When Billie Holiday went to Hollywood: the biopic as reputation management in <i>Lady Sings the Blues</i>

When Lady Sings the Blues, the autobiography of jazz vocalist Billie Holiday, was published in 1956, the image that the book presented of Holiday defied midcentury politics of respectability and fashioned a notion of ladyhood borne from the struggles of Black women. While numerous producers showed interest in adapting the source material to the screen, the book’s image of Holiday proved difficult to reconcile with the strictures of Black representation within Hollywood. By analyzing archival materials that give insight into several attempts to adapt this book to film, this article chronicles Holiday’s relationship to Hollywood both via her own brief screen career and through the fifteen-year period in which producers sought to bring Holiday’s life to the screen as Hollywood negotiated the possibilities of Black representation from the Civil Rights years to the Black Power era. In so doing, I argue that biopics constitute a form of reputation management wherein the cultural value of a public figure is negotiated within the industrial priorities of entertainment institutions. The case of Holiday and Lady Sings the Blues illuminates the politics of the possible in adapting a Black woman’s defiant image of selfhood to the screen within the industrial conditions and narrative conventions that defined Hollywood during a crucial period for African American cinema.