Popova reviews a new biography of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout:
This is a masterwork of dimensional insight into an icon who sought to flatten and flatter himself as much as possible and to shroud his exceptional artistry in exceptional artifice, a man woven of paradoxes, who, despite his chronic failings of private self-control, exerted his every faculty on controlling his public image. And yet, somehow, Teachout manages to peel away these protective layers and expose the flawed human being beneath them by elevating rather than diminishing Ellington’s humanity, enriching rather than discrediting his legacy.
From Teachout’s book:
Ellington was especially attached to the idea of serving as a spokesperson for African Americans — an aspiration admirable enough on the surface, but only if unbridled from ego and self-inflation, something of which Ellington was far from innocent given the amount of personal publicity he poured into his objective. … And yet beneath the persona Ellington projected lay a person of swelling imperfection — he shamelessly “borrowed” creative material from his band musicians without sharing the royalties or accolades, and had ceaseless extramarital and extra-extramarital affairs, cheating on his wife Edna with his longterm lover Evie, on whom he cheated with countless other women. (So intense were the private passions around his publicly muzzled affairs that, at one point, Edna attacked him with a razor after finding out he had been sleeping with another woman, reportedly his Black and Tan co-star Fredi Washington. What Edna didn’t know was that Duke had a regular habit of checking into several hotels, handing out keys to different women, only later deciding which hotel room he wanted to ravage for the night.)
Previous Dish on Ellington here.
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