Duke (64 page)

But tired he was, and though he remained relentlessly active, barnstorming around America and Canada and touring Australia, Europe, Japan, South America, and the Soviet Union, his capacity for physical regeneration was not unlimited. A recording of his last “solo” concert, which he gave with Joe Benjamin and Rufus Jones at the Whitney Museum of American Art in April of 1972, shows that his piano playing was losing its sureness of touch, and pictures taken around the same time show him looking seedy and weary. Nor was it merely a matter of advancing age: Something was gravely wrong with him.

Like so many superstitious people, Ellington’s seemingly nonsensical anxieties pointed to an overweening fear of death. Ever since he lost his mother, it had been the great unmentionable, and it fed his own hypochondria. “If he stubbed his toe, he’d call his doctor,” Clark Terry said. “Even if he had to do it from Egypt.” The doctor whom he called was Arthur Logan, whom he had met at the Cotton Club in 1937 and on whom he had depended ever since. An extremely light-skinned man who chose in his youth not to pass for white, Logan practiced at Harlem’s Upper Manhattan Medical Group (after which Billy Strayhorn’s 1956 composition was named) and shared an Upper West Side brownstone with his wife Marian, a former nightclub singer who happily embraced the customs of the black elite after their marriage in 1958. Ellington took constant advantage of his relationship with Logan, calling him in the middle of the night to ask, “Arthur, how am I feeling today?” Logan was happy to oblige his famous friend, presenting Ellington with a monogrammed doctor’s bag that he stuffed with innocuous pills of various kinds and giving him “rainbow” multivitamin shots whenever the two men were in the same city. “There’s nothing wrong with Edward,” he admitted. “It’s in his mind. If it makes him happy for me to stick him, I’m going to stick him.” Marian was amused by their interdependence: “Of course, Edward needed Arthur. Arthur kept him healthy, so he could make his music. Edward also loved the idea of Arthur. He thought it was magnificent to have his personal physician with him all the time, like some sort of ancient potentate.” In time he took on Strayhorn and the rest of the band as patients. It was Logan who told Strayhorn that he was dying of cancer, and in 1972 it became his responsibility to give the same news to Duke Ellington.

Cootie Williams had come down with a respiratory ailment when the band traveled to Houston that May to spend two weeks playing for dancers at the Shamrock Hotel. Local doctors tested the entire band for tuberculosis and emphysema, and advised two of them, Ellington and Harry Carney, to consult their own physicians after returning to New York. Ellington never needed to be told twice to see a doctor, so he paid Arthur Logan a visit as soon as he got home. To their mutual horror, Logan discovered that Ellington, a lifelong smoker, had cancer in both lungs. The two men decided to keep his illness secret for as long as they could, and Ellington returned to the road, determined to beat the disease that had cut Strayhorn down.

Even in his last illness he remained, incredibly enough, attractive to women. The orchestral conductor Maurice Peress, who was working with him on a musical project, testified to his appeal: “Once the word got around that I passed unchallenged in and out of the great man’s dressing room, women—old flames and wannabe flames—began pressing notes on me to pass on.” And he still had two more good albums in him. Norman Granz, who had lately resumed his professional ties with Ellington, had no interest in recording the full band, having concluded that it no longer played well enough. Ellington, he said, “clung to the band like a crutch, just as old people cling together in marriage because they can’t think of anything else to do.” But he felt that Ellington the pianist still had something to say, and Granz persuaded him to tape a pair of small-group albums in December and January. On
This One’s for Blanton,
a duet album for which Granz paired him with Ray Brown, Ellington tipped his hat to the young bass virtuoso whose playing had helped to inspire his most sustained and distinguished period of compositional activity.
Duke’s Big 4,
on which he joined forces with Brown, the guitarist Joe Pass, and Louis Bellson, contained combo versions of “The Hawk Talks” and six Ellington standards, one of them a frisky gallop through “Cotton Tail” that betrays no sign of the dire straits in which he now found himself: Three days after the session, he was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital with what a spokesman described as “chronic exhaustion and a virus infection.” Mercer led the band in his absence, and he was back on the road a month later.

Sick or not, Ellington had two additional projects on his plate. One was the Third Sacred Concert, which would be premiered at London’s Westminster Abbey in October. The other was his autobiography, for which Doubleday had paid him an advance of $50,000 (about $319,000 in today’s dollars). Sam Vaughan, a New York editor who had worked with Dwight Eisenhower on his presidential memoirs, was eager to see the book into print. Ellington, having spent the advance as soon as he got it, had accumulated a huge stack of handwritten notes but needed help to transform them into a finished manuscript. At one time he had considered working on his memoirs with Carter Harman, the author of
Time
’s 1956 cover story, and to that end he talked at length to the journalist in 1964, speaking with unprecedented, often profane candor about a wide variety of subjects, including race and sex. Among other things, he described himself as a “pussy freak” (“I have walked past
money
to get pussy!”) and claimed that men who, like him, sought to satisfy women in bed instead of merely satisfying themselves “are the people who get bags under their eyes.” But Harman, who wanted to write about “the ‘secret’ Ellington,” realized that what the composer wanted was “to write a book that was a print version of the public Duke Ellington . . . he said, ‘No, once you’ve been in the spotlight, you never dare get out unless it’s after midnight and you go into the bathroom, pull down the shade and turn off the light.’” So Harman withdrew from the project, and Ellington chose instead to work with Stanley Dance, a British jazz writer and record producer who had married Helen Oakley, Ellington’s old publicist, in 1947. Dance had become one of the bandleader’s most trusted associates after moving to the United States in 1959, and eleven years later he published
The World of Duke Ellington,
an invaluable collection of profiles of and interviews with Ellington, Strayhorn, and various members of the band, thus making him a logical candidate to collaborate with Ellington on what eventually became
Music Is My Mistress
.

Ellington’s foreword points directly to Dance’s limitations as a “journalist”: “Stanley is well informed about my activities and those of my associates. . . . However, I am sure he has not revealed more than he ought!” But it was precisely because he trusted Dance’s discretion that he asked him to work on his memoirs, and the two men put together a publishable manuscript out of Ellington’s pile of scrawled memoranda, which Dance later described as having been written on “hotel stationery, napkins, old sheets of manuscript, and everything like that.” Even before they sanitized it, the book was toothless, with only an occasional glint of candor (“Sonny Greer is a big bullshitter, and talks his ass off”) shining through the evasions. By the time they were finished, the evasions were all that remained.

In the course of working on
Music Is My Mistress,
Dance saw Ellington’s home life with Evie up close:

In some ways I used to dread going to the apartment on West End Avenue, because I had to waste so much time. I’d go there and I had to sit for hours watching these terrible movies on TV before we’d get any work done. And Evie by this time could appear a pretty embittered woman. They’d shout at each other sometimes and Duke would press me to eat. I’d be starving, maybe, but I’d say no because I knew Evie didn’t want to be bothered.

Lisa Drew, who edited the manuscript, prodded Ellington to be more frank. But he had no intention of doing so, and the book that Doubleday ended up publishing, according to Sam Vaughan, was “a mixture of the best and the worst of Ellington. All that love-you-madly stuff goes on and on. We spoke to him about it. We said, ‘If you say you love everybody all the time, whether it’s true or not, you have no credibility.’” Ellington knew well how unforthcoming
Music Is My Mistress
was. “We’ve written the Good Book, and now we’ll write the Bad Book!” he told Dance. But it said what he wanted to say and looked the way he wanted it to look. When he saw that the dust jacket of the twenty-five-thousand-copy first edition was designed in brown, his least favorite color, he insisted that it be withdrawn and reprinted in blue, and Doubleday reluctantly complied with his wishes. And even though he had gone out of his way to avoid giving offense to anyone, the book nevertheless contained a certain number of revealing truths, not least the oft-quoted passage in which Ellington explained its title: “Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one. . . . Lovers have come and gone, but only my mistress stays.”

He kept on making public appearances in order to stay on the right side of solvency. In February he trotted out the dreaded medley on
Duke Ellington
 
.
 
.
 
.
We Love You Madly,
a CBS special produced by Quincy Jones that also featured Ray Charles, Sammy Davis Jr., Billy Eckstine, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Joe Williams, the jazz-rock group Chicago, and a fifty-three-piece orchestra that was salted with a dozen of his sidemen past and present. “I could feel that he wasn’t going to be here forever,” Jones recalled. Those who heard how tired he sounded as he addressed the audience must have thought the same thing. He looked and sounded no better when he returned to the Rainbow Grill in August for the next-to-last time, playing poorly and speaking sharply to strangers who approached him. (“You talk too fast,” he had told an interviewer in Helsinki a few months earlier. “You don’t listen enough.”) Stanley Dance visited him in his dressing room and was astonished to hear him say, “I am surrounded by mediocrity, Stanley, and I’ve never been accustomed to it.” To Betty McGettigan, a music-loving Californian who had met Ellington in 1969 and with whom he embarked on a long-distance affair, he was just as blunt. “People always want something of me,” he told her.

Two months after closing at the Rainbow Grill, he flew to London for the Third Sacred Concert. Though he refused to admit the gravity of his condition, Mercer started to understand how sick his father was when Ruth, who never traveled with the band, decided to accompany her brother to England: “I guess I really resented that, figuring that between the two of them they knew he was on his last legs.” Ellington’s spoken introduction to the premiere performance left no possible doubt of his desperate condition—he sounded sick unto death—though the weakness of the piece itself, a réchauffé of his earlier sacred music that is distinguished only for its gentle solo-piano prelude, said all that needed to be said.

From then on he made no secret of how he felt. “As the days went on, the smile turned into a grimace . . . he knew the game was up; there was no point in going through the finger exercises or trying to preserve his image, by this time he knew he no longer had an image,” Mercer said. Yet he continued to keep his engagements, playing dates in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Zambia, and Yugoslavia, then flying back to England for a command performance at the Palladium and another week of touring. Along the way he received a call from Marian Logan, who told him that her husband had died under mysterious and still-unexplained circumstances, with the police finding the doctor’s corpse in a Harlem viaduct. The news reduced Ellington to uncontrollable weeping. “I’ll never get over this, I won’t last six months,” he told her.

“He looks beat and kind of lonely”: With Jimmy Hamilton, London, 1963. The demoralizing effects of Ellington’s unrelentingly brutal touring schedule could be seen by the public long before lung cancer forced him off the road and into the hospital

At the beginning of December he went to New York for three more weeks at the Rainbow Grill, then returned one last time to the road. The struggles of a lifetime—to command respect for his race, to charm the public, to stay abreast of the times, to keep his family comfortable and his secrets secret—were at an end. Now he struggled merely to get through each show and make his painful way to the next one. It soon became clear that he was no longer up to playing one-nighters, and Mercer started canceling them. On March 21, Mercer took his father to Northern Illinois University Hospital after a performance in DeKalb, Illinois. “Does he know how sick he is?” an intern there asked Mercer. “Do
you
know how sick he is?” Mercer replied. The intern then called Ellington’s physicians in New York, who advised him that the bandleader could come home and enter the hospital whenever he wanted. He hung up and asked one last question: “Does he know that when he goes in this time he’s not ever coming back out anymore?” The next night Ellington played two shows at Michigan’s Sturges-Young Auditorium. Then he flew back to New York, leaving Mercer and the band to carry on. He never again appeared in public.