Ruth Ellington Boatwright; Independent ob
Hyfler/Rosner
Sister and business manager of Duke Ellington
12 March 2004
Ruth Dorothea Ellington, businesswoman: born
Washington DC 2 July 1915: married first David James (two
sons; marriage dissolved), second McHenry Boatwright (died
1994); died New York 6 March 2004.
There was a regal quality in Duke Ellington's behaviour that
seemed to have been there from birth. Many thought it to
have been acquired later, but, since it could be seen also
in the mien of his only sibling, Ruth, it's likely that it
was a family characteristic.
It is epitomised by a full-page photograph in Ellington's
autobiography Music is My Mistress (1973) where Ruth, in
full-length evening gown and a rather alarming blonde wig,
stands formally next to the Duke in a palatial doorway at
the White House with President and Mrs Richard Nixon.
"Basically there were two women in Duke Ellington's life:
his mother and his sister Ruth," said Ellington's son
Mercer. "He thought of Ruth as an image of his mother. His
feeling for his mother was akin to religion."
There was another reason why Ruth accompanied Ellington to
the White House in 1969. The pianist habitually surrounded
himself with a group of beautiful women. Had any one of them
been invited internecine warfare would have broken out among
the others. Ruth was deemed to be beside the competition
rather than of it.
"He regarded women as flowers, each one lovely in her own
way," said Ruth Ellington. "I couldn't believe it, the way
women kind of fell on their faces in front of him."
By 1930 Duke Ellington was well established in New York, and
moved his family from Washington to his expensive new home
in Edgecombe Avenue in Sugar Hill, Harlem. They moved again
to a penthouse in the same street and it became home over
the years to the family, to Duke's musical amanuensis Billy
Strayhorn and to one of his mistresses.
From here Ruth Ellington, 16 years his junior, attended the
Columbia University Teachers' College. She left in 1939 with
a degree in biology and planned to become a teacher. The
family stayed extremely close and when his parents died (his
mother, Daisy, in 1935; his father, James, a former butler,
two years later) Duke, who had been supporting everybody for
some years, took over Ruth's welfare. He held family ties so
close that he always vehemently disapproved of anybody that
a member of the family married.
"Edward was extremely protective of me, but in such a
wonderful, sweet, luxurious way that one doesn't know one is
being protected. One loves riding around at 16 with a mink
coat but one doesn't know that one is a prisoner, in
effect." Ellington acted as a strict father would, and
insisted that, when Ruth went to study at the Sorbonne in
1939, she be accompanied by a chaperone of his choosing. In
Paris to learn languages and to write a thesis comparing the
teaching of biology in Paris and New York, she stayed with
her brother's friend the singer Josephine Baker.
Duke Ellington was to maintain his influence on his sister
until his death, aged 75, in 1974. By then she had been for
many years his business manager and she continued to look
after the business affairs of the Duke Ellington estate for
years afterwards.
She also inherited from him his share in Tempo Music, the
publishing company that he owned with Billy Strayhorn. Her
brother had named her as president of the company when he
had formed it in 1941. He bought for her a large house in a
smart area of New York where she kept a room filled with his
honours and awards over the years. She retained the
collection with her when she later moved to smaller homes.
Ellington had used the profits from Tempo Music to run his
band. On his death Ruth Ellington was able to use them to
support her elegant life. Appropriately eccentric as she
was, her apartment was decorated with original paintings and
small dogs. The singer Earl Okin recalls a visit:
I found myself in a sort of silver lamé tent, as though I'd
arrived in a very luxurious Arab abode. The sofa was a white
fur affair. I sat down and, to make myself comfortable, put
my elbow on the matching cushion . . . but it barked. It was
a Yorkshire terrier that precisely matched the sofa.
She had married first a political scientist and journalist,
Daniel James. After they were divorced she married McHenry
Boatwright, an opera singer. After he died in 1994 Ruth
Ellington didn't want to live alone and persuaded different
family friends to share her apartment.
Ruth Ellington Boatwright kept in close touch with the
organisations of enthusiasts dedicated to the Duke Ellington
band and worked in the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. She founded the jazz ministry
at St Peter's Lutheran Church in Manhattan, where she and
her brother had worshipped.
Steve Voce