Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  For all his controlling devices, Otto Preminger had little influence on the music composed for Anatomy of a Murder: it’s pure Ellingtonia and, as such, a most unconventional movie score, thematically bracing, hardly subordinate mood music. Strayhorn contributed a few touches, including a couple of lyrical bars in the main theme and a pretty part for celeste, which he also played for the soundtrack; he performed as well the tender piano solo seemingly played on screen by Stewart in a pensive moment at home. “He asked me to play something I liked,” explained Stewart. “What I think he did, you see, was write something for me that I would have played myself. It was very interesting the way he did it.” When not composing on the inn’s piano in Ishpeming, Ellington and Strayhorn worked up arrangements for the Ellington Orchestra and oversaw the soundtrack recording at the Radio Recorders studios in Los Angeles; holed up in a four-room suite at the Chateau Marmont for several days of intensive arranging and recording, Strayhorn increased their efficiency by preparing the meals. “He became the official cook, because we had a great big kitchen with lots of pots and pans. He would not allow anyone else to enter the kitchen, and he used to cook some great dishes. He even got himself a chef’s hat,” wrote Ellington in his 1973 memoir, Music Is My Mistress.

  Though Preminger used only a fraction of the music composed for the film, he got his news value: the score was widely noted as a breakthrough for Ellington and celebrated, especially by the jazz press. As Nat Hentoff wrote in the Saturday Review, “This is one of [Ellington’s] most satisfying collections of new themes in recent years. There is … evident in the score Ellington’s unique capacity to create quickly evocative, impressionistic moods; and there is, above all, his commanding ability to use his orchestra as his own instrument. The result is film writing that sounds much more personal than most, since it has been, in effect, performed as well as written by one man.” Ellington himself characterized the score as a learning experience. “Music in pictures should say something without being obviously music, you know, and this was all new to me,” he said in an interview for the American Weekly Entertainment Guide. “I’ll try another one and then I’ll show them.” Strayhorn kept his distance from the project: although he attended the film’s preview screening at the Stanley Warner Theater in New York on June 19, 1959, he sat with a friend, a concert pianist, apart from Preminger, Ellington, and the stars (and Joe Morgen), and he passed up the premiere party for a quiet dinner for two in Greenwich Village. “Billy said, ‘Let’s have spaghetti,’” recalled his companion, the pianist. “I said, ‘Well, maybe we should at least make an appearance at the party. Aren’t they expecting you?’ And Billy said, ‘Oh, let Edward have his fun. I could use a drink.’”

  9

  UP AND DOWN, UP AND DOWN

  Saturdays used to be Goldie’s. Initiating the weekend with cosmopolitan fervor, Strayhorn and Goldberg would typically catch the matinee revue at the Apollo or an afternoon concert at Carnegie Hall and try a new restaurant the New York chefs were talking about. Frank or Gustavia might come along. It was a surface mark of the corrosion of his relationship with Goldberg that as the 1950s ended, Strayhorn entered into a new Saturday routine with another group of friends. He started socializing regularly with a prosperous black couple, Marian and Arthur Logan, whose brownstone at 121 West 88th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was becoming a social center for New York’s black elite. Strayhorn had met Marian Logan professionally when she was Marian Bruce, the nightclub singer he accompanied on Clark Terry’s In a Mellow Tone album. Since her marriage to Logan, a doctor, in March 1958, she had largely ceded her musical career to a role as one of black society’s grand hostesses. A handsome woman and self-assuredly possessed, she wore her good looks like an object to be coveted; because of her high, sculpted cheekbones and flowing, waved shoulder-length hair, she resembled Marlene Dietrich, and, like her, she would never stand or sit—she would lounge. She chain-smoked Kents with her left hand and held her drink, usually champagne—“my bubbly”—in her right. Marian Logan was particular: she preferred Dom Perignon, talked about favorite vintages impressively, and served them in fluted French crystal from Tiffany’s. She had a light, throaty speaking voice and carried on conversations in a disarming blend of formal language, softly and carefully articulated, and slang, spit out. Describing her home’s interior design, she said, “We requested that an open staircase be constructed, leading to the second floor Arthur and I thought it might bring a sense of mystery to the room, although it allowed all the men to look up at my ass.” Gutted to the beams and renovated to their specifications, the main floor of the nineteenth-century townhouse the Logans bought early in 1960 was thoroughly as inviting as the exposed walnut stairway that served as its centerpiece. All the old interior walls were removed, creating one room the length of the building, a party space. There was a grand piano at the front end of the floor and a small bar in the back; dark woods and muted earth tones shrank the space and warmed it. “Marian’s parlor was one of the real ‘in’ places of black society,” said Rachel Robinson, the wife of Jackie Robinson. “Marian was an extraordinary hostess. She had cocktail parties that were like a Who’s Who.” In the late 1950s, Logan played hostess to the likes of the Robinsons, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and Sarah Vaughan, as well as Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.

  Neither man gravitated to the Logans’ for social status. While Strayhorn was inching into Marian Logan’s inner circle, Ellington became close to her husband, his personal physician—an admitted hypochondriac’s best friend. Reared in Tuskegee, Alabama, and educated at Williams College in Massachusetts and the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, Logan had the cordial warmth of a country gentleman and a professional authority that engendered trust among the most privacy-conscious patients, public figures such as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Robinsons, in addition to Ellington and Strayhorn and many of their friends, including most of the Copasetics. (In 1956, Strayhorn had titled a surging, bop-oriented piece he composed for the Ellington Orchestra after the institution where the Copasetics received medical attention and Dr. Logan practiced, “Upper Manhattan Medical Group,” or “U.M.M.G.”) Logan had a finely groomed mustache and a furrowed pompadour, both silver. Fair-skinned and delicately featured with olive eyes, he was frequently mistaken for white. “I got used to the dirty looks from people who thought I was hanging on a white man, and a doctor, yet,” said Marian Logan. When Logan spoke, which he did with the slightest Alabama accent, he would steadily increase both the speed and the pitch of his voice, then clip off the last word of a sentence, leaving an instant of sudden silence; this infused the most casual remarks with dramatic impact. Ellington, now over sixty, treasured his association with Logan and not only because the doctor carried weight with Ellington’s most fearsome antagonist, his mortality. “Of course, Edward needed Arthur. Arthur kept him healthy, so he could make his music,” said Marian Logan. “Edward also loved the idea of Arthur. He thought it was magnificent to have his personal physician with him all the time, like some sort of ancient potentate. He loved to have Arthur and I at recording sessions, and we’d go to all of the shows—he’d see to it that we never had to pay—so he could have his personal physician on hand. He would call Arthur at the most ungodly hours—four in the morning, five in the morning—just to make sure Arthur would pick up the phone in case he might really need him for something if he weren’t perfectly healthy, which Edward usually was. Edward knew he was a hypochondriac—lots of people are. Big deal. That doesn’t mean anything. Edward liked the idea of having his doctor at his beck and call, anywhere, anytime, and Arthur was complicit in it. Arthur went along for the ride. You know why? He loved it, too. He loved the idea of being Duke Ellington’s doctor. It was all a big, fabulous charade, two grown men playing dress-up.”

  Early on Saturday afternoons, Strayhorn called Marian Logan from one of the pay phones by the escalators in Macy’s basement, where the store sold imported foods and gourmet specialties. Ever f
ond of nicknames, Strayhorn had taken up Arthur Logan’s pet name for his wife, Doll Baby; she usually called him Strays but sometimes Itty Bitty Buddy or Bitty for short. Strayhorn usually addressed Dr. Logan as Arturo. “Strays said, ‘Good afternoon, Doll Baby. I’m at Macy’s. What are you fixing for dinner?’” Marian Logan recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know. What do you have in mind?’ Strays said, ‘Don’t do a thing. I’ll be right there.’” An hour later Strayhorn ceremoniously unpacked two overloaded brown shopping bags onto the Logans’ dining-room table, displaying all the ingredients for paella. “I took the job of mixing cocktails while Strays made dinner. Arthur chopped the vegetables and such,” said Logan. “There was so much food cooking, my goodness. We called some friends [including Strayhorn’s colleague Felrath Hines from the Neal Salon, who lived behind the Logans on West 89th Street], and a few hours later, we were properly looped and having a party.” With minor variations in ingredients—the recipe and the friends would vary, according to availability—this became a weekly ritual for Strayhorn and the Logans. “Strays would say, ‘I’ll make the pot,’ and he’d be off. It would be like somebody would call a stew. But when he got finished with the wine and the seasonings and everything, oh, it would be ambrosia, I’m telling you.”

  Within a couple of months, no one needed to be invited; overlapping groups of Strayhorn’s and the Logans’ friends—Hines, Luther Henderson, Bill Coleman, the Neals, the Robinsons—knew to come by the Logans’ house on Saturdays for Strayhorn’s pot. “We all took turns cutting up the ingredients and everything. Strayhorn had us all working for him,” said Hines in mock outrage. Francis Goldberg came just once or twice. “Strays finally brought Goldie down. He was bugging him to come,” said Marian Logan. “He was very presentable and good-looking. He made a very good impression. But he was a pain in everybody’s ass. He had to be the center of the attention. He tried to take over the cooking and make it a professional production, and it was supposed to be a fun thing, a thing for the whole group.” At dinnertime, Goldberg situated himself at the head of the Logans’ table and waited to be served rather than make his own plate, like everyone else. “Goldie was terribly emotional, and that got under Strays’ skin something awful. Anybody joke around with him and say something anywhere teasing, Goldie went into a fit. ‘How dare you talk to me that way?’ He’d be out of his chair and standing there at attention, the big baby. You’d look over at Strays, and he’d be gone. Strays was in the kitchen, stirring his pot. Goldie embarrassed him; we hardly saw him. When Strays started coming around regularly, Goldie was nothing but trouble. Strays was trying to get away from him.”

  Like Strayhorn and some of those most dear to him since his childhood, from his mother and Harry Herforth to Aaron Bridgers and Lena Horne, Marian Logan loved nature and books. Logan made it known that she was fond of white flowers, and Strayhorn made it a habit to bring her one—just one and of any variety, but white only—every time he saw her. Since they were sometimes difficult to find, Strayhorn had a standing order with a neighborhood florist, the Academy Floral Company on Broadway and 107th Street, to set aside white flowers, and he gave them to Logan with such frequency that she kept an opal teardrop vase on the piano just for Strayhorn’s gifts; she would usually replace each one before it had time to die. Logan, in a position of some leisure, bought and read about a dozen books a year, predominantly biographies and popular fiction, as well as some poetry (her favorite poet was e. e. cummings), which she shared with Strayhorn. “Not every book. One out of every four or five I read, if it was really interesting,” she said. “Strays didn’t care for escapism. He liked to read something stimulating whenever possible”—that is, virtually anytime. Some Saturdays, the Logans and Strayhorn broke their cooking-party routine and took a drive north on the Taconic Parkway into the Catskills, Arthur Logan behind the wheel of his sleek, immense black Impala convertible, his wife alternately chatting and napping, Strayhorn reclining sidelong in the back, reading a book. In order to vary his stimulants, Strayhorn would also bring a portable bar: a wicker-and-leather attaché-style case equipped with various mixological accessories, glasses, and bottles filled with gin and tonic water. “He’d lie there in the back with a cocktail, and he’d read away,” said Marian Logan. “Arthur would be looking at the countryside and say, ‘Strays, there’s a beautiful farmhouse,’ or whatever. Strays would say, ‘Wonderful, Arturo, wonderful! Describe it to me.’ And he’d keep reading and sipping on his cocktail.” When the three venturers dallied off the highway onto local roads around Phoenicia in New York State, country stores and roadside stands—rural shopping opportunities—would get Strayhorn engaged. He loved buying farm-grown fruits and vegetables and once, impressed by a harvest of cabbage, bought a whole bushel basket of it; back in the city, he called his friends and invited them to come and each take a head. “We stopped into one little store somewhere, and Strays said, ‘Ooooh, this is what I’ve always wanted!’” said Marian Logan. “It was one of those old-fashioned ice-cream makers that you have to crank. Strays just had to have it, so he bought it, and we brought it home, and the next weekend, Strays made ice cream. Peach. We called everybody, and he laid down the law: everybody had to take a turn cranking the goddamn thing or they couldn’t eat any of the ice cream. Except he wasn’t about to do any cranking. Oh my goodness, no. Of course, naturally, we wouldn’t let him eat any of his own ice cream. My God, oh, they were good times.

  “But Strays wasn’t always in very good shape,” Logan said. “He had his good days, but he had his bad days, believe me, the poor thing. You had to see him. Some days he came by, and he would stay here and he would be great. He loved to play the piano. He played for me. Always classical. Never jazz—never, most of the time, unless I asked him to, His favorite thing, when he was here, was we would stay up all night and talk. Arthur went to bed. Strays said, ‘Good night, Arturo. I’ll tuck your Doll Baby in.’ We’d stay up all night. Five, six in the morning, we’d still be yapping. That was his favorite time in the world. The phrase he used for it was halfway to dawn. He said, the way he saw it—he had such a wonderful mind, a brilliant mind, the way he saw things—he said he liked the fact that it was a kind of in-between state. It wasn’t day and it wasn’t night. What day was it? You’re half asleep. You’re half awake. Your resistance is gone—it’s like a truth serum. Your feelings just pour out. You don’t even realize what you’re saying. He loved that, loved it. He told me, he said, ‘I think everything should happen at halfway to dawn. That’s when all the heads of government should meet. I think everybody would fall in love.’

  “We talked about civil rights. Strays was very aware of what was going on in the world. The man was politically aware. He wanted to do something for the movement—we both did—and we would talk all night about the situation and the things we thought had to be done. He knew every single person involved in the movement by name. His interest was not casual. The man was as serious as shit. Then, half the time, he was a wasted man. He couldn’t talk. He was drinking day and night. Half the time, he wasn’t really there. He was a shell. But nobody could tell unless you really knew him. If you didn’t know him extremely well … I mean, like family, and there weren’t that many people who really knew him like that. He didn’t allow it. If you really knew him, you knew what a bad state he was in. He always had the same expression. He had a beautiful smile, like a baby. Half the time, he would be so out of it that he literally couldn’t speak. You had to put your ear right up to his mouth to hear what he was saying. He couldn’t make sounds. You never knew how he was going to be. He drank just constantly, in every imaginable situation. He wasn’t looking for reasons to drink. It was beyond reasons. He just drank. If he was down, he drank to drown it, and if he was up, he drank to celebrate. He drank for relaxation. He drank for fun.”

  One afternoon that spring, Strayhorn called his friend Bill Coleman. “Why don’t you come on by, and we’ll have breakfast,” Strayhorn suggested. “I have bacon!” Coleman came over out of cur
iosity. “It was funny, like he had some exotic thing, bacon! Like it was a rare delicacy that was impossible to get. ‘I have bacon!’” Coleman opened up Strayhorn’s refrigerator to see the bacon for himself, and there was indeed a package of bacon on a shelf and a bottle of gin on another, and nothing else.

  Professionally, Strayhorn bobbed between fervent engagement and resigned inertia. He continued to take on projects outside his ongoing work with Ellington, most often with Johnny Hodges, but he was functioning, at times, from a dilatory remove. In April 1959, he accepted an offer from Stanley Dance, the English jazz writer and record producer, to serve as musical director and pianist on a small-band Hodges showcase with fellow Ellingtonians Quentin Jackson on trombone, Harold “Shorty” Baker on trumpet, and Russell Procope on clarinet, as well as session players Al Hall (founder of Wax Records, a 78 label) on bass and Oliver Jackson on drums. A longtime Ellington enthusiast, Dance had once written a withering critique of Strayhorn’s early contribution to the Ellington Orchestra canon: “Mr. Strayhorn is an example of today’s youth in jazz. He throws tradition overboard. He will have originality at the expense of beauty.… Listen to ‘Chelsea Bridge,’ an example of an obsession for tone colour and voicing which excludes everything else that matters,” wrote Dance in the English journal Jazz Music in 1943. After Dance married the producer Helen Oakley and moved to the United States, he slipped into Ellington’s inner circle, and he and Strayhorn achieved a gentlemanly concord. “I wouldn’t say we were best friends, but Billy was always perfectly gracious. I don’t know if he ever read a word I wrote about him. He never brought it up, and I didn’t either, certainly,” said Dance, a tall, soft-spoken fellow with a Ronald Colman mustache and the temperate charm of a palace official, which is essentially what he was. “That [recording] date, Stanley and Billy, you know, I’d say kept away from each other,” recalled Oliver Jackson. “Billy and Rab [Hodges] were so close, man, that’s the only reason Billy did the date.”