Time’s cover story had contained only an evasive reference to “a separation from his wife that became permanent,” a sentence even more obscure than the one included in the magazine’s earlier story about the premiere of Black, Brown and Beige (“His wife, from whom he has been separated for many years, lives in Washington”). He had insisted on it. According to Carter Harman, the terse reference replaced an “unforgivably brusque” description of Ellington’s domestic arrangements inserted by a researcher for Time who had dared to talk to Edna Ellington. When Ebony’s Marc Crawford interviewed her at length in March of 1959, describing her as “the virtually unknown Duchess who has lived a lifetime in Duke’s shadow” and allowing Edna to speak for herself about the breakup of their marriage thirty years earlier, he flew into a rage.A few years later Ellington would specifically acknowledge to Harman, who was considering writing his biography, “the responsibility of not embarrassing the Negro.”
