Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  Ellington fell prey to criticism: “THINGS AIN’T WHAT THEY OUGHT TO BE WITH ELLINGTON’S BAND” read the headline of Down Beat’s contorted review of a one-night stand at the Civic Auditorium in Portland, Oregon. Yet Ellington was still producing work of a high musical order, some of it with participation by Strayhorn. In December 1951, Ellington recorded one of his most sharply drawn long-form compositions, “A Tone Parallel to Harlem,” a programmatic fourteen-minute tour of black Manhattan; Strayhorn, uncredited, contributed about thirty seconds of music to end the piece. More notably, Strayhorn helped fashion extended new arrangements (again unacknowledged) of Ellington compositions (“Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “The Tattooed Bride,” and “Solitude”) to be recorded for an LP titled Masterpieces by Ellington; the pieces range from eight to fifteen minutes in length, and each is a distanced reconsideration of an Ellington piece, expanded with mercurial shifts in tempo and timbre. Most constructively, Strayhorn fleshed out an Ellington riff sketch with harmony and lyrics—an ode to Strayhorn’s mother, spun around Strayhorn’s pet name for her—and ended up with “Satin Doll.” Though Johnny Mercer was brought in to replace Strayhorn’s oedipal lyrics with ones evoking more commercial male-female love, “Satin Doll” was recorded as an instrumental and became a modest hit (and the last single-record success of Ellington’s career), peaking at number 27 in three weeks on the Billboard chart. (Strayhorn’s original lyrics to “Satin Doll” are not known to have survived.)

  The timing was good: unlike most other swing bandleaders, Ellington was able to support his orchestra with his earnings as a composer. “That was the old man’s secret,” said Mercer Ellington. “That orchestra was his instrument; more than that, it was his whole life. Nobody else was able to keep their band together year after year, through all the changes in the music scene. But nobody had that catalog of compositions that he had. With all those royalties coming in, he was able to meet his payroll, which was substantial, because a lot of those cats had been in the band for a long time. Harry Carney—that was the only job he ever had in his life. And they all made good bread. They were top men. Without those royalties, the old man would have been operating at a loss. He would have gone under, just like the rest of them.” Surviving a sea change in musical tastes, Ellington accepted a kooky mix of bookings in the early 1950s: corny battle-of-the-bands dates with Stan Kenton at the acoustically disastrous Rollerdome in Revere Beach, Massachusetts; an extended engagement at the Aquacade on the World’s Fair site in Flushing Meadows, New York, where the Ellington Orchestra shared the bill with ice skaters, a ballroom-dancing competition, and water-fountain tricks. Had it not been for his publishing holdings—all those songs by Ellington, Ellington-Strayhorn, Strayhorn, Mercer Ellington, and others in the Ellington roost—the bandleader might not have held on through the decade.

  Much as he rejected closure, Ellington avoided confrontation: he didn’t resist when Strayhorn broke the news of his decision to enter into a partnership with Luther Henderson. “Strayhorn and I had it all figured out,” recalled Henderson. “We figured we could bring in $300,000, $400,000, maybe $500,000 or so a year. That was nice money. But I think a great deal of it was, for Strayhorn, he wanted to do something for himself. Strayhorn went and told Ellington, and he called me. He said, ‘I talked to Edward. Everything’s fine.’ The next day, Ellington called me. He said, ‘Luther, Strays was telling me all about your plan. It sounds great. It’s brilliant. Marvelous. But you know, there’s one thing I think I should tell you. You know, I’ve worked with Strayhorn for a long time. I know what he can do. And I have to tell you, you don’t need Strayhorn, not with your talent. He can’t do what you can do. He just puts notes down on the music paper. When the music paper sees you coming, it comes alive! It leaps up in joy! When you write a piece of music, the music paper feels privileged. It’s the happiest day of the music paper’s life.’

  “What a snow job!” said Henderson. “It sounds ridiculous when I hear myself repeat it. The funny thing is, when Ellington says it, you believe it. Don’t ask me why. You fall for it.” At once puffed up and insecure about his own judgment of Strayhorn’s abilities, Henderson was relieved to find his prospective partner equally hesitant to proceed with their agreement. “I don’t know what Ellington said to him,” added Henderson, who didn’t tell Strayhorn about Ellington’s call. “I have to assume it was the same kind of thing—Strayhorn didn’t need me. I wasn’t as good as him. In any case, we just let the whole thing slide. We didn’t go through with it.” Their momentum lost, Henderson and Strayhorn never picked up Rose-Colored Glasses again either, despite an encouraging critique in a memo from Herbert Machiz, who said the work could succeed with its characters humanized. “We left all that undone,” said Henderson. “It was the biggest mistake of my life. I should have never let him go.”

  Strayhorn didn’t go right back to Ellington, however. To realign his life his favorite way, lushly, Strayhorn gravitated to Europe and Aaron Bridgers. In Paris he found an environment that seemed uniquely hospitable to blacks, gays, and artists; indeed, a whole colony of black musicians, painters, and writers had emerged on the postwar Left Bank—the place of his Pittsburgh dreams transformed into a European branch of the Neal Salon. The writers James Baldwin and Chester Himes, the painter Herb Gentry, the jazz musicians Kenny Clarke and Art Simmons were part of a growing group of blacks who, seeking acceptance and opportunity outside the homogeneity of Eisenhower-era America, looked to notoriously liberal France. “A number of us stayed there after the war because we felt like we found a place where there was less racism, and we were treated like professionals and artists,” said Simmons, a veteran, along with Clarke and John Lewis, of the seventeenth Special Services band. Roundish and funny, a nice guy from the States, Simmons became de facto den father of America’s jazz expatriates, French division. He liked his whiskey and, nonetheless, played disciplined piano in the style of Hank Jones. “Some of what we thought when we first came to Paris was probably naive,” said Simmons. “Pretty soon, I noticed some of the French people talking in a terrible way about ‘the Arabs’ and ‘the Jews,’ and I started wondering what they said about me when I wasn’t around. And there was something kind of superior in the way they embraced American blacks, a ‘noble savage’ attitude or something. But it was better than the situation in the States in a lot of ways. And I think it was better for other guys who were black like me but gay on top of it.” Bridgers certainly found comfort in the French brand of detached tolerance. “Nobody cared who you were or what you were,” he said. “There was no judgment. That’s one of the reasons Billy and I loved it here [in Paris].

  “From the moment he came to Paris, it was like nothing had changed and we had just been together the day before,” said Bridgers. “We did everything together. Everything was the same again. It was good for us; things were better when we were together.” As members of a community of their own within Parisian culture—the French called them Am-Am—black Americans had established social centers, cafés like Chez Honey, a small box on rue Jules Chaplain in Montparnasse operated by Herb Gentry (and named for his wife), where expatriates met one another as well as visitors from the States. Strayhorn stopped by in passing—a courtesy call—but relished the more glamorous elements of the city: he had come for old Paris in all its extravagant glory, not for the tempered familiarity of an American colony. Bridgers in tow, Strayhorn spent the days shopping. He liked to walk around Claridge’s, a luxurious hotel with pricey French specialty shops in the lobby (Bridgers said, “He thought it was a palace”), and he ordered monogrammed leather luggage—there would be no confusing his bags on the Ellington band bus. At one shoe store, he picked out several pairs of loafers. “‘A pair of these, a pair of those. Have you got them in black?’” as Bridgers recalled. A favorite stop was Fauchon, the famous boutique for delicacies and spirits; Strayhorn bought a case of exotic liquors in colorful elongated bottles and had the order shipped home. For dinner, the two of them—some nig
hts with a Parisian friend of Bridgers’s like the industrialist Jean Berdin or the pianist Raymond Fol—favored Le Doyen; Strayhorn experimented but had to have his smoked salmon and foie gras.

  On Bridgers’s nights off, he and Strayhorn roved the jazz clubs: Bricktop’s, beloved by the Parisian elite; the Club Saint-Germain, favored by the university set; the Olympia, a musicians’ hangout; and two popular nightspots, the Ringside and the Living Room. “Americans like Billy and Aaron believed the Parisian nightclubs were freer than the American nightclubs,” said the French jazz writer Maurice Cullaz, who accompanied Strayhorn and Bridgers in some of their club hopping. “They believed there was reason to be comfortable here. They had a good time. They didn’t have to worry about what people thought. Naturally, no one really knows what Parisians are thinking, including we Parisians.” Most evenings, Strayhorn and Bridgers relived their treasured Cafe Society days at the Mars Club, where Bridgers was the house pianist. It was a little room in the eighth arrondissement, off the Champs-Elysées: Annie Ross, a naturalistic jazz vocalist and no belter, didn’t need a microphone, and instrumental trios were booked rarely, since there was no place for a drum kit. The walls were painted with loose-line sketches of planets and stars asserting the rocket-age Mars theme. Ben Benjamin, a balloon-shaped gay American, ran the place for the Parisian woman whom he had married and with whom, accordingly, French law permitted him to share ownership of the business. In the estimate of one of the Mars Club’s managers, the American singer Nancy Holloway, the clientele was nearly half gay. Featured performers during this period were virtually all Americans, including Annie Ross, the singer-pianists Blossom Dearie and Bobby Short, and the pianists Peter Matz and Richard Allen. A gathering place for song aficionados, the Mars Club was what the singers would call a verse club: instead of starting with the chorus, you could do the whole composition, including the opening verse. “A majority of the audience was like dear Aaron and Billy, brilliant listeners,” said Dearie. Between sets, Aaron Bridgers played solo cocktail piano. “Poor Aaron,” said Cullaz. “When he sat down, the people started talking, like a record was playing.” Before closing, whenever he was there, Strayhorn yielded to inexorable demand and took a turn at the piano for a murmuring, self-referential rendition of that song about a week somewhere romantic. “It was an internationally known gay hangout,” said Peter Matz, a young music student at the Ecole Normale when he played the Mars Club. “They’d all come there to check in and hear the latest news. Strayhorn was a star there because everybody knew all about him through Aaron. At the Mars Club, man, Strayhorn was it. He was the main man.” Bobby Short, too, was impressed: “When he came into the room, he had an aura. He looked very, very, very much like he should have been in white robes or something.”

  Strayhorn returned to New York and the world of Duke Ellington in the second week of 1956. Throwing his own homecoming party after more than a month overseas, he took Francis Goldberg and a few other friends to Cafe Society Uptown, bought a few rounds in salute to Bridgers, and charmed the group with droll descriptions of the Mars Club and its Continental clientele. “He was like Noel Coward, a miniature, black Noel Coward,” recalled one of the group that night, a gay black musician familiar with the Paris scene. “Now, I knew all about Paris—I played at the Mars Club. And I was hanging on his every word. Billy loved that place so much. The way he described Paris, it was all new to me.” Meanwhile, Cafe Society had also changed: as declining demand for big-band music had lowered the surviving orchestras’ asking prices, Barney Josephson, the owner, was able to afford the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Strayhorn’s musician friend recalled, “Billy saw a bill on the wall: ‘Coming Soon: Duke Ellington and His Orchestra!’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ll have to come to see Duke Ellington—and hear all those Billy Strayhorn songs.’ He looked around the tiny little club, and he puffed on a cigarette, and he said, ‘If there’s room for them.’”

  As it turned out, Ellington was inclined to make room for Billy Strayhorn, more so, in fact, than he had been at any time since the ASCAP ban. When the Duke Ellington Orchestra opened at Cafe Society on January 12, 1956, Strayhorn was there, sharing a table with his musician friend. He greeted seemingly every one of the more than three hundred customers shoehorned into the cabaret and drank several Billy’s Martinis. “Halfway into the show,” said his friend, a pianist well known at Cafe Society, “he said to me, quietly, ‘I talked to Edward. He would like me to be more engaged again. He asked me what sort of project I would like to do.’ So I said to Billy, ‘Well? What are you going to do?’ He lifted up his martini, and he looked straight ahead. He didn’t look at me. And he said, ‘Take one sip at a time. One sip at a time.’” Before the evening’s end, Strayhorn had the first metaphoric taste of his new relationship with Ellington. The bandleader, who was considering signing with Columbia Records, introduced him and his guest to Irving Townsend, a Columbia producer who was a clarinetist and a longtime Ellington buff. “We exchanged the usual pleasantries,” recalled Strayhorn’s friend, “and Duke said, ‘Mr. Townsend, you’re so fortunate to have come tonight because you have the pleasure of meeting the wonderful man I told you so much about, Mr. Strayhorn. Mr. Strayhorn has many wonderful, wonderful ideas for recordings, and if Mr. Strayhorn has an idea, it must be truly wonderful. Why don’t you two get acquainted so we can get started right away with all of Mr. Strayhorn’s ideas?’” Strayhorn shot his friend a get-this-guy look and proceeded to follow Ellington’s lead.

  Townsend and Strayhorn, chatting while Ellington shook hands and nodded to his fans, got as far as one of Townsend’s own ideas: a vocal album pairing the Ellington Orchestra with the pop singer Rosemary Clooney, a hot commodity for the wave of hits she had given Columbia under easy-listening mastermind Mitch Miller, including “Mambo Italiano,” “Botch-a-Me,” and “Come On-a My House.” The task had a taint of the old novelty “Jumpin’ Jive” and Strayhorn’s earliest work in Ellington’s vocal wing. Nonetheless, Strayhorn apparently saw promise in the project—he said he thought Clooney was underrated, his friend recalled—and before the two of them left Cafe Society, Strayhorn, Townsend, and Ellington had agreed on a basic approach to the album: whatever Clooney and Strayhorn wanted to do.

  Strayhorn flew to Los Angeles and took a taxi to Clooney’s home in Beverly Hills, a Spanish-style split-level she shared with her husband, the actor José Ferrer, and their three children; she was very pregnant with a fourth child and under doctor’s orders not to fly. Working under deadline to begin recording in less than ten days and unfamiliar with Clooney’s style (her range, best keys, and preferred tempos), Strayhorn set priorities: “He made me breakfast in bed,” said Clooney. The twenty-seven-year-old singer was suffering nearly constant nausea, and Ferrer was in England directing and acting in a film, The Cockleshell Heroes. Sleeping in one of the children’s rooms, Strayhorn stayed with Clooney for more than a week to act as nurse and play Ellington Orchestra records, occasionally at the same time. “We didn’t know each other at all before that, and we became incredibly close immediately,” said Clooney. “I was having a very difficult pregnancy. I was really suffering, and he got me through it. I’d say, ‘Oh, God, I’m going to throw up again,’ and he would say, ‘Okay, now. It’s okay,’ and he would take care of me. He said, ‘Don’t get up, honey,’ and he’d make me crackers and milk. I felt a bit better one day, and he baked me an apple pie. He cared about that baby. He cared about the fact that I couldn’t afford to get tired, and he watched out for me. I would just stay in my bedroom, and he would come upstairs, and we’d sit on the bed and talk about things. Most of the time, we didn’t even talk much about music. When we did work on the music, it was like I was working with my best friend. I wanted to do my best for him, and I would do anything he wanted.”

  Strayhorn and Clooney chose their numbers (a mix of Ellington favorites, including “Sophisticated Lady” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” and lesser-known Strayhorn songs such as “Grievin’” and “I’m Checkin’ Out, Goo
m Bye”) and ironed out the arrangements (to accommodate Clooney’s range, he slipped a key change into the bridge of “Sophisticated Lady”). Songs and singer were ready for the first recording session, scheduled for January 23. It wasn’t practical, however, for the Ellington Orchestra to perform on the end of Clooney’s bed. Irving Townsend came up with a resourceful solution: the Ellington Orchestra would record the instrumental music in New York, and Clooney would overdub her vocals in a studio near her home, under Strayhorn’s supervision. The trumpeter Clark Terry recalled the East Coast dates, which Strayhorn flew back for, as tense: “Nobody had ever worked that way before. When we played for a singer, we were used to hearing the singer sing and playing around it. I said to Strayhorn, ‘Hey, Strays, why don’t you sing the songs, and they can erase your voice? Wouldn’t that be better, if we could hear your voice?’ He looked at me deadpan, and he said, ‘No, I believe silence would be preferable.’”

  As at many other Ellington Orchestra sessions, the work was hurried: John Sanders, a valve trombone player enlisted as a second copyist, shared space with Tom Whaley at a card table set up in the recording studio; as soon as they inked the parts, the band members would pick them up and play them for the first time, tape running. “I didn’t know what to expect picking up a part for one more version of ‘Sophisticated Lady,’” said Terry. “Then I played it, and I told Strayhorn, I said, ‘That chart we just played, man, that arrangement of “Sophisticated Lady,” that is really the most fantastic chart I have heard in a long time.’ And he said to me, ‘Did you enjoy your part?’ I’ll never forget that. ‘Did you enjoy your part?’ That man was always thinking about you.” (Strayhorn told a magazine interviewer, “I have a general rule. Rimsky-Korsakov is the one who said it: All parts should lie easily under the fingers. That’s my first rule, to write something a guy can play. Otherwise, it will never be as natural, or as wonderful, as something that does lie easily under the fingers.”) Once the instrumental sections had been recorded, Strayhorn got a flight back to Los Angeles and supervised Clooney’s overdubbing at the Radio Recorders studios. Accustomed to working with a live orchestra surrounding her rather than with frozen accompaniment squeaking through a set of headphones, Clooney was jittery. “We tried a few takes, and it was a disaster,” said Clooney. “I couldn’t get used to being separated from the music like that. Billy was studying me very intently. Finally, he said, ‘Okay, Rosie. It’s okay. The band isn’t here. It’s just a tape. Okay? You don’t have to pretend that the band is here. Listen to me, honey. You’re in your house, and you’re sitting in your room. You turn the radio on—and it’s Duke Ellington! That’s great! You love Duke Ellington. So you start singing along. You’re brushing your hair. You’re looking in the mirror, and you’re singing along to the radio. Okay?’ And that did it for me. I was all right from then on.” Although overdubbing was new, this kind of collaboration was familiar to Strayhorn. “The only other really strong advice he gave me was on ‘I’m Checkin’ Out, Goom Bye,’” said Clooney. “He told me not to do it angry. He said, ‘Just because you’re leaving the other person, it doesn’t mean you’re angry. You’re in charge. You’re leaving, because you’re the strong one. You might even come back. Who knows?’”