Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  Beggar’s Holiday was staged at a record cost of approximately $300,000; the show promptly settled in at a draw of some $5,000 per week less than the $27,000 it required to break even. “Perhaps it was too daring for its time,” speculated George Abbott. “Audiences then were shocked by the very sight of blacks and whites together on stage.” The show had only a sixteen-week run at the Broadway Theater on West 53rd Street before closing in the last week of March 1947, despite reviews that found much to praise, principally in the music. The New York World-Telegram’s reviewer wrote, “Mr. Ellington’s score is a generous outpouring of his individual talent, filled with the spirit and the warmth of his music, the pulsing beat of his rhythms, the strength and the refreshing colors of his modern harmonies,” and the critic for the New York Times observed, “Mr. Ellington has been dashing off songs with remarkable virtuosity. No conventional composer, he has not written a pattern of song hits to be lifted out of their context, but rather an integral musical composition that carries the old Gay picaresque yarn through its dark modern setting.” Strayhorn’s program credit read: “Orchestrations under the personal supervision of Billy Strayhorn.” “What credit could be given?” asked Luther Henderson. “‘Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’? Uh-uh. This was supposed to be a Duke Ellington show. ‘Billy Strayhorn’—who was he? ‘Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’—what was that? You couldn’t sell it.”

  This time, however, Strayhorn wasn’t buying so easily. “Billy didn’t say ‘boo’ about Duke or how the credits would read the whole time,” recalled Oliver Smith. “But on opening night on Broadway, there was a grand, gala party. Duke was there in all his splendor, receiving his public.” Ellington moved among the first-nighters in a disembodied glide that impressed the dancers; he acknowledged others with only a slow beginning of a nod of the head and never appeared to move the rest of his body, apparently powered by something outside himself. “Billy said to me, ‘Let’s get out of here,’” said Smith. “I said, ‘But the party’s just starting.’ And he said, ‘Not for me it isn’t.’ I told him no, I really should stay, and he walked away and out of the theater alone.”

  6

  I’M CHECKIN’ OUT, GOOM BYE

  “Da-dee day! Da-dee day!” Billy Strayhorn scat-sang the opening theme of Gershwin’s An American in Paris into the microphone of his parlor record-cutting machine. Two days earlier, New Year’s Eve 1947, Strayhorn had thrown a bon voyage party for Aaron Bridgers, who sailed for France the following morning. Through Moune de Rivel, a leonine and faintly talented French West Indian chanteuse-turned-restaurateur once featured at Cafe Society Uptown, Bridgers had gotten his first job in music, as a cocktail pianist at Chez Moune de Rivel, a simple spot on the busy Latin Quarter corner of rue St. Jacques and rue du Sommerard. Strayhorn’s bash was still in full swing the evening of January 2. Bridgers was some six hundred nautical miles across the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary, his bags stuffed with the powdered milk and chocolates he expected to find in short supply in postwar France, while his old gang topped three days of loosely Gallic celebration by shellacking regards for their friend in Paris. Strayhorn played host on the recording, announcing each speaker with bilingual savoir faire. “Bonsoir messieurs, mesdames!” proclaimed Strayhorn. His little voice, sweet and sibilant, formed the French words limberly. “Aaah! La vie parisienne—et le théâtre! Aaah! Pour Monsieur Aaron Bridgers, écoutez! This record we’re making for Aaron apropos his coming visit to the City of Lights. We are gathered here, quite a quiet little gathering, to make this little farewell disk to our good friend, Aa-ron. Vous avez l’esprit de Paris, n’est-ce pas? Aaron, you must take this to the Sorbonne and play it for all the professeurs.” Haywood Williams said a few gentle, nervous words into the mike; Ruth Ellington phoned and delivered her wishes, entirely unintelligible, through the receiver; and two relatively new members of the Convent Avenue group chimed in—Francis Goldberg, the sailor Strayhorn had met in California during the war, now discharged and working as a cook in New York, and his imponderably named fraternal twin Frank, a postal worker with movie-star looks and a boxer’s frame. “When you gonna come bouncin’ around there, Strayhorn?” cracked Frank Goldberg. “Oh,” responded Strayhorn coyly, “I’ll probably spend April in Paris.” Precious continentalism underlined the self-enhancement in Bridgers’s and Strayhorn’s Francophilia: if their lives ever seemed less than lush, a dose of Paris would ease the bite of it. “Ever since I was growing up in North Carolina, I had always fantasized about sipping champagne on the Champs-Elysées,” said Bridgers. “Going to Paris was an experience I had to have, and Strayhorn knew that, because he felt the same way. He was very happy for me. It was a bit sad for both of us when I went, but we thought this was a wonderful thing for me. This was a transition time for us, and we both believed it would work out well, because I was going to Paris. We thought of Paris as a wonderful place. There was no problem, because I was in Paris. This was also a good time for me to go away. Strayhorn needed some time alone. He was going through some things of his own.”

  Paris was becoming a locus of change for Strayhorn and those dearest to him. A few months before Bridgers sailed for France, Strayhorn returned on the SS America from an intercontinental trip that had been a virtual secret mission. He had accompanied Lena Horne to her unpublicized Paris wedding to Lennie Hayton, her longtime beau, an MGM arranger and conductor; California law prohibited mixed-race marriages, and Hayton was white, of Russian Jewish heritage. Horne found a compatible Strayhorn surrogate in Hayton: bourgeois and vigilantly so, Hayton relished introducing Horne to wines and classical music, mostly that of Bartók, Ravel, and Stravinsky. With his aquiline features and longish graying hair, Hayton, thirty-eight, looked like the old Georgian nobleman he behaved as if he were. He frequently wore a yachtsman’s cap, and he never sailed. “Since I couldn’t have Billy, I let myself fall in love with Lennie,” allowed Horne. “I submitted him to Billy for his approval, and he gave it to me, or else I wouldn’t have married him.” She did so in a civil ceremony on April 16, 1947, Hayton standing on her right, Strayhorn on her left. “Billy and Lennie were as compatible as Lennie and I, and that just had to be,” added Horne. “They got along well. They’d stay up together and talk and play music after I went to bed.” Strayhorn and Hayton decided to learn chess together; they bought an instruction book and played for days straight, keeping a record of their moves on a notepad both for future study and to document their improvement, neither of which occurred, as far as Lena Horne could tell.

  Hayton, a jazz-oriented arranger and onetime pianist for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra (during this stint, he recorded a perky duet version of “Sweet Sue” with one of Whiteman’s vocalists, Bing Crosby), developed a growing interest in Strayhorn’s music and career. He was exploring the prospect of developing his own music production and publishing company and asked Strayhorn about his agreement with Ellington. Alarmed to find that Strayhorn had none—and had no idea how much his arrangements and compositions might be worth on the open market—Hayton urged him to be more attentive to the business side of his career with Ellington. “That was the beginning of problems with Strayhorn,” said Mercer Ellington. “Lena and Lennie really took him under their wing, and because Aaron was away in Paris, they got a lot more of his attention than Pop. We didn’t see very much of Strayhorn for a while.”

  At every party Horne had in Los Angeles, she recalled, Strayhorn played “Lush Life.” When Marie Bryant, the star of Beggar’s Holiday, had a bash at her Los Angeles home, Strayhorn played “Lush Life.” “I never intended for it to be published,” Strayhorn explained. “No, I really didn’t. You know, you have your little private projects? Well, that was ‘Lush Life.’ It was something that I did and I had written and that I liked for myself, and I just did it at parties.” Were another musician or admirer to remark on the song’s complexity, Strayhorn would protest in self-deprecation, slide to the left of the piano bench to make room for one more, and demonstrate how to play a rendition of “
Lush Life” using three fingers. At Marie Bryant’s house in the fall of 1948, however, Strayhorn’s little private project fell on the ears of Norman Granz, the thirty-year-old entrepreneur who brought a refined sensibility to the Clef and Norgran record labels he had founded. Hearing Strayhorn’s performance, he asked him to record the composition for an inventive jazz anthology album he was putting together, The Jazz Scene, a bound album of six 78s showcasing performers such as saxophonists Charlie Parker and Lester Young, pianist Bud Powell, and bandleader Machito, as well as arrangers such as Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti. “At that party was one Norman Granz, and he loved it—‘You must record it!’ I didn’t particularly like the idea of doing an isolated [song] in a collection of things,” Strayhorn said. “It didn’t seem to me to have any kind of form. I mean, just to have works of this person, that person, and the other person, at least the way he explained it to me. I didn’t like the idea. He said, ‘You can have anything you want. You can have any size orchestra.’ I said, ‘There’s only one way to do “Lush Life,” and that’s with piano.’ And since I was the only one who knew it, I was the only one who could do it, because I had never written it down. So I recorded it, and as we finished the date, Nat [Cole] came in, because he had to do some retakes on a piano album he was doing—he came in a little early. He said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘Well, a song of mine.’ So he said, ‘I’d like to do that.’ Well, you know, I paid that no mind whatsoever.” The Jazz Scene was released in late 1949, but without “Lush Life”; Strayhorn was represented, nonetheless, in two selections featuring Harry Carney, “Sono” and “Frustration,” for which Strayhorn played piano and wrote string quintet arrangements. Both compositions were by Ellington, who also supervised the two recordings. “We didn’t include Billy’s ‘Lush Life,’ because we could only accommodate a limited number of selections,” said Norman Granz, “and Billy also contributed two beautiful string pieces.” (The arrangements were credited to Ellington on the release.)*

  “Lush Life” remained a party treat until the fall of 1949, when Strayhorn discovered that Nat Cole had indeed recorded the song, in an exuberantly un-Strayhorn vocal rendition set to an exotically theatrical orchestral arrangement by Pete Rugolo, released as the B side of a commercial tune, “Lillian.” Strayhorn preferred the A side, in part for the way it rhymed his mother’s and his first names, Lillian and William. “When he first heard Nat’s ‘Lush Life,’ that was the only time I ever, ever heard Billy really upset,” said Aaron Bridgers. Strayhorn had called immediately after hearing Cole’s recording. “I never heard him talk like that. He was screaming, ‘Why the fuck didn’t they leave it alone?’” Rugolo took liberties with the composition, streamlining the modulations and adding a few bars at points. (“Nat said he didn’t know what to do with it,” said Rugolo. “So I took it and I worked on it for a while, and I got this idea—I kind of expanded the verse, I made like a tone poem out of it. I added bars, and I tried to catch a weekend in Paris—I put a little Paris thing in, and I tried to make it that kind of a thing.”) Moreover, Cole muffed some of the lyrics: he replaced the ethereal allure of “your siren song” with the strange alarm of “your siren of song”; he sang “strifling” for “stifling” and “those who lives are lonely, too” instead of “those whose lives.…” Strayhorn “was snorting, he was so angry,” said Bridgers. “Of course, any other time, it might not have bothered him quite as badly. I think it was just the icing on the cake. He was getting frustrated at that time.” And his next trip to Paris only sharpened the bite of it.

  In the spring of 1950 Ellington took on a third theatrical project, his most intellectually enterprising yet. He was to compose the score for a dramatic musical version of Faust, with book, lyrics, and direction by Orson Welles, whom Ellington had met in California. In July 1941, almost immediately after the opening of Jump for Joy, Welles and Ellington had announced plans to collaborate on a documentary to be called Saga of Jazz, but it had never come to be. As he was during the gestation of Beggar’s Holiday, Ellington was busy touring, this time through Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and other points in Europe; and once again, Ellington dispatched Strayhorn to the theater, this time the little Théâtre Edouard VII in Paris. Alerted that Welles wanted to work independently on the script, the sets, and other aspects of the effort, Strayhorn met with the production manager, Herbert Machiz, a young American studying in Paris on the first Fulbright fellowship in drama, and he set out to compose. Strayhorn began notes for four pieces to be sung by the three characters Welles had decided to use at that point, Dr. John Faustus, Mephistopheles, and Helen of Troy: “Me Is the Trouble,” “Zing, Zing,” “In the Dungeons of Guilt,” and “Song of the Fool.”

  Imminently, however, Strayhorn’s experience appeared inadvertently Faustian: the assignment looked doomed. Titled The Blessed and the Damned, the hybrid Faust tale—parts Milton, Dante, Marlowe, and Welles, plus whatever music Strayhorn would contribute—evolved into a one-act third of the evening, augmented by a short Welles spoof of Hollywood called La langouste qui ne pense à rien (The Unthinking Lobster) and, as the finale, Welles’s magic act. “It was a salad,” recalled Samuel Matlovsky, the music director for the whole production, which was in the end billed as Le temps court (Time Runs). “Worst of all,” said Matlovsky, “Welles kept changing it completely in rehearsals. One day he’d decide to do something from Richard III. The next day there was something by Oscar Wilde. It was crazy.” As Helen of Troy, Welles cast Eartha Kitt, a twenty-two-year-old unknown whom Welles had caught in a thrown-together performance at Kyle’s nightclub on the rue de Pontier after she was fired from the Katherine Dunham troupe. To audition her, Welles turned his back and only listened to her voice; during rehearsals, he insisted that the untrained first-timer needed no direction. “Whenever he directed anyone in the show, he wouldn’t speak directly to the actor,” recalled Kitt. “He would speak only to Machiz. He’d say, ‘Tell such-and-such a person to do such a thing.’ And he never directed me at all. I asked him, ‘What should I do here?’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m not directing you. A director only directs stupid people.’”

  As opening night, June 17, drew near, Welles had written no lyrics for Strayhorn’s music and, accordingly, decided to use no songs in The Blessed and the Damned except “Me Is the Trouble,” which he finished with Strayhorn one night in early June over wine at the Café de la Paix. As Helen, Eartha Kitt sang Welles’s lyrics to Strayhorn’s simple twelve-bar lament: “Hungry little trouble, bound in a bubble, yearning to be, be or be free / All that you see, is all about me, / Hungry me.” Responding as a chorus, two actresses, Rosalind Murray and Tommie Moore, chanted, “Now Satan got lonely way down in the pit / So he grabbed Dr. Faustus and put him on the spit.” “It was terrible,” admitted Kitt. “The music might have been good. But nobody could tell. The whole show was a disaster. Incoherent.” Though Strayhorn had originally begun writing arrangements for a six-piece ensemble made up of piano, flute, clarinet, French horn, bass, and drums, Matlovsky’s piano ended up as the only instrument. “We didn’t get to use most of Strayhorn’s music,” explained Matlovsky. “So there was no entrance music for Orson. I didn’t know what to do at that point, so I played the Third Man theme, which had been a big international hit. Orson shot me a glare like he was going to kill me—then the audience burst into applause. That night he said to me, ‘The Third Man bit was great. Keep it in.’” With Ellington billed as composer of the music for The Blessed and the Damned, Time Runs tottered for several weeks in Paris, then moved to Hamburg and promptly closed. Strayhorn was clearly disappointed, according to Welles’s personal assistant on the French production, Janet Wolfe. “The guy was awfully frustrated,” said Wolfe. “Orson was driving us all crazy, but that was Orson, and you had to love him. It was the music that really suffered. It got lost in the shuffle, and he—Billy Strayhorn—he looked like a little lost lamb. He looked to me like any minute he was about to cry.”

  Not all the sadness in Strayh
orn’s Paris venture was professionally rooted, however. When Strayhorn saw Aaron Bridgers, his old housemate was living at the Villa Pax, an old brick boardinghouse popular among students and young performing artists, including, at that time, the American jazz pianist Jimmy Davis and the mime Marcel Marceau. Bridgers was settling in for an extended stay, having begun to build a local reputation as a bar pianist and having been offered a regular slot at the hottest new boîte de nuit, the Mars Club, owned by an American, Ben Benjamin. Returning to New York this time, Strayhorn wasn’t quite going home: much of his life, both as an artist and as a man, had changed.

  Strayhorn moved out of the Convent Avenue basement den he had shared with Bridgers and into his first place of his own, a contemporary one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of 15 West 106th Street, a clean-lined building a hundred feet or so from the rocky northwest corner of Central Park. For continuity, Strayhorn kept most of the furniture he had bought with Bridgers, including their moderne, low-to-the-floor turquoise couch; for freshness, he decorated with lots of color: long pink curtains hung on the windows, framed by wide woodwork painted light purple; the insides of the closets were in bright red—when he selected his clothing, the mood was festive. With no built-in bar and stools and no garden, the apartment was less a party pad than a single man’s home; it wasn’t as well equipped for entertaining. But it was an exciting place in which to get dressed. In fact, although Strayhorn continued to entertain his old friends about once a month while he was in town, his post-Paris retrenchment brought him into a much more “downtown” social circle, if only geographically.