The lonesome death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman at age 46 in New York last weekend put me in mind of another great artist's untimely demise. Jazz singer Billie Holiday was also a heroin user (but mostly an alcoholic). She died in July 1959, at age 44, of heart failure while in police custody at a New York hospital. The circumstances of Lady Day's struggle with addiction in the 1940s & '50s contrast starkly with Hoffman's over the past year or so. The differences between them reveal the progress society has made in dealing with narcotic dependence - at least when it comes to celebrities.
In Julia Blackburn's unconventional biography of Holiday, With Billie (NY: Pantheon Books, 2005), it's clear that the jazz icon was not so much driven to an early grave by her own demons as she was hounded there by zealous agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Billie was awaiting trial on drug charges at the time of her death. She'd already endured ten months of incarceration at a federal prison in West Virginia (1947-48), worried that jazz fans might forget her.
The publicity that followed Holidays' various drug arrests, spread by a merciless tabloid press, broke the proud singer's heart. The loss of Holiday's NYPD-issued cabaret performer's license, one consequence of her criminal record, hindered her ability to earn a living. Tragically, the government's draconian war on drugs - as embodied by federal agents who advanced their careers by harassing this famous (black) woman - hastened her passing. Billie Holiday was perhaps the most emotionally evocative jazz vocalist of all time. If only she had been treated with more compassion.
In the case of Philip Seymour Hoffman, police & prosecutors were not interested in the (white) actor's heroin habit until after his death. Although it's small comfort to his grieving friends & family, Hoffman had the luxury of dying at his Greenwich Village home, a wealthy & respected man. His relapse after two decades of self-proclaimed sobriety might have remained a private matter - had he not chosen to discuss it publicly in the year preceding his sad end. Like Holiday, Hoffman tried & failed at rehab. Unlike her, he was not subjected to condemnation by the press for his substance abuse.
In fact, the news coverage of Hoffman's fatal overdose has been mostly sympathetic. The media have seized this opportunity to discuss constructively the recent resurgence of heroin abuse in the US. Hoffman's passing has mainly been reported as a loss to the world of stage & cinema. Broadway even dimmed its lights in tribute to the gifted actor/director, despite the fact that he died (like Lenny Bruce) with a syringe in his arm. Fortunately, addiction is now recognized as a complicated illness.
But just when it seems that our society - albeit not necessarily our government - is becoming more compassionate, up pops some sign of a trend in the opposite direction. On public radio yesterday I heard a Missouri legislator proposing that the Show Me state substitute a firing squad for lethal injection as the official means of execution. Wyoming is considering a similar execution-by-riflemen bill. There's reportedly a shortage of the toxic chemicals used on Death Row by those 35 American states that still kill prisoners (3 recently abolished the death penalty, but not retroactively).
The whole mess makes me proud to be from Wisconsin, which abolished capital punishment in 1853. Meanwhile, the ghost of Gary Gilmore (executed by firing squad in Utah, at his own insistence, in 1977) grins. As W.C. Fields used to say, "I have mixed feelings: despair and disgust."
Rest in peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who so convincingly portrayed on film that alcoholic misfit Truman Capote, whose "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood so eloquently describes the emotionally complex killer Perry Smith (executed by hanging in Kansas, 1965).
Thank you, Billie Holiday, whose moving performance of the anti-lynching anthem "Strange Fruit" at NY's integrated Café Society circa 1940 inspired the FBI to start investigating her as a subversive. She was a fiercely loving, tormented artist who refused to inform on others.
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