Plot
In 1928 Baltimore, Eleanora Fagan, also known as Billie Holiday, is working as a 15-year-old housekeeper in a brothel. While home alone at her aunt's house, she is raped by a man who followed her from the brothel. She flees to her mother Sadie, who sets her up a job cleaning for another brothel in Harlem. The brothel is run by Lorraine, a woman who pays little money to Billie. Billie tires of scrubbing floors and becomes a prostitute, but soon quits and returns to a nightclub to unsuccessfully audition to become a showgirl. After "Piano Man" accompanies Billie when she sings a song, [a] club owner Jerry books her as a singer in the show.
Billie's debut begins unsuccessfully, until Louis McKay arrives and gives her a twenty-dollar tip. Billie accepts the money and sings. [b] She takes a liking to Louis and begins a relationship with him. Eventually, she is discovered by Harry and Reg Hanley, two white bandleaders who sign her as a soloist for their southern tour in hopes of landing a radio network gig. During the tour, Billie witnesses the aftermath of the lynching of an African-American man, which presses her to record a song. [c] The harsh experiences on the tour result in Billie taking drugs, which Harry supplies after she collapses on stage. One night when Billie is performing, Louis comes to see her. After realizing that Billie is doing drugs, Louis says that she is going home with him. Billie promises to stay off the drugs if Louis stays with her.
In New York, Reg and Louis arrange for Billie's radio debut, but the station does not call her up to the stage to sing; the radio sponsor, a soap company, objected to her race. Disappointed, the group heads to Cafe Manhattan. There, Billie gets drunk and asks Harry for drugs, saying that she does not want her family to know that the radio show upset her. He, however, refuses. Angered, Billie is ready to leave, but Louis arranged for her to sing at the Cafe, a club where she once aspired to sing. She obliges with one song but refuses an encore, leaving in need of a fix. Louis, suspicious that Billie broke her promise, takes her back to his home but refuses to allow her access to the bathroom or her kit. She fights Louis for it, pulling a razor on him. Louis leaves her to shoot up, saying that he does not want her there when he returns.
Billie returns to the Harlem nightclub, where her drug use intensifies until she hears of Sadie's death. Billie checks herself into a drug clinic, but cannot afford her treatment there. The doctor secretly calls Louis, who comes in and starts paying her bills without her knowledge. Impressed with the initiative that she has taken to straighten herself out, Louis proposes to her at the hospital.
Billie is soon arrested for possession of narcotics and removed from the clinic. In prison, she goes through withdrawal. Louis brings the doctor from the hospital to treat her, but she is incoherent. He puts a ring on her finger to remind Billie of his promise to marry her. After finishing her sentence, Billie returns home and does not want to sing anymore.
Billie marries Louis and pledges not to continue her career, but the lure of performing is too strong and she returns to singing, with Louis as her manager. However, her felony conviction stripped Billie of her Cabaret Card, which would allow her to sing in New York City nightclubs. To restore public confidence and regain her license, Billie agrees to a cross-country tour. Her career takes off on the nightclub circuit.
Louis leaves for New York to arrange for a comeback performance for Billie at Carnegie Hall. Despondent at Louis's absence and the never-ending stream of venues, Billie asks Piano Man to pawn the ring that Louis gave her in exchange for drugs. While they are high that evening, Piano Man's drug connections arrive; he neither pawned the ring nor paid for the drugs. The dealers kill Piano Man. Within the hour, Louis and her promoter call Billie with news that they completed the Carnegie Hall deal. Louis returns to find a traumatized Billie, who has fallen back into drugs.
Billie plays to a packed house at Carnegie Hall. An on-screen montage of newspaper clippings juxtaposed alongside her performance reveals that the concert fails to sway the commission to restore her license; that subsequent appeals are denied; and that Billie is eventually re-arrested on drug charges and dies at age 44.
Reception
Box office
The film earned an estimated $9,050,000 in North American rentals in 1973. [7] Its overall domestic box office totaled $19,726,490. [3]
Critical reception
Vincent Canby of The New York Times described Ross as "an actress of exceptional beauty and wit, who is very much involved in trying to make a bad movie work ... her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché." [8]
Variety wrote, "For the bulk of general audiences, the film serves as a very good screen debut vehicle for Diana Ross, supported strongly by excellent casting, handsome '30s physical values, and a script which is far better in dialog than structure." [9]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, writing that Ross had given "one of the great performances of 1972", and observing that the film "has most of the clichés we expect—but do we really mind clichés in a movie like this? I don't think so." [10]
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune also awarded three stars out of four, writing, "The fact that 'Lady Sings the Blues' is a failure as a biography of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday doesn't mean it can't be an entertaining movie. And it is just that—entertaining—because of an old fashioned grand dame performance by Diana Ross, late of the pop-rock scene, in the title role." [11]
Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Ross gave "one of the truly fine screen performances, full of power and pathos and enormously engaging and sympathetic". [12]
Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote that "when the movie was over I wrote 'I love it' on my pad of paper ... Factually it's a fraud, but emotionally it delivers. It has what makes movies work for a mass audience: easy pleasure, tawdry electricity, personality—great quantities of personality." [13]
Tom Milne of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that Ross did "a remarkable pastiche job on the tone and timbre of Billie Holiday's voice, [but] misses the elegant, almost literary wit of her phrasing", and found the presentation of Holiday's life story "offensively simplistic". [14]
It is worth noting that society's perception of race plays a role in the reception of Lady Sings the Blues and the criticism of Diana Ross as Holiday. When Ross's racial authenticity was questioned, audiences did not know if she was capable of playing Billie Holiday. Ross's public perception as an "honorary white girl" [15] made her less appealing for the role of Billie Holiday. Audiences argued that her more commercial and "white sounding" voice made her a bad fit to portray Billie Holiday, for Holiday had a bigger jazz influence. Ross contended that she did not attempt to copy Billie's sound; rather, she attempted to bring her own sound to the role.
The film holds a 71% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 62 reviews. [16]
