Lena wore a black dress and Jones slipped a diamond-studded wedding band on her finger as the groom’s father pronounced them man and wife in the living room of his home in Sugartop. Teddy and Irene looked on along with their sportswriter friend, Ches Washington. Several days later, the Courier ran a story confirming that “the prettiest girl in Harlem” was giving up her singing career for her man. “It’s love and a home,” Lena was quoted as saying, underneath a photo of her and Jones sitting down to a bacon breakfast in their new “apartment,” two rooms in his brother’s house.
The picture certainly captured Jones’s vision of the marriage. He expected his new bride to become a housewife, but the role didn’t fit Lena easily. She actually knew nothing about cooking bacon, or cooking anything else for that matter. She had to learn to make the pork chops and biscuits her husband expected for dinner. She could tell Jones hated his job at the coroner’s office, believing it was beneath him, but he refused to discuss it. He spent most of his time hanging around with Democratic ward heelers on the Hill, dreaming big about how they would be rewarded for helping FDR win reelection, and many nights she found herself alone while he went to political meetings. But the thing that bothered Lena most was her new husband’s attitude toward money. Taught frugality by her grandmother Cora, Lena couldn’t stand to see Jones spend money they didn’t have on expensive clothes to keep up appearances with the Loendi Club crowd.
Within another month Lena was pregnant, however, and she focused on preparing for motherhood. She grew particularly fond of her doctor, a Pittsburgh obstetrician named Ira Cornelius whom everyone referred to as “Buster.” On the day Lena went into labor, she was relieved to see Buster at the door of the hospital. “Take it easy and I’ll look in on you tomorrow,” he assured her. “Where are you going?” she asked. Lena didn’t know that black doctors in Pittsburgh weren’t allowed inside white hospitals. She became so panicked that it took her two days to deliver her baby, a little girl she named Gail. Decades later, Lena would remember being forced to give birth without the help of Dr. Cornelius as “the cruelest act of prejudice that was ever visited on me personally.”
A year later, little Gail had just turned one when her mother received an unexpected phone call. It was from Ralph Cooper, the inventor and emcee of “Amateur Night” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Cooper remembered Lena from her days at the Cotton Club and wanted to make her an offer. He was starting a production company to make movies for black audiences, and he asked her to star opposite him in its first venture, a film called The Duke Is Tops that he planned to shoot in Hollywood. Lena was intrigued, but she was certain that her husband would veto the idea. Yet to her surprise, Jones gave her permission, dreaming of all the money she would earn.
For the people of Pittsburgh, it was the biggest news of the year. The Courier ran a banner headline. Teddy purchased Lena a first-class plane ticket to Los Angeles and threw a farewell party at the Loendi Club. Adding to their debts, Jones insisted on buying her a new coat and a tulip-shaped hat for the sendoff. Woogie Harris and his wife showed up at the Pittsburgh airport to help carry her bags. Woogie’s little brother, Teenie, who had begun a new career as a photographer, snapped pictures for a two-page spread in Flash, a Negro version of the “newspicture magazines” that had become all the rage. “From Smokeland to Filmland!” a caption cheered.
Yet as soon as the plane left Pittsburgh, there was trouble. Turbulence forced a landing in Arizona and Lena had to complete the trip by train. When Ralph Cooper met her at the station, he was upset that the skinny teenager he remembered now had a young mother’s figure. The name of his company—Million Dollar Productions—turned out to be fanciful. Financing had yet to be completed for the movie and there was no cash to pay the actors. When Lena called Jones with that news, he demanded that she quit and come home, and they had a huge fight over the phone. But she decided to stick it out and complete the shoot, since it only lasted ten days and she was enjoying her stay in the home of one of the most famous Negro radio stars of the day, Lillian Randolph, better known as Birdie the maid in The Great Gildersleeve show.
When The Duke Is Tops premiered in Los Angeles several months later, many of Hollywood’s other black stars turned out, from “Bojangles” Robinson to Mantan Moreland and Hattie Noel. A Los Angeles critic praised it as an uplifting musical with “no ‘Uncle Tom’ bandana or calico sequences.” But it was a very different scene at the Pittsburgh premiere, held the same night at the New Grenada Theatre on the Hill. The crowd was shocked to learn that Lena had refused to attend. Instead she sent a telegram to the Pittsburgh NAACP, which hosted the event, stating “PROFESSIONAL APPEARANCES SHOULD BE MADE ON A PROFESSIONAL BASIS.” Lena wanted to be paid! the gossips clucked. She had gone downtown to a white movie instead! a rumor had it. Offended, the Courier reporter who covered the premiere praised Lena’s singing but panned her acting, sniffing that “she is no Myrna Loy.”
But the gossips didn’t know the full story. The truth was that Lena didn’t attend the premiere because her husband forbade it. Jones told her that he didn’t want to see her bow and scrape for the uppity Negroes who would be in attendance. Yet it seemed to her that Jones just wanted to prove that he was the boss of the household, and that she was at his beck and call. Her husband was also still sore that she hadn’t made money on the movie, and he had dictated the telegram that had made her look greedy. Now that Lena was home, the minister’s son was again exuding contempt for her show business life—suggesting, she later recalled, “that he had rescued me from a life of sin.”
So when Lena received another show business offer several months later, she kept it quiet. Lew Lewis, a New York theater producer, invited her to star in Blackbirds of 1938, a revival of the popular musical revue. Grudgingly, Jones agreed to let her go on condition that she take Gail, so Lena asked a Pittsburgh friend to come with her to babysit. The show tried out in Boston, but there wasn’t enough money to pay the cast. Again, Jones demanded that Lena quit, but she stayed out of loyalty to the ensemble. Finally Blackbirds made it to Broadway, where it received lukewarm reviews and closed after a week. On the last night, Jones showed up from Pittsburgh and refused to let Lena attend the cast party, and it was then that she decided she wanted a divorce.
When Lena told her father, Teddy urged her to reconsider. He set up a family meeting with Jones’s father and sister. Everyone urged the couple to think about what was best for Gail, and Lena warily agreed to give the marriage another try. Almost immediately, she got pregnant again. In early 1940, she delivered a baby boy who was named Edwin, after his father and grandfather, and nicknamed “Little Teddy.”
After the birth, Lena made a new friend who finally helped her find work in Pittsburgh. Jones was part of a group that met at different homes to play bridge, the favorite card game of the Sugartop set. Lena didn’t play, but sometimes she tagged along and sat in the corner. One day one of the regulars came over to talk to her, a slim, elegant lady with braids around her ears. It was Charlotte Enty Catlin, the Hill socialite and acclaimed pianist. They hit it off immediately, and before long Charlotte asked if Lena would like to go into business with her. Charlotte often played at the homes of rich white folks around the city, and she suggested that Lena come along to sing. When Lena warned that her husband might not permit it, Charlotte said, “I’ll ask Louis.” And sure enough, Jones couldn’t bring himself to say no to someone of Catlin’s social standing.
For Lena, it felt good to be performing again, without the grueling hours and miserable conditions of nightclubs and road trips. When she and Charlotte arrived at a host’s home, they were ushered into a side room while the guests finished dinner. Then everyone gathered around the piano while the two entertained them with the kind of songs that went over well in the wealthy white world: “The Man I Love,” “Copper-Colored Gal,” “The Sunny Side of the Street.” The hosts were always very polite and appreciative, and sometimes they offered coffee and cake. Cash never changed hands directly: inst
ead a fee of $5 or $10 was discreetly sent to Catlin the next day.
The Cotton Club or the Ritz-Carlton they weren’t, but the soirees helped Lena improve as a singer. In such intimate settings, she could hone her natural talent for working a lyric. Catlin recognized this as Lena’s great strength—her ability to tell a story, rather than her sheer vocal prowess. Charlotte helped Lena develop that skill, teaching her how to vary her inflection and pace and projection.
Later, Lena would look back at the experience of singing with Charlotte Catlin as one of the many ways Pittsburgh changed her, for all the disappointments of her marriage. Pittsburgh allowed her to get away from her suffocating mother and stepfather, and to be treated like a grown-up by her father and his friends. It forced her to learn to stand up for herself, as a wife and a performer and a businesswoman. And it gave her a first experience of being treated with respect, by white folks and her own people. Compared with how she had been exploited everywhere else in her young life, she recalled, “the Pittsburgh work was at least straight-forward, honest work.”
Still, it wasn’t enough to save Lena’s marriage. By the time Little Teddy was a year old, she had decided that it was over. She knew she couldn’t escape Jones without her own money, so she asked her father’s wife, Irene, for a loan to buy a train ticket to New York and a hotel room in Harlem until she earned enough to send for her children.
When Lena confronted Jones with her plan, they had one last terrible fight, during which he said two hurtful things that she would never forget. “You can take Gail, but you’ll never get Teddy!” Jones seethed, and sadly that would turn out to be true. Gail would soon join Lena in New York and spend the rest of her childhood with her mother. But her son would stay with his father and never become as close to Lena as she wished during his brief lifetime, which was cut short by kidney disease at the age of thirty.
Yet Louis Jones would be wrong about the other harsh thing he told Lena Horne on the day she left him and his hometown for good. “Just because a bunch of Pittsburgh socialites think you’re cute,” he said, “doesn’t mean you can make it somewhere big.”
• • •
LENA HORNE AND BILLY STRAYHORN just missed meeting in Pittsburgh. If Lena had befriended Billy’s piano teacher Charlotte Catlin earlier, or Billy had stayed longer, they surely would have encountered one another there. But in 1939, the year before Lena started performing with Catlin, Billy left for New York on an odyssey that began when he, too, started playing in the homes of white Pittsburghers.
At the end of 1938, Strayhorn was still working at the Pennfield Drug Store in Shadyside, manning the fountain and making drop-offs. Sometimes he would stay to play piano at the homes to which he delivered, and as word of his talent spread he started getting work performing at private dinners and cocktail parties. A fellow employee at the drugstore named David Pearlman heard Billy play and was so impressed that he had an idea. Pearlman was studying for a druggist license at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy, and one of his classmates was George Greenlee Jr., the nephew of Gus Greenlee. One day, Pearlman pulled George aside to sing Billy’s praises. “George, we have a delivery boy who’s one of the finest musicians I’ve ever heard,” he said. “Your uncle knows all the biggest musicians. Why don’t you introduce him to someone?”
George had never met Billy but he trusted Pearlman, who was one of the few white pharmacy students who treated him as an equal. George happened to know that his uncle was throwing a big party that night at the Crawford Grill for Duke Ellington, who was in Pittsburgh playing at the Stanley Theatre. Assuming the festivities wouldn’t start until the show was over, George waited until after midnight and headed straight to Gus’s private club on the third floor of the Crawford Grill. Sure enough, Duke was there. As soon as his uncle introduced them, George made his pitch. “A good friend of mine has written some songs,” he said, stretching the truth, “and we’d like for you to hear them.” George figured that Duke wouldn’t refuse in front of Gus, and he was right. “Well, why don’t you come backstage tomorrow after the first show?” Ellington said.
An early December snow was falling outside the Stanley Theatre when Billy met George there the next day. They took in the one o’clock matinee, then made their way to Ellington’s dressing room. They found Duke stretched out on a chair, head back and eyes closed, having his hair conked. Ellington motioned toward an upright in the corner. Show us what you can do, he said. Billy sat down to the piano.
“Mr. Ellington, this is how you played this number in the show,” Billy said, producing a note-for-note imitation of Duke’s rendition of “Sophisticated Lady” during the matinee. Then Billy said: “Now, this is the way I would play it.” His fingers returned to the keyboard, and out came an up-tempo version in a different key that was “pretty hip-sounding,” as George Greenlee remembered it.
Amazed, Duke got up and stood over Billy at the piano. “Can you do that again?” he asked. Billy played another of Ellington’s best-known songs, “Solitude,” first as Duke had performed it during the matinee, then with a different harmonization.
Ellington asked his valet to fetch Harry Carney, his baritone saxophonist. As Carney entered the room Duke whispered: “Listen to this kid play!” Carney went to alert two other stars in the orchestra, alto sax player Johnny Hodges and singer Ivie Anderson. When they got back, Duke had his hands on Billy’s shoulders and was asking him to play his own compositions. Billy obliged with “Something to Live For,” from Fantastic Rhythm. Then he played another tune he hadn’t named yet. When Duke asked what it was called, Billy laughed. Later, Ellington described it as the moment he became truly captivated with Billy Strayhorn, when he first heard the sound of Billy’s laughter.
In the few days Ellington had left in Pittsburgh, he gave Strayhorn assignments to see what more he could do. He asked Billy to write a lyric, then an original orchestration. When Billy returned with his handiwork, Duke was between shows in his dressing room, having dinner with a mocha-skinned beauty named Thelma Spangler, an aspiring musician and recent graduate of Schenley High School whom Ellington had met the night before at the Loendi Club. Billy spread his sheet music on the floor and Duke pored over it for several minutes. Then Ellington scooped up the pages and Thelma watched from backstage as he handed them out to the musicians on the bandstand, whispered a few words to Ivie Anderson, and then began conducting. An ethereal version of “Two Sleepy People” filled the Stanley Theatre. When it was over, Ellington beamed.
Backstage, Ellington told Strayhorn that he wanted him to come to New York and work in his organization. He handed Billy a twenty-dollar bill for the orchestration and a slip of paper explaining how to take the subway from Pennsylvania Station to Duke’s apartment in Harlem.
Over the next few months, Billy agonized. He didn’t know if Ellington was serious. Since his childhood visits to his grandparents in North Carolina, he had rarely left Pittsburgh. He worried about leaving his mother. He didn’t have enough money to pay for a train ticket to New York City. But Lillian Strayhorn encouraged her Bill to pursue his dream, and one of his white bandmates from the Mad Hatters offered to travel with him and loan him money for the trip. First, though, Billy decided to write a song to offer Ellington when he got there. Sitting down to his used piano on Tioga Street Rear, he quickly banged out a bouncy tune based on the subway directions to Harlem that Ellington had given him.
When Strayhorn finally headed East, Ellington was on the road, and it took several days to track him down in Newark. Duke didn’t remember Billy’s name, but he said that he had been wondering how to find him. He asked Billy to return to New York with the band and offered to put him up in a $5-a-night room at the YMCA. Several days later, Strayhorn returned to Pittsburgh to collect his things and say goodbye to family and friends. One of the pals he phoned with the news was Ralph Koger, the young Courier reporter and fellow Westinghouse alumnus, who had listened to Strayhorn play the new song he wrote for Ellington. “Guess what,” he told Koge
r. “I’m going to work for Duke. I played that tune ‘A Train’ for him, and he liked it. I’m moving to New York!”
Soon Strayhorn was living with the Ellington family in Harlem and exploring the exciting new world of Manhattan, including the freedom it gave him to begin exploring his sexuality as a gay man. He started writing arrangements for the Ellington orchestra and played piano on several of its recordings. Then a showdown in the music industry presented Billy with an unexpected opportunity to demonstrate his songwriting talent. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the organization that collected royalties for songwriters, was demanding more payment from radio programs. Instead of submitting, the stations decided to form a rival organization and boycott ASCAP songs and writers. To stay on the airwaves, Ellington needed to come up with an entirely new repertoire not attributed to him, since his existing songs were all part of the ASCAP empire. So Duke told his son, Mercer Ellington, and Strayhorn to get to work.
Laboring night and day in a Chicago hotel room, fueled by cigarettes and whiskey and blackberry wine, the two men turned out a dozen new songs for the orchestra to record. Strayhorn’s contributions ranged from several haunting ballads—“Chelsea Bridge,” “Passion Flower,” “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing”—to a propulsive full-orchestra showpiece called “Rain Check.” He dusted off several of the songs he had written for Fantastic Rhythm in Pittsburgh, including “My Little Brown Book” and “Something to Live For.” And he wrote an arrangement for the song he had composed as a gift to Ellington that was so infectious that it became the orchestra’s new signature. Until then, Ellington’s theme song had been a languorous tune called “Sepia Panorama.” From then on, it would be Strayhorn’s piano-stomping, trumpets-blaring, saxes-purring orchestration of “Take the ‘A’ Train.”
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