Beyond the Myth: Rick Anderson on His Mother’s Dance That Fueled Ellington’s Rebirth at Newport ’56

1956. In the popular consciousness, the grandeur of swing era big bands had ceded to the vibrant electric spark of rock. One of the greatest of an era past, Duke Ellington, saw the Orchestra he had led for over three decades begin to disintegrate. Essential band members gradually jumped ship as the ensemble played to increasingly shrinking crowds. Where they once packed Carnegie Hall, they now could barely fill a small skating rink. Money was drying up, too. The band needed a miracle to continue. George Wein offered a chance to recover by calling upon Ellington and his longtime arranger Billy Strayhorn to present a three-part suite at that summer’s Newport Jazz Festival. But it seemed for naught. The entire performance, including the commission, fell flat with the audience. As the clock inched ever closer to midnight, the crowd seemed listless and tired. The legendary drummer “Papa” Jo Jones, who performed with Teddy Wilson earlier in the evening, sat at the edge of the stage. He rolled up a newspaper – or possibly a festival program – and began feverishly beating it against his knee, adding a heavy beat. The Orchestra started combining two older pieces from 1937 – “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue” – with tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves’ incredibly long twenty-seven-chorus solo serving as the glue. In the audience, a blonde woman in a dark dress was so moved by what she heard that she lost control. She started a near riotous dance craze that turned the crowd wild. That night saved Duke’s flailing career to the point that he would later frequently remark that he “was born in 1956 at the Newport Festival.”

Or so the tale goes. However, legends are funny things. Even when one thinks they know a story, they rarely see the entire picture. Emphasizing certain narrative elements sets aside others that make reality so much richer. After the night at Newport, the questions about the event became fixated on who. Who caused the magical evening, the mystery woman or the band itself? And who was she anyway? Yet, in many ways, the far more meaningful question was not who but why. Why was she even there? Why did she dance? Now, seven decades later, why are we still talking and thinking about that evening?

Despite the tale that still persists, the mystery dancer – Elaine Anderson – was not quite someone who became inexplicably possessed by the music. No, as her family would attest, she was a dancer at heart. Choices and circumstances had set her dream aside. She seemed to long for a different life, and Newport finally let her desires emerge for all to see.

While these facts belie the romanticized image of a figure so overwhelmed by her senses that she completely lost control, it is a mistake to think that the truth lessens the magic of that night. If anything, reality speaks even more to what Ellington’s band accomplished within Freebody Park’s stone walls and the freedom inherent in the band’s music. Even the combined title “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” suggests a fall followed quickly by a brighter rise. Elaine Anderson never became a famous dancer. But she became something more. She became an icon, even if few ever knew her name.

So, did Anderson cause Ellington’s rebirth at Newport, or did the band simply release something lurking too long inside her? Does it truly matter? Together, dancer and band both sought freedom in a country that prides itself on liberty but supports a culture where far too often that right is not always equally applied. Seventy years after Ellington’s famed performance of July 7, 1956, it is time we better acknowledge the truth about who Elaine Anderson was and how that event came to be. It is our hope that the conversation you are about to read with her son, Rick Anderson, provides a fuller picture of his mother. But the timing of this piece is also nothing short of opportune. Anderson’s story reflects not merely her own lived experiences but also raises questions about how far America has come in addressing the social forces that hold others back and how much further we have to go. In this sense, perhaps this conversation is as much a meditation on our nation’s semiquincentennial as it is the platinum anniversary of Ellington’s performance. We just dance in the hope of what is still to come.

PostGenre: What do you feel people most misunderstand about your mother’s role at Ellington’s 1956 Newport performance?

Rick Anderson: One of the things that’s so interesting to me is the continuing perception that my mother was some anonymous gal who spontaneously got up and started to dance. Nobody has really explored the fact that her dancing wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing that came out of nowhere. There was a background, history, and set of roots that motivated her to dance that night. It wasn’t mere happenstance that my mother ended up getting up and doing her number at Newport. The seeds were planted a long time earlier.

PostGenre: Elaine wanted to be a dancer originally, but gave it up to raise a family. In some ways, it was almost inevitable that she would dance that night.

RA: It was inevitable. I have to qualify that I’m not an unprejudiced person here. So, you have to take what I say with a certain grain of salt. But, trying to be as objective as I can, my mother represented the breakthrough of women in the 1950s who were still trapped in society’s norms and limitations. She tried her damnedest to break out of a traditional married setting. People who knew her all saw it. She was a very special, talented, and different person. And she touched a lot of people, many more people than anybody really knows.

But it all started when she got into Wellesley College, and her mother said, “No, you have to go to a two-year college.” Her mother was a very dominating force. My mother tried to break through and ended up getting married at eighteen. She had three kids by the time she was twenty-four. But in the meantime, she went out to Hollywood, got a screen test, and had a few bit parts in movies. That’s not the traditional path that a married woman would take at the time, back in the 1940s.

PG: Your family also had ties to the movie industry, with Elaine’s father starting one of the first movie theaters in New England.  

RA: Right, my grandfather and his brothers started it. Back then, unlike today, motion picture theater owners had leverage over the Hollywood studios. That leverage meant that Hollywood came to the owners to pitch films to show as opposed to the opposite. During that period, as my mother was growing up and then into the 40s and the 50s, her family owned eight theaters in New England. In those days, that was enough for them to be recognized as a player in the industry. So, Hollywood came to them.

To give you an idea, although this happened after she had gotten married and had kids, the family’s New Bedford, Massachusetts, theater had the world premiere of Moby-Dick (Warner Bros., 1956). Of course, it made sense to choose a New Bedford theater for the premiere because the city was the whaling capital of the world. Anyway, Gregory Peck and his wife stayed in my grandparents’ house around the time of the premiere. Richard Basehart and John Huston were around, too. And there is that photo I sent you of my mother playing the piano with Robert Wagner, which was taken in her mother’s home.

My mother was exposed to many movie stars, even early on. And there was always simmering thing in her connected to her interest in dance and film that coalesced, I think, in 1955.

PG: What happened in 1955?

RA: Her best friend, Carol Haney, was on Broadway in The Pajama Game. My mother was so proud of Carol, and we all went down to New York to see the show. She and my mother grew up in New Bedford together and used to dance together. And now, here she was on Broadway. Carol Haney ultimately won a Tony Award [for Best Featured Actress in a Musical] for her role in The Pajama Game.

What many people don’t know about Carol is that she was a very tragic character. My grandfather helped introduce her to people in Hollywood. And she went to Hollywood when she was nineteen. If she had been prettier looking, she would have played Debbie Reynolds’s role in Singin’ in the Rain (MGM, 1952). Instead, she was the person Gene Kelly used to help teach Debbie Reynolds how to dance. She danced with the best of them, Jack Cole, and a little with [Fred] Astaire. But she particularly danced a lot with Gene Kelly. Her big break came in a movie called Kiss Me, Kate (MGM, 1953). There is a dance scene in it with her and her partner, Bob Fosse. They did a dance together in that movie that was incredible. And you can see that dance show up in the Broadway show, The Pajama Game, where she and Fosse were the leads.

Anyway, when my mother got down to Broadway and saw Carol finally receive the recognition that she deserved, I think it set in motion what would be forthcoming from my mother the next year in Newport.

PG: As far as Newport, your uncle and your mother had box seats for the festival since the first one in 1954 and went for several years. When did she stop attending the festival?

RA: She was there all the way through until she blew out of town in 1961. So, the 1960 Festival was probably her last one.

PG: So, she attended for seven years, most of them after 1955. Any idea why she did not get noticed much the times she presumably danced there after 1956?

RA: Well, you must have seen the movie Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Galaxy, 1959).  

PG: Of course.

RA: If you go back and watch that movie, you will see a blonde woman with sunglasses in the crowd when Anita O’Day is singing. The camera focuses on her. You’ll see her really getting into the rhythm. That’s Elaine.

My parents weren’t Newport people. They had a good friend who was a Newport person, but not on the side of the tracks where [Festival co-founders Elaine and Louis] Lorillards played.

PG: Was that the Capuanos? [ed. note: Eddie Capuano of Fall River, Massachusetts was an early sponsor of the Newport Jazz Festival and a friend of both the Lorillards and Anderson and her husband, Larry Anderson].

RA: Well, the Capuanos were wealthy people who had a house in Newport. My parents were down in Newport all the time visiting them. My father was actually a bigger jazz fan than my mother. My parents used to go up to [George Wein’s club,] Storyville in Boston. There were also some really good jazz places in Providence in those days that they would visit. There was even a good jazz club in Fall River, Massachusetts.

I remember my parents would corral some of the performing musicians and bring them back to our house, where they’d smoke dope in the back room. My parents loved to mingle with the jazz musicians. And of course, having the box in Newport was a must because they were part of the scene. But things only came to a head and exploded that night in 1956.

PG: Given that she wanted to be a professional dancer, it must have been exciting for her to become essentially famous for dancing, even if not in any capacity she could have ever anticipated.

RA: She enjoyed the attention. There was an unfortunate quote from her in the New York Times, which I think was misleading. There was a piece written by a guy named James Barron, who is actually still writing. The story was all about a guy named Phil Schaap.

PG: The incredibly detailed archivist and broadcaster.

RA: Right. And in that story, Phil mentioned the gal in the black dress who danced at Newport, but he didn’t know who she was. Our daughter saw the piece when she was eight or nine years old and wrote to Barron to say “that gal in the black dress is my grandmother.” James Barron turned around and said he wanted to talk to my mother. So, he then interviewed both Elaine and me and wrote a story about how he had solved the mystery of who the woman was; a mystery that even Phil Schaap wasn’t able to answer.  But Elaine made the unfortunate comment in her interview that the story behind her dance in 1956 was that she had a few too many drinks and got up and danced. I think at that point, she was trying not to be totally honest about what she was really all about.

But the truth is, she lived a really interesting life. Once, when she was living out in Sausalito, California, she walked into a very famous restaurant in San Francisco named Ernie’s. And in there was a very famous local guy named Joe DiMaggio.

PG: Joltin’ Joe.

RA: She walked in, and he saw her. He did a double take and then called over the maître’d and said, “I want to talk to that woman.” I think he thought Elaine looked like Marilyn Monroe. So they sat down, and they chatted. My mother managed to encounter a lot of different people after she got divorced. She was a free spirit. It took a lot of guts for her to leave a small town like Fall River, Massachusetts, and give up a life where she was the queen of the town and married to a very wealthy guy, to go off and do what she did.

She’d spent some time in Hollywood and was a member of the Variety Club. You could only be part of the Variety Club if you were a professional or someone in the motion picture business, whether on stage or off stage or screen. The Variety Club had yearly conventions in great places. In 1958, her wings started to flap, and she felt like she needed to get the hell out of Fall River. So she convinced my father to let her go to the Variety Club convention in London. He agreed to it, and she went. The only problem with the convention was that it lasted for about four or five days. She didn’t come back for another seven months.

PG: Wow.

RA: When she got to London, she met a very beautiful woman named Francine Brandt. Francine was, I guess, the French word was courtesan. She was not a prostitute; but a companion who lived with or associated with incredibly wealthy people. We don’t really have courtesans much in the US, but it is common in Europe. Francine was French, and she had an affair with the French filmmaker Roger Vadim. She knew that crowd. So she and my mother hook up and then go all over the place. They finally ended up in Rome. And she ends up being gone for seven months. Of course, she has three kids at home. Not too many mothers take off like that. And she herself hooked up with some Italian movie star. As I said, she was a free spirit. I knew she was one back when I was a kid, too. But again, going back to when we started talking, she just wasn’t some anonymous person who got up and decided who decided to spontaneously dance.

PG: Why do you think the narrative of her being an average person in the crowd still perpetuates? Even the famous photograph [record producer] George Avakian used of her for Ellington’s record is framed in such a way as to suggest she was an average person with no formal dance background.

RA: Interesting. We got to know George Avakian well. Elaine said to him at Newport the year after the Ellington performance, 1957, “Why did you use such a lousy picture?” And he said he was concerned she might sue the label over using a photo of her without her approval. That’s why they used the picture with her arm up, somewhat blocking her face. They wanted to avoid having her come at them. She said she wouldn’t have sued over it and that they should have followed up with her on it.

PG: Did they not know who she was, since there seems to be a bit of a mystery around the dancing figure at the Festival?

RA: I think they knew her. George Wein knew who she was since she had been up in Storyville. As you’ve read in all the articles, the question that comes is whether she just popped up and also how much of an influence she had on Gonsalves that night. You can read the history any way you want to, but the fact of the matter is that she was part of the mix.

Something like what happened that evening had never happened before. We’ve seen it so many times since, but never before. There was a video that came out a few years ago and made an analogy between rock ‘n’ roll and that night. It compares Gonsalves’ solo to non-jazz solos and found that the performance was jazz’s moment of stepping into the world of rock ‘n’ roll.

PG: Interesting. Rock was the big musical craze at the time, but few have connected it to what Ellington did. Jazz was not really dying, but it was not really getting the popular attention it once did.

RA: Yeah, despite the fact that Ellington said he was born again in Newport in 1956, his music really didn’t die. I don’t think big band jazz took off after that, but that night did show the power his music still held even as tastes shifted.  And of course, the papers followed, and there was a flurry of publicity afterwards.

PG: Seventy years later, why do you think people still talk about your mother’s dancing at the Ellington performance? There is no video and limited photography, yet it still seems to capture the imagination of many.

RA: I know what you mean. My dream has always been to find enough still pictures that I could piece together into a fifteen minute video.

I’m having lunch today with a guy named George Russell. He and I belong to the same tennis club. I met him about a year and a half ago at the club. He was a journalist for Fox Broadcasting, and used to be an international journalist with Time Magazine. At one point, we were chatting along with some other friends. One of my other friends mentioned my mother because George is infatuated with what happened at Newport. So George asked which festival and I told him it was Ellington at Newport in 1956. And he said the record was one of his favorites. He absolutely loved “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” And we ended up talking for a while about the gal that danced. It just shows you how the story still speaks to people.

PG: It’s interesting too because the album tied to that night, Ellington at Newport 1956, is generally cited as one of the best live albums ever, but only a portion was actually done at the festival, with the rest in studio. Even the studio parts, however. capture the energy of that night so well that you can almost see your mother or someone dancing to it when you listen.

RA: There is a very famous jazz photographer named Roy DeCarava. About ten or eleven years ago, he self-published a big coffee table book called ‘The Sound I Saw.’ At the time it came out, my daughter was a freshman or sophomore at Brown [University]. She was at the [Rhode Island School of Design] Museum in Providence to see an exhibit of DeCarava’s photographs. As she was leaving, she saw his book on the table.  She looked through it and came to the end where she found pictures of a blonde woman in a very surreal way dancing with her arms up. There were four pictures. This book had photographs of almost every jazz musician you could think of. But here was Elaine, captured in photographs that I’d never seen before. So my daughter called me and told me she had encountered the book.

The book was hard to find, but we found a copy and reached out to DeCarava. He’s since passed but was a professor at Hunter College at that time. He had printed all of his own stuff. He never had an agent because he was fearful of being commercialized. So he never really got the attention that some other jazz photographers did. After many weeks of back-and-forth emails with him, my wife and I had lunch with him and his wife, Caroline, who was another Hunter professor, here in Brooklyn Heights, New York.  

PG: Did he remember being at the ‘56 festival?

RA: Definitely. And it was fascinating talking to him. For Newport in ’56, he didn’t have tickets to get in. He was outside the box office when he ran into Nat Hentoff, who knew him. Nat and Roy started talking, and Nat ended up helping Roy get into Freebody Park that night. Roy said it was an incredible night. He said what happened was surreal. He said the place became alive. And he captured it all in a way that made the truth clear. Some accounts say that there were other people dancing that night in Freebody Park. That was probably the case, but it was clear nobody danced like this gal. And it all came out of what was stuck inside of her for decades.

One of the raciest magazines back then, Saga Magazine, covered the festival that summer. Their writer described the dance as a cross between Salome’s Seven Veils and a Gypsy Rose Lee special. Some photographs show she used the white bars that separated the seating sections as a crutch to bounce off of. She was basically in her own trance. But it was in sync with Gonsalves and the band. And Jo Jones is up there with a rolled-up newspaper, five feet from her, saying, “Go gal, go gal, go gal.” Off she went.

​Make your own history at the 2026 Newport Jazz Festival. You can read more about the Festival here. Stay tuned as we continue our extensive pre-coverage of the event. We will also be providing live coverage from Fort Adams.  You can learn more about Elaine Anderson and that magic night in Newport from John Fass Morton’s ‘Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport ’56.’