by David Hajdu
* * *
In the right corner of the landing at the top of the steps that led from the ground floor of the Logans’ building on West 88th Street to their living-room entrance, there was a straight-backed wooden chair. It was intended to be used for putting on and taking off boots, but since neither of the Logans wore boots the seat of the chair was covered with at least a week’s worth of newspapers, amassed until someone got around to lugging them down to the trash. On a cold Saturday early in 1964, Arthur Logan poked onto the landing to greet Strayhorn and noticed his friend sitting precariously on top of the newspapers; he was not removing boots. Strayhorn was huffing to catch his breath after having climbed the Logans’ stairs. His eyes were slightly popped, and he looked pale. Marian Logan watched from behind her husband as he quickly knelt in front of Strayhorn and studied his face. “Arthur said, ‘If I were a doctor, I’d say you could use a checkup,’” recalled Marian Logan. “Strays nodded his head, and Arthur reached out his hand to help him get up and go into the house.” Four or five days later, late on an afternoon at the end of the week, Logan came home a couple of hours earlier than usual and sat down in front of Marian at their dining table. “He said, ‘Oh, the worst news in the world, doll.’ I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘Itty Bitty Buddy is sick.’ I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘He has cancer—of the esophagus. And it’s bad, Doll Baby. It’s bad.’ He was just brokenhearted. He just sat there. He put his head on the table, and he cried like a baby.”
Marian Logan let her husband weep, holding his hand. “After he was all calmed down, I asked him, ‘How bad?’ He said, ‘Very advanced, probably terminal. But I’m going to send him to some specialists. We’ll see what they can do. I said, ‘Why? What causes that? Cigarettes?’ Arthur said, ‘Smoke, drink—either one. Maybe neither. It’s cancer. We don’t know. And it doesn’t matter now.”*
Logan hadn’t yet shared his diagnosis with Strayhorn; he wanted to tell him privately on their next Saturday, friend to friend. “Arthur said, ‘Well, I’m going to get Strays.’ They drove into the country and talked. This is when he told him what to expect, what was going to happen, and all that kind of information. They were gone three or four hours. Arthur always believed that you should tell the patient the truth, no matter what it was. He said, ‘If you lie to people, they’ll know you’re lying, and they’ll think of something even worse.’ They came back, and Strays walked through the door with a smile on his face. Strays felt very secure because he loved Arthur and he believed in him and had known him for years. He said, ‘Now, I’m all right, Doll Baby. I’m all right. We’re going to manage through it. Arturo said I can drink, so let’s have a Sterling martini.”
Bill Coleman stopped by Strayhorn’s house later that evening and heard the news. Startled and distraught, Coleman found his friend collected. “He discussed it matter-of-factly, in very measured tones. ‘Arthur says I have cancer.’ He kept that even temper. He talked about dying possibly and was completely cool and calm as he talked about it. He was resigned and obviously had been resigned about important matters before and knew how to handle it.”
Ellington, less accustomed to resignation, responded to the diagnosis of his partner of twenty-five years in an eruption of emotion. “Arthur called Edward and told him. He was on the road somewhere,” Marian Logan recounted. “Arthur said, ‘Edward is terribly, terribly angry. I think he blames me. ‘How can you tell me this? Do you know what you’re saying? Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ ‘I said I just diagnosed him.’ Edward said, ‘What kind of doctor are you? Why didn’t you see this coming?’ He was irrational. And he was pissed off.” Perry Watkins, a theatrical producer traveling with the orchestra at the time, saw Ellington’s rage nearly deplete his renowned patience. “I think Billy’s illness upset him. I know it did, because I was on the road with the band,” said Watkins. “We did twenty-seven gigs in thirty-one days, and we really had no time to think very much, and during that time the news of Billy’s illness came. Mercer and I were adjacent to each other [in the hotel], and he [Ellington] called Mercer, and I went into the room, and he said, ‘I’m very upset, and I don’t want any nonsense tonight. You tell the cats.’ The gentlemen in the band act up variously from time to time, and he was in no mood that night for any foolishness at all. And on top of that, he lost a pair of gold cufflinks, which also made him pretty angry, too. So he was in no mood that night. He said, ‘You know, this thing distresses me no end.’ He said, ‘Why Billy? Why Billy, of all…’ He said, ‘This thing shouldn’t happen to me.’”
There’s no knowing exactly what Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn said to each other. Was Strayhorn as contained with Ellington, his closest collaborator, as he was with his personal friend Bill Coleman? Would Ellington have vented his frustrations to Strayhorn or provided stolid support? Using the same wording with many of his friends, Strayhorn would only say, “Edward told me not to worry about a thing.”
In their work together through the mid-1960s, Ellington and Strayhorn lost a bit of creative momentum, producing two albums of contemporary hits arranged in the Ellington style (including “Moon River,” “Red Roses for a Blue Lady,” the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and the like) and an Ellingtonian version of the Sherman Brothers’ score to the Walt Disney musical Mary Poppins. Playfully imaginative, the new treatments and performances generally transcended the music’s origins: the work is artful, if not always art on a scale with the Ellington and Strayhorn masterworks. “A lot of the arrangements of those pop tunes were done on the spot in the studio,” said Buster Cooper, a trombonist. “Duke hummed the sections or Billy scribbled ideas down, and Tom Whaley copied the parts right there. The ink on the sheet music would still be wet when we were cutting the record.” If the course of the Ellington and Strayhorn collaboration was in a level stage, it also had impressive spikes, most notably the suite inspired by cultures the composers had encountered in the Middle East. Performed (in incomplete form) as early as February 1964 and refined over the following year, the mistitled Far East Suite evoked, translated, filtered, intermingled, and reinvented the sounds of a complexity of Eastern cultures with a loving sense of wonder, even though one of its highlights—“Isfahan,” named after the city in Iran—had been composed by Strayhorn long before the trip (and was originally titled “Elf”). The work (not released commercially until early 1967) represented a return to form for Ellington and Strayhorn, as Dan Morgenstern raved in Down Beat: “If you have been saving a vintage bottle of Chateau Lafitte Rothschild or some other kind of ambrosia, the advent of this chapter in Ellingtonia provides that special occasion you have been waiting for.… Hail, then, to the Duke of Ellington, who has added the colors and textures of the Orient to his brilliant palette, and has given us new riches on top of riches. Hail, also, to Billy Strayhorn, who has enriched his legacy. It is encouraging that music of such strength and beauty can be created in our troublesome times; music that fulfills the uplifting purport of true art.”
“Billy became much more serious after his diagnosis for cancer—more serious about music, more serious in general,” recalled Bill Coleman. “He didn’t seem to want to put as much of himself into the less artistic projects for Ellington. He started talking about writing classical music again. We talked about his writing a work of variations on some jazz themes. He had more gravity.” For his Riverside Park reading, Strayhorn switched from the newspaper to books, Oliver Jackson noticed. (His library at the time included Dylan Thomas’s Me and My Bike; Picasso’s Picassos, a book of prints; Robert Laffont’s Il ne m’est Paris, in French; and Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence.) He laughed less at Ernest Brown’s jokes, his fellow Copasetics member thought. “I guess he never thought I was funny, but he stopped pretending,” said Brown. He brushed up on art, calling Felrath Hines to recommend favorite books and exhibits. His conversations with Martin Luther King at the Logans’ seemed to Marian Logan longer and more heated; the two men moved from the kitchen into the parlor, fac
ing off in the cushioned chairs. In the second week of December 1964, when King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Logans brought Strayhorn to see their celebrated friend off to Stockholm. Euphoric activists celebrated with King in a lounge at Kennedy Airport as Strayhorn watched from his swivel chair and punctuated the encomiums with an occasional “Bravo!”
That winter, he began nurturing a close relationship with an acquaintance of Frank Neal’s and Charles Sebree’s from their days at the Art Institute of Chicago, Bill Grove, a graphic designer long on the periphery of Strayhorn’s social circle. Two years younger than Strayhorn, Grove, who was white, was quiet to a point that unnerved some and serious to the verge of humorlessness. “He never said anything, so you never knew what he was thinking,” said Haywood Williams. Grove’s was an expressionless, unchanging face, handsome as it was. He had a trim row of light brown hair scalloping a vast forehead. Raised in moderate comfort outside of Chicago, Grove had studied piano as a boy and painted watercolors; he despised his father, his sister Madeline Grove Williams recalled. “He was always very reserved,” she said. “When he was young, he was extremely shy, painfully shy. He was a very timid person. He was always extremely vain, a very fancy dresser. Not flashy, but he took pride in wearing beautiful clothes.” Since young adulthood, Bill Grove had socialized primarily with black men, his sister said. One of his longtime intimates in New York, the black pianist Dwike Mitchell said of him, “He is the one person—and I say person, not white person—who I’ve ever met in my life who didn’t have an ounce of prejudice in him.” Grove, who moved to New York in 1939, the same year as Strayhorn, valued order and precision. He spent virtually all his professional life at the same job, as art director of the magazine Consumer Reports, where the staff knew him as proper and detail-oriented. “We were located in a slum of Mount Vernon, New York, and people dressed and behaved for the occasion, but not Bill,” recalled the magazine’s editor, Irwin Landau. “Bill was always elegantly dressed, very well-mannered. Besides being a good designer, he was a very good editor and an expert on the nuts and bolts of things like our ratings tables and what was right and what was wrong and where we used a period. I think everyone remembers visits from Bill where he would say, ‘Are you sure this is correct?’”
Neighbors on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (Grove lived on Central Park West, a few blocks south of Strayhorn’s old place on West 106th Street), Strayhorn and Grove started meeting regularly for dinner at the Flash Inn, cocktails at the Showman’s. “Strays’ whole gang knew, ‘Okay, now they’re a couple,’” said Marian Logan. “At first, people did a little double take, you know, because he was white. But that wasn’t what that relationship was about—it wasn’t any black-white thing. It was a thing about compatibility. Strays found just what he needed right then with Grove. They both drank like it was water, but they talked a lot and Grove listened to Strays. He was a listener; Goldie was a talker. They went to movies. They read magazines and books.” (Strayhorn’s copy of The Stones of Florence was inscribed “BS/BG.”) With Bill Grove, Billy Strayhorn slowed down, as if to stretch the time.
Among the few who knew of Strayhorn’s illness, its symptoms still inconspicuous, Honi Coles urged his friend to expend his creative energy more judiciously. “I told him, ‘Do your own stuff—write a symphony,’” said Coles. “‘Put together your own band, make your own records. You put yourself second long enough. Time to put yourself out there.’” With the venues for tap dancing diminishing, Coles had taken a nonperforming job as stage manager of the Apollo Theater; without Strayhorn’s assent, he was already planning to produce a concert showcasing Strayhorn as a performer. “I had the date allocated, and I was ready to talk him into it. Then somebody beat me to the punch.” In March 1965, three representatives from the Duke Ellington Jazz Society, a six-year-old organization of Ellington enthusiasts, offered Strayhorn the opportunity to be featured in the first solo concert of his lifetime. The fact that they had no knowledge of his illness served to persuade Strayhorn to give the performance. “He was very happy to be recognized,” said Marian Logan. “He didn’t want it out of pity.” Strayhorn was indeed well recognized within the clubby realm of the eighty-member society. “Our approach as a matter of principle was always Ellington-hyphen-Strayhorn—that those two men were to be treated as absolute equals, and it was established as a matter of great importance,” said Douglas Bray, president of the society and chair of its concert committee. Encouraged by Ellington’s sister Ruth, who passed along Strayhorn’s unlisted home phone number, Bray called Strayhorn to discuss the prospect of his performing; it took four phone calls over two weeks, Strayhorn hedging and postponing, until Bray—accompanied by fellow Ellington Jazz Society members Tom Detienne and Tom Harris—met Strayhorn to discuss the concert. They convened at six o’clock on a weekday in the lounge of the new New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan, a swinging-sixties atmosphere; suited businessmen arched hungrily in plush-cushioned, chrome-tube chairs that shifted about in a swamp of shag carpeting. Making small talk, Bray brought up a parallel he saw in Strayhorn’s association with Ellington and the mentor-protégé relationship between Goethe and Schiller; Strayhorn knew his Goethe well enough to chat on the subject and promised to catch up on Schiller. “Good,” Bray recalled Strayhorn’s saying, “now I can learn about me.”
As the group shifted to its agenda, however, Strayhorn withdrew. “He just did not want to do it,” recalled Harris. “He expressed great reservation about whether an audience would come to hear him. ‘Why would anybody pay money to come and listen to me for an hour and a half? They want to hear Duke and not me.’ And we reiterated over and over again that he was greatly beloved in Ellington circles, [among] Ellington people, and pointed out that this was who the audience was. I remember we reassured him that this was like an extended family. I think he felt reassured when we focused on this extended-family aspect—this would not be an audience off the street. These would be people who were prepared to love him because they already knew what he had done, and they were prepared to enjoy and to love whatever he wanted to do. We put it on the basis ‘Pretend you’re just playing for friends, Billy.’ In the course of giving all the reasons why he couldn’t do it, shouldn’t do it, didn’t want to do it, he said, ‘Don’t forget, Dukie Boy is out there all the time. I play in my apartment and in recording studios. But it’s not the same thing. I don’t play in public. I’m not a public artist or performer.’” Frustrated, Bray finally offered Strayhorn an out. “All right, Billy,” he said, “Let’s talk about it again another time. Maybe you’ll feel differently about it next year,” and, taking a long draw on a cigarette, Strayhorn abandoned his objections. “You know,” he said, as Bray recalled, “it sounds like fun.”
Once committed, Strayhorn tackled his concert debut with youthful vigor. He planned out a three-part program made up entirely of his own compositions and co-compositions with Ellington: first a recital-style segment of unaccompanied piano, then a few trio performances and a set featuring a small group with somewhat unusual instrumentation. He lined up trumpeter Clark Terry, who had left the Ellington Orchestra in 1959; clarinetist and alto saxophonist Bob Wilber; French horn player Willie Ruff; bassist Wendell Marshall; and drummer Dave Bailey, along with Ozzie Bailey for a few vocal numbers. A week before the concert, scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, June 6, at the New School on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village, Strayhorn called a rehearsal in his apartment; he had written new arrangements for the whole second half of the concert, vigorous charts of old and relatively recent pieces, such as “Passion Flower” (reconceived as a soaring up-tempo number), “Chelsea Bridge,” “Rain Check,” and “Upper Manhattan Medical Group.” The band ran through the tunes for about four hours, with breaks for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. “He had worked out every detail—the harmonics, everything he wanted us to play,” recalled Ruff. “He even had worked out, very precisely, the dynamics, which nobody, nobody bothers with in jazz. If he didn’t hear what he wanted to hear, h
e hadn’t written what he wanted to hear—the writing was like that. That day, when we were rehearsing, he made a few changes on things he didn’t like, or, more likely, if somebody had trouble playing something. One horn passage of mine was tricky. He said, ‘I can rewrite that, you know.’ And I said, ‘No, Billy, I like the way it lays. Let me get used to it.’ It was just a hard phrase to make. He really knew the French horn. But he never, ever used clichés. His writing was so unusual it could catch you by surprise the first time.” In honor of the group’s rehearsal site, Strayhorn dubbed his first band in nearly thirty years the Riverside Drive Five.
A group of friends—an extended family indeed—the sold-out audience of jazz fans in the 450-seat New School auditorium gave Strayhorn an explosive ovation as soon as he walked on stage, dolled up in a new, bright-white suit. He beamed and laughed out loud, still giggling as he started playing a set of meticulous piano solos, including chamber-jazz renditions of pieces from throughout his career: “Hear Say” (his modernist segment of the Ellington-Strayhorn Deep South Suite), “Orson” (a tribute to Welles), “All Heart” (a ballad of his incorporated into the Ellington-Strayhorn Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald suite), and the buoyant Ellington Orchestra dance tune “Clementine.” “I had known he was good, but I didn’t know he was that fantastic a pianist until that concert. He blew the hall away,” said the pianist Randy Weston, one of the many musicians, including Ray Nance, Billy Eckstine, and the drummer Jo Jones, who attended the show. Strayhorn charmed the place with his nonchalant humor. “He had a graceful confidence that was overwhelming,” said Dave Bailey. “From the moment that he tiptoed to the piano, everybody just knew, okay, here comes a genius. Swee’ Pea was a very demure person and a very mysterious person, meaning you didn’t know whether to take him seriously or not. But he used that fact as a performer. He handled the audience very deftly.” Tom Harris recalled that Strayhorn introduced a new song (untitled and unknown) with a slyly mocking story, announcing, “I have a friend. And this friend has an orchestra, and this friend travels with this orchestra fifty-two weeks a year. He refuses to take a vacation, and this has been going on for years. Every once in a while, this friend calls me from some place I’ve never heard of, from some distant part of the world, and says, ‘Billy, I’m working on a song, but I’m stuck, can’t finish it. Now, the first part goes like this: Bah bah bah bee boo bee bee bah bah, bah bah bah bah bee bee boo bah boo. I want you to finish it for me. Call me back tomorrow morning. Or in ten minutes. And tell me how you finished it.’” Pause and laughter. “Now, I’m going to let you in on a secret. I didn’t call him back yet, but I’m going to play it for you now.” According to Tom Detienne, “the audience went bananas, completely bananas.”
