Strayhorn and Ellington had first met in the younger man's native Pittsburgh in 1938 (one of Mr. Hajdu's most intriguing revelations is that had the young Strayhorn not been granted an audience with Ellington, he would have sought one with the bandleader next playing through town, Count Basie). From that point on, as their longtime friend Lena Horne has observed, "Their relationship was very sexual. Don't misunderstand - it wasn't physical at all Duke treated Billy exactly like he treated women, with all that old-fashioned chauvanism. Very loving and very protective, but controlling."
During Strayhorn's life and ever since, the myth has been that he and Ellington wrote and thought identically. The most famous story of their three-decade collaboration relates to the writing of Suite Thursday, the John Steinbeck-inspired composition which Ellington's orchestra introduced at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1960. Ellington wrote most of the Suite while on the road, and Strayhorn filled in with one of the movements from his apartment in New York. As usual with Ellington, there was no time to rehearse the finished work, and both men heard it for the first time at the premiere concert. "When they got to my part, then went into Ellington's part, I burst out laughing," Strayhorn recalled not long after, "Without really knowing, I had written a theme that was a kind of development of a similar theme that he had written. It was as though we had really worked together - or one person had done it. It was an uncanny feeling, like witchcraft, like looking into someone else's mind."
Mr. Hajdu, however, makes it clear than this incident was the exception and not the rule in their partnership: far from being just a ghost-writer or a pinch-hitter for The Maestro, Strayhorn was his own man from the beginning. Where Ellington (as his aide and chronicler Stanley Dance has pointed out) tended to rely more heavily on the blues, Strayhorn was thoroughly schooled in impressionists like Debussy and Ravel. Part of the joy of Ellington compositions like "Rockin' in Rhythm" or "Dancers in Love" is the devil-may-care fashion in which one section almost randomly follows another, in the stop-and-start tradition of the great stride pianists. Contrastingly, everything in Strayhorn's pieces fits together much more organically. And although Strayhorn's music could stomp, moan and swing no less convincingly than Ellington's (particularly in his most famous composition, "Take The A Train"), there was always a greater tenderness, particularly in the long series of "floral" compositions, like "Passion Flower" and "A Flower is a Lovesome Thing," he wrote for the band's supreme balladeer, alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. "There's so much more sensitivity and complexity in Strayhorn's compositions than Ellingtons," said the band's bassist Aaron Bell. "We could always tell Strayhorn's."
This remarkably rewarding partnership was continually fueled by the two men's personal differences. Certainly the most important attachment of each man's life was to his mother, but Ellington came from the black middle class, was heterosexual and, by many accounts, highly promiscuous, whereas Strayhorn, the abused son of a bitter and violent manual laborer, was gay and apparently involved only in very long-term romantic relationships.