Duke (45 page)

Not only did Ellington’s price go up, but he landed an important gig as a result of the publicity surrounding the Carnegie Hall concert. The band moved into New York’s Hurricane Restaurant in April for a twenty-five-week residency that slashed his traveling expenses and gave him invaluable publicity. Radio was at its listening peak in 1943, and the Mutual Broadcasting System rushed to take advantage of Ellington’s long-term engagement at the Hurricane (later renamed the Zanzibar Club). For the next two years he was heard regularly on network radio, making live broadcasts from the Hurricane and, in May, launching a Sunday-evening series called
Pastel Period
that was devoted to ballads and lyrical instrumental pieces. Though he claimed to have lost $18,000 by taking the lower-paying job, the national exposure provided by his broadcasts more than made up for it.

The band itself continued to perform on a high level. “Everyone seemed to think the band was at its best [with Blanton and Webster], but it was still playing well when we were at the Hurricane and Zanzibar,” Harry Carney said years later. Surviving air checks of the Mutual broadcasts, as well as the commercial recordings that Victor (now known as RCA Victor) began to make after settling with the AFM in 1944, confirm his recollection. Not only did the musicians play with undiminished authority throughout the midforties, but Ellington was composing as well as he ever had. “Blue Cellophane,” “Carnegie Blues,” “A Gathering in a Clearing,” “Magenta Haze,” “Rockabye River”: All of these sides, and many others as well, were indistinguishable in quality from the Blanton-Webster classics.

Recording for Victor in the midforties. Though the Blanton-Webster band of 1940–41 is generally regarded as Duke Ellington’s strongest group, he continued to turn out first-rate compositions during the rest of the decade, and the band, despite the loss of several key players, performed them with undiminished authority, both on record and in person

The band was still up to its old tricks. The old reliables were as temperamental as ever, and they continued to make trouble for new players who did not yet understand that merely reading the music on their stands was not enough to make them Ellington men. Harold “Shorty” Baker, who shuttled in and out of the trumpet section at frequent intervals between 1942 and 1962, described his own hazing as follows: “When I first joined that band, they let me sit there playing wrong notes for a week without telling me the parts had been changed! Nobody ever marked changes.” Unflappable as always, their leader made the most of whatever they cared to give him. George Avakian, who became Ellington’s record producer when the band signed with Columbia in 1947, looked on in amazement as the composer threw together an impromptu gem called “New York City Blues” in the studio:

The musicians trickled in very slowly. Duke was not among the first to arrive, and something like two hours after the session was supposed to begin, the engineer and I were still discussing yesterday’s baseball scores with the musicians, and Duke said, “All right, let’s start.” And he began setting up a blues with whoever happened to be there. There was some kind of odd instrumentation—as I recall, there was only one, possibly two, brass players, and about three saxophones.

Nor had much of anything changed on the road, where black musicians, however famous they might be, were subject at all times to unexpected degradations. Early in his run at the Hurricane, Ellington learned that the restaurant’s headwaiter refused to accept reservations from black patrons, telling them that the club was sold out, and had to complain to the owner so that his friends could come and see him play. When he played Ciro’s, one of Hollywood’s most expensive nightclubs, in 1945, his very presence there was news. According to
Billboard,
“Booking Ellington into Ciro’s sets a precedent, in that it is the first time that any of the swank [Hollywood] strip spots have gone in for a high-priced, big-name Negro band.” But nothing was said about how the club’s manager had warned Ellington, “We don’t allow the help to socialize with the guests.” George Raft, who was friendly with Sonny Greer, demanded that his own table be set up in the alley outside the club so that he could enjoy the musicians’ company, and got his way.

To veteran players accustomed to such slights, what happened at Ciro’s was more of the same. But Kay Davis, a middle-class black from Chicago who started singing with the band at the end of 1944, wasn’t used to being treated like a second-class citizen and was stunned by what she saw on her first trip to the Deep South: “I remember getting off the train to play in Macon, Georgia. The police chief came up to us threateningly in the station and Duke’s manager explained that this was the Duke Ellington band. ‘I don’t care about Duke Ellington any more than any other nigra,’ he said. We ran and got back on the train.”

Ellington, too, was up to his own time-honored tricks in the midforties, as the reminiscences of his friends and colleagues make clear. All agree that he was as slick and manipulative as ever. When Ben Webster asked him for a raise, he replied, “I can’t afford to pay you what you’re worth. Nobody can.” His need for privacy also remained strong. “He kids around with us, but if you get too close to him, he’ll make a joke or put you on, and edge away,” another sideman told Nat Hentoff. Above all, no one, not even his lovers, was permitted to interfere with his composing. “Duke was so involved in himself and what he had to do that other people and other things were like side dishes,” a close friend said. “They were just there. He took them for granted.”

No matter how he had spent the day, he ended it at the piano. In 1944 Gunther Schuller roomed next door to Ellington and never forgot what he heard there:

He would just play, improvising, more or less fooling around, ruminating, as it were, sometimes for long periods of time, working on some melody or motive, trying out some harmonic progression or a chain of chords, always so beautifully voiced. Then, every once in a while there would be silence, and I would hear the scratching sound of a pencil. Duke had heard something he thought worthy of committing to paper. Then the keyboard ruminating would commence again. . . . Around four or five in the morning he’d finally lie down to catch a few hours’ sleep, then get up around ten thirty to hand out some music to Tom [Whaley]—maybe only twenty or thirty bars.

But no matter how late he stayed up composing a piece, he still waited until the last possible minute to finish it. According to Herb Hendler, who served as his A & R man at Victor during this period, “When Duke was coming in, I used to set up tables in the studio for his copyists. He’d sit at the piano and bang away. Then he’d give a lead sheet to the copyists, and an arrangement would be done there and then, with Duke adding odd phrases as he went along.” And he was still womanizing, always on the qui vive for yet another pickup. Young Joya Sherrill, who started singing with the band in 1944, was fascinated by his attitude toward the women who ceaselessly pursued him: “I saw so many women around him and I would say, ‘But Duke . . . you were just with this one the other day. You just told this one you loved them.’ He said, ‘Joya, I love all of my women.’ And he really, I think he really meant that.” He always had plenty of them to love. Ruth Ellington found it “shocking . . . the way the women kind of fell on their faces in front of him.” Yet he was far from picky about his sexual partners. “He never seemed to be interested in the perfect woman,” Mercer said. “If she had a scar, or was slightly misproportioned—big-busted, big-hipped, or a little off balance—then he was more interested.” To Don George, an up-and-coming lyricist with whom Ellington collaborated on such hit songs as “Everything but You” and “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” he explained that his promiscuity “keeps my juices flowing, and that’s where I get all my ideas for the music I write.”

Seven years after Ellington’s death, George published a memoir called
Sweet Man
in which he breached the wall of silence that the composer’s intimates had maintained with regard to his sex life. Parts of the book read like a French stage farce, only more explicit: “Duke would check into two, three or four hotels, hand out keys to different ladies, then, later on, pick out the hotel room he wanted to go to.” It was the highest priority of his publicists to prevent the press from reporting on such escapades. Not only were they concerned about his reputation, but Ellington was just as determined to keep Evie Ellis in the dark about them, for his short-tempered consort, with whom he had been living since 1939, was ready and willing to resort to violence. According to Mercer, she went after him with a gun at least twice. Having been carved up by a wife, Ellington didn’t propose to get shot by a mistress, though he refused to curtail his coupling, explaining to George that “we can’t permit anything to interfere with man’s inalienable right to have a little pussy on the side.”

Ellington’s extramarital relationship with Evie was no more conventionally respectable than were his extra-extramarital activities. It didn’t help that Ruth Ellington, according to Mercer, “did not allow Evie in her home.” Their mutual hostility made his domestic life uncomfortable, especially during holidays: “So when Easter, Christmas came around, or whatever, instead of him taking a grip on it, he ran! So he couldn’t demand everyone would be in one room. The only way he could compensate for it was to see each one, one at a time . . . so as a result of this he planned as best as possible to be working on holidays. Christmas, Thanksgiving, whatever.” Proverbially unwilling though he was to confront disagreeable matters, Ellington also knew that his refusal to regularize his liaison with Evie by divorcing Edna was not without its advantages. “I think Evie was his protection,” said Phoebe Jacobs, a publicist who knew both Ellington and Evie. “In other words, every time he got too involved with another woman, he’d always say, ‘Well, I have to go back to Evie.’”

 • • • 

None of these shenanigans made it into “The Hot Bach,” a three-part profile of Ellington that appeared in
The New Yorker
in June and July of 1944. Written by Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach” sketched its subject with sympathetic clarity: “Duke Ellington, whose contours have something of the swell and sweep of a large, erect bear and whose color is that of coffee with a strong dash of cream . . . is a calm man of forty-five who laughs easily and hates to hurry.”
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While the piece says nothing about Ellington’s sex life, the other facets of his offstage personality had never before been conveyed so clearly in print. “The Hot Bach” disclosed that his religious belief was not just for show: “I’ve had three educations—the street corner, going to school, and the Bible. The Bible is most important. It taught me to look at a man’s insides instead of the cut of his suit.” It showed him battling stoically with racial prejudice: “You have to try not to think about it or you’ll knock yourself out.” It showed him talking about food, about clothes, about women, and, ever and always, about music: “As Bach says, if you ain’t got a left hand, you ain’t worth a hoot in hell.”

Boyer was also struck by the care that Ellington took to conceal that personality from the public, hiding it behind a mask of charm:

Ellington has, like most entertainers, a stage self and a real self. On the stage, at least when he supplies the “flesh”—the trade term for personal appearances in movie houses—he presents himself as a smiling, carefree African, tingling to his fingertips with a gay, syncopated throb that he can scarcely control. As the spotlight picks him out of the gloom, the audience sees a wide, irrepressible grin, but when the light moves away, Ellington’s face instantly sags into immobility.

That
The New Yorker
now thought him worthy of a three-part profile demonstrates the extent of his celebrity in 1944—as well as the wisdom of Irving Mills. Though the two men had parted ways five years earlier, Ellington continued to reap the benefits of Mills’s farseeing decision to market him not merely as a glamorous jazzman but as a great artist. But the coming of the Swing Era, which was a white man’s game, had shifted attention away from the pioneering black bands. In 1941
Down Beat
had invited its readers to name the “best swing band” of the year, and Benny Goodman had beaten Ellington 2,130–1,841. It is interesting that
Time
should have treated the poll as news, and even more interesting that the story was one of the few times that Ellington’s name appeared in
Time
during the forties. The premiere of
Black, Brown and Beige
had gotten him back into the magazine, but you can only make your Carnegie Hall debut once, and in the world of the media, merely being a genius is not news. Hollywood had turned its back on him as well. The band appeared in Vincente Minnelli’s
Cabin in the Sky,
a screen version of the all-black Broadway musical, but Ellington and his men shared the screen with Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Rochester, Ethel Waters, and the Hall Johnson Choir, performing briefly at a nightclub full of happy black dancers. William Morris had no more aces in the hole. Print ads show that the agency was still using Mills-coined slogans (“Weird melodies! Amazing syncopation!”) to pump up his image. Like the man himself, they were old news.