The Life of Duke Ellington by Wendie C. Old

Author:Wendie C. Old [Old, Wendie C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780766061293
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2014-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

ADORATION IN EUROPE/PREJUDICE AT HOME

The Stock Market Crash of October 1929 stopped the flow of money. Many rich people suddenly found themselves poor and unable to afford nightly or weekly visits to nightclubs like the Cotton Club.

Although the Cotton Club lasted for another decade or so, they no longer offered long-term contracts. They began alternating Ellington and his orchestra with other bands in an attempt to attract customers. For a while, Ellington and his orchestra traveled with vaudeville acts.

Irving Mills still poured his energies into promoting Ellington’s orchestra. Every day he broke barriers. He not only got them into an Amos ‘n’ Andy movie called Check and Double Check , but he also managed to line up short feature films starring Duke Ellington and his Orchestra.

During the 1930s, he managed to get them into other films starring white actors, such as Belle of the Nineties , Murder at the Vanities , and The Hit Parade.

In Murder at the Vanities , the scene showing an eighteenth-century orchestra playing one of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies dissolves into Duke Ellington’s orchestra swinging with a jazz version of the same tune. This so offends a classical conductor that he mows them down with a machine gun.

All this time, Ellington was still as attached to his mother as she was to him. During his New York City success in the Roaring Twenties, he took the money he earned and showered her with gifts—long ropes of pearls, a fur coat, an extravagant car called a Pierce-Arrow limousine complete with a chauffeur to drive it. Whenever his mother protested, he would declare, “If you don’t take these things, I won’t work.”1

Despite the distance in miles between them, they remained close. In fact, his mother seemed to develop asthma whenever he was not around. After Ellington broke up with his wife, Edna, he invited his mother and father to come live with him in New York City. They arrived in 1930, bringing his sister Ruth. Immediately, his mother’s asthma vanished, never to reappear.

Ruth Ellington remembers that their mother was “happy to be caring and cooking for her son again, waiting each day for him to come through the door and shout, ‘Mother, I’m home to dine!’”2

She would use that limousine to follow him from show to show when he was on tour and was his biggest fan. “After a couple of thousand people had stopped applauding,” his sister remembers, “my mother was always still applauding.”3

When Ellington decided to take the orchestra on tour across the United States, he enlarged the brass section to three trombonists and added a singer, Ivie Anderson. Throughout the years, other female singers toured with the band, but “Ivie Anderson was always considered the best, the one who most closely matched Ellington’s unique sound.”4

In 1932, “Creole Rhapsody” won an award as “best new work by an American composer.”5

In many ways, Ellington was a typical artist. If something inspired him, it was all-important. If it did not, it did not exist. Money was in the second category for him.

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