by David Hajdu
Timing allowed Strayhorn freedom to develop music in his new element with all the independence Ellington had promised. On March 23, Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra boarded the Ile de France for a spring tour of Europe, with engagements in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden. This schedule gave Strayhorn nearly seven weeks at Edgecombe to work on new compositions and arrangements, as well as to study Ellington’s own scores for an essential understanding of his technique. “I stayed home,” said Strayhorn, “and wrote a few things like ‘Day Dream.’” (The piece would be recorded in a Johnny Hodges small-band session the next year.) Overhearing Strayhorn’s new work, Mercer Ellington implored his housemate to share it with him in his father’s absence; Mercer wanted to premiere the material in a band he was organizing with classmates at Juilliard. Strayhorn agreed, and the Mercer Ellington Orchestra gave rehearsal performances of Billy Strayhorn’s first New York compositions, including “Day Dream” and “Passion Flower” (to be recorded by a Hodges-led group in 1941). Mercer rejected Strayhorn, however, as a prospect for band pianist: “Strayhorn wasn’t good enough to play piano.” When Ellington and his orchestra returned to New York on May 10, Strayhorn was fully prepared with original charts suitable for small bands and with a deeper knowledge of Ellington’s approach, garnered through his study of Ellington’s manuscripts. Strayhorn’s next visible role would be an unexpected one. On July 24, he accompanied the band for two weeks at the open-air ballroom on the roof of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. Watching from the sidelines several nights into the run, Strayhorn noticed Ellington frequently hopping up from the piano on the side of the stage to lead the orchestra from the front of the bandstand; at the end of the night, the bandleader grumbled that a cold breeze was threatening his health—Ellington was known to be susceptible to hypochondria—and instructed Strayhorn to take over on piano for the rest of the run. “The guys in the band had never heard me play,” said Strayhorn, who proceeded to perform all of Ellington’s parts as well as several solo pieces each night. “They were sort of like, ‘Oooh!’ I was very flattered.”
The Boston stay also expanded Strayhorn’s responsibilities as an arranger. While working at the Ritz-Carlton, Ivie Anderson pitched for a chance to sing the frolicsome swing tune “The Jumpin’ Jive,” a popular Cab Calloway number; Ellington assented and assigned Strayhorn to arrange the song for the full orchestra. Strayhorn delivered it promptly, despite having to write out the individual instrumental parts for each band member himself; this “copying” task was usually the duty of the orchestra’s valve trombonist, Juan Tizol, thirty-nine, the Puerto Rican–born, classically trained composer of such atmospheric specialty numbers as “Caravan” and “Pyramid.” Busy enough copying for the prolific Ellington (and perhaps wary of this curious initiate), Tizol refused to copy the scores, according to Strayhorn.
When the time came to try out Strayhorn’s debut work for the Ellington Orchestra—the band was rehearsing on the rooftop bandstand during the day—the arranger was missing. “I walked across the Boston Common, and I sat down, and I was trying to take as much time as possible, because I didn’t want to be there when they played it,” said Strayhorn. “When I got to rehearsal and the music was all passed out and everything, I went down in one of our hotel rooms below the roof, and I hid” Strayhorn couldn’t escape Jonesy (Richard B. Jones, the “band boy”), who virtually forced him to go hear his own work. “So I went up, and they went through the arrangement, and it turned out all right,” Strayhorn allowed. Though the piece was never recorded, Strayhorn’s original pencil score shows the young orchestrator introducing a warm, impressionistic touch (through the use of a minor triad with a major seventh), one of his favorite chord effects. “So I was greatly heartened,” Strayhorn said. “As a result of that arrangement, he put me in charge of the singers. Now I was to do all the vocal arrangements.” In fact, Ellington’s newfound faith in Strayhorn’s skill at big-band orchestrations for vocalists was so strong that he recommended his new associate for a freelance commission offered to him in Boston. Mary Martin, a young stage actress and singer who had just made both her Broadway debut in Leave It to Me and her first film, The Rage of Paris, had requested an arrangement, and Ellington urged her to hire Strayhorn, who took the job for five hundred dollars. First word of the fee came as a disappointment, however: on hearing he’d be paid “five” for the job, Strayhorn complained to Ellington, “I was getting five dollars an arrangement in Pittsburgh.”
Zipping through his protégé’s rites of jazz passage, Ellington soon gave Strayhorn an instrumental assignment for the full orchestra. Strayhorn took up the task of adapting composer Pete DeRose’s mood piece “Deep Purple,” an instrumental recorded by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in 1934 but best known as a vocal number after Mitchell Parrish added lyrics and, in the process, streamlined the melody for performance by singers. For his orchestration, Strayhorn adhered to the original melody, which, to Ellington band members familiar with the vocal version, sounded incorrect. “I got into a little thing with members of the band,” recounted Strayhorn. “I wrote it the way the man originally wrote it. So when the band played it, it sounded like a wrong note. Duke asked me, ‘Is that a wrong note?’ I said, ‘No. That’s the original note, the way the man wrote it.’ And everyone else said, ‘Oh, no—there’s somethin’ wrong.’ Finally, Ellington called everybody to attention, and he said, ‘Now, look: This young man—I will not have you embarrass this young man. This young man is a very bright young man, and if he says that’s the right note, I will not have you embarrass him.’” As he spoke, the latest record by the Duke Ellington Orchestra was selling briskly nationwide: a vocal rendition by Jean Eldridge of “Something to Live For,” Strayhorn’s yearning ballad from the Mad Hatters’ repertoire. If, through Duke Ellington’s musical largesse, Billy Strayhorn was beginning to find something he’d long lived in hopes of, he could have easily overlooked the fact that Ellington’s name had been added as co-composer of the song.
4
SO THIS IS LOVE
In Pittsburgh, who he was had inhibited Billy Strayhorn from doing what he could do; in New York, what he could do enabled him to be who he was. Earlier, provincialism had encumbered Strayhorn’s arrival as an artist; in the more inclusive, cosmopolitan atmosphere of Manhattan, Strayhorn’s musical success spurred his coming-of-age as an individual. Twice, too, change came with a gracious introduction. This time it was an Ellington, Mercer, who introduced Billy Strayhorn to a friend of a friend. Aaron Bridgers was a twenty-one-year-old black pianist from North Carolina who had met Duke Ellington through a mutual acquaintance, a Dr. Hill, after an Ellington Orchestra dance at Pepper’s Warehouse in Bridgers’s hometown, Winston-Salem (in the dance hall, the white and colored sections were divided by a clothesline). Bridgers had recently moved up North and into a small single room at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, a dignified turn-of-the-century building as prestigious as 409, and had dropped by the Ellingtons’ apartment, meeting Mercer briefly. Soon after that, in the fall of 1939, the younger Ellington glanced out a window of his apartment and spotted Bridgers lounging on a park bench by the Edgecombe cliff walk, and he decided to bring Strayhorn downstairs to meet him. “I knew I had to introduce these guys,” said Mercer Ellington. “Ruth and I knew Billy was sort of lonely—he didn’t have anybody in New York except us. I didn’t really know that much about Aaron. I just thought they’d like each other.”
Strayhorn and Bridgers had more in common than either would disclose on the street with Mercer Ellington. Their principal differences were physical: tall and a bit thickly built, Bridgers was a strong presence; he had narrow, wide-set eyes that cooled off the effect of a readily generous smile—the top of his face seemed more serious than the bottom. He dressed well but quietly, and he had a silky brush-line mustache. Temperamentally, Strayhorn and Bridgers were compatible spirits. “We had everything in common, particularly music. We became very close right away,” explained Bridgers, who was working as an el
evator operator at the Kenmore Hall Hotel on Lexington Avenue in midtown while studying informally from time to time with jazz virtuoso Art Tatum, practicing evenings on his landlady’s player piano. “We had the same favorite musicians, especially Tatum and Teddy Wilson. And we both loved the French classical composers. I had always had a love for all things French, and I discovered that Billy did too.” (Strayhorn would take to pronouncing Bridgers’s name “Ah-ron,” with coy Gallic flair.) The men started going out nearly every night, trying ethnic restaurants (especially no-name pasta houses) all over town, gabbing away on the subway in French. “We used to love to do that, just to annoy people,” admitted Bridgers, proud of his two years of French at Atkins High School. “The sight of two black men together then, speaking French, would confound people to no end.” In the morning, they’d walk a few blocks to Ginny Lou’s restaurant for skillet-scrambled omelettes. “We couldn’t have been closer,” said Bridgers. Within weeks, the two had become inseparable, and before the end of Strayhorn’s first year in New York, they moved in together.
Bridgers found the apartment through his friend Haywood Williams, a playful boxer dog of a man whose whole body bounced when he was amused, which was frequently. Two years younger than Strayhorn, Williams had just moved to Manhattan from rural Lackawanna, New York, around the time Bridgers met him at a party; Bridgers got Williams a job as a bellman at the Kenmore Hall. In turn, Williams helped arrange for the owner of his building on 126th Street to rent Strayhorn and Bridgers the bottom floor of 315 Convent Avenue, a handsome three-story brownstone on a cozy block of small Tudor-style row houses in Sugar Hill. Jimmy Rushing, the bearish blues singer then with the Count Basie Orchestra, lived upstairs with his wife, Connie. “They were always fighting and made all kinds of noise, screaming and hollering and throwing things all day,” said Bridgers. “And when they made up at night, they were even noisier.” The new roommates had both privacy and comfort in what was essentially the basement: a private entrance underneath the main stoop gave way to a long hall leading to the bedroom; on the right were an eat-in kitchen and an ample living room. Strayhorn and Bridgers had part of the space rebuilt as a young cosmopolitans’ dream pad. With the help of a group of Bridgers’s hotel coworkers as well as some professional carpenters—“Aaron was pretty handy,” said Williams, “but not Billy. Oh, no”—they had a long bar constructed in the living room; along it, they placed a row of tube-steel stools with red leather cushions. To complete the cocktail-hour ambience, they arranged a couple of round bar tables and chairs in the center of the room and brought in an upright piano (an old eighty-dollar player model whose mechanics had been removed) and a long couch that could be converted into a bed. Strayhorn hung some prints, including a blue-themed Monet floral, and he splurged for a music lover’s extravagance that became the apartment’s focal point: an amateur record-cutting machine to make recordings of their singing and playing. Behind the apartment, glass doors opened onto a patch of garden where Strayhorn planted some flower seeds. “Nobody had an apartment like Billy and Aaron’s place,” said Williams. “It was straight out of the pages of Esquire magazine.” In place of Waspy Ivy Leaguers and their Vargas girls, however, there were two giddy young black men.
“Living with Billy was wonderful. It was a wonderful time of life for us,” said Bridgers. “We were just coming into our own. We discovered everything together.” On a typical day, Strayhorn might neaten up, perhaps rest for a while, and shop or spend some time with Ruth Ellington; he rarely worked traditional hours. Though Strayhorn and Bridgers hired a housekeeper, a middle-aged West Indian woman, Strayhorn left her little to do. “She was very motherly to us,” said Bridgers, “but Billy had the place so spotless that all that was left was the laundry. He had quite a few very delicate silk shirts, and he had her wash them. It was quite an honor, because the only other person he ever allowed to touch his favorite clothing was his mother.” (Strayhorn still shipped her his most precious garments for her to hand-launder, press, and mail back to him.) A few nights a week, Strayhorn would cook. “He had certain dishes that he’d prepare that were his specialties. He never made ordinary things,” said Bridgers. “They were combinations of things that he created himself, like music, things with beans and greens and goodness knows what. Some of them didn’t have names, also like his songs.” When Bridgers came home, there were always empty glasses in the refrigerator ready for chilled cocktails (as Esquire recommended). If Bridgers played piano or listened to a record—Bartók and Hindemith were his favorites—Strayhorn might work. “Nothing I did ever seemed to bother him, even when he was writing music,” said Bridgers. Conditioned to block out household distractions at Tioga Street Rear, Strayhorn could disappear in an internal world. “I could be playing one thing on the piano, and he could sit down with a piece of music paper and write the most intimate, complicated composition for a full orchestra,” said Bridgers. “He could hear it all in his head, no matter what was going on around him.” Most evenings, Strayhorn would come up with a plan to go out and would phone Bridgers, who in the mid-1940s took a new job as a guard at the United Nations. “He’d call, and all he’d say was, ‘Such-and-such place. One o’clock.’ And I’d meet him there.” Their Monday-night haunt was the Hollywood, a bar for show-business insiders near Small’s Paradise on Seventh Avenue in Harlem where pianists congregated each week and took turns at the keyboard; Strayhorn would occasionally knock out a Teddy Wilson number, but Bridgers, who had yet to perform professionally, sat out the sessions. Most other nights, Strayhorn and Bridgers would gravitate to either of the entrepreneur Barney Josephson’s chichi cabarets, Cafe Society Uptown on the Upper East Side or Cafe Society Downtown in the Village. Both nightclubs, glitzy spots showcasing gifted young black singers like Hazel Scott and Sarah Vaughan, got to be known as exotic simply by welcoming a mixed-race clientele. “There weren’t that many places below Harlem for blacks to go, and we weren’t made to feel out of place at Cafe Society,” said Bridgers. “Billy and I were never made to feel anything but completely at home there. Nobody looked at the two of us like we were strange because of who we were.”
At home one night, Strayhorn and Bridgers invented a psychological experiment. They went to sleep with the radio on and, upon wakening, each sat down with paper and pencil to list all the songs he felt he might have heard unconsciously. They did this for three consecutive nights. “It was very eerie,” said Bridgers. “We both put down some of the same titles—like, we’d both have ‘Stormy Weather’ and ‘Blue Moon.’ We discussed it, and then we decided it didn’t prove anything, and we weren’t sleeping very soundly. So we gave up the experiment. But it showed how interested Billy was in the mind and what happens deep below the surface. He was extremely fascinated with the world of the mind and what goes on without words.” Indeed, Strayhorn clearly preferred nonverbal communication to talking, even with Bridgers. The men rarely discussed their deeper feelings, including those for each other. “Billy and I both felt that you don’t have to talk about such things. You communicate them better in other ways,” said Bridgers. “We never pried into each other’s minds or demanded to know what the other was thinking or feeling, particularly when it comes to your feelings for people. How we felt, whatever we thought about our feelings—him, me, our friends, how he felt about Duke—these things he felt, I know and I always did, too, you should know already. You shouldn’t have to ask.”
Their silence was not secrecy. On the contrary, many of the people who knew Strayhorn at the time were struck by the guileless assurance with which he and Bridgers conducted their relationship. “We accepted Aaron as a new member of the family, because he was with Billy,” said Ruth Ellington Boatwright. “They came around all the time and made no bones about it. They were together, and that’s how it was. They didn’t go through the motions of any kind of pretense.” Strayhorn seemed avid to cross then-forbidding social boundaries with Bridgers: when a new member of the Ellington Orchestra, clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton, invited him home for di
nner with his wife, Vivian, Strayhorn brought Bridgers; then Strayhorn returned the gesture and had the Hamiltons over for a home-cooked meal at Bridgers’ and his apartment. “It was me and my wife, so Billy thought it should be him and Aaron—as natural as that. We all hung out and ate beans and drank together like it was nothing, even though it was actually something, really,” Hamilton recalled. “There wasn’t a lot of guys who was homosexual and acted like that, like there it was and you have to accept it—and if you don’t, that’s your problem.”
Around Convent Avenue, Strayhorn and Bridgers were so intimately associated with each other that a neighbor, the dancer Royce Wallace, couldn’t distinguish them in her mind; seeing Bridgers on the street alone once, she called out Strayhorn’s name. “To me,” said Wallace, “they were like one person.” Strayhorn was even outward about Bridgers in the company of old hometown friends. According to George Greenlee, who visited Convent Avenue shortly after Strayhorn and Bridgers moved in, “Billy was really happy to be with Aaron and so proud that you had to be happy for him. He didn’t worry that I might think differently about him all of a sudden, because he never really made any secret about who he was in Pittsburgh, even if he didn’t have anybody yet.” Only with his parents did Strayhorn remain cryptic about Bridgers, although his sister Georgia developed suspicions when she made her first trip to New York. Lovely and confident, Georgia was accustomed to pursuing what she wanted. “As soon as Billy was out of the house and she and I were alone, she tried to seduce me,” recalled Bridgers. “She was trying to see if I was gay. I didn’t respond to her, naturally. So she came out and asked me, ‘What’s going on with you and my brother? What’s the story? Are you two lovers or what?’ I tried to explain to her, first of all, that not responding to her advances does not necessarily mean that a person is gay. When it came to Billy and me, I said it was something she should properly talk about with her own brother. I don’t know if she ever did that, but she didn’t come back to our house for a long, long time.”