The queen of good times

Within the first 10 minutes of Bessie, HBO’s new biopic of Bessie Smith, we see the blues legend sing, cry, dance, cut a man and kiss, lustily, both men and women. The drinking comes later, but not much.

At a party at the home of Carl Van Vechten, the Harlem Renaissance patron and gadfly, a soused Bessie, played by Queen Latifah, belts the anthem “Work House Blues”, to an audience including Langston Hughes, then throws a drink in the host’s face when he uses a racial epithet. “It was every emotion I probably could have asked for,” Latifah said dreamily. “She was a busy woman.”

The movie is a passion project for Latifah, 45, who first auditioned for the part in 1992. She had always hoped that playing Bessie in the film would introduce the pioneering but lesser-known singer to a new fan base, inspiring people to “draw from who she is and flip her style for today’s music.” Over the years, she watched the screenplay bounce from person to person, while she grew to lead a mini entertainment empire, eventually landing in a position to help develop the film herself.

Now a singer, actor, executive, TV personality, cosmetics spokeswoman and author, Latifah may have developed a signature brand of feel-good feminism. After waiting for more than two decades she is able put a stamp on Bessie’s unruly but powerful life.

“It’s always been important to play strong female characters,” Latifah said, as she did in her ‘90s sitcom Living Single and her turn as Matron Mama Morton in Chicago, which earned her an Oscar nomination in 2003. When she got approval to make Bessie as a star and a producer, after HBO came on board in 2009, she chose, with the network’s support, to give the task of writing and directing to another black woman, Dee Rees.

“It wasn’t a requirement,” Latifah said, but it was an ideal. “Whenever I’m No. 1 on that call sheet and I’m a producer, I’m always actively trying to make sure that my crew looks like the world.”

Nicknamed the Empress of the Blues, Smith, who died in 1937, was for a time the highest-paid black entertainer in America, rising from impoverished roots in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was boundary-less: bisexual, trysting even through marriage; the head of a traveling show that employed dozens; and a brazen personality who played to both white and black audiences. Although she wasn’t quite the raucous guest the movie depicts, she did sing at a Van Vechten party that Hughes attended. He later wrote that, after opera star Marguerite D’Alvarez performed an aria, Smith offered a compliment: “Don’t let nobody tell you you can’t sing!”

“She was not afraid to be wrong or afraid to fight or afraid to tell someone just like it is, and that’s a gift,” Latifah said. “She gave me all the work I could handle.” Putting Bessie on screen required a new level of intimacy from Latifah, born Dana Owens. In bare skin and bedroom scenes with men and women, she is vulnerable one instant; sexy and bombastic the next. “I’m not worried about what people think in any way, shape, or form when it comes to this movie,” she said. “This is Bessie’s story, and it needed to be told.”

Separated by generations, Bessie, who influenced the likes of Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, and Latifah, one of the first female rappers to earn a gold record, are part of a continuum of women in music who made their own opportunities and expanded, against some odds, their circles. A foremother might be Ma Rainey, the blues woman who helped teach Bessie about stagecraft and in the film is played, as a mentor and a sexual libertarian, by Mo’Nique. “The issues they were dealing with then are the same things we’re dealing with right now, gender equality and wage equality,” Mo’Nique said. “Those women were right on time to show us, today, those blueprints” for action, she added. “They took charge of their image.”

The script for a Bessie biopic was initially adapted from music writer Chris Albertson’s biography Bessie, published in 1972. Melvin Van Peebles wrote a draft, Albertson said, then Horton Foote, the playwright who wrote the screenplay for the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Still, it languished in development, through the deaths of Foote and producer Richard D Zanuck.

At the suggestion of HBO, Rees, 38, got the call to write her version of the script in 2012, a year after she broke out in the indie filmmaking world with Pariah, an autobiographical lesbian coming-of-age story. She grew up in Nashville, and her grandmother introduced her to Bessie’s music, so she had an emotional bond. “She was a queer black woman from Tennessee,” Rees said. “I felt a kinship.”

For anyone who would use her performance to peer into her off-screen relationships, Latifah, who officiated the same-sex and straight group wedding at the 2014 Grammys, was sanguine. “I know people will see that opportunity,” she said. “That can’t be my concern. That’s why they call it a private life because it’s something I get to enjoy to myself.” As for requests to discuss it, she said, “Turn that radio right on off, you know what I mean?”
Like many biopics, the historical picture that Bessie presents is smudgy. (Her death, at 43, in a car crash that generated many lurid and inaccurate articles, is not depicted.) But Albertson praised its treatment of the music. “This is the closest I’ve heard anyone come to Bessie Smith,” he said of Latifah’s vocals.

For Latifah, the turbulent life of Smith was “hard to watch” on screen, she said. But the experience of playing her was unparalleled. “You have to take the seat belt off,” she said. “With this role, I have to be free.”