Henry Blankfort, part two

 

Henry Blankfort, far right, confronts HUAC in Hollywood, 1951.

The Hollywood Theater Alliance was also responsible for Zero Hour.   After Meet the People and before Jump for Joy?

At around the same time as Meet the People.  A professor who is fired because of the hierarchy.  [director] Sidney Salkow was out here.  So was Albert Maltz.

Of the Hollywood Ten.

Yeah.  And they wrote Zero Hour.

It didn’t have a successful run.

No.  As a matter of fact, at the end of the second act I posted a closing sign.

On opening night?

Yeah, I smelled it.

I have something about another production by the Hollywood Theater Alliance, a thing called They Can’t Get You Down, but by that time you were gone.

Departed.  And They Can’t Get You Down did not go up.  Really, its main success was Meet the People, number one.   And I see, Eddie Eliscu, one of the writers, has just written a show directed by his son, up north.  It’s playing near San Francisco.  My son, who lives up around San Raphael, read the reviews.  Brilliant, great reviews.  Eddie Eliscu is still writing plays; how do these guys hang around?  I thought they were dead!

Getting back to Ellington, was the person that you got to know very different from his suave, sophisticated onstage persona?

No.  He was a suave and sophisticated guy, very much onstage all the time.  A wide-ranging imagination.  The one reservation I have about Ellington is that he never really did anything strong for his people.  I think there were a number of reasons for this; one was his religiosity.  Everything that happened was God’s will.

Do you mean to say he was fatalistic about things like Jim Crow?

It wasn’t fatalism.  I’m an atheist.  The God-fetish that too many people accept isn’t fatalism, but there’s a meaning in it I just can’t understand, that there’s some hand or some chemistry that’s the reason for all this.  My own philosophy is I'm against anything that divides people.  I think they're all manufactured, anyhow.  Basically, to be very crass about it, most of it's bullshit.  Those people are programmed to walk with bended knees, heads down.   I've seen so much hypocrisy in the religious world, the misuse of people for personal benefit.  What are there: fourteen hundred different religions?

But Duke didn't want any part of it.   

No, Duke would never get involved.  I think because of his talent and his personality, he was readily lionized in his successful days by the chic whites who would ask him to dinner to prove they had no prejudice.    

In a sense, that was the basis of his whole career, at least one way of looking at it.  In show business, he was the number one Black, the Negro who showed that the Negro could "make it" in show business.  

Because of my involvement with Jump for Joy, I became one of the writers on Tales of Manhattan.

I don't know anything about that.

Tales of Manhattan was a major film.  It had an interesting concept:  it was the story of a tailcoat.  It had Ginger Rogers and Eddie Robinson in it.  [Charles] Laughton was in it, and Ethel Waters.  Paul Robeson was in it, and my assignment was to do the section with Paul Robeson.   Later on, they also put me on the Edward G. Robinson section.  It was one of the big pictures of its day.

And history has a funny way of twisting about itself.  When he [Robeson] and I were doing that part, there was bad segregation.  His daughter is still alive.  He sang at a show where his son and daughter were assigned the same seat one night.  Can you imagine that?  But his daughter did a book that lies:  it says he didn't like his episode in Tales of Manhattan.  Tales of Manhattan was made in the 1940s.  Fortunately, there has been some change in Black attitudes.  Paul had complete artistic control over his section.  He even sent me a handwritten note, which said he was overjoyed.  When he read my draft, he wrote in some comments.

Anyway, in the story the tailcoat with money in its pockets. lands on a little sharecropper's place.  Ethel Waters, who plays his wife, believes it's from God.  Robeson thinks that's bullshit; he wants to spend the money on tractors, and plows, and everything for this little community.  She wants it for a church.  He wins.  

Another thing about Ellington:  he was a great womanizer.  When we were casting the show, he called me over and said, "I want to tell you something. There's a woman coming to your office," and he told me her name.  We walked out of the office, and he had E.S.P.  This is true!

There's a lady, Lena Horne.  I was the first white man whose hand she shook, because she had intense dislike for whites and still carries it around.  I read somewhere that she married Lenny Hayton because he was white, not because she loved him.  But she learned to like him.  

Duke tells in his book, about Jump for Joy, that there were backstage discussions every night.  Every time the curtain came down, there would be changes made.

Oh, all the time.

Tell me about that.  Were there sharp disagreements?  Were they political in nature?

Some of them were, like no dialect was political in nature.

How did these discussions usually play out?  Were there conservatives or radicals among the cast?

 Yes, like society.  This was not quite true of Meet the People.  There you didn't have anybody who was conservative, none.  I was politicized through Meet the People, in an organizational way.

What about the backstage discussions in Jump for Joy?

Well, there were many of them.

Were certain sketches taken out by consensus?

These people became afraid when they got threats to blow up the theater, that kind of stuff.  One thing I saw in the general cast, among the girls and fellows:  some of them did become radicalized.   They saw something happening, even to themselves.  They began to understand, when you want to get your master's foot off your neck, you've got to take that goddamned foot and twist it.  And it gave them a sense of pride.

There was a gal called Lomax who wrote for the Black paper called The Sentinel, a very brilliant writer with a very mordant pen, razor-edged.  We opened against Cabin in the Sky, the stage version, the same night.  She compared Cabin in the Sky to Booker T. Washington and Jump for Joy to Frederick Douglass.  When I saw that review, that's all I wanted.  

I can see how she would think that way.

I'd never met her, up to that time.  The first time I saw her we fell in love.  Fantastic.  We kept in contact for a number of years, then she went abroad for a and became a columnist.  There were too many of complaints from white people.  She was ahead of her time.  The thing in the past that bothers me most about Jump for Joy is the in the attitudes of reviewers that this was never recognized as a milestone in the theater.

Now, in a sense, too-- this was also true of Meet the People-- was Dorothy Dandridge.  This would play down South, and there were attitudes among white actors, not in the cast, but within the Actors Guild.  In the matter of my driving her home, her mother was black and honest with me, and she understood it.  I could only suppose it; they lived it.   She was afraid.  Some might say it's being paranoid on the part of Blacks.  It's actual.  Dorothy went out when some white boys and girls threw tomatoes at her, and there were some episodes going into restaurants.  For a while, my wife and I lived a very stormy life!  We'd make reservations in restaurants, and we'd come in with Dorothy.  "Sorry, sorry."  I remember one night at the Brown Derby on Vine Street, I told the maitre-d' I'd piss on the floor.  They called the cops, but we got a table.

We introduced her to one of the Nicholas Brothers-- Harold?--  She was married to him.         

Later on in the Forties, you became quite a political activist.  You have a cousin named Michael Blankfort?  

He just died.

I'm sorry to hear that.    

I'm not.  He was an informer, on his own volition, too.  

You're referring to the HUAC hearings that took place here thirty years ago?

He named two people, whom he had no knowledge about:  me and his former wife.    

As a result, did that bring you in front of the Committee?

Oh, no, no, no.  I was at the bottom of the barrel, but I was there.

I've read your testimony, by the way.

It's one of the high points of my life.

Your message rings out, bold and clear.

Oh, I had a wonderful time.  

Was Michael blacklisted?

For about ten minutes.

So he went on working, while you were blacklisted.  You were out of the film business from that point on.

I did a couple of things under pseudonyms.

As in Woody Allen's movie, The Front?

Yes.  I didn't mind keeping a double set of books.  Of course, I'm involved with an aerospace education, on levels of all sorts, and they know all about me.

How did you get involved in that career, and when?

I live by serendipity.   When I was blacklisted, I'd been doing quite well in the motion picture business.  You lived up to everything you made in those days.  I had to work!  Oh, I sold door to door, all that kind of stuff, but I took it in stride.  I wasn't bothered at all about being blacklisted, psychologically.

I don't know how to worry, you see.  I simply don't:  I'm retarded!  It's funny; by a series of coincidences, I got a job with a company called Revell.

Model airplanes?

On my first day, I met the president.  I didn't know who he was, and I got into a big argument with him.  And he offered me a job!  I didn't know who the hell he was.  And six months later, I was a vice-president of the company.  So many letters from kids came to me about those airplanes.  

I talked to Patricia Willard a couple of weeks ago.  She worked for you, is that right?

Yeah, I remember her taking up a lot of my time.

She's on a grant.  She's working on an Ellington book, too.

From the Smithsonian, right?

From the National Endowment for the Arts or Humanities, I'm not sure which.  That's what I should have done!

What are you going to do?  A book?

I've sent a manuscript to a couple of publishers, who don't seem to be interested in my first draft, so I'm working on my second draft.  One of them I interested was the Louisiana State University Press.  The commercial publishers aren't interested in anything about Ellington, as far as I can tell.

 You know, his book didn't sell too well.

 

  

Henry Blankfort, Studio City, 8/13/82, part one

Henry Blankfort and I conversed outdoors, poolside on a patio in his backyard.  I found him extremely engaging, articulate, and eager to tell his story to someone of my generation.  During the course of our talk, I was introduced to his wife Sylvia, and from time to time his young grandson came out, whereupon Henry would ask him to find a cigarette for him.  I was a smoker at that time, and he didn't hesitate to take one of mine, insisting he was doing me a favor by taking it away from me.

Our conversation was leisurely, but organized, and we spent a good two hours together.

HB:  I suppose the way to begin is to start with Jump for Joy, which is how I first met Ellington.

DC:  I'd like to go back to before Jump for Joy.  You were a member of the Hollywood Theater Alliance.  Tell me about that first.

Yes, I was the director for the Hollywood Theater Alliance.  This was back during the Depression, 1939, and a group of writers and I were unhappy about the nation and the world, which is something inborn in writers, I guess.  We felt this town had an enormous amount of talent that had no opportunity.

I was in New York at the time, at a cabaret called TAC, the Theater Arts Cabaret.  We were open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  It was really a showcase for people involved with theater.

Who were the members of TAC?

Oh, I don't know their precise names, but probably from the Theater Guild.   Most of these writers tried our space as a hangout, where they could come as sort of a club and, at the same time, give opportunity.

The people who started the Hollywood Theater Alliance, and then in New York with the Theater Guild and also the Civic Theater downtown.   And we thought we might do the same thing here:  not only a non-profit thing, but a less-profit thing.  We put in some bucks and rented a little place, just Saturdays and Sundays.  The people who performed would get the profits, if there were any.  We'd feed them and write them material for a week.  Each one of us put in money to get the set launched, and we rented a little place on Sunset Boulevard.

Most of the people who started the Hollywood Theater Alliance were left of liberal, and naturally their thinking took on a color taint.  Some of the people in the administration of this city did not like this, so we usually had a [police] Red Squad out here.

Am I correct in thinking this was not an organized [Communist] Party political thing, with a Party fraction behind it?

I assume there was great Party influence, but not in a direct way.

Anyway, we rented this place on Sunset Boulevard and began holding auditions, and several of the city's mothers and fathers didn't like what we were doing.  They would say that we needed a new fire-door here, all sorts of restrictions.  It sort of got our hackles up, and we decided to really go all-out.

We rented a little theater.  It was no longer a cabaret, because we couldn't get a license to serve food.  They put all sorts of obstacles in our way.  So, we simply decided we would do a variety show, and the threads and pieces of it would be the People of our society and our culture.  Because I had a business background, they made me executive director.  I took charge, and it became a fantastic hit.

Tell me about the show itself.

The material in it?

Who was involved on the creative end?

Everybody.  Most of the music was done by Jay Gorney and Henry Meier.  Jay Gorney was the author of "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"  Now, at the age of eighty-five, he's teaching at Columbia [University].

Duke with Sid Kuller, 1941

And we all contributed skits to this thing.  We put this on in a relatively small theater.  In the first two days, we took in about twenty-four dollars, but suddenly it flashed.  The narrative was about Hedda Hopper, the columnist.  She was, like Louella Parsons, very powerful in this town.  There were fireworks.  It attacked all her principles:  it was anti-racist.  One of the numbers had the cast singing the Bill of Rights, word for word.  It got a standing ovation.

We had certain sketches that were so provocative that we had bomb threats.  But it was terrifically successful; we were able to move to larger and larger theaters, and then on to San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.

Who were the stars of the show?

The stars were new and unknown at the time.  Jack Albertson.

His debut, more or less.

Oh, yeah.  This was the first show in the United States that had a mixed cast.  One of them was Dorothy Dandridge.

In Meet the People?  She was also in Jump for Joy.

I discovered her.  A gal named Virginia O'Brien would take auditions for us.  She was frightened stiff.  She had rehearsed at home, but she was so frightened that she stood there as if she were a robot, and the words came out like one of these games they have today.

At the end of the thing, she was so frightened she ran off crying.  I ran after her and grabbed her.  I said, "Baby, you were great!  Do just what you did."  We had a concept different from hers, but hers had a peculiar quality, as if we're all programmed.

Someone at MGM saw Virginia O'Brien and liked her, and she got an offer to sign a contract.  When she came to me, I said, "Take the contract," even though by this time she was a hit in our show.  But if we followed our principles with these kids...

You'd have to let them go.

And now we had to replace her with a Negro gal.  So, I had some auditions, and up comes a beautiful girl.  I saw her mother, Virginia Dandridge, standing by.  And I decided:  Dorothy Dandridge.  I didn't let the cast know about this.  In sounding out some of the people there in the Hollywood Theater Alliance, some were a little disturbed.  (I didn't give a fuck about those things.  I'd walked off contracts with the studios.  If my bosses did things I didn't like, I walked out on them.)  They thought it was fine, but they wondered how the audience would react, and they didn't want to put the whole play in jeopardy.

So, I rehearsed Dorothy away from the cast.  She was just sixteen or seventeen.  I took her to a gown shop on Hollywood Boulevard.  Part of the deal was I'd drive her home every night.  Her mother was very aware of the racism in the studios.

Well, she exploded.  It was one of the most fantastic experiences I've ever had.  She came in two days before the performance, and I said I didn't want any discussion with the cast.  She came out, and one of the spotlights hit her, and after she did her number, the audience stood up and cheered!  She was sensational.

We kept on changing sketches, to keep it alive, contemporary.  In one of them, the Democratic Party is looking for a candidate for President.

In 1939 Roosevelt was in office.

But they didn't know if he'd run for a third term.  Here's what the skit was:  we come to the Oval Office, and the fellow they're going to nominate has his back toward the audience.  He's asked, "How are we going to sell this to the people?"  Turns out he's an actor, and he has a rubber mask on.  It's a mask of Roosevelt!  When he turns around, he's Roosevelt, and he talks like him.  And we had stuff like "It's the Same Old South."

We got threats of bombing, the same thing as with Jump for Joy later on.  But the show was a phenomenal success.  It discovered a log of actors; I would say that out of the cast, at least eighty or ninety per cent of them got contracts with studios.  And we began making some money, so we set up shows that would travel around into little towns in Southern California, to give people a feeling of the theater.  When there were strikes and labor problems, we would send a show in there.

As far as your question before, concerning political guidance for the show, I'm pretty sure not one word was sent from Moscow.

I would imagine not!  I think Uncle Joe had problems of his own.

During the time of the pact between the Soviet Union and the Nazis, we had a number with Hitler and Stalin dancing, each with a knife at the other one's back.  To anyone who was politically aware, this was a treaty of convenience.  The Western nations wanted Hitler to rule the Soviet Union.

Well, it was a great success.  It was the longest-running play in Hollywood for a number of years.  When it ran here, it was in one of the largest theaters in Hollywood.  It got enormous community support, I would say.  The individuals involved weren't making any money.  We put it into these extras and paid these road companies.  We set up classes; we had a place called the Actors' Lab out here.

At this time, you were still making a living as a screenwriter?

Yes.  I think out of the generosity of their hearts, because I was spending so much money myself, I think they gave me an extra $125 a week.  I'd given up some jobs for studios in order to do this.  I'm a strange contradiction:  I've never been interested in money and material things, whatever the reasons.  Because I never felt the pinch of poverty, perhaps, I had no interest in money.

So, we had a couple of road companies going to the major cities.  We were very successful in San Francisco and Chicago.  It didn't have a long run in New York, because I did an unfortunate thing.  Pal Joey was opening the same night as we were, and they had big stars and big names like Gene Kelly, but I said we were going to beat them.  Well, we didn't!

We kept it running about three months.  This was a show imported by New York from California.  We were the outlanders invading the Big Apple.  The press did not look with favor on us.  Politically, the things we were saying were not comfortable garments for the people of New York to wear with ease.

Then they decided to do a Meet the People number two, but I personally was uncomfortable with it.  When we did the original thing, it was done with the kind of flair that I enjoyed; there was no attempt to be serious about a subject.  And just about this time, the Hollywood Theater Alliance wanted to do an all-Negro revue, but I wasn't comfortable with this material.  They worked on it for a year and a half, but nothing came off.  It frittered away.  You see, when writers don't get paid, you can only get their energy for a certain amount of time.

But there was talk in the community about this Negro show.  I was approached by a guy named Sid Kuller.

I talked to him yesterday.

You're serious?  Is he in town?  I've got to call him.

So, I was approached by the American Revue Theater.

But you must have been associated with Sid Kuller on Meet the People.  At least, his name is listed among the show's personnel as a writer.

I think Sid did something, but we never used it.

Maybe he was on the business end?

No, not the business end.  He was a comedy writer.   With Jump for Joy, I supervised the entire production.  This was a time when big bands had kind of folded.  We had an opportunity to get Duke Ellington.

He was playing at the Orpheum Theater.  Sid Kuller had a chance to catch Ellington, possibly at the Orpheum or the Casa Manana.

We signed up Duke at a very reasonable price.  I raised the curtain on that thing for $18,000:  talk about blood, sweat and tears.  Talk about Churchill and the Battle of Britain; this was the battle of Hollywood!

Tell me how you got involved.

Well, I knew some of the guys, and I think I got more credit for Meet the People than I deserved.  I got offers from major studios to be a producer, but I was never interested in the big stuff.  As a matter of fact, when I was writing and producing motion pictures, I selected the area of B pictures for a number of reasons.  For one thing, from my business background I was interested in budgets and producing quality within the budget.  And I had no supervision; all they ever said was, "Henry, you've got two bucks and three days."  I would go out on the sets they'd built for major motion pictures and have a story done for that set.  I remember one instance when Walter Wang had produced a major motion picture, and over a weekend, I did a story to fit these sets. They used to have double bills, and my little picture would open on the same show as a second picture.  And they both had the same sets!  Wang got frantic. He wanted to kill me.  He was a very passionate man.  I used to use some of the same costumes, whatever was there.  I would use contract players.

So, the American revue Theater started.  This was nowhere as politically oriented as Meet the People, in a conscious way.  I saw an enormous opportunity to bring to American audiences what was going on.

It was a kind of fulfillment of that all-Negro revue you had in mind earlier.

Yes, but it wasn't played as if it were an all-Negro revue.  We lampooned things.  For instance, we had a running thing where a Black guy is haunted by a ghost, and the audience expected him to react in terror, but the opposite would happen.

You had a skit with Garbo and Hepburn and Noel Coward.

We had a Noel Coward sketch in there, but the sketch was not written by Noel Coward, but in that idiom.  A number of very interesting things happened; I would talk to the girls who were going to be in the chorus and tell them why I was interested in this play, and say that they were making a contribution to the Black experience.  I said there would be no Negro dialect.   Nick Castle was the director; when I signed him up I thought the director should have full sway.

He did the choreography also.

He was a choreographer.  He came up at Twentieth Century.

He just died, didn't he?

He must have died, because they buried him.  I hope he died before they buried him!

Members of the chorus would come by, one at a time, to my office, and I knew what was on the mind of every one of them.  Here's this pontiff:  I'll get the job if I lay for him.  But I opened up conversations with them and asked them what was on their mind.  I told them that if any of these white guys puts a hand on you, I don't care who they are, I'd kick them right out on their ass.

I remember one time I got a complaint about a sketch that had dancing and dialogue, a sketch with dialect.  I went to a rehearsal unannounced, and I told them, "Don't do it.  I don't care what the director says."  I asked Nick Castle to come by my office.  I told him not to use dialect.  He answered, "But I'm the director."  I told him to tell the actors, and by God he changed!

This was a very exciting thing, staging Jump for Joy, to see the effect on the audience and also on the cast.  Incidentally, it was my first experience with a thing called "tea"; now they call it marijuana.  I met Herb Jeffries in the green room once and asked him, "What's that strange smell?"  There was all this smoke around, and he said, "That's tea, baby."  I didn't know what the hell he was talking about.  I didn't see any cups!

I think he's playing out in the Valley now.  He was a very interesting guy, with many facets.  he was so light skinned he could pass.  He had a brother who did.

He worked out here before he joined Ellington, acting in westerns.  He was known as the "Bronze Buckaroo."

Anyway, when I saw him in his dressing room, he said he was going into the Navy.  I said, "Don't worry about white people.  There's nothing white about any of us, except our skeletons.  I said, "Take pride in the fact you're a Negro.  I'm proud I'm a Jew, but I just happen to be one.  So what?"  For some reason, he never went into the Navy, something physical, I guess.

How well did you know Duke?

Oh, I knew him fine.

Did you meet him at Sid Kuller's place?  He had parties every Saturday night.

Parties?  I practically lived on Central Avenue.  Central Avenue is in the heart of Watts.  Now, Duke could have gotten into any hotel in LA, but not his band.  So, the hotel they occupied was the Dunbar. They took a bunch of rooms, one after the other down the hallway.  

He had this interesting thing:  he knew he was black, but he was not an agitator.  I used to argue with him, and he'd say, "Henry, you're an agitator."   I told him I felt Black people in this country were not being treated fairly.  I used to argue that whether or not Black people receive their rights is up to them, as well as white people fighting along with them.  At around this time, he and his band had been commissioned to play at something, a coming-out party, by Nelson Rockefeller in Tarrytown, New York. but all the hotels were taken.  Rockefeller found them places to stay-- in the stables!  I said, "You took this shit?  It might not make any difference to you, but it does to me.  If it were a white person, that's where they'd belong:  in a stable."

 He was a very religious man and an enormously generous guy in many, many ways.  I remember one time at a stage door; he always drew crowds at a stage door.  A brother came up and whispered something in Ellington's ear.  Duke had a guy named Smitty, who kept business records for him.  He called him over and said, "Give this boy some togs."

I thought it was Jonesy.

No, Jonesy was his valet.  Jonesy later had a story about Duke's home on Sugar Hill, in Harlem, where Duke would give away clothes.  They were old clothes, but they were new.  He had like fifty of the same kind of suits.

Very generous.  I once saw him buying three Cadillacs at the same time; that was on Wilshire Boulevard.  One of them for his wife in Washington, one for his girlfriend in Philadelphia, and one for Bea-- is that her name?

Yes.  Bea Ellis.  Did you get to know her?

Sure.

Did she come out to L.A.?

She was at every rehearsal, with all those girls.  She was ready to take out that razor [laughs].  She watched over him like a hawk.

She died not long after he.  I have the idea that Duke was not involved with the content of the show at all.

He enjoyed it, but he didn't know what it was.  If he did, he certainly kept it to himself.  I could never get him into a discussion, really.  You see, with Duke, a kind of legend grew up around him.  Orson Welles was close to him.  I think they worked on some stuff together.

Anyway, the show was very successful out here, and Duke became very successful out here.  After the curtain went down at eleven o'clock, we had jam sessions afterward.  They all got onstage, and the audience was really nutty.  It was fantastic.

He also had this feeling about money, as though there was some kind of gold mine opening up.  I remember once, when I stayed at his apartment in New York, he needed a piece of paper to write on.

He said, "Go over to the desk and find something."  I found an envelope from Columbia or RCA  or something.  It wasn't open, but it had a transparent address window, and there was a check in there.  I said, "Duke, there's a check in here."  He said, "Let me see it."  Forty-two hundred dollars in royalties.  He hadn't even opened the money!

He also was very glib.  It obviously came from his innate ability:  he never had to work hard on his music.  It came out of the vibes in his soul.  But the sweat that it put me through!  I kept asking, "Duke, where's the score?"

"Don't worry about it."  This was three or four days before the opening.  "Duke, we've got to have this thing."

Jonesy took me to Duke's room at the Dunbar, which had a tub.  And Duke gets into the tub with a board across it and big sheets of wrapping paper, like you'd see at a butcher's store, and a gallon of chocolate ice cream.  I think he drank scotch, or whatever the hell it was, with milk.  Now, if only this scene could be photographed:  here's what would happen.  He'd scrawl some stuff down, and "Swee-Pea" -- Strayhorn-- would come and take the papers from him, go into a room with a beat-up old upright piano and do some arranging.  Then he would take his arrangement down the hall to all the men, one at a time.  They were very small rooms.

Then he'd begin doodling.  Duke would be writing, he would be arranging, and Duke would be listening and yell out.  It was the wildest thing!  I would say by ten or eleven the next morning, he'd worked the night through with the score.  I'm trying to think of the lyricist on his songs.  Was it Webster?

Paul Webster.

A very meticulous guy, very precise.

Had he been around long before this?

Most of the writers I hired had had some recognition.  But Duke's rocket began to flare then.  Zoom!  He began getting all kinds of offers.  But he held on to the contract.

Everywhere I've looked there's a different version of this story.  Someone wanted him in NewYork?

A guy named Friedman was his agent from the William Morris office.

Another thing Kuller suggested for the closing of the show was the military draft.  This was November, just before World War Two.

December 7.  The draft took some of the guys, but it wasn't a major factor.

Mercer Ellington says there were financial problems.

Oh, we always operated on a shoelace.

With a successful show, that's difficult to understand.  You played to full houses.

There were people in that show who were uneasy about it.  It's like the "moral majority" supporting Reagan now.

Who are we talking about, supporting the show?  John Garfield put up some money.

Not a hell of a lot.  Nobody put in a hell of a lot.

Joe Pasternak?

Oh, a thousand bucks.

This article says otherwise.  Joe Pasternak gave you a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, according to Kuller.

Oh, I'll tell you what Joe Pasternak did.  We had to put up a bond for musicians and stagehands, and Pasternak put up half of it.  But there's no check for twenty-five thousand dollars that I ever saw.

Even though the show was doing well, you weren't rolling in money.

I don't think the show made any money.  Did Kuller say anything?

He said there were packed houses, standing-room only.

We didn't charge much for tickets.  We were going to do another show after that, called Zero Hour.  I have a note from Theodore Dreiser.  I have it framed.  He enclosed a check for a hundred bucks.  To get a check from Theodore Dreiser-- for a writer to contribute money:  it's usually the other way around.

Was Zero Hour a straight drama?

Yes.  It took place on a college campus.

 

  

 

     

 

Henry Blankfort, far right, confronts HUAC in Hollywood, 1951.

I.     L.A. Times Obit, June 22, 1993

Henry Blankfort; Screenwriter Was Blacklisted in McCarthy Era

Henry Blankfort, 90, a screenwriter who became a publicist after he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era died Wednesday in North Hollywood of cardiac arrest.  A native of New York, Blankfort moved to LA in 1936 and three years later became director of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, where he co=wrote its "Meet the People."  He wrote or co-wrote 25 screenplays, including "Tales of Manhattan" and "Double Exposure."  During World War II, Blankfort made military films for the Signal Corps.  His show business career ended after he refused in 1951to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was seeking information about Communists in Hollywood.  

II.    Interview,  Studio City home, 8/13/82

Henry Blankfort spoke with me for two hours.  Throughout our conversation, he was articulate, remembered the past vividly, and was eager to tell me his story.  When I mentioned my earlier talk with Sid Kuller, Blankfort was surprised he was still alive and living in Beverly Hills.  He resolved to give Kuller a call. 

     A. Genesis of Meet the People, 1939

 HB was then the exec dir of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, described as "mostly a writers' hangout."  Evolved into a co-op to produce cabaret theater in LA, music and schtick comedy.  New York at the time had much more of this kind of entertainment.

Before MTP, the Alliance had conceived a play with the theme of fascism     

     B.  The Alliance was not exactly a non-profit.  It was a "less profit," out-of -pocket seed money.  The performers were paid with whatever the show took in.  Most of the Alliance's members were "left of liberal."  (Not an organized CPUSA fraction!). Meet the People was strongly influenced by their outlook.

When trying to open the show as a cabaret, they couldn't get a liquor license.  So MTP became instead a "variety show."  HB:  "tremendously successful... made me the executive director in charge of production."  The creative team included Jay Gornay,  H. Myers, for the music.  The entire cast contributed skits at the ? Theater.  The box office took in $24 on opening day.  The columnist Hedda Hopper denounced the show "attacked all our principles, but audiences gave it standing ovations." 

We continued talking about the Red Hunt, HUAC in the 1950s.  MTP had a decidedly anti-racist thrust and introduced a song whose lyrics quoted the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution.  The show received bomb threats.  But it was so successful that it was able to perform in ever larger venues in LA, even opened in San Francisco and aimed for Broadway.  Initial stars were Jack Albert and Virginia O'Brien.

By the coincidence of O'Brien's having to leave the show, according to Blankfort, MTP was the very first show with a biracial cast, by the presence of the teen-aged Dorothy Dandridge (who would perform again in Ellington's show two years later).  Blankfort auditioned her privately, away from the rest of the cast, but she was frightened and did badly at first and wanted to leave the room.  

Blankfort followed her out and told her she'd been great.  After continuing private rehearsals, Blankfort announced to the rest that Dandridge would replace O'Brien and ignored those who feared how audiences might react.  Blankfort drove her home at night.  

Dorothy Dandridge's movie career began (soon after?) with a contract with MGM.

"Sensational hit":  The show kept changing sketches to remain involved in the issues of the day.  There was an election campaign skit, in which an actor with his back to the audience turns to reveal his rubber mask of FDR.  He goes on to perform a song, "The Same Old South."  The show began making money.  After touring a wider swath of Southern California, the show opened in SF.  Parts of the show were also performed at strikers' picket lines.**

MTP was the longest-running Hollywood theater attraction for many years.  The show spawned road companies and Actor's Lab classes.  Blankfort himself earned $150 a week and left his usual job as a screenwriter for a time.

MTP ran successfully in SF and Chicago, but in New York its competition included the huge hit Pal Joey (Rodgers & Hart?) starring Gene Kelly, and consequently MTP closed after a very short run.  In New York the critics regarded it as "outlanders from California invading the Bi9g Apple."  Once the company returned home, some had the idea of mounting a MTP number two, but Blankfort was uncomfortable with it.  In the end there was no serious intent about such a production."

But in the following year the Hollywood Theater Alliance conceived the idea of an all-Negro revue.  Their first intent didn't attain fruition, but the following year a series of circumstances brought JFJ to another Hollywood theater smash hit.

HB met Sid Kuller, who then lived in Beverly Hills, whose screen writing a few years earlier. had contributed to the controversial (?) film  Zero Hour.  After they had exchanged ideas, the pair organized the American Revue Theater to have another try at an all-Negro revue.  There was considerable support in the show business community.

Parenthetically, Blankfort was optimistic:  "I have a feeling the space program is going to bring peace to the world.  Nations, as they exist today, are a silly thing."

Blankfort supervised the entire production of JFJ.  

*The title sounds like it might have inspired some ditties in Jump for Joy a couple of years later.  Ellington's show was controversial in the same way.

**Answering an earlier question of mine about the direct involvement of the CPUSA, here remarked, 

"Moscow had nothing to do with it.  We went on to the subject of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, specifically a cartoon of Stalin dancing with Hitler, each one hiding a dagger 

An Excerpt from “Twelve Essays in Critical Appreciation Concerning the Music of Duke Ellington”

 

Among the memoirs by persons who made the acquaintance of Ellington upon his first visit to England in 1933, one of the most interesting is that of Russell Woodward, penned at Cambridge in October of that year.  A book-length manuscript, excerpts from which were used in 1935 by the Associated Negro Press, most of Woodward’s twelve essays are devoted to analysis of Ellington’s compositions and the playing styles of his soloists.  The one included here, however, is a good example of the kind of impression Ellington made on the English.

The complete typewritten manuscript may be found in the Claude Barnett file of the library of the Chicago Historical Society.  The following text, except for minor typographical corrections, reproduces exactly the original manuscript.

 

The Eleventh Essay

Although these essays are critical rather than biographical, I feel impelled to include a personal note on the subject of the man who composes the music; and though the short essay which follows may seem out of place in an appreciation of his work, it is not intended to serve as mere “fan fodder.”  Its only purpose is to provide yet another viewpoint from which the music of Duke Ellington may be studied; If it fails in such purpose, then it must be condemned as irrelevant.

I enjoyed a great deal of Ellington’s company when he was in England.  Whether the pleasure was mutual I do not know, for the charm of the man is such that he could only silence the most effective of “Some of These Days.”  Most composers would have become embittered by such treatment, but not so the Duke.  He knows that variety shows provide the wherewithal to retain his orchestra.  That being so, he must make sacrifices in one direction and nurture his brain-children in his spare time.  It is to his eternal credit that he does it with good will.

Perhaps it is his humour which preserves him from bitterness.  His sense of humour is just right; not excessive, not irrevocably intellectual, not cruel.  His laughter is not reserved for the climax of an anecdote.  The humour of “Ducky Wucky” can only be fully appreciated when you have seen Ellington’s complete smile—complete in the sense that it is the expression of his inmost feelings.  He smiles sincerely.  His humour makes him tolerant, and only on two occasions have I known him to be vexed; one of them was when he was describing the relative amount of applause awarded to “Lazy Rhapsody” and “Tiger Rag” at a concert arranged specially for those interested in his music, and then his annoyance was directed, not against the audience but against the organisers of the concert who promised him a receptive audience and whose optimism was unjustified.  (I am afraid that we differed at that point:  my sympathies were all for the courageous “Melody Maker” people who must have suffered a painful disillusionment.)  The other occasion was when, after playing at a dance at Bolton, the driver of his car lost the way home and eventually deposited him in Liverpool at about six a.m.  Even that mishap did not perturb him very violently, and after he had slept he treated the matter as a joke.  “I can drive a car and I can read signposts, so I don’t see why I should have paid that guy to do it,” was his only remark.  He is the best tempered of men, and his indignation is only roused by circumstances which justify it.\

Jack Hylton meets the band

His activities as a composer excepted, he is inordinately lazy.  Whether this is inborn or an acquired habit of sleeping whenever an opportunity occurs in his most exacting life, I do not know; I suspect it is a combination of both.  Certainly, he is the nearest living approach to Rip Van Winkle, for there cannot be another man who can sleep for so long at a stretch.  Combined with an absolute lack of any time sense, this attribute has caused many anxious moments to his managers.  To refuse to admit the claims of the clock is from a worldly point of view sheer madness; Duke had to have his keepers.  Unfortunately, the “head-keeper” was no mean exponent of the art of sleeping either, and I well remember one particularly exciting morning when we had to catch the 11:40 train.  At 11:39 I had given up hope and relinquished the compartment, but half a minute later a white cap with Mr. Ellington underneath it came sauntering along.  Apparently at 11:30 he had been in bed.  I may add that he was staying at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, and that exchange station is right at the other end of town!

The characteristic which endears him to everyone is his modesty, for there is nothing sham about it.  He does not deprecate his own music, for as is right he believes in it, but he finds no pleasure in talking has succeeded.   Abuse “Sophisticated Lady” to the point of obscenity, and the reply will be, “You don’t like it?”; or praise “Old Man Blues” to the skies and the reply will be either, “Yes, Barney plays marvelously in that,” or “Look, what’s that building on the corner?”  Constructive criticism he welcomes, but he evades discussion of the points at issue.  From all members of his band, I have heard the same tribute: “The Duke’s a grand guy; he’s never changed.”  All the limelight and publicity leave him unspoilt.  He is so utterly natural, so absolutely devoid of affectation, that no success could harm him.  His interest in life, the people around him, and the little events of the day preclude any possibility of egotism.  His work takes up the remainder of his waking hours.

At the London Palladium

His faith in his own music is not a relative faith.  He never stops to consider whether it is worse than this or better than that.  His praise for the work of other composers is never affected by the fact that he himself is a composer.  One night when I was looking through some records in his dressing-room, I found, hidden between a Bach fugue and a Don Redman record, Spike Hughes’ “Sirocco.”  I turned to Duke and asked his opinion of it, and for the next few minutes I was regaled with a glowing eulogy of Hughes’ work in general and “Sirocco” in particular, a speech so sincere that it might have come from a young student of music.  It was from that moment that I realized his essential bigness, and I felt pity for the little critic who had, in abusing his music, called him “shoddy.”

          

So far only the lazy charm of the man has been mentioned; that is the side of his character which is discernable.   But behind these delightful attributes is a power which is felt subconsciously rather than discerned, the power of a great artist.  He strength of character needs no emphasis; it does not prod you in the stomach, for it does not require a focal point for its force.  He commands by suggestion, for on the vast majority of occasions his suggestions are obviously right; if they are not and it is explained to him why they are not, he agrees instantly.  That is how he rehearses his orchestra.  Command a man to do something and he may refuse; command his respect first, and a mere hint may be enough.  Only greatness can command that respect, especially among artists.

Sincerity in itself is not greatness, as the more extreme romantics would have us believe, but greatness is not possible without sincerity.  Ellington’s sincerity is a part of his life; when he says “Thank you,” he is grateful, for he is intensely of any kindness toward him.  It is that sincerity combined with a refusal to admit defeat which must have helped him out when jazz was scorned even more than is so today, and when only the inanities of “Rhapsody in Blue” were considered worthy of attention—presumably because it displays a great deal of misplaced cleverness and is “symphonic.”  It is that sincerity which has brought forth the best from his men, which as kept the orchestra together for an unprecedented length of time, and which at length has begun to reap its reward.  The music of Duke Ellington is the voice of a man, proud of his race, unaffected, far above the petty worlds of “commercial art” and hero worship, a man whose companionship elevates those with whom he associates toward his own level.  When I read again the lives of many great artists with their drink and their women, my regard for him is the greater.  It is a fine thing indeed when the artistic temperament exhibits itself as it does in the case of the Duke.  

THINGS AIN'T, RECAPITULATION AND CODA

 V.  RECAPITULATION AND CODA

 

This study has traced the rise, decline and resurrection, as it were, of one African-American artist, Duke Ellington, but it has attempted to balance his story against the economic, social and political background which intrudes upon it at every turn.  Without this background, Ellington’s life cannot be portrayed fully, yet the image of the man left us by most writers has been almost devoid of the often unpleasant facts of existence for a Black genius trapped in a racist society.

It is for this reason that I’ve paid rather scant attention to the subject of his particular musical genius, since other writers have commented at length, and often perceptively, about it.  A full assessment of what Ellington represented musically is a tempting project in itself, but it was perhaps best stated in a remark, attributed to Miles Davis, that all jazz musicians should daily get on their knees to thank Duke Ellington.  Their debt to Ellington, in a musical sense, derives not so much from any direct influence he had upon his contemporaries or descendants—Ellington was, as a pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger, unique, although Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk might be counted among his progeny, as it does from his development of a new range of expression for Black folk culture.  Through Ellington, particularly in its use of the chromatic scale.

Ellington, along with others of his generation, recreated the African-American folk idiom into perhaps the most pervasive cultural force of the past century.  It has indeed transcended nearly every geographical and political boundary on this planet.  Its sheer impact upon world culture dwarfs the achievement of any European composer who ever lived.  The role of Duke Ellington in establishing this music was, of course, preeminent.

At the same time, African-American music has been rejected consistently by the white cultural establishment.  While its creators have been ruthlessly exploited by the purveyors of popular entertainment, untold fortunes having been wrung from jazz and its commercialized derivatives, it has never been given its due recognition by the elite of “serious music.”  Most of Ellington’s career was devoted to gaining this sort of recognition, and many of his works, particularly those he composed for performance at Carnegie Hall in the 1940s, must be considered in this context.  Of these, critic Stanley Dance wrote,

The longer works and suites offered Ellington opportunities to express himself more expansively and with more freedom, to “put on” the audience playfully and, more important, to proceed with a series of “social significance thrusts.”  He was a subtle tactician engaged in warfare all his life who those who cheated him in business whenever they could, and those who discriminated against what he called “my people.” …

He walked, as it were, a musical tightrope, a smile on one side of his face, a frown on the other.[1]

As his music was the expression, from his point of view, of a complex set of contradictory social relations, we find the same forces expressed in Ellington’s personality, both in the dapper aristocrat he appeared to be in public and in the little-known character he adopted in private, which some found unpleasant.  To a remark, made by one critic after Ellington’s death, that he was a vain and cunning man, Dance replied,

Cunning, in the sense that he was very shrewd, he certainly had to be, to fight powerful adversaries.  Inevitably there were many who resented a black musician attaining the position he did and commanding so much respect throughout the world.

Another critic, detecting “a vein of snobbery” in Ellington, caused Dance to comment that, in taking his music around the world, it was necessary for Ellington to reciprocate the respect he received from heads of state and others, because he felt “when they showed him respect he was gaining respect for his race.”[2]  There is at least a kernel of truth in this judgment.  It corroborates Mercer Ellington’s observation of his father’s desire to be considered “a credit to his race,” and was in fact the keystone of a social philosophy which seemed an almost comic anachronism to the generation which grew up in the latter half of Ellington’s career.

To his own generation, and to the Blacks who came of age in the 1930s, Ellington was as much symbolic ideal as were Billy Eckstine and Miles Davis in the following decades.  Since the symbology of success in America has always been a matter of finances, it was perhaps Ellington’s acumen as a businessman, rather than his stature as a musician, which garnered him such adulation at the zenith of his career as a popular performer.  Whatever success he achieved in this regard, however, was done at considerable expense; Ellington remained, to the end of his days, a “sharecropper” eating well at the white man’s table.

Success was therefore a matter of compromises and sacrifices.  If Ellington was able to utilize his superlative musical genius to offset the restrictions imposed upon him as an artist, he was not so fortunate when it came to the role he wished to play socially and politically.  Ellington’s espousal of racial pride, which in the context of the 1930s and ‘40s appeared militant, and had to be curtailed.  The war was somewhat responsible for changing his persuasion, but he was shaken more severely by the outright persecution inflicted upon him, both by the government and by the Negro establishment, in the early 1950s.

Before that time, Ellington had made gestures of patriotism.  Upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, the Ellington orchestra played a long program of his compositions on the Blue Network (the predecessor to ABC) and was said to be “proud of the fact this was really the only American music heard on thee air that dreadful day.”[3]  Years before, he had broadcast all night from a Chicago Ballroom to keep the lines open for bulletins about the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

Thirty years later, however, this patriotism (now subsidized by the U.S. State Department)     appeared forced and was used to camouflage the oppression of Blacks in the United States.  Of his 1963 tour of Indian, for example, Ellington wrote,

At the press conferences, we would talk about jazz and, very often, the race situation in America.  Some of them wanted information, but others wanted to discuss it from a more provocative viewpoint, and then I would have to explain that the situation of the Negro in America was more complex than we had time to clarify, but I always told them that the Negro has a tremendous investment in our country.  We have helped to build it and we have invested blood in every war the country has fought, and this accounts for what has been happening.  “What is being done now?” they would ask, and I would reply that I was sure our leaders have strategy, but that if I knew it I wouldn’t be very bright to reveal it, to cast it around for publication, because it would help our opponents to put up an even more formidable resistance than they now have.  One man asked me, “Why hasn’t the Negro artist done more for the cause?”  That upset me and I said, “If you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn’t ask a question like that.”  I came back to him later, after I had cooled off a   bit, and explained that we had been working on the Negro situation and h his condition in the South since the ‘30s, that we had done shows[4], musical works, benefits, etc., and that the American Negro artist had been among the first to make major contributions.”[5]

Elsewhere, Ellington reported a similar skirmish abroad concerning the race question in America:

“The United States has a minority problem… Negroes are one of several minority groups, but the basis of the whole problem is economic rather than a matter of color.”

While my opponent is busily thinking, I give him another opportunity by introducing another subject.

“The United States has an extremely accurate news service and the press enjoys almost complete freedom,” I claim.  “Did you. Incidentally, hear about the five little girls who were burned up in that church down in Alabama the other day?”

“Yes”, he says with great triumph.

“Well, that was only a couple of days ago, and I’m not sure anybody else would have let such news get out that quickly if it had happened in their backyard.”

He has nothing to say to that, so I carry on:

“You have heard of the Reverend Martin Luther King, I’m sure.”

“Yes,” he says, with a measure of exultancy in his voice again.

“Let us say that he is the representative of an oppressed race of people…  When I saw him just before I left Chicago a few weeks ago, he was coming down Michigan Avenue.  I waved to  him, and in order for him to say hello to me, he had to have his chauffeur stop this long Cadillac.  An aide got out and opened the door, and two motor policemen in front of the car, and two more behind, had to stoop so that he could get out and shake hands with me. This is the way the man lives and travels who is representing that oppressed race, so the standards are not the same every place in the world. They vary according to where you are.”[6] 

Such incidents, repeated everywhere in the world Ellington traveled, contributed strongly toward the Uncle Tom image which would alienate his younger audience.  In many instances, he showed an astonishing lack of tact, as during his performance in 1969 at San Francisco State University, while the African-American students there were conducting a strike.  According to Ralph Gleason, Ellington’s $3,000 fee was “paid out of [university president S.I.] Hayakawa’s contingency fund, the initial $50,000 of which Chicago millionaire W. Clement Stone contributed.”  Members of the local Black Student Union and American Federation of Teachers grew concerned that Ellington “did not know where Hayakawa was at.”  Contrary to rumors that Ellington would endorse the BSU at his concert, his announcement attempted to skirt the issue: “This concert is totally dedicated to those of us who are determinedly dedicated to developing the Black Studies program.  This remark drew applause, but when Ellington, mentioned him as “our choreographer,” he was booed loudly.  At a reception after the concert, “a BSU member smarting from Ellington’s even mentioning Hayakawa, put the Duke down in plain terms.”[7]

In public during his last years, Ellington was a creature of the establishment, so much so that it is difficult to determine his feelings about major social issues.  In Mercer Ellington’s account, there was much more perception in his thought than he allowed the public to see:

  Like Martin Luther King, he was not so much interested in the race aspect per ce as in the consideration of minority groups, the downtrodden and deprived.  The idea of equality he held paramount, progressively so toward the culmination of his life. He equated the black situation  inn America with other troubled situations in the world, like that of the Arabs versus the Jews, or the one-time predicament of African Pygmies under Senegalese domination.  He watched with great interest the struggle for independence from Britain in the West Indies.

The principle here—the immorality of man’s enslavement of man—and its inadmissibility took hold of his mind quite early on.  It was strengthened and authenticated by what he read in the Bible:  that man   should not suffer under another man’s hand.  He began to think more subjectively, seeing himself as a man placed in a subordinate position as a black man.  The idea that he should try to change what destiny seemed to have decreed grew in him, and stayed with him till the end.  Very often, and in many ways, he came out and stated honestly and definitely how he felt, but this was only with people he was close to and not for the record.[8]

Ellington was careful to insert clauses against segregated audiences in all his contracts.  In addition to Martin Luther King, he was known to admire Paul Robeson, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, but he deplored the various ideological, national and caste divisions among Blacks, insisting at the same time that “blacks in the United States should look on themselves as Americans primarily and should try to straighten things out within the family before going outside.”  As for himself, however, the raciaHisl struggle “was an area where Ellington never wanted to push himself to the front, never wanted esteem or to be considered heroic.  He preferred to be accused of doing too little than to be lauded as a great man helping his people when within himself he felt unable to do enough,”[9]

Ellington’s well-known aversion to communism is reported by his son to have been genuine and based on religious convictions (“He disliked anything the played down the idea of the church, and he knew that communism never tolerated any philosophy other than its own.”[10]), yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that his pronouncements on this subject were based, at least in part, of the fear of a repetition of the red-baiting which had scandalized his name and nearly terminated his career in 1950.  His professional association with radicals, including Communists, had been far more than casual, but whatever regard he had for them had to be sacrificed to create the image of Ellington as the ideal representative of his race.

In a sense, Ellington was prosaically typical of his race, at least according to the portrait of him drawn by his son, for his life seems a perfect case history for E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie.  Indeed, the private life Duke Ellington exhibited traits that went beyond mere superstition, religiosity, or even mysticism, to what his son concedes was outright paranoia:

I firmly believe that from around 1950 onward Ellington began to develop a pronounced form of paranoia.  He blamed different things on different sets of people.  In world events, he believed prominent men were often influenced to act wrongly or indulge in reprisals by women somewhere in the background.  He’d take headlines and check back to prove his theory.  When something bad happened on the international level, he often saw the handiwork of people in powerful positions, communists, financiers, or both.  While he believed that communists worked ceaselessly to overthrow the power of the United States, he also held that capitalists worked exclusively for personal gain, something he considered true of unions as well.  The impact of their machinations on the society he lived in truly disturbed him…

In general, he adopted an uncritical attitude toward personal idiosyncrasies, so that where homosexuals were concerned he might have seemed part of their society, whereas in truth he never was.  But although he always claimed not to believe in categories, he was in fact both criticizing and categorizing when he ascribed certain troubles to what he called the Faggot Mafia.[11]

 It is striking that a man who is now considered the most successful musician in the history of jazz should have emerged with the psychology of a victim, which he of course was.  That same history since Ellington’s greatest creative years, perhaps in reaction against the “credit to the race” syndrome he typified, has produced a new set of musical heroes along with a new musical language, concomitant with the African-American’s reassessment of his cultural values.  All of them have faced the same social dilemma as Ellington, and regardless of their various cultural stances, they too have been victims.  The African-American dilemma in the arts will not be overcome until the racist society which nourishes it is abolished.

---

[1] Stanley Dance, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, January 1946.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke… & Other Heroes, p. 165.

[4] MIMM, pp. 308-309.

[5] Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke… p. 165.

[6] Ibid., pp. 234-235.

[7] Ibid., pp. 184-185.

[8] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 181.

[9] Ibid., pp. 184-185.

[10] Ibid.

 

[11] Ibid., pp. 157-158.