Duke (36 page)

 • • • 

“I feel that his was the only band I could do anything with—the only place where I would fit,” Strayhorn told Sinclair Traill in 1959. It made sense that he should have felt at home in Ellington’s rowdy crew of iron-willed individualists, for he had always found it hard to fit in. The words that turn up repeatedly in the recollections of his admiring schoolmates tell the tale:
egghead, oddball
 . . . and
sissy
. “He had a hard time making friends,” Mickey Scrima said. “To tell you the truth, people used to call him a sissy.” And Scrima knew Strayhorn well enough to understand that he had poured his otherness into his art:

The guy went through a lot of shit in his life, from his father right on through school—the kids calling him a sissy, you know. He kept it all in and put on a big front that everything was fine, nothing bothered him. Then he sat down and wrote all that music with all that emotion. All his feelings came out in the music. That’s what made his stuff so incredible and different from Duke’s. It was great music, like Duke’s was, and it was so full of dark feeling.

By all accounts Strayhorn was at ease with his sexuality. Though he was disinclined to talk about it other than indirectly and never “came out” in public, he also never pretended to be heterosexual, and expected his friends and colleagues to treat him as they did everyone else. This attitude was unusual in the thirties and forties, not least in the world of jazz, which was (and still is) something of a boys’ club with a locker-room feel, a subculture in which open homosexuality, if not unknown, was still uncommon. “There wasn’t a lot of guys who was homosexual and acted like that, like there it was and you have to accept it—and if you don’t, that’s your problem,” said the clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton, who joined the band in 1943. While most of Ellington’s musicians accepted it, some of them, it appears, did not. Barney Bigard, in a passage that was censored by his wife from the transcript of his oral-history interview, spoke critically of Strayhorn’s sexuality, and it is noteworthy that the clarinetist mentioned him only in passing in
With Louis and the Duke,
his posthumously published autobiography, while Rex Stewart said nothing at all about him in
Boy Meets Horn
.

As for his relationship with Ellington, it would always be fraught with tension. According to Mercer Ellington, “Pop never cared one bit that Strayhorn was gay. . . . He knew plenty of gay men and women, so there was no question about, ‘Hey, is this person a freak or something?’ Pop knew the story. He backed up Strayhorn all the way.” But Mercer also reports that Ellington believed in the existence of “a Faggot Mafia. . . . He went on to recount how homosexuals hired their own kind whenever they could, and how, when they had achieved executive status, they maneuvered to keep straight guys out of the influential positions.” And while Ellington treated him with the trust and respect that Strayhorn’s own father had withheld, there was—as usual with Ellington—more to it than that. According to Lena Horne, who had a fling with Ellington before becoming one of Strayhorn’s closest friends, “Duke treated Billy exactly like he treated women, with all that old-fashioned chauvinism. Very loving and very protective, but controlling, very destructive.”

Nor was his influence on Strayhorn a one-way street. Derek Jewell cites “someone who knew [Ellington] in the 1930s” as follows: “I think Duke was a much simpler character before he met Strays. You could even say he was sweeter. But he was so much more interesting once Strays happened along.” The singer Herb Jeffries, who joined the band in October of 1939, put it less euphemistically:

Duke was a magnificent role model. He was brilliant at it. But some of it was hocus-pocus—grand gestures and particular five-dollar phrases that he’d pronounce with dramatic emphasis. Meanwhile, he never really read anything except the Bible . . . and he knew far less about the fine arts, including other composers, than he liked to let on. In Billy, Duke saw that image he considered so important, in flesh and blood.

When it came to high culture, Ellington was a poseur, a strangely incurious man who knew next to nothing about classical music and read not systematically but at random, taking care to display
Remembrance of Things Past
on his shelves for the benefit of journalists who assumed that he had read the whole thing from cover to cover, just as they believed him whenever he said that he had just finished writing his first opera (or symphony, or Broadway show). Not Strayhorn. In addition to being a classical-music connoisseur—he favored Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and the French impressionists—he was impressively well read in 1939, and grew more so in years to come. Could the bourgeois from U Street who learned in childhood the importance of keeping up appearances have been unconsciously jealous of his bilingual protégé from Pittsburgh, who turned himself by sheer force of will into that which his patron longed to be? And if he was, might that jealousy someday come between the two men?

Eventually Strayhorn himself would think such dark thoughts—but not yet. For the moment he was deliriously happy, and not just because he had found his calling. In the fall of 1939 Mercer introduced him to a casual acquaintance from the neighborhood, a black pianist named Aaron Bridgers who was working as an elevator operator while studying piano with Art Tatum. By year’s end, Strayhorn had moved out of the Ellington apartment to set up housekeeping with Bridgers in Harlem. Though both men were discreet about the nature of their relationship, it was evident to all who knew them that they were lovers. Ulanov later implied as much in his biography of Ellington, and Ruth Ellington never doubted it: “We accepted Aaron as a new member of the family, because he was with Billy. . . . They were together, and that’s how it was. They didn’t go through the motions of any kind of pretense.”

If Strayhorn had wondered how he wanted to live his life, the liaison with Bridgers answered his questions. But it also drove a wedge into the center of that life. Ellington had opened up the world of jazz to him. He played Strayhorn’s music, paid him generously, and denied him nothing save for credit, which he gave only on his own capricious terms, though those with ears to hear knew that something was up. When Victor released Strayhorn’s vocal arrangement of “Flamingo” a year later, John Lewis heard it and marveled: “It had nothing to do with what had gone on in jazz at all before. It sounded as if Stravinsky were a jazz musician.” So did Gerry Mulligan: “When Strayhorn came on the scene, he just blew us away . . . To bring all that complexity to bear and have it be so beautiful was something incredible to everybody who knew anything.” Ellington, who knew plenty, felt the same way, praising “Flamingo” as “a turning point in vocal background orchestration, a renaissance in elaborate ornamentation for the accompaniment of singers.”

It would have made sense for so gifted an artist to strike out on his own. But Strayhorn needed no Irving Mills to warn him that he could not function as a celebrity bandleader while living more or less openly as a gay man. So he hung back, accepting Ellington’s largesse—and capriciousness—in return for being allowed to love whom he pleased. Meanwhile Ellington laid on the praise whenever interviewers asked him about Strayhorn. When they didn’t, which was usually, he kept his opinions to himself. This was why most mainstream-media articles about Ellington said nothing about Strayhorn, and why those that did described him in terms that diminished his importance. In Richard O. Boyer’s “The Hot Bach,” the 1944
New Yorker
profile that was the most comprehensive journalistic account of Ellington’s life and work to appear in his lifetime, Strayhorn is dismissed as Ellington’s “staff arranger and a talented composer in his own right.”

It was a near-Faustian bargain, one whose very existence Strayhorn denied. “He has never made me feel that I am walking in his shadow,” he said of Ellington in 1965. But he knew full well that he had chosen safety and security over fame and fear, and he grew less comfortable with the choice. On the surface, Ruth Ellington said, he gave the impression of being calm and collected: “The one thing that stood out about Billy . . . is that no matter what anyone said or did, he was never sensitive about his own feelings or anyone trying to hurt him, and he was always understanding and sympathetic and seeing every point of view, without any reference to himself whatsoever.” His friends knew better, especially after the “cabareting” that Sonny Greer admired degenerated into alcoholism.

Most of the time he brushed off Ellington’s half-unintentional, half-calculated slights with an ironic aside or a repetition of his favorite catchphrase, “Ever up and onward.” But it says much about their relationship that Strayhorn’s nickname for Ellington—which he used to the older man’s face—was “Monster,” and on one occasion he let his own mask slip. In 1957 Ellington was profiled in
Look,
and the piece, as usual, made no mention of his longtime collaborator. Soon after the issue hit the newsstands, Strayhorn dined with a friend, the dancer Honi Coles, who had read the article and was irate about it. “You wrote every bit as much of that music they’re fussing all over as Ellington and they didn’t even mention your name,” the friend told him. “Why do you let them get away with that? . . . I think you do care or you wouldn’t be drinking like a fucking fish every fucking time I see you.”

“I’m better off without all that,” Strayhorn replied. “Let him have his articles. I’m better off this way.”

Then he burst into tears.

10

“THE SEA OF EXPECTANCY”

The Blanton-Webster Band, 1939–1940

D
UKE ELLINGTON SAID
in 1964 that he thought of his compositions as “a continuing autobiography”: “My music talks about the new people I keep meeting, especially the new men who pass through the band and sometimes stay. I use their particular ways of expressing themselves, and it all becomes part of my own style.” While the coming of Billy Strayhorn was a key chapter in that chronicle, Strayhorn did not make his first noteworthy contributions to Ellington’s book of arrangements until the fall of 1940, and five years had gone by since a new soloist, Rex Stewart, last joined the band. It was time for a change—though no one, not even Ellington himself, knew how fateful it would be.

Billy Taylor, Ellington’s bassist, had now held that chair for five years. While Ellington regarded him as “one of the ace foundation-and-beat men on the instrument,” the fact that he had hired Hayes Alvis to play alongside Taylor, just as he had hired Taylor to play alongside Wellman Braud, shows that he sought something more from his rhythm section. Jazz bass technique was still in its infancy in 1939. In the late thirties most bassists were recovering tuba players with catch-as-catch-can techniques who had taught themselves the instrument out of necessity. Many of them, like Count Basie’s Walter Page, were solid “foundation-and-beat” men, but Bob Haggart, Milt Hinton, and Slam Stewart were the only well-known jazz bassists whose technical equipment was sufficiently developed to permit them to function not just as section men but also as soloists, and none of them was looking for a job (Haggart played with Bob Crosby, Hinton with Cab Calloway, while Stewart co-led a popular combo with Slim Gaillard). If Ellington wanted to trade up, he would have to find the new man himself.

On October 20, 1939, the band pulled into St. Louis for a two-week stand at the Hotel Coronado. At some point shortly thereafter, Johnny Hodges went to Club 49, an after-hours spot frequented by traveling musicians, where he heard a twenty-one-year-old bassist named Jimmie Blanton. Impressed by his playing, Hodges went back to the hotel where the band was staying and rousted Ellington out of bed to hear the youngster, who was then working with Fate Marable, the pianist-bandleader in whose riverboat orchestra Louis Armstrong had played two decades earlier. According to Mercer, he “arrived in his pajamas and topcoat.” An eyewitness, the trumpeter Ralph Porter, tells what happened next: