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Often, his efforts to avoid unpleasantness take the form of hypochondria—as he puts it, "I'm a doctor freak." Although his doctor says he is an unusually healthy specimen, Duke tends to mistrust his ability to stay well; if his pulse rate seems slow to him in Las Vegas, it means a call to New York, for his doctor to take the next plane out. He will not tolerate air conditioning—"You know, I'm delicate. My hair gets wet, the air conditioning hits it, and I get a sharp pain right down the middle of my back." His personal vanity extends to his feet, which he exercises against the wall at odd moments during his busy days and nights.
Even the Duke himself has trouble fathoming the hidden truths of his personality, although he likes to try. "I may be a heel," he will say, "but I hate for people to think so." Or, "I always take the easy way." Perhaps his best estimate of his life and career is a self-deprecating one: "I'm so damned fickle," he says. "I never could stick with what I was doing—always wanted to try something new. I never accumulated any money, so I always had to keep working.''
At Last, Clicks. When Edward Ellington was born in Washington, D.C. in 1899, the capital was jigging to the insolent rhythms of ragtime pianists. Farther west Buddy Bolden's fabulous cornet was shaking New Orleans' levees, and such young idolaters as Joe ("King") Oliver and Sidney Bechet were soon to hammer out the rudiments of instrumental jazz. Washington jazz tended to strings—pianos, banjos, violins—but it had the same ancestry: the sophisticated rhythms of African drums, which later took on a more succinct and sensuous character as they drifted through the Caribbean islands, gradually infiltrated the U.S. via New Orleans and the East Coast. The East Coast variety, with its own flavors added, eventually became the ragtime of Duke's childhood.
"Man, those were two-fisted piano players," he recalls. "Men like Sticky Mack and Doc Perry and James P. Johnson and Willie 'The Lion' Smith. With their left hand, they'd play big chords for the bass note, and just as big ones for the offbeat, and they really swang. The right hand played real pretty. They did things technically you wouldn't believe."
Ellington's father was first a butler, then a caterer, and eventually a blueprint technician, and he provided well for his family. Duke had art lessons, at which he did extremely well, and piano lessons, which he never mastered. He felt they cramped his style. He worked in a soda fountain after school, and spent his hours at home working out his own method of playing the piano. By the time he was 14, he had started a piece called Soda Fountain Rag, and he played it so many different ways that people thought it was several compositions.