Julia Blackburn: With Billie

Billie Holiday was treated carelessly all her life.

In January 1979, a young woman named Linda Kuehl walked out of a Count Basie concert in Washington DC, went back to her hotel room and jumped out of the window.

She had been working on, and failing to make headway with, a biography of Billie Holiday. The book may not have come together, but Kuehl did leave behind more than 150 taped interviews with friends and associates of the singer whom many consider to have been the greatest in jazz.

Now, the Orange Prize-shortlisted author Julia Blackburn has used those tapes to write a life, of sorts, of Holiday. Divided mainly into chapters in which individuals recall the Holiday they knew, the book shines a spotlight on aspects and times of the singer's 44 years, but does not attempt a straight-forward narrative biography; perhaps wisely, as there have been more than enough of them.

What terrible yet fascinating stories these old associates had to tell. What casual brutality filled the alcohol-shortened lifespan of a woman whose preference for scumbags led her to live with a series of men who beat her up, robbed her and treated her with such contempt that one even shopped her to the narcotics police. The only moments of joy are viewed through a mist of booze and drugs, such as the night she went to dinner with a group including the editor of her autobiography, Lee Barker. "We had a great evening, just marvellous," Barker wrote. "Everyone was on heroin except me, and her chihuahua was on gin."

These are the first-hand comments that illuminate the strange underworld that Holiday inhabited. At first, the commonplace attitude of her milieu towards sex and prostitution, for instance, can seem shockingly freewheeling to us.

Did Holiday's mother, Sadie, really think it appropriate for her 14-year-old daughter, who had been raped at 11, to come to stay with her in New York — considering that her home was a brothel? Perhaps she did, given that she later set up a whorehouse herself. Asked if Holiday was turning tricks at that time, a family friend said she didn't know, but that in any case it was always "better to sell it than give it away".

Just about all her men are described as being "pimps". In a telephone transcript, her last husband, Louis McKay, is quoted complaining about US$700 he thought she owed him: "If I got a whore, I get some money from her or I don't have anything to do with the bitch." He went on to muse about having her killed.

Sadie alternated between periods of abandoning her and times when she tried to control Holiday's life. The 1947 drugs bust that led to a year in jail had been orchestrated by Holiday's agent, Joe Glaser. When, within months of her death, she was arrested for violating the terms of a new and ill-publicised act that compelled those convicted of narcotics charges to report to customs on leaving the country, her comments were heart-rending. "A little thing like this, I didn't know about. And nobody cared enough about me to tell me about it."

This, above all, is what comes through in the recordings. Holiday was manipulated, used and treated carelessly all her life. That she was a great singer was its only positive part.

Curiously, her singing career is the one area on which this book is silent. The reader is given next to no information about her place and stature in the jazz world or what it was that made her a great singer. Given her talent, this is a strange omission. "All that meat and no potatoes, just ain't right," as Louis Armstrong once sang.

Blackburn admits that her task has been to communicate what was on Kuehl's tapes. But the reader should bear in mind that, just as Holiday colluded in the making of the myth (most notoriously in her own semi-fictional autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues), so might the interviewees occasionally have been guilty of playing up to the legend.

This book adds to the field of Holiday studies, but no one should take it as the definitive truth. Neither should it be treated as a starting point from which to delve into her life. Instead, any readers who need an introduction to Lady Day should turn to Stuart Nicholson's authoritative biography.

- INDEPENDENT

* Jonathan Cape, $59.95