Lush Life
Page 21
In Goldberg, Strayhorn found a companion especially eager to rove Manhattan. “They both liked the theater, they both liked museums, they both liked music,” said Goldberg’s sister, Gustavia Goldberg Pagan, who frequently had both her brothers and Strayhorn to her apartment on Tenth Avenue for a dinner of steaks and rice. One Sunday afternoon, Strayhorn and Goldie took Gustavia and her two children, Anna and Michael, to Coney Island; Strayhorn slipped off his shoes and walked the beach with the kids, munching on a hotdog for lunch and washing it down with something Goldie had brought in a thermos. “They took advantage of the whole city,” said Pagan. “Goldie knew more about New York than anybody I’ve ever known. He could have been the best guide New York ever had.” He was a professional chef, having learned basic skills from his father, Monticello Goldberg, a cook, while growing up in Dallas and then having trained as a cook in the navy; briefly, after he moved to New York during the war, he worked at the Ritz-Carlton, and he mentioned the fact proudly and frequently. “Goldie gave Billy a lot of cooking tips,” said Frank Goldberg. “They were always in the kitchen together. Of course, Billy’s favorite dish was always those beans cooked in beer. He would set out in the morning to prepare this dish, and it would take all day to get everything he needed. Billy and Goldie and I had to go to ten different stores to get everything.” Between ingredients, Goldberg added, the group would break for rest stops in nine different bars.
“Billy adored Goldie heavily in a very romantic way,” said Lena Horne. “It was the kind of attachment that ran very deep—it was a very needy relationship. There was something in Goldie that Billy needed very badly at that time. Strength, maybe. The booze, definitely.” Strayhorn’s affection for Goldberg was such that he persuaded the Copasetics to accept him as a member—at Goldberg’s initiative and despite his obvious lack of show-business experience. “He wanted to be in the Copasetics,” said his twin, “and that was all Strayhorn needed to hear.” As Coles recalled, Strayhorn, still the president, proposed admitting both Goldie and Frank Goldberg to defuse charges of favoritism toward his new companion, and he stressed the “administrative abilities” of Goldie, the chef, and Frank Goldberg, the postal worker, as special qualifications. “Basically, Goldie wanted to be wherever Billy was, and Billy wanted to make Goldie happy,” said Coles. True to Strayhorn’s argument, however, the Goldbergs served essential roles that aided the Copasetics in their expanding activities. “My brother was a doer,” said Frank Goldberg. “You’d walk in and you’d say something needed to be done, and he’d do it. He’d take over. He was a doer. He was a take-charge type. ‘I’ll take care of it. I’ll do it.’ Next thing you know, he’d have it done.” Francis Goldberg became treasurer. “Dancers aren’t necessarily as good with money as we are with our feet. The best shuffling we do is on stage,” said Phace Roberts. “Goldie was very interested in financial matters.” Frank Goldberg took on a new responsibility: publication of a program—the Copasetics called it their souvenir booklet—to be distributed annually at the group’s shows.
Under Strayhorn’s leadership, the Copasetics were now producing full-scale musical revues, presented annually on a Monday evening near the end of September. The productions were conceived by an entertainment committee consisting of Strayhorn, Coles, Atkins, and their fellow members Pete Nugent, William “Chink” Collins, and Roy Branker; Strayhorn wrote the music—four to eight new songs related to the theme of each show—as well as big-band arrangements to be played by the Milton Larkin Orchestra, a solid Harlem affair orchestra. “The members of the entertainment committee would get together and come up with all the skits and the dialogue and whatnot. We’d put a good deal of time and work into it,” said Atkins, who recalled that a few months would go into writing about forty-five minutes of material, half the show. A typical skit: the Copasetics, portraying policemen, barge into a garage to bust some crap-shooting hoodlums and their dames, but the game beckons and the cops play, joining the gamblers and their ladies for a production number. After the Copasetics’ first full-scale event in 1951, which had been held at the Sudan nightclub (on the site of the original Cotton Club in Harlem), the group’s location of choice was the Riviera Terrace Room, a swank banquet hall equipped with a stage on Broadway at West 73rd Street. In 1957, more than eleven hundred ticket buyers—virtually all show-business insiders and figures in black society—paid fifteen dollars apiece to attend the Copasetics Cruise. It was the social event of the season in Harlem and apparently was never acknowledged, even in a passing reference, in a single New York publication beyond the black press. “Anybody who was anybody had to be there,” said Rachel Robinson, the wife of Jackie Robinson; the couple attended nearly every year, including 1957, when they were in the company of Lena Horne and Lennie Hayton, Miles Davis, Willie Mays, and others. (Duke Ellington never attended the Copasetics’ events; “I believe he didn’t want to upstage Billy,” said Coles. “The Copasetics were something Billy had away from Duke, and Ellington kept it that way for him. I give him credit for that.” Ellington and/or Tempo Music offered support to the organization by advertising in the souvenir booklets, however.) “People waited all year for the next Copasetics night,” added Robinson. “It was important to the community—all that talent dedicated to doing something good for the community, and no profit motive. You felt wonderful being a part of it.”
Strayhorn drew multiple rewards from his part in the Copasetics. In addition to the fraternal support of the group, he found the Copasetics shows a creative outlet removed from Ellingtonia: his compositions for the Copasetics reveal a side of him unheard elsewhere in his work. Nearly unidentifiable as Strayhorn’s, the music is sheer play. As examples, two numbers performed at the 1957 Copasetics Cruise, “Welcome Aboard Blues” and “Bon Voyage” (the former with lyrics by Strayhorn and music cowritten by Strayhorn and Roy Branker, a cocktail pianist), find the author of “Grievin’” and “Passion Flower” in a state of jubilant abandon. The music to both numbers is likable, rhythmic fun as lighthearted as the words. “Welcome Aboard Blues”:
We’ve got frik-a-frak, apple jack
Over the top, a little slop.
We’ve even got a little razzmatazz,
We’ve got luki-plu, mop-mop,
Oolya-coo, bebop
Loaded to the decks with jazz.
So welcome aboard,
The S.S. Copasetic’s yours for the run of the cruise
So say adieu, goodbye to the blues,
And have a ball,
Because you’re all
Welcome aboard.
“Bon Voyage” begins so flippantly that its fourth line hints at the conditions under which it may have been written:
Bon bon bon bon bon bon bon bon bon voyage,
Hope the crossing is fine.
Enjoy yourself and frolic ev’ry day,
Improve your health the alcoholic way,
And you’ll have a wonderful time.
Indeed, said Honi Coles, “Billy had a good time when he wrote for us. He was often quite inebriated.”
Several other key figures in the Ellington organization were pursuing musical projects of their own at the same time, though none as far from Ellingtonia as Strayhorn ventured with the Copasetics. In fact, like Johnny Hodges with his recent work for Verve, Ellington Orchestra members Clark Terry and Cat Anderson insured their solo efforts with the equity of Ellington’s resurging appeal. They worked almost exclusively in the Ellington-Strayhorn vein and with other Ellingtonians, including Strayhorn, who was called on to compose and arrange music as well as play piano for several Ellington-oriented recordings without Ellington’s participation. Terry’s effort, inappropriately titled In a Mellow Tone (and later reissued more appropriately as Duke with a Difference), featured nine Ellington instrumentalists performing jam-session versions of material from the Ellington Orchestra repertoire, including “Take the ‘A’ Train”; Strayhorn arranged and played gracefully modernist piano on two of eight numbers, Ellington’s “Come Sunday” and “In
a Sentimental Mood,” the latter sung by Marian Bruce, a young cabaret singer with a bright, clear contralto. “The session was a small but not insignificant example of what Billy would do without Duke,” said Orrin Keepnews, who produced the album for Riverside Records. “What we were trying to do was treat the Ellington songbook in a different way, so it was a rare time when Billy got to do that music and somebody said, ‘Hey, play piano, but don’t be Duke. Play it like yourself.’ He loved the idea, and it really comes across.” The Anderson project, entitled Ellingtonia and credited to Cat Anderson and the Ellington All-Stars, features new Strayhorn arrangements of two of his standards, “Chelsea Bridge” and “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,” plus a piece composed for the album, “Lovelinessence,” a warmly enveloping ballad, vintage Strayhorn. Unfortunately, the low-budget Strand Records release failed to include composer credits for any of its selections; as a result, Strayhorn’s contributions as composer and arranger went unacknowledged.
With Johnny Hodges, meanwhile, Strayhorn had been participating in at least an album a year since Creamy in 1955. The following year had seen Ellingtonia 56, a mixture of small-ensemble and big-band pieces (featuring the entire Ellington Orchestra, minus its leader) arranged by Strayhorn, who played gentle ensemble piano throughout and contributed the swinging “Snibor”; spelled backwards and altered, the title was a tribute to Fred Robbins, a disc jockey and the host of one of Strayhorn’s favorite jazz radio programs, Robbins Nest. Later the same year came Duke’s in Bed by Johnny Hodges and the Ellington All-Stars without Duke. Again, Strayhorn contributed all the arrangements, limber settings for a nine-piece band, and he played piano and wrote one new original, “Ballad for Very Tired and Very Sad Lotus Eaters,” a luxurious, serious piece, its Satie-like title notwithstanding. In 1957, there was The Big Sound by Johnny Hodges and the Ellington Men, which Strayhorn arranged much in the style of his work with Ellington and for which he played supportive band piano but submitted only one composition, his “Johnny Come Lately” from 1941. Produced by Norman Granz, all the Hodges albums find Strayhorn at leisure; they’re after-hours sessions—some friends making a little music for extra money, working without the pressures of their high-profile Ellington work. “I think those records were an important release for [Strayhorn],” said Granz. “He had a unique opportunity to play piano, for one thing, which he did wonderfully. I never told him to play like Ellington. He was great to work with. Nothing was a problem. He had a wonderful, relaxed way about him. Johnny loved him. Everybody loved him. They loved working with him, and he was very happy to do the work. I think the opportunity to do that work on his own, away from Ellington, was awfully valuable to him and good for him.”
Hodges and Strayhorn seemed the most unlikely friends. Educated only through the first few grades of elementary school in the black pocket of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Hodges was a lifelong working musician, originally a drummer, then a pianist, and, by his early teens, a soprano saxophonist with the instrument’s early master, Sidney Bechet. Hodges had already played in three other ensembles, including one of swing pioneer Chick Webb’s bands, when he joined Ellington’s budding aggregation in 1928. Embarrassed by his modest vocabulary and often shaky grammar, especially in the company of the grandiloquent Ellington, Hodges developed a protective shell of taciturnity. He declined to sign autographs, even for his most ardent fans, because he could scarcely write his name. “Everybody said Johnny was gruff. They thought he was cold,” said his wife, Cue Hodges. “He was just afraid.” In performance, Johnny Hodges set the shell aside and, with impeccable musical eloquence, expressed his exceptional sensitivity and good humor. Hodges and Strayhorn were a model of compatible contrasts: one, outwardly stoic, produced music of heart-swelling emotionality; the other, publicly exuberant, created works of tortured discontent. “Neither one of them guys was really who they seemed,” said “Wild Bill” Davis, an organist who was a frequent partner of Hodges’s for Verve. “Johnny was just as mushy inside as Strayhorn was froufrouy.” Working together, Hodges and Strayhorn made complementary collaborators, gut musical feeling and conservatory acuity united in artistic fidelity.
Strayhorn so enjoyed playing with Hodges that he agreed to take one of his extremely rare live-performance engagements as 1958 began. Combining a winter vacation with work, he and Hodges accepted an offer to play the Shamrock Lounge in Miami Beach, a handsome music room with a view of the ocean and an upper-crust clientele, located in the Golden Strand Hotel on Collins Avenue, the resort strip; it was owned by Frank S. Leslie, a Toronto-based investor and jazz buff who had met Strayhorn and Hodges at his flagship hotel, a summer resort in Huntsville, Ontario, called the Bigwin Inn, where the Ellington Orchestra had performed on several occasions. Ellington released Hodges from his band temporarily, replacing him for three months with Bill Graham, a fixture at Snookie’s jazz club in Manhattan who could approximate Hodges’s marzipan tone. Fleshing out their group, Strayhorn and Hodges enlisted as bassist Bill Pemberton, a New York gig player, and as drummer Jimmy Grissom, who had sung with Ellington from time to time earlier in the 1950s. Leslie gave the band its name, The Indigos, to evoke the Ellington connection, which he emphasized promotionally; ads in the Miami Herald announced “The Indigos quartette [sic—a Strayhorn touch?] featuring Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Hodges from the famous Duke Ellington Band—Dancing.” Booked from January 23 through the end of March, the group played Strayhorn tunes, including “Your Love Has Faded” and “Passion Flower”; Hodges vehicles from the Ellington band book such as “The Jeep Is Jumpin’”; and standards, according to Cue Hodges, who stayed with her husband in one of the Golden Strand’s beachfront “villas.” Strayhorn was their next-villa neighbor and lived alone, although he had a few male visitors, Cue Hodges noticed. “They had a good little group,” she said. “Swinging. The people enjoyed hearing them. Johnny liked his breaks from Ellington, and so did Billy.”
Duke Ellington didn’t hire a sub for Billy Strayhorn. Working in Los Angeles on the first studio recording of Black, Brown and Beige—a revised, truncated version featuring the celebrated gospel singer Mahalia Jackson—Ellington called on Strayhorn for last-minute arrangements. “I was in Florida … working with Johnny Hodges,” recalled Strayhorn. “We were working at a hotel, so, of course, we were off at 2:00 in the morning, Eastern Standard Time. So, I would go home, and he [Ellington] was recording at—you know, in the afternoon, at 2:00 in the afternoon [Pacific Standard Time]. So I would go home and stay up until time to call him, until the time that he was up. And we would confer over the phone about what was to be recorded that day. I was writing things [such as a new arrangement of “Come Sunday”], and I had a cab driver down there who would take the score to the airport and mail it off air special. He became very skillful at doing it, and he’d mail it off to Los Angeles. It ended up, of course, that I didn’t hear anything that was recorded, even things that I had written. They were recorded, and I didn’t hear them until a year later.” Strayhorn was given no credit of any kind on the resulting Columbia LP, released in September 1958.
To build on his reputation as a cultural leader, Ellington needed something fresher than Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbook of his hits and Mahalia Jackson’s version of his 1943 masterpiece. Neither project advanced his redefined collaborative relationship with Strayhorn either. Fortunately, exactly the right sort of opportunity came their way while Strayhorn was working in Florida: Ellington took a commission to create the score for a serious-minded Broadway production. Based on a little-read 1955 novel, Mine Boy, by a black South African writer named Peter Abrahams, the proposed drama with songs would explore the theme of apartheid as it affected the lives of an all-black cast of characters. Ellington had signed on in New York after a brief pitch by the show’s lyricist, Herbert Martin, and its principal producer, Christopher Manos. Both were eager newcomers in their twenties (and both white), undaunted by the challenge of mounting an all-black musical tragedy about racial oppression. Ellington haggled a bit over his compensa
tion but agreed to contribute the score with no advance payment, and he took a copy of the script and Martin’s libretto—complete lyrics for seventeen songs—to set to music. Touring with his orchestra, as always, Ellington met Strayhorn in mid-January 1958 to work on the show during a week’s engagement at the Bal Masque in Miami Beach’s Americana Hotel; Ellington mentioned the new project to Beatrice Washburn, a reporter for the Miami Herald, who wrote, a tad prematurely, “Though popular music is the stuff of his existence, two of his main achievements are Mine Boy, an operetta on South Africa, and A Drum Is a Woman, the history of jazz.” In an extraordinary step for a producer, Christopher Manos had traveled south with Ellington and his orchestra. “I thought it was awfully unusual that Duke agreed to do it immediately, so I asked around, and I heard that he had a way of saying yes and then doing nothing about it,” said Manos. “So I says, ‘Duke, are you really going to be able to do this?’ And he says, ‘Well, you know, I’m very busy.’ And I says, ‘Well, just tell me if you can’t do it.’ And he says, ‘Well, the only way it’ll get done is if you come with me on the road and goose me.’ So that’s what I did.”
In Miami Beach and a couple of nearby locations, where Ellington and his orchestra played through January 21, the team of Manos, Ellington, and Strayhorn worked at putting Martin’s lyrics to melodies. Manos’s role was counselor and spur, while Ellington’s and Strayhorn’s roles, seemingly interchangeable, remained mysterious to Manos. “Duke would work alone or he’d be with Strayhorn or Strayhorn would work by himself—I never knew exactly what was going on,” said Manos. “At some point, Duke would play me a melody or a little thematic thing. His technique was, ‘Do you like this? How about that?’ I’d give him my input, and he would go away again and go over it with Strayhorn. Then the thing would get a little further along. They would work a few days on a song, and it would be finished. I never had any idea who did what, but there was no misunderstanding that Billy was every bit as involved as Duke, maybe more so when it came to the writing.” Throughout the process, Ellington and Strayhorn used Martin’s lyrics precisely as submitted and never proposed the slightest modification. “It was peculiar that they accepted everything that I wrote and wrote music to it,” said Martin. “I couldn’t complain that they were working that way and ending up with songs, but there was something missing in the lack of give and take. There are some things that could have been better had I sat down with Ellington or with Strayhorn and had we actually worked together.” As Martin recalled, Ellington’s interest in the show seemed to wane not long after his initial efforts with Manos and Strayhorn, whereupon Strayhorn appeared to assume control of the project. Indeed, Strayhorn’s personal investment in Mine Boy evidently ran deeper than Ellington’s. “Billy was really hoping it would work,” Manos said. “Billy was, I would say, a bigger catalyst for the piece than Duke was, in that he was really hopeful that it would work. ‘How’s it coming?’ ‘Is it working?’ Those kinds of questions were asked much more by him than by Duke, who sort of wanted to get something down that would work and move on with his band.” Once the music for Mine Boy was complete—a total of twenty-two songs finished by the summer of 1958—Strayhorn’s hopes for the show hung with Manos and his success at fund-raising, a laborious and uncertain task for any Broadway production, let alone a musical about apartheid.