The Tragic Real-Life Story Of Billie Holiday

Eleanora Fagan is one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the past century, rising to fame in the 1930s with a voice as emotive as a raspy saxophone. Known more famously as Billie Holiday, she emerged as a defining voice of her generation — and generations to follow — from her early days singing tableside for tips in Harlem jazz clubs to taking center stage at Carnegie Hall. 

Lady Day, as she would come to be known, proved a woman ahead of her time, fighting the injustices of segregation, becoming one of the first black musicians to sign with an all-white orchestra, and courageously bringing voice to racial violence through her soulful, mournful rendition of "Strange Fruit." At the height of her career, she had love, money and fame, yet she suffered heartbreak, poverty and addiction. 

From the streets of Baltimore to her deathbed in a New York hospital, Billie Holiday's real life story is equal parts inspirational and tragic.

The story of Billie Holiday's early childhood is cloudy, with a variety of sources differing on some basic details including her birth name — such as Eleanora Fagan Gough and Elinore Harris. What's clear, in almost all accounts, is that she was born April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia to teenager Sadie Harris. Her father was musician Clarence Holiday. She spent her formative years in jazz-soaked Baltimore where, living in poverty, she dropped out of school by the fifth grade and took jobs scrubbing floors and running errands for a neighborhood brothel.

At age 10, she served her first of two stints at the Baltimore House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, a Catholic reformatory school, according to NPR. Her first time there was for truancy, while her next stay came after being abducted and assaulted by a 40-year-old neighbor. At the reformatory school, Holiday found her singing voice but also endured horrific treatment. Holiday recalled in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, that while there she wasn't permitted to sleep in the dormitory with the other girls and, at one point, was locked in a room with a dead girl.

By the late 1920s, both Billie and her mother turned to a life of prostitution in Harlem.

At 14, Billie Holiday shook that life and, desperate for money, shopped her voice around the jazz clubs in Harlem. "This is the truth. Mother and I were starving. It was cold ... Mother was a housemaid and couldn't find work. I tried scrubbing floors, too, but I just couldn't do it," Holiday told Downbeat magazine in 1939. She hustled for tips at the clubs and speakeasies in Harlem, taking in $18 a week and savoring, with joy, the simple taste of a sandwich. "Mother and I ate that night — and we have been eating pretty well since."

Never classically trained, Billie Holiday was discovered at age 18 and quickly found herself at the heart of the jazz scene, surrounded by its trappings — marijuana, alcohol and opiates — and faced with the harsh realities of segregation. When touring with white bandleader Artie Shaw, she was often forced to use the service elevators so as not to upset white patrons, prohibited from eating with the rest of the band, and confined to a dark room until she took the stage to entertain the same patrons who wouldn't share her elevator.

Billie Holiday skyrocketed to fame in 1939 with the independent recording of "Strange Fruit," an unforgiving, haunting poem about lynchings of African Americans. The at-the-time graphic, brutal portrayal of racial violence became a hit, but put her squarely in the crosshairs of the federal government, specifically the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

The head of the bureau, Harry Anslinger, heard rumblings of her heroin use and began relentlessly pursuing her when she continued to speak out against racial violence and injustice during the Jim Crow era, according to Johan Hari, author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. In 1948, she was busted for heroin possession and, instead of being sent to a hospital to get well as she requested, she was sentenced to a year and a day in a West Virginia federal prison.

An episode of BBC's "Reputations" recounts that Billie Holiday's prison intake form noted "needle scars on hands, arms and legs." She came out clean, sober, and a convict unable to secure the necessary license to perform in cabarets and clubs. Not long after her release, however, Billie Holiday played at Carnegie Hall.

In the accounts of her love life, Billie Holiday married twice and embarked on a third relationship in the 1940s and 1950s; all these relationships were troubled and tragically influential. It was her first marriage to Jimmy Monroe in 1941 that served as Holiday's foray into drug addiction, first with opium then heroin. The marriage ended shortly thereafter, but her drug use continued with boyfriend Joe Guy.

During this period, Billie Holiday spent a lot of money supporting their collective habit, according to Jazzwise. All the while, Holiday was making some of the best recordings of her career. In her memoir, she recalled: "I spent the rest of the war years on 52nd Street and a few other streets. I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they'd bring me the white gardenias and the white junk."

In 1957, Holiday married Louis McKay, who in the early years together managed to keep her clean yet cleaned her out financially. They separated, Billie Holiday returned to drugs and by 1959 she was dead.

Biographer Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, notes that Holiday spoke of addiction not as a victim but as an owner of it. Holiday remarked in an interview that "heroin not only kept me alive — maybe it also kept me from killing." She went on to say, unapologetically, "I hold no regrets and I carry no shame."

So much of what we know about Lady Day comes from her own words, as captured in her 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, and as told to journalist William Dufty. The memoir punctuates the tragic life of jazz's melancholy song bird and now years on it is seen as being just as murky as the details about her early life. Since its publication more than 50 years ago, its legitimacy as a factual accounting of her life remains up for debate.

The memoir, penned at a time when Holiday needed money, came together through a series of conversations between Billie Holiday and the author, the latter noting that he wanted her to have a chance to tell her story authentically in her own words, according to a 2006 SF Gate article. Holiday never read it before it was published, and fact checking wasn't Dufty's primary concern.

Regardless, Billie Holiday's memoir "is as true and poignant as any tune she ever sang. If her music was autobiographically true, her autobiography is musically true," noted writer David Ritz in his introduction to a new edition of the book released in 2006.

Billie Holiday's hard life and hard living took a toll and by the 1950s, her addiction worsened, according to PBS' American Masters. At the height of her career, she was making roughly $1,000 a week, and much of it went toward feeding her drug habit. Sadly, like some of her contemporaries, years of drug and alcohol abuse badly beat her body, culminating in a cirrhosis diagnosis. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a study found a higher instance of cirrhosis among jazz musicians as a result of years of substance abuse. 

By May 1959, Lady Day lay in her deathbed in a New York hospital with policemen stationed outside her door. As if pouring salt in a wound, she spent her final days under arrest because heroin was found hidden in her hospital bed, according to the Baltimore Afro-American. After six weeks in the hospital, Billie Holiday died on July 17, 1959. The official cause of death was heart failure resulting from lung congestion. She was nearly penniless at her death, save for the $750 in cash strapped to her leg — a down payment from a publisher for a new memoir. Holiday was 44.

Upon her death, the Baltimore Afro-American wrote: "A marijuana smoker at 14, an addict on a heroin kick at 25, and a physical wreck before she was 50 — that was the life of Lady Day."

Today, the life of Lady Day cannot be summed up so simply as it was back then. Though punctuated by tragedy, Billie Holiday's life speaks much more to the triumph of will, the strength of conviction, and the courage to bring voice to racial injustice.

"Legends are about a state of mind, not a state of being, and some thrive best when they're not in competition with a living person. This is especially true of Holiday," noted NPR in a piece about the 1960s renaissance of Holiday that has continued into the new millennium.

She made the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1961, and shortly after nearly 100 of her greatest records from the early years were restored. Her catalog is in wide release to this day. And in the 1970s, her memoir, Lady Sings the Blues, made it to the big screen starring Diana Ross, who earned an Oscar nod for her portrayal of Billie Holiday. In death, Holiday garnered more than 20 Grammy wins or nominations, and in 2000, Holiday was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

It's been more than 50 years since Holiday's death, and though she left the world as she entered it — in poverty — we're richer for having her voice as a testament to a hard life that shaped a legendary lady.