after 65 years.
“This would have made a whole movie,” William Dufty told me in 1994, and now it has:
Lee Daniels’ The United States vs. Billie Holiday–out next month.
Paul Alexander is writing a new book on Holiday for Pantheon. Last summer he interviewed me about Tallulah vis a vis Holiday. In 1994 I interviewed Dufty, who co-authored Holiday’s 1956 autobiography, about Holiday vis a vis Tallulah. I told Paul that I’d look for those tapes and transcribe them in their entirety–so far I’ve found and transcribed one tape and sent it to him. Dufty had a lot to say; in fact, we both wonder why Dufty never wrote his own autobiography.
Dufty recollected at some length to me the subject of Daniels’ new film: Holiday’s relationship with black narcotics agent James Fletcher. Fletcher “went into the Prohibition bureau,” Dufty told me, “when you needed, if they had a back face they practically had to work undercover, and he was practically alone.” Fletcher’s later involvement with Holiday was such that he betrayed his professional mandate and did not arrest her when he had sufficient cause to do so.
Fletcher “was around’ during Holiday’s final hospital stay in 1959. Holiday wanted Dufty to collaborate with Fletcher on a memoir: she “had essentially put the gun to his head and the gun to my head.” Eventually they did collaborate on a manuscript, not describing his “love story” with Holiday but describing “the drug enforcement landing on blacks, showing that it was corrupt from the first moment.” That’s the message that Holiday wanted put out: “She was totally radicalized by her exposure to the U.S. government. She thought the Fletcher thing would have impact.”
The book was too honest for New York publishers: none would accept the book.
Dufty said he also wrote a two-person play about Fletcher and Holiday that foundered because he couldn’t find an actress he thought could embody her.
Now the Fletcher-Holiday dyad is finally going to reach the public.