Fine and Mellow

Haven't bought any of the Lady's biographies, but Julia Blackburn's With Billie sounds like it might be a keeper. From the New York Review of Books essay:

"In the spring of 1947, Jimmy Fletcher heard from his bosses at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that it might be a convenient time to visit Billie Holiday at home. Her manager, a former fight-fixer, whoremonger, and running dog in Al Capone's pack, had offered up the celebrated Negro "torchchanteuse" and notorious dope fiend as grist for Harry Anslinger's publicity mill...
Fletcher was a veteran black undercover operative who knew Holiday from long years of going around. It fell to him, and a colleague named Cohen, to bring her in. They rousted Billie out of bed in a Harlem residence hotel, and found nothing they were looking for, either in her rooms or among her belongings. Agent Cohen suggested then that a policewoman be brought in to inspect their suspect's body cavities. They could look for themselves, Billie allowed, if they'd agree to leave without her if she proved "clean." Ignoring their demurrals, she stripped bare, straddled the toilet bowl, and urinated. Cohen tried to close the bathroom door. Choosing shamelessness over complicity in her own humiliation, she pushed it back open, "forcing both of them to see her nakedness and her defiance." She never averted her stony eyes from the faces of her onlookers.
Fletcher knew then that he was in the presence of a thoroughbred—a true-to-the-game "mud-kicker" in the parlance of the streets she came from —who could take life's worst without a snivel. "She sealed herself closer to me that morning," he remembered. "She sealed our friendship."