Jazz great Anita O'Day dies at 87

 By Lorena Blas, USA TODAY

The "Jezebel of Jazz" has died.

Jazz great Anita O'Day dies at 87

Singer Anita O'Day, 87, whose wild behavior and reputation as a drug addict contributed to that nickname, died early Thursday.

O'Day, whose renditions of Honeysuckle Rose and Sweet Georgia Brown made her one of the most respected jazz singers of the 1940s and '50s, died in her sleep at a hospital in West Hollywood, where she was recovering from pneumonia, her manager, Robbie Cavolina, said.

"On Tuesday night, she said to me, 'Get me out of here,' " Cavolina told the Associated Press. "But it didn't happen."

O'Day began singing in her teen years and released her most recent project, Indestructible!, in April.

"All I ever wanted to do is perform," she told the AP in a June 1999 interview. "When I'm singing, I'm happy. I'm doing what I can do and this is my contribution to life."

O'Day was born Anita Belle Colton in Chicago. She left home in her teen years and joined a burlesque show. When one of the singers came down with laryngitis, she was asked to fill in. The rest is history. She later recorded with jazz legends, such as drummer Gene Krupa and trumpeter David Roy Eldridge (Let Me Off Uptown), and took the stage at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, where Thelonious Monk and Louis Armstrong also performed.

While she held her own among the finest in jazz, she also battled personal demons. She was addicted to heroin for more than a decade and alcohol for many more years. She occasionally spent time in jail on drug charges.

"I tried everything. Curiosity will make you go your own way," the singer once said.

She gave up drugs after a near-fatal overdose in the late 1940s. She described her drug addiction in her 1981 autobiography, High Times Hard Times. But she continued to drink. "Sometimes I think booze is what keeps me alive," she said to an interviewer.

Decades later, O'Day gave up alcohol after a painful recovery after falling down the stairs in her home in 1996. She had been on a drinking binge.

In 1997, the National Endowment for the Arts honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

In recent years, she has been performing at various Los Angeles clubs. Cavolina just completed a feature film about the singer called Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer. It is expected to be released in 2007.

Cavolina told the AP that O'Day has no children and no immediate family.