Tough Personal Battles Helped Devine in Billie Holiday Role

To convey the sadness of blues singer Billie Holiday’s last months, Loretta Devine, a star on the ascent, has to dig deep into her past for some painful memories.

“I have to go to the weakest part of myself,” said Devine, speaking in a soft, almost little-girl voice. “I have to go into the negative part of my thinking to get to her. She had very low self-esteem from being (allegedly) raped, being in whorehouses and being told she wasn’t a singer,” said Devine, who is starring in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” which opens Saturday at the Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

“In this show, they have to force her to do the show. I, Loretta, try to set myself apart from her. There is so much pain in the text and in the songs. Sometimes, I think they’ll put me in the hospital on June 17 (when the play closes). I’ll be so emotionally exhausted.

“The other day, I told the music director when we were doing the runthrough that I really wanted to hide.”

If she did, a lot of people would come looking for her. Not only is she the play in Lanie Robertson’s one-woman show, she also stars with Vickilyn Reynolds (her co-star in the New York, London and Los Angeles productions of “The Colored Museum”) in a new CBS television series, “Sugar and Spice,”which will compete with her live stage work on Friday nights at 9:30.

“Sugar and Spice,” a comedy about two sisters raising a niece, has been compared to “Laverne & Shirley” with a kid, or an all-female “My Two Dads.” The producers wanted Devine and Reynolds to re-create some of the snappy, comic chemistry they showed when they fussed at each other as warring wigs in “The Colored Museum.”

So what does a rising star in her 30s look back on to re-create the pain of a singer who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1959, at age 44, with 70 cents in the bank and $750 taped to her leg?

“I was the only one who wasn’t nominated for a Tony,” she said, referring to the Broadway cast of “Dreamgirls” in which she performed.

“Being black in this country is not as painful as it was back when Billie lived, but you see things happening in South Africa and you see the drug crisis, and you know that, even though the time period is different, the problems are frighteningly similar.”

What she doesn’t tell you, until near the end of the hour at an Old Globe conference room, and then only because it seems to slip out, is that she has had to contend with more in her life than crises in the headlines and missing out on an award.

Her parents divorced when she was a baby, and her now deceased grandmother, who helped bring her up in Houston, was frightened when Devine not only wanted to be the first person in her family to attend college, but was determined to go to the University of Texas, where the student body was mostly white.

“My grandmother was afraid I would be lynched,” she said.

No one threatened her, but, despite her determination to make good at the school, where she worked three jobs to support herself, she never got a shot at the kind of parts she wanted in the theater program.

“I wanted to be Lady Macbeth, but I got to play one of the witches. I had to do pieces outside the school.”

Later, she was accepted to the master of fine arts program at Brandeis University--but again, she didn’t get a shot at the parts she wanted.

“They didn’t know what to do with me,” she said with just a trace of bitterness. Later, when she began landing parts on Broadway and toured to Boston in “Dreamgirls” and “Big Deal,” the school had a big function for her. After all, she is one of the few in her class of 12 who works.

But that doesn’t make her feel proud. It just makes her remember those days in Boston in the 1970s when busing and racial incidents started getting out of hand.

“You would go to the store with your money to buy something, and people would ignore you. If you stood on a certain side of the street, you couldn’t get a cab. Being black, there’s just all this added stuff you have to deal with.”

Being black was something Holiday had to contend with as well, Devine points out.

What brought down Holiday was her heroin problem, she said. “It makes your determination lax.”

But Devine also believes that Holiday was treated harshly by police, who looked the other way at white performers using drugs, because of her skin color and because she would not put up with second-class treatment.

“She was very proud,” Devine said. “If she was told she had to come in by the back door, she would quit.”

Holiday did not have so much a big voice as she did a strong and uniquely emotional voice, a voice that Devine believes is much like her own.

“It will be a challenge for me, a proving ground. Billie has been a part of all black singers’ lives because it is as if she has this window open when she sings, and you look inside her.”

What Devine wants to do with the part is open herself up so that audiences will see Billie inside her--as if she were performing live at the Emerson Bar and Grill.

“The thing I want to happen for me is for people to think they are actually watching her live for the night it is happening. I don’t want them to feel they are watching an actor, but they are in an actual bar watching her .”

She will sing 18 songs from Holiday’s repertoire, including “Don’t Explain,” “Somebody’s on My Mind,” “God Bless the Child,” “Strange Fruit,” “Them There Eyes” and “Ain’t Nobody’s Business.”

To heighten the sensation that the audience is at Emerson’s watching Holiday live, designer Robert Brill has built a bar with the linoleum and wood stained and marked to show age. Crew members have been encouraged to throw their cigarette butts on the floor. There will be dust in the corners. Some audience members will be seated on stage as patrons at the bar. Devine, as Holiday, will walk around the edge of the stage, playing to the crowd.

Part of the poignancy of Holiday, who got her start in Harlem, comes from seeing this great performer reduced to performing in a rundown bar, where she desperately did not want to be. She had been busted for drugs in Philadelphia and, because of that, her license to perform in any New York clubs that served alcohol was revoked. Being broke, she was stuck with singing wherever she could get jobs. Ironically, she ended up back in Philadelphia, where the nightmare began.

Unlikely as it seems, Devine, too, seems to live with the fear of someday finding her options limited. Despite the increasing length of her resume, she still fears what happened to her in college and graduate school--that she won’t be given the chance to audition.

“My biggest fear when I got in this business was that I would pick up the trade papers, and there would be nothing to audition for. The problem is that there aren’t enough big roles that you can choose from. For most black actresses, there is a little piece here and a little piece there.

“I’ve always loved Billie Holiday--long before I did this show. This is one of the biggest things I’ve ever done. I’ve been really lucky.”