Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  Back in New York with Francis Goldberg, Strayhorn found some solace. Goldberg moved into Strayhorn’s apartment on West 106th Street, and they set up a housekeeping system: Goldberg handled everything. “That’s just how he was,” said Frank Goldberg. “Strayhorn didn’t have to worry about anything—my brother took care of it. Shopping, cooking, organizing things. Billy didn’t have to worry anymore.” Whenever friends stopped by, which some were now less likely to do, Goldberg played host. While Strayhorn had shared entertaining duties with Aaron Bridgers, cooking while Bridgers tended bar, attending to guests while Bridgers changed the records, now he lounged with a drink and chatted impassively while Goldberg scurried from room to room. Outside the house, Goldberg assumed a similarly visible and influential role in Strayhorn’s life. “No matter what Billy was involved in, Goldie was suddenly there,” said Bill Patterson, who frequently met the two of them late in the evening after they had attended Ellington Orchestra recording sessions or Columbia Records events together. Like Patterson, several of Strayhorn’s oldest friends betrayed traces of envy. “Goldie knew Billy like a book,” said Haywood Williams. “He knew how to make him happy. I think Billy needed to feel appreciated at that point, and Goldie worshiped him. He treated him like he was a god. And they lived like it too.” Williams would visit on weekends; by noon, he said, Strayhorn and Goldberg were serving Bloody Marys, and in the afternoon, cocktail time, they’d have a few martinis, then a few more before dinner, an occasion for wine. “Then we’d go out drinking,” said Williams. “Goldie was the leader. He made all the decisions. I don’t know—maybe that’s what Billy needed then. Maybe Goldie was good for him. How could you tell? How could they know? They were always drunk.”

  Thoroughly insinuated into Strayhorn’s private and professional life—one of Ellington’s notebooks bears the notation “Goldie” and the phone number of the apartment Goldberg shared with Strayhorn—Goldberg lobbied determinedly to accompany Strayhorn and the Ellington Orchestra on an extended European tour arranged for October and November of 1958. “We were involved in putting together our fall Copasetics event, and Strayhorn was preparing for this trip,” said Honi Coles. “Goldie was very jealous that Billy was going to Europe for three months without him. Billy almost didn’t go. Goldie had him feeling guilty about it. But Duke wasn’t about to pay for Goldie, and Goldie wasn’t going to pay his own way.” In the final days of September, Coles and a few fellow Copasetics, including Cookie Cook, along with Strayhorn’s old friend Bill Coleman, saw Strayhorn and the Ellington Orchestra off at a bash Ellington threw at Manhattan’s Pier 88, where the Ellingtonians were sailing for Plymouth, England, on the Ile de France; Goldberg stayed at home. “It was quite an elegant affair,” said Coleman. “Billy seemed to be having a great time.” Whatever the nature of Strayhorn’s conflict with Goldberg, he kept it private. “Everyone was toasting each other farewell. Billy was quite in his element,” continued Coleman. As the ship headed across the Atlantic, Strayhorn remained in the festive spirit: “He was toasting day and night,” recalled the trombonist Britt Woodman. Strayhorn stopped, however, on the last evening of the voyage, October 2. At Ellington’s recommendation, Strayhorn was named guest of honor at the trip’s climactic captain’s party, a lavish ceremonial dinner traditionally held in tribute to the ship’s most celebrated passenger. More than a hundred passengers gathered to offer Strayhorn his grandest toast, but he didn’t attend. Early the next morning, he was found nattily dressed and asleep on the floor in a corner of the ship’s mess, where he had passed out, apparently while looking for something to eat.

  At the home of wealthy friends of Herbert Martin’s in Hartford, Christopher Manos was running backers’ auditions for Mine Boy, now titled Saturday Laughter (“sounded like more fun than a mine,” said Manos), while the composers played one-nighters across Europe. From October 5 through November 20, the Ellington Orchestra gave thirty-seven concerts in thirty-three cities, from Berlin to Oslo. Strayhorn had little to do and put his all into it. “He wasn’t writing anything at the time,” said Jimmy Woode. “During many of the days, we enjoyed restaurants together. Billy did a good deal of shopping. He came to our shows to hear the band. After the performances, several of us generally went out to hear the local music over cocktails.” In London, the British baritone saxophonist Joe Temperley, then playing with the trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton’s swing-style band (one of England’s most popular jazz groups), went pubbing with his idol, Harry Carney, after one of the Ellington Orchestra’s shows; Strayhorn joined them and attracted some attention by drinking gin and tonics, straight up, in pint glasses. “Pubbing, cabareting, clubbing—all those things. That was how Billy spent his time,” said Woode. “He was enjoying himself.”

  Christopher Manos, meanwhile, was not. For readings of select scenes and musical numbers from the show, he had retained a musical director, Abba Bogin, and a working cast, which included Ellington’s occasional vocalist Joya Sherrill, Strayhorn’s friend Brock Peters, Thelma Carpenter (formerly with Basie), and new faces Diahann Carroll and Ivan Dixon; all donated their time on the understanding that they would be hired for the anticipated Broadway production. “The music we got from Ellington, whether he wrote it or did it with Strayhorn or Strayhorn did it, whatever, needed some work to be usable in auditions, let alone in an actual production,” said Bogin. “What we got very often would be a sketch of a thirty-two- or sixty-four-bar tune in a very straight, commercial form. It might have to be extended or have to be shortened or changed around at various points. The singers had difficulties with some sections, and there was no composer there. So we’d figure something out ourselves and just do it; we had no choice. Strangely enough, I don’t think Ellington cared one way or another what we did. I met him early on before he left with his band, and he said to me, ‘I’m sure you know your business. Whatever you guys do is fine. I don’t have the time to be with you. If the show gets produced, I’ll try to stop in and see what you did. Until then, do whatever you want.’ I got the distinct impression that he had no concept of what it took to write a show, in terms of knowing what the play is all about or doing what a Richard Rodgers or any composer working for the theater would do to be involved with the play and try to make a song work as part of a show.” Another possibility is that Ellington’s show-business experience, rather than naïveté, prompted him to practice artistic triage. Having already expended his and Strayhorn’s creative resources on the project, which was one with notable artistic merit but little apparent commercial potential, he gave priority to his orchestra, the lifeline of his career. As Manos acknowledged, the very nature of Saturday Laughter was its undoing. “This was right at the beginning of the civil rights movement in this country, and we were trying to stage a Broadway show based on the black point of view on apartheid in South Africa,” said Manos. “We were young and idealistic. But the money people weren’t.” By late November, when Strayhorn returned to New York with Ellington and the orchestra, Saturday Laughter had been disbanded for lack of funds.

  In the absence of a high-profile new project, Ellington agreed to revive another of his neglected early efforts, much as he had the previous year with the Mahalia Jackson version of Black, Brown and Beige. “Originally, see, Duke had big, big hopes for Jump for Joy,” recalled Sid Kuller, the principal lyricist of the 1941 production. “He thought it really should have made it to Broadway like we had planned, but we were way ahead of our time.” With civil rights so much in the news, Kuller urged Ellington to resurrect their satirical take on Uncle Tomism, a decidedly more accessible approach to black consciousness than Saturday Laughter. “Duke liked the idea of showing people what they missed, see. Right an old wrong,” added Kuller. Opportunely, the booking agent Joe Glaser wanted the Ellington Orchestra for an extended run at the Copa City dinner theater in Miami Beach. Acceding to Kuller’s overtures, Ellington offered Glaser an update of Jump for Joy and headed to Chicago, where he was booked to play the Blue Note nightclub from December 17 to January 4, a
holiday-season tradition for the Ellington Orchestra. Immediately after Christmas, Strayhorn joined Kuller in Miami Beach; Goldberg stayed home again, to his distress (“Goldie couldn’t leave his job, but he couldn’t understand that Billy had to leave New York for his job,” Honi Coles recalled), and the two old collaborators set out to write a new show in less than three weeks’ time.

  When Ellington got to Florida in the second week of January, about a week before the updated edition of Jump for Joy was due to open, Strayhorn and Kuller had written several new songs, including a gospel number, “So the Good Book Says”; a misplaced piece of xenophobia called “If We Were Any More British, We Couldn’t Talk at All”; and an ode to the cool-jazz attitude, “Walk It Off.” “That one was totally Billy’s idea, the title and even some of the words,” said Kuller. “It was his philosophy. You got a problem? Walk it off.” On Ellington’s arrival, the trio hammered out nearly a dozen additional tunes, from the sultry vamp showcase “Three Shows Nightly,” designed for the nightclub singer Barbara McNair, to the burlesque novelty “Show ’Em You Got Class,” performed by the comedian Timmie Rogers. “All I had to do was think about Strayhorn,” said Rogers. “He was class.” Kuller, Strayhorn, and Ellington kept writing new songs for the show more than a week after it opened on January 20. Produced by Kuller and choreographed by Nick Castle, a veteran Hollywood dance director whom Kuller had met at MGM, the one-set production jammed a cast of nearly thirty singers and dancers, including the vocalists Lil Greenwood and Jimmie Randolph, Talley Beatty, and the comic dance duo Stump and Stumpy (James Cross and Harold Cromer), onto Copa City’s modest stage. The music was credited to Ellington alone; Strayhorn was acknowledged, along with Ellington, as one of the arrangers. (In copyright registrations filed by the show’s publisher, Robbins Music, Ellington and Strayhorn were cited as co-composers of three songs: “If We Were Any More British, We Couldn’t Talk at All,” “So the Good Book Says,” and “Walk It Off.” None of the music written for the production was recorded.) Although ads in the Miami Herald announced, “Pre-Broadway Engagement … The World’s Greatest Musical Extravaganza of All Time,” the production was scattered and formless. Kuller cut and added songs and skits nightly in a frazzled, ultimately futile effort to stimulate attendance. Variety reported “extensive revisions since first night in an attempt to come up with a staging that can overcome the negative results on patron pull.” Frustrated, Kuller and Ellington struggled to salvage the show. “We loved the thing,” said Kuller. “We would do anything to save it, and we tried. The thing is, see, we finally realized people don’t go on vacation to Miami Beach to become socially enlightened. We were giving it to them with sugarcoating. But it was still medicine. The resort crowd didn’t want it.” Some hundred thousand dollars in the red, Jump for Joy closed abruptly on February 8, and Copa City shut down for the duration of Miami’s peak vacation season.

  Strayhorn appeared to take the production’s failure in stride. “Let me put it to you this way,” said Kuller. “Billy wasn’t as personally excited about the show as he was when we did it in 1941. His work was fantastic. When he sat down to write music, he was 100 percent involved. He was a master at his craft. But I mean, he didn’t seem to be overly concerned personally if the show made it or not. As soon as he was done writing, he was off. He and Paul Gonsalves went out partying. Man, when they were around, the booze was flowing. This was a different guy than the peaceful kid I took to the wine country in 1941, let me tell you.” As Talley Beatty noted, “Billy was flying. It was party time for him. His attitude was, ‘This is Duke’s thing. Good for him. I’ve done my work. I hope you like it. Now, goodbye, I’m going to have a drink now.’”

  Strayhorn returned home by the second week of February 1959, nearly two months before Jump for Joy had been scheduled to end its run, to find Francis Goldberg charging abandonment. They were in the middle of an ugly squabble when a musician friend of Strayhorn’s stopped by their apartment to pick Strayhorn up for an Ellington Orchestra recording session. Strayhorn opened the door for his colleague, who lingered in the living room while Strayhorn hustled into the kitchen to talk to Goldberg. “He didn’t even offer me a drink,” said Strayhorn’s fellow musician, “so I knew there was something serious happening.” Only Goldberg’s voice carried through the kitchen door. “The guy was out of control, screaming, carrying on. ‘You’re always going somewhere without me,’ this and that about going to Florida. It was not pretty, man.” About twenty minutes later, Strayhorn glided through the door pleasantly, and he and his friend cabbed downtown. “We went down to the date, and he said to me, ‘I have to apologize to you for what you were just exposed to.’ I said, ‘No, man, that’s all right. Are you okay?’ That’s all I was concerned about—was he okay. He said, ‘I’m fine, thank you. He is a very vulgar person. And I don’t like that very much.’ The way he said that, ‘He is a very vulgar person’—that was Strayhorn, man.”

  Several of Strayhorn’s other friends were seeing signs of growing conflict. As Bill Patterson observed, “Billy had always let Goldie do everything for him. Everybody always knew that. But Goldie took it too far. He dominated Strayhorn, and Billy went along with it; he seemed to want it. But Goldie got abusive.” According to Haywood Williams, “Goldie couldn’t control his emotions. All of his feelings were strong feelings, and when he was upset, he really took it out on Billy.” At least once or twice a week, Strayhorn was meeting friends for drinks without Goldberg and leaking hints of mounting distress. “Billy had one or two more than he should have and he let it out more than he would have any other time,” recalled one of his best friends. “He said, ‘You know, he can really hurt a person when he wants to. I don’t know how much of it I care to take.’” Initially a boost to Strayhorn’s self-esteem, Goldberg’s force of personality had hardened into a tool of diminution.

  Ellington’s stature as a composer grew, unimpeded by the failure of Saturday Laughter and the disappointing revival of Jump for Joy. Branching into yet another medium, he accepted a commission to score his first feature film, exactly the kind of venture beyond the jazz world that helped validate a jazz artist as a real composer in the eyes of the mainstream. The producer and director Otto Preminger, a radical by Hollywood standards—he had defied censorship rules by allowing words like virgin and pregnant in his 1953 film The Moon Is Blue, and had produced two all-black films, the 1954 Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess, released early in 1959—asked Ellington to compose the score for his screen adaptation of the best-selling courtroom novel Anatomy of a Murder. Written by Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker under the pseudonym Robert Traver, the book told the story of a country lawyer (portrayed by James Stewart) defending a jealous husband (Ben Gazzara) accused of killing a suspected rapist of his flirtatious wife (Lee Remick). “Otto chose Duke because Duke would be a talked-about choice, and Otto valued that,” explained his wife, Hope, who worked on Anatomy of a Murder as a costume designer before their marriage. “And he liked to use people who really wanted to score a film. Otto was quite unusual because he insisted on having the composer on the set during the production. He felt that they got closer to the picture that way. Therefore, he said he liked to use composers eager to prove themselves, because nobody else would sit for spending all that time on the set.”

  True to custom, Ellington had Strayhorn fill in for him as Anatomy of a Murder began production in the third week of March. With almost gimmicky veracity, Preminger was shooting entirely on location in the actual settings in rural Ishpeming, Michigan, that Voelker had depicted in his book. (As an exception, Voelker’s own Victorian house was used as the defense attorney’s residence.) The entire cast and crew of about 120 were put up at the one hotel in the area, the Marquette Mather Inn, a rough-hewn old place where Strayhorn stayed while he watched rehearsals, jotting notes for the music by day and reading Voelker’s novel over sips of cognac in the hotel lounge through the evening. A cozy hotel with a bar that closed promptly at 11:00 p.m., it brought out Stra
yhorn’s convivial grace. “Billy was an utter delight, wonderful company,” said Lee Remick, with whom Strayhorn took a few late-night walks along the dirt paths leading into the surrounding woods. “He told me all the names of the trees and the things he thought were beautiful about them.” Strayhorn would occasionally drift to the lounge piano and play requests or snippets of classical pieces. More than once, James Stewart joined him for four-hand duets. “He was a fine gentleman and a heck of a pianist. I never sounded so good,” said Stewart, who had studied piano and sung (and recorded) with a New Orleans–style jazz band during his undergraduate years at Princeton. Ellington arrived the first week of May, some two months after Strayhorn but early enough in the production to spend a couple of weeks living with the cast and crew; he so valued the commission that he postponed his usual summer stint at the Blue Note in Chicago until mid-July. Less willing to sacrifice his usual Chicago steaks, he had beef shipped in from the Sutherland Hotel’s butcher to be prepared at the inn. “Between the fish that Voelker caught in the morning and the steaks that Duke had flown in, we ate very well,” Hope Preminger recalled.