by David Hajdu
Applying his gift for musical empathy to the artist he loved so, Strayhorn worked closely with Horne to refine her singing style and repertoire. “I wasn’t born a singer,” said Horne. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally. Very subtly, he made me stretch—he raised keys on me without telling me. He taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything. He played good music for me to hear, because I hadn’t heard anything. He went around with me to auditions and played piano for me. I was terrified, but he kept me calm and made me good.” Horne finally landed an engagement at Los Angeles impresario Felix Young’s Little Troc cocktail lounge, a smaller version of Young’s failed nightclub extravaganza The Trocadero. Something close to a Cafe Society West, the intimate Little Troc was located in a Sunset Strip space about the size of a grade school classroom. The floor-level stage was so tiny that the Katharine Dunham dancers, who opened for Horne, kept knocking over patrons’ drinks and quit after three performances; the dressing rooms were small as well, recalled the dancer and choreographer Talley Beatty, then with the Dunham troupe: “Billy and Lena were working together in her dressing room, which was really a little closet. They were right up against each other, but it didn’t matter to them. They only needed the space of one person, they were so close.” To Horne’s old New York club material, Strayhorn added arrangements of four new numbers for her pianist, Phil Moore: “Blues in the Night,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” and “When the Sun Comes Out.” “He knew what songs were right for me. He knew my personality better than I did,” said Horne, “and he wrote arrangements that had my feeling in the music.” Hollywood talk made the show a must-see—“People who never went to nightclubs pushed their way into the place four or five nights a week,” the New York Times reported—and Lena Horne seemed on her way to a screen career.
Strayhorn worked well with singers. Ever since the imaginary lush life of his teens, he had had a fondness for theatrical songs in the Gershwin and Porter vein; he knew the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway repertoires thoroughly and favored the vocal song form in his most personal work. (Although he might zip through an arranging assignment in the midst of a house party, while guests noodled on the piano or records played, he would craft his own songs alone, refining the work for weeks or longer, according to Aaron Bridgers.) A facile pianist and adaptive collaborator, Strayhorn served as a sensitive accompanist and vocal arranger, roles of growing value to the Ellington Orchestra as singers emerged as a popular focal point of the major bands in the 1940s. When Strayhorn first took over the Ellington Orchestra vocal wing in 1939, Ivie Anderson was the only singer; by the mid-1940s, he was supervising a roster of full-time singers, including Joya Sherrill, Maria Ellington (no relation), Kay Davis, and Al Hibbler.
Herb Jeffries, who left the band in 1942 to pursue a full-time film career, acknowledged his debt to his friend for nurturing his singing style as well as the orchestra’s larger vocal identity. “When I was hired for the band, I used to sing in a high, high voice,” said Jeffries. “I used to clown around and do some imitations. So one night we were down in Nashville, and I was imitating Crosby backstage, and when Strayhorn heard that he said, ‘Oh, I like that. That’s great.’ So he told Duke, ‘That’s the voice, that’s the voice he should sing in.’ So he brought me all the way down from a very high voice into the mellow voice that I’ve used ever since. That’s the kind of thing he did with the singers in the band. He’d work very, very closely with you, and he sensed what your strengths were. Then he picked songs and did the arrangements to bring out the best in you.” Joya Sherrill, a fair-skinned, impishly cute teenager from Detroit when she first performed with the Ellington Orchestra in 1942, said she grew up under Strayhorn’s tutelage as well. “I had never sung professionally before,” said Sherrill, who auditioned for Ellington by performing her own lyrics to “Take the ‘A’ Train.” “Billy would teach me my songs and get in lots of lessons about music at the time. But he would never act like he was teaching me. As things came up, he would explain something or help me with something. By the time he was done with me, I had learned a lot about my craft. That’s the way he did things.” Maria Ellington, elegantly winsome, sang relatively little; when Ellington signed her in 1944, he referred to her as “the beauty department.” Strayhorn did teach her the sexy novelty “Rocks in My Bed.” “I hated it, because it was basically a silly song,” recalled Maria Ellington Cole (who later married Nat “King” Cole). “I think they used me more for show than anything, because of my looks. Billy worked with me on my songs and played piano for me. But when I asked him how I was doing, he’d say, ‘Oh, you look divine.’”
Among the orchestra’s female singers, Strayhorn seemed closest to Kay Davis, a mousy concert vocalist with a master’s degree in music from Northwestern when Ellington hired her in 1944; her specialty was performing the abstract, wordless vocal parts that Ellington pioneered early in his career with such compositions as “Creole Love Call.” “I mostly did Duke’s obbligato vocalizing rather than standards or Billy’s tunes,” she explained. “But Billy and I rehearsed all the music together, and we became fast friends. We both loved classical music, and that was a very strong bond. He taught me ‘Lush Life,’ which was very flattering, considering how special that song was to him. He had very particular ideas about the way that song should be sung and very high standards. Eventually, he and I did it together in public.” (Strayhorn and Davis finally gave “Lush Life” its first major performance at Carnegie Hall on November 13, 1948; it was essentially a duet, with the full Ellington Orchestra contributing only the climactic final chord. Although his notebooks show that Strayhorn was working on an arrangement of “Lush Life” for the Ellington Orchestra at this time, he abandoned the project.) Strayhorn taught her “down to every little inflection,” according to Kay Davis Wimp. “He was very particular like that. For instance, he taught me how to drink a martini. He told me that the proper drink for me was a martini, and he told me how to drink it. He said, ‘It tastes bad. But drink it anyway—you’ll adjust.’ And he was right.”
Strayhorn worked less closely with the orchestra’s principal male vocalist of the 1940s, Al Hibbler, perhaps because the Arkansasborn singer’s style was so untouchably idiosyncratic, a mercurial amalgam of earthy tones, part-growls, and abstractions, all imbued with a jarring hint of a Cockney accent. “I didn’t need Strayhorn very much,” said Hibbler, who was born sightless and learned singing with the choir of the Arkansas School for the Blind. “Strayhorn was all right. He was something else. I may be blind, but I know who’s in the room with me. Ray Nance was in the room, I knew Ray Nance was in the room. Cootie Williams was in the room, I knew Cootie was in the room. Strayhorn was in the room, I didn’t know he was there. He was like a ghost—there’s no way you knew if he was even there.”
The Second World War affected Billy Strayhorn’s life less than he had expected. When the news of Pearl Harbor broke, Strayhorn and Lena Horne were alone, drinking cocktails in her apartment; they sat on the floor holding their drinks with two hands, staring at the knobs of the radio. “Billy turned to me,” recalled Horne, “and he said, ‘It’s all over.’ We thought that was the end of the world.” It was, certainly for now, the end of their private happy hour: Strayhorn left immediately for New York and, with Aaron Bridgers, undertook what would be a less than traumatic adjustment to wartime. Both Bridgers and he were declared 4F, Bridgers for a hernia, Strayhorn for his severe myopia. Ellington, who was forty-two when the United States entered the war, wasn’t drafted; he maintained a homefront version of his usual relentless touring and recording schedule, adding armory dances all over the country (these tended, though, to be largely civilian events to which servicemen and their dates were admitted free of charge) and making sure to pitch in with benefit appearances. Sharing a bill with Bette Davis, Abbott and Costello, and Rudy Vallee and his Coast Guard Band at the Hollywood Canteen in October 1942, Ellington performed a duet with harmonica player
Larry Adler, a private in the army infantry. Strayhorn accompanied the band to this event and, while he was in California, met Francis Goldberg, a sinewy, strong-featured black sailor stationed at the San Pedro naval base; Strayhorn and Goldberg clubbed together around Los Angeles over the course of several days and agreed to reunite in New York after the war.
Both with Ellington and outside his organization, Strayhorn composed and arranged material, including an extended collaboration with Ellington called “The Deep South Suite,” for morale-boosting “V-discs,” which were distributed without charge within the armed services. A political buff and Roosevelt booster, Strayhorn hoped the 1944 presidential election would bring a prompt end to the war. On election night, he arranged to listen to the returns with a few friends at Ruth Ellington’s apartment. “He was very anxious about the election,” recalled Claire Gordon, a friend of the Ellingtons’ who was part of the group that evening. “He felt it was imperative that Roosevelt win. We went out to buy something to drink to have as the returns came in, but since it was election night and the liquor stores were closed, we couldn’t get any alcohol. We went from store to store, wandering all over the place. Finally, we found a place that would sell us some slivovitz, a ceremonial plum brandy. We went back, and we listened to the returns, and we drank. Roosevelt won, but we weren’t very happy because we were sick as dogs from the stuff we were drinking.” None of Strayhorn’s friends or members of his immediate family died in the war, although George Greenlee encountered trouble stateside. Commissioned as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Force and assigned to the 477th Bombardment Group of black pilots (the Tuskegee Airmen), Greenlee was rejected for intelligence training while seemingly less qualified whites were accepted; he protested in terms accurately deemed disrespectful and was court-martialed near the end of 1944. Strayhorn traveled overnight by train to McCoy field in Orlando, Florida, to visit his friend in the brig, only to find that Greenlee’s uncle Gus had pulled strings with the army brass and gotten his nephew relatively lenient confinement to base. Strayhorn and George spent the weekend in the officers’ club, as Greenlee recalled, drinking “to victory and the numbers games.” Meanwhile, Strayhorn had already played a more tangibly constructive part in the war effort, though he didn’t know it: his old Westinghouse High School friend Boggy Fowler was serving in the special services and spent three years producing Fantastic Rhythm at navy bases throughout the Pacific.
In the expansive postwar spirit, a rich opportunity came Ellington’s way. Perry Watkins, a young black set designer and stage manager esteemed for his work with Harlem’s WPA Negro Theatre (as well as with Orson Welles on his all-black production of Macbeth for the Federal Theatre), set out to produce his first Broadway show, a daring contemporary fable based on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, first produced in London in 1729. Though the antihero tale of a thief and a jailer’s daughter had been updated relatively recently by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht as Die Dreigroschenoper (The Three-penny Opera), Watkins’s twist was to use a multiracial creative team and cast for what he called Beggar’s Holiday. Spotting Ellington and a small entourage finishing dinner in a midtown Manhattan restaurant, Watkins walked up to him cold and offered him a commission to compose the score in collaboration with the librettist John Latouche, who had a track record with black-themed material as the author, with the composer Vernon Duke, of Cabin in the Sky. Watkins was surprised at first to find Ellington unfamiliar with The Beggar’s Opera. “I realized all of a sudden that Duke never went to the theater very much,” remarked Watkins, who was equally surprised when Ellington accepted the offer anyway, on the spot.
Watkins’s proposition was another step in forming Ellington’s reputation as a composer who transcended big-band jazz. Nobody was asking Tommy Dorsey to write for the Broadway stage; moreover, this was a full “book” show in a “legit” theater—not a revue in a “Negro-circuit” house—and one based on a work by an old, dead white Englishman. “Ellington wanted the recognition of writing a Broadway show,” recalled Luther Henderson, a lifelong friend of the Ellingtons (and a Juilliard classmate of Mercer’s), who helped prepare the show’s music for the stage. “In fact, he wanted the recognition of writing a Broadway show more than he wanted to write a Broadway show.”
Ellington’s endless loop of band engagements prohibited him from working on Broadway for a prolonged period. Latouche found it nearly impossible to collaborate with Ellington and threatened to quit, complaining that he needed to talk to him—Ellington was the composer. “I can’t work like this,” said Watkins. Henderson explained: “Duke Ellington would give up his band and his traveling from one city to another only under the penalty of death. Ellington would never leave his band—never, ever, not for anything. Now, you cannot do a Broadway show without the composer present, because a Broadway show is a collaborative effort between composer, lyricist, choreographer, and the performers.” However, Henderson added, “Beggar’s Holiday was not produced without the composer present—one of the composers, at any rate. Ellington said, ‘I will leave you Strayhorn.’” It was no secret: An item in the September 9, 1946, edition of the New York Herald Tribune reported, “Billy Strayhorn, composer-arranger, arrives from the West Coast tomorrow to begin work on a new jazz version of The Beggar’s Opera’ in collaboration with Duke Ellington.”
Working alone at home on Convent Avenue, as well as with Ellington as often as possible, including by phone—the band was away from New York for several months prior to the show’s first rehearsal on October 21, 1946—Strayhorn applied himself to Beggar’s Holiday with striking seriousness of purpose. “Strayhorn had the theater bug,” said Aaron Bridgers. “That show meant a lot to him. He gave it everything he had in him.” The result was a collection of sophisticated yet swinging, harmonically uncommon theater songs, including the pretty “Brown Penny,” “Women, Women, Women,” “Girls Want a Hero,” “Maybe I Should Change My Ways,” “The Wrong Side of the Railroad Tracks,” and “I’m Afraid,” all composed either by Ellington in collaboration with Strayhorn or solely by Strayhorn. During the rehearsals in New York and tryouts in New Haven, Newark, Hartford, and Boston, Strayhorn handled the music through whirligig revisions and additions to the show. “It was in a lot of trouble out of town,” recalled George Abbott, who replaced Nicholas Ray as director. “I don’t know what Nick was doing, but it wasn’t working. I was brought on board, and it was evident to me that a great many changes had to be made, including some new songs and other changes to the music. I never saw Duke Ellington, never worked with him. Billy took care of whatever I asked for. He sat down and wrote it right there, whatever was needed.”
In New Haven, it was decided that what the show needed was a ballet number. “We were out of town and they needed this ballet,” said Luther Henderson. “And I remember in the hotel at about two o’clock—I was there—I watched Billy talking to Ellington [by telephone] for a few minutes. And Strayhorn stayed up the rest of the night, and the next day the orchestra read the music, and they put the ballet [titled the “Boll Weevil Ballet”] in the show the following day.” In Hartford, the first act was being performed on stage while the second act was being revised backstage. “That’s what Billy Strayhorn was going through,” said Perry Bruskin, a comic actor in the show. “He was writing music during the actual production.” As the set designer Oliver Smith recalled, “It was hectic because they were cutting and adding songs all the time, and Billy had to write them on the spot. I used to sit in his dressing room and watch him. I’ll never forget it, because of the way he worked. He sat down with the music paper and very methodically wrote the song. He heard it in his head. And only when it was complete would he sit down and read it through on the piano. He’d ask me, ‘Well, what do you think?’ Once I told him, ‘That doesn’t really sound like an Ellington song,’ and he said, ‘It’s not supposed to.’” Luther Henderson understood. “The misconception was that Ellington put Strayhorn there because Billy knew what Duke would do,” said Henderson. �
�The truth was the opposite: Ellington put Billy there to do what he wanted, because Duke knew that whatever Billy did would be great.”
Strayhorn made a hit with the cast. “Despite how important he was to the show, when he came into a group, he would stand on the side,” Bruskin recalled. “He projected that kind of very pleasing, gentle intelligence. But he had an authority that we accepted immediately—that this was the man with responsibility for the music. That’s all. And everything he said was the last word as far as the music was concerned.” Bill Dillard, a singer and actor, was also struck by Strayhorn’s warm authority. “He had an air of ‘I know what I’m going to do,’” said Dillard. “When he came up with a song or when he changed anything—some of the music or whatever it was—you had a feeling that he really knew what he wanted to do. His directions and his corrections to us were all done in a very friendly way. We all enjoyed whatever he wanted us to do.” Among the dancers, above all, the men, Strayhorn made a special impression. “He always came around us and delighted in being around us,” remembered the dancer Albert Popwell. “This was unusual, because we were more or less a clan—they called us the gypsies, because we were really in a world of our own. And Billy always seemed to merge toward us, one, because so many of us were gay, and that was a very important connection, especially if you were black and gay. Also, dancers are always like kids, and he was short and looked very boyish. I don’t mean that Billy was childish, because he was very sophisticated and incredibly strong in that way of still water runs deep. It was like you knew that if he wanted to and you crossed him, he could lash at you. He reminded me of a cat like that.”