Linda Lipnack Kuehl
Linda Lipnack Kuehl was an American arts journalist, based in New York City. Intending to write a biography of Billie Holiday, she interviewed friends, fellow performers, and key figures in Holiday's life, but died before its completion. Various other writers' biographies on Holiday have drawn upon Kuehl's material, as did the film Billie, which is narrated by Kuehl's recorded interviews. She worked as a high school teacher and free lance writer.
Arts journalism career
Interviews that Kuehl conducted with writers were published in The Paris Review in 1972 and 1978.She was a Jewish feminist and a fan of Billie Holiday. In 1971, she began plans for a biography of Holiday, who had died aged 44 in 1959. She interviewed almost 200 people—friends, family members, band members, peers from 1930s Harlem, piano players, psychiatrists and a pimp—and was still finding people in 1978. Her archive on Holiday included these interviews on 125 audio tapes as well as "a long paper trail, including police files, transcripts of court cases, royalty statements, shopping lists, hospital records, private letters, muddled transcripts and fragments of unfinished chapters." However, Kuehl did not complete the book. In 1978 she was found dead on a Washington, D.C. sidewalk, after attending a Count Basie concert. "Police deemed it suicide, Kuehl having supposedly jumped from her hotel room, although there was no proof of this", and her family believes she may have been murdered.
Kuehl's research revealed that Holiday's addictions were "becoming a crutch for a life beset with violence, misogyny and racism."