Diana Ross Goes From Riches to Rags
Diana Ross is going out of her mind. She just threw a glass of champagne in somebody’s face, and now it’s the bathroom scene in Lady Sings the Blues, and she’s running amuck with a razor. Billy Dee Williams won’t give her back her works and she’s raving for a fix – snarling like a rabid bitch, teeth and nails and then she gets a cut-throat razor and goes for the throat and she means it. When they got through somebody asked Billy Dee if he thought Diana Ross could act.
Here was this little slinky, not long out of the Supremes; and it’s common knowledge the Supremes were a consummate corporate invention, with Diana Ross in her ravishing wigs and dazzling shimmer and gloss, working the most amazing pair of livid red lips in America over a faceful of blinding white teeth, animating and insinuating her 103 pounds of lean sheen – she’s exquisite, polished till she shines. But the girl never acted in her life except for a couple of dumb skits on Johnny Carson, and here she is with the audacity to impersonate the most beloved jazz martyr of all time. There were a lot of people outraged. Diana got a lot of spiteful letters, a lot of them from righteous old black jazz veterans.
And tight up against her, here’s Billy Dee Williams, coming off a big break in Brian’s Song on TV, a hot new black leading man with ten or twelve years in the theater under his belt – a seasoned actor – so he had his doubts about her, too. And then early on in the shooting they come to the bathroom scene and Diana Ross throws this fit and Billy Dee had to fight for his life. I don’t know, says Billy Dee, I don’t know if she can play Billie Holiday – she is Billie Holiday. And Williams has got scars to prove it.
Berry Gordy was there. It’s his picture, he put in close to four million dollars of Motown money, and Diana Ross is his most treasured possession, so he stayed close to the production. And when Billy Dee said that, Berry dug it right away. You’ve seen the ads by now, just the slim bejewelled wrist clutching an old RKO mike, a handcuff dangling like a manacle, and in classy bold type on top it says: DIANA ROSS IS BILLIE HOLIDAY.
Ralph Gleason goes along with that, and John Hammond, and a lot of those other respected old hepcats who should know, because they were there. They saw Billie Holiday come painfully apart, stitch by stitch, and along the way, because she couldn’t help it, she sang jazz better than anybody had ever heard before. She broke all the rules – changed the whole idea of the singer in the band to where she was no longer just another sideman stuck back behind the clarinet player and taking 16 bars of swift vocal. She became the star of the show. Everybody from Ella Fitzgerald on down has been trying to catch up with her ever since.
Billie Holiday sang with the best bands there were, Teddy Wilson and Benny Goodman and Count Basie, all of them, and she was the first to sing as zingingly as they played. She brought a high radiance and sophistication into those steamy little Harlem cellars and took it all downtown to the plushest nitespots and finally into the sacred hush of Carnegie Hall. She hid nothing. All her devotees knew she was banged out on stuff up there, they knew where she went when she left the bandstand in between numbers and came back with a faraway gleam in her eyes and made every song she sang into a stylized personal confession of hurt pride and carnal knowledge. For those that knew and adored her, she remains the immaculate and tragic aristocrat of jazz, the saddest story of them all.
So, naturally, a lot of the hardcore Billie Holiday devotees thought the movie was pretty soapy stuff. It’s true it’s way overwrought and a lot of it is plain lies and melodrama, and in a well-meant but poorly thought-out effort to simplify Billie Holiday and tie up all her loose ends into a satisfactory continuity and coherence of the heart that her life denied her, Berry Gordy and Paramount and Sidney Furie, the director, have plundered and expurgated Billie Holiday for their own good purposes. And they’ve lucked out; they couldn’t help it. They’ve got a smash box-office rags-to-riches movie on their hands, and most of the credit has to go to the little girl from the Supremes who comes up with the most extravagant and compassionate virtuoso star turn of the year.
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