Singers: She Who Is Ella

“Ella,” says her manager offhandedly, “Drake Brown is in the audience tonight.”

“Who?”

“Drake Brown. You mean you’ve never seen his picture in the papers?”

Ella Fitzgerald tenses fearfully when she hears this. The most popular jazz singer in the world for 27 years and only now reaching the peak of her career, she remains a celebrity fan nonpareil. So out on the stage she goes and sings her heart out to impress Drake Brown. It is unimportant that Drake Brown does not exist. In jazz the end justifies the means.

Lower Owl, Upper Sparrow. Last week, in a new and stunning blonde wig, she was at her greatest in the pink and purple Flamingo Room at Las Vegas, appearing before a mass of abnormally hushed conventioneers, all of whom were in the palm of her hand. Ella is 46 now. Countless other singers have entered and left the scene during the span of Ella’s career. A British magazine recently conducted a poll to determine the second best female singer; it was understood that the first was Ella. As a true jazz musician, she has never sung a song twice the same way. She still makes her old classics like How High the Moon sound fresh and new, and in recent years she has reached out to include anthologies of Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin.

Her incredible improvising runs are effortless. She can take off from a melody, go over it, around it, through it, under it, moving at twice the speed of nine-to-five Man, tossing in casual doodies in the abstract expressionism of sound. When other singers’ jugulars would be bulging, Ella isn’t even panting. She seems to breathe through her ears. Her range goes from lower owl to upper sparrow. Her voice sounds all of 20 years old. Her manner, for all her speed, is soothing. Just when you think she might be turning into Bonnie Baker, however, she kicks the lid off and begins to scat: “Scoodee-oo-da-do-dee-uba-ty-ty-ta-roo.”

She is the chair professor of the art of scat singing, wherein a singer abandons comprehensible lyrics in the middle of a song, and she can scoodee-oo-da for 800 bars without running out of fresh gibberish. For added sparks, she tosses in little shards of the classics, such as, say, a bit of the William Tell Overture. Then suddenly she turns to a robust fragment of Did You Ever See a

Dream Walking, only to return quickly to the riverbed of perickety-bip-delip-deluda-bry-bry-kanoo.

But play as she will with the originals, she respects their integrity, if they have any. Her imitators shred songs; she explodes and reassembles them. Much of her genius in performance may arise from her ability to write songs as well as sing them. She made her name, after all, when she wrote A-Tisket A-Tasket in 1938, turning a nursery rhyme into the No. 1 tune in the nation.

Ringo Way. Born in Newport News, Va., orphaned and raised by an aunt in Yonkers, Ella Fitzgerald in her early days was a skinny girl, but over the years her stature grew in both senses. She is supersensitive about her weight, and understandably cried through the night once when—after she had performed with another heavy singer—a critic wrote: “Last night the stage contained 600 Ibs. of pure talent.” The talent moves as well as sings. One of Ella Fitzgerald’s secrets is that she really wishes she were a dancer. When she feels good onstage, she becomes as physical as she is vocal, cutting steps left and right to underscore her song.

Ella is a hypo-millionairess now, can afford a Don Loper wardrobe, and endlessly redecorates her house in Beverly Hills. She is also kind, thoughtful, and painfully unsure of herself. She spends her free evenings sewing or watching television or writing new songs. She has just written one in homage to Ringo Starr, the Beatle:

Don’t knock the rhythm of the kids today;

Remember they’re playing the Ringo way.

Once married for four years to Bass Player Ray Brown, Ella has a son, Ray Jr., who plays football and basketball for Hollywood High School and is a drummer in a combo as well.

She herself was educated only through the ninth grade; unthinking people hurt her deeply by imitating her weak grammar or by ascribing to her an accent she does not have. The mere mention of a high school dropout will start her lecturing: “You never know, one of these kids may have something but not the money or means to finish.”

She is pleasantly informal, but she does have her formal side. “It used to bother me when people I didn’t know came up and called me Ella,” she says. “It seemed to me they should say ‘Miss Fitzgerald,’ but somehow they never do.” Perhaps this is because there are several million Fitzgeralds but only one Ella.