Duke (56 page)

That, he added, was what happened to Hodges, as well as Williams and Lawrence Brown. Though all of them left, they all came back, and even Hodges, who had had some success on his own, sounded happiest when in the company of his fellow Ellingtonians. And that was why Terry quit: He feared becoming so fully absorbed into the self-sustaining musical organism that was the Ellington band that he would no longer be able to function without the guiding hand of the master.

And what of Ellington himself? Was advancing age sapping his creativity? Or did he simply spend too much time on the road? The
Time
cover story quoted an unnamed “friend” as follows: “If he retired for a few years and just wrote, he would leave a wealth of music. The record companies should let Duke write tremendous symphonies that would represent America and a style of music. . . . He shouldn’t be limited to 14 or 15 men.” It was, of course, uncomprehending nonsense, the kind that was echoed by outsiders who failed to understand that he was incapable of doing any such thing. His pianism continued to deepen, as can be heard on
Back to Back
and
Side by Side,
a pair of blues-oriented combo albums featuring Johnny Hodges (who received equal billing with Ellington) that Norman Granz recorded for Verve in 1959. Building on the promise of the 1953 trio sides, he had blossomed at last into a truly great small-group soloist. But the music that he was now writing for the full band was less impressive. He needed the band as much as it needed him, and neither was what it used to be.

What Ellington undoubtedly thought he needed was a new Paul Gonsalves or Sam Woodyard. Instead he found something completely different: a new woman.

15

“FATE’S BEING KIND TO ME”

Apotheosis, 1960–1967

T
HE ARRIVAL OF
middle age did not lessen Duke Ellington’s need to keep his personal life away from the public eye.
Time
’s cover story had contained only an evasive reference to “a separation from his wife that became permanent,” a sentence even more obscure than the one included in the magazine’s earlier story about the premiere of
Black, Brown and Beige
(“His wife, from whom he has been separated for many years, lives in Washington”). He had insisted on it. According to Carter Harman, the terse reference replaced an “unforgivably brusque” description of Ellington’s domestic arrangements inserted by a researcher for
Time
who had dared to talk to Edna Ellington. When
Ebony
’s Marc Crawford interviewed her at length in March of 1959, describing her as “the virtually unknown Duchess who has lived a lifetime in Duke’s shadow” and allowing Edna to speak for herself about the breakup of their marriage thirty years earlier, he flew into a rage.

A few years later Ellington would specifically acknowledge to Harman, who was considering writing his biography, “the responsibility of not embarrassing the Negro.” That responsibility must have weighed on him even more heavily after he won the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, a decoration that singled out “the highest or noblest achievement by an American Negro during the preceding year or years,” in September. The winners of the medal included such luminaries as George Washington Carver, Roland Hayes, James Weldon Johnson, Marian Anderson, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Thurgood Marshall, Ralph Bunche, and Martin Luther King Jr. No jazz musician had previously won it—nor have any won it since. The decision to single out a jazzman for such high honors was a source of controversy in the black opinion community, which was as self-conscious about middle-class respectability as was Ellington himself. An editorial published in the
Los Angeles Tribune
pushed all of his buttons at once: “Lord knows, we love his music, but its sexy growls and moans have never moved us to go out and register to vote, or bowl over a bastion of prejudice.” His own people, it seemed, were no more willing to acknowledge his achievements than were whites—perhaps even less so.

“I became his slave”: Fernanda de Castro Monte with Duke Ellington in Madrid, 1966. An exotic-looking lounge singer who was known as “the Countess,” she became Ellington’s mistress in 1960 and catered to his every whim. When Evie found out about their affair, she threatened to shoot him on the spot

He knew that there would always be somebody looking over his shoulder, and had long ago resolved never to forget his self-imposed duty to act “on behalf of the race.” But he was no less determined to lead his life as he pleased, and women still found him toothsome. According to the jazz pianist Marian McPartland, who played throughout the fifties at the Hickory House, one of his New York haunts, he “had so much sex appeal it was almost frightening.” It was as evident when, in March of 1960, the band settled down in Las Vegas to play a three-month run at the Starlight Lounge of the Riviera Hotel. That was where Ellington met Fernanda de Castro Monte, who was working as a lounge singer at the Tropicana. She came to hear Ellington, was smitten at first sight, began an affair with him, and soon grew so obsessed with her new lover that the Tropicana fired her for missing shows. “I became his slave,” she told Don George.

Very little is known about Monte, who was never interviewed and rarely photographed, but everyone who met her agreed that she was a strange bird. Ellington introduced her to friends as “the Countess,” and that was what the members of the band called her as well, sometimes referring to her as “the Countess from Algeria.” According to Derek Jewell, she was around forty at the time of her first meeting with Ellington. George described her as “a tall, strikingly handsome, blond lady who stood bold” and dressed flashily, favoring furs, jewels, and sunglasses. Charles Sam Courtney, a diplomatic official who met the Countess when Ellington and the band came to Turkey in 1963, remembered her as “an aging woman wearing too much make-up but sexy nonetheless” who spoke with a “bizarre” accent that sounded “more like the Bronx than Algeria.” While Courtney took it for granted that she “could not have been listed in any peerage,” the Countess’s exoticity was self-evident, for she carried an Argentinian passport, claimed to have lived in Algeria and Brazil, and is said to have spoken several languages.

She was, in short, a woman uncommon enough to catch Ellington’s eye, and she pressed her advantage at once, sending two dozen red roses to the bandleader’s dressing room at the Starlight Lounge for several nights in a row, then showing up at a table for one. “She would remain for a set and then disappear mysteriously,” Mercer recalled. “This went on for a week, and then Pop knew who was sending the roses.” Their affair, he added, progressed to the point where “nobody could see Ellington from the time he left the stand until he came back and sat down at the piano the next evening. Once he got off [the bandstand] he disappeared, as though the night had engulfed him.”

What started as a passing fancy grew into one of the longest-lasting involvements of his life. Though the Countess came and went as she pleased, she and Ellington were inseparable whenever they were together, usually during his overseas tours. “She was very much there,” the choreographer Alvin Ailey recalled. “I mean, under his armpits. He couldn’t walk out onstage and direct the orchestra without her being next to him.” She would, he said, follow Ellington into a men’s room in order to stay close to him. The Countess went out of her way to take care of her companion, going so far as to pack his suitcases and clean his dressing rooms. Above all, Ellington said, she tended to his stomach: “She makes sure I eat all right, and that’s enough for me to give her whatever she wants.” Among other things, she introduced him to vodka and caviar, which, so he said, enhanced his virility.

Most of Ellington’s friends and colleagues liked the Countess. Even Ruth spoke well of her: “She did a lot for Edward. She interpreted for him. She did research. She was very intellectual. I certainly liked her, as I liked anyone who could make Edward happy.” Norman Granz described her as “a very cultured woman. . . . She could introduce you to art dealers and such, and she was certainly very cognizant [of] art.” He thought her an improvement on Ellington’s previous girlfriends: “Duke did well to have her, I think. It was much better than having some old groupie hanging around.” Ellington was careful to keep their relationship secret, partly because the Countess was white, which would have caused a scandal in America, and partly because he was genuinely afraid of Evie, who was as suspicious as ever of her longtime companion’s other companions. Inevitably, though, she learned of the affair, and on one occasion she is said to have flown to Tokyo, caught him in bed with the Countess, pulled a gun, and insisted that he choose between them—which he declined to do.

Was Ellington in love with the Countess? Or was he merely thrilled by her obsession with him? He was sixty when they met, an age when the most attractive of men may find themselves beset with self-doubt. It is easy to imagine him falling for her at so discomfiting a moment, but their involvement, far from being transient, was to endure for the rest of his life.

 • • • 

With the arrival of the Countess, Ellington’s creative juices started to flow again. In September came
Suite Thursday,
a piece premiered at the Monterey Jazz Festival whose four brief movements were nominally inspired by
Sweet Thursday
, John Steinbeck’s 1954 novel about life on the Monterey waterfront. Ellington and Strayhorn had already recorded a colorful jazz version of Tchaikovsky’s
Nutcracker Suite,
and
Suite Thursday
was later coupled on LP with a similar treatment of five movements from Grieg’s incidental music for
Peer Gynt
. Most of the latter arrangements were by Strayhorn, but
Suite Thursday
appears to have been almost entirely Ellington’s work, and despite its slightness, the piece (whose last movement, “Lay-By,” displayed Ray Nance’s violin playing to highly favorable effect) suggested that he was shaking off the torpor caused by the sudden loss of so many of his players.

A month after recording
Suite Thursday,
Ellington went to France with Strayhorn to work on his second film score,
Paris Blues,
leaving the band behind and spending nearly two months in the city where the film was set. He later described his stay there as “the closest thing to a vacation [he]’d ever been able to think about,” though it was of necessity a working holiday: “I’ve never had a vacation from music in my life. Oh, once in a very great while, I may leave the band for a few weeks, as when I was writing the music for
Paris Blues
in Paris. But I’m never away from music. I may not have been in swimming during the preparation of
Paris Blues,
but at least I was getting a little wet.” The score, which includes a splendidly moody title song, received an Academy Award nomination, the first to go to a black composer (it lost to
West Side Story
).
^**********
The music, alas, was wasted on Martin Ritt’s pretentious film, in which Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier play grimly serious expatriate jazzmen who become entangled with Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll. Bosley Crowther dismissed
Paris Blues
in
The
New York Times
as “a weak, aimless story,” and it is remembered today only for the Ellington-Strayhorn score, which is both more elaborate and more prominently featured than the music for
Anatomy of a Murder
.