Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  “The other side of that coin,” said Marian Logan, “was that Strays finally looked like he had the kind of thing he really wanted, but he knew it wouldn’t be for long. He knew damn well it would be all over soon and he couldn’t get everything out of it that he should have. ‘Isn’t he great?’ He used to say that. ‘Isn’t he great? He’s so great.’ He said to me over and over toward the end, ‘Bill’s so great. If they had white boys like that in Pittsburgh, Doll Baby, you wouldn’t know me.’ He would never have left! ‘I’m going to miss that boy.’ He meant, you know, after he was gone.”

  Strayhorn had had a will drawn up on July 30, 1965, naming as executor of his estate his sister Georgia’s eldest son, Gregory Morris, a public school teacher whom Strayhorn respected as a peer. The stipulations were few. Among them: there were to be two memorial services, one private and one public; he was to be cremated, his remains to be cast into the Hudson River; his black star sapphire ring would go to the Copasetics; a 72″-by-36″ Frank Neal painting of two Haitian women would go to Francis Goldberg, who had already taken it when he left Strayhorn’s apartment; the balance of his property, both professional and personal, would go to his mother, Lillian Strayhorn. On October 19, 1966, however, Lillian Strayhorn died suddenly at age seventy-four of arteriosclerosis. Though his grief compounded his own grave condition, Strayhorn summoned the strength to fly home for his mother’s services. He had become so frail that Gregory Morris didn’t recognize him at the Pittsburgh airport and drove past him several times. With his sister Lillian’s assistance, Strayhorn selected the clothes his mother would be buried in and planned virtually every detail of her memorial at Hopewell’s in Homewood, the same site as his father’s service. He held up better than his family expected. “Although he was saddened by her loss,” said Morris, “I believe that he was definitely relieved that she would not have to endure his death.” Strayhorn told his sister Lillian, “Now I don’t have to worry.” “What he meant,” she said, “was Now I can go in peace.” Through her death, Strayhorn’s mother eased his own.

  That holiday season, Strayhorn felt too weak to visit Pittsburgh. “It’s not Christmas without Mama, anyway,” he told Marian Logan. “So Arthur said, ‘Let’s go somewhere—doctor’s orders.’” Logan handled the arrangements, and Strayhorn and Grove spent the eight days from Christmas 1966 through New Year’s Day 1967 with the Logans (including their three-and-a-half-year-old son Chip, Strayhorn’s godson) on St. Vincent, in the Caribbean. At a recently built two-bedroom house on the Villa Beach, Strayhorn spent the afternoons on a wicker lounge chair in a firsthand test of the life-giving powers of the sun. Grove, fair-skinned and prone to sunburn, tended to stay indoors reading; he would walk outside a few times a day to be with Strayhorn or bring him a drink: each morning Strayhorn mixed a half-gallon batch of rum punch and stored it in a wide-mouth jar in the kitchen refrigerator, and each afternoon he mixed another to replenish it. Lena Horne called every night. There was a fully equipped kitchen, and Arthur Logan and Grove took to it as if it were a clubhouse. Every few days, they’d stock up on chicken, fresh fish, and local vegetables, then improvise meals. Strayhorn had his liquified in a blender the Logans brought. At the table, Strayhorn sat before an array of drinking glasses, each filled with a different preparation: a milky glass of stuffed crab, a speckled glass of salad greens. “Grove would bring out his dishes in those glasses, and Strays would smile, and he’d say, ‘Lovely! Oh, that looks wonderful!’” said Marian Logan. “He’d pour his filet of fish or his fettuccine into his stomach, and he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s delicious, Arturo! You must give me the recipe.’ He pretended it was a great, gay party, but there was an angry undertone, the dryest sarcasm you’d ever hear.” On New Year’s Eve, the group threw a small party, inviting a few locals they had met in the markets and around town. For entertainment, Arthur Logan paid someone he and Strayhorn had encountered in a nearby bar twenty-five dollars; the man had explained that he was a bandleader, like Duke Ellington, and he showed up with his four sons, one of whom played the guitar while the others sang and struck percussion instruments. They knew six songs, which they repeated all night with changes in mood and tempo. Strayhorn joined in on one number, rattling maracas over his head. “Aren’t they wonderful?” he asked no one in particular, grinning with all the enthusiasm he showed for dinner.

  Rested from his trip to St. Vincent, Strayhorn felt strong enough to work on and off during the first few weeks of the new year, and he harnessed his strength with care: for the first time since his score for the all-black, gay-oriented production of The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in Their Garden in 1953, he tapped some of his deepest creative resources to compose a work for non-Ellingtonians. Stimulated by a performance of the Dwike Mitchell–Willie Ruff duo at the Hickory House, Strayhorn composed a suite for piano and French horn, and he asked Mitchell and Ruff to perform it for him privately. “It was something he wanted to write for himself and hear himself, something he had in him that he had to do,” said Mitchell. A through-composed twelve-minute work in three organically related movements, the suite takes the raw-nerve emotionality of pieces like “Passion Flower” to a level so intimate and infused with pain that hearing it is an act of voyeurism. If “Something to Live For” was a wishful sigh and “Lush Life” a cynical moan, Strayhorn’s suite for piano and French horn is his dying scream. “It takes so much, it’s so emotionally involved, that I was drained for days after playing it,” said Ruff, who discussed the piece with Strayhorn at the composer’s apartment, where he and Mitchell performed it. “Its meaning is so strong. It’s really Billy’s autobiography. It’s really the last words from a great genius shutting down before his time. It’s all about frustration and anger—lost chances, missed opportunities. He’s saying, ‘I’m mad! Goddamn it!’ He’s mad because he’s checking out and he wasn’t done. You know, he could have done anything. He could have been the biggest of the big. He could have done it, man. His genius is right there in his music. But there he was, checking out, and nobody except the musicians and few of the writers in the jazz magazines knew who Billy Strayhorn was. He looked back at his own life and he couldn’t find himself.” (The piece, which incorporated “Boo-Lose,” was recorded by Mitchell and Ruff in 1969 as Suite for the Duo on an album of Strayhorn compositions.)

  With Bill Grove’s help, Strayhorn held on. He had the walls of his apartment repainted in light, bright colors, and Grove hung a set of sheer, pale yellow curtains, as if to magnify the sunlight. Felrath Hines, who visited in the midst of the redecorating, offered his counsel on the psychology of the new decor. “Billy said he wanted the apartment to brighten him, like an afternoon outdoors,” recalled Hines. “He was choosing light, natural colors for everything. I said something about doing something in white, to open up the space, and he said, ‘Oh no, Fel, too much like a hospital. I’ll be living there soon enough.’” Remaking his own appearance in the same spirit of renewal, Strayhorn switched to his summer wardrobe half a year early, and he bought a pink cotton seaman’s cap that he took to wearing everywhere. He looked eccentric—out of time and place, lost in clothes a couple of sizes too big for his undernourished frame. Fighting the lethargy and the discomfort that came with his cancer, he sought distraction in a semblance of his old social schedule, though this grew difficult. He planned on going to the Showman’s one afternoon and set out to hail a cab on Broadway but had to call his niece Adrienne for help to walk the two blocks east. “He was very emaciated from the cancer, and his clothes were hanging off of him, and that sailor hat of his was down over his face,” recalled Adrienne Conaway Claerbaut. “We made it over to Broadway, and Uncle Bill said, ‘just hail me a cab, because I want to get to Harlem.’ And I hailed a cab, and the cab driver looked at him and said he wouldn’t have a bum like him in his cab and drove away. He was so upset. He was so dejected. He felt just terrible.” Strayhorn pared his social life down to an occasional dinner with Grove at the Flash Inn. Noticing his absence from the Hickory House, Will
ie Ruff dropped by Strayhorn’s apartment before his set one evening. “His place was darkened and all,” remembered Ruff. “I said, ‘Billy, how are you doing?’ He said, ‘No good, baby.’ He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get this thing. This thing is a motherfucker.’” Ruff brought Strayhorn up on the latest talk among his musician friends—“this and that about people, various people we knew in our field”—while Strayhorn sat quietly in the dark until he fell asleep.

  “He was in bad shape,” said Lena Horne. “So I said, ‘All right, we’re going to take you to Palm Springs.’” Horne and Lennie Hayton had a vacation home there, and they drove Strayhorn, along with Grove, cross-country to rest in the Western sun. “We’d lie outdoors. Sometimes we’d talk. Sometimes we didn’t,” said Horne. “Bill Grove did everything for him. He couldn’t do very much anymore. He hadn’t mentioned anything about what he wanted to do now—he knew he was dying. We didn’t have to talk about it. He didn’t say anything about what he wanted, and this began to worry me. So Bill Grove and I talked about it, because we didn’t know what to do. And one day Billy said, ‘Well, I think I better go to my family.’ Grove had to get back to that magazine he worked for, and I had a tour to do. So my friend Elois [Davis] took him to Los Angeles—that’s where she lived—and they went to the airport, and he went home to say good-bye.”

  Though George Greenlee had recommended seeing a Pittsburgh attorney, Silvestri Silvestri, to revise his will in the light of his mother’s death, Strayhorn cut short his visit to Pittsburgh and returned to New York gravely ill. “He was too sick, although he really should have done it,” recalled Silvestri. The day after Strayhorn arrived back in New York, he saw Arthur Logan, who sent him straight to the Hospital for Joint Diseases on Madison Avenue in East Harlem. “Arthur came home and said, ‘Go see your Itty Bitty Buddy, Doll Baby. He needs you now,’” recalled Marian Logan. His disillusionment dissolved into resignation, Strayhorn rejected sympathy. “I went to visit him frequently,” recalled the Reverend John Gensel, a Lutheran minister and music enthusiast who made the New York jazz community his personal mission. “As soon as I came in, instead of saying, ‘Oh, John, I feel so terrible,’ he didn’t say anything like that. He turned to his friend Bill, who was sitting at his bedside, and he said, ‘Oh, Bill, see if the pastor wants a glass of orange juice.’ There he was, so thin and so small, and he was immediately concerned that I was taken care of.” There was an arrangement of spring wildflowers on Strayhorn’s dresser, ordered by Lena Horne, and she had it replaced every few days. Ellington ordered baskets of fruit for Strayhorn’s guests to eat while they visited and, in an elaborate (and costly) get-well gesture, sent a musical gift. He arranged for several pianists working in Paris at the time (including Aaron Bridgers, Claude Bolling, Raymond Fol, and Joe Turner) to record solo performances on a tape that Ellington had shipped to the hospital. “Duke asked a number of us to do this. I was very happy to, being very fond of Billy,” said Bolling. “I said to Duke, ‘What should I play? I don’t know what to play.’ Duke said, ‘Give him some James P. [Johnson].’ Duke loved James P.” Ellington himself phoned Strayhorn at least once a day. “He couldn’t visit him,” said Marian Logan. “Edward couldn’t see him like that. He couldn’t take that.”

  Strayhorn spent the day napping, looking through magazines, and, on a few good days, working on a new piece with a favorite old title, “Blue Cloud.” (He used it for at least two different compositions, one of which became a part of his Suite for the Duo.) He had completed an orchestration of the composition before his hospitalization and had sent it to Ellington, who was already performing it around Europe. Retitled “Blood Count,” the piece, in its final form, is a wrenching moan, its pedal-point bass line evoking the rhythmic drip of intravenous fluid. And Strayhorn put away his music paper. “He didn’t write anymore after ‘Blood Count’,” said Marian Logan. “That was the last thing he had to say. And it wasn’t ‘Good-bye’ or ‘Thank you’ or anything phony like that. It was ‘This is how I feel,’ and he felt like shit—‘Like it or leave it.’”

  Every evening, Bill Grove took the commuter train from Mount Vernon to the 125th Street stop and walked directly to the Hospital for Joint Diseases. “Grove took good care of Strays,” said Marian Logan. “Arthur couldn’t do as much for him as that boy did for him. But it got to where there was only so much anybody could do.” On Tuesday, May 30, Strayhorn told Grove, “You don’t have to come tomorrow.”

  A little past halfway to dawn, at 4:45 a.m. on May 31, 1967, Billy Strayhorn died of esophageal cancer at the age of fifty-one. He was with Bill Grove.* Lena Horne heard in Europe, where she was honoring a tour commitment. “It tore me apart that I couldn’t be with him. I was heartbroken about it,” she said. Marian Logan was vacationing with her son at the Montreal World’s Fair, Expo ’67, when her husband called with the news. “I said, ‘It can’t be. I’d just talked to him, and he was telling me to go to the park there and watch the Saint Lawrence River go by.” Both Arthur Logan and Ruth Ellington phoned Duke, who was one week into a three-week engagement at Harrah’s Casino Cabaret in Reno. “Arthur said Edward just cried,” Marian Logan recounted. “He said, ‘This is too much for me, Arthur.’ And he just cried. Arthur said, ‘Are you going to be all right?’ And Edward said, ‘Fuck no, I’m not going to be all right! Nothing is all right now.’ And Edward just cried.” As Ellington wrote in Music Is My Mistress, “I started sniffling and whimpering, crying, banging my head up against the wall, and talking to myself about the virtues of Billy Strayhorn. Why Billy Strayhorn, I asked? Why? Subconsciously, I sat down and started writing what I was thinking, and as I got deeper and deeper into thinking about my favorite human being, I realized that I was not crying any more. It seemed that what I was doing was more important than anything, so on and on I wrote.”

  Margieriete Pharr, the wife of the painter Nye Pharr and a friend of Ruth Ellington’s and Aaron Bridgers’s, called Bridgers. “I was expecting it but I wasn’t, you know what I mean?” said Bridgers, who, when he heard the news, slipped off the silver Juvenia watch that Strayhorn had given him and tucked it in a box. George Greenlee, in Paris for a conference, found out from Bridgers at the Living Room, where he had gone to see Bridgers perform, only to find him arranging a leave of absence with the club manager. “Aaron was trying to keep his cool with the club owner,” said Greenlee, “but he was literally shaking. The club owner said to him, ‘Go, say goodbye to Billy. We’ll wait for you.’” Cookie Cook called Honi Coles. “He loved that man dearly—we all did,” said Coles. “That’s why we decided then and there to retire the title of president of the Copasetics in Billy’s honor. After Billy, there would never be another president.” The next morning, Luther Henderson was riding the crosstown bus to visit Strayhorn in the hospital when he learned Strayhorn had already died. In its obituary, the New York Times reported: “Billy Strayhorn, jazz composer, arranger, lyricist and pianist, who was often called Duke Ellington’s alter ego, died of cancer yesterday at the Hospital for Joint Diseases.… According to [the Times’s jazz critic, John S.] Wilson, Mr. Strayhorn was ‘a small, stately man’ who observed the world with ‘benign amusement’ through dark-rimmed glasses. His friends emphasized his modesty, his humility and his desire to stay in the background among the Ellington contingent.”

  Strayhorn’s family members met in New York to plan a public memorial service, with suggestions from Lena Horne, Ruth Ellington, and members of the Copasetics, while Bill Grove hosted a private gathering of mourners among Strayhorn’s gay friends and others close to the two of them. Bill Coleman’s old coworker Frederick Brewington, who lived near Kennedy Airport, was assigned to pick Aaron Bridgers up and drive him to Grove’s apartment. “He was completely distraught,” Brewington recalled. “We stopped by my house and I stupidly showed him the new Baldwin piano I had just bought for my son and asked Aaron if he wanted to play it. He looked at me like he didn’t remember what a piano was.” At Grove’s place, Francis Goldberg had taken on cookin
g duties. “Goldie tried to make it his production, all about him and his wonderful food,” said one of Strayhorn’s friends. Grove, though closest to Strayhorn over the past decade, grieved with collected grace and with empathy for Strayhorn’s other intimates. “Grove ached for Billy then and every day for the rest of his life,” said Dwike Mitchell. “But he didn’t play Camille.” Bridgers, Goldberg, and Grove—the three men Strayhorn loved most, Ellington excepted—mourned together. “There was no competition, apart from some attitude from Goldie,” said one of their friends. “Everybody loved that man so much, there was just all kinds of crying everywhere. You have to remember, a lot of individuals felt like he was the most important person in their life. Of, I don’t know, thirty, forty people who came in and out of the house that day, twenty-five of them just lost their best friend.”

  Ellington was virtually paralyzed with despair. There was to be a private viewing of Strayhorn’s body and a brief memorial service for family and close friends at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue on Saturday, June 3; a public service at John Gensel’s church, St. Peter’s, would follow on the morning of the fifth. Ellington, booked with his orchestra in Reno, made no plans to attend either service. “Arthur kept calling Edward every day,” recalled Marian Logan. “Arthur said, ‘You got to come to New York.’ Edward said, ‘I can’t.’ Finally, on the morning of the [public] funeral, Edward called. He was in town. But he said he still wasn’t going to the funeral. So Arthur went to see him. Arthur said he was lying in the bed, buck-naked. He said, ‘I can’t go to the service.’ ‘What do you mean, you can’t go?’ He said, ‘Because I don’t have anything but my kissy-blue shirts.’ That’s what he called his favorite blue shirts. He said, ‘I don’t have a white shirt.’ So Arthur said, ‘Don’t worry, Strays is laying out there in a kissy-blue shirt too. He doesn’t have a white shirt on.’ Edward said, ‘Really?’ And he jumped out of bed and threw his clothes on.”