The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “You can’t write music right,” Duke said, explaining his methods of composition, “unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker.”

  “Absolut phantastisch!” the German murmured. Duke seemed startled, then laughed.

  “Vot a varm, simple laugh you haf,” the refugee said enviously.

  Duke laughed again. “No, what I mean is,” he said, “you’ve got to write with certain men in mind. You write just for their abilities and natural tendencies and give them places where they do their best—certain entrances and exits and background stuff. You got to know each man to know what he’ll react well to. One guy likes very simple ornamentation; another guy likes ornamentation better than the theme because it gives him a feeling of being a second mind. Every musician has his favorite licks and you gotta write to them.”

  “His own licks? Licks?” asked the refugee.

  “His own favorite figures,” Duke said. He looked out the window. “I sure hated to leave that chick,” he said affably. “I’d just met her. She was all wrapped up for me. All wrapped up in cellophane.”

  “Please?” asked the German.

  “I know what sounds well on a trombone and I know what sounds well on a trumpet and they are not the same,” Duke said. “I know what Tricky Sam can play on a trombone and I know what Lawrence Brown can play on a trombone and they are not the same, either.”

  “Don’t you ever write just for inspiration?”

  “I write for my band,” Duke said. “For instance, I might think of a wonderful thing for an oboe, but I ain’t got no oboe and it doesn’t interest me. My band is my instrument. My band is my instrument even more than the piano. Tell you about me and music—I’m something like a farmer.”

  “A farmer that grows things?”

  “A farmer that grows things. He plants his seed and I plant mine. He has to wait until spring to see his come up, but I can see mine right after I plant it. That night. I don’t have to wait. That’s the payoff for me.”

  “Mr. Ellington, how do you get those lovely melodic passages?”

  “If you want to do a mellow cluster with a mixture of trombones and saxes, it will work very well,” Duke said. “A real derby, not an aluminum one, will give you a big, round, hollow effect.”

  “A real derby?”

  “A real derby.”

  “Not an aluminum derby?”

  “Not an aluminum derby.”

  “Phantastisch!” the exile said.

  Duke laughed. He called to Sonny Greer, his drummer, sitting up ahead, “I sure hated to miss that chick,” he said. “She was all wrapped up in cellophane.”

  The refugee’s pale blue eyes stared steadily at Duke. “When inspiration comes, Mr. Ellington,” he said finally, “you write, natürlich?”

  “It’s mostly all written down, because it saves time,” Duke said. He seemed eager to get away, but the coach was crowded and there wasn’t another place to sit. “It’s written down if it’s only a basis for a change. There’s no set system. Most times I write it and arrange it. Sometimes I write it and the band and I collaborate on the arrangement. Sometimes Billy Strayhorn, my staff arranger, does the arrangement. When we’re all working together, a guy may have an idea and he plays it on his horn. Another guy may add to it and make something out of it. Someone may play a riff and ask, ‘How do you like this?’ The trumpets may try something together and say, ‘Listen to this.’ There may be a difference of opinion on what kind of mute to use. Someone may advocate extending a note or cutting it off. The sax section may want to put an additional smear on it.”

  “Schmear?”

  “Smear,” Duke said.

  Duke tried a few times to end the discussion, but the exile’s questioning kept bringing him back to his exposition, and he was still explaining when the train pulled into Pittsburgh, where he and his band were to give a concert at Carnegie Hall. The hall is a resplendent place. It has tall, gray marble columns with gilt Corinthian capitals, and on its walls are inscribed the names of Schubert, Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin. As the band trooped through the building to the dressing rooms, Duke glanced at the list of his predecessors and remarked, “Boys, we’re in fast company.”

  FROM

  Geoffrey T. Hellman

  APRIL 26, 1947 (ON LE CORBUSIER)

  Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born French architect who for over twenty-five years has been the world’s most articulate and influential exponent of modern architecture, is rarely satisfied with anything that happens in building circles, but he was delighted, last December, when the East River site was accepted by the United Nations for its headquarters. As a member of the United Nations Headquarters Commission, he delivered a speech to this group’s parent body, the General Assembly’s Headquarters Committee, in which he intimated that he had, in a way, foreseen this decision long before the United Nations came into existence. Le Corbusier, who visited this country on a lecture tour in 1935, bases his claim to prescience on an article he wrote while he was here. Under the title “What Is America’s Problem?” it appeared, in translation, in the American Architect. The passage that he likes to point out reads:

  Manhattan—great unfilleted sole spread out on a rock—is no good except along the backbone; the edges are slums.… The edges along the East River and the Hudson are inaccessible. The ocean is inaccessible, invisible.… Yet all that ocean and those great rivers are invisible, and the advantages of their beauty, their space, their movement, and their lovely light under the sun, all that belongs to no one. New York, the immense ocean port, is for its inhabitants as inland as Moscow! And those splendid sites along the river, destined, it would seem, to receive immense apartment houses with windows opening on space, these sites are desolating—for they are slums. By a well-advised municipal development, it would be easy to rehabilitate these districts and the profit would be sufficient to permit going ahead with rehabilitation of the center of the city, now all violence and anarchy.

  Today, a well-advised development—although not a municipal one—is in hand for one of these sites, and Le Corbusier has a good deal to do with it. His conception of what the United Nations Headquarters ought to look like is revealed in the projects, never realized, that he has drawn up for a dozen cities, in Europe, North Africa, and South America, and in a series of buildings that the French government is about to construct, from his plans, in La Rochelle, a war-devastated town in western France, and La Pallice, its port, which during the war was a German submarine base. This conception calls for a group of glass-walled structures perched well above the ground on huge, reinforced-concrete piles, or pilotis, and set a few hundred yards apart to provide space in between for parks and athletic fields. Le Corbusier calls a group like this a vertical garden city. Wallace K. Harrison, the eminent American architect who is director of planning for the United Nations headquarters, admires Le Corbusier professionally and selected him as one of ten members of the United Nations Board of Design Consultants, which has been set up to help him design the United Nations buildings. However, Robert Moses, City Construction Coordinator and Mayor O’Dwyer’s representative in United Nations negotiations, has little use for him. Moses is the possessor of an intransigence rivalled only by Le Corbusier’s. His chauvinism is intense. As one of the chief plumpers for locating the United Nations headquarters in Flushing, he was distressed, last fall, when Le Corbusier, airing his views on that site in a report of the Headquarters Commission, said:

  New York is a terrifying city. For us, it is menacing. We are not wrong in keeping it at a distance!…Flushing Meadow is not the site for the Headquarters of the United Nations, because Flushing Meadow is inescapably a suburb of New York, a dependency of New York. Now, the United Nations is neither a dependency of New York, nor of the United States of America. Freedom—not constraint—must at every minute be the dominant feeling. In no case must the United Nations become a corollary to America. To implant its Headquarters in the very shadow of the skyscrapers of Manhattan is inadmissib
le. The Manhattan skyscrapers are by their very nature too precarious; New York is a thrilling city but so questionable that it cannot take the Headquarters of the United Nations into its lap. This is a question of moral proportion. In fact, a question of “respectability.”

  The Rockefeller offer, paradoxically, seems to have dissipated Le Corbusier’s terror of the city, and he now believes that a few East River skyscrapers, especially if designed on vertical-garden-city principles, might not be too precarious after all. Moses is still in favor of keeping Le Corbusier at a distance. “What do these foreign fellows know about our foundations, our hard-rock problems?” he said recently. It is probable that the United Nations buildings will show traces of Le Corbusier’s influence, but it is also probable that they will rest on old-fashioned, orthodox foundations rather than on pilotis.

  Along with the other consultants, Le Corbusier is working on plans in a drafting room on the twenty-seventh floor of the R.K.O. Building. He puts in his mornings on sketches and models. Afternoons, he and his colleagues attend staff meetings with Harrison and others. Harrison knows that Le Corbusier is one of the greatest designers in the world and also one of the most temperamental, and he has been handling him accordingly. Le Corbusier has responded with a great show of sweet reasonableness. “I am in complete calm here,” he told a visitor to his working quarters the other day. “I think God has come down to earth. I don’t even mind working in a room with other people. An architect shouldn’t be alone. He can’t do his best work without talking. Talking stimulates you. You develop ideas when you have an audience. And anyway, you don’t have to listen to what the other man says.” After spending the morning not listening to his colleagues, Le Corbusier usually repairs for lunch to Del Pezzo’s, a casual Italian restaurant on West Forty-seventh Street, where he politely ignores the remarks of various friends.

  Le Corbusier has spent many years in the study of urbanisme, a word that he feels embraces not only living in a city but the sociological and economic problems living in a city creates. His present benign state of mind about New York notwithstanding, this study has strengthened his conviction that he exists in a world of idiots, fools, and paupers who haven’t the sense to realize how badly off they are. He is sure that slum dwellers, by and large, are not as unhappy as they ought to be. “I know that a proper plan can make New York the city par excellence of modern times,” he wrote in Quand les Cathédrales Etaient Blanches, a fairly trenchant book about the United States that was one result of his lecture tour of this country in 1935, “can actively spread daily happiness for these oppressed families—children, women, men stupefied by work, stunned by noise of the rails of the subways or elevateds—who sink down each evening, at the end of their appointed tasks, in the impasse of an inhuman hovel.” Nevertheless, he has noted with annoyance that some of the oppressed millions actually seem to perk up toward evening and go bowling or to the movies. His own capacity for moral indignation is boundless.

  · · ·

  Le Corbusier’s trip in 1935 seems to have been made under a misapprehension. That summer, Philip L. Goodwin, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, and at that time chairman of its Committee on Architecture, visited Le Corbusier in Paris and invited him to come here for a lecture tour. Goodwin said that the Museum would sponsor the tour and pay all expenses, and that the entire favorable difference, if any, between these costs and the lecture fees would go to Le Corbusier. The architect accepted this offer, but upon his arrival in New York he acted as though he hadn’t completely understood it and was simply on a sightseeing junket in the course of which he would make a mint of money. His ship was met at Quarantine by Robert A. Jacobs, a young Manhattan architect who had served an apprenticeship with the Parisian architectural firm of Le Corbusier & P. Jeanneret a year before, and whom the Museum had engaged to act as Le Corbusier’s interpreter on his American tour. “Jacobs,” said Le Corbusier, “where are the photographers?” Jacobs, an obliging man who also admires Le Corbusier intensely, found that the press cameramen on board were busy taking pictures of other celebrities. He slipped a newspaperman five dollars and implored him to take a picture of Le Corbusier. “I’ve used up all my film,” said the photographer, returning the money. Being an obliging fellow himself, however, he snapped his empty camera at Le Corbusier, who looked mollified. The Museum had arranged with the French Institute to put Le Corbusier up in a suite that this organization then maintained on its premises to accommodate visiting French notables, but when Le Corbusier heard about this plan, on his way uptown, he shook his head. “Je m’en fiche de l’Institut Français,” he said. “Je vais au Waldorf.” Jacobs suggested that this might be too expensive, and Le Corbusier, who has always called the Modern Museum the Rockefeller Foundation, said that Mr. Rockefeller would foot the bill. Instead, Jacobs took him and his baggage direct to the Museum, where a press conference had been arranged. Le Corbusier’s English is poor, and Joseph Alsop, of the Herald Tribune, undertook to help interpret it for the benefit of the less cultured reporters. “Your skyscrapers are too small,” Le Corbusier said in the course of the conference, during which it quickly turned out that he knew at least enough English to be able to complain bitterly when he felt that Jacobs or Alsop had translated him inadequately. He also complained when the press photographers started to take pictures of him. According to witnesses, he pulled some studio portraits of himself out of a suitcase and offered to supply them to the newspapermen for five dollars apiece. “My God, you can’t do that to the New York Times,” said Miss Sarah Newmeyer, the Museum’s publicity director. Le Corbusier pocketed his pictures and looked injured. (He afterward told Jacobs that he had wanted to help out the French photographers who had taken the pictures.) The interview over, he repeated his refusal to go to the French Institute, although by now he had lost interest in the Waldorf. “I wish to be where I can see Broadway,” he said. Fernand Léger, the celebrated French painter, who is a friend of his, was living at the Park Central, so the Museum people got Le Corbusier a room there, on the twenty-fifth floor. His remark about the New York skyscrapers, which was widely repeated in the press, puzzled many readers, and he later said that he had only been joking when he made it; what he had really meant was that the tall buildings here were “little needles all crowded together,” whereas “they should be great obelisks, far apart,” with space between them for parks and athletic fields—Le Corbusier’s ideal for any city.

  Accompanied by Jacobs, Le Corbusier started his lecture tour a few days after his arrival. “Jacobs,” he said several times, as he riffled through the newspapers of whatever city they happened to be in, “where is the picture they took of me on the boat?” In two months, he delivered twenty-three talks in nearly as many cities. One of them, at Columbia University, was to begin at eight-thirty in the evening, but he arrived half an hour late. Jacobs had delegated his wife to take Le Corbusier up there, and Mrs. Jacobs explained that they had started in time but that he had stopped the cab at a delicatessen on the way. He was finishing off a loaf of French bread as he mounted the platform. During his tour, he was amazed at the vast amounts of silverware that were provided for breakfast in bed at some of the big hotels, and he often enlivened this meal by clapping on his head the silver dome that covered his egg dish. He was also astonished by cellophane toothbrush containers, the ticket slots in the backs of train seats, and the paper wrappers on lump sugar. “In Paris,” he said, “food hangs around unsanitarily but appetizingly.”

  Among the places Le Corbusier lectured at were Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Vassar, Bowdoin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Minnesota, and the Philadelphia Art Alliance. During his stay in Philadelphia, George Howe, a famous architect of that city, was introduced, or reintroduced, to him. Howe had been taken to Le Corbusier’s Paris apartment by a friend for a drink several years earlier; on this occasion, his host had ignored him for about half an hour and then asked him if he was an architect. Howe nodded. “Oh, I thought you were the naval officer
from downstairs,” said Le Corbusier. When they met again, in Philadelphia, Howe, who is no man to take umbrage at genius, volunteered to show Le Corbusier around the town. One of the buildings he pointed out was the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, a notably modern skyscraper, which he and William Lescaze designed. His guest, who until then had been acting as though he still thought Howe was the naval officer from downstairs, gazed at this edifice with approbation. “Ah, mon vieux,” he said, “why don’t we be partners the next time you have a big job?”

  Le Corbusier likes to talk to young people at colleges, and he enjoyed his tour until, toward the end, it dawned on him that he had been put through a pretty heavy schedule and wasn’t going to make much money out of it. His expenses came to about twelve hundred dollars. His lecture fees, most of which were seventy-five or a hundred dollars, added up to about eighteen hundred. The Museum gave him a check for the difference. It had also put on a show of his work and sent a couple of his architectural models on a travelling exhibition, from which they had by then returned in a somewhat damaged condition. Le Corbusier felt that the “Rockefeller Foundation” might have treated him more considerately. A few nights later he turned up at a dinner party waving a dollar bill. “This is what the Rockefeller Foundation paid me for my lecture tour,” he said. His sorrow was the greater because on earlier lecture tours, in South America, he had been paid higher fees and been received with greater éclat. Mr. Goodwin took this fact, as well as Le Corbusier’s astonishment at American hotel silverware and toothbrush containers, into consideration in an urbane letter he wrote to Le Corbusier just after he went back to France: