The Ellington orchestra made its first recording of “Take the ‘A’ Train” in Hollywood during a West Coast swing in early 1941. While Duke was there, he was invited to a party hosted by an MGM movie writer named Sid Kuller. Ellington played the piano for the crowd, which grew so exuberant he described them as “jumping for joy.” Before the night was over, Kuller had convinced Duke to write a full-length stage show around that theme. That summer, the musical entitled Jump for Joy opened at the Mayan Theatre in Los Angeles with an all-black cast and a lineup of songs that included several more soon-to-be classics: “Rocks in My Bed,” “I’ve Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good,” and an instrumental number that would later be put to lyrics with the title “Just Squeeze Me.” Ellington was listed as the writer of all those tunes, with Billy Strayhorn credited in the program only for “musical arrangements.” But Kuller and others would confirm that Billy collaborated with Duke on almost every song in the musical, a role that would have come naturally to him after his experience in Pittsburgh writing and rehearsing the entire production of Fantastic Rhythm.
It was also during the summer of 1941 in Los Angeles that the paths of Billy Strayhorn and Lena Horne finally crossed. Fleeing Pittsburgh for New York in late 1940, Lena had found her spot in Noble Sissle’s orchestra taken. Instead she landed a job singing for a white swing band led by saxophonist Charlie Barnet that had won respect from black audiences with its jazzy recording of “Cherokee.” Through Barnet, Lena was introduced to John Hammond, the talent scout for the Greenwich Village nightclub Café Society. On its small stage, Lena was able to display the intimate singing style that she had perfected in the drawing rooms of Pittsburgh, and her performances won new friends and admirers among the sophisticated mixed race crowd that frequented the club, from Benny Goodman and Paul Robeson to the artist Romare Bearden.
Lena moved into her grandparents’ old house in Brooklyn, and for several months Little Teddy came to visit. At Easter time, Big Teddy also arrived from Pittsburgh, and while he was in New York he once again took Lena to see Joe Louis train in New Jersey. Joe was now the heavyweight champ, and the shy chorus girl he had met five years earlier was a full-grown woman in a fox stole, silk stockings, and open-toed shoes. They began a secret affair. When light heavyweight champ Billy Conn challenged Louis for his title in May, Lena asked John Hammond to drive her around Central Park so she could listen to the fight on his car radio. Until Louis finally knocked Conn out in the thirteenth round, Lena was a nervous wreck, punching Hammond as though she was in the ring herself and leaving black-and-blue marks all over his arm.
The affair with Joe Louis didn’t last long, but it wasn’t the only dalliance Lena had during this time. Another Café Society regular was Duke Ellington, who liked to come downtown to mix with the bohemian crowd. Lena had first seen Ellington in her Cotton Club days, when he had no idea who she was, but now he laid on his regal charm and they, too, had a brief fling. It also ended quickly, but not before Duke helped convince her to pursue a new job opportunity in Los Angeles. A club owner named Felix Young was planning a big new spot called the Trocadero and wanted to hire Lena as a featured singer. She was reluctant at first, but Duke flattered her by telling that it was her duty to “let the whole world benefit from your incredible radiance.” He also said he wanted to introduce her to a friend he called “Swee Pea” who was working on a new musical they planned to debut in Los Angeles. “You’ll get to meet ’Pea because we’re getting ready to open Jump for Joy there,” Ellington said.
Shortly after Lena arrived in California, Duke sent her a ticket to one of the first performances of the show. The seat next to her was empty, but during intermission a small man sat down in it. “I’m Billy Strayhorn—Swee Pea,” he said, clasping her hand. To Lena, he looked more like an elegant owl, with his round face, thick glasses, and smartly tailored suit. But his soft voice and warm manner immediately put her at ease. After the show was over, she invited him to her apartment, and they talked through the night. She figured out quickly that their relationship would never be romantic—and she even suspected that Duke had sent him as a chaperone to keep other men away—but Lena knew immediately that she and Billy Strayhorn were destined to be soul mates.
One of the first things Billy and Lena talked about that night, Horne would tell Strayhorn’s biographer, was Pittsburgh. She didn’t go into greater detail, but it is very likely that they discovered their common bond with Charlotte Enty Catlin, Billy’s piano teacher and Lena’s accompanist. They may have marveled at the ties between Lena’s father, Teddy, and Gus Greenlee, the man who had made it possible for Billy to meet Duke Ellington. Both would later speak of the similar sense of humor and worldview they discovered that evening, and it isn’t hard to image that they found it in part by gossiping and laughing about the colorful characters and cultural quirks of black Pittsburgh.
Over the next few months, Billy and Lena became inseparable. They went to an L.A. sanatorium to visit Jimmy Blanton, Ellington’s talented young bassist, who had started his career performing on riverboats with Fate Marable and was now sick with the tuberculosis that would claim his life at age twenty-three. They frequented Alabama and Brothers, two nightclubs in the black section of town that attracted a hip mixed race crowd. Billy also helped Lena prepare for her debut at the Trocadero, which was still under construction. He suggested songs that matched her voice, wrote flattering arrangements and coached her on her delivery, picking up where their mutual coach Charlotte Catlin had left off.
On December 7, 1941, Billy and Lena were rehearsing at the home of friends when they heard the awful news about Pearl Harbor. They gathered around a radio and listened speechlessly, sensing that the attack would change everything but not yet knowing how. For Lena, it would mean that her move to Los Angeles would turn out very differently than she had expected. As war rationing went into effect, Felix Young canceled his plans for a grand nightclub and instead opened a tiny venue he called the “Little Troc.” Instead of show-stoppers, Strayhorn helped Lena develop tunes and arrangements to fit the smaller space, songs such as “Honeysuckle Rose,” “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” and Harold Arlen’s “Blues in the Night.” Lena’s extended run at the Little Troc would make her the toast of the Los Angeles music scene, and lead to a series of wartime film roles that turned her into one of black America’s leading movie stars.
Back in Pittsburgh, meanwhile, America’s entry into World War II would get the steel mills and other factories humming at full capacity, as Smoketown answered FDR’s call to create an “Arsenal of Democracy.” And at The Pittsburgh Courier, it would give rise to a new crusade, to mobilize support for the war effort and for black soldiers at the front, that was the culmination of everything Robert L. Vann had fought for during his contentious time as a Negro in the bosom of the New Deal.
A Pittsburgh resident shows support for the Courier’s “Double V Campaign” during World War II.
THE PAPER
6
THE DOUBLE V WARRIORS
WHEN PERCIVAL LEROY PRATTIS left Chicago in the summer 1935, on the odyssey that would take him to a new home in Pittsburgh, he couldn’t bring himself to say goodbye in person. For more than a decade, Prattis had worked for Claude Barnett, the founder of America’s first black wire service, the Associated Negro Press. Although Barnett paid him a pittance, the two men had become close friends, and “P.L.,” as Prattis called himself, was in Barnett’s debt. Barnett had taken a chance on him even though he had come late to journalism. From a poor family in Philadelphia, Prattis was waiting tables in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to put himself through school when a customer asked if he would like to write an article for a local paper. Barnett was also willing to hire Prattis after he lost his first job in Chicago, with the Defender, following a personal dispute with publisher Robert Abbott. Most of all, Prattis owed Barnett for recommending him to the editors of The Pittsburgh Courier, who by the early 1930s were looking for someone to investigate the crooked sales agents who w
ere pocketing most of the profits from the 150,000 copies of the Courier that were sold in Chicago every week.
The part-time job for the bosses in Pittsburgh had worked out well. Prattis made the sales agents pay up; he also lifted the Courier’s profile by encouraging the editors to send copies to Chicago VIPs. He had sharp editorial instincts, too, such as his tip to Bill Nunn about the young Joe Louis and his suggestion that Julia Bumry Jones put more Windy City gossip into the Chicago edition of the paper.
During all this time, however, Prattis’s personal life was falling apart. In his twenties, he liked to joke, he had been so poor that “I couldn’t afford to look at a girl.” Short, balding, and bespectacled, he also resembled an accountant more than anyone’s idea of matinee idol. So at age thirty-seven, Prattis had married a longtime acquaintance named Lillian Sherman, despite knowing that she was an unpredictable spirit who had broken off several previous engagements. Now, after three turbulent years of matrimony, Lillian had run away from Prattis, too—to New York—and he had decided to run after her.
On the August day when Prattis left the Chicago office of the ANP for good, he felt “alone in the world,” as he later put it. He had just turned forty, and he was certain half of those years had been wasted. He told himself that he needed to do something “to become some sort of somebody.” Instead of breaking the news face-to-face, Prattis left a farewell note for Claude Barnett. “This is merely to let you know I have gone,” he wrote. “It’s the hardest thing I have ever done in my life—to part with so much of what we have been together. To have said goodbye in words would have been too hard, for you and for me . . . . I am unhappy in my private life and my work, I shall try to find work, any kind of work. If you can help me, I know you will.” Prattis ended the note with a forwarding address in New York and a wistful wish for his boss and friend. “Let us see if there are not things we can do,” he wrote, “far as we may be apart.”
While en route to New York, Prattis stopped off in Pittsburgh for a day to meet with Robert L. Vann and Ira Lewis. They didn’t offer him a full-time job, but they did enlist him to be part of the team the Courier was sending to Joe Louis’s next fight in New York, against Max Baer, the former champ who had lost his title to Gentleman Jim Braddock. As it turned out, Prattis got an even bigger scoop that day: about Joe’s secret marriage to his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Marva Trotter just hours before the fight. Prattis was the first to report details of the rushed ceremony in a fourth-floor apartment on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. Impressed, Ira Lewis phoned him long-distance with an official offer to work at the Courier’s headquarters, at a salary of $40 a month, more than Prattis had ever made. Lillian protested, but after several weeks he talked her into moving with him and they shipped their belongings to Pittsburgh.
The arrangement didn’t last long. Within a year, Lillian fled to New York again to take a beautician’s course, announcing that she intended to open a hair salon. Then she abruptly returned to Pittsburgh and convinced her husband to invest the little savings he had accumulated into a new eatery on the Hill, which she called the “P & L Chicken Shack.” When Lillian flew off once again, Prattis divorced her. Before long he was dating a clerk in the Courier sales office, Helen Sands, a quiet, churchgoing young lady who had grown up on Sugartop and left Pittsburgh only briefly to attend Cheney College outside Philadelphia, where she made the honor roll. When Prattis proposed marriage, he wrote to Claude Barnett that he had deliberately chosen a levelheaded bride with deep Pittsburgh roots as a sign to his colleagues at the Courier—and to himself—that he planned to stay put. He was forty-three now, and at last he had found the place and the position that would allow him to become some sort of somebody.
Although Prattis was quickly promoted to city editor, he was seen as an outsider among the tightknit group that had worked at the paper since the 1920s. He had a particularly wary relationship with Bill Nunn, the loud, backslapping newsroom general who in personality and appearance was his polar opposite. Unlike so many others, Prattis was also not charmed by the earthy tongue and bawdy humor of Julia Bumry Jones. Forced to share the same table in the Courier’s tiny newsroom where Jones received guests and made reporting phone calls for her gossip column, Prattis later described his discomfort with her “unrestricted and unrestrained coarseness.”
But Prattis found favor with the Big Chief, Robert L. Vann. Although Vann was far too aloof to say it out loud, he probably saw something of himself in Prattis. Like Vann, Prattis had grown up extremely poor, in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia. He had also put himself through college—at Hampton University in Virginia—before moving to Michigan to study at the Ferris Institute. Like Vann, Prattis spoke in a learned manner and dressed in a fashion that belied his humble origins: in double-breasted suits, trousers braced with suspenders, and conservative rimless eyeglasses.
But what Vann admired more than anything about Prattis was that, unlike any of the other Courier editors, he had served in the military. Drafted at the age of twenty-two, Prattis had been assigned to the all-black 813th Pioneer Infantry Brigade and had arrived in France in August 1918 just in time for the Meuse-Argonne offensive. After less than two months, he was promoted to sergeant major and he proudly wore his olive green officer’s uniform under General Pershing’s command in the push across France that put an end to the war.
Of all the crusades that Vann had waged in his quarter century at the Courier, none was dearer to his heart than the cause of Negro soldiers. After World War I, he had run editorials calling for a monument to honor black troops who died in the trenches. Hamilton Fish, the Republican congressman from New York who had commanded a “Harlem Hellfighters” unit during the war, agreed to introduce Vann’s monument bill, only to be thwarted by another Pittsburgher—David Reed, a flinty Republican on the Military Affairs Committee. When Congress voted to disband all but four black Army units in the 1920s, Vann sent reporters to expose the conditions at their segregated bases, where the soldiers were denied combat training and relegated to shoveling out horse stables and other menial tasks. Now, in the late 1930s, Vann was becoming increasingly convinced that another world war was possible, and he was determined to use the Courier’s growing reach and influence to make certain that black soldiers were taken seriously and treated justly this time.
For Vann, it had been a sobering time since he departed for Washington, D.C., in the first year of the Roosevelt presidency. His reward for calling on black voters to turn “the picture of Abraham Lincoln to the wall”—an impressive-sounding post as “Special Assistant to the Attorney General”—had turned out be a frustrating sinecure. When Vann showed up at the Justice Department, no one had assigned him an office or a secretary. He was given tedious administrative chores such as writing memos to remind staffers to fill out their time sheets. He was never asked to meet with Attorney General Homer Cummings, and was kept at arm’s length by the group of Negro aides and advisers known as FDR”s “Black Cabinet.” To make matters worse, Vann had to spend four months of his first year in the job convalescing from a near-fatal skull fracture, after he impatiently tried to pass a truck on a drive home to Pittsburgh and his Packard sedan slammed into a car coming down a hill in the opposite direction.
With little to do in Washington, Vann decided to take a monthlong cruise with his wife, Jesse, in the fall of 1935, traveling by ship around the Gulf of Mexico all the way to California. While the Vanns were in Los Angeles visiting the Hollywood set where their friend Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was shooting a movie with Shirley Temple, they received a surprise gift from Pittsburgh. On the week that the Courier’s circulation passed 100,000 issues for the first time, everyone at the paper had signed the last copy off the presses for them. The gesture touched Vann—and made him realize that he could do more good running the paper than trying to fight the bureaucracy in Washington. In a mordant letter, he explained his decision to his friend H. L. Mencken. “The work got a little tedious for me,” Vann wrote of the Justice Department p
ost, “because it developed that such a job as I held was a splendid pastime for old men who are seeking a soft place in their declining years. I did not want to get into the rut of an old man because the only difference between a rut and the grave is that the grave is a little deeper.”
As luck would have it, Vann returned to Pittsburgh just as the biggest foreign crisis of the time was erupting. The Fascist regime in Italy, led by Benito Mussolini, had invaded its former colony of Ethiopia, governed by the dynamic young Emperor Haile Selassie. Still in Chicago, P.L. Prattis sent Vann a letter pointing out how interested black readers would be in this David and Goliath story and suggesting that he send a reporter to the front. Prattis hoped that he would get the assignment, but instead Vann gave it to a writer who was better known to Courier readers: Joel Augustus Rogers. A self-taught Jamaican, Rogers had originated a popular feature called “Your History” that appeared every week on the Courier editorial page. Illustrated in the manner of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” the column touted the exploits of famous Negroes through history—and delighted readers by asserting that many Great Men assumed to be white, such as Beethoven and Haydn, were in fact part black.
The war correspondent idea was an expensive gamble—one that no other Negro publisher could have afforded at the time—but it paid off handsomely. For six months, Rogers filed melodramatic dispatches from “the front” that the Courier touted with banner headlines. In reality, like most white reporters covering the war, Rogers witnessed little combat. He relied almost entirely on Ethiopian government sources, and as a result he vastly overestimated the progress of Selassie’s thinly armed forces and underestimated the advantage the Italians had, particularly once they started using mustard gas and other chemical weapons. After fleeing the capital of Addis Ababa, Salessie gave a loudly ballyhooed interview to Rogers in which the emperor claimed to be winning the war when actually he was weeks away from giving up and leaving the country. One of the British correspondents, Evelyn Waugh, would later spoof the wildly erroneous reporting on all sides in his comic novel Scoop. Still, the war coverage proved a huge boon for the Courier, lifting its weekly sales by 70 percent to 170,000 copies.
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