Ellington's Attitude Toward Women— The Man With Four Sides,4 (+Bonus)

(This essay stands on its own, but it is also the last of four inspired by Ellington’s unproduced musical show, The Man With Four Sides. You can find the others in the Index. Below, for Paying Subscribers, is a rare printed interview with Edna Ellington, Duke’s wife.)

We really have no idea why The Man With Four Sides never made it to Broadway. The usual opinion about Duke’s unproduced shows in general, including this one, is that the music is strong but the scripts are weak. I shared with you some pages last time from Duke’s own typed script, and there may or not be issues with how well-written the dialogue is and so on—but, let’s be honest, there are serious issues with the content. In the show, a man is rejected by a woman, and the very last scene has him referring to her as a b..ch and imagining that he is whipping her a hundred times. After ninety-nine, he has some kind of psychological block and can’t continue. The End! That’s how Duke ended it. Seriously??!!

Ellington is clearly expressing anger toward women here, in particular against women who dominate men. The very end is a bit difficult to understand, but it seems to suggest that if the character were a “real man,” he would be able to continue to a hundred lashes of the whip, and perhaps beyond. The script is also concerned with sex and prostitutes and a striptease artist. Ellington was so wrapped up in his own perspective that he didn’t see how this story would seem from someone else’s point of view. He didn’t realize that such a story, and such an ending, would be impossible on Broadway in 1955—or in 2024, for that matter! It’s unknown why his first investor, Lorella Val-Mery, dropped out, but I can imagine that after she read the script she may have decided not to get involved.

It is well known that Duke was a womanizer—I’m not giving away any secrets by saying so. In 1999, on a TV special called Swingin’ with Duke, part of the PBS Great Performances series, Wynton Marsalis expressed his admiration for Duke’s way with women. Talking with the late broadcast reporter Ed Bradley, he said that “Duke loved women, and they loved him.” He declared that Duke’s music “could put you in a bed,” and he concluded “that’s something that men all over the world wish they could understand.” Here are the two relevant excerpts:

Clearly, Wynton is trying a bit too hard to put a positive spin on Duke’s womanizing. But what was the reality? Some of the most revealing evidence of Ellington’s attitudes toward women can be heard in about twenty hours of taped conversations with Carter Harman. Harman (1918-2007) was a trained modern classical composer, a music critic for the New York Times and Time magazine in the 1950s, and a record producer. A man of many talents, he was also a decorated pilot during World War II. Although there is no author listed on the famous 1956 Time cover story on Ellington (as was often the case in those days when a piece was written by a staff member), it was Harman’s work. To research the article, he spent a Sunday with Duke in Las Vegas in May 1956, and recorded a few hours of conversation. Apparently, they hit it off, because in 1964 he was preparing to work on Duke’s memoir, and they met up several times from late May through early November 1964 all over the U.S.A. while Duke was on tour. They recorded many more hours of talk in the car, in Duke’s hotel rooms, and so on. That project ended because, according to Harman, he wanted to show the private Duke, whereas Ellington did not really want to reveal himself in public. When Duke finally wrote the memoir, it was of course with his old friend Stanley Dance—credited only in the Acknowledgements—and one learns nothing about the private Ellington from Music is My Mistress.

But Harman’s tapes survive (at the Smithsonian Institution), and in those roughly twenty hours, most of which I have studied, Duke talks a lot about his career of course, and a bit about segregation. Harman shared some excerpts of those tapes at an Ellington conference in 1991. But Duke also talks a lot about women, and Harman did not share those moments. Harman was a white man from old Virginia stock (on his father’s side), but somehow, Duke felt very at ease with him. Duke told Harman dirty jokes, made numerous graphic comments about women’s anatomy, and consistently talked about women strictly as sexual objects, to which “a man is entitled.” In all the hours of conversation, I don’t recall Ellington once referring to “my wife” or “my girlfriend,” and certainly there is nothing about love. In fact, there is no indication anywhere in these conversations that he “loves” women at all, only that he enjoys their bodies.

So, is it true that Duke loved women, or did he just enjoy having sex with them? Was he really a romantic, or did he just like seeing how women would react to his compliments, and learning which of his “pickup lines” would work? Was he ever “head over heels” in love with any woman? If so, who was it? Nobody comes to mind, and no such woman has been mentioned in the hundreds of books and thousands of articles about Duke. And think of the pain that he caused to his wife Edna by his many affairs—or to his long-term mistress Evie. Duke and Edna’s son Mercer, in his insightful memoir, says that Duke came closest to showing love to Evie, but even there “It is hard to say how deep Pop's feeling for Evie was” (p.203). Mercer sums up Duke’s relationship with women in this passage (p.128):

Despite the fact that he was involved with so many women, I would say that, apart from his mother and sister, he had a basic contempt for women. He spent so much time celebrating and charming them, but basically he hated them. In many cases, once he uncovered a weakness, or brought them to heel, so to speak, he passed on to someone else; but it was a love-hate thing actually, and more hate than love.

Mercer’s book is full of very thoughtful observations and should be taken seriously. The expression “brought them to heel” comes from dog training, but it is commonly used for any situation where a person manages to dominate or “tame” another person. Mercer is suggesting, I believe, that when a woman became too attached to Duke, too needy or dependent, he lost interest and moved on.

The hatred of women that Mercer observed in his father comes through in the script for Man With Four Sides. Surely, that’s a major reason that it was never produced. And, although we rightly worship Ellington the composer, there is value and relevance in looking realistically at his attitude toward women. By so doing, we gain an understanding of this complicated person who produced so much astonishing music.

All the best,
Lewis

P.S. I thank John Howland and Julius Tolentino for help with background research for this essay. All of the content is mine alone, of course.

P.P.S. Below, for Paying Subscribers, is a rare interview with Edna Ellington, Duke’s wife.