Duke (33 page)

He apparently has consistently identified himself with the interests of the minorities, the Negro peoples, to a lesser degree, the Jew, and to the underdog, in the form of the Communist party.

Hammond’s judgment may have become slightly warped, and his enthusiasm and prejudices a little bit unwieldy to control. . . . John has identified himself so strongly in certain directions that he no longer enjoys an impartial status which would entitle him to the role of critic.

The series ended with a piece in which Ellington commented on fourteen of his fellow bandleaders, sometimes praising them with the faintest of damns. Bob Crosby’s all-white New Orleans–style group, for instance, was described as “[a] band with an amazing amount of color. We feel that here the tan has attained a very luxurious lustre, perhaps through absorption.” Sneakiest of all are his backhanded remarks about Benny Goodman, in which close readers will have no trouble detecting a discreet whiff of malice: “His practice of offering his own renditions of all the worthwhile music he encounters during his career of musical activities . . . deserves sincere tribute.”

Were these articles, like his decision to leave Mildred and take up with Evie, a sign of restiveness? What happened next suggests as much. In March the Ellington band returned to Europe for a monthlong tour, giving concerts in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, the Hague, Amsterdam, and several cities in Sweden. The atmosphere was tense, nowhere more so than when the group passed briefly through Germany en route to Sweden, laying over for six hours in Hamburg. The train was surrounded by SS guards whom Rex Stewart described as “frightening to see . . . their attitude, their steely glinted, non-smiling frozen glances said, ‘Here’s death à la carte.’” The band was acclaimed everywhere else it went, above all in Stockholm, where Ellington’s reception was so perfervid that he titled one of his new compositions “Serenade to Sweden.” But even before he sailed back to New York,
The
Melody Maker
reported that he and Mills had “severed their long business association” and that the band would now be booked by the William Morris Agency. Details of the professional divorce soon found their way into the trade press: Duke Ellington, Inc. was dissolved, Mills exchanged his interest in the company for Ellington’s shares in Mills Artists and the bands of Cab Calloway and Ina Ray Hutton, and Jack Robbins replaced Mills as his publisher.

Mills later claimed that he had initiated the break “because [he] sensed that Duke had fallen into a different attitude toward his music, and was taking off in what [Mills] thought was a wrong direction.” When Ellington wrote
Reminiscing in Tempo,
he explained, he “lost touch with the huge, loyal following that loved genuine Ellington music.” Ellington himself said nothing. His only recorded statement about their separation was made in an unpublished 1964 interview in which he said, “Irving Mills decided in ’38 that we should split up, because he wanted to gamble more with his money and so forth, and he knew I didn’t want to do it.” Other witnesses supplied their own versions, among them Sonny Greer: “Duke started getting disenchanted with Irving Mills in 1938, when we were at the downtown Cotton Club. . . . He began to think that Mills was not giving him the attention he deserved. This was right after Benny Goodman had played in Carnegie Hall. Duke started thinking if Benny Goodman can play in Carnegie Hall, why can’t I? And Irving wasn’t able to get Duke in there.”

Ulanov, who got his version from Ellington himself, agreed with Greer that “lack of attention” was at fault. But he also told of how Ellington paid a surprise visit to Mills’s office and asked to look at the books:

Duke Ellington sat down at the table and looked through all the books of Duke Ellington Incorporated, the record of his business association with Irving Mills. He looked at almost every page, at some with greater interest than others, at the reports on his best-selling records and those which hadn’t sold so well, at the results of this theater booking and that location stand, the Cotton Clubs, East and West, Europe and short stands from coast to American coast.

“Thank you very much,” Duke said to the secretary, after better than an hour’s poring over the books of Duke Ellington Inc. He got up slowly, adjusted his jacket and tie, put on his hat and overcoat and walked out of the office. He never returned.

Bob Udkoff, one of Ellington’s friends, confirmed this account, adding a telling detail. He said that Ellington had asked Mills to buy “the most expensive casket made” for Daisy, to which Mills replied that it would cost him $5,000. When Ellington looked at the books in 1939, he discovered that Mills Music had only paid $3,500. As Udkoff told it, this petty misrepresentation was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

What led Ellington to look at Mills’s books? It’s probable that he was embarrassed by articles in the black press that criticized him for putting his financial affairs in the hands of a white manager whom he allowed to take advantage of him. The ever-helpful John Hammond worked this vein in his 1935
Down Beat
article about Ellington: “The Duke has been exploited in a way that is absolutely appalling . . . Although he and his orchestra have earned between $5-and-$10 thousand a week consistently for the last eight years, he has received disgracefully little himself.” In 1936 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. fanned the flames with a column for the
New York Amsterdam News
in which he called the bandleader “a musical sharecropper” who harvested “Massa Mills’ cotton.” Porter Roberts said much the same thing in
The
Pittsburgh Courier,
claiming that Ellington had “EARNED something like $2,000,000—for somebody else.” Ned Williams wrote to a friendlier black paper,
The
New York Age
, to refute Powell’s column, calling it “an unfounded and unwarranted libel” and adding that the members of the band travel “in a style and comfort to which no other orchestra, white or colored, in the country is accustomed.” (He neglected to mention that Ellington’s sidemen paid for their own accommodations out of their salaries.) But Hammond, who had worked for Mills, was in a position to know whereof he spoke, and he always insisted that his old boss had taken financial advantage of Ellington. No doubt he did—that was the way Mills operated—and if so, it stood to reason that Ellington would grow restive, especially when his own people started attacking him.

Whatever the cause of the break, the results were clear-cut: Ellington signed with William Morris, while Irving Mills went on to a long and fabulously successful career that was underwritten by his lion’s share of Ellington’s copyrights. Only one of the thirty-three paragraphs of
Variety
’s 1959 feature story about the fortieth anniversary of Mills’s career mentions his relationship with Duke Ellington. Yet his ex-protégé never took his former patron to task. The account of their break published in
Music Is My Mistress,
if characteristically evasive, was true as far as it went: “We dissolved our business relationship agreeably, and in spite of how much he made on me, I respected the way he had operated. He had preserved the dignity of my name. Duke Ellington has an unblemished image, and that is the most anybody can do for anybody.”

In private Ellington was more realistic, acknowledging that Mills had swindled him but explaining that there was no way that he could prevail were he ever to say so for the record. He always pointed out that it was Mills who not only made him famous but took great care to shield him from humiliations that would have gnawed at his personal dignity. Ellington was intensely aware that even though he had structured his life in such a way as to steer clear of racist confrontations, he would never become famous enough to be invulnerable to them. Well into the forties, he instructed his publicists and road managers to call ahead in order to ensure that he would be welcome at any Manhattan nightclub or restaurant that he cared to visit. When he went to Yale in the late thirties to dine with Marshall Stearns and his students, one of his hosts was shocked to see another student in the dining hall rise from his seat, say “I don’t eat with niggers,” and stalk out. “Gentlemen, let us enjoy our repast,” Ellington told the party, then sat down and dined with apparent unflappability. He knew that if such things could happen to him at Yale, they could happen anywhere, and he would never forget what Mills had done to insulate him from such ugly encounters.

In addition to seeking a bigger piece of the financial pie, Ellington switched managers to bolster his prestige still further. Though the William Morris Agency was comparatively new to the world of popular music, it was a Hollywood powerhouse whose glittering client list included Jimmy Cagney and Judy Garland. “Duke was very respectful of William Morris,” a friend later said. “I think he was a little awed by him.” But it would take more than prestige to keep him afloat on the roiling sea of swing. In recent months his recordings had declined in consistency, and it was starting to look as though he had been demoralized by his shrinking popularity. Worse still, he learned upon returning from Europe that his recordings would now be overseen by John Hammond, who had been appointed associate director of popular recording at Columbia, which had recently bought out ARC. In 1943 Leonard Feather published a tale about the only recording session at which Ellington and Hammond are known to have worked together:

John Hammond . . . was supervising the recording [of “Serenade to Sweden”], and at one point he told Duke that one of the soloists was departing too far from the melody, and that Duke should have him keep it straight.

Duke fixed Hammond with a cool grin and said, “John, you’re getting more and more like Irving Mills every day.”

According to those who were in the studio at the time, John never quite got over that.

Ellington may have prevailed in this skirmish, but he also knew that Hammond had persuaded Columbia to sign Benny Goodman’s band and was about to do the same with Count Basie. Since the producer had close ties to both bandleaders, Ellington had good reason to wonder whether he would get lost in the resulting shuffle, and better reason to assume that Hammond would make sure of it. As Stanley Dance said, “Anybody that John couldn’t push around was out of favor with John.” So Ellington returned to Victor after five years, and his new label agreed not to sign any other black big bands to its full-priced Victor label, only to the thirty-five-cent Bluebird line, a concession that sealed the deal.

The arrival of Evie Ellis, the European tour, the break with Irving Mills, and the decision to change record labels helped to fill Ellington and his men with new energy. “After our very successful European jaunt, the band started hitting on all cylinders like a wondrous musical juggernaut,” Rex Stewart wrote. But America, still in thrall to the King of Swing, did not yet notice. “That Ellington’s is the most unappreciated band in existence is no secret among most musicians. . . . High time the Ellington band got the recognition it deserves,”
Down Beat
declared in its review of “Serenade to Sweden.” Something more was needed to propel him back to the top of the heap—and it had just arrived.

9

“THE EYES IN THE BACK OF MY HEAD”

With Billy Strayhorn, 1938–1939

B
ILLY STRAYHORN’S FAVORITE
time of day was the middle of the night, which he called “halfway to dawn.” It was a suitable hour for a man who lived in the shadows. To the public at large Strayhorn’s name was nothing more than the answer to a trivia question, and the curious fact that he, not Duke Ellington, had written “Take the ‘A’ Train,” the Ellington band’s ubiquitous theme song, was all that most people knew about him. Though Ellington started playing his music in 1939, it was not until four years later that a jazz magazine published the first feature-length story to be written about Strayhorn, and the mainstream media paid him even less heed. His name appeared only once in the
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature
prior to his death in 1967.