad shape, cirrhosis of the liver. She'd lost 20 pounds and much of her strength. Billy wasn't going anywhere. The doctors knew it. This was the short coda before the stage exit. There'd be no encore. Death was thick in that hospital there.

But that didn't stop G-man, Narco-Fucco, Henry J. Anslinger. As long as Billy Holiday was above ground, Billy Holiday was a threat. Ainsinger hadn't forgotten strange fruit, protest music, from a black entertainer, a black female entertainer. Ainslinger was never going to let it go. The stakes for him were too high. He had an entire nation's social order to maintain. Everyone had their place from Angzinger's point of view, and Billy Holiday clearly didn't know hers or her people, so judgment was swift and punishment a must. Ainsinger thought of Psalm 7-11. God is an honest judge. He is angry with the wicked every day. Simple, true. But that passage didn't jazz. Ainslinger's eye are complete. He pulled from his memory, Timothy 3, 1.1.5.1.5.5. He pulled from his memory, Timothy 3, 1.5.

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, treacherous, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, avoid such people. Henry Engzinger did the opposite. it. He didn't avoid such people, people like Billy Holiday. He confronted and crushed such people so that America could... Junky jazz musicians were a scourge. That was the Fed mantra,

especially those with high-minded ideas about equality. Billy Holiday with her fur coats, her catalanx, her heroine, and her protest song. Who did she think she was? Ainslinger knew who she was. Uncle Sam knew who she was, and sure as shit God knew who Billy Holiday was. As she lay dying in her hospital bed, Henry Ainslinger and his federal agent stormed into her hospital room and arrested Billy Holliday for possession of illegal narcotics, heroin. Her new arraignment would be in a few weeks. Billy Holiday died before being judged one more time. In her hospital bed, handcuffed, offstage, on drugs, the opposite of free. So incredibly sad.

Such a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member,

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On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia clerk. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yelloo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or

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