Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  By now, James’s ambitions, already pulled to wire thinness, were beginning to disintegrate. Drifting from the steel mills to lower-paying labor, he ended up working as a hod carrier. His job was to heap plaster onto a handled metal plate (the hod) and to carry it on his shoulder to masons working on construction sites. He didn’t mix the plaster and he didn’t apply it; he carried it and could prove he did by the hump on one shoulder that hod carriers wore as a badge of duty. After an especially grueling period, a hod carrier’s hump would tend to crack open, abscessed. Unlike many others at this work, however, James didn’t lose the hair on one side of his head from the exposure to lye, although he was hospitalized twice for chemical damage to his eyes. Much the same, Lillian found her own dreams of leading a society life degenerating to a routine of survival. The family kept growing: after Bill came the first girl who lived, Georgia, in 1921; another healthy boy, John, in 1924; another, Theodore, in 1926; then premature twins, Samuel and Harry, both of whom died shortly after their birth in 1928. Lillian carried the responsibility of rearing the five children with few labor-saving devices—she sewed their clothes by hand—and with progressively less help from James; after working long days, he was spending more and longer evenings at Harry Collins’s place.

  “He became a bitter person and a drinker,” explained Lillian Strayhorn Dicks, Lillian and James’s last child, born in 1930. “My father shouldn’t have been born when he was born—that was his first mistake. I think the fact that he was born out of his time was the cause of a lot of his unhappiness, the frustration or whatever. He was bright and had a lot of personality, and he probably would have done very well years later. But back then, who needed a bright black man with personality? That goes a little against the grain when you have to put your head down and you have a family to raise. So, being blessed with a sharp tongue and a temper, he became a bitter person—a bitter person with a lot of responsibility and a lot of frustration.” Volatile and envenomed by drink, James released his frustrations on his family. The least of his attacks were verbal: when his son John came down with a case of eczema, James razzed him with the nickname Johnny Blaze Face. Most were physical: he would routinely beat one of the boys for ostensible infractions he wouldn’t explain. Bill seemed to trigger the worst in him, perhaps because the boy was so small and quiet, the easiest prey, so different from James—and so much like Lillian. With few exceptions, James treated him dismissively, and the exceptions were often ugly. Bill started wearing eyeglasses and once laid them on the floor while he was reading; when James entered the room, he stomped on them and walked away laughing. “He traumatized his children, especially Billy, because of the kind of mistreatment that he would subject them to. He was very cruel to them,” said Robert Conaway. “The children, when they were young, were frightened of him.” As Lillian Strayhorn Dicks recalled, “Oh, he was abusive. He would say things that would hurt you. He would hit. You learned to be fast with the side step.”

  Like many parents who nurture sick babies to health, especially parents who have lost earlier offspring, Bill’s mother always seemed uniquely connected to her “miracle baby.” “They were extremely close—to the exclusion of everyone, I think,” said Lillian Strayhorn Dicks. If that closeness provoked his father’s wrath, his mother was quick to intercede in his defense. “She would deflect [James’s] anger away from Billy and bear the burden of that,” one member of the Strayhorn family said. “She would stand up there and challenge him. She would basically interpose herself and protect Billy from his rage. I think that’s part of what shaped her and her relationship with Billy.” Her own aspirations may have faded (“I know she wanted more in life,” said Lillian Strayhorn Dicks, “and I think she felt, If only Jim had done things differently…”) but she clearly saw hope in Bill, still just a grade school boy without much direction or evident sense of himself. She took extreme measures to insulate him from his father as well as from his older brother, Jimmy, and indeed from all of Homewood, sending him on a series of long visits to his grandparents in North Carolina.

  Bill had first spent time in Hillsborough with his mother at the age of five or so, and the two of them, sometimes with other family members, had visited occasionally since. But from age eight to eleven, he stayed in Hillsborough during school vacations for weeks at a time. Hillsborough was literally his second home—and spiritually, it seems, his first. “His sister Georgia used to say that he was different when he came back from Hillsborough, that something good happened to him down there,” a Strayhorn family member confided. “It’s almost as if that’s where he found himself. I know he got a lot of attention down there and had the run of the place, pretty much, and that couldn’t be further from the situation in Homewood, where he really didn’t have the room to hear himself think.” Space and leisure time were abundant in and around Lizzie and Jobe Strayhorn’s house on the corner of Hillsborough Avenue and West Margaret Lane. It was an airy place, surrounded by a wide plank porch and, at its perimeter, greenery in the summer. Lizzie had a special affection for flowers, and she’d spend hours discussing them with Bill. The inside of her house was friendly: pictures decorated the walls, and the Victrola was well-used, usually to play spirituals. The thoroughly furnished parlor was arranged around the piano, a symbol of cultured gentility rare on Tioga Street Rear. In the evenings, Lizzie, who served as pianist for her church, played often and prettily, as neighbors would recall years later. Apparently she also made an impression on her grandson, whom she guided and encouraged until the piano eventually became central to his life in Hillsborough. “My grandmother played the piano, and I used to kind of, you know, waddle over to the piano—toddle, shall I say?—” Strayhorn recalled, “and pick out little things that sounded good to me.” Experimenting at the keyboard, he approximated a few tunes he had heard in church, among them “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, I’ll Be There,” a favorite of his mother’s. “In Hillsborough, he was able to live more like our mother wanted him to live in Homewood,” Lillian Strayhorn Dicks said. Bill would disappear for hours and take long walks by himself, wandering through the old slave cemetery catty-corner from Lizzie and Jobe’s house, following the squirrely bank of the Eno River, a few hundred yards to the south, or roaming the trails of the woods to the west, where people liked to pick scuppernong grapes.

  Back on Tioga Street Rear, where the focal point of the living room generated heat rather than warmth, Bill’s budding interest in music and flowers had few outlets. The family’s weekly household budget of fifteen to twenty dollars left no extra money for music lessons, let alone an instrument: when he entered the fifth grade of Homewood Elementary School in his brother’s hand-me-downs, his classmates teased him because the toes of his shoes were curled up like pixie boots. His parents had at last filed an amendment to his birth certificate, legally naming him William Thomas Strayhorn; establishing his own identity was another matter. As he would recall in later years, “During grade [school], I had no music, except what one ordinarily gets in grade school—you know, group singing and that’s about all. One thing I wanted was to play the piano, and I wanted that badly. But my family didn’t have a piano. You can’t learn to play one if you haven’t got one.”

  Bill set out to buy himself a piano. “I started selling papers. On the same corner as that on which I sold my papers was a drugstore, and occasionally I would do errands for the druggists—you know, deliver medicines and things like that,” he told an interviewer. This drugstore was the Pennfield Pharmacy, a busy shop on the corner of Penn Avenue and Carnegie Place, an upper-middle-class district called Point Breeze. “Well, eventually, being the neighborhood paper-boy as it were, I got to know everyone in the district, so the druggist hired me because I was so familiar with all his potential customers. He took me as a sort of, well, a kind of soda fountain and delivery boy. But I worked things up until I was practically a clerk. Of course, during all this time I was going to grade school and selling papers as well. So I finally bought myself a piano and started
to play it. I started to study, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. My family was kind of large and so couldn’t indulge me in all my wishes, so I had to do this for myself. It wasn’t all that easy, but I guess if you want something hard enough it just gets done. Directly I got that piano.”

  What he bought was an upright player piano with a broken roll mechanism, and it became the new centerpiece of the parlor on Tioga Street Rear, much to his mother’s pleasure; his father was rarely home long enough to react one way or another. Lillian’s only objection was to her son’s repetition of piano exercises. As Lillian Strayhorn Dicks said, “There would be times when Mama would say, ‘Okay—I can’t take another! Play a song through, won’t you?’” (Long after this, his mother would delight in recalling the first song she ever heard Bill play, the spiritual “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.”) He paid for his own sheet music and lessons, which he took from Charlotte Catlin, a black teacher associated with Volkwein’s, a music store that was a hub of musical activity in Pittsburgh. As Robert Conaway recalled, “All the money he could get a hold of, he bought music. He had so much music that the house was swamped with music—all kinds of music, novelty music and everything. He had music stacked up everywhere, in the corners and places. It was orderly but all stacked up. He had it stacked this high.” (Conaway gestured to his chest, about four and a half feet from the floor.)

  Most eleven-year-olds in Homewood gravitated toward the streets. In good weather, boys and girls together played One-Two-Three-Dropkick in the alleys or roller-skated back and forth on Penn Avenue till dark—on Saturdays, they might race all the way to Sharpsburg and back, a good five miles. Bill Strayhorn didn’t join them. If his Hillsborough experiences represented a certain enlightenment in repose, he seemed to seek some kind of continuity at home: after school, he walked around the closest thing to the woods, Frick Park, a 340-acre patch of trees (135 varieties) and man-made ponds, and he found solidarity in one good friend, Harry Herforth, a kindred spirit from a white street in Homewood. The two had much in common: small and soft-featured, Herforth was one of nine children raised by a single mother who worked as a three-dollar-a-day domestic, and both boys were developing an interest in music. (Though Herforth hadn’t begun playing an instrument when he and Strayhorn became friends, he soon took up the trumpet; as an adult, he played assistant first chair with the Boston Symphony.) “We were scrabbling to keep body and soul together,” Herforth recalled. “Billy and I were both in about the same straits, it seemed to me. But we had a bond that was memorable. We gravitated together because of our artistic sensibility. He was well-read. He was an egghead as a kid. He talked about books, and I talked about books that we had read—Treasure Island, short stories by Jack London—and we didn’t talk about much else. Other kids were talking about girls and sports. Directly across from our grade school was the Homewood library, and it was a place of hallowed sanctity to each of us. We would go there, and as soon as you go into the door, to me it was like going into a temple, a cathedral, because of the books—the books were just full of wonderment. When I mentioned this [to Strayhorn], I discovered that Billy, too, felt that the library was a cathedral of learning. That was what brought us together.”

  Strayhorn introduced Herforth to his outdoor sanctuary. “When we had time, we would go to Frick Park, and we would walk and talk—we walked and talked and walked and talked. As I recall quite clearly, we never talked about kids, other people. We talked about composers, authors, playwrights—not esoteric ones, but ones that were esoteric to us at the time. He would ask me if I had heard of Cesar Franck. ‘Did you hear this?’ ‘Have you heard that?’ That was 90 percent of our conversation. Looking back on my whole life, that was one of the outstanding things: taking a walk with Billy Strayhorn. I went to his house frequently, but only to pick him up on our way somewhere. I would sit in the living room. I never talked to any member of his family aside from his mother, and that was just ‘Hello.’ His father would pass by, but he wouldn’t even look at me or Billy. There was no conversation whatsoever, not with me and not with his son.”

  For the next five years, Strayhorn and Herforth attended Westinghouse High, a public school endowed by George Westinghouse, the electrical industrialist whose local factory then employed some thirty-five thousand workers in the Pittsburgh area; the company logo hung over the auditorium stage. Within its two city blocks of austere white-granite walls, Westinghouse had an enrollment of four hundred, about 20 percent black, and was well known for its gym team, which from the late 1920s to the late 1930s won the city finals ten years straight. In 1927, Carl McVicker, a young Carnegie Tech graduate, joined the Westinghouse faculty as an instrumental-music teacher and instituted a music program considered so radical that two teachers left the school over it. (It helped McVicker’s cause that his oldest friend was superintendent of schools.) He accepted and encouraged students of all backgrounds and races to play all instruments. “Mr. McVicker instilled self-respect in those of us who were his students, because he respected us regardless of our background,” said pianist Ahmad Jamal (once Fritz Jones), a student of McVicker’s who made his professional debut while still attending Westinghouse. In addition, McVicker started a school swing band as a (then-controversial) alternative to the concert orchestra and marching band. Under McVicker, music-hungry students like Strayhorn thrived. “We were a factory-town school, so we had a lot of kids like Billy, kids who needed an outlet of one kind or another but had a hard time because they were black,” explained McVicker, a gangly six-foot-three man with open, deep-pooled eyes and a Chaplin mustache; he looked like the music teacher of a student’s doodle. “I wanted any kid in my program who was serious, and Billy was about as serious as they get. Earnest, hardworking, wanted to get ahead in music. As a matter of fact, I would say he was much different from most high school musicians. He was an intellectual. He had a broad base of knowledge of academics, although he learned everything we could teach him about music—and more. You know, he didn’t play in the swing band. He wasn’t interested. He was a serious pianist and concentrated strictly on the concert repertoire.”

  For high school piano and harmony instruction, Strayhorn had Jane Patton Alexander, a middle-aged musical conservative who stressed rules and discipline. Strayhorn would remember her with begrudging gratitude. “She did a wonderful thing for me: she taught me a basic progression, and I did that for two years,” he said in a 1962 interview. “Couldn’t vary. Had to do it in all kinds of ways. Of course, I hated it. But it was invaluable training.” Alexander must have held him in high regard: when she had to leave the classroom, she put Strayhorn in charge of teaching his own class. “He would get up from his little chair and go up in front of the class and proceed to teach the class—oh, for a good forty, forty-five minutes,” says Frank Spangler, one of Strayhorn’s music-theory classmates. “He was just a kid like the rest of us, but he was already like a professor.”

  Bit by bit, from classroom to auditorium and then to ballroom, Strayhorn began taking his musical ambitions public. In school he worked his way up the scale of academic orchestras, eventually assuming the role of first pianist for the forty-nine-piece Senior Orchestra, which performed concert scores of lenient pieces like Grieg’s “Sigurd Jorsalfar” and Karl Goldmark’s “Sakuntala Overture.” Strayhorn joined the orchestra for an hour of rehearsal every day at noon, the fourth period, and performed with it at school assemblies and the annual commencement exercises. The culmination of his experience with the orchestra came on the evening of March 1, 1934, when he was featured in a performance of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 16. “I never heard a student play that way before or after,” said Carl McVicker more than fifty years later. “The orchestra may have been a group of students, but Billy Strayhorn was a professional artist.”

  Outside of school, meanwhile, Strayhorn started to test the local music waters. As Harry Herforth began to master the trumpet, he and Strayhorn worked up some duets, including W. Paris Chambers
’s “Commodore Polka”—pleasant and gently impressive diversions, exactly the sort of thing civic groups had clean-scrubbed students perform as entertainment interludes at meetings. The duo of Herforth and Strayhorn filled this bill at several high school assemblies, at a few PTA meetings, and once for the Pittsburgh Board of Education. “I don’t know how many of the people who heard us were expecting a mixed-race duo, but we certainly were subjected to a lot of glares. We were nervous enough without that,” said Herforth. “I do think it softened the blow that Billy was perceived as my accompanist, though that’s not at all how we wanted to be seen.” Under McVicker’s direction, Westinghouse High provided Pittsburgh organizations an alternative to the Herforth-Strayhorn duo: the Orchestra Club, a twenty-five-piece classical ensemble selected by audition from the top ranks of the larger school orchestra. Strayhorn, the pianist, was the only black member. The group performed frequently at social events around Pittsburgh, including banquets at both of the city’s major hotels, the Schenley and the William Penn. The club’s first trombonist, John Stitt, would remember Strayhorn as “pretty quiet—he kept to himself, since there weren’t too many black fellows in classical music back then.” Frank Raucci, the bass violinist, would recall something more unusual: “He had a book full of music, which he played when the club met. It was beautiful, I remember. We found out later that he had been playing his own compositions—he was writing all this time. But we could never tell. They sounded just like works by a classical composer.”