by David Hajdu
Just when Strayhorn’s classicism was becoming a vital component of Ellingtonia, the orchestration got a monumental boost with the arrival of two new band members, the bassist Jimmy Blanton and the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. Blanton, a quiet and lanky young recruit from St. Louis, had a gift for contrapuntal melody, a ringing tone, and impeccable intonation that broadened his instrument’s orchestral possibilities; before Blanton, bandleaders had essentially used the bass as a string tuba. By taking Ben Webster as the orchestra’s first full-time tenor saxophone soloist, Ellington not only caught up with Count Basie and his influential tenorist Lester Young but gained a strong and versatile solo voice to match his own instrumental muscularity and eclecticism. (On his music for Juan Tizol’s driving “Perdido,” Webster wrote a note in the margin: “Swing like Pres.”) With the Blanton-Webster band under him and Strayhorn submitting ambitious work, a freshly challenged Ellington reached a watershed of his own. The compositions he was recording in the early 1940s (even during the ASCAP ban, which affected radio broadcasts only)—the dizzying “Cottontail,” the forceful “Main Stem,” the quirkily expressive “Harlem Air Shaft,” and the commanding “Ko-Ko”—mark an invigorated master working at his resolute best. “Duke was really reborn with that combination of talents in his organization,” said the composer, critic, and historian Leonard Feather, who was in the studio during several of Ellington’s recording sessions with Blanton in early 1941. “Duke said, ‘Listen, you’re going to hear something you never heard before—a bass player who plays melody, and in tune.’ Blanton was wearing the wildest zoot suit you’d ever see—big, wide stripes—but he played like an angel. Strayhorn had a proprietary interest in Blanton—he had heard him play before Duke did and was one of the people who brought him to Duke’s attention—so he was watching very closely and helping out a bit, making little changes in the chords and the voicings. Duke was in his glory at the center of it all.”
Outside the studio, Blanton, Strayhorn, and Webster carried on as close friends. Webster, under six feet but beefy, was physically daunting—musicians called him The Brute—but unashamed of his sensitive side; he lived with his mother and grandmother for much of his adult life and, in a moment of sorrow, was known to cry as easily and shamelessly as, in a moment of anger, he would pummel an antagonist. It was Webster, Feather recalled, who gave Strayhorn the affectionate (though subtly belittling) nickname that fellow musicians quickly embraced: Swee’ Pea, taken from the troublesome, one-toothed baby in the Popeye newspaper comics and cartoons. (Feather and others speculated that the nickname might also have alluded to Strayhorn’s fondness for sweet-smelling cologne. Some sources, most notably Ellington, credit the name to drummer Sonny Greer; others, including Ellington’s first biographer, Barry Ulanov, attribute it to saxophonist Otto “Toby” Hardwicke.) Strayhorn called Webster Uncle Benny. “Ben, Billy, and Blanton became very attached to each other, probably partly because they were the new guys, which made them outsiders in the eyes of the longtime members of the band,” said Helen Oakley Dance. “Ben—the big, darling tough guy, and he was older—loved them dearly. He adopted them. If one of them didn’t get on the bus on time or couldn’t get a seat or something, Ben would take care of it. He established himself as their protector.” The three-some carried on musically as well, playing together after hours. Pianist Jimmy Rowles, then a student at Gonzaga University in Spokane, remembered hearing Blanton, Webster, and Strayhorn play together at a no-name joint in Seattle late one night in the spring of 1941 when the Ellington Orchestra was in town. “I came into town to hear Ellington and went out that night, and in walked the three of them,” said Rowles. “It was amazing—the most beautiful trio I’d ever heard in my life. They had perfect taste. Every note was just right. And they could swing. I mean, they really swung.”
Midway into the seven-week Casa Mañana run, Ellington invited Strayhorn to accompany him to a private party being held late one night at the home of an MGM gag writer, Sid Kuller, who had introduced himself to Ellington at the club earlier that week. The two of them found Kuller’s extravagantly stylish Art Deco house in Culver City (designed by Columbia Pictures art director Steve Gooson, a former architect) jammed with Hollywood types—Kuller’s celebrity friends such as John Garfield and Mickey Rooney; the screenwriter W. R. Burnett, who wrote Scarface; and starlets and would-bes and their various predators. The black character actor Frank Fay and some of his friends were regulars, earning Kuller’s parties praise (and, more important to Kuller, publicity) from gossip columnist Louella Parsons for breaking the social color line. “Duke and Billy weren’t used to this, see,” recalled Kuller. “But it was all right, and they liked that, and they came back the following Saturday, and this time they brought half the band,” including Harry Carney and drummer Sonny Greer, who danced that night with Lana Turner. “He was cute,” Turner recalled, “but not as cute as Billy, but he wouldn’t dance with me. That was okay. We talked and became great friends. He was so charming, but not in a come-on way. He was very real, even at a Hollywood party.” Around 2:00 a.m., as Kuller remembered, “the place was wall-to-wall people, and Duke was at the piano. I said, ‘Boy, the joint sure is jumping,’ and Duke said, ‘Jumping for joy.’ He started to turn the line into a song, right there. After a few more drinks, we decided to write a show together—Jump for Joy.” Kuller was serious: with Garfield and Burnett as backers, he quickly put the funding together for Ellington, a few collaborators, and him to stage a musical revue. Ellington was equally serious about the potential of this, his first major theatrical project; he approached it as a musical vehicle for black pride, a showcase for black talent, and a gutsy swipe at Uncle Tomism.
Jump for Joy opened on July 10 at the 1,600-seat Mayan Theatre, the premier venue for black acts in Los Angeles. Though Duke Ellington was given top billing, he played piano and led his orchestra from the pit, largely out of sight; on stage, the show featured singers Dorothy Dandridge and Ivie Anderson, plus comedian Wonderful Smith, dancers Henry “Phace” Roberts and Andrew Jackson (The Rockets), a dance chorus of twelve, and a choir of ten. The score was a bit of a hodgepodge and far from pure Ellingtonia: Mickey Rooney wrote the music for one number (“Cymbal Sockin’ Sam”) and Kuller’s pal Hal Borne, a white MGM journeyman, contributed five songs, including such black-themed numbers as “Sun-Tanned Tenth of the Nation” and “I’ve Got a Passport from Georgia.” The standouts among the originals, however, were credited to Ellington: the rousing, gospel-inspired title song, the gorgeously mournful ballad “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good,” the liltingly romantic “Brown-Skinned Girl in the Calico Gown,” and the tuneful swinger “Subtle Slough” (an instrumental that later became the popular “Just Squeeze Me” after Lee Gaines added lyrics). The show was poorly received by most critics, with a few exceptions, such as Ed Schallert of the Los Angeles Times and Almena Davis of the Los Angeles Tribune, a black weekly. “The audience loved us, but they were almost completely black,” recalled Wonderful Smith. “The critics were white, and they had never seen anything like this. They didn’t know what to make of it. The music was magnificent and the performers were all tops, but it was all in a completely different style than what you’d see in a white theater. The big difference was style, not quality. But that wasn’t understood.” Operating at a cost of about seven thousand dollars per week, the show was pulling considerably less by its fifth week and closed after twelve weeks and 101 performances. “It was a pity,” said Henry Blankfort, the show’s producer and director. “We were hoping to move to New York and open on Broadway, but we ran out of money. Broadway might have been more receptive to a black show. We’ll never know.”
No one ever knew how much Billy Strayhorn had to do with Jump for Joy. Somewhat akin to Strayhorn’s musical Fantastic Rhythm, it might have been a natural project for Ellington and Strayhorn to collaborate on. Ellington and Hal Borne, however, were the only composers credited in the show’s program and promotional materials. Only on the last page of the program
is William Strayhorn acknowledged, along with Duke Ellington and Hal Borne, for “musical arrangements.” According to Blankfort and Kuller, however, Strayhorn cowrote much of Jump for Joy with Ellington as a composing collaborator rather than as an arranger. “We should have listed Billy, too: ‘By Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.’ But Ellington had the name. He was the big draw,” said Blankfort. Kuller said he dealt with Ellington and Strayhorn as artistic equals: “Billy really did write a whole lot of the show. They were writing together all the time. They were collaborators in fact, in spirit, in mind, and in talent. When we were writing the thing, sometimes I’d work with Duke, sometimes I’d work with Billy. It didn’t matter—we were all writing it, as far as we were concerned.” Sometimes, according to Phace Roberts, Strayhorn composed alone. Roberts visited Strayhorn’s dressing room often and watched him work; there was an upright piano in the basement room and a small bar, at which Strayhorn would mix a concoction he called a Heater Booster Cooler (brandy, rum, and ginger ale in secret proportions). “Billy was always writing new songs for the show, and he’d play them for me to try them out,” said Roberts. “One time, I was there waiting for Billy to mix up this drink, and Duke walked in. Duke said, ‘What’s the latest?’ Billy sat down and played a new number he was working on. Duke was listening—‘Uh-huh, uh-huh.’ And that was that. It was in the show.”
As the manuscript score for Jump for Joy illustrates, Strayhorn had a big hand in no fewer than five compositions, including “Rocks in My Bed,” “Cindy with the Two Left Feet,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Is a Drive-In Now,” and “Bugle Breaks” (the only number whose copyright includes Billy Strayhorn, cited as coauthor with Duke and Mercer Ellington). “The thing is, see, Duke was the front man,” explained Kuller. “It was a big enough shock to the world to have Duke Ellington’s name up there. Listen, the world wasn’t ready to accept a show by Duke Ellington. It certainly wasn’t ready to accept Duke Ellington and some other guy nobody ever heard of.” At the heart of this arrangement, Ellington and Strayhorn themselves seemed to share an attitude of resigned complicity. “Duke knew this was the way it had to be for this thing,” said Kuller. “So did Billy. They both knew the ropes. Hey, they were beside themselves to be doing this at all. Once we started this thing, it was tremendously important to Duke. His name was out there in front. And anybody could see that Billy loved working on the music and being involved in the theater. He was content just to be doing it. If Duke Ellington’s name was out there, so be it. That was okay with them.”
The chance to live for most of the year in California, where he was invited to Hollywood parties and Lana Turner was there, appeared to be a compensatory thrill to a lifelong easterner like Strayhorn. “He got into the whole exotic trip of the West Coast,” remarked Jeffries. “It was a kind of mecca to us—all the glamour. Everything was new and sunny. Strayhorn bought into all that.” One of Kuller’s houseguests, Harry Salzman, a young Canadian who had just come to Hollywood looking for work, invited Strayhorn to come along on a visit to a winery near Santa Ana. “The whole zeitgeist of touring a winery and sipping the vintages really appealed to Strayhorn,” said Kuller. “It wasn’t something a lot of Negro kids from Pittsburgh did.”
By night, Strayhorn explored the black music scene around Los Angeles, where he was an uncommon sight again: there, he was the celebrity. When Strayhorn and Blanton, roommates in a private home on Pico Boulevard below Hollywood (they weren’t allowed in most hotels), found the hippest jam session in town—at Billy Berg’s packed little club on Sunset and Vine—they were received like New York royalty. The house rhythm section vacated at their arrival, according to Lee Young, a drummer who was then leading a seven-piece group with his brother Lester, who had left the Basie band the previous year. “Strayhorn and Blanton were recognized as heavyweights,” said Lee Young. “They played, and the place stopped cold.” Through Blanton, whom Young had already known well, Strayhorn became friendly with both Lee and Lester Young and wrote some music for their band: new arrangements of three tunes, “Flamingo,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and one of the numbers from Fantastic Rhythm, “My Little Brown Book.” Lee Young paid Strayhorn seven dollars for each one. “They were hip charts,” said Young. “It wasn’t easy to write for seven pieces with two tenor saxophones. Billy got a great, full sound out of those seven pieces. He made us sound like fourteen.” While he was at it, Strayhorn passed on some tips to one of the Youngs’ regular arrangers, trumpeter Gerald Wilson. “He really taught me how to arrange,” remembered Wilson. “Chord structure, how to get from one point to another—I couldn’t figure out how he did all those things. He sat me down and showed me: ‘Here, Gerald, you can just do this.’ It was so natural, so easy to him, like writing a letter. I don’t think he had any realization that what he could do was incredible. It just doesn’t come like that to other people.”
Wineries and parties and Billy Berg’s jams aside, Strayhorn’s West Coast excursion peaked shortly before the show closed, when Ellington called on his polished young colleague’s grace with an extramusical assignment: Lena Horne duty. About a year earlier, in New York, when Horne was twenty-three and starting out in cabaret, she and Ellington had had a secret fling. Horne had since come West to do some nightclub work and poke around the movie business, and Ellington arranged for her to see Jump for Joy. At intermission, Strayhorn approached her. “This small, wonderfully brown little man with great big glasses walked down the aisle. He was like an owl,” Horne recalled. “He said to me, ‘Miss Horne, I’ve been commissioned by Mr. Ellington to keep you company. My name is Strayhorn.’ You see, Duke could be very possessive with women. He wanted to make sure that no other man came after me, so he arranged for Billy to be my chaperon. He assumed that Billy was safe, which I guess he was in the way that Duke saw me, which was as a sex object.”
Strayhorn and Horne connected nonetheless. “He sat with me in the theater, and he was soft-spoken,” said Horne. “I liked him immediately, and that’s very unusual for me, because I’m very inward. We watched the rest of the show, and we talked as if we had just left each other the day before and had things to catch up with. We talked a little about Pittsburgh, because we both came from there. There was an immediate recognition by both of us that we would be friends. For me, it was as if my other self came up and spoke to me—we were that much in sync.” After the show, Strayhorn accompanied Horne home to the apartment (on Horn Avenue) in whites-only Hollywood that she had rented under another woman’s name. “I took him to my house, which is another unusual thing, because I was never there myself. I didn’t want to be seen there. But I wanted so much to be alone with Billy, to talk to him, and with him I felt totally safe. I didn’t care who saw me and where they saw me. I felt strong. So we went to the house. He played ‘Lush Life’ for me on the piano, and we talked all night.”
For the several weeks remaining in Strayhorn’s California stay, he and Horne kept constant company, discovering restaurants and dropping into nightclubs, usually the Capri, a top jazz spot, and Brothers, the black club where white actors loved to be seen. “I was lonely in California when I first went. I had always been a lonely person, until I met Billy,” said Horne. “We went to museums, we went out at night to hear the blues. He was the one I wanted to be with all the time. He was my guru.” Mostly, Strayhorn and Horne stayed in at her house or went for walks and talked. “I never met another man like him. He liked to stop and look at a tree,” she said. “We stopped on the street once, because there was a carving on a door that interested him. He could tell I was a person who had missed a lot in life and wanted to know everything, and he was so bright. I hadn’t gone to school very much, and he was very scholarly. I’d always been a snob against education. But I learned from him; things I would never have thought to ask a teacher about, I could ask him. We talked about everything. We talked about what it was like to be a woman and what it was like to be a man, and we talked about how mixed up each of the sexes were and how better off we’d all be if
we were even more mixed up together. He wasn’t like a professor—he was like you imagine a professor to be. He was brilliant but gentle and loving. He never made you feel dumb. He was very sure of himself and decisive in his thinking. You wanted him around you, and he made it bearable to have other people around.
“I wanted to marry him so badly. He was just everything that I wanted in a man, except he wasn’t interested in me sexually. If I could have had him, I would have taken him. We were in love, anyway. He was the only man I really loved.” These are things Lena Horne loved about Billy Strayhorn: “He had a face like an elf. You’d want to put your hands up and hold it. He loved food like he loved trees and nature. He thought food was beautiful—the texture of an apple. He was very unhappy when people didn’t handle food respectfully. When he got angry, he never showed it. I knew he was seething inside sometimes, but he rarely showed his anger. If he heard somebody say something that he disagreed with, he’d deal with it in a very relaxed and easy way. He’d say, ‘Well, I don’t like what you said.’ That’s all, yet it would seem very forceful. Nobody was offended, but he made his position clear. He was very, very strong and at the same time very sensitive and gentle: he was the perfect mixture of man and woman.”
