by David Hajdu
As he came into his own in New York, Strayhorn began to move in a circle of like-hearted spirits, most (though not all) black and gay. Beyond Bridgers, the core members of this group included Haywood Williams; Bill Patterson, a psychology student at NYU; and Bill Coleman, a probation officer for the Queens County Supreme Court who had been best man at Patterson’s wedding. Honorary initiates included the arranger and composer Ralph Burns, then working for Charlie Barnet, and the theatrical-set designer Oliver Smith. With various combinations of these friends, Strayhorn set out to bring to life the lyrics he inscribed in block letters in the Mad Hatters’ band book, images of penthouses and champagne, “some cocktails, some orchids, a show or two.”
“I’d pick up the phone and Billy would say, ‘Allez-y!’ That would be the signal, and we’d be off,” recalled Williams. Strayhorn might hire a limousine and spirit a few friends off for a spin through Central Park, a tray of martinis balanced on their laps as they rode. All points seemed in time to lead to Cafe Society. “Going there was like going home for us,” said Williams, who first met Strayhorn on an outing to the downtown club. “Aaron said, ‘Let’s go to Cafe Society—there’s somebody I want you to meet,’” recalled Williams. “So we took the subway downtown, and we met Strayhorn, who was waiting for us in a subway station in midtown. I looked over, and there was this little guy standing on the subway platform in a porkpie hat. He looked so silly—still a square-head from Pittsburgh trying to be cool. But he was already getting known in the in-the-know crowd. People were starting to talk about the fact that Ellington brought this guy in, and everybody wanted to know who this guy Billy was.” Before long, the bartenders knew: at Cafe Society, any customer could get a chilled martini glass of gin with a light spray of vermouth by ordering Billy’s Martini. Switching to rum one night, at Mary Lou Williams’s suggestion, Strayhorn adjusted poorly. “He used to come down to the café practically every night,” Williams said. “I said, ‘Oh, we have some wonderful rum.’ He didn’t know that this rum would knock you out if you drank a glassful of it. So he was standing at the bar while I’m playing, you know, and everything’s cool. And I looked around to the side, and I saw him reel a little bit, and he had the glass in his hand. All of a sudden I heard this ‘Whoosh!’ They were carrying him out, and he had the glass in his hand.”
The night would go on, typically, well after Cafe Society closed, when Strayhorn would lead whoever still had the life to a piano joint uptown called Luckey’s Rendezvous, named for its proprietor, Charles Luckeyth “Luckey” Roberts. He was a pianist’s pianist of the vigorous “stride” school and composer of “Moonlight Cocktail,” a sweet ballad that was a 1942 hit for Glenn Miller, and his club was located partway below street level at St. Nicholas Avenue and 149th Street; there were red walls, opera-singing waiters and waitresses (hired from Columbia University’s music program), shoulder-to-shoulder drinkers, fried-shrimp sandwiches, and a piano that Strayhorn would likely end up playing by dawn. Sam Shaw, a filmmaker and photographer with ties to the music business through his brother Eddie, a song publisher, caught Strayhorn at Luckey Roberts’s often. “Billy would be there every time I was at the place, and I went an awful lot,” recalled Shaw. “That was a place you could really let go, and he would. He was never there alone. It was one place uptown where nobody looked twice or cared about a couple of gay guys coming in. Billy and his friends could have themselves a good time out in public. And he had started to get quite a following there for his piano playing.”
The gay social world in 1940s Manhattan centered around friends-of-friends-only parties in private homes; held at regular hours several nights a week, these events were de facto gay bars where drinks and, often, light meals were sold. By all accounts, Strayhorn was not well known in these quarters; he preferred more intimate gatherings with Bridgers and their friends in his own home. Strayhorn would cook for a full day or two, preparing mounds and pots of home-style dishes like fried chicken and beans with rice. Bridgers acted as bartender, and the doors opened for thirty or so friends and their friends. “Billy loved to play host and make sure everybody was eating. That’s the kind of party he liked to have,” according to Ralph Burns. “It would be great, because a lot of us had so much in common. A lot of us were in the music business, and we were gay, of course—not that we would stand there and talk about being gay. That wasn’t it. It was just really good to be in each other’s company. Billy would put these parties together, and they were just a great, easy, natural good time.” When there was another pianist in the house, and there usually was, Strayhorn would invariably sit the musician down for a four-handed duet; he reveled in collaboration and was small enough to play standing up while his partner sat alongside him on the piano stool. “That was one of his favorite things,” said Williams. “He’d do wonderful, incredible things with another musician. People would get up after playing with Billy and say they never sounded better in their lives.” On occasion, Strayhorn and his partner, or perhaps a whole group, would write a song on the spot. “It would happen like a game,” said Bridgers. “Somebody would start with a line of words, and Billy would make up a melody for it. Somebody else would throw out something else, and Billy would put it all together right there. The next day, none of us would remember any of it—unfortunately, because Billy had the ability to make something pretty good out of nothing.”
When he socialized beyond Convent Avenue or Cafe Society, Strayhorn gravitated toward other musicians. Among members of the Ellington Orchestra, he would pal around with most of the regular barhoppers, including Ben Webster, the celebrated tenor saxophonist, who joined the band in January 1940. According to Helen Oakley Dance, Webster, “a big guy, instinctively fathered him. Besides, they both liked a good drink.” However, Strayhorn drifted naturally to the vocalist Herb Jeffries, a fellow Francophile closer to Strayhorn’s age (Webster was six years older). Jeffries, a fair-skinned mixed-race baritone with chiseled good looks—he starred in several all-black movie westerns as the Bronze Buckaroo—shared Strayhorn’s faith in the ennobling power of gentility. “We both spoke French, so we loved to go to the very chicest French restaurants around New York,” Jeffries remembered. “There was a tremendous amount of discrimination, and you could show a certain amount of sophistication by the mere fact that you could speak a language that the next white person couldn’t. Strayhorn and I both felt this showed you weren’t that lowly person, that Amos ‘n’ Andy character that everybody thought you were. If you knew a thing or two about good food and wine, it made people wake up and think, Hey, he’s not that watermelon figure I expected. So it gave you a bit of a mental kick too.”
When he was on his own for an evening, Strayhorn went off in search of music. In the early 1940s, he became known and swiftly accepted at Minton’s Playhouse on 118th Street in Harlem, according to both Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach, two of the creators of the then-gestating music some were calling bebop. Though he generally just listened—Gillespie remembered him paying special attention to the great pianist Thelonious Monk, another of the music’s pioneers—Strayhorn sometimes sat in on the probative Minton’s jams that gave birth to bop. “Strayhorn was on the scene, and he played with the best of them,” said Gillespie. “He never made a big deal out of it or looked for any attention. One night, he and Bud [Powell] decided to cut [compete, taking turns at the piano], and, man, I’m telling you, he turned that piano inside out.” A teenage Max Roach witnessed something similar another night at Minton’s. “Pianists loved to play for each other, you know, and for the crowd,” said Roach. “One night, Strayhorn sat down after somebody, I don’t remember who, and nobody would go to the piano after him. He was that good.”
In a corner of his new life, Strayhorn retained a place for his family. He rarely disclosed much about his background to his friends. “He wouldn’t say anything about his childhood or the members of the family unless you asked him straight out, and then you would only get a few words,” said Haywood Williams. To Bridgers alone, Strayho
rn was a bit more revealing. “He said he didn’t care much about keeping in touch with a couple of his brothers, because they weren’t the nicest people to him,” recalled Bridgers. “Of course, he loved his mother very much, and he talked about her—for instance, what she would probably say if she were in a certain situation he might be in. She was like a guiding force in his life, even while he was in New York.” Strayhorn and his mother stayed in touch by phone; he wasn’t a letter writer, evidently out of embarrassment over his herky-jerky penmanship. “Half the family told him, ‘We can’t read your handwriting,’” said Lillian Strayhorn Dicks. “So he said, ‘To hell with you. I won’t write.’”
Every three or four months during his first years in Manhattan, Strayhorn would take the train and visit Pittsburgh for a few days. More than once, his father wouldn’t be there; he would leave for periods, at first for weeks, sometimes months, at a stretch, then for several years at a time. “I don’t know how she did it,” Lillian Strayhorn Dicks said, “but Mama always took him back. That was what a wife was supposed to do.” With James contributing sporadically, Lillian could no longer keep up her house without financial help from her sons, who pitched in according to their means. As the best-off among them, Billy Strayhorn not only sent cash regularly but helped his mother move out of the “zenith way” and onto Tioga Street proper. While young Lillian was sent to stay with her aunt Julia in New Jersey, her mother moved into a comfortable two-story rented house across the street from the Bucket of Blood; Strayhorn and his brothers took care of the monthly rent. “Mama had always dreamed of something better,” said Lillian Strayhorn Dicks. “She finally got it, thanks to her boys—and mostly Bill.”
He would bring his mother a fancy gift—a pair of imported gloves, for instance—whenever he came to Pittsburgh and take her shopping downtown for stockings and some other finery she couldn’t or wouldn’t get herself. Lillian Strayhorn Dicks remembered every visit as a family holiday. “He seemed like an exotic visitor,” she said, “because he always had beautiful clothes and different things. Naturally, everybody would come around to see him, and he’d be so charming, so New York—tell all the women they were beautiful. We’d catch him up on what the latest family scandal was, if any, and he’d laugh and give his opinion on what was going on. He’d look at all the new babies—there were always more children since he was there last—and tell you how to raise them. Mama was in her glory. She was so proud of him, and that was the most important thing to him. I think she’s the only reason he came home. At one point, he almost said as much. Somebody was saying something about something that somebody in the family was upset about, and he said, ‘F them! I’m not concerned about anybody but Mama.’” The men in the family, never involved in that distaff talk, would chip in a few questions about New York’s spicier side, much to Strayhorn’s discontent: his brother Johnny made one remark about the “joints in New York,” and Strayhorn snapped, “There are no joints in New York.” As Lillian Strayhorn Dicks recalled, “Nobody could say anything negative about New York. For Bill, everything in New York was very posh. They just didn’t have joints in New York. Joints were reserved for Pittsburgh, and that was a place Bill was very far away from”—even when he was in his parents’ living room.
Strayhorn didn’t so much transform in New York as take form; in New York, his amorphous youthful ideal of urban élan could finally be made real. “He had always had a certain vision of himself,” said Lillian Strayhorn Dicks. “But it never had a chance to come out until he went to New York and met the right people and went to the right places. Then he really came alive.” As his intimates saw him, Strayhorn emerged during his first years in Manhattan as nearly a caricature of sophistication, at least in appearance. Strayhorn dressed like a dandy: he liked striped or dark-colored shirts, sometimes paisley prints, and colorful ties; his favorite tie designer, Countess Mara, specialized in whimsical, cartoonish figures on bright backgrounds. Alto saxophonist Marshall Royal left Birdland on Broadway, around the corner from West 52nd Street, at around four one morning and found Strayhorn window-shopping at Layton’s men’s store. “He was admiring a suit jacket,” recalled Royal. “There was another one he liked a couple of blocks away, at Phil Kornfeld’s. He took me down to look at that one, and it was real nice.” Strayhorn was fond of the feel of silk and cashmere on his body, and he collected socks; he had two sock drawers. Bred to regard good manners as elevating, he purchased an etiquette guide that he read as intently as one might a novel. When he bought a new suit, he kept the front pockets sewn up, because his mother had taught him to keep his hands out of his pockets.
Strayhorn had two favorite phrases: “Ever up and onward” was one. As Aaron Bridgers recalled, “It was his constant message of encouragement and good cheer. It meant, Don’t look back—yesterday was yesterday and today is today. Look ahead.” The other was, simply, “That’s great!” and its variants: “He’s great!” or “She’s great!” Bill Patterson explained, “That was the thing he said more than anything. It was part of his philosophy, his approach to being alive, which was very generous, very open, almost too much so. He could see what was unique and worthy in almost any individual he came upon. Like, a waitress would wait on us, and she’d walk away, and Strayhorn would say, ‘She’s great!’ Why? We didn’t see it, but Strayhorn would see something there. The big and the small—these weren’t real distinctions for him. Strayhorn would always see something he felt was truly great.” Strayhorn treated those around him—and those around them—well. “He was a gift giver,” said Williams. “When he came to your house, it was never empty-handed. He’d bring a little something that he saw in a shop that he thought you might like, a decorative box or something like that. If you were in a bar and Billy came into the bar, he’d buy you a drink and whoever was with you a drink, no matter how many people were in your party.” Strayhorn’s generosity wasn’t limited to others, however. As Bridgers affirmed, “If I said to him, ‘Billy, don’t buy that shirt or that pair of pants. It’s too expensive,’ he said, ‘Mind your own business.’ He said, ‘Life is too short.’ He’d slap me down with words if there was something he wanted.” Strayhorn was a reader, and he said his favorite Shakespeare was sonnet 97 (“How like a winter hath my absence been / From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!”). His friend Bill Coleman dropped by Convent Avenue one afternoon and found Strayhorn reclining on the sofa, poring over the orchestral score to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; it was pleasure reading, not work, Strayhorn said.
Strayhorn and Bridgers had a copy of the Kama Sutra that Strayhorn would study at length. He liked erotica: he had a set of translucent Japanese discs that, held up to a light, revealed arty etchings of men and women having sex, and he collected beefcake postcards. Among Strayhorn’s friends, graphic (though not flirtatious) conversations about sex were common. “There was an awful lot of talk about sex—positions and how to do this or that. Straight, nonstraight, whatever,” remembered Patterson. “Oils, powder, esoterica. Strayhorn loved, really loved, to talk about that stuff. But it was mostly in fun. He laughed so hard he couldn’t stop.” Strayhorn laughed easily and heartily, though the sound came as a breathy giggle, as if the biggest part of the laugh had stayed inside.
“Billy was much stronger than he looked,” said Aaron Bridgers. “Once when we were out together, I turned to him, and I said, ‘Billy, I’m getting drunk.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s fine. You enjoy yourself.’ So I did, and I eventually got so drunk I couldn’t get up to go home. Now, Billy was about half my size, but he picked me up, actually picked me up, and carried me outside, put me in a cab, and picked me up again and carried me in the house.” His emotional strength was both more obvious and far more impressive, according to those close to him. “The one thing that stood out about Billy then,” said Ruth Ellington Boatwright, “is that no matter what anyone said or did, he was never sensitive about his own feelings or anyone trying to hurt him, and he was always understanding and sympathetic and seeing every point of vie
w, without any reference to himself whatsoever. If I saw somebody had said something about him that I thought wasn’t right, he’d say, ‘Oh, darling, don’t worry about it,’ and he’d go on.” Bill Patterson saw Strayhorn’s psychic wherewithal in vaguely spiritual terms. “Billy wasn’t delicate or soft at all. He had an extraordinary presence. You got the distinct feeling that he was functioning from a place that’s different from where the rest of us come from, and from that place within himself, he seemed to be able to see people in a different way than a lot of people get seen or most of us see people. He listened, he actually listened to you. He was always present.” In teasing honor of his deeper side, Bridgers gave Strayhorn a nickname that stuck within their circle: Buddha.