Duke (65 page)

After spending two days at the apartment with Evie, Ellington checked into the Harkness Pavilion of Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. On April 4
The
New York Times
reported that he was ill. “It’s nothing serious and he’ll be out in a few days,” said a spokesman. Frank Sinatra sent his private jet to Houston to fly Dr. Michael DeBakey to New York to look his friend over. Once DeBakey confirmed that the situation was hopeless, Sinatra sent thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers and fruit to Ellington’s hospital room, where he kept on writing music for as long as he could. The electric piano that he had carried with him on the road was at his side, and he toyed with two final projects, a ballet score called
The Three Black Kings
and a comic opera called
Queenie Pie
.
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His friends, who visited him regularly, were shocked by his appearance. “He had shriveled so much but his hair hadn’t; it looked like an oversize wig that had been plopped on,” Don George said. Evie came, too, but she was nearly as sick as he was, and when her own doctors concluded in mid-April that she was also suffering from lung cancer, Ellington insisted that she seek treatment at once. Ruth, the Countess, and Betty McGettigan took her place at his bedside, but his feelings for Evie grew stronger as he neared the end: “Even though the intense sedation kept him alternating between periods of pain and euphoria, to the very end he called her two or three times every day to say to her, ‘I love you, doll. Honest, I love you.’” Meanwhile Paul Gonsalves, wasted away by years of addiction, died in London on May 14, and Tyree Glenn followed suit four days later in New Jersey. The news of their deaths was kept from Ellington, who was barely clinging to his own life. On May 23 he developed pneumonia, and at 3:10 the next morning, three weeks after his seventy-fifth birthday, he breathed his last.

Tens of thousands of people filed past his coffin, which lay in state at a funeral home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He was wearing the Medal of Freedom, France’s Legion of Honor, and the Emperor’s Star of Ethiopia, his most prized decorations. Gordon Parks viewed the corpse with an artist’s detachment: “He appeared to have lost his fear of the inevitable; he seemed fulfilled. But with the energy and the mischief gone, he was a smaller man than I remembered.” Count Basie, Dick Gregory, and Johnny Mercer came to see him off. So did the Countess, escorted by Sonny Greer and Russell Procope, who had started a trio with Brooks Kerr and were playing at an East Side club. So, too, did countless strangers and half-remembered colleagues. One of the latter, Frisco Bowman, a septuagenarian musician who had jammed with Ellington in Harlem, assured a reporter that he was “up there now with the Louis Armstrongs and the Jelly Roll Mortons.”

John S. Wilson of
The
New York Times,
who had covered his career with a combination of critical candor and personal respect, wrote the paper’s front-page obituary. Ellington would have appreciated the fact that the word
jazz
did not appear until the eleventh paragraph, when Wilson remarked that it was “a word that he consistently rejected in relation to his work.” The appraisal was lengthy and just, describing him as a “master of music” and noting that his music had received “international critical praise and brought listening and dancing pleasure to two generations,” though Wilson got some things wrong, claiming that Ellington had divorced Edna and married both Mildred and Evie. (
Time
said only that he was “never lacking for female companionship.”) A sidebar of tributes included a few words from President Nixon, who took time out from Watergate to say that “the wit, taste, intelligence and elegance that Duke Ellington brought to his music have made him, in the eyes of millions of people both here and abroad, America’s foremost composer.” Also cited were Gunther Schuller, who placed him “in the pantheon of musicians along with Bach and Beethoven and Schoenberg,” and Bing Crosby, who said that “Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were the greatest musicians of all time.”

Time,
on whose cover he had appeared eighteen years earlier, now declared that his work would be remembered as “the most distinctive single body of composition in all of jazz.” And
Jet,
the weekly newsmagazine that specialized in covering the doings of prominent and successful blacks, went all out, publishing a half dozen photos of Ellington lying in state and quoting Mercer as saying, “His absolute faith in God just made him believe that he could go on and on, and he did. . . . If I go through life with half as much valor as he showed in the past year, I would be the strongest man in the world.”

That night CBS aired a half-hour special called
A Tribute to Duke Ellington
. Stanley Dance, Ella Fitzgerald, Russell Procope, Billy Taylor, and an ancient-looking Sonny Greer all came to the studio to say a few innocuous words about their friend. Ellington himself was represented by a brief clip from
Duke Ellington
.
.
. We Love You Madly
(in which he looked ashen and drawn) and a lengthy excerpt from the ASCAP medley. “Mood Indigo,” “Satin Doll,” “Solitude,” “Sophisticated Lady”: All passed in fleeting review, though none of the soloists was identified, not even Harry Carney, the last of the old-timers, who had stayed with the band all the way to the end.

On May 27 Ellington’s funeral was held at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Ten thousand people were in the pews, with another twenty-five hundred listening on the street via loudspeakers and thousands more listening to a live broadcast of the services carried by WRVR, New York’s all-jazz station. Count Basie sat in the front of the church, plainly distraught. Carney, Greer, Procope, and Cootie Williams were present, too, as were Mercer, Ruth, Pearl Bailey, Louis Bellson, and Benny Goodman. Ella Fitzgerald, Earl Hines, Hank Jones, Ray Nance, Joe Williams, and Mary Lou Williams provided the music, and the eulogy was delivered by Stanley Dance, who called Ellington “the greatest innovator in his field, and yet paradoxically a conservative, one who built new things on the best of the old and disdained ephemeral fashion.” He went on to say, no less truly, that “his various associates and friends knew different aspects of him, but never, as they readily admit, the whole man.” Then he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery beside his mother and father, whose caskets had been moved to New York when the Washington cemetery in which they were buried was condemned. Carney, Greer, and Don George rode to the cemetery together in a limousine. “I’m not going to live much longer,” the saxophonist said. “With Duke dead, I have nothing to live for.” Five months later he, too, was dead.

Nat Hentoff, who stood outside the cathedral that day, spoke to an old black man. “I’m just here to bear witness,” he said. “A man passed through, and he was a giant.”

 • • • 

Mercer and the band flew to Bermuda the next day to play at an IBM convention. They had no choice, for there were bills to be paid. Ellington died intestate—he had preferred to give the members of his extended family everything that he could while he was alive—and in the end the copyrights to his songs were sold off in order to pay his taxes. Mercer led the Ellington “ghost band,” as such groups are known to jazz musicians, until his own death in 1996. (It remains in existence, led by Paul Mercer Ellington, Mercer’s son, who never knew his famous grandfather.) Evie died in 1976 and was buried in the same grave as her companion, though no mention of her presence is made on Ellington’s modest tombstone. Two years later Mercer wrote
Duke Ellington in Person: An Intimate Memoir,
in which he sought with partial success to come to terms with his complicated feelings toward his father.

Unlike many artists who won fame during their lifetimes, Ellington underwent no posthumous decline in his reputation. He is universally acknowledged as the greatest composer in the history of jazz and, increasingly, as one of the greatest of any kind in the history of American music, as well as a peerlessly creative big-band orchestrator, a pianist of formidable originality, and an enduring exemplar of black accomplishment and pride. Untroubled by the radically collaborative nature of his artistic achievement, which led some classical musicians to question how seriously he could be taken as a composer in his own right, the classical-music critic and historian Alex Ross wrote in
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,
his influential 2007 study of musical modernism and postmodernism, that “Ellington carved out his own brand of eminence, redefining composition as a collective art.”

His recordings continue to be reissued and his songs continue to be played and sung, though the critics have never stopped wrangling over their comparative importance. While a small but resolute group of commentators, most notably Stanley Crouch, has plumped in recent years for his later work, the vast majority of Ellington’s critics agree that he was at his best in the forties. In 1989 Gunther Schuller finally got around to publishing
The Swing Era,
the long-awaited sequel to
Early Jazz,
in which he wrote of the later suites and found them wanting: “Ellington never fully succeeded in his almost lifelong quest to express himself in larger, not just longer, forms . . . he never really understood the nature of the problem he was facing in undertaking to write in larger forms.” It is a verdict in which most scholars concur, though it does not diminish his stature in the least: He was, like Chopin, Paul Klee, Jorge Luis Borges, and Flannery O’Connor, a disciplined lyric miniaturist who knew how to express the grandest of emotions on the smallest of scales, and who needed no more room in which to suggest his immortal longings.

If anyone doubts that he still matters, one need only look at the way in which America’s cultural institutions now treat him. In 1987 Jazz at Lincoln Center joined the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, New York City Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center Theater, the Juilliard School, and the School of American Ballet as a constituent of America’s biggest and most influential performing-arts center, and Wynton Marsalis, the co-founder, placed Ellington’s music at the heart of its programming. His musical manuscripts and personal papers were acquired the following year by the Smithsonian Institution. He even scored a Broadway hit at long last with
Sophisticated Ladies,
a glossy 1981 revue based on his songs that ran for 767 performances. And in 1999 he got his Pulitzer, a special award “bestowed posthumously on Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington, commemorating the centennial year of his birth, in recognition of his musical genius, which evoked aesthetically the principles of democracy through the medium of jazz and thus made an indelible contribution to art and culture.”

Everyone knows him—yet no one knows him. That was the way he wanted it. “To the very end, he made sure he left nothing behind that would let people know the real Duke Ellington,” Norman Granz said. But he had: He left behind his music, the only mistress to whom he told everything and was always true.

AFTERWORD

L
IKE
POPS
, MY
2009 biography of Louis Armstrong,
Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington
is not so much a work of scholarship as an act of synthesis, a narrative biography that is substantially based on the work of academic scholars and other researchers who in recent years have unearthed a wealth of new information about Duke Ellington and his colleagues. My interpretations of this information are my own, but without these men and women, whose work is fully and appreciatively acknowledged in the source notes and bibliography, no part of
Duke
could have been successfully completed.

In Ellington’s case, however, much of the most significant research to be done in the past quarter century and more has come from part-time scholars whose work is as professional—and as consequential—as that of any professor. They labor for love, and I stand on their shoulders. Foremost among them are the superlatively diligent members of the Duke Ellington Music Society, whose invaluable findings have been regularly published since 1979 in
The International DEMS Bulletin,
all of whose issues I have read with the closest attention. I have also profited greatly from the efforts of the Duke Ellington Society UK, which are published in its own quarterly journal,
Blue Light
.

I wish to specifically acknowledge the assistance of Steven Lasker, a longtime contributor to the
DEMS Bulletin
and the world’s foremost collector of Ellingtonia, who read every word of the manuscript of
Duke
and commented on it in amazingly painstaking detail. Nobody knows more than Steven about Ellington and his music, and nobody could be more generous to those who seek to profit from his immense knowledge. In addition to graciously allowing me to spend several days sifting through his private collection, he supplied the book’s title and cover photograph, as well as several of the other photos reproduced herein. These words of appreciation can be no more than an inadequate substitute for the formal recognition that his scholarship deserves and has yet to receive.

I have also benefited immeasurably from the wise counsel of Brian Priestley and Ken Steiner, two other distinguished Ellington experts who took the trouble to read and comment on the manuscript of
Duke;
John Edward Hasse, the author of
Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington
and a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, who oversees the museum’s Duke Ellington Collection and helped me to find my way through its holdings; and the staffs of Rutgers University’s Institute of Jazz Studies and Yale University’s Oral History of American Music archive and Stanley Dance collection, who opened their doors and files to me. My mistakes, like my interpretations, are mine alone, but there are far fewer of them because of their help.