LADY SINGS THE BLUES Motown/Paramount

I had to be darkened down so the show could go on in dynamic-assed Detroit. It’s like they say, there's no damn business like show business. You had to smile to keep from throwing up. ,

Billie Holiday

Started my life In an old, cold

run down tenement slum My father left,

He never even married mom I shared the guilt that momma knew So afraid that others knew I had no name ...

“Love Child” — The Supremes

There is a moment of improbable terror when Diana Ross sings that final line, a peak of tension that contains everything that made Motown great. Even if it isn’t her own story, Diana Ross must have lived in the same kind of anguish: those supperclubs and the show-tunes were the product of the same refusal of one’s past. The Supremes Sing Rogers and Hart wasn’t false. It had as much to do with who the singers were as Holland-Dozier-Holland or Smokey Robinson did, even if white bohemia hated what night club Motown told it about black reality in the 60’s and 70’s.

What Motown’s entrance into the supper clubs should have told us was that black America, or a good part of it, wanted in. It aspired to every middle class value white bohemia had flung aside. Motown’s Broadway showtunes served notice to the counter-culture that the Sound of Young (Black) America was not an outlaw noise of its own accord; its spirit of self-determination, however warped by social and economic vices, slapped the spoiled, lily white counter-culture where it hurt most: right in its radical chic. Like the brats we are, we responded with boos and catcalls, “doing our best to deny it.” Nothing should have driven the point home more forcefully than the sight of Diana Ross, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, one after another, singing silly Broadway show tunes on album after TV special after night club engagement. Instead, we denied that Motown was doing what its best instincts told us it had to do. I suspect that it was we, and not .Berry Gordy’s slick Empire, who were stupid. It took Lady Sings the Blues, in which Diana Ross is turned inside out, brutalized, sullied, left defenseless and almost gibbering, to teach me this. It might be the most important lesson the rise of Motown from Berry Gordy’s basement to a Hollywood sound stage has to offer.

The power of the film is amazing. All the odds were against it. Diana Ross symbolized everything I didn’t like about the Gordy power structure; how was this googly-eyed little skinny ever going to portray the awesome reality of Billie Holiday?

Like all great performers, Diana Ross came up with the simplest answer: she’d cop to it all. She’d be a junkie, she’d be a whore, she’d fix in the bath and dressing room; she’d let herself be degraded in ways we hadn’t thought imaginable.

It works. I know more about Billie Holiday — I have listened to more of her records, read more of the literature surrounding her, thought more about her — than I ever would have otherwise.. I have more respect for her, and for Diana Ross. And for Motown. Lady Sings the Blues is a triumph — not without its contradictions and frustrations and failures, but nonetheless triumphal. Those contradictions and problems simply make the movie more thoroughly a part of the Motown tradition.

What’s it about? It’s about Billie Holiday, the greatest voice jazz has ever known, capable of turning any song into a tour de force of sorrow and bitter regret. Holiday earned every inch of her gigantic reputation; she rode jazz singing to such limits that there has not been a challenge to her throne since her death.

She was classic in another sense, too: came from a broken home (“Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three,” are the first lines of her autobiography, on which the movie is loosely based.), married several times, a junkie whose addiction nearly destroyed her career. Had she been a whit less talented, heroin would have erased her name from history.

If Billie Holiday was great because she transcended her weaknesses, Diana Ross plays her fantastically because Ms. Motown is not afraid to succumb to her own frailties. Diana doesn’t try to be Billie Holiday, she just tries to be something like her peer: run the gamut from little girl, to prostitute, to singer, to romantic fool to junkie and finally to triumphant, broken genius.

Part of the magic is in her eyes. The reason, or one of them, that a lot of white kids didn’t like Diana Ross was that she was forever bulging those eyes, acting like a little girl. In Lady, she is able to use her peepers as an asset: as a little girl’s, yes, but then again, as a sultry woman’s. There is both innocence and experience in her eyes as Diana stalks the stage; I have rarely witnessed anything like it.

True, the links between heroin and racism (which is what the movie is about, even more than it is about Billie Holiday) are overdrawn. But it would be difficult to portray the complex reasons why Holiday did become an addict in any other way. It would undoubtedly be less successful. Like the music Motown makes, Lady Sings the Blues is most successful when it is direct, when its impact is not diverted or subtle but upfront and deliberate.

' Then there is the singing. Diana doesn’t attempt to sound like Billie Holiday. Their voices are totally dissimilar, anyway. That’s probably fortunate, too. Instead of trying to cop Holiday’s style, Ross sings the songs (particularly “Good Morning Heartache”) her way: more mellifluous, more flowing, less gritty and raw, but still powerfully. I’m tempted to say she has never sung better.

Diana doesn’t do it alone, of course. Her supporting cast is excellent, particularly Richard Pryor, who looks more than a little like Smokey Robinson (both facially and in the way that he moves) as Billie’s piano player, and Billy Dee Williams, as Holiday’s great love, Louis McKay. (Their relationship is fictionalized, but emotionally accurate: the book ends, “Tired? You bet. But all that I’ll soon forget with my man ... ”)

The Motown touch is most thoroughly revealed in the final scene. As Billie steps back on stage for her Carnegie Hall encore, the crowd roars with applause and cheers. She begins to sing the most famous Holiday song of all, “God Bless the Child.” When she moves into the first “Mama may have/Papa may have ... ” a series of newspaper clippings — done in sepia tones as is all the chronological telescoping in the movie — begins to flash on the screen: “Triumph at Carnegie Hall, Failure With Licensing Commission,” then her several arrests and finally her death: “Jazz Singer Dead at 44.”

But that’s not the end. The clippings flash off the screen, Diana/Billie finishes the song, and the crowd rises in ovation. Then, and only then, the film ends.

That’s what makes Lady Sings the Blues as emotionally acute as the autobiography from which it is drawn. That’s also what makes it a Motown movie.

Indeed, Lady may tell us as much about Motown as it does about Holiday. For one thing, the final scenes have the Gordy group’s sense of triumph, the sense you get from hearing “My Guy” that Mary Wells is still the most popular female singer in the world. Things don’t have to age in Tamlatown.

But, again, the scene takes place in Carnegie Hall; it’s another black invasion of white culture. If that sounds racist, well, it’s certainly written from a white perspective. Looked at in another way, Billie Holiday’s Carnegie Hall show represents, at least in Motown’s eyes, a new pinnacle of acceptance for black culture in white America.

Either way, we are left with a triumphant Billie Holiday, which is the only kind of Billie Holiday we’d want to be left, I think. Lady Sings the Blues honors Lady Day in a way that it could not possibly have, had the movie been made by anyone except the Motown family. And no one, it Seems to me now, could possibly have played Holiday better than Diana Ross. “God bless the child that’s got its own,” indeed.

Dave Marsh