Duke (18 page)

This reference to a forgotten artist deserves to be taken seriously, for it answers a question about Ellington’s musical development: If he didn’t listen to classical music in his youth, how and when did he acquire the knowledge of modern chromatic harmony that is evident in his post-1930 compositions? The answer appears to be that he got it from Will Vodery. In 1946 Barry Ulanov observed that Vodery had

assimilated the classical experience and translated it into the terms of the musical comedy pit band. It was more easily assimilable for Duke in those terms and made far more of an impression upon him than it would have in its original form. . . . From Vodery, as he [Ellington] says himself, he drew his chromatic convictions, his uses of the tones ordinarily extraneous to the diatonic scale, with the consequent alteration of the harmonic character of his music, its broadening, the deepening of his resources. It has become customary to ascribe the classical influences upon Duke—Delius, Debussy and Ravel—to direct contact with their music. Actually his serious appreciation of those and other modern composers came after his meeting with Will Vodery.

Show Girl,
unlike
Hot Chocolates,
failed to make the grade, in part because the songs were not up to Gershwin’s high standards. (Only one standard, “Liza,” came out of the show.) Brooks Atkinson of
The
New York Times
called it “the least notable of the recent Ziegfeld productions.” Most of the other reviewers agreed, and many of them, like Atkinson, didn’t even bother to mention Ellington. But he still wrung a fair amount of acclaim out of the 111-performance run. Flo Ziegfeld took the trouble to publish an article calling the members of his band “the finest exponent[s] of syncopated music in existence. Irving Berlin went mad about them, and some of the best exponents of modern music who have heard them during rehearsal almost jumped out of their seats with excitement over their extraordinary harmonies and exciting rhythms.”

It was a great moment for Ellington and his men. “We were the first to play a Ziegfeld show,” Sonny Greer said with pride years later. “Never had no colored band play it.” Irving Mills knew it, too. Even though he claimed not to be making any money off Ellington, he continued to cover the band’s expenses, paying the salaries of the new members who joined when Ellington opened at the Cotton Club. “I was out thousands of dollars before anything ever developed,” Mills later said. “I didn’t know where the money was coming from.” But he knew where it was going to come from: “You know I was a music publisher, I was glad to get my songs plugged and I was glad to have a home for the band to have it together for the records.” He also knew that there were many more ways—and places—to sell Duke Ellington.

5

“I BETTER SCRATCH OUT SOMETHING”

Becoming a Genius, 1929–1930

H
OLLYWOOD HAS ALWAYS
had an equivocal relationship with jazz. Once the presence of a saxophone on the soundtrack of a Hollywood film was an aural signpost pointing to steamy sexuality. Now it indicates world-weary sophistication. But no matter what signals the sound of jazz is intended to send, its making and makers are usually romanticized when they are portrayed in movies, just as the music itself is softened for mass consumption. Nor has the American film industry ever been at ease using black musicians in anything other than the most stereotypical of roles, when it allows them on the screen at all. Louis Armstrong was customarily relegated to such parts—in 1938 he even played a character referred to on-screen as “Uncle Tom”—and though the first feature-length talking picture was called
The Jazz Singer,
it was not until two years later that black jazz musicians of any importance appeared in a commercial movie. Moreover, the film in question was shot in Manhattan, not Hollywood, and it was directed not by an old studio hand but by an experimental filmmaker.

Dudley Murphy, the director who brought jazz to the silver screen, collaborated with Fernand Léger, the French cubist painter, on
Ballet mécanique,
a Dadaist film that was made in 1924. Five years later he persuaded RKO to hire him to direct a pair of short subjects based on black popular music. The first, made early in 1929 and released that fall, was
St. Louis Blues,
starring Bessie Smith and James P. Johnson, which
Variety
described as “pungent with tenseness in action and replete with Aframerican local and other color.”
St. Louis Blues
ended up doing poorly at the box office, but by then Duke Ellington and his band had reported to RKO’s New York studios in August of 1929 to make their talking-picture debut in Murphy’s next film, a nineteen-minute two-reeler called
Black and Tan,
while continuing to appear on Broadway in
Show Girl
. It’s possible that Carl Van Vechten introduced Ellington to Murphy—a production still taken on the set shows the three men together—but Murphy, like so many avant-garde artists of the twenties, had long been fascinated by jazz and the culture that spawned it, and he would not have needed Van Vechten, or anyone else, to send him to Harlem.

Arthur Whetsel, Fredi Washington, and Duke Ellington in a publicity still from
Black and Tan
. While
Black and Tan
shows Washington dancing herself to death in the flimsiest of costumes, it also presents Ellington and the members of his band as serious, committed artists—an uncommon way for black jazzmen to be portrayed on-screen in 1929 and for many years afterward

The plot of
Black and Tan,
concocted by Murphy himself, is exiguously simple. Fredi Washington, a willowy flapper, longs to support Ellington, her impoverished composer-companion, even though she suffers from a heart condition. (Both performers go by their own names.) She has found a nightspot that will hire him, but only if she dances with his band, thus putting her life at risk. When two dimwitted movers come to their apartment to repossess the piano, Washington bribes them with a bottle of gin so that Ellington and Arthur Whetsel can continue rehearsing his latest opus, “Black and Tan Fantasy.” The action shifts to the stage of the club, where Washington, attired in a near-nonexistent costume, dances to “Cotton Club Stomp,” collapsing at the end of the number. Her performance, together with a pair of dances performed by six real-life Cotton Club Girls and the Five Hot Shots, a precision tap team that also appeared at the club, offers a glimpse of what a Cotton Club floor show might have looked like. Murphy then cuts to Washington’s deathbed, where she discloses that her last wish is to hear Ellington and the band perform “Black and Tan Fantasy” accompanied by a choir. (The presence of a choir in their Harlem apartment is, to say the least, unexpected.) She dies at film’s end, gazing soulfully at the out-of-focus face of her lover.

Today
Black and Tan,
with its chiaroscuro lighting and kaleidoscope-like multiple images of the Ellington band, suggests an uneasy yoking of arty expressionism with minstrel-show comedy. But in 1929 it was revolutionary, not merely because it was the first commercial sound film in which an important jazz band was seen but because it presented the neatly dressed, nicely spoken Ellington as an
artist
. As the film gets under way, we see him coaching Whetsel in the proper way to play “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and his musicians carry themselves with like poise in the nightclub scene, looking more like a chamber orchestra than a dance band. Moreover,
Black and Tan
got decent reviews and enhanced the reputation of its star. “This short, though billed and exploited as a slice of Harlem nite life[,] should go anywhere,” said
Variety
, whose reviewer also praised the film’s “fanciful and attractive” camera work. Black newspapers agreed.
The
Chicago Defender,
whose editors kept a close watch on how blacks were characterized in the media, called
Black and Tan
“excellent entertainment . . . one of the most accurate slices of Harlem night life yet to be shown by any medium.” Three years later
The
New York Age
praised it as the first film to have steered clear of the “nauseating lowdown niggerisms” that had blighted earlier screen appearances by black performers.

Black and Tan
also marked—literally—a transition in Ellington’s private life. After 1928 his left cheek bore a prominent crescent-shaped scar that is easily visible in the film’s last scene (and in the photograph reproduced on the cover of this book). Though rarely mentioned by journalists, it made fans curious enough that he felt obliged to “explain” its presence in
Music Is My Mistress:

I have four stories about it, and it depends on which you like the best. One is a taxicab accident; another is that I slipped and fell on a broken bottle; then there is a jealous woman; and last is Old Heidelberg, where they used to stand toe to toe with a saber in each hand, and slash away. The first man to step back lost the contest, no matter how many times he’d sliced the other. Take your pick.

None of Ellington’s friends and colleagues was in doubt about which one to pick. In Irving Mills’s words, “Women was one of the highlights in his life. He had to have women. . . . He always had a woman, always kept a woman here, kept a woman there, always had somebody.” Most men who treat women that way are destined to suffer at their hands sooner or later, if not necessarily in so sensational a fashion as Ellington, whose wife attacked him with a razor when she found out that he was sleeping with another woman.

Who was she? One possible candidate is Fredi Washington. The costar of
Black and Tan
had launched her theatrical career in 1922 as a dancer in the chorus of the original production of Eubie Blake’s
Shuffle Along
. Sonny Greer later described her as “the most beautiful woman” he had ever seen. “She had gorgeous skin, perfect features, green eyes, and a great figure. When she smiled, that was it!” Washington was light enough to pass for white but adamantly refused to do so, a decision that made it impossible for her to establish herself in Hollywood, though she appeared with Paul Robeson in Dudley Murphy’s 1933 film of Eugene O’Neill’s
The Emperor Jones
(for which her skin was darkened with makeup) and starred in
Imitation of Life,
a 1934 tearjerker in which she played, with mortifying predictability, a light-skinned black who passed for white. Ellington never spoke on the record about their romantic involvement, but Washington later admitted to the film historian Donald Bogle that she and Ellington had been lovers: “I just had to accept that he wasn’t going to marry me. But I wasn’t going to be his mistress.” Their relationship was widely known at the time in the entertainment world, enough so that Mercer Ellington could write in his memoir of “a torrid love affair Pop had with a very talented and beautiful woman, an actress. I think this was a genuine romance, that there was love on both sides, and that it amounted to one of the most serious relationships of his life.”