Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  Reviewing the performance in the New York Times, John S. Wilson noted, “Mr. Strayhorn is a small, dapper man with a flair for elegance and a mocking wit.” Musically, Strayhorn was equally well received by the press; Dan Morgenstern wrote in Down Beat, “This concert … afforded a rare and welcome opportunity to hear and see Strayhorn in a full-fledged showcase of his multiple talents. It indicated, among other things, that Strayhorn is much more than Ellington’s alter ego (although that in itself would be no mean accomplishment).… Everything he plays is invested with a rare sense of form and development, and there is none of the empty rhapsodizing to which some of his melodies and harmonies lend themselves in lesser hands.”

  Ellington, out of town again, missed the concert but heard such glowing reports from his sister that he arranged for Strayhorn and his Riverside Drive Five to record their numbers for an album. The week after the concert, Ellington himself produced—and paid for—the sessions, recorded at the RCA Records studios. “The day after the concert, I got a call,” said Bob Wilber, a reed player. “It was Billy, and he says, ‘Well, we’re going to record the concert because it went so well.’ And I showed up, and the first thing I notice is—I look into the control booth—and there’s Duke. Duke was sort of the producer for the date. With Billy, you sensed a very firm sense of purpose behind the work. With Duke, it was fun.” As they wrapped up all the band’s numbers, Ellington announced that he wanted to tape one more. “We got some time. Let’s fool around,” he said, as Wilber recalled. “So he sat down at the piano with Billy,” Wilber said, “and Duke said, ‘Anybody got a riff? Guys?’ And Clark came up with some little figure and played it for Duke. Duke said, ‘Okay, let’s go,’ and they rolled the tape, and they recorded it. The number was done, and Duke said, ‘That’s the way to do it.’” (Ellington, Strayhorn, and the Riverside Drive Five recorded two tunes created this way, “Oink” and “Pig Sty.” Both derived from riffs contributed by Terry, and the songs were copyrighted by Tempo Music in the name of Terry’s wife, Pauline Reddon. On CD, “Pig Sty” has been mistakenly entitled “Pick Side” and inaccurately attributed to Strayhorn.)

  Strayhorn seemed radically energized by the whole stream of events, optimistic, confident, altogether upbeat, even about his health. He talked about taking the Riverside Drive Five on a national tour. Looking back as he planned forward, he offered George Greenlee, the man who had introduced him to Ellington, the job of managing the tour. “He said, ‘George, I’d really like you to do this,’” said Greenlee. “Obviously, he was thinking his time might be limited, and he wanted to pay me back in some way. He was wrapping up. But I didn’t know anything about managing a tour. Frankly, it was a strange job to offer me. But that’s what he had.”

  Discussing the prospective tour with Willie Ruff, Strayhorn brought up his illness, which Ruff had heard something about through his longtime duo partner, Dwike Mitchell; Bill Grove and Mitchell were still close friends. “He said he wanted to keep playing and he thought he’d be able to keep going for a while longer because Dr. Logan found a surgeon to operate on his throat,” said Ruff. “He said Dr. Logan got this big Japanese surgeon who commuted between Tokyo, New York, and Boston to do this one operation. He said esophageal problems were very common in Japan because they drink very, very hot things, like boiling; it has to be bubbling when it goes down, he said. So they had some advanced treatments, and was going to have this thing done.” The surgery Strayhorn underwent, relatively common in the United States as well as Japan, was a tracheostomy, in which an incision is made in the windpipe, between the Adam’s apple and the collarbones; the thyroid gland is severed, and a metal (or plastic) tube is inserted for breathing. In Strayhorn’s case, the voice box wasn’t affected, so his speech was unimpaired.

  The silken chic of Strayhorn’s ascots, puffed between starched and pressed collars, obscured the severity of his condition only among casual company. “You could tell in his eyes—he was more shaken up than he wanted people to think,” said Haywood Williams. “He tried to put on a happy front. ‘Everything’s fine. I feel great.’ You knew better, if you knew him at all.” Among close friends and in the solace of a fifth or sixth drink, Strayhorn showed signs of a steadily darkening state. Slumped at the Logans’ dining table late one night, he rolled a wax apple out of a lazy Susan and stared at it for a few minutes, declaring matter-of-factly, “A fruit that only looks like it’s alive. That makes two of us.” With Lena Horne, whom he could see just once every few months since she was living in Palm Springs and touring the nightclub circuit, Strayhorn poured out his distress. “I had never seen Billy like that,” recalled Horne. “I had seen him depressed before. We had both gone through terrible low points and helped each other ride it out. This time, he didn’t think this was one you could ride out. This was it. He knew it, and I knew it. And all I could do is let him feel and let the feelings out. Oh, he cried. He cried, and he drank, and he cried some more. I couldn’t be around as much as I wanted to be. I wanted to be with him all the time.”

  As he had always revealed his feelings through his music, Strayhorn started venting his anguish creatively. He reworked a piece he had composed for an unreleased Ellington session and titled it “Boo-Lose,” combining his fondness for wordplay with open self-pity. Venturing further, he took on one of the lightest assignments Ellington had ever given him and twisted it into a message of fatalistic discontent. On a trip along the West Coast, Ellington had heard Gerald Wilson’s Los Angeles–based big band perform a Wilson tune called “When I’m Feeling Kinda Blue,” a backbeat-driven dance number in the vein of late-1950s rock and roll. Ellington “smelled a hit,” said Wilson, and asked for the music. “Duke took the arrangement I did for my band, which I gave him happily,” said Wilson. “Duke said he wanted Strayhorn to add lyrics, which he did. Strayhorn came up with a new title, and he wrote a set of lyrics, and he called me up. He had just called Duke and read them to Duke, and Duke loved them. Duke wrote them down over the phone, and we had a song: my music and Billy’s lyrics.” Strayhorn’s new title was “Imagine My Frustration,” and the lyrics use a banal old rock-song theme, the wallflower pining for acceptance. By the end of most such songs, the protagonist is at last appreciated for his or her (traditionally, her) unseen or unconventional virtues and finds happiness. Not so in Strayhorn’s variant, a cynical story of hopelessness. This time, despite her proud persistence, the wallflower remains unredeemed and unappreciated:

  Went down to the dance,

  Sat down by the wall,

  Invited to dance

  By no one at all.

  The couples danced by

  So charming and gay

  But nobody once

  Looked over my way.

  So awfully sad,

  Dissatisfied

  And hurt so bad,

  I almost cried.

  Imagine my frustration

  With no invitation to dance.

  Head high, standing tall,

  Who else could I be

  But belle of the ball

  Who likes what they see,

  And then in my ear

  Someone said to me,

  Wallflower, my dear,

  How come you can’t see?

  They couldn’t care less,

  They’re not impressed.

  As you might guess,

  You’re in excess.

  Imagine my frustration

  With no invitation to dance.

  A smile to the crowd,

  Tiptoe and alert,

  The band blew and bowed

  But nixed on the flirt.

  A voice said to me,

  Wallflower, my dear,

  You’re sweet as can be

  But how come you’re here?

  They couldn’t care less

  About your dress,

  You’re in a mess

  And in excess.

  Imagine my frustration

  With no invitation to dance.

  Recorded by Ella Fitzgerald wi
th the Ellington Orchestra in October 1965, “Imagine My Frustration” appeared on the album entitled Ella at Duke’s Place, the first Ellington Orchestra vocal project without Strayhorn on hand since Ellington and Strayhorn had met.

  Strayhorn’s cancer spread. Under Arthur Logan’s orders, the weakening patient began a regimen of high-dosage radiation treatments once a week at St. Clare’s Hospital on 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue; though nonintrusive, each of the sessions left Strayhorn dispirited for several days. He wasn’t eating and, for the first time in his fifty years, looked his age. His deep cherry-bark skin turned a thin gray. The radiation failed to slow the disease’s momentum, however, and Strayhorn required additional surgery to excise cancer cells. His esophagus was removed, necessitating a gastrostomy, wherein the stomach is severed and attached to a feeding tube with an external cap under the chest. Strayhorn could now consume liquids only, by opening an “abdominal tap” and pouring the fluids directly into his stomach. Though further consumption of alcohol would scarcely aid Strayhorn’s condition, Logan assessed the trauma of changing Strayhorn’s habits at this point as more detrimental to his patient than the alcohol itself. “Mix the martinis,” Strayhorn told Marian Logan when she visited him at home after his surgery. “Arturo said I can drink. And I know when Arturo tells me I can’t drink I’m in trouble.”

  Too ill to carry his traditional workload for Ellington (who continued his financial support), Strayhorn was husbanding his creative energy for unusual projects that appealed to him. At Ellington’s urging, he composed part of an exceptional suite entitled A Blue Mural from Two Perspectives for Ellington to perform as part of Lincoln Center’s Great Performances at Philharmonic Hall concert series. Premiered on December 12, 1965, the piece was written for four saxophones, piano, bass, and drums and is, in part, a classically inspired “mirror” composition: the sheet music is designed to be read forward first, then backward. (Called “retrograde,” the technique originated in the Middle Ages and was adopted in the twentieth century by twelve-tone composers.) The work took the musicians, including Ellington, aback. “It was weird, really. That was pure Strayhorn,” said Louie Bellson, the drummer for the performance. “I had never heard of anything like that, but Billy explained it to me. He said, ‘Bach liked to do it, Lou. Try it. You’ll like it too. Just read the music down till you get to the end, then read it backwards. You’ll have fun.’ And you know what? I really did.” The bassist, John Lamb, conservatory trained, had some experience with the technique in performances of chamber music, which he mentioned with some pride to Ellington during rehearsal the afternoon of the piece’s premiere. “I told Duke, ‘You find this in a fugue.’” “Naturally,” replied Ellington, determinedly repeating his piano part to master the piece. Though its title evokes its design, Ellington didn’t mention the piece’s conception in his introductory remarks, and the critics missed it, though A Blue Mural from Two Perspectives was well received. “The suite is not merely a matter of magic sounds,” wrote critic Dan Morgenstern in Down Beat. “It is also substantially structured and plumbs a wide range of moods and feelings. The opening section is a prime example of Ellington’s and Strayhorn’s ability to create with a minimum of instrumental resources and, one might add, to create music beyond categorization.” (It was never again performed or recorded in its entirety.) Strayhorn, watching from a box with a small group of musicians, including the pianist Jimmy Jones and Bill Berry, an Ellington Orchestra trumpeter, smiled delightedly throughout the performance and at its conclusion pulled a flask of cognac out of an inside pocket of his sports jacket for a celebratory toast. Berry tried to pretend he wasn’t looking as Strayhorn unbuttoned his shirt, popped open his abdominal tap, and poured cognac into his stomach.

  “Strayhorn was definitely trying to do a classical thing with a jazz touch, instead of a jazz piece with classical sophistication. That’s the way he explained it,” recalled Bellson. It was Strayhorn-Ellington rather than Ellington-Strayhorn. As Strayhorn told Marian Logan, “I can’t be Edward anymore, Doll Baby. I hardly have the strength to be me.”

  Ellington, at the same time, was pursuing a growing creative passion of his own: he started becoming absorbed with composing religiously themed music for performances with his orchestra in houses of worship such as Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, where his first “Concert of Sacred Music” took place on September 16, 1965. The shift in Ellington’s focus at this point, more than four decades after he put together his first band, seemed to many of those nearest to him to be one of the most personal steps of his career. “Edward felt that was his most important work,” said Ruth Ellington Boatwright. “He felt very deeply about it. He applied himself to it completely.” Though some of Ellington’s past music had evoked the spiritual tradition (notably “Come Sunday” from Black, Brown and Beige and the “Sunday Morning” finale of A Tone Parallel to Harlem), Ellington began creating whole programs of pieces invoking God and propagating faith. Some of the music was drawn or adapted from early Ellington efforts, including My People and his 1945 rhapsody New World A-Comin’, as well as Black, Brown and Beige. Like those projects, his new devotional music was unmistakably his own although, at his request, Strayhorn offered some advice on arrangements, an occasional melodic idea, and the basis for one of Ellington’s narrative interludes, a rumination on what Ellington called “the four freedoms by which I think Billy Strayhorn lived: freedom from hate, unconditionally; freedom from self-pity; freedom from fear of doing something that would help someone more than it does him; and freedom from the kind of pride that could make a man feel that he was better than his brother.”

  Strayhorn’s influence on Ellington’s religious work may have been more personal than musical. As Mercer Ellington saw this phase of his father’s life, confronting Strayhorn’s mortality shocked Ellington into dealing with his own place in the eternal scheme. “His first reaction was ‘How could that happen to Strayhorn?’” said Mercer Ellington. “That went into ‘Hey, then, why couldn’t that happen to me?’ and that started him thinking more deeply about God and everything. He always believed in God his whole life. That was always there. It came more to the forefront when Strayhorn got sick. The old man didn’t like the whole idea of death or any kind of ending of anything.” Strayhorn participated personally in only one of Ellington’s “sacred concerts,” a revised version of the Grace Cathedral event conducted at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in lower Manhattan at 8:00 p.m. and midnight the day after Christmas 1965. “And now there will be a change in programming,” Ellington announced midway through the concert. “Billy Strayhorn and his pretty little friend.” Lena Horne, demurely gorgeous, her hair wrapped in a white silk scarf, snuggled alongside Strayhorn on the piano bench and sang a new Christmas ballad (lyrics by the Reverend Dean Barlett, the pastor of Grace Cathedral) to Strayhorn’s plaintive piano.*

  Strayhorn and Bill Grove kept separate apartments, but as Strayhorn grew more seriously ill, they were rarely seen apart. At the Flash Inn, Joe Merenda started having two place settings prepared every time Strayhorn called to say that he was on his way. Grove joined Strayhorn at the Copasetics meetings, a de facto member. “If Billy was there, Bill Grove was there,” said Honi Coles. “As far as everybody was concerned, he was one of us.” It was Strayhorn and Grove at the Logans’ (“He sat and kept quiet, but he was there—and Martin liked him. He gave a bunch of big checks,” said Marian Logan), at the Neals’ (“There weren’t a lot of white faces in the lot, but he was one of them. Grove didn’t mind at all. You might say he liked it,” said Dorcas Neal), and most everywhere else Strayhorn used to go alone, including his families’ homes in Pittsburgh. On a summer weekend in 1966, Strayhorn brought Grove around to meet his brothers. “Bill Grove was the only one of Uncle Bill’s companions that I ever remember him bringing home to the family,” said Jimmy Strayhorn’s son Larry, who was twenty-six at the time. Jimmy and Grove talked outdoors while the Strayhorn kids watched; they seemed to chat easily, and Grove admired the concr
ete flower boxes Jimmy had crafted from handmade castings.

  Every weekend, as a rule, Strayhorn and Grove called a limo and took a ride out of Manhattan, sometimes with friends, including Dwike Mitchell. “Billy would say, ‘We’re going to New Jersey,’” recalled Mitchell. “And he and Grove—I might come, but they usually went alone—Billy and Grove would spend the day driving god-knows-where together all over New Jersey. They’d stop along the roads and shop for fruits and herbs and all kinds of things. And you know Grove was a drinker, like Billy. So you know that by the time they’d come back at the end of the day, they’d be flying, crawling out of the limo with bags of things from New Jersey, rolling out onto the curb.” Strayhorn and Grove had a “thing,” Mitchell said. Over the months, their friends noticed a new theme emerging in both their apartments: Grove gave Strayhorn an original oil painting of the sun and a ceramic serving dish glazed like the sun; Strayhorn gave Grove gold cufflinks with engravings of the sun and a sun-shaped wall clock. “They developed this just between them,” said Mitchell. “They became enamored of the sun and its radiance and powers of life-giving. Light and illumination and how it gave life. This became like the symbol of something that they had between them.” Amid this collection of vivifying symbols, Strayhorn found a real source of rejuvenation in Grove’s companionship.