Duke

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Authors: Terry Teachout
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whom Duke married in 1918 and from whom he parted a decade later. She was interviewed only once, for a profile published in Ebony seven years before her death in 1966 in which she spoke tactfully but, it appears, truthfully about their life together. They fell in love, she said, in high school, at a time when he had “just learned the difference between girls and boys.” She played piano herself and wanted to become a music teacher, and she claimed to have taught her dashing boyfriend “how to read music.” Judging by her pictures, Edna was both fair-skinned and pretty. According to Mercer Ellington, “My mother’s folks were from a higher station of black society than my father’s. They were schoolteachers and principals, and they considered all musicians, including Duke Ellington, low-life.” Mercer thought that they would not have married had she not become pregnant. But the children of U Street were taught to do the right thing, so Edna and Edward were wed on July 2, 1918, with the birth of Mercer Kennedy Ellington following eight months later. In 1959 Edna spoke of the early months of their marriage as “hard days.” In addition to painting signs and playing piano with other men’s bands, her new husband was moonlighting as a messenger for the Treasury Department. But like many another teenage father, he was brought up short by what he later called the “tremendous responsibilities” of parenthood. He placed his first ad three months after Mercer was born, and soon he was making enough money to buy a house and a car.

    “I’m still hooked”: Edna Thompson, taken around the time that she married Duke Ellington in 1918. Though he left her for good a decade later, the unhappy couple remained legally married for the rest of Edna’s life
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    Ellington never spoke about Edna to reporters, nor did he publicly acknowledge that they did not divorce after separating. It was not until the Ebony interview that most of his later fans became aware of his wife’s existence, and all that she said at the time about their decision to remain legally married was, “I’m still hooked on Ellington. . . . I don’t want a divorce and neither does he.” He must have found it handy to use her existence as an excuse not to marry any of his later girlfriends, though it seems at least as likely that his philandering started early in their marriage. He claimed to have lost his virginity at the age of twelve, and his interest in women grew stronger as he grew older. “I think that what put him into show business in the first place, more than anything else, was that it was a good way to get a girl to sit beside you and admire you as you played the piano,” Mercer wrote in 1978. ¶ But Ellington’s marriage was a closed book that he chose not to open: Edna, like all the rest of his women, goes unmentioned, even in passing, in Music Is My Mistress . In 1955, however, he wrote an unpublished play called Man with Four Sides whose protagonists, the Lanes, are a middle-class black couple of a kind familiar on U Street. The wife, Mrs. Martha Washington Penoctbottom Lane, speaks with “proper-type stiltedness” and “governs her little home with all the pomp and grandeur of an empress.” Otho, her husband, is a secret drinker who longs desperately to “escape from the atmosphere / Of this house—which my wife / Dominates completely.” Though Ellington never said as much, it may be that he meant the play as a withering critique of the life from which he extracted himself by leaving Edna.
    Had he ever loved her? Or was their marriage an empty vessel of necessity and, later, of convenience? Fanny Holmes, the wife of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., said that Washington is “full of famous men and the women they married when they were young.” Perhaps the Ellingtons were that kind of couple—but we can never know.
     • • • 
    The professional relationships that Ellington formed in the years after World War I lasted

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