Duke (47 page)

Watkins lengthened the odds by picking John Latouche to write the show’s book and lyrics. Enormously personable and greatly talented, he scored a modest hit on Broadway in 1940 with the stage version of
Cabin in the Sky,
in whose screen adaptation the Ellington band had appeared. But Latouche, who is now best known for his libretto for Douglas Moore’s 1956 opera
The Ballad of Baby Doe
and the lyrics for a handful of show tunes, most notably “Lazy Afternoon” and “Taking a Chance on Love,” was a poisoned chalice, a gay alcoholic with a hard-earned reputation for unreliability. Vernon Duke, who worked with him on
Cabin in the Sky,
remembered his colleague as “ever alert, his wit ever sharp and often merciless,” but handicapped by his personal shortcomings: “Extremely erratic by nature, Latouche worked spasmodically and swiftly . . . short periods of work to be followed by long days and nights of blissful laziness and idle gallivanting.” It was a judgment with which all who knew him concurred. But there was no question of his talent, and he was already at work on a draft of
Twilight Alley
(as
Beggar’s Holiday
was initially known).

What Latouche had written so far was promising enough for Watkins to persuade John Houseman, who had cofounded the Mercury Theatre with Welles in 1937, to consider becoming the show’s director. While directing would never be Houseman’s strong suit—he was first and foremost a uniquely creative producer, both on Broadway and, later, in Hollywood—his pioneering work with the Negro Theatre Unit had made him something of a hero to theatrically minded blacks. But though he liked the sound of
Twilight Alley,
he had good reason to fear that getting the show from the page to the stage would be tricky:

Latouche was not only lazy, but he had been working on several other projects during the summer; he had written a number of lyrics but only the roughest draft of our first act and almost nothing of the second. Ellington, teeming with tunes and mood pieces, still had not faced the necessity of composing a complete musical score. Added to these unpleasant discoveries was another of which I only gradually became aware: our producers were desperately short of money. Finally—owing to the Duke’s enormous list of future commitments—we had no leeway at all but must start rehearsals within four weeks or not at all.

What Houseman meant by “a complete musical score” was clearly not what Ellington meant. Having worked on one Broadway musical, a
succès
d’estime
called
Lute Song
that closed after four months, he knew that the composer of a successful musical had to supply purpose-written songs conceived and executed in close collaboration with the librettist, and Ellington didn’t work that way. His
Twilight Alley
songs were either written on the road or pulled out of his trunk. Still, Watkins had managed to assemble a plausible-looking cast:
Oklahoma!
had made a star out of Alfred Drake, the MacHeath of
Twilight Alley,
while Zero Mostel, who played Peachum, was not yet a star but was well on his way. Libby Holman was cast as Jenny, and though her above-the-title days were long behind her, she was still remembered for such hit revues of the twenties and thirties as
The Little Show
and
Three’s a Crowd,
as well as for her scandalous private life. (Openly bisexual, she had been indicted in 1932 for allegedly murdering her husband, Zachary Smith Reynolds, who was heir to the R. J. Reynolds tobacco fortune and whose death made her a millionairess.)
Jump for Joy
’s Marie Bryant and Avon Long, lately of the 1942 revival of
Porgy and Bess,
were cast in supporting roles, and when Watkins’s scenic designs proved to be inadequate, Oliver Smith, who had worked for Ballet Theatre and on two Broadway hits,
Billion Dollar Baby
and
On the Town,
was brought in to create what turned out to be a brilliantly stylized big-city set. The prospect of collaborating with these pros induced Houseman to sign on, and
Twilight Alley
went into rehearsal on October 21.

Ellington had miraculously contrived to spend the whole of that month in New York, playing at the Aquarium Restaurant and working on the show in his off hours. Come November, though, at the moment when his presence was needed most, he returned to the road for a month of one-night stands in Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Omaha, Philadelphia, Rochester, Syracuse, and Toronto, pausing in New York just long enough to appear at Carnegie Hall with Django Reinhardt, who was visiting America for the first time and touring with the band.
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His absence upset Latouche, who threatened to quit because he expected to collaborate directly with his composer instead of “working” with him over the phone. He was kidding himself. As Luther Henderson put it, “Ellington would never leave his band—never, ever, not for anything. . . . [So he] said, ‘I will leave you Strayhorn.’” Not only did Strayhorn write the dance music for
Twilight Alley
and orchestrate the score in tandem with Henderson, but he also composed the best song in the show, “Brown Penny,” by himself, and helped out with several others. According to Houseman, he “would run up to the Duke’s apartment and fish out of a drawer, crammed with unperformed music, whatever tune seemed to fit the scene.” Yet his program credit was the same as the one that he had received for
Jump for Joy:
“Orchestrations under personal supervision of Billy Strayhorn.” It was taken for granted that Ellington’s name was necessary to sell the show, and Strayhorn, once again, was eased into the shadows.

Latouche found it impossible to come up with a convincing ending. His first attempt was a heavy-handed sermon delivered posthumously by MacHeath, who had just been dispatched in the electric chair: “The deed has been done by all of us—the hates hated by all of us. . . . The one thing we share in this inequal world is guilt.” No one found it good enough, so he started tinkering with the book, causing the show to grow longer and longer. By now the producers’ checks were bouncing, and rehearsals were getting out of hand. On December 1, two nights before the Boston tryout of
Twilight Alley
opened, Ellington showed up at the Boston Opera House and was so dismayed by what he saw there that he skipped town the next day. Houseman felt the same way, claiming that “the last twenty minutes of the show . . . were virtually improvised by Drake and the cast before an audience that included the usual number of vulturous ill-wishers from New York.”
Billboard
summed up the debacle as gently as possible, calling the show “something of an opera, ballet, operetta, musicomedy and play with music. It’s all and none of these. . . . Alley has a lot of everything but not enough of anything in particular to pull it into the hit class.”

Houseman quit or was fired—he was never sure which—and George Abbott, Broadway’s top show doctor, was brought in to do what he could before
Twilight Alley
reached New York. He fired Holman, hacked away at the dialogue scenes, changed the title to
Beggar’s Holiday,
and boggled at the continuing absence of his composer: “I never saw Duke Ellington, never worked with him. Billy took care of whatever I asked for. He sat down and wrote it right there, whatever was needed.” What he couldn’t do was talk the producers into putting up more cash. “I think I could have made a hit show . . . had I been able to have the proper changes of cast,” Abbott said in his memoirs. “But having extravagantly squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars, the management now suddenly became penurious and was unwilling to squander a little more to salvage what they had already wasted.” Furious at the consequences of their penury, he refused to let his name be printed in the Broadway program.

Beggar’s Holiday
opened at the Broadway Theatre the day after Christmas. The reviews were mixed, though some of the critics, like Brooks Atkinson of
The
New York Times,
had unexpectedly friendly things to say: “Let appropriate salutes be fired in honor of Duke Ellington and John Latouche. Using John Gay’s ‘Beggar’s Opera’ as a ground plan, they have composed a flaring musical play in modern style . . . Mr. Ellington and Mr. Latouche have given Broadway a score and lyrics we can be proud of.”
Life
agreed with Atkinson about the songs, praising the “full-blooded musical score” and “biting lyrics,” while Barry Ulanov, writing in
Metronome,
did what he could for his friend: “There are so many good tunes in the show it is hard to make a choice.” Alas, there weren’t. Except for Strayhorn’s “Brown Penny,” the score was undistinguished, though Lena Horne tried her best to make a hit out of “Tomorrow Mountain,” a hope-for-the-future ditty whose lyrics were lifted by Latouche from “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” (“Under cigarette trees, we’ll take our ease / While the cops fan off the flies”). Ellington did his bit by recording five of the songs for Columbia, but he rarely performed them outside the studio, and they were soon forgotten. As for Latouche’s book, even Ulanov conceded that it was a mess: “It offers no really sympathetic character; such warmth as is stirred in the audience by the talented members of the cast is managed entirely by Marie Bryant’s dancing and singing, by Alfred Drake’s singing and the excellent music assigned all the other principals.” Of the production team, only Oliver Smith got away clean, with Eric Bentley sneering that his “fine settings look like a tombstone over a play that died during rehearsals.”

Beggar’s Holiday
closed on March 29, 1947, after 111 performances. A two-week run in Chicago failed no less completely, and the investors lost all their money. “The thing that was wrong with the show,” Ellington later said, “was that it was about twenty years ahead of its time . . . nobody could understand why anybody would have an integrated show.” While he was right about that, it is also true that later attempts to revive
Beggar’s Holiday
have been no more successful, and he seems never to have figured out that Broadway shows, however fine their intentions, cannot be written on the fly, least of all when one of the authors lacks the necessary stage experience. Ellington stuck around town long enough to attend the cast party, then headed to Chicago to lick his wounds. As for Strayhorn, he ducked out while his boss was holding court for his fans that night. “The party’s just starting,” Smith told him. “Not for me, it isn’t,” Strayhorn replied. Not only was he wounded by the show’s failure, but he resented Ellington’s unwillingness to give him appropriate credit for the hard work he had done. “That show meant a lot to him,” Aaron Bridgers said. “He gave it everything he had in him.” A seed of doubt had been sown, and soon it would bear fruit.

 • • • 

For Ellington the bad news had only just begun. He canceled his recording contract with Musicraft, having figured out that the label was incapable of delivering on its roseate promises. The William Morris Agency shut down its big-band department around the same time. Meanwhile, the critics started to turn on him. Mike Levin, for one, was politely but firmly dismissive of his 1947 Carnegie Hall concert in the pages of
Down Beat:

No jazz admirer denies Ellington’s greatness. But no Ellington fan will likewise deny that his concerts would go far better if the yearly last minute scuffles could be avoided, the music planned, written and rehearsed in time to give the band a decent opportunity to live up to its reputation . . . the Ellington organization showed itself competent as always, brilliant in a few places, but sadly lacking in fire and technical execution at others.

A month later, Ted Hallock reviewed a Chicago performance even more dismissively for
Down Beat:
“Ellington is not as good as Ellington has been. The obvious degeneration applies to the leader more than the sidemen because the tremendous incentive and feeling of happiness once instilled by the Duke into every player with whom he came in contact has now vanished.” Hallock’s review was too much for Marshall Stearns, who fired back in the same magazine, pointing out that “each year, the critics . . . commence the annual burial rites. A month or so later, after the band has ironed out the program on the road, the brighter critics change their minds and hop back on the band-wagon. No wonder Duke says despairingly: ‘There are no jazz critics.’”

Stearns had a point—but so did his colleagues. It wasn’t just that Ellington refused to change his procrastinatory ways. The band’s unevenness also reflected the instability of its personnel roster. In mid-1947 he returned to Columbia, from which John Hammond had since departed, and started making records with George Avakian, who loved Ellington’s music so much that he was more than willing to put up with the undisciplined ways of his sidemen. But many of the musicians whom Avakian admired most were no longer there. When the band straggled into Columbia’s Hollywood studios in August to cut its first four sides under the new contract, the only horn players left from the prewar lineup were Lawrence Brown, Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, and Ray Nance.

Ellington paid his first postwar visit to England in the summer of 1948, but he left the band behind, bringing with him only Nance and Kay Davis, appearing with a local rhythm section, and laying off his other musicians for the duration of the two-month tour. It was, to be sure, a matter of necessity—the British musicians’ union was as sticky in 1948 about allowing foreign musicians to work in England as it had been in 1933—but the band’s absence seemed to symbolize the dire straits in which its leader found himself. Even his body was turning on him: He collapsed in agony after a concert at Washington’s Howard Theatre and had to undergo surgery to remove a cyst from his kidney after returning to New York.

In yet another sign of the times, Fred Guy handed in his notice the following January. Ellington did not replace him. “You just grow and grow and grow and it gets more expensive,” he explained. “Getting rid of the guitar was a useful economy.” True though it was that fewer bandleaders were carrying rhythm guitarists on their rosters, the consummately reliable Guy had served as a stabilizer for Sonny Greer, who was drinking so much that he could no longer be counted on to keep the rest of the band swinging. According to a musician who heard Ellington around that time, “All the booze had gone into Sonny’s legs and the tempo was going haywire.”