Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  The ten songs with words and music that Strayhorn wrote for Fantastic Rhythm range from typical 1930s razzmatazz to inventive recitative, with several quirky stops—including an arch take on misogyny and a hymn to silent submission—between them. A pre-curtain overture interweaves the show’s major musical themes, arranged with sophisticated voicings for the Moonlight Harbor Band; Strayhorn’s classically oriented harmonic sensibility was so uncommon for the milieu that he wrote instructions to the musicians on the eighth bar of the music manuscript: “This chord is correct.” The first several scenes, greatly revised from the Stunt Day presentation, establish characters and advance the show’s story with a combination of spoken dialogue, leitmotifs, and complete songs—a fairly advanced approach for a regional production in 1935. The opening number, “We Are the Reporters,” introduces three newspapermen, a chorus of secretaries, and their editor, who crows:

  I’m the boss

  My employees say that I’m a pest

  But I can buy them, every one

  Because I’m the boss.

  Harold Strange, who handled the editor’s role, remembered Strayhorn’s attitude toward the character. “The idea was that the boss is somebody who can buy and sell people. He owns them,” said Strange. In the following number, “The Sob Sisters,” the paper’s three female human-interest columnists compare notes with an investigative reporter and a food columnist:

  (woman)

  I’m that awful creature

  That the daily tabloids feature

  As a sob, sob sister

  (man)

  I’m that scribbling felon

  Who exposes guys like Mellon

  And I make them blister

  Melodically, both early numbers have simple conversational melodic lines for the benefit of limited singers. “I played one of the Sob Sisters, and I couldn’t sing what Billy originally wrote,” said Dorothy Ford. “So he changed it for me to something I could practically just talk.” The third musical sequence, “Don’t Mess Around with the Women,” goes further in this direction; it’s a pure recitative, spoken above an instrumental backing. The Sob Sisters attend a Women Haters’ Convention, where several members are debating the merits and liabilities of misogyny. The head of the group pronounces:

  I fell in love with a woman once

  She called me Sugar Pie

  I overheard her say one day

  She’d be glad if I should suddenly die

  So I don’t mess around with the women

  They don’t mean you any good

  Like “Don’t Mess Around with the Women,” the four ballads that constitute Fantastic Rhythm’s romantic core are all shaded with a skeptical, often ironic, attitude toward romance. A cynical ode to sexual surrender, “Let Nature Take Its Course” could easily be the theme song of a man haters’ club:

  When you’ve been around you’ll find

  That men like to have their way

  They all have a one-track mind

  So don’t let your tongue betray you

  And if my child

  He likes your smile

  And wants to hang around for a while

  Don’t use any force

  Let nature take its course

  The song flows easily and has a lilting melody that belies the lyrics’ unusual celebration of acquiescence:

  Nature has a certain way

  Of making golden silence seem to say

  Much more than a persuasive voice

  Didn’t you know?

  A slow-tempo minor-key vehicle for Dorothy Ford—it was the number sung in front of a prop moon—“It Must Be a Dream” is a lament of untempered despair:

  I’ve got the blues in my love song

  I’m in the dumps on up on the eightieth floor

  Ho-hum!

  It must be a dream

  It just doesn’t seem

  That there’s no you beside me

  To be my excuse for living

  Later in the show, after Ford’s character finds her love, she sings a follow-up number, “I’ll Never Have to Dream Again.” But here again, romance has a dark side. The sentimental, almost childish lyrics are vapidly unconvincing:

  I’ll never have to dream again

  Dreams that always die

  I’ll never have to sigh again

  Never have to cry

  Strayhorn set the tune to a brooding minor-key melody in waltz time; the piece is like a grade school valentine set to the music of an Eastern European dirge. The only song in Fantastic Rhythm to be published and recorded in later years is “My Little Brown Book,” which also deals with loneliness. Thematically an old-fashioned heart tugger, the song is noteworthy for a single chord change, a chromatic modulation in the last stave that foreshadows the contours of dozens of pieces associated with the 1940s.

  While not as emotionally complex as the rest of the show’s music, the three major dance tunes demonstrate their composer’s versatility. Both “The Rhythm Man” and “Harlem Rumba” (the latter a showcase for the peroxide-blond Tioga Street native Delores Gomez, Boggy Fowler’s girlfriend) are subtly jazz-infused songs related to the “rhythm” theme. The title number, the show’s big closer, is ideal for a massive group tap dance. The lyrics simply mark the beat:

  When you shake your hip

  Till it starts to slip

  And you rock your soul

  Till it seems to roll

  They call that Fantastic Rhythm!

  It all ends, unusually for this sort of song, on a ninth chord, a warm Strayhorn harmonic touch.

  Working in small groups at first, the cast of more than fifty began to run through material in June 1935; their rehearsal hall was Strayhorn’s living room on Tioga Street Rear. “All that could get in there got in there. All that couldn’t get in there got out,” said Clyde Broadus. By fall, as the sets, the costumes, and the lighting started coming together, the whole group began gathering for rehearsals at Westinghouse High. As Strayhorn would recall, “We were all out of high school, but the only auditorium we knew, of course, was the auditorium in the high school. So we went back to the school, hired the auditorium, put out publicity and put on this show for a grand total of two nights [at that location]. Oh, that was really something.” Advance tickets, available through businesses such as the Lincoln Drug Store and Ramsey’s barbershop, cost twenty-six cents; reserved seats, forty-seven cents; children’s tickets, sixteen cents. Presented on November 6 and 7, 1935, Fantastic Rhythm made a notable impression, largely but not exclusively in Pittsburgh’s black community. All three major Pittsburgh papers covered the performance, the Courier proclaiming in its headline, “‘FANTASTIC RHYTHM’ HIGHLIGHT OF WEEK’S ENJOYABLE EVENTS,” and praising (in an article probably written by Koger) “ten new snappy, lively tunes, from fox-trots to rhumbas, by Billy Strayhorne, budding young musical genius.”

  Appealing to a young mixed-race audience and building on the show’s success at Westinghouse, Fowler immediately booked a string of Pittsburgh high schools—Schenley, Baxter, Allderdice, and others—for performances over the next few months. The show’s ongoing success was such that in mid-1936 it was booked for a run at the Roosevelt Theater, one of the most prestigious venues for black culture in Pittsburgh. “See, back in them days, you couldn’t go but certain different theaters, because they didn’t allow colored,” said Boggy Fowler. “So we went to all the colored theaters—we’d go to all the colored places that you could go.” Indeed, from 1936 through 1938, Fantastic Rhythm played in major black theaters throughout southwestern Pennsylvania, including Rankin, Braddock, Homestead, East Liberty, and Orangetown. The cast changed somewhat, as higher-profile performances called for better performers; in 1937, Billy Eckstine, a promising young Pittsburgh vocalist, joined the show. “It was a big break for me to do Fantastic Rhythm,” he said. “That really was the big time, and mostly due to that music by Billy. That’s what made it truly professional.” The show’s composer, however, was missing; after the first few performances,
he pulled out from active participation and another acclaimed young Pittsburgh pianist, Erroll Garner, took over. “After writing it, Billy didn’t seem to have any interest in the show,” Ralph Koger speculated. “He made it known that he intended to do greater things. This was nothing to him, and he moved on.”

  While Strayhorn was proving deft at a variety of musical assignments, his ambitions remained focused on the classical world. “His dream was still to pursue classical piano,” said Harry Herforth, who discussed the future with Strayhorn while home from the New England Conservatory. “His difficulty was finding the means to do it.” After six years of soda jerking, Strayhorn had saved enough money to afford classes at the Pittsburgh Musical Institute, a private conservatory founded in 1915 and housed in a graceful wooden Victorian building on Bellefield Avenue, an easy streetcar ride from Homewood. PMI was small (enrollment in the 1936-37 year was under sixty) but reputable; it offered a bachelor of music degree in association with the University of Pittsburgh. Strayhorn was accepted in 1936 and began piano and music-theory classes that fall; he was one of two black students enrolled that term. “I remember, he was a very serious student,” said Roy Shoemaker, a music-theory instructor. “We accepted anybody—boy, girl, white, colored, or striped—as long as the student was serious about the music, and he was.” For piano, Strayhorn studied privately under PMI’s founder, Charles N. Boyd, a tweedy, charismatic middle-aged man highly regarded by students for his intellect and cultivation; Boyd was a friend of Albert Schweitzer, who had once played organ for PMI students. “I felt bad for the other teachers who taught the same subjects [as Boyd],” declared his daughter, Muriel Boyd Albitz. “When the semester started, the line to get in Daddy’s class was a block long, and the others would get two or three [students]. I would know people who ordinarily would cuss a little bit. When they talked with him, they talked differently, they became different. They became better people, if just for the time they were with him.” As one of Strayhorn’s classmates, Bruno Salvaterra, recalled, “He always searched out your strong points and would build on them. I was in awe of him, truly. Everybody was.”

  Boyd was playing organ for friends in his home on April 24, 1937, when he died of a heart attack at age sixty-two, and Strayhorn, in his second term of study, lost the incentive to return. “I went to the Pittsburgh Musical Institute for a short time,” Strayhorn recalled. “And it was only short because the man who taught me died shortly after I went to study with him. He was so wonderful that I didn’t think there was anyone else there who could teach me. So I didn’t stay.”

  Urbane, worldly, empathetic, stimulating, Boyd seemed everything that would appeal to Strayhorn in a mentor and role model—that is, he was the antithesis of Strayhorn’s father. By the mid-1930s, James Strayhorn had slipped further into a pattern of alcohol abuse and rage. The children, fearful of his wrath, kept their distance on the rare occasions when he drank at home rather than at Harry Collins’s place or, on payday, at the bigger, rowdier Bucket of Blood. Latching onto his son Johnny for some reason, he once pulled the boy down into the basement and literally crucified him, tying him with wire to nails on the rock walls; it took his wife’s intervention with a skillet to settle James down for the night. Lillian, now sleeping in her daughters’ room, maintained her dignity with a dedication to refined behavior in defiant contrast with her world. “Papa would be in one of his moods, raising hell,” said Lillian Strayhorn Dicks. “We kids would be hustling to get out of the house, and as we were throwing on our coats, Mama would tell us, ‘Now remember, ladies and gentlemen do not put their hands in their pockets.’ Billy Strayhorn provided his mother respite, as well as hope. “I’d wake up sometimes in the middle of the night to the sound of laughter downstairs,” said Lillian Strayhorn Dicks. “And the next morning, I’d go down to the kitchen and I’d see an empty box of ice cream in the garbage. I’d know Bill and Mama had been up all night. He would bring ice cream home for her—she loved it—and the two of them would sit up at the kitchen table all night, talking and laughing.” Increasingly, though, Strayhorn kept away from Tioga Street Rear, except to sleep and play some piano. “After a while, he was barely around anymore,” said Lillian Strayhorn Dicks. “When he wasn’t working at the drug store, he was out with his friends, doing something in music.”

  With Harry Herforth away at college, Strayhorn drew closer to his old piano-and-percussion partner Mickey Scrima and Scrima’s circle of friends, especially his neighbor Bill Esch, who played guitar. Scrima and Esch were as determined as Strayhorn was to build careers in music, and they would rendezvous with Strayhorn at Pop Lesher’s, a soda shop in Homewood known for its jukebox filled with jazz and pop hits. On Sundays, they’d take in an amateur ball game in the park; wherever they were, they talked music. Slim and blue-eyed, with longish dirty-blond hair and a curlicue smile that hid teeth needing some work, Bill Esch was a “walking musical encyclopedia who lived, breathed, and sweated music,” according to Esch’s older brother Ray. As Scrima said, “He was the kind of guy that, if you wanted to know about any band in the country, he knew about every, every band that ever played a note of music. He went on and on with Strayhorn about a bandleader, Joe Haymes, because Haymes used parallel ninths in his arrangements. He would buy every record that he could possibly buy. He’d have his radio on all night, and he’d call me when I was sleeping and say, ‘Hey, turn on station so-and-so. Benny Goodman is coming in from Chicago.’ We couldn’t call Strayhorn, because his family didn’t have a phone, so we’d save all this up to tell him the next day.”

  It was Esch, along with Scrima, who fanned Strayhorn’s developing fascination with jazz into ardor. Together, Esch and Scrima pitched in to buy Strayhorn his first jazz record, a 78 rpm Art Tatum solo. “He literally wore it out and had to buy another one,” said Scrima. “When we first started palling together, Billy wasn’t into jazz at all—he was a classical piano player. We would get all these records and sit down, in Esch’s house usually, and listen to them for hours. Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Benny Goodman—they were the big ones we listened to. Billy was all ears, man, and he was hooked in a minute. He really loved Tatum and Teddy Wilson best of all of them. What he realized, we talked about, was that everything he loved about classical music was there, in one form or another, in jazz—and here was a place he could apply himself. Art Tatum was black. Teddy Wilson was black. And they were serious musicians, like Strayhorn saw himself.”

  Since Esch was primarily interested in arranging (regarded as a so-so guitarist, he was writing charts for a local swing band, the Buddy Malone Orchestra, for which Scrima was playing drums) and since Strayhorn had had experience orchestrating Fantastic Rhythm, much of their conversation together often centered on arrangements and orchestrating technique. “He was a fine arranger,” Strayhorn would say, “and I learned a good deal from him.” (Jack Purcell, a longtime Pittsburgh bandleader who used Esch’s charts as early as the 1930s, described Esch’s work at the time as “methodical—he had very unusual, attractive voicings, and he always had something to say; there was always a point to what he wrote.”) Evidently the self-taught Esch was also influenced by his classically trained compeer: according to Veronica Heffernan Esch, Bill Esch’s girlfriend during the period of his friendship with Strayhorn (and later Esch’s wife), “My husband had no musical training other than what he learned from Billy Strayhorn. I don’t want to take anything away from my own husband, but I was with them when they studied together in the house, and my husband was really learning just as much from Strayhorn as Strayhorn was learning from him.” (“By the way, Billy wasn’t one of those ones who only know music,” said Veronica Esch. “He and I went shopping once in Horne’s department store for a suit for Bill—he had wonderful taste in clothes—and you should have seen the looks we got. The manager came over and was just about to throw us out, but we were finished, and we were leaving anyway.”)

  Strayhorn himself had no girlfriend at the time, or at any point earlier
in his life, by all accounts. He is not known to have so much as danced with a girl. At the parties he attended, he often played piano; otherwise he talked casually to young women and men but wasn’t one to flirt (with members of either sex). He never attended a prom or other school social event except to perform. His closest known friends, all male and heterosexual, generally thought of him as asexual but at some point speculated that he might be homosexual. “The topic of sex just never came up with us,” noted Harry Herforth. “Considering that we were best friends during adolescence, I suppose that fact in itself is significant. I myself was a very late bloomer and didn’t start dating until my late teens, but looking back after a while, I could see clearly that Billy was probably always homosexual.” Mickey Scrima was a bit more prescient: “To be perfectly honest, a lot of us suspected that Billy was gay, by simple virtue of the fact that he never talked about girls, for god’s sake. But I never heard anything about him being with a guy either, and he never came on to any of us.”

  There was a quiet, insular gay social scene in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, and a gay black member of the Fantastic Rhythm cast—Michael Phelan, who danced Strayhorn’s “Harlem Rumba”—was part of it during the period when Strayhorn lived in the city. “There were very few public places where we could meet,” he said. “On Saturday night only, there was a private club on Liberty Street. You paid five dollars and walked down steps into the basement. It wasn’t much. Most of the gay socializing took place at private homes where there were parties. Now, they always wanted me to do a dance, so I knew practically everybody who was gay in town. And I certainly knew everybody who was black and gay. I met Billy, strictly businesswise, from doing Fantastic Rhythm. But I never saw him anywhere.” There is no evidence that Strayhorn was involved in gay relationships in his youth, but one thing is clear: he was never known to engage in a heterosexual relationship, not even to test the experience or for appearances’ sake.