The art that you see now, Rhodes says. Some of the nicer ones have feelings enough to hate themselves for what they have to do. 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. . Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs., Still, some part of Billie Holiday believed she had done something evil, with her drug use, and with her life. I wanted to do what Berry Gordy, Diana Ross, and Billy Dee Williams did. It imagined black bodies hanging from trees as a dark fruit native to the South. Before our conversation begins, Rhodes turns his camera out to show me the snow outside the sliding door of his moms house in Austin. In the film's depiction, Holiday's impact with the emotional song made her a target in the eyes of the federal government. While its widely known that Coca-Cola used to contain actual cocaine, that wasnt the only place you could find now-illegal drugs. Will that trickle into society essentially?. It is improvised, relaxed, free-form. Then randomly, the feelings came rushing in. 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. In the book, Hari tells stories of the casualties of the drug war, from its 20th century origins to profiles of contemporary dealers and users. It tells the story through three central characters: Billie Holiday, Jimmy Fletcher, who was one of the first Black federal agents, and Harry Anslinger, the Fletcher met Holiday after he was hired by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to infiltrate her social circle and gain her trust something the bureaus head, Harry Anslinger, knew would be nearly impossible for a white agent to pull off. F rom his first day in office in 1930, Harry Anslinger had a problem, and everybody knew it. The real Holiday did record the song in 1939. But of all the people Rhodes could be stranded with, mom is a top choice. ", Singing "Strange Fruit," Primetimer writes, "drove Harry Anslinger nuts, and made her personal destruction a goal of his. I will let you know what day. His advice on drug raids to his men was always simple: Shoot first.. When Jimmy was sent to raid her, he knocked at the door pretending he had a telegram to deliver. Some damnbody is always trying to embalm me, she said, but the doctors came back and explained she had an array of very serious illnesses: she was emaciated because she had not been eating; she had cirrhosis of the liver because of chronic drinking; she had cardiac and respiratory problems due to chronic smoking; and she had several leg ulcers caused by starting to inject street heroin once again. Theres, unsurprisingly, not much out there about a romantic relationship between the agent and the singer. It was all she had left. It was the story that Black people needed, that the culture needed at the time. Holiday was busted again, arrested, and put on trial. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. Rhodes sees Fletcher as someone who got in deeper and deeper to this gunk of a situation and even ended up falling in love. Please, she said to the judge, I want the cure., She was sentenced instead to a year in a West Virginia prison, where she was forced to go cold turkey and work during the days in a pigsty, among other places. Daniels's film portrays aspoiler alertromance between Holiday and Fletcher, which blossoms while he's on her case. His job was to bust his own people, but Anslinger was insistent that no black man in his Bureau could ever become a white mans boss. As Hari tells NPR, "Jimmy Fletcher's brief was follow Billie Holiday everywhere she goes; befriend her; document her drug use, and get it ready for an indictment. Cocaine supposedly made Black people almost superhumanly strongNEGRO COCAINE "FIENDS" ARE A NEW SOUTHERN MENACE blared a 1914 New York Times headline. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. It follows its own rhythm. His reasoning was simple, he told me in 2013: addicts, he said, are human beings, just like you and me. Punishment makes them sicker; compassion can make them well. Fletcher ultimately led a raid on Holiday, pretending to have a telegram to deliver. 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. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, reek of filth., His agents reported back to him that many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly., The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakishthe musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. For Rhodes to play part in it does as well. I had been wanting to work with Lee because his sister Leah, Leah and Kim Coleman and Lindsay Graham, three casting directors who always brought me in since I moved to L.A., Rhodes explains. 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 says. While he knew something special was on the horizon, Rhodes says the experience wasnt incredibly different. WebRecruiting a black agent, Jimmy Fletcher, for the job, Anslinger began his attacks on Holiday in 1939. Another painting. According to Biography, White busted Holiday at San Francisco's Mark Twain Hotel, even though she claimed to have been clean for a year. When he hangs out with her boisterous entourage while they drink and do drugs backstage, hes the quiet outsider looking in. Holiday tracked Fletcher down and sent him a signed copy of her 1956 autobiography, writing inside: Most federal agents are nice people. Black Americans love this country, often at our peril.. Holiday would continue singing the song for the Cafe Society crowd, and they ate it up. ", Day adds: "I was obsessed with that movie and Diana Ross's performance, but the movie was done in the early '70s; [J. Edgar] Hoover and Harry J. Anslinger were still in power, [Holiday's abusive husband] Louis McKay was still alive, and the technical director on that film. Its too big to go under the door! he snapped back. 1975 to 'Moscato's Dump' by FBI agents in Newark and Jersey City, New Jersey." The audience cannot see his face. Now, after three years, he returns to play Jimmy Fletcher, a Black federal agent tasked by his white superiors with implanting himself in Holidays life to bring her Anslinger sent Fletcher, one of the FBIs few Black "Billie Holiday's styling fulfilled the bitterness and the shocking quality I had hoped the song would have," Meeropol said, according to The Guardian. It's not your fault. Of them, he landed a recurring gig on the Tyler Perry series If Loving You is Wrong. History remembers Fletcher as the man who betrayed Holiday. Immediately after, Billie Holiday received her first threat from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. But while the movie charts Holidays efforts to maintain her career while being hounded by law enforcement and struggling with substance abuse disorder, its not just a portrait of the life of one artist: The film also tells an important story about the origins of Americas war on drugs. You dont have to do that. Theres not a lot known about the condition, but it affects approximately three percent of the worlds population. Now, after three years, he returns to play Jimmy Fletcher, a Black federal agent tasked by his white superiors with implanting himself in Holidays life to bring her down for drug use. Something many may not know about the life of Billie Holiday is that she was hounded by drug czars not for being addicted to heroin, but because the Federal Bureau of Narcotics director Harry Anslinger was on a mission to keep her from singing the song "Strange Fruit. Holiday died on July 17, 1959. And then suddenly, Trevante was gone. At the end of 1999, Connolly was arrested. In all her time behind bars, she did not sing a note. 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. And maybe she fell in love with him," but calls the relationship as portrayed in the film "elevated" and "imagined." Laugh? Her friend Maely Dufty screamed at them that it was against the law to arrest somebody who was on the critical list. Harry and his men refused. 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. His accuser was the longtime girlfriend of a mafia hitman named Greg "the Grim Reaper" Scarpa. She was the type who would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type., Also Read: 18th and GrandTraces L.A. History Through a Palace of Violence. She told people she would rather die than go back to prison, but she was terrified that she would burn in hell just as her mother had said she would all those years before, when she was a little girl lying on the brothel floor, listening to Louis Armstrongs music and letting it carry her out of Baltimore. Southerners dont do snow. You victimize yourself by becoming a junkie.. As is depicted in the film, however, that trauma didn't stop once she became famous. To Harry Anslinger, Billie Holiday was like the symbol of everything that America had to be afraid of, Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, said inan interview withWNYC Studios. "He said, You might want [Garland] to take longer vacations. With Billie Holiday, he sends agents to stalk her ruins her entire life, says the author. After being arrested for possession in 1947, Holiday was sentenced to a year in prison. She was still a hero, no matter what they did to her, no matter how they persecuted her, she never stopped singing Strange Fruit. She never let them destroy her.. Theyve got a dirty job to do and they have to do it. How Lady Day was in the middle of a Federal Bureau of Narcotics fight for survival. In real life, Anslinger served as the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration, from 1930 to 1962. I felt like after that I knew how to make films., Barry Jenkins 2016 Best Picture winner was Rhodes introduction to the upper echelons of Hollywood. As Hari writes, His job was to bust his Where else [but in the Bureau of Narcotics] could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? He may well have been high when he busted Billie for getting high. Harry hated to hire black agents, but if he sent white guys into Harlem and Baltimore, they stood out straight away. 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. Here was a black woman, before a mixed audience, grieving for the racist murders in the United States. While she lay dying, a by-then retired Fletcher attempted to visit Holiday in the hospital. The man was arrestedbut Holiday was sent to a reformatory. 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. There is this neurological phenomenon known as synesthesia. California's road to recovery runs through D.C. Republicans, Why New Jerseys ventilator guidelines may favor younger, whiter patients, Rhode Island ends specific restrictions on New Yorkers by making them national. Billie paid her debt to society, one of her friends wrote, but society never paid its debt to her.. And when she insisted on continuing on her right as an American citizen to sing Strange Fruit, Anslinger resolves to destroy her., Also Read: Strange Fruit: The History of Billie Holidays Famous Protest Song. 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. According to Hari, after Fletcher first raided her apartment for drugs, he took Holiday aside and offered to talk to Ansliger for her in an attempt to lighten her punishment, saying, I dont want you to lose your job. Soon after, they ran into each other at a bar and talked for hours, Hari said. [Moonlight] was like a student film as well because it was such a tight-knit thing, he recalls. Tragically, her personal life was marked by horrifying abuse. His job was to There's a movie for everybody now. I like to drive slow., Part of that journey included sitting down with Lee Daniels at the end of 2018 to discuss what an adaptation of Billie Holidays life might look like. In the years after Billies trial, many other singers were too afraid of being harassed by the authorities to perform Strange Fruit. But Billie Holiday refused to stop. But did it really happen that way in real life? Not long after, he ran into her in a bar and they talked for hours, with her pet Chihuahua, Moochy, by her side. The Time Ray Liotta Eviscerated Bradley Cooper. . How they were carrying the paint. Jimmy Fletcher was the answer. Like my great-grandmother raised nine children by herself in Backwoods Louisiana, he says. 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. In the run-up to the passing of the Harrison Act in 1914the law that first criminalized drugs in the United Statesthe New York Timesran a story typical of the time. You know what I mean? She was the type who would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type, Fletcher remembered of Holiday in an interview. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Anslinger began his attacks on Holiday in an interview on trial condition, but affects. Perform Strange Fruit could be stranded with, mom is a top choice cocaine supposedly made black people almost strongNEGRO! In prison nice people a federal Bureau of Narcotics did it really that. His accuser was the longtime girlfriend of a mafia hitman named Greg `` the Grim Reaper Scarpa. 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