Duke (58 page)

The United States government had been sending jazz musicians abroad for years, and even before they traveled under official sponsorship, their overseas performances were viewed in high places as a valuable form of advocacy. “America’s secret weapon [in the Cold War] is a blue note in a minor key,”
The
New York Times
had said of Louis Armstrong’s foreign tours. It was taken for granted that Ellington’s polished elegance would make him at least as effective a representative as the ever-ingratiating Armstrong, and those who knew him best knew that there was no chance of his making impolitic statements to left-wing foreign journalists. When it came to Communism, his private views were identical to his public ones: “I know damn well sure I wouldn’t want to be subsidized by anybody in the government of the United States or anybody else . . . if my drive and so forth is greater than another guy’s, then I’m entitled to earn more and spend more.” He also felt, though he never said so for the record, that he would be a more suitable ambassador than the genial Satchmo. “He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone on the way,” Ellington said when Armstrong died in 1971, and he meant it. But he detested the trumpeter’s grinning public persona, finding it closely akin to Tomming: “It’s a matter of dignity, it’s a matter of embarrassing the race . . . you can’t sell your race for your personal gain.” He had felt the same way when, in 1955, the State Department sent a touring production of
Porgy and Bess
to the Soviet Union. As far as he was concerned, what black America needed was to be represented abroad by a gentleman who knew which fork to use.

So the Kennedy administration dispatched Ellington, Strayhorn, and the band to Ceylon, India, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Pakistan, accompanied by Thomas W. Simons Jr., a State Department escort officer whom the bandleader found sympathetic. As well as giving concerts, Ellington and his musicians listened to local players and gave lecture-demonstrations that went over well. But nobody had warned the State Department about the Air Force, whose senior member, Ray Nance, was sent home from Jordan after getting into a backstage scrap with Cootie Williams that upset him so much that he failed to stand for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was suspected that Nance’s addiction was the real cause of his misbehavior, but Ellington denied it, and Simons advised the State Department that “the embarrassment and harm which America has suffered as a result of Nance’s conduct pales beside the tragedy of a fine American and a fine man.” The episode, however, led to a permanent estrangement between Ellington and Nance, who did not rejoin the band until 1965, then left again after a short stay, this time for good.

Ellington himself caused a different sort of trouble for Simons, who informed his superiors that the bandleader’s “habitual tardiness was a constant burden . . . the most time-consuming, exhausting, and enervating job the escort had was to try to get the group anyplace on time.” And while Simons also reported that Ellington was “a gentleman from head to toe, entirely concentrated on his music, his comfort, and his reputation,” he was appalled when the Countess showed up in New Delhi and attached herself to Ellington’s entourage, in the process causing “acute embarrassment and apprehension to American officials.” Though Simons carefully explained that the bandleader’s relationship with his guest could not “under any reasonable definition of the word be described as tawdry,” nobody connected with the tour needed to be told that it would cause an international scandal if he were to be photographed enjoying the company of a white woman who was not his wife.

To keep such matters secret for very long is not within the power of even the most determined escort officer. Photos of Ellington and the Countess were duly taken by local paparazzi, but by the time they got into print, President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, and his violent death swallowed up every other story published around the world that weekend. “It’s a hit, man,” a shocked Ellington told Charles Sam Courtney, who broke the news to him. “He was fingered. . . . John F. Kennedy was the only president since Lincoln who gave a damn about the Negroes.” He wanted to continue touring, playing memorial concerts modeled after his 1945 radio tribute to FDR, but the State Department insisted on sending the band home at once, and Ellington later told a reporter that he had been advised that American officials “thought jazz concerts might be considered in bad taste.”

Assorted sticky moments notwithstanding, the venture was officially judged a success, and from then on lengthy government-sponsored foreign tours would become a regular part of the itinerary of the Ellington band, which went to Japan in 1964, Africa in 1966, Latin America in 1968, Russia in 1971, East Asia in 1972, and Africa again in 1973. In
Music Is My Mistress
Ellington wrote extensively but not illuminatingly about his travels, during which he was treated like the VIP he was, spending most of his time in concert halls and hotel rooms and uttering orotund platitudes (“Musicians of the past have influenced all musicians of the present”) to the local reporters who interviewed him. He saw less and less of the lands that he visited and the people who lived there. By 1971 he was even arranging for the steaks that he ate each day to be shipped directly from New York to Russia via Pan Am airlines, a luxury that was widely reported in American newspapers, one of whose stories bore the headline “Duke Can’t Cut It on Russian Steaks.”

The State Department tours helped to keep the band afloat during increasingly tight times.
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In addition to being financially remunerative, they inspired Ellington to compose several multimovement works, among them
Far East Suite
(1966),
Latin American Suite
(1968), and
The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse
(1971), into which he incorporated snippets of local musical color gleaned from his overseas listening: “You let it roll around, undergo a chemical change, and then seep out on paper in a form that will suit the musicians who are going to play it.” By then, though, his energy was slackening, and none of these musical travelogues is more than fitfully inspired. In the later ones, Ellington responded to the mode- and scale-based non-Western music that he heard on his travels—much of which he privately admitted to finding monotonous—by resorting to one- and two-chord vamps that create a harmonically static feel at odds with his past practice. Unlike his earlier large-scale works, most of which are completely or largely written out, the late suites also contain long improvised solos, few of which are interesting enough to justify their length.

The inconsistency of these works is far from surprising, since Ellington wrote them at a time when he was maintaining a schedule of public appearances that would have crippled a man half his age. It’s more surprising that they contain any worthwhile music at all, and that the first of them,
Far East Suite,
should rank among the more listenable efforts of his later years, not least for his own percussive playing, both in the ensemble and, in “Ad Lib on Nippon,” as a soloist—though the best movement, a sexy ballad feature for Hodges called “Isfahan,” was actually written by Billy Strayhorn. It was no coincidence that the quality of the suites declined after Strayhorn’s death. The contrasting style of his contributions, which were more melodic and harmonically richer than the movements written by Ellington, gave to
Far East Suite,
like
Such Sweet Thunder
and
A Drum Is a Woman
before it, a musical variety that is lacking in the post-1966 suites.

 • • • 

Two years after the Far East tour, Mercer Ellington became his father’s band manager, simultaneously holding down a chair in the trumpet section (he never took solos). Ellington offered a deadpan explanation of his son’s presence: “I knew he’d been off his horn for a long time and he’d lost his chops, but he can get by, and you know I’ve had so many managers turn left on me. I thought if anyone else is going to steal money off me, I’d keep it in the family.” It may have sounded funny, but he meant every word. Al Celley, the road manager since 1944, had been caught embezzling, and Ellington fired him as soon as the band returned from Turkey in 1963, simultaneously giving the boot to William Mittler, his longtime accountant. Unwilling to look after the band’s finances himself, he needed the help of someone whom he could trust without reserve, and Mercer, who had tried persistently but without success to establish himself as a bandleader, decided at last to quit “going upstream,” as he put it, and accept his familial fate.

In addition to straightening out Ellington’s convoluted financial affairs, Mercer rode herd on his musicians, who had so wide a reputation for bad behavior that the band had actually been blacklisted by certain hotel chains. He found it hard at first to give orders to the older men: “Here I was in a position where I had to overlord people who had led me by the hand to the movies, who had taken me out to the circus, who had bought me candy apples or gone swimming with me.” But he was determined to get rid of the drug addicts (except for Paul Gonsalves, who was now, after Johnny Hodges, the band’s most popular soloist), keep the chronic drinkers like Sam Woodyard on a short leash, and persuade everyone to hit the bandstand on time each night.
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The last of these tasks proved to be the hardest: “When I joined the band, it paid to be bad. I had to reverse the system and give them a reason to be good. . . . I started beefing, hollering, and screaming, and in some cases getting into fisticuffs, in order to straighten this situation out.” But Johnny Hodges, for years one of the band’s prime offenders, decided for reasons of his own to cooperate with Mercer, and over time a modicum of discipline was established.

It was also Mercer’s task to figure out how to bring in more money, to which end he and his father hired Cress Courtney, who had worked with the band during its William Morris days and now returned in 1968 as Ellington’s personal manager. At first the two men were puzzled by the fact that Ellington was, in Mercer’s phrase, a “successful failure” who was world-famous but found it hard to keep the grosses high enough to pay the bills. Eventually, though, they realized that he didn’t
want
to operate in a conventional way. In the late forties he had invited Herb Hendler to manage the band. Hendler looked at the books and saw that Ellington was paying his players a total of $4,500 each week, two thousand more than Ralph Flanagan, a popular bandleader of the day and another of Hendler’s clients. Upon explaining to Ellington that the payroll had to be trimmed, he received this reply: “I have to stand out in front of that band for five shows a day, sometimes. The band you run has got to please the audience. The band I run has got to please
me
. So that’s why I’ve got to have them, no matter what they cost.” Just as he wanted to pay the highest salaries so that he could hang on to his best players, so did he want to get his own money up front so that he could live as he liked and support his family and friends in the grandest possible manner. “Ellington was a great bird-in-the-hand guy,” Courtney explained. “You know, he’d see cash, that was it. He didn’t want to know about what went on the day after tomorrow.”

Ellington and his now-departed business associates played fast and loose with the federal tax code in order to make these things happen, and in the sixties their sins caught up with them. The Internal Revenue Service went after Ellington with a vengeance, disallowing exemptions, personal “loans,” undocumented deductions, and write-offs of various family-related expenses, including those that were incurred by Tempo Music, the music-publishing operation that he had long used as a conduit for siphoning cash to Mercer, Ruth, and Mildred Dixon. In time the noose grew so tight that the IRS started garnishing his box-office receipts. By the time of his death, Ellington was thought to owe somewhere between $600,000 and $700,000 in back taxes and penalties.

As well as looking after his father’s affairs, Mercer also provided companionship for Ellington, who grew lonely on the road when he had no woman in tow—though he took care, Mercer added, never to ask for his son’s company, that being a sign of vulnerability. It was around this time that Rex Stewart remarked that Ellington had “apparently learned to give more of himself in public but less in private.” It was a penetrating observation from one who knew him well. His capacity for companionship had been corroded by too many ironic put-ons, too many “friends” who exaggerated their intimacy with him, and too many room-service steaks eaten in solitude. (The Lucullan feasts of Ellington’s youth had become as much a thing of the past as the liquor he had once drained by the pint. Now he contented himself with steak, grapefruit, and hot water with lemon peel.)

Even the flock of women who kept on following him from town to town became oppressive. Mercer saw that, too:

It was no longer a matter of hitting a town, having a fling, and moving on. Women began to cling to him more and more. The world was shrinking because of air travel, and he never knew when and where some of these ladies would show up . . . sometimes he had to run for shelter to get them off his back, and that was where Thunderbird—Evie—was so valuable. He could always go home, close the door, and let her answer the telephone.

Ellington was also uncomfortably aware that his music was no longer in vogue. Frank Sinatra had sold Reprise to Warner Bros. in 1963 in order to rid himself of the daily headaches of running a business, after which the label made itself over into a rock-and-pop imprint, signing Arlo Guthrie, the Kinks, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young. That left Ellington out in the cold, and instead of continuing to record his own material for Reprise, he resorted to such expedients as putting out a collection of songs from
Mary Poppins,
Walt Disney’s hit movie about a nanny with magical powers, and taping a pair of albums called
Ellington ’65
and
Ellington ’66
that contained not originals but up-to-the-minute pop tunes like “Charade,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Moon River,” and “Never on Sunday,” interspersed with such unlikely fare as Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the Beatles’ “All My Loving” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”