Billie Holiday is painted as one of life's victims but she didn't see it that way

Billie Holiday is universally known as one of the jazz world's saddest casualties, a phenomenally talented singer who was defeated by her heroin addiction at the age of 44, in 1959. But, as the latest documentary in BBC2's Reputations strand suggests, she was not the tragic figure that she is usually pigeon-holed as. Just because the key events in her life - rape and abuse, working as a prostitute, having a long-standing drug habit, spending time in jail, being persecuted for being black - could have made her a victim, it doesn't automatically follow that she was. Her end was

tragic, but that needn't mean that her life was, too.

Producer-director David Turnbull was keen to include Holiday because it has been such a long time since the last TV biography of her was made - the excellent Arena documentary of the early 1980s - and because the Reputations series hadn't tackled a jazz subject before. Once he began to look into the subject, he discovered that the people who knew her didn't regard her as a tragic figure at all. His resulting Reputations programme shows Holiday in a new light.

She was, says Turnbull, ''much more in control of her career and her life than she liked people to imagine''.

The documentary even suggests that she encouraged the tragic image. Turnbull explains: ''She liked people to feel sorry for her. She was quite happy for people to think that she was not really in control of what was going on, which was partly so that she didn't have to explain herself to other people.

These were very difficult times for female performers, especially black ones, and I don't think it was possible for her to

be entirely honest about who

she was and what she was doing in those days. Even her auto-biography has wilful distortions in it.''

One of the main contributors to the documentary is William Dufty - who collaborated on that autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. Dufty reveals that Holiday was happy to write about her bisexuality - and she was even prepared to name names, including those of the sexually voracious actress Tallulah Bankhead, movie maverick Orson Welles, and the heiress Louise Crane.

But, as Turnbull says: ''They weren't allowed to keep a lot of the material in the book because the publishers were scared of litigation, especially from people like Bankhead who denied ever meeting Billie. They weren't worried about black people causing trouble, but they wouldn't allow mention of any living white person unless it could be substantiated. Orson Welles wasn't bothered about being in the book, but the publishers took out the stuff about him anyway.''

Holiday's sexuality has never been discussed on TV before, and, as Turnbull says: ''There wasn't room for the stories we heard about men taking their wives backstage to meet Billie, and then finding out that the wives had actually gone off for the night with her.'' Attention usually tends to focus on Holiday's drug habit and that, says Turnbull, is one reason why her one-time pianist and close friend, Bobby Tucker, has been reluctant to participate in previous TV projects.

But, of course, you can't deal with Lady Day without tackling the subject of her habit. Turnbull believes that her reputation as a drug addict preceded her in the 1950s, and cost her many opportunities. ''There's a story in the film that William Dufty tells about how he told her she should be on The Ed Sullivan Show, because that was the biggest variety show at the time. She said that she and Sullivan used to smoke opium up in Harlem and he wouldn't have her anywhere near his show - in case she gave him away.''

Holiday's habit also almost cost the archives the single-most important piece of jazz footage ever shown on TV: the all-star version of the blues tune Fine and Mellow from the live 1957 CBS show The Sound of Jazz. Turnbull explains:

''We didn't have time to include this story in the final

cut, but The Sound of Jazz was sponsored by a big corporation which wasn't very happy about a known drug-taker on a programme with which its name was associated. It said she

wasn't to be invited on, and it was only when the producers of the show said that if she wasn't in it, there would be no show, that the corporation backed off.''

Although she did appear on some TV shows in the 1950s,

little footage survives. Turnbull says: ''Unlike a lot of her contemporaries, there's no archive film of her being interviewed. There's nothing of her doing anything other than singing,

and there's not even a huge amount of that.''

Which is all the more reason for Turnbull feeling more than a little chuffed about the fact that his film includes two archive clips which have not been seen in almost 50 years. One of the clips is of her singing I Only Have Eyes for You in France in the fifties, and the other is from an American TV show, also from the fifties. Turnbull says: ''She's singing one of her own songs - Billie's Blues - about how her man treats her badly, and beats her, and as she sings this line

she casts a glance at her husband, a nasty piece of work who's in the audience, and he smiles. It's very telling.''

She may have appeared to be easy prey for the dope-peddlers, and she may have consistently gone for abusive men, but Billie Holiday, according to

Reputations, chose to do drugs even once she knew the consequences, and chose to be a punchbag even though, as she often proved, she was more

than capable of fighting back. She was, says Turnbull, quot-

ing one of his interviewees, a woman ''with a huge appetite

for sensation''.

And if, after watching the

programme, you still believe that Lady Day was a sad figure

worthy only of pity, just listen to her classic 1930s recordings which exude nothing less than pure joie de vivre.

l Reputations, Tuesday, BBC2, 9pm

l April 7, 1915: is born Eleanora Fagan, the illegitimate daughter of Sadie Fagan, 19, and Clarence Holiday, 16, in Philadelphia

l December 1926: raped by a neighbour in Baltimore and sent to a Catholic girls' home

l Spring 1930: starts singing in Harlem clubs

l November 1933: makes her recording debut with Benny Goodman's band

l January 1937: makes first recordings with members of the Count Basie band, including her musical soulmate, the tenor saxophonist Lester Young

l March 1938: joins the otherwise all-white Artie Shaw Orchestra; quits nine months later

l April 1939: records the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit for Commodore

l April 1941: performs with Louis Armstrong's band for a week in New York

l August 1941: marries Jimmy Monroe

l October 1944: makes her first Decca recordings, with strings. The session

includes Lover Man

l April 1945: claims to have married trumpeter Joe Guy

l February 1946: gives a sell-out classical-style recital at New York's Town Hall

l September 1946: joins Louis Armstrong in Hollywood to film New Orleans which purports to tell jazz]s story. She plays a maid

l March 1947: enters clinic to break drug habit, but nurse supplies drugs

l May 1947: arrested on drugs charges and sentenced to a year's imprisonment

l March 1948: breaks box-office records with comeback concerts at Carnegie Hall

l January 1949: loses permit to perform in New York nightclubs

l late 1951: marries manager Louis McKay

l January 1954: begins first European tour

l July 1956: publication of Lady Sings the Blues, her autobiography

l December 1957: appears in the live TV special The Sound of Jazz

l June 1959: while in hospital suffering from illnesses unrelated to drugs, she is arrested for drugs possession

l July 17, 1959: dies of heart failure