Billie Holiday by John Szwed

one that nonetheless includes a fictional affair with the black DEA agent who eventually was assigned to follow her. Jennifer Hudson (who played the character modeled on Florence Ballard of the Supremes in the film
Dreamgirls
) would be cast as Billie.
    The Photos
    Holiday was one of the most photographed black women of her time, one of the first to have her picture appear in a national magazine, and perhaps the most popular jazz performer among professional photographers. Many of those images are still in wide circulation today, even though there were those who felt she never looked as good in pictures as she did in life.
    Carl Van Vechten was apparently in the midst of a project to photograph every leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance—Nora Holt, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Bessie Smith—and was eager to get Holiday into his studio. Even though she is not normally considered part of the Renaissance, Holiday was widely known by many Harlem artists to be one of their own.
    She was not particularly eager to do another shoot, but the Harlem journalist Gerry Major intervened on behalf of Van Vechten and arranged a session in March 1949. Major asked her to wear an evening gown, but she arrived dour and distracted in an everyday gray suit. She was still under indictment in California for drug possession and had justbeen denied a New York State Supreme Court order to restore her cabaret card. Van Vechten began shooting, but she was not cooperative. The conditions of his sessions could be excruciating: He worked slowly under hot lights, moving floral arrangements, pets, and art objects in and out of the frame, asking for changes of clothing between shots, or no clothing at all.
    He pulled out the photos he had taken of Bessie Smith to convince her of the quality of his work. She began to cry, and he began to click away as she explained how important Smith was to her. After a break at midnight, she returned from her apartment with a sharp change in attitude and her dog Mister, a boxer. Van Vechten filmed Billie in color (which he usually avoided) peeking out from behind a vase of large pink roses, wearing an evening gown, and even topless, with her arms folded across her breasts; she lay down with her head next to her dog’s with the camera on the floor in front of them, and in a dark robe against an angular black-and-silver-striped hanging. He photographed her singing while seated, or holding an African carved head next to hers. Many of hisimages suggest that he might be looking back to the exoticism of Josephine Baker, perhaps even further back to Gauguin’s Polynesian paintings.
    Van Vechten later wrote that he had “spent only one night photographing Billie Holiday, but it was the whole of one night and it seemed like a whole career . . . I took photographs of her crying, which nobody else had done, later I took pictures of her laughing.” Once they had finished, she stayed until dawn while “she related in great detail the sad, bittersweet story of her tempestuous life.”
    In the 1940s
Life
magazine was the source for the best photography in the United States, with a stable of ace news and portrait photographers like Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Philippe Halsman, and Edward Steichen, and several who were especially drawn to jazz, Gjon Mili, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith. Mili, something of an avant-garde photographer, staged jam sessions in his loft studio for films such as
Jammin’ the Blues
and the still photography he did for
Life
. In 1943 he filmed a jam session to accompany anarticle on V-Discs, the government-supported recordings that were sent to military bases across the world. Mary Lou Williams, James P. Johnson, Teddy Wilson, and Duke Ellington were among the musicians, and the singers included Lee Wiley, Josh White, and Billie Holiday. The