by David Hajdu
In late 1940s’ Manhattan, an informal group of creative people emerged outside the public eye, its members virtually all black men, artists—painters, dancers, writers, musicians—and gay. There were exceptions, of course: John Cage, white and gay, participated occasionally; Harry Belafonte and the painter Felrath Hines, black and straight, were active members; Eartha Kitt dropped in sometimes. The very point of the group, however, was to defy the reductiveness of category. The Neal Salon, as it came to be called, was founded by Frank Neal, a dancer (formerly with Katherine Dunham) and painter (trained at the Art Institute of Chicago), and his wife, Dorcas, known as a stimulating hostess and chef. Every weekend night and, often, once or twice during the week, insiders knew to convene at the Neals’ parlor, no earlier than midnight. It was a moderate-sized second-floor space with wide windows that overlooked a row of storefronts on 28th Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue; a view without charm, it turned the eye inward. A few paintings by Frank Neal, depictions of working people and still lifes in both watercolor and oils, spotted the walls, though they were not lit—the room tended to darkness. There was always food: a pot of chicken and rice or ham and beans, plus a plate of sandwiches on the table, and Dorcas Neal kept everything coming as long as anyone was eating. She drank coffee compulsively, always a whole pot a night herself. Everyone else drank beer or whatever people brought. These were not parties, however. “It wasn’t like a raucous atmosphere, with a lot of drinking. It was a way for a particular group of people to get together and talk and support each other,” explained Dorcas Neal, an exquisite woman with an easy charm and a smile that started tentatively and grew very slowly until, as if in triumph, it took over her face. “I guess you could say this was a safe place to be. It was a place for a group of people who were just different to be in the company of those who were the same. It was all like a family situation. This was a breeding ground for a certain group of artists at a certain time when they had nowhere else to go. It was like Bloomsbury. In this group, these people could be the artists they were and be dealt with like artists. They all faced a lot of the same problems and a lot of the same questions regarding their careers and their place in the world, which was white at the time. I think they were able to answer many of those questions for each other and solve those problems and become successful in the world.” The regular members were Dorcas and Frank Neal, of course; Felrath Hines; the dancer and choreographer Talley Beatty; Art Smith, a jeweler who was a friend of Beatty’s; the painter and playwright Charles Sebree; the actor and singer Brock Peters; the composer Lou Harrison; the writer James Baldwin, when he was in the city; the historian Bill Coleman; Belafonte; and, starting shortly after his return from Paris in 1950, Billy Strayhorn.
“Ours was a group that never saw the light of day. People stayed until at least five or six in the morning, a lot of times straight through until breakfast,” said Dorcas Neal. “Strayhorn was a night owl, like the rest of us, so he became very active. At first, people would step back a little when he came in, because he had such a reputation as a genius—among people in the know, you know. But he was a very charming and very generous person, and he got very close to everybody and even started working on things with people.” Strayhorn had been acquainted with Talley Beatty since the dancer had appeared in a short film set to the Ellington Orchestra recording of “Flamingo” in 1942; together, they now laid the groundwork for a ballet (to be produced years later as Road of the Phoebe Snow). In much the same way, Strayhorn and Sebree started outlining a musical drama showcase for Belafonte, to be called Fisher Boy. Although Variety published a brief mention of the project, it was never produced and is not known to exist in any form. It was Strayhorn who purchased the first painting that Felrath Hines ever sold, an abstract of circles in bold reds and yellows. “He was very cosmopolitan and knew much more about art than you might expect,” remembered Hines, who had studied at New York University and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met Frank Neal. “He was very supportive of my pursuing art when we were at the Neals’ and talking about our problems. It was nearly impossible to be black and try to be accepted as a fine artist at that time. Billy was having the same experience in music, and he encouraged me to keep on. Then, when I had my first gallery show, he came and bought the first painting. That was the kind of support I really appreciated.”
As a rule, intangibles were the currency of the Neal Salon. “For those in the group who were black and gay, and that wasn’t everybody, it meant the world just to see that there were others like them in the arts,” noted Dorcas Neal. “They didn’t have to talk about homosexuality, and, in fact, they practically never did. It was an understood thing. The only one who was perfectly willing to talk about it, as far as I knew, was Strayhorn. One night he said, ‘I’m not going to change for anybody, and if they don’t like it, that’s their problem.’ Of course, it wasn’t just their problem. If it wasn’t anybody else’s problem, we wouldn’t have had the salon. Nevertheless, it was always more understood than talked out.” The “main thrust,” as Talley Beatty recalled, was “art, every kind of art. It was highly animated—wonderful. Everything was criticized. No one came away unscathed. It was very sociopolitical. A black gathering, very sociopolitical. We had all worked with prominent white people—myself, with Jerome Robbins—and we had done well with them, up to a point. At the salon, we could discuss our observations and frustrations together and argue about them, which is what inevitably happened. I had been reviewed in the New York Times, and I said, ‘This should be worth about fifty thousand dollars. But look at me—I can’t get a job!’” Adversity fortified the salon’s insularity, according to Brock Peters. “I guess we felt we were kind of special,” he said. “We were all daring to try to have careers in an arena where everything was structured against the possibility of having a career. And we got fuel from seeing each other and encouragement in talking with each other and comparing notes and laughing about things and gossiping about things in the business as they looked from our perspective. I wanted a career in concert music and was having trouble coming to terms with the necessity of doing popular work, and Strayhorn and I talked about that a great deal. He encouraged me not to compromise. He said he knew all about compromise, and things hadn’t always worked out the way he expected.” For his part, Strayhorn appeared to come away from the Neal Salon sessions with a renewed sense of worth, according to Dorcas Neal. “It was a big shot in the arm for him at that time,” said Neal. “He said to me, ‘You know what? There are some things I want to do for myself for a change. I think I’m going to do them.’”
Early in 1950, Strayhorn accepted an invitation to become a member of a more formal organization that he might have seemed unqualified to join. It was a society of black tap dancers called the Copasetics, founded in honor of tap icon Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who was credited with coining the term to express soft-shoe felicity, as in, “How’s everything, Bojangles?” “Everything’s copasetic!” It was a state the often indigent dancer likely felt less than his language suggested. Waiting in pitiless cold on a snaking mourners’ line outside the 69th Regiment Armory on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, where Robinson’s wake was held on December 5, 1949, a few younger dancers agreed to start a social organization in their idol’s memory. One of them was Charles “Cookie” Cook, partner with Ernest “Brownie” Brown in the comic dance team of Cook and Brown. Small and quick-witted—he moved with spring-action surprise and talked the same way—Cook knew Strayhorn through mutual friends in gay circles and asked his fellow dancers to accept the musician in the Copasetics. “We were looking for gentlemen—who you were, not what you were,” explained Honi Coles, half of the “class act” of Coles and Atkins and first president of the Copasetics. Along with Cook, Brown, Coles, Cholly Atkins, and Strayhorn, early membership included the dancers James “Catfish” Walker and Luther “Slim” Preston, Phace Roberts and his partner, Johnny Thomas, Eddie West (of the Chocolatiers dance troupe), the comedian LeRoy Myers, and Louis Brown (a veter
an member of the Cotton Club Boys and close friend of Robinson’s who became a liquor salesman).
Five of the members (Cook, Brown, Coles, Atkins, and Myers) had already formed an unofficial club by steering one another into the same apartment building, 2040 Seventh Avenue, at 122nd Street, known around Harlem as “the dancers’ house.” Gathering at the Showman’s Cafe (“uptown’s smartest rendezvous,” a hangout for Apollo regulars on 125th Street) a few weeks after Robinson’s wake, the members drafted a charter: “The Copasetics is a social, friendly benevolent club. Its members pledge themselves to do all in their power to promote fellowship and to strengthen the character within their ranks. With these thoughts ever foremost in our minds, it should be our every desire to create only impressions that will establish us in all walks of life as a group of decent, respectable men. Bearing in mind that these achievements can only become a reality by first seeking the aid of God.” The Copasetics met every Sunday afternoon in the early years, rotating the location among the members’ homes. For the first meeting held at his place, Strayhorn tacked little signs all over the apartment pointing directions to the refrigerator, the telephone, the bathroom, and other points of possible interest, and he prepared one of his specialties, red beans slowly cooked in beer. “Strayhorn’s house became our favorite place to meet because he was such a great host and fantastic cook,” recalled Phace Roberts. “After a while, we met there most of the time. His apartment was like our clubhouse.” Ritualized with the keeping of minutes and the recitation of the preamble, the Copasetics’ meetings, much like Strayhorn’s beans, boiled down to alcohol-steeped indulgence. “Well, we talked about all sorts of things,” said Cholly Atkins. “We talked about what was happening in the business, different trends and the like. Who was up and who was down. Nothing in particular, just talk. Lots of laughs and lots to drink, that sort of thing.” Busmen on holiday, the Copasetics always seemed to end up dancing at some point in their meetings, if only on the pretense of settling an argument about a step; Strayhorn would hop to the piano stool, and a Sunday gathering of gentlemen upended into a cutting session. “We communicated with our bodies—that’s what we did,” explained Honi Coles. “If we were celebrating, if we were debating, if we were fighting, we did it in dance.” At the close of every gathering, the elected treasurer would pass a hat for donations in lieu of prescribed dues, to cover whatever food and however much drink attending members had enjoyed; if there was a surplus in the hat, the members would remember who was up and who was down. As Atkins explained, “It was the type of thing like if, let’s say, somebody didn’t have any engagements at that particular point and we knew his rent was due or there were doctor bills and he could use a little help. It might be a member or it might be somebody else we knew. The money would go there.”
Though ostensibly an outsider, Strayhorn was accepted as a peer—or something more—by the Copasetics, and he clearly treasured their affection and respect. “He was just a lovable person,” said Atkins. “He had such a level-headed attitude toward everything. He was a great inspiration to most of us guys.” To Phace Roberts, “He was the brains of the group. He knew about everything and explained it to us.” LeRoy Myers said, “He was well respected among the guys in the group because his demeanor, his personality, was such that he commanded attention.” So dedicated a Copasetic was Strayhorn that he was elected president of the group. “A club like this needed a decisive personality,” said Atkins. “I mean, guys would get into heated things. Everybody had an idea about what we should do, what should be happening. There were fist fights sometimes. And Strayhorn was the guy who would keep all of this down. It wasn’t that he was pushy. He was just so sharp and even-keeled that everybody listened to him. Everybody felt that if Strayhorn wanted to do this, this is what we should do.” He returned their faith with loyalty—and work. “I think the reason Strayhorn was so dedicated to the Copasetics was that he recognized how much love was in the Copasetics for him,” added Atkins. “Most people shunned people like him for being how he was, and here was a bunch of guys who were crazy about him—not because of his lifestyle or anything but for him, as a person. We made him our leader.” As president, Strayhorn focused his enthusiasm on a new initiative, a Copasetics show, which he would write for the group to perform. The organization had already sponsored an affair in September 1950, a dance at Big George’s Barbecue in Queens, the highlight of which was an impromptu performance on bass fiddle by the prizefighter Ezzard Charles; Strayhorn composed a song for the event, “Let’s Have a Ball,” an up-tempo trifle. Next time, Strayhorn promised, he’d produce a whole Copasetics musical revue.
Emboldened through the Neal Salon, invigorated by the Copasetics, Strayhorn eventually heeded Lennie Hayton’s counsel and applied himself to the business of his musical life. For guidance, he turned to Leonard Feather, the expatriate Briton who, through a range of journalistic, public relations, composing, and record-producing projects, had built a reputation as an all-purpose jazz whiz. (Shortly before this, Feather and Strayhorn had collaborated on a forty-four-page booklet on Ellington’s instrumental approach, entitled Duke Ellington Piano Method for Blues, which credited Ellington as its author.) “He asked me for a crash course in the music business. He wanted to know how everything worked,” said Feather, who met with Strayhorn in his apartment office above Cafe Society Downtown at I Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. “I’m not sure how much of the music business I really ever understood myself, but we went over all the various aspects of the business fairly thoroughly. He went away in typical Strayhorn fashion; he was very nonchalant. The next time I saw him, a week or so later, I asked him if our conversation had been of any use to him. He said, ‘Oh yes, thank you very much. I’ve found the skeletons. They give their regards.’ He had looked into his publishing and found a variety of problems.”
Strayhorn’s work since his arrival in New York, virtually all of it performed or recorded by Duke Ellington or members of his orchestra, had been published by several companies in a manner fairly typical for the time—that is, through a knotty mesh of conflicting strategies difficult to untangle from the outside. It was axiomatic that the composer would not necessarily be the immediate or the primary beneficiary of his own work. In fact, Duke Ellington had been a historic victim of this system years earlier, when he was under contract to Irving Mills; the publishing mogul took credit for co-composing or writing lyrics—and took the related royalties—for more than fifty Ellington works, including such masterpieces as “In a Sentimental Mood,” “Mood Indigo,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Solitude,” and “Sophisticated Lady.” Fortunately for Ellington, no one really thought Mills wrote anything. Strayhorn’s case was more complex, since his responsibilities in the Ellington organization included aiding Ellington in both refining and completing works clearly conceived as Ellington music; on stage, Ellington referred to Strayhorn with cryptic aesthetic intimacy as “our writing and arranging companion.” Moreover, in jazz a fine musical line often divides composition and arrangement. As a result, Strayhorn could hardly be shocked to find his name missing from the credits of Ellington pieces in which he had a hand, notably, “The ‘C’ Jam Blues,” “The Mood to Be Wooed,” “Tonight I Shall Sleep (with a Smile on My Face),” and the “Sugar Hill Penthouse” section of Ellington’s long-form masterwork, Black, Brown and Beige. Since it was not the convention to publish arrangements, neither did Strayhorn have reason to expect his orchestrations for “Flamingo,” “Frankie and Johnny,” and “Blue Belles of Harlem” to be copyrighted in his name. Three other kinds of publishing conflicts, however, involved Strayhorn uniquely. The strangest of these “skeletons” were compositions correctly credited to Strayhorn on record labels but not copyrighted in his name: “Flippant Flurry,” a 1947 Strayhorn composition, and “Overture to a Jam Session,” another Strayhorn original from the same year. Both were filed with the Register of Copyrights in the name of Duke Ellington, who in turn received all royalties for them. Some other Strayhorn works—for i
nstance, his “Tapioca” and “Feather Roll Blues”—were recorded and issued with the proper composer credit but not copyrighted at the time. The least unusual of these cases were compositions Strayhorn created alone for which he shared credit with Ellington, including the Mad Hatters’ “Something to Live For” and “Your Love Has Faded,” as well as “Day Dream,” “Grievin’,” “Brown Betty,” and “I’m Checkin’ Out, Goom Bye,” not to mention Strayhorn’s contributions to the scores of Jump for Joy and Beggar’s Holiday.
Since the most recent (though not all) of these compositions were published by Ellington’s own company, Tempo Music, Inc.—set up for Ellington’s new repertoire during the period of the ASCAP radio ban and managed by Ruth Ellington—some of Strayhorn’s publishing problems were problems with Ellington. “That was the first time I saw any conflict between the old man and Strayhorn,” remembered Mercer Ellington. “Strayhorn had looked into his royalties and such, and he was upset. They had a talk about it, but Strayhorn wasn’t satisfied, and he pulled away. There was some distance between them there.” (In the handful of interviews published or broadcast during his career, Strayhorn refrained from noting this rift with Ellington; with few exceptions, he responded to inquiries about Ellington with generous praise for his artistry and leadership.) Ellington had, however, given Strayhorn some stock in Tempo Music (ten shares) when the company was formed in 1941, and through it Strayhorn had been profiting from all compositions published by Tempo, including the many Ellington pieces that Strayhorn had nothing to do with. Moreover, Ellington’s financial generosity toward Strayhorn had long been seemingly boundless: Strayhorn’s rent and living expenses, his vast and lavish wardrobe, the finest food and drink, travel—anything Strayhorn seemed to need or want was his. “Money wasn’t quite the problem. How could it be, when Billy had everything?” asked Leonard Feather. “The problem was the lack of independence that his business problems represented. Billy couldn’t very well do very much [work] of his own if he was entirely tangled up with Ellington’s and he was totally dependent upon Ellington for all his needs. The actual source of his frustration was artistic. He hadn’t had very much of a chance to do much of his own thing since the whole period of ‘Chelsea Bridge,’ during the ASCAP strike. Surely he knew he wasn’t being acknowledged for many of the things he was doing. He was obviously frustrated as an artist. He decided it was time to do something about it.” Leonard Feather, along with both Duke and Mercer Ellington, ended up helping.
