Duke (32 page)

The label of the original 78 release of “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” which was another of Ellington’s unacknowledged collaborations—the main theme is based on a Hodges riff—says that it came “from ‘Cotton Club Parade of 1938,’” which opened on March 10, a week after the song was recorded. In fact it was dropped from the show, all of whose songs were written by Ellington. It was his first Cotton Club score since “Blackberries of 1930,” and even though none of the other tunes caught on with the public, his contribution to “Cotton Club Parade of 1938” was well reviewed and widely noticed, as were the band’s regular radio broadcasts from the club. Even
The
New York Times,
which had been slow to take note of black jazz, deigned to praise the “skilled tickler of the ivories” who had “written the entire show . . . replete with tunes which will soon be hits.”

But appearances were deceiving, both for the Cotton Club and for Ellington himself.
Variety
’s review of the show mentions in passing that the club “has the same $1.50–$2 table d’hote dinner policy and no couvert [cover charge] thereafter,” a sign that the once-glamorous night spot was struggling. (It closed permanently two years later.) So was Ellington, though his sidemen were not privy to the extent of his financial difficulties. “We worked clean through the Depression without ever knowing there was one,” said Barney Bigard. But Mercer, unlike Bigard, knew that his record sales were sagging and that his parents’ medical bills had stretched his credit to the limit: “Now he was not only broke, he was also in hock to many people from whom he had borrowed to keep the band going.”

He also lost two musicians in 1938. Freddie Jenkins, who had returned to the band the preceding March, was worn out by what he later called “the ‘TOO-sies’—TOO much money, TOO much drinking, TOO many women, while TOO young” and decided to retire from music, and Arthur Whetsel was laid low by a brain tumor that made it impossible for him to continue playing. He quit in February, after which Ellington told a reporter, “Not only am I losing one of my best musicians but one of my closest companions as well. One who has been at hand along with the rain and the sunshine.”
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Wounded by grief and puzzled by the public’s changing tastes, Ellington gave an interview in October in which he said that “swing is stagnant, and without a future,” adding that to him it sounded “like the monotonous rhythmical bouncing of a ball. After you hear just so much, you get sick of it because it hasn’t enough harmony and there isn’t enough to it. . . . I predict that Negro music will be alive years after swing is dead. Negro music has color, harmony, melody and rhythm.” He even recorded a tune called “Swing Is Stagnant,” which was judiciously retitled “Buffet Flat” before being released.

As always, he tried to put the best possible face on his troubles. It was in 1938 that he started telling journalists, possibly as a diversion, that he had finished writing his first opera. But he knew that he needed a change, and it came in 1939, when he stopped drinking and acquired a new girlfriend.

 • • • 

“I don’t drink any more,” Ellington wrote in
Music Is My Mistress
. “I retired undefeated champ about thirty years ago, and now I call myself a ‘retired juicehead.’ I drank more than anybody ever.” While it would have been no small feat for him to go toe-to-toe with Sonny Greer or Otto Hardwick, there is no reason to doubt his word. But he had seen what alcohol could do and was doing to many of his colleagues—as well as to his father—and so he called it quits, renouncing the “gladiatorial” boozing that he described with nostalgia in his autobiography. From then on he settled for hot water with lemon peel. On the bandstand he drank endless Coca-Colas, each one sweetened still further with four teaspoons of sugar.

When it came to sex, though, he generally preferred to say yes, and it was around this time that he left Mildred Dixon and moved in with a brand-new companion. Beatrice Ellis, usually known as “Evie,” was a long-legged Cotton Club “showgirl” whose job was to stand around and look pretty. She was, in accordance with the club’s policy, light-skinned, so much so that Clark Terry, on first meeting her, “didn’t know if she was colored or white.” Everyone who knew her agreed that she was also very, very pretty, though Mercer, who grew close to Evie in later years, described her as “typical of many attractive black women at the Cotton Club; very intelligent but not very well educated. The goal for these women was to snare a handsome black bandleader, because if they fooled around with the white patrons, the best they could hope to become would be mistresses.”

“He didn’t want anyone to have permanency”: Beatrice “Evie” Ellis and Duke Ellington in the forties. Ellington left Mildred Dixon for Evie, a Cotton Club showgirl, in 1939. He stayed with the temperamental Evie until his death, but never married her. She pulled a gun on the chronically unfaithful Ellington after catching him in bed with another woman, but she never left him

Opinions vary on when she met Ellington. According to one report, Joe Glaser, Louis Armstrong’s manager, saw her dancing at a Chicago club and brought her to New York at the age of sixteen (Glaser had a penchant for teenage girls) to work at the Cotton Club. In another, less likely version of the story, it was Ellington who saw her in Chicago and persuaded Glaser to bring her to the Cotton Club. Whatever the truth of the matter, it appears that Mildred got wind of their affair soon after it began, as Barry Ulanov indicates:

Mildred had heard about a girl who was crazy about Duke and for whom Duke seemed to have some affection. Bea Ellis, a beautiful showgirl at the downtown Cotton Club, had indeed spent a lot of time at the place with him.

“There’s something there,” Mildred told Duke one afternoon . . .

“I think there is,” Duke said.

“Do you love her?” Mildred asked Duke.

“I think I do,” Duke said.

“All right,” Mildred said, “you do as you think best.”

Early in 1939, Mildred gave Duke his freedom and Bea Ellis became Mrs. Ellington.

Ruth and Mercer stayed behind in the Sugar Hill apartment that Ellington had shared with Mildred, and so, for a time, did Mildred herself. A society-column item indicates that she was still living at 381 Edgecombe with Margaret Whetsel, Arthur Whetsel’s widow, in 1941. Moreover, Ellington appears to have kept on paying Mildred’s bills, albeit circuitously. In 1945 the trade papers reported that she was managing Tempo Music, the music-publishing firm that Ellington had launched four years earlier, and she was still there as late as 1950. Whether the job was anything more than a tax-deductible sinecure is not known. Throughout his life Ellington would use his business enterprises, including Tempo Music, as a way of subsidizing (and controlling) his family members. But his willingness to support Mildred says something about his continuing loyalty to her—as well as about his guilt at having cut her out of his life so heartlessly.

The black press linked Evie to Ellington early in their relationship, but in later years he kept her, as he had Mildred, out of the public eye. Though she gave frequent dinner parties at home, the two were rarely seen together elsewhere. He was less discreet in private, sometimes introducing her to friends as “Mrs. Ellington,” and he even allowed Ulanov to refer to her in that way in his biography—once. But the label on the doorbell to their apartment said “Bea Ellis and Edward K. Ellington,” and after 1946 Ellington never spoke of her to reporters, going so far, Mercer claimed, as to pay off gossip columnists and place expensive ads in trade publications to prevent their liaison from being mentioned in print. And though he showered Evie with gifts, he refused to marry her, even after Edna died in 1966.

It was a recipe for trouble, and Evie, whose nickname reportedly stood for “evil,” stirred up plenty of it once she realized that she had misjudged her lover. According to Mercer:

She felt very exploited, and worried that she wouldn’t be taken care of if he died, because he didn’t believe in wills. . . . Evie was very much obsessed with the idea of becoming Mrs. Ellington, but somehow he was able to persuade her that if he were to get a divorce from my mother, it would be a very expensive undertaking. Wouldn’t she rather see him have more money? She went along with the idea, and that was where she made her mistake. Instead of saying, “I’d rather have you and be poor,” she had said, “I’d rather wait for the money.”

Worse yet, Ellington made no pretense of being loyal to her. One night he showed up late for a gig, then charmed the restive audience with this one-liner: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you had seen her you would understand.” He believed that he had an absolute right to sleep with any woman at any time, and his sexual appetite was so comprehensive that he even bedded unattractive women to whose charms his friends were blind, explaining that “everyone has to dig a little distortion once in a while, in order to lead a rounded life.” Because he spent so much time on the road, there was no way for Evie to stop his flings, and none of his friends was willing to help her do so. So he did as he liked and she stayed home and fumed, waiting impatiently for his infrequent visits.

Ellington’s friends never settled on an explanation of his satyriasis, about which he was so unapologetic that in 1952 he wrote a piece for
Ebony
in which he shared with the world his definition of an “exciting woman”: “She is a fuzzy piece of fluff gratifying to the touch. . . . She sways seductively through your consciousness with the same subtle power with which a train moves through the night.” Mercer, who witnessed many of his most intimate relationships up close, believed him to be a Don Juan who “had a basic contempt for women. He spent so much time celebrating and charming them, but basically he hated them.” Don George disagreed: “A lot of men who are womanizers don’t like women, but Duke was a womanizer who liked them as well as loved them.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he liked women but was wary of them. As he warned the photographer Gordon Parks:

I do not wish to disenchant you, my friend, but fair lady’s power lies not in her soft beautiful arms. It’s discreetly concealed midway between her upper left thigh and her lower right hip. Love her madly, Friday through Friday if necessary, respect her. But watch her. She has more ways to destroy you than the Soviet Army.

In 1951 Ellington recorded a monologue called “Pretty and the Wolf” in which he tells the tale of a “pretty little girl—a little country, but pretty” who comes to the big city, where she meets a “smooth, handsome, successful, cool” fellow who promises to help her “get somewhere.” Though his purpose is to get her into bed, it is the girl who does the bedding, and she ends up leading her hapless victim around by the nose. That, one suspects, was Duke Ellington’s notion of love—and marriage. “You grow up, you find out that the girls want to do it [i.e., have sex] more than you do,” he said in 1964. “They’re the pursuers, they’re the huntresses.” In
Man with Four Sides,
written around the same time as “Pretty and the Wolf,” one of the characters says, “Women who cry and women who laugh, / They all want all, nobody settles for half.”

The truth was that like so many other great artists, Ellington was an opportunist who saw other people in terms of what they could do for him. His detachment, George believed, was complete: “Duke’s only concern was getting the next eight bars straight in his head. He was totally involved in his craft and used people to their own good as fuel for his music. . . . He didn’t want a role that would give him permanency in anyone’s life. He didn’t want anyone to have permanency in his own life.” Least of all did he wish to give his lovers even half of himself, and Evie, who must have thought herself to be the exception, was shocked to learn otherwise.

 • • • 

Having made what he took to be necessary adjustments to his private life, Ellington now endeavored to persuade jazz fans that he was as important as ever. Starting in February of 1939,
Down Beat
published a four-part series of articles in which he held forth on every aspect of the Swing Era. He led with his chin in “Duke Says Swing Is Stagnant,” in which he dismissed swing as “adolescent,” exempting only Benny Goodman and the xylophonist-bandleader Red Norvo: “It is the repetition and monotony of the present day swing arrangements which bode ill for the future. The mechanics of most of the current ‘killer-dillers’ are similar and of elementary quality.” He then devoted two consecutive pieces to the sins of jazz critics, pointing to John Hammond as the main offender and hinting at the well-known fact that Hammond, who was now working as a record producer, was in the habit of puffing his own releases by writing favorable reviews of them.

Ellington also slipped in a barbed reference to Hammond’s alleged ties to the Communist Party, an imprudent sideswipe that he was later forced to retract in print: