Memories of The Great and The Good

by Alistair Cooke

  In his big hassle with the regents of the University of California about “the traditional right of free education,” he tried, and failed, to institute a small tuition fee. He believes that somebody, the federal government or the state, is going to have to charge a fifty-cent fee for a doctor’s visit, something for drugs, and some check on the general assumption “that you can dash off to a brain surgeon with a headache.” “I think you will find,” he says without producing the documents, “that in the countries where they’ve introduced a national health service, they have underestimated their health budget by as much as five times.” California, at any rate, seems to be having its own grim experience of subsidizing hypochondria on a mammoth scale.

  What about the cities? He heaves a sigh and pops a cough drop in his mouth against what he grinningly describes as “a slight case of instant pneumonia.” He has deep doubts about the President’s Commission study, or about encouraging the surplus farm population to come into the cities. “My God, the OEE [Office of Emergency Employment] brought the Indians in. It was a disaster—they learned to be delinquent, or alcoholic. I think we have to take a new look at the whole idea of great cities. I doubt that stacking them higher and higher is the answer; we should explore decentralization and I don’t mean the fringe suburb. If the jobs stay in the city the suburbanites are chained to the old cities, and the traffic and maintenance programs will become unbearable. ? m talking about settling new towns in the open spaces. We might see how far the people would move if the job moved with them.”

  This is the long run. How about the short and frightful run of riots and racism, burn, baby, burn? He is suddenly quite calm. “Once we have violence, we’ve got to have enforcement—prompt and certain. We’ve been lacking in enforcement. The criminal must know he’ll be punished at once.” He is so clear and unspeculative about this that we don’t pursue the toughening procedures of the Oakland police or the questionable threats of Mayor Yorty of Los Angeles to crack down with force on all malefactors or apparent malefactors when the trouble starts.

  And supposing he had to declare himself on the election issues for 1968? “Vietnam may not be there, but if it is it’ll be issue number one. Either way the great issue is an umbrella issue, what I call the Morality Gap: crime, obscenity, delinquency, and abandonment of law. Demonstrations must be within the limits of civil disobedience. Labor and student disputes should start with negotiations, not, my God, with a strike. Now, they all take to the streets at once.”

  You leave him having gained an impression of an engaging kind of energy. He is precise and thoughtful on finance and the mechanics of welfare, quietly dogmatic about the social ferment. He talks no jargon, which is a rare relief. He chants few slogans, he does not preach or intone. He sounds like a decent, deadly serious, baffled middle-class professional man. This, as an executive geared for social rebellion and reform, may be his weakness. But it is his strength among the voters that, in a country with a huge middle class, he so faithfully reflects their bewilderment at the collapse of the old, middle-class standards, protections, and, perhaps, shibboleths.

  16

  The Duke

  (1974)

  When it is finished,” says the guidebook, “it may well be the largest cathedral in the world.” I am always leery of sentences that contain “may well be.” But it is certainly a very large cathedral, namely, the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on the Upper West Side in New York City. Its foundations were laid in 1892. They’ve been building it ever since, and the end is not yet.

  On Monday, May 27, 1974, St. John the Divine housed a ceremony that would have flabbergasted its architect and its early worshipers. Every pew was filled, and the aisles were choked, and there were several thousands listening to loudspeakers out on the street. And when the ten thousand people inside were asked to stand and pray, there was a vast rustling sound as awesome, it struck me, as that of the several million bats whooshing out of the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico at the first blush of dusk.

  It is not the size of the crowd that would have shocked the cathedral’s founders (they might have taken it jubilantly as a sign of a great religious revival). It was what the crowd was there for. A crowd that ranged through the whole human color scale, from the most purple black to the most pallid white, come to honor the life and mourn the death of a man who had become supreme in an art that began in the brothels of New Orleans. The art is that of jazz, and the practitioner of it they mourned was Edward Kennedy Ellington, identified around the world more immediately than any member of any royal family as—the Duke.

  The Duke’s career was so much his life that there’s very little to say about his private ups and downs, if any. He was born in Washington, D.C., in 1890, the son of a White House butler, and perhaps the knowledge that Father had a special, protected status inside the white Establishment had much to do with the Duke’s seeming to be untouched, or untroubled, by the privations and public humiliations we should expect of a black born in the nation’s capital. Certainly he must have thought of himself as belonging to one of the upper tiers of black society. But his upbringing could be called normal for any of the black boys who were to turn into great jazzmen. I’m thinking of men like Earl Hines and Fats Waller, the sons of colored parsons or church organists, who, almost automatically as little boys, were hoisted onto a piano stool. The Duke took piano lessons, but also took to sketching and thought of a career as an artist. This dilemma was solved by his becoming a sign painter by day and running small bands by night.

  What got him going was the nightly grind and the daily practice. It is something that nightclub habitués seldom credit, it being assumed that while classical pianists must follow a daily regimen, people like Ellington, Hines, Waller, Tatum, simply have a “natural gift” and just rattle the stuff off on request. Nothing could be more false. I remember ten or fifteen years ago running into an old and engaging jazzman, a white who was employed in a poky little jazz joint in San Francisco. Muggsy Spanier was a sweet and talented man who had had a long experience of the roller-coaster fortunes of a jazzman: one year you are playing before delirious crowds in a movie theater or grand hotel, three years later blowing your brains out before a few listless drunks in a crummy roadhouse off the main highway in some place called Four Forks, Arkansas, or New Iberia, Louisiana. Just then Muggsy was in a lean year playing in a small band with Earl Hines, who was also at a low ebb (this was before Hines, the father of jazz piano, had been discovered by the State Department and the Soviet government, or been rediscovered by a new generation). Well, Muggsy had left his trumpet in this dreadful nightclub and found he needed it, on his night off, for some impromptu gig or other. So he had to go into the nightclub next morning, always a depressing experience, what with the reek of sour air and spilled alcohol and the lights turned down to a maintenance bulb or two. He told me that one of the unforgettable shocks of his stint in San Francisco was coming from the bone-white sunlight into the smelly cave and squinting through the dark and seeing Hines sitting there, as he did for two or three hours every morning, practicing not the blues or “Rosetta” or “Honeysuckle Rose” but the piano concertos of Mozart and Beethoven. To the gaping Muggsy, Hines looked up and said, “Just keeping the fingers loose.” To be the best, it’s a sad truth most of us amateurs shrink from admitting, you have to run, fight, golf, write, play the piano every day. I think it was Paganini— it may have been Rubinstein—who said: “If I go a week without practice, the audience notices it. If I go a day without practice, I notice it.”

  This digression is very relevant to the character and the mastery of Duke Ellington. He was at a piano, but he was there as a composer, day in and night out. For a man of such early and sustained success, it is amazing that he not only tolerated the grind, after one-night stands, of the long bus rides through the day, and the pickup meals, but actually cherished them as the opportunity to sit back and scribble and hum and compose. He did this to the end.

  I knew all the records
of his first period when I was in college, from 1927 through 1932. And when I first arrived in New York I wasted no time in beating it up to the Cotton Club to see the great man in the flesh. But, apart from a nodding acquaintance in nightclubs, and becoming known to him no doubt as one of those ever-present nuisances who request this number and that, I didn’t meet Ellington alone, by appointment so to speak, until the very end of the Second War. I went up to his apartment on the swagger side of Harlem. There is such a place, in fact there are as many fine shadings of Negro housing through the hierarchy of Negro social status as there are shadings of pigment from the high yaller to the coal black. Ellington was at the top of the scale, in a large Victorian building looking out on a patch of greenery.

  The date had been set for two in the afternoon. In my mind’s eye I had the picture complete: the dapper figure of the Duke seated in a Noël Coward bathrobe deep in composition at a concert grand. For those were the days long before bandleaders got themselves in gold lamé and sequins. The big bandleaders wore dinner jackets. The Duke wore white tie and tails, and was as sleek as a seal.

  Well, I was shown into a large and rambling apartment with a living room that had evidently seen a little strenuous drinking the night before. Off from the living room behind curtained French doors was a bedroom. The doors were open and there in full view was a large bed rumpled and unmade. Beyond that was a bathroom, and out of it emerged what I first took to be some swami in the wrong country. It was the Duke, naked except for a pair of underdrawers and a towel woven around his head. He came in groaning slightly and saying to himself, “Man!” Then his man came in, his butler, and they went into the knotty question of what sort of breakfast would be at once tasty and medicinal. It was agreed on, and the Duke turned and said, “Now.” Meaning what’s your business at this unholy hour of two in the afternoon?

  The breakfast arrived and he went at it like a marooned mountaineer. To my attempts to excite him with the proposal I had come to make, he grunted “Uh-huh” and “Un-un” between, or during, mouthfuls.

  At last he pushed the plate away, picked up his coffee cup, and sat down and slurped it rapidly and nodded for me to begin again. I had come to suggest that he might like to record a long session with his band for the BBC. This was, remember, the peak period of his big band, and I suggested that we record him not, as we now say, “in concert,” but in rehearsal. He shot a suspicious glare at me, as if I’d suggested recording him doing five-finger exercises. But slowly and wearily he began to see my problem, and to respect it. Simply, how to convey to a listener (this was before television) the peculiar genius of the Duke, since it was unique in the practice of jazz music. Which was somehow to be, and feel, present at the act of creation when it was happening to the Duke standing in front of the band in rehearsal. Everybody knows that the best jazz is impossible to write down in the usual musical notation. You can no more make a transcription of Hines playing “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” or, worse, Art Tatum playing any of his cascading variations on “Tea for Two,” than you can write down three rules for the average swimmer to follow in doing the two hundred meters like Mark Spitz. Jazz is always improvisation done best by a group of players who know each other’s whimsical ways with such mysteries as harmonics, counterpoint, scooped pitch, jamming in unison. Alone among jazz composers, the Duke’s raw material was the tune, scribbled bridge passages, a sketch in his head of the progression of solos and ensembles he wanted to hear, and an instinctive knowledge of the rich and original talents, and strengths and perversities, of his players. They were not just trumpet, trombone, clarinet, E-flat alto sax and so on. They were individual performers who had stayed with him for years, for decades. One of them, Harry Carney, played with the Duke on his first recording date in 1927, and he was with him on the last date, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, last March. In 1927 Ellington had created a weird, compact, entirely personal sound with his band. It was weirder still and richer, but it was just as personal at the end.

  Eventually the Duke appreciated that what we wanted was not just another performance. He agreed, and we had a long and unforgettable session, in a hired studio on Fifth Avenue, where we recorded the whole process of the number dictated, the roughest run-through with many pauses, trying this fusion of instruments and that, stopping and starting and transferring the obligato from one man to another, the Duke talking and shouting, “Now, Tricky, four bars” and “Barney, in there eight.” And in the last hour, what had been a taste in the Duke’s head came out as a harmonious, rich meal.

  The Duke was nicknamed as a boy by a friend who kidded him about his sharp dressing. He was an elegant and articulate man and, as I’ve hinted, strangely apart from the recent turmoil of his race. Not, I think, because he was ever indifferent or afraid. He was a supremely natural man, and in his later years devout, and he seemed to assume that men of all colors are brothers. And most of the immediate problems of prejudice and condescension and tension between black and white dissolved in the presence of a man whom even an incurable bigot must have recognized as a man of unassailable natural dignity. He had a childlike side, which—we ought to remember—is recommended in the New Testament for entry into the kingdom of Heaven. He was very sick indeed in the last few months. He knew, but kept it to himself, that he had cancer in both lungs. A week or two before the end, he sent out to hundreds of friends and acquaintances what looked at first like a Christmas card. It was a greeting. On a field of blue was a cross, made up of four vertical letters and three horizontal. They were joined by the letter O. The vertical word spelled “Love” and the horizontal “God.”

  He has left us, in the blessed library of recorded sound, a huge anthology of his music from his twenty-eighth birthday to his seventy-fifth. He began as a minority cult, too rude or difficult for the collectors of dance music. For much, maybe most, of his time he was never a best-seller. He never stuck in the current groove, or in his own groove. He moved with all the influences of the time, from blues to bebop and the moderns, and transmuted them into his own, and at the end his difficult antiphonies and plotted discords, the newer harmonic structures he was always reaching for, were no more saleable to the ordinary popular-music fan than they had ever been. Most people simply bowed to him as to an institution.

  In 1931 a college roommate of mine who was something of a pioneer as a jazz critic, on the university weekly, was graduating, and he wrote a farewell piece. He recorded the rise and fall—during his four-year stint—of the Red Hot Peppers and the Blue Four and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers and Bix and Trumbauer. He ended with the phrase: “Bands may come and bands may go, but the Duke goes on forever.” Ah, how true! We thought it a marvel that the Duke had ridden out all fashions for four long years. In fact, his good and always developing music lasted for forty-seven years. And we have it all.

  So I am inclined to paraphrase what John O’Hara said on the death of George Gershwin: “Duke Ellington is dead. I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”

  17

  Aiken of Vermont

  (1984)

  By November, up here in Vermont, the scarlet and gold landscape of the fall has usually faded into russet, and at regular intervals around winding roads there are pyramids of burning leaves like smoldering camp fires. But Thanksgiving Day 1984 was, by Vermonters’ lights, marvelously brilliant and beautiful, a flashback. It was cold, not as cold as it will be by January (“7 A.M., 23 degrees below zero and all is well”) but sharp, what Dickens called “piping cold.” The sun had risen in an orange glow and would go down later, as the song says, in blood.

  In the early afternoon, it was a brisk, almost playful sight: all these hurrying bundled-up people, like a jolly Brueghel festival, dipping over the green mountains and bobbing across the valleys to the great American family feast.

  This year’s Thanksgiving was special in Vermont, for a special family reason. For once, pride in the death of a famous son went beyond the usual media slop and boilerplate rhetoric into a truth people
knew and felt. Even though the day was glittering and most people outdoors seemed as cheerful as they are meant to be on that day, from every public building throughout the state, and from the bedroom windows of the smallest rural cottage, the flags were at half-mast—for a man whose life and character moved in a straight line, from a small farm to a big farm, to the state legislature, to the governorship and then, forty-three years ago, to the Senate of the United States, where he remained a gathering force for many tough good things. A funny, independent, Yankee-shrewd, totally incorruptible man, who went back home to Vermont in his eighty-fourth year. Until only a few months ago, his sense and experience were available to anybody who cared to tap them. Then he failed quickly and died—at ninety-two. Senator George D. Aiken. So, on Thanksgiving Day, at the funeral in the small town he grew up in, there was little cause for mourning at the grave.

  George Aiken was a type we like to think will be always with us. Vermont is a mountainous, landlocked state between New Hampshire and upstate New York. Deceptively beautiful, for just beneath its rolling green carpet is very rocky terrain, which—combined with great extremes of temperature—restricts its farming to dairying (lots of cows) and fruit-growing. Indeed, the value of its farm crops is such as to leave it the second poorest farming state in the Union. But, because of its production of fine marble, and building stone; because of a prosperous industry in the syrup that’s tapped from its forests of maples; because of a thriving skiing industry; because, also, in a state bigger than Wales, there are only half a million people, there is less poverty than most places.