Duke (19 page)

Edna, however, was no more forthcoming than Duke, saying only that she was “hurt, bad hurt when the breakup came” and referring to the affair in
Ebony
with an obliqueness worthy of her wayward husband: “Ellington thought I should have been more understanding of him. . . . Any young girl who plans to marry a man in public life—a man who belongs to the public—should try to understand as much about the demands of show business first and not be like I was.” In point of fact, though, her lack of “understanding” extended to slashing her husband’s face. That she did so is certain, but nothing else is definitely known about the assault, not even its exact date. “Something happened between [Ellington] and his wife and he’s been terrible with women ever since,” Lawrence Brown said. “I mean, like he’s always trying to make somebody’s wife, because somebody made his wife and they got in such a fight, that slash he has on the side of his face, she cut him while he was sleeping, with a razor.” Brown was a presumptively biased witness, since he later married Fredi, becoming one of a number of Ellington sidemen (five, Mercer claimed) who took up with their boss’s ex-girlfriends at one time or another. But Barney Bigard also claimed that the Ellingtons were mutually unfaithful, describing Edna’s boyfriend as “quite a figure in the music world.” Regarding the act itself, an unnamed “close friend” of Ellington told a biographer that Edna had vowed to “spoil those pretty looks” before cutting him, a secondhand account that is obviously unverifiable but nonetheless sounds believable.

Since the scar can be seen in
Black and Tan,
Edna must have found out about the affair well before the film was shot, which raises the possibility that her wrath was provoked by a different woman. Mercer writes in his memoir that his father had also been seeing “a Park Avenue socialite” whose family “managed to involve the police in discouraging the affair.” As for Washington, Mercer also said that the unnamed actress with whom Ellington was involved “was one of those people who do not let their hearts rule them completely, and I believe that what brought the affair to an end was the fact that he never had any intention of divorcing [Edna], so that marriage was out of the question.”

After the attack, Ellington fled his Harlem apartment, leaving everything behind, including his clothes—but he steered clear of Fredi Washington. Instead he moved in with Mildred Dixon, a dancer with a heart-shaped face who had made her Cotton Club debut along with Ellington in December of 1927. Their liaison, Mercer recalled, took him by surprise: “I came home from school one day, and there was a strange woman living with my father and taking care of me and Ruth. My mother, it turned out, had moved back into the building up the street, where we had lived before. They had separated without telling us. Nobody in my family liked to be the bearer of bad news.” It wasn’t quite like that, but it was close enough: Ellington and Mildred lived briefly at her place, then found a five-room flat in a building perched on the high bluff known to Harlemites as Sugar Hill, a sedate neighborhood of handsome row houses and apartment buildings whose population had become predominantly black a few years before Ellington moved there. The neighborhood is now decayed and unsafe, but in the thirties and forties it was the home of W. E. B. DuBois, W. C. Handy, Joe Louis, and Paul Robeson. Advertisements in the
Amsterdam News
touted it as “the Finest and Most Exclusive Section in Harlem,” and Ellington agreed: “If you ever sat on a beautiful magenta cloud overlooking New York City, you were on Sugar Hill.” Langston Hughes, who cast a colder eye on the pretentions of blacks with money, described it more matter-of-factly as a place full of “nice high-rent houses with elevators and doormen . . . where the plumbing really works and the ceilings are high and airy. For just a few thousands a year one can live very well on Sugar Hill in a house with a white-tiled hall.” (In 1930 Ellington told a census taker that he was paying $95 a month in rent, about $1,200 today.)

That Ellington should have chosen to bring his new companion to Sugar Hill says much about his social ambitions. Once they got there, though, he kept Mildred out of sight, so much so that the 1930 census report does not even list her as a resident of the flat that they shared. The infrequent press reports in which mention was made of Mildred always referred to her as his wife, just as Barry Ulanov claims in his biography that “Mildred became Mrs. Ellington.” But she never did, and Ellington is not known to have said a word about her for public consumption beyond what he told Ulanov. Only among friends did he admit to his love for the quiet woman whom he called “Sweet Bebe” and who made a favorable impression on all who knew her. Mercer spoke of her “innate class,” and Helen Oakley described her as “very nice, extremely nice—she went to Vassar, and she was just a darling gal.”

That we know so little about Mildred says even more about her closemouthed companion. Ellington kept no diaries and almost never wrote personal letters, and the mask of smiling, noncommittal urbanity that he showed to the world was firmly in place by the time he gave his earliest surviving interviews, which date from 1930. Had there ever been a time when he spoke openly of his private life and inner thoughts? If so, it was over by then, and one suspects that it was his violent break with Edna that led him to drop the curtain on such matters. Not only would he have found it embarrassing to admit to having been cut up by his own wife, but to talk about it in public—or about his extramarital relationships with Mildred, Fredi, and the countless women who followed them into his bed—would have compromised the image that meant so much to him. A black artist who sought to “command respect for the race” by presenting himself as a man of distinction could not afford to have such things become generally known, much less to talk about them himself. But Ellington carried his discretion to extremes, and continued to do so until he died. Did it simply become a habit? Or was his silence an outward sign of his determination never again to let a woman get the best of him?

Whatever the reason, Mildred’s devotion to him was no secret. According to Barney Bigard, “Duke used to gamble, you know, and sometimes he didn’t have enough money to pay off the boys in the band and she’d give him her [Cotton Club] salary to pay off. And he treated her badly.” That he did, but at the time Ellington was so much in love with her that when he brought his mother, father, and sister to New York to live with him, he insisted that she join them. Daisy refused at first to go along with so scandalous an arrangement, forcing Mildred to live in another apartment in the same building. J.E. balked as well, but not because he was unwilling to live under the same roof as his son’s mistress. He was loath to leave Washington, Ruth said, because he didn’t care for the idea of “being put out to pasture at such a tender age of forty-nine!” He must have been even more dubious about the emasculating prospect of being replaced at the head of the table. But in time both parents accepted the ménage, acknowledging their son, however reluctantly, as patriarch and sole breadwinner of the Ellington family. That suited him down to the ground. He wanted to put his mother on a velvet cushion and make his father do his bidding. He wanted to preserve and protect his sister’s innocence (“He just thought I should be there, like a doll”) and keep his son dependent (Mercer was forced to wear his hair in girlish braids for much of his childhood). Above all, he wanted to be free of the wife of his youth—without having to divorce her.

All he wanted, in other words, was to have everybody in the palm of his hand, and at the age of thirty-one, he got it. Even for a man who knew the value of good looks, a scar on the left cheek might well have seemed a tolerable price to pay.

 • • • 

Such triumphs have their price in money as well as flesh, but Ellington could afford them. According to Freddie Jenkins, “We would be in the recording studio at seven
A.M
. and record until noon. In the afternoons we were making movie shorts, or doing a matinee at the Ziegfield [
sic
], or rehearsing. Then we’d play a night show at the Ziegfield, be back at the Cotton Club at eleven and play until four
A.M.
” Though it was a stressful life, it was also a profitable one.

Ellington was doing well enough to add more players to his band, and in July of 1929 he hired Juan Tizol, a trombonist from Puerto Rico. Though the band included several light-skinned musicians, Tizol was Ellington’s first sideman who was not “officially” black. In Rex Stewart’s words, his “pure white countenance made him stand out like a blob of sour cream in the middle of a bowl of black caviar.” Not only was Tizol nominally white, but he was, in Tricky Sam Nanton’s phrase, “a legit man.” A classically trained musician who moved to the United States in 1920 to work in the pit band of Washington’s Howard Theatre, Tizol played the valve trombone, an instrument favored in Spanish-speaking countries but rarely encountered in jazz bands. He didn’t consider himself to be a jazzman: “I take all my solos straight. Sweet style.” He also preferred playing written-out solos to improvising, and his compact, focused tone, warmed by a fast vibrato, was well suited to the lyrical melodies that Ellington loved to hear him play. Some of them were by Tizol himself, for he was a talented tunesmith who contributed several original compositions to the band’s book, most of which had a Latin flavor and two of which, “Caravan” and “Perdido,” became jazz standards.

Tizol’s compositions were scored by Ellington, since the trombonist had no gift for orchestration. Instead he doubled as the band’s copyist, taking Ellington’s untidy manuscripts and “extracting” in longhand the parts to be played by each musician. It was an intimidating task, both because Ellington was so prolific and because of his peculiar manner of notating his music. “This thing ain’t supposed to work, man,” the pianist Jimmy Jones said after looking at an Ellington score for the first time. Instead of writing “full scores” in which each part has its own line, he opted for three- and four-line “short scores” with the saxophones jammed onto a single staff—except for Harry Carney, whose baritone-sax part occupied a line of its own—and the trumpets and trombones on the other staves. The trombone staff also contained a sketchy bass line, but Ellington never wrote out guitar or drum parts, leaving them to be made up by Fred Guy and Sonny Greer. (He also improvised his own piano parts.)

These methods arose from Ellington’s lack of formal training, but even after he mastered the basics of notation, his scores remained unconventional. As Mercer explained it, he

wrote in such a cryptic fashion that the average person couldn’t figure out what he was doing. He’d put clefs that didn’t really belong on that particular staff, and he had a system of not changing the accidental so long as the accidental didn’t belong to the particular part that that instrument was playing. . . . As a result, people who had a chance to look at the music, and maybe play it, found it didn’t make sense.

Adding a fifth brass player opened up new compositional vistas for Ellington, who started thinking of his trumpets and trombones as two separate sections instead of a single multivoiced choir. In addition, the fact that Tizol used valves instead of a slide allowed the trombonist to play chromatic passages like the descending line that ends the first strain of “Caravan” with exact intonation, which would become more useful to Ellington as his music grew harmonically richer. According to Mercer, Ellington also appreciated the fact that “he could write for [Tizol] along with the saxophones. On valve trombone he could move more quickly than Tricky Sam could on slide.” That, too, mattered to the fast-maturing composer, who was now mixing the colors on his instrumental palette in increasingly unorthodox ways.

What Ellington thought of Tizol as a person is harder to know. In
Music Is My Mistress
his praise was more opaque than usual: “Tizol is a very big man, a very unselfish man, and one of the finest musicians I’ve ever known.” This poker-faced paean gives no hint that the dour, bespectacled Tizol, like Barney Bigard, was also a practical joker who went in for such stunts as smearing Limburger cheese on mouthpieces and setting off stink bombs during performances. “You would never believe it if you met him casually,” said Bigard. “He always seemed so far above everything, but he was the ringleader of us pranksters.”

It’s unlikely, however, that any pranks were played when the Ellington band spent two weeks playing for Maurice Chevalier on Broadway in the spring of 1930. Nowadays Chevalier is known, if at all, for his appearance in
Gigi,
but in the thirties he was an international star who was almost as popular in America as he was in his native France, and it was a colossal coup for Ellington and his men to accompany him at the Fulton Theatre. Chevalier took full credit in his memoirs: “I went to hear him, and my decision was quick and sure: the Duke and nobody else.” On another occasion he claimed to have insisted that Ellington be engaged even after he was warned that many New Yorkers would look with disfavor on his being accompanied by a black band: “I am French and I do not know the American racial prejudices! Either Ellington is with me, or I do not sing and I cancel the show, that’s all!”

No doubt this is true, but Ellington made a point of mentioning in
Music Is My Mistress
that Irving Mills claimed to have “fought” with the singer’s manager “to have us play in concert with Maurice Chevalier.” While Mills himself appears to have made no such claim, he did place in
Variety
a full-page ad “signed” by Ellington and the band in which prominent mention was made of Chevalier,
Show Girl,
the Cotton Club, Victor Records, and “MR. IRVING MILLS, the first to recognize our possibilities, and whose judgment and untiring efforts are responsible for our success.” A few months later he planted an even more self-celebratory feature story in
The
New York Age:

Mills signed Ellington, and after years of work and study he developed this organization into one of the most talked of musical combinations in the world . . . Mills personally supervises every orchestration and arrangement the band plays. He arranges the bookings and directs the exploitation in general. He selects the records made for the various phonograph companies and is master of the destinies of Duke Ellington.