The United States vs. Billie Holiday is now streaming on Hulu. To me, this is all about how we love this country and it dismisses us, He became a sensation as the first and only white man ever to infiltrate a Chinese drug gang, and he even learned to speak in Mandarin so he could chant their oaths with them. When he discovered that a Washington society hostess he knewa beautiful, gracious lady, he notedhad an illegal drug addiction, he explained he couldnt possibly arrest her because it would destroy the unblemished reputation of one of the nations most honored families. He helped her to wean herself off her addiction slowly, without the law becoming involved. Many factors contributed to the shift from societally sanctioned drug use to just say no culture. Justin Kirkland is a Brooklyn-based writer who covers culture, food, and the South. The full sourcing for this article can be found in the books endnotes. Harry had heard whispers that she was using heroin, andafter she flatly refused to be silent about racismhe assigned an agent named Jimmy Fletcher to track her every move. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. The fanfare and the accolades were incredible, but Rhodes insists his biggest takeaway from Moonlight was the experience of making a film. In all her time behind bars, she did not sing a note. He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them and instructed: Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. The man was arrestedbut Holiday was sent to a reformatory. Jimmy Fletcher is literally, actually an agent for the United States and she falls in love with him. "And his whole life, he felt really guilty about what he did. She was, her friend Annie Ross told me, as strong as she could be.. I wanted to do what Berry Gordy, Diana Ross, and Billy Dee Williams did. When Billie was forty-four years old,a young musician named Frankie Freedom was serving her a bowl of oatmeal and custard in his apartment when she suddenly collapsed. "Billie Holiday's styling fulfilled the bitterness and the shocking quality I had hoped the song would have," Meeropol said, according to The Guardian. After starring in Moonlight, a 21st century masterpiece, he appeared in a trio of action films then stepped back from the spotlight. .css-o05pt{display:block;font-family:Didot,Didot-fallback,Georgia,Times,serif;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:0rem;margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;text-shadow:0 0 0 #000,0 0 0.01em transparent;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-o05pt:hover{color:link-hover;}}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-o05pt{font-size:1.18581rem;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.25rem;margin-top:0.625rem;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-o05pt{line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-o05pt{font-size:1.23488rem;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-top:0rem;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-o05pt{font-size:1.39461rem;line-height:1.2;margin-top:0.9375rem;}}35 Classic Photos from the Academy Awards, 46 of the Coolest Set Photos in Movie History, 'Last of Us' Star Pedro Pascal Posts Upsetting IG, Everything to Know About the 95th Academy Awards, Storm Reid Knows How to Create Heartbreaking TV, Believe It: 'Ted Lasso' Returns This March, Ashley Park Joins 'Only Murders in the Building', Carrie & Aidan Go on a Beach Date in New Set Pics, Sam Smith Is Joining 'And Just Like That' S2, Elizabeth Banks on Cocaine Bear's Brilliant Chaos. It was called The United States of America versus Billie Holiday, she wrote in her memoir, and thats just the way it felt. She refused to weep on the stand. The way I saw it is, at least in my life, I see a lot of people who will do anything to be successful or to better themselves, especially when they're trying to find themselves. Anslingers men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch, and whenever one of them was busted, they all chipped in to bail him out. She just wanted to be sent to a hospital so she could kick the drugs and get well. From hair trends to relationship advice, our daily newsletter has everything you need to sound like a person whos on TikTok, even if you arent. Southerners dont do snow. For years, American pharmacists sold a product called Mrs. Winslows Soothing Syrup, which contained morphine and alcohol. And so, when she died on this bed, with police officers at the door to protect the public from her, she lookedas another of her friends told the BBCas if she had been torn from life violently. She had fifteen fifty-dollar bills strapped to her leg. 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. Cause you can start working and just keep working and keep working, he says. 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. When she was ten years old, she was raped by an adult neighbor. I toiled whole-heartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun, White boasted after he had retired from the Bureau. So I was like, Yo, I have to work with Lee.. And then suddenly, Trevante was gone. Harry hated to hire black agents, but if he sent white guys into Harlem and Baltimore, they stood out straight away. She was taken to the Knickerbocker Hospital in Manhattan and made to wait for an hour and a half on a stretcher, and they said she was a drug addict and turned her away. [2] [3] Law enforcement career [ edit] She had written inside it: Most federal agents are nice people. She told The Hollywood Reporter, I could see this love affair that [Holiday] has with Jimmy Fletcher, because it tells the story of the love affair that Black Americans have with America. He was a Black agent assigned by the egregiously racist head of Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger (played by I had to take a break to sit back. They took a mug shot of her on her hospital bed. It is improvised, relaxed, free-form. CNN . One of the people responsible for Americas turn from this laissez-faire approach to drug consumption was Harry Anslinger, whos played in The United States vs. Billie Holiday by Garrett Hedlund. He is bent in such a way that his body is contorted, as if hes carrying something we cannot see. We dont know the first time Billie called Jimmy a motherfucker, but she soon spotted this man who was hanging around, watching her, and she grew to like him. I more gifted myself the opportunity to try to put myself into his shoes and to really take in his influences, whether it be musically or the famous people of that time. Holiday after being arrested for heroin possession in 1947. There is this neurological phenomenon known as synesthesia. What the film doesnt cover is that Fletcher continued to work for the government. When Billie was busted again, she was put on trial. So that to me was so necessary and portraying him in that way.. F rom his first day in office in 1930, Harry Anslinger had a problem, and everybody knew it. It sounded, his internal memos said, like the jungles in the dead of night. Another memo warned that unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected in this black mans music. The Time Ray Liotta Eviscerated Bradley Cooper. Holiday received her first threat from the bureau in 1939, after performing "Strange Fruit" on the stage in New York. They grilled her on her hospital bed without letting her talk to a lawyer. Meanwhile, even after successfully prosecuting her the first time, the authorities weren't done with Holiday. Yes, Jimmy Fletcher was a real person. And it seems like their dalliance didn't just exist on-screen. But racist fears that drugs could unleash particular stores of violence in non-white people were also prevalent. They get on really wellBut Billie Holiday was so amazing that Jimmy Fletcher fell in love with her.". Since then, Holiday struggled to get better, though she continued to sing "Strange Fruit." I come from a family of strong Black women. And the raid scene in which she strips naked before him demanding to be searched for drugs is based on Fletchers memory of the incident, which Hari says suggests that the interaction between them became intense., After her autobiography was published, Holiday sent a copy to Fletcher. And Anslinger worked very hard to encourage the use of the word marijuana instead of cannabis, because marijuana is a Spanish-Mexican word, says Hari. That night, White came to Billies show at the Caf Society Uptown, and he requested his favorite songs. Some of the nicer ones have feelings enough to hate themselves for what they have to do, she wrote in her inscription to him. Now, as a former convict, she was stripped of her cabaret performers license, on the grounds that listening to her might harm the morals of the public. (This racist belief was behind the removal of the drug from Coca-Cola.) Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture. Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. Harry Anslinger did not create these underlying trends. This is heartbreaking. According to Biography, White busted Holiday at San Francisco's Mark Twain Hotel, even though she claimed to have been clean for a year. To be able to be hip with the cats when he was hip. So now, on top of the cirrhosis of the liver, Billie went into heroin withdrawal, alone. While its widely known that Coca-Cola used to contain actual cocaine, that wasnt the only place you could find now-illegal drugs. I did not think much of Ms. Holidays performance, he told her manager sternly. In other instances, you might taste noise. Its just that all the questions about it have him questioning himself. Theyll remember me, she told a friend, when all this is gone, and theyve finished badgering me. George White did not agree. What really did her in was when her abusive husband, Louis McKay, got involved. They don't say, Oh my God, there's a 15-year-old girl here. The headline was: Negro cocaine fiends new southern menace. It described a North Carolina police chief who was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro, with whom he was well-acquainted, was running amuck in a cocaine frenzy [and] had attempted to stab a storekeeper . One of the ambulance drivers recognized her, so she ended up in a public ward of New York Citys Metropolitan Hospital. But if youve ever taken a painting and held it close to your faceso close that your nose touches the canvasyou can see that theres a chaotic rhythm in the brushstrokes. Billie didnt blame Anslingers agents as individuals; she blamed the drug war itselfbecause it forced the police to treat ill people like criminals. He wasnt allowed inside her room, but Holiday was reportedly happy to learn that he'd tried to see her. So in that regard, we're in a much, much, much better place. Jimmy Fletcher was the answer. Harry and his men refused. The United States Vs Billie Holiday True Story, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. After she failed to show any sexual interest in him, he drugged her to see if that would change. She died addicted. He'd heard rumblings that the singer was using heroin and assigned Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), a Black FBI agent, to follow her, journalist Johann Hari revealed in his book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, per Politico. My mom raised two boys here by herself. You watch, baby, Billie warned from her tiny gray hospital room. She was sentenced to a year at a West Virginia prison. She's based (and born and raised) in Brooklyn, New York. I'm a country dude, man, he says, refusing to acknowledge that hes built like a brick shithouse, to take a phrase we use in the South. He believed that the response to being dealt a weak hand should always be to dramatically raise the stakes. Drugs were banned in the United States in a moment of deep, racist determination and hysteria, he says. It just is what it is., Billie Holidays life story reemerging in 2021 feels almost willed to be. The audience cannot see his face. And that's what Barry does, he explains with the enthusiasm of an art student. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. 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. Amid all of that came Moonlight. "She was the type who would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type. A senior at the University of Texas, Rhodes was primed for a job in the oil and gas industry, a career he had been interning and preparing for since high school. His accuser was the longtime girlfriend of a mafia hitman named Greg "the Grim Reaper" Scarpa. 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. That's our life. It's always that kind of a thing., Everything I choose to do is representative of who I am in some way to kind of show you more about me, Rhodes says. But did it really happen that way in real life? The genre represented a threatening meld of Black and white musical traditions, and he wrote that the music sounded like the jungles in the dead of night. That the music attracted both Black and white audiences, furthering its dangerous race mixing potential, was even more alarming to Anslinger. In The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Andra Days Holiday embarks upon a steamy romance with Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), the agent Anslinger tasks with finding ways to imprison her on drug charges. She flaunted her way of living, with her fancy coats and fancy automobiles and her jewelry and her gowns, he complained. With her signature melancholic voice, Holiday became one of the most influential singers and songwriters of the 1930s and 40s, and penned songs including her classics Dont Explain and God Bless the Child. Despite lacking formal training, her phrasing and improvisational skills were masterful, and she remains one of jazzs defining vocalists. Its when your senses kind of overlap. Billie paid her debt to society, one of Holidays friends wrote, but society never paid its debt to her.. The Japanese man couldnt breathe. Some artists got killed for it.. 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. This content is imported from youTube. She stripped and stood there, and then she pissed in front of them, defying them to watch. These Romantic Movies Are Guaranteed To Make You Cry, The Greatest Romantic Comedies That Youll Watch On Repeat, 26 Movies Every Woman Should See At Least Once. When Jimmy was sent to raid her, he knocked at the door pretending he had a telegram to deliver. It follows its own rhythm. When he hangs out with her boisterous entourage while they drink and do drugs backstage, hes the quiet outsider looking in. It's not your fault. . The art that you see now, Rhodes says. They claimed it was hanging on a nail on the wall, six feet from the bottom of her beda spot Billie was incapable of reaching. Just as Anslinger was beginning his tenure at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a teenaged singer was getting her start in Harlem nightclubs. Back then they were like, what? 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. Theres not a lot known about the condition, but it affects approximately three percent of the worlds population. Written in response to the lynching of Black Americans in the Jim Crow era, the composition resonated with the movement for civil rights, and therefore threatened those in positions of power. The personality test given to all applicants on Anslingers orders found that he was a sadist. Apply Today eligibility Eligibility 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. 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. And that may be true. When finally a friend was allowed in to see her, Billie told her in a panic: Theyre going to kill me. Anslinger sent Fletcher, one of the FBIs few Black Rhodes is a self-taught student of art, whose admiration of color and details seeps into his role in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, out now on Hulu. It's easy to say you want to do something, but walking to do it is very, very difficult. Fletcher shadowed Holiday for years, and became protective, 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.. The United States vs. Billie Holiday - Trailer (Official) A Hulu Original, Director Lee Daniels works with Andra Day and Rhodes on the set of, Rhodes says, of playing Fletcher, "He was caught up in a shitty situation and he was someone trying to prove himself to himself. I got enough to finish her off, he had pledged. What happened to Jimmy Hoffa may soon be known, if the government reveals what it has kept hidden for decades. She was too afraid to go to the policebut finally she was brave enough to cut him off. But of all the people Rhodes could be stranded with, mom is a top choice. So as he got to work on Billie, Colonel White was watched by his last victim, and this made him happy. 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. Moonlight is magenta, in case you were curious. With the emotional adventure of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever closing out the controversial fourth, Minor spoilers ahead. But privately, he told his friends he didnt really know if his victim was a spy at all, and he didnt care. 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. Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, and grew up in Baltimore. We come from a different tribe. But what pulled Rhodes attention most was the idea of stepping into the role of Jimmy Fletcher. He knew that to secure his bureaus future, he needed a high-profile victory, over intoxication and over black people, and so he turned back to Billie Holiday. Narcotics agents were sent to her hospital bed and said they had found less than one-eighth of an ounce of heroin in a tinfoil envelope. They summoned a grand jury to indict her, telling her that unless she disclosed her dealer, they would take her straight to prison. 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Case you were curious echoes, all mating on American shores performing Strange.... Indecent rites of the ambulance drivers recognized her, so she could be stranded,. The first time, the authorities were n't done with Holiday: out! Arrested for heroin possession in 1947 the stakes was getting her start in Harlem nightclubs watched by last.