Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  Strayhorn’s name was linked with Ellington’s throughout Townsend’s liner notes, whose concluding paragraph reads, “Duke Ellington’s first brush with the classics is successfully completed. It is a tribute, I think, to Duke and Billy and to Tchaikovsky.” But Strayhorn’s role was virtually lost in the press, which generally described the project as Ellington’s alone. To some extent, Joe Morgen continued to exert influence on the coverage of Ellington in the major New York–based publications, particularly the trade papers and the gossip columns; Ellington’s place in the American consciousness, however, transcended publicity. “Morgen was forever promoting Ellington to anyone who would listen and ignoring Billy, naturally,” Leonard Feather said. “The number of those in the know who listened to Joe Morgen was diminishing. However, so was the number of those whose conceptions of Ellington were about to change very greatly. The general public had just come to accept him as a serious composer. Now, the same public was not quite ready to have that perception adjusted to accommodate the reality of Strayhorn—by that I mean that they were both great composers but often working hand in hand. The Nutcracker LP serves as the perfect case in point. There, we have Ellington and Strayhorn promoted equally, quite remarkably—and quite a testament to the record company, at that. But only Ellington registered in the mind of the public. One couldn’t be surprised by the manner in which Billy responded to this occurring time after time. He truly invested himself only when the work inspired him. He could turn out a great deal of music, and he was literally incapable of producing anything less than excellent and interesting. But it became known that he was becoming prone to periods of isolation and delay unless he found a particular musical project inspiring.”

  Sam Shaw, an independent film producer who knew Ellington through his brother Eddie Shaw’s music-publishing business and had met Strayhorn at Luckey Roberts’s joint years earlier, was developing a feature, his first, that explored thematic territory close to home for Strayhorn: a story of black artists in Paris “struggling with the world and within themselves to be accepted as the people they were,” in Shaw’s description. Initially, Shaw conceived of the film in the mid-1950s as a veiled biography of the black collagist Romare Bearden, a friend of Shaw’s through New York gallery circles. (Shaw had a second career as a still photographer; many of his photographs depict artists at work, and the images are kinetic and instinctive, moments of emotion slapped down onto paper.) Shaw’s backers at United Artists, however, deemed a fine artist’s conflicts “too internal for their bankbooks,” according to Shaw. He was a beefy and tough little man with a floor-brush mustache and a good liberal’s discomfort in neckties; he liked corduroy jackets and tweed caps, even in the summer, and might be mistaken on a film set for an extra in period Warsaw peasant garb. Shifting the story to jazz musicians, Shaw optioned the rights to an earnest 1957 novel by his acquaintance Harold Flender, Paris Blues, about a black tenor saxophonist named Eddie Jones. (Flender had a bit of firsthand experience with jazz as a writer on a TV variety series, The Eddie Condon Floor Show.) For the film, Shaw lined up a tag team of writers—credited, Walter Bernstein, Irene Kamp, and Jack Sher; uncredited, Ring Lardner, Jr., Ted Allen, and Flender—and devised a script about two American musicians, one white, now the main character, and one black, his friend, who move to Paris and, while finding their creative voices and debating the relationship between refined and vernacular music, fall for a pair of tourist women, one black, one white. That both romances were mixed-race matches was an element of the film that contributed significantly to Ellington’s agreement to take on the project. “Duke thought that was an important statement to make at that time. He liked the idea of expressing racial equality in romantic terms. That’s the way he thought himself,” said Shaw. “That aspect of the film appealed to Billy, too, metaphorically for a gay relationship. Billy was also interested in the artistic struggle. One of the guys wanted to compose concert music but wasn’t accepted by the classical establishment. This issue was of great importance to Billy, and also to Duke, of course.”

  At the insistence of United Artists, the romantic story lines were untangled and rewoven: white trombonist Ram Bowen (to be portrayed by Paul Newman) and his black band mate, renamed Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier), pair up with white schoolteacher Lillian Cornell (Joanne Woodward) and her black colleague, Connie Lampson (Diahann Carroll), respectively. Nonetheless, both Ellington and Strayhorn found more areas of commonality in Paris Blues than they had in Anatomy of a Murder. “They felt close to the characters, like they were part of them—black artists in a foreign, white world,” said Shaw.

  At the outset of rehearsals for Paris Blues, which was to be produced entirely in France, Strayhorn heard from his sister Georgia. Since he would be in Europe anyway, he offered to let her stay in his apartment in Manhattan if need be. He gave a set of keys to Bill Coleman, asked him to collect the mail, and filled him in on Georgia. Strayhorn took a day flight into Le Bourget airport in the first week of October and checked into the Hôtel de la Trémoille, a warm little four-star hotel in the eighth arrondissement, where the Pennebaker Production coordinators had arranged for Ellington and Strayhorn to work in adjoining suites. Ellington remained stateside, however, to honor concert and studio commitments (including a session to record Suite Thursday for a Columbia LP) through the end of November. On Strayhorn’s first evening in Paris, he went, alone, to hear Aaron Bridgers play at the Mars Club. “When we saw each other again, it was like we had never been away again. We always had that kind of feeling. That never changed,” said Bridgers. “We spent most of our free time together. However, I was working at nights and Billy was busy during the day, writing music. So we got together whenever we could find a way to do so.” Strayhorn arranged a most effective way, introducing Bridgers to Shaw, who was looking for someone to portray an expatriate black pianist in the film and agreed to cast Bridgers; the role had few lines (and those few were cut before the film’s release). “Billy took me out to meet Aaron, where he was playing, and I was impressed. I thought he had a great look, very strong, very handsome,” said Shaw. “Billy was very proud of him. There was a real connection between the two of them. You felt it across the room when they were together. Billy was a very complicated guy, very deep. And he wasn’t always happy. He was the most delightful and charming man you’d ever meet, but he could slide into a deep seriousness, and you’d see it. When Aaron was there, Billy was a little more at peace. Everybody in the cast accepted Aaron. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, there comes Strayhorn’s guy’ or a thing like that. Aaron held his own. You could see why Billy loved the guy. He was a good soul. But he could be very, very serious, just as serious as Billy. The two of them went through a lot, and you could tell it.” When Ellington arrived—overcoming his lifelong fear of flying, he took his first transatlantic flight on December 8—Strayhorn brought Bridgers to many of the sessions at Ellington’s Trémoille suite. “Billy had some of the music outlined before Duke arrived,” said Bridgers. “Then Billy would write something and play it for Duke, and Duke would nod and say something like, ‘Yeah, man, I like that.’ Or Duke would play his parts for Billy, and Billy would encourage him. Back and forth—it was like that when I was there.” Strayhorn’s weakness for Paris life, however, often overcame the strength of his professionalism, and Ellington was left to work alone.

  Strayhorn had an address book with the names and addresses of friends and colleagues around the globe and one book just for Paris, a separate world for him since the after-school meetings of the Cercle Français at Westinghouse High. His Paris book was a checklist, and every evening a friendship flourished over food and drink: with the music writer Claude Carrière at Gaby and Haynes’s soul-food restaurant, with the jazz buff Alexandre Rado at the Club Saint-Germain, with the expatriate American saxophonist Johnny Griffin at the Montana bar. (“Where did you learn to write music the way you do?” Griffin asked Strayhorn. “In high school,” he said.) The one Parisian friend with whom he couldn’t revel this time was
Jean Berdin, who was laid up in bed with multiple bone fractures from an accident. Strayhorn called him a few times, however, and offered advice on handling his plight. “One day I told him how much I was suffering and that I had had a horrible night, because I had many parts of my body broken, and I was suffering very much. And Billy said, he said, ‘Suffer.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘Suffer’—that’s what he said. I was furious at him. I hung up the phone very angry with him. I suppose he meant that suffering, pain, can be good for you. I don’t know.”

  To serve as a musical adviser and French translator for Ellington and other Americans involved in the movie’s music, Shaw hired the expatriate American jazz trombonist and arranger Billy Byers. “They hired me to be general music supervisor and Duke Ellington’s translator. However, Duke Ellington needed no translator, because everybody spoke to him in English, so I wound up hanging out a lot with Strays,” recalled Byers, a tubby, roundheaded little fellow with a boyish nimbleness of musical style and of mind. “Duke worked all the time. He was a very organized man. Every day, he got up and wrote for about four hours, no matter how late he had been up or how heavy the cabareting the night before. Billy’s role was this: he did what he could when he could. But he was always out getting drunk in the Mars Club. I was with Strays almost every night, with Aaron when he wasn’t working his club, otherwise the two of us or the two of us and one of Strays’s friends. I love to drink too. However, I couldn’t keep up with him. I had a habit of going to bed every night. He went on to the next day.” Early one morning Byers, drunk, drove Strayhorn, drunker, to his hotel on a borrowed motor scooter. “There is no justification for our survival,” said Byers.

  “After working and living with them like that, so closely, my perception of Ellington and Strayhorn completely reversed. It turned upside down,” Byers added. “Now, I had always understood that Duke was a free creative spirit and a bon vivant, and I had always pictured him with a bottle of champagne in one arm and a blonde on the other, gliding through the club car and saying to Strays, ‘I just got an inspiration: Da da da-da da da [the melody of the lyric “missed the Saturday dance”]! Go and do something with it.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth. It turned out that Strays was the indulgent artist and Ellington was the professional; Ellington worked like a dog, and Strayhorn was the playboy. He was drunk and hanging out all the time. They were both great composers, but Duke was a professional and a crowd pleaser, and the essence of his pieces was to please the crowd. Strayhorn wasn’t: the essence of his work was to satisfy himself. He didn’t always have a lot of output. Duke kept Strayhorn around knowing the output might be small and getting smaller, but wanting it all.”

  If the cocktails were overwhelming the jazz in Strayhorn’s life at the time of Paris Blues, Aaron Bridgers did not see it. “He was simply having a good time, that was all,” Bridgers declared. “He was very happy, very content. Very content. Very content. I’m sure of it. Billy was very happy. That’s the only reason he would drink. He was celebrating.” Members of the film’s cast and crew were struck by something grayer when they met Strayhorn away from Bridgers. “He seemed like quite a sad little man to me,” remarked Paul Newman. “Billy was not really with you, even when he was with you,” said Ted Allen. Diahann Carroll, who turned to Strayhorn for company between takes, saw anguish in his reserve. “Spending that time with Strayhorn was something I could never forget,” she said. “He was a beautiful, delicate little flower, just, you know, a genius, but a tortured genius. He was an unhappy person. His genius was so overwhelming that being in his presence was something you could never forget. You know, there’s such a thing as feeling too much and hearing too much. He suffered from that. I got exactly the same feeling being in the presence of James Baldwin. Strayhorn had the ability to perceive other people better than most of us, and what he perceived wasn’t always kind, particularly in relation to himself and the life he chose for himself. Strayhorn and Baldwin both knew the cruelness of the world, and that’s what I thought was part of the enormous sadness beneath their exteriors.”

  Aesthetically, what Strayhorn contributed to Paris Blues helped advance its underscore beyond the level of the Anatomy of a Murder music, which was essentially a song score. The several sections of the Paris Blues music that bear Strayhorn’s stamp work not only as jazz miniatures but as organic musical complements to the scenes for which they were devised. As the critic John Tynan noted in Down Beat, “Most of the genuine musical interest in the picture lies in the Ellington-Strayhorn underscore. [It has] unique appeal both as music and as the means of heightening dramatic impact. It is clear that Ellington and Strayhorn have learned a lot since Anatomy of a Murder.” Once again, however, Strayhorn was not acknowledged in the film’s credits, even though the first music in the movie is “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

  In the early hours of a cold January morning in 1961, Alan Douglas, a young American record producer, approached Strayhorn at the Mars Club, having met him a few times at the Barclay Studios during the Paris Blues soundtrack recording sessions. Strayhorn was gregarious now that he had finished working on the movie, and Douglas was solicitous, scouting projects to record efficiently in Europe for release in the States by United Artists’ new jazz label. “I said, ‘Billy, when are you going to sit down and record something yourself? We know how your stuff sounds when Duke plays it. Why not let us hear how it sounds when you play it? Why not?’ And he didn’t even think about it, really. He just said, ‘Why not?’ I didn’t know if he was serious or he was drunk. He just said, ‘Why not?’ Like nobody ever asked him before.” Firming up their serendipitous deal by phone that afternoon, Douglas and Strayhorn arranged to record in a pair of back-to-back three-hour sessions at Barclay, beginning at midnight (when studio rates were lower) two days later.

  With some logistical guidance and financial support from Douglas, Strayhorn scurried to develop a theme for the project, write the necessary arrangements, and line up musicians. It would be an intimate album: Strayhorn’s favorite pieces among his own compositions, performed as piano solos or piano and bass duets, occasionally accompanied by a string quartet or abstract voices in harmony. “Billy decided what he wanted to do,” said Douglas. “It was an incredibly personal album. He conceived it as something very introspective. He wanted to create an atmosphere and a mood and a place to go that was just quiet and alone but still complex and intelligent and mysterious.” Most of the songs came from Strayhorn’s first decade as a composer, and all had been performed or recorded by Ellington or Ellingtonians: “Something to Live For,” “Lush Life,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Day Dream,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Passion Flower,” “Just A-Sittin’ and A-Rockin’,” “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,” “Multicolored Blue” (“Violet Blue”), and “Strange Feeling” (from the Ellington-Strayhorn Perfume Suite). Strayhorn’s performances, however, redefine many of the compositions in singular terms: “‘A’ Train” is a graceful ballad with whispered strings; the densely orchestral “Chelsea Bridge” is a spare piano solo; “Just A-Sittin’ and A-Rockin’” rocks pensively. “The idea wasn’t meant to be definitive,” explained Douglas. “He was saying, ‘Here are these songs that mean a lot to me, and this is what they happen to mean at this particular point.’” If so, the album expresses a sweeping melancholy, its tempos lonesome strolls, its harmonies variations on moans and sighs. Entitled The Peaceful Side, it evokes an uneasy rest. “It was my title, and it never was right,” said Douglas. “It was really the inside of Billy Strayhorn. What was really peaceful was the actual recording.”

  Conducted overnight and completed shortly after 5:00 a.m.—Strayhorn’s beloved “halfway to dawn” time—the sessions were memorable for their absence of incident, according to the engineer, Gerhart Lehner. “The ambiance, it was like a dream,” said Lehner. “Billy’s music just poured out, like the recordings already existed and he was miming to a tape.” Strayhorn and the bassist Michel Gaudry sipped wine and played, rarely needing more than one or two t
akes; during the break, they talked about French linen. They snacked on cake. “He was serious but nice and easy,” recalled Gaudry, who, like Douglas, had got to know Strayhorn at the Mars Club. “That was his secret—he made you feel comfortable. He was so honest. His playing was so honest, and it was so emotional. It just happened. He gave me a little advice, like colors he wanted, some moods. Then, ‘Okay, play! Play!’ No problem! And it came out like pure emotion.” Mimi Perrin, the leader of the jazz “vocalese” groups the Blue Stars and the Double Six of Paris, directed the chorus, dubbed the Paris Blue Notes. “We didn’t sing any words; we sang ‘Aaaah…’” said Perrin. “And that was what Billy Strayhorn was like, making his record. Aaaah…”

  Strayhorn himself was critical of his piano performance. “In Paris I made an album, and … it sounded all right when I heard it there, but that was some months ago. I don’t play much anymore.… Ellington’s very fortunate because he has a band, and he plays with the band and writes too. But in order to play and write, he’s unique really, because you either do one or you do the other. It’s like Nat Cole when he started singing—he stopped playing, because you really can’t—playing requires—you’ve got to—it’s a thing itself, and when you play and write, it’s a different thing. I mean, you can do it. If you know how to play the piano, you can play forever once you learn it. But I mean to really play—and that was Nat’s thing—that’s why he doesn’t play anymore. I don’t feel that I’m playing. It sounds great to somebody else, but it doesn’t sound great to him, his conception of how he should play. He has high standards of what he should sound like.”