Duke (41 page)

How widely was this understood at the time? The local black press was either ignorant of the Communist tint of the show’s creative team or preferred to downplay it. A columnist for the
California Eagle,
for instance, reported in February that “Jno. Garfield, who because he’s always been interested in interracialism is dubbed ‘radical,’ is a frequent Casa Mañana visitor. He likes Ellingtonia.” And while the Popular Front had long taken an interest in black jazz, there is no reason to suppose that Ellington was aware of its activities in anything more than the most general way. It is well within the realm of probability that he did not fully grasp the extent to which the HTA was Communist-dominated. In his only known statement on the subject, made in a 1971 interview, he told Stanley Dance that his “social[ly] conscious” friends in Hollywood included “a lot of those intellectuals—some of them were labeled Communists.” It’s true, too, that Ellington was also peripherally involved in other Popular Front undertakings throughout the thirties and forties. He endorsed, for instance, the reelection of Franklin Roosevelt to a fourth term in a strident full-page ad that was placed in
The
New York Times
by the Independent Voters Committee of the Arts and Sciences, a Communist-controlled Popular Front group specifically organized to win the support of high-profile liberals. (His fellow signers included Marian Anderson, Tallulah Bankhead, Thomas Hart Benton, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Carl Sandburg, and Orson Welles.)

But all who knew Ellington well agreed that he was never a political animal. He appeared regularly at NAACP benefits, and Irving Mills had long despaired at his open-handed contributions to black charities: “Whatever town he went to, there were people on his back for donations, and he helped everybody. He spent more money than he was making.” The civil-rights movement, however, was the only cause in which he took a sustained interest. “I’ve never been interested in politics in my whole life, and don’t pretend to know anything about international affairs,” he wrote in 1950. In private, Mercer Ellington said, he was outspoken about his detestation of Communism:

When something bad happened on the international level, he often saw the handiwork of people in powerful positions, communists, financiers, or both. While he believed that communists worked ceaselessly to overthrow the power of the United States, he also held that capitalists worked exclusively for personal gain. The impact of their machinations on the society he lived in truly disturbed him.

It’s that his postwar anti-Communist statements were made in order to cover his prewar tracks. Ellington, like many other blacks, appreciated the Communist Party’s stance against racism, and his sentiments were widely shared in Harlem. As early as 1933, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. had proclaimed, “I don’t mind being called a Communist . . . the day will come when being called a Communist will be the highest honor that can be paid an individual and that day is coming soon.” Ellington himself would actively support the candidacy of Benjamin J. Davis Jr., who ran for New York’s city council on the Communist ticket in 1943. But like most blacks of his generation, he was also a longtime Republican for whom the party of FDR was also the party of southern segregation, and if he had ever harbored genuine Communist sympathies, it’s inconceivable that he would have smeared John Hammond in 1939 for the producer’s alleged Communist ties. In any case, Ellington’s Federal Bureau of Investigation file shows that the bureau took only a cursory interest in him. The thirty-five-page file, opened in 1953, consists exclusively of responses to background checks by other government agencies, all of which recycle the same list of associations with known and alleged Communist fronts, most of them active promoters of civil rights and, during World War II, Russian war relief. Perhaps J. Edgar Hoover thought otherwise, but nothing in Ellington’s file indicates that he was other than what he said he was, a largely apolitical black artist of liberal inclination who, like most liberal artists of the thirties and forties, knew his fair share of fellow travelers.

 • • • 

It’s no surprise, then, that Ellington was ready and willing to collaborate with a group of hard-left Hollywood artists and writers “whose sympathies fitted into my scene and scheme” to create a pro-black musical, just as they themselves were happy to collaborate with one of America’s most admired jazzmen. For him, the point of the association was that he wholeheartedly approved of the concept of
Jump for Joy,
which he described as “an all-Negro show with a social-significance theme. . . . Everything, every setting, every note of music, every lyric, meant something. All the sketches had a message for the world.” He was also drawn to the idea of collaborating with Sid Kuller, who understood (or thought he did) how hard it would be for a team of white writers to turn out comedy sketches about black life and was prepared to work overtime to fill in the gaps in his grasp of black culture. “Traditionally, black humor had been portrayed by blacks for white audiences from a white point of view,” Kuller later told an interviewer. “Our material was from the point of view of black people looking at whites.” And Ellington himself knew that
Jump for Joy
would need to make its political points with the lightest of touches in order to go over with a mass audience, which explains why he was open to working with a comedy writer: “We included everything we wanted to say without saying it. . . . Just to come out on the stage and take a soap box and stand in the spotlight and say ugly things is not entertainment.”

He was no less eager to ensure that
Jump for Joy
would steer clear of the racial stereotypes with which long experience had made him all too familiar. “I am a Negro,” he told a black reporter in 1941. “Brag about it every day.” The last thing he wanted to do was write a show that was any less prideful, and having spent years playing for the Cotton Club’s high-yellow chorus line, he adamantly refused to bow to pressure from the producers to make the performers in the show look uniformly and artificially “black.” At one point John Garfield dared to suggest to the
light-skinned Herb Jeffries that he should wear makeup to darken his skin. “You don’t seem to fit the right shade,” Garfield said, and Jeffries complied, blacking up in his dressing room for that night’s performance. When he came onstage, Ellington was enraged: “Ellington was looking at me like my zipper was open or something . . . when the first half of the show was over, he came flying backstage and said, ‘What the hell are you doing, Al Jolson?’” The makeup was removed at once.

Everyone involved with
Jump for Joy,
in short, was on the same page, and Ellington and his collaborators had put together an impressive cast and production team. In addition to Ivie Anderson, Herb Jeffries, and the Ellington band, which played in the pit, the sixty-person cast included such black stage performers as Wonderful Smith, a carhop turned comedian who parlayed his appearance in the show into a high-profile job as Red Skelton’s radio sidekick, and Marie Bryant, an adorably pug-faced singer-dancer who later became an assistant dance director at MGM and Columbia and is best remembered today for her appearance in Gjon Mili’s 1944 jazz short
Jammin’ the Blues
. (Asked what she did for a living, Bryant replied, “I teach Betty Grable to shake her buns.”) Kuller and Hal Fimberg wrote or cowrote most of the sketches, assisted by a platoon of collaborators—Ellington claimed that
Jump for Joy
was written by fifteen different people—and Nick Castle, who was to make a name for himself as Twentieth Century-Fox’s house choreographer, staged the musical numbers. The bill was topped by Dorothy Dandridge, who won brief fame in 1951 as the drop-dead-gorgeous star of
Carmen Jones.
She was still a teenage starlet in 1940, but her looks were already impressive: Jeffries later described Dandridge as “the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. By all standards.”

The fly in the ointment was that Ellington had no intention of allowing the writing of the score to interfere with his other professional and personal pursuits. Instead of working face-to-face with Kuller and Paul Francis Webster, the show’s principal lyricist, he wrote tunes wherever he happened to be at any given moment, then called his colleagues up and played the results to them over the phone. Not only did he have no taste for the disciplined work that goes into the making of a musical, but his ambitions were in irreconcilable conflict with his schedule. In a pattern of behavior that would become familiar to his future theatrical collaborators, he finessed the issue by putting off serious work until the eleventh hour, at which time Henry Blankfort, the production supervisor of
Jump for Joy,
came to his hotel to beg the great man to get down to business before it was too late:

Duke was in the bathtub. Beside him was a stack of manuscript paper, a huge container of chocolate ice cream, a glass of scotch and milk, and Jonesy. Jonesy was his valet, and his job was to keep adding warm water and let out cooling water to maintain a constant temperature in the tub for the Maestro. And Duke was serenely scribbling notes on the paper and then calling to Billy Strayhorn. Billy would take the notes and play them on the beat-up old upright piano in Duke’s room. Duke would listen and then write more notes . . . and about four or five hours later, two more songs for the show were finished.

Somehow the score got written, and when
Jump for Joy
opened, Ellington and the producers were sure that their show was destined for Broadway. “We had a national tour all planned—leading to an open run in New York,” Kuller said. Ellington recalled the mostly black first-nighters as enthusiastic, in part because none of them had ever seen a musical that, like
Jump for Joy,
sought to show them as they were and tell the world how they felt: “As the audience screamed and applauded, comedians came off stage smiling, and with tears running down their cheeks. They couldn’t believe it.”

The critics saw it differently. Nearly everybody praised Ellington and his band, and a few reviews were entirely favorable, including Ed Schallert’s notice in the
Los Angeles Times:
“Duke Ellington and his orchestra, heading a group of star singers and dancers, brought zest and class to the musical revue ‘Jump for Joy’ last night.” But most were freighted with qualifications, above all the make-or-break notice in
Variety,
whose unequivocal support would be needed if
Jump for Joy
were to have any chance of transferring to New York: “Main trouble with ‘Jump with [
sic
] Joy’ is that it doesn’t jump. Rather, and more to the point, it lags . . . skits and blackouts are, for the most part, pointless and not too funny. . . . Mebbe the piece can be tightened and whipped into acceptable form, but the chances are against it.” Even the black reviewers disliked the sketches. Almena Davis, who wrote about the show for the
Los Angeles Tribune
, believed that “a good part of the trouble” with
Jump for Joy
lay in the fact that Kuller and Fimberg were white: “To paraphrase a line from ‘Jesse James,’ we will never have a good colored theatre until we take all the ‘grey’ [i.e., white] writers out and ‘shoot ’em down like dogs,’ having first developed some good colored writers to fill their places.”

The creative team responded by rewriting
Jump for Joy,
not just once but repeatedly. “The show was never the same, because every night after the final curtain we had a meeting up in the office,” Ellington remembered. “All fifteen writers would be present whenever possible, and we would discuss, debate, and make decisions as to what should come out of the show the next night.” When Dorothy Dandridge dropped out early in the run, he sent for Big Joe Turner, wrote him into the show to enhance its firepower, and gave him “Rocks in My Bed” to sing. Through it all the crowds kept coming, and according to Ellington, they liked what they saw: “The Negroes always left proudly, with their chests sticking out.” But even a fan like George T. Simon acknowledged his doubts about the show when he reviewed it for
Metronome:

Duke Ellington’s band was supposed to be the featured attraction, but it spent its time down in the pit, struggling through enticing, but intricate, accompaniments. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t make a feature of a pit band . . . the revue, as a whole, lacked the spontaneity that you’ll find in vaudeville acts such as those at the Apollo in Harlem.

The box-office grosses kept on sagging, and
Jump for Joy
closed in September after eleven weeks and 101 performances. It reopened in November for a weeklong run, after which Ellington briefly incorporated a vest-pocket version into his traveling stage show, but never made it to New York. The only attempt to revive
Jump for Joy
in his lifetime, a 1959 production in Miami Beach, lost its backers $100,000. After that the show went unseen until the surviving sketches and musical numbers were reconstructed forty years later for a noncommercial Chicago production.

Ellington believed, as did his collaborators, that
Jump for Joy
flopped because it was ahead of its time, and it is now generally regarded as (in Gary Giddins’s words) “a milestone in Ellington’s career and a benchmark in American theater.” Indeed, it has come to be taken as an article of faith that the show was a critical and commercial failure not through any fault of its own but because white audiences were unprepared to embrace a musical that presented blacks as real people, not shiftless louts. That may well be true, but there is also reason to think that the critics were at least partly right. Because so few of the sketches are extant, it is no longer possible to speak authoritatively about their overall quality. Given the fact that none of the show’s principal authors are known to have written anything else of lasting interest, though, it seems likely that they were at least as uneven as the reviews indicate.