THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, March 23, 1995 TAG: 9503230041
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CRAIG SHAPIRO, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 168 lines
IN FOUR MONTHS, Billie Holiday would be dead, $50 taped to her thigh as she left this world July 17, 1959. On this March night, in a dark, grimy club in South Philadelphia, it was clear Lady's days were few.
Five people were in the place when Holiday, her dog in her arms, stumbled over the microphone cord as she stepped on stage. Strung out. A tumbler full of liquor on the upright behind her.
Defeated.
Some songs she wouldn't do; her pianist trapped her into singing others. After running through 10 or 12 tunes, Holiday stumbled out.
Lanie Robertson can still see the fallen icon.
The playwright wasn't there that night - he was only 13 in 1959 - but a friend who was in the club recounted it so vividly that Robertson never forgot.
``The image of such an important American artist being so ignored and in such - he said she was as high as a kite, too - was something that just haunted me,'' he said. ``However, it was such a static image; it was not a dramatic image. And though I was extremely interested in her for many reasons - as a theatrical symbol she was extremely potent - it was too static to make a play of.''
It wasn't until the early 1970s, at a Broadway performance of ``Piaf,'' that Robertson saw how he could dramatize Holiday's story. In the play, the French chanteuse, told that her lover has died in a plane crash, walks up to the mike and sings ``My Man.''
``At that moment, I realized I could write a play, the play I had been wanting to write for so long,'' Robertson said. ``I thought if I could find a way to bring the audience into an awareness of what the songs meant to her, that the songs in fact could become an extension of Billie's thought.
``She wrote `God Bless the Child' for her mother. How that song connects with her mother allows me to cover a part of her childhood and a part of her drug addiction.''
Robertson spent a year and a half listening to Holiday's extensive songbook, arranging then rearranging the 15 songs that outline ``the emotional terrain'' of ``Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill,'' which is being presented by the Virginia Stage Company.
The songs, among them such signatures as ``When a Woman Loves a Man'' and the controversial ``Strange Fruit,'' are interspersed with monologues, creating what The New York Times called a ``shrewdly constructed piece that .
Of its star, Lonette McKee, The Times said, ``the woman she embodies is dying, but what impresses one is her strength. Not desperate or agonized, she seems a beautiful, ruined piece of nature.''
``Lady Day'' won off-Broadway's Outer Critics Circle Award in 1987.
``I think what a good actress does is to work from her own psyche and her own emotional experiences,'' Robertson said last week from Winston-Salem, N.C., where one of his plays was being produced.
``If you're dealing with something such as drug addiction and you're not a drug addict yourself, and never have been one, you need to make some correlation. It can be a love affair or anything else, but one has to feel some linkage so that you make an emotional connection. You go for something that is true to the person.''
Chris Calloway, who is starring in the VSC production, made that connection the first time she slipped into Holiday's shoes. She's made it each time since.
The daughter of legendary bandleader Cab Calloway, she made her Broadway debut with her father and Pearl Bailey in ``Hello Dolly!'' She also appeared in ``Pajama Game'' and, with her father and his orchestra, performed at jazz festivals in the United States, Europe, South America and Japan.
Whenever ``Lady Day'' has come around - in Edinburgh and England, Texas and Alabama - it's been at some personal crossroads.
``The first time was when I tried to break away from my father,'' Calloway said last week between rehearsals. ``I had been working with him for 17 years and, because he was so large and everything anyone did in his presence had to complement what he did, it left very little space for me to artistically develop my individuality.
``So when I had an opportunity to do this play, it was the first time I realized I had value and merit as an artist on my own.''
A single mother who now lives in Santa Fe, N.M., she is again sensing the first rustle of the winds of change.
``I'm at that point now. My father died in November (and) my identity was very much wrapped up in him. Now, what do I do? I find myself back with Billie, hoping that I will get her blessing again.''
Calloway, a strikingly handsome woman with a quick smile, said she was never awed by the prospect of playing Holiday. In part it's because she's a trained actress and singer, a former student at Boston University's School of Fine Arts.
But it also has something to do with her childhood. Her godmother is Lena Horne, and Calloway still remembers those Christmas Day calls from Uncle Dizzy - Dizzy Gillespie. The be-bop great phoned every year to play ``Happy Birthday'' to her father.
``My approach to her (Holiday) is not that she is larger than life, because I've hung out with the larger-than-life,'' Calloway said. ``Certainly hanging out with my dad, with whom it was blatant that on the stage in front of an audience he was one person and off the stage he was another, I would have to assume that every artist is like that.''
Not every artist, though, has endured like Lady Day. The tragedies that defined Holiday's life - racism, drug and alcohol abuse, the physical and emotional suffering - still touch a common chord.
``It's funny,'' Calloway said. ``I used to get so mad with my father. He hated interviews. People would say, `Well, Mr. Calloway, how did you get started?' He'd get (angry) and say, `My mom drank some gasoline and I came out.' Then they'd ask if things have changed. And he'd say nothing's changed.
``I would go, `That's so stagnant.' But it's really the truth. I mean, people are still trying to be people, and other people are resenting them for trying to be people. It was a different kind of racism in those days, but your feelings get just as hurt.''
Robertson's voice trails off when he talks about Holiday's death at age 44. The $50 taped to her thigh - payment for an interview she had granted in her New York hospital room - was all she had left. She was under arrest because a friend had bought her a joint. When the police found it, they confiscated everything.
But it was more than those incidents that drew him to Holiday.
``It was the chance to deal with her as an icon on so many different levels,'' he said. ``She obviously was a woman in a business controlled by men. She was a drug addict in a time when drug addiction was a criminal offense, quite literally. She was an artist in a commercial society, and she was a black. She was a black woman in a racist and chauvinist society.
``All these things combined to make a very tragic figure.''
Similar parallels can be drawn in a play that Robertson recently finished about country-music great Hank Williams Sr. ``It's sort of exactly the same story except that he was 29 (when he died).'' Robertson said.
``Billie Holiday is a multimillion-dollar industry,'' he said, ``but the abuse of the artist in our society, especially the devaluing of American artists, is something that continues. It cost us at least 10 or 20 years of Billie Holiday's life.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
BETH BERGMAN
Staff Photos
Chris Calloway, daughter of jazz great Cab Calloway, rehearses for
her starring role as Billie Holiday in "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar &
Grill."
Calloway says appearing in "Lady Day" was the first time I realized
I had value and merit as an artist on my own."
You talk about the vestal virgin; Billie was the vestal virgin
with fifty million scars . . . That's why she couldn't make it in
this world, she never could make it. She was just too gentle, too
honest, too emotional.
- ``Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie
Holiday''
[For a copy of the INFOLINE box, see microfilm.]
BETH BERGMAN
Staff
Chris Calloway portrays Billie Holiday in the last four months of
her life in ``Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill.''
Playwright Lanie Robertson calls Billie Holiday ``a very tragic
figure.''
SHOW FACTS
What: ``Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill,'' by Lanie Robertson;
produced by the Virginia Stage Company
When: 8 tonight, continuing through April 9; performances daily
except Mondays and this Saturday
Where: Wells Theatre, 110 E. Tazewell St., Norfolk
Tickets: $10 to $30
Phone: 627-1234
Also: A free discussion follows the 2 p.m. performance Sunday;
the 9 p.m. performance April 1 will be signed for the
hearing-impaired
by CNB