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It doesn’t matter that Tick doesn’t use Smith’s comment. But there is a sense of easy layups missed. There are relatively few female voices in this book, which makes one miss Margo Jefferson’s devastatingly fine writing on Fitzgerald. Jefferson has described being embarrassed to watch Fitzgerald on television when she was a teenager, because Fitzgerald would sweat onstage. The perspiration threatened to “drag her back into the maw of working-class Black female labor.”
In a book short on humanizing detail, I was surprised to find a single sentence devoted to Fitzgerald’s cookbook collection. Tick doesn’t describe this collection, nor tell you that the 300 or so titles are housed at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library. Apparently, Fitzgerald didn’t cook from these books, but simply loved to read them, which makes her a kindred spirit to me. It’s poignant to note that she had diabetes, so she surely could not always have eaten what she longed to.
She annotated her cookbooks in the margins. Who would not want to know, in two or three paragraphs, what she put there? Tick doesn’t say. Nor does she note that Fitzgerald was said to have floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in every room in her house, and that she kept letters and other things inside her books.
It’s poor sportsmanship, perhaps, to write about what isn’t in a book as opposed to what is. But even browsing a Sotheby’s catalog of Fitzgerald memorabilia auctioned in 1997 gives you a deeper sense of her personal style than Tick manages to convey. According to The Chicago Tribune, a pair of her fake eyelashes sold for $900.
Nor does Tick describe Fitzgerald’s Beverly Hills house, though there are many photos online — it looks a bit like Larry David’s place on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — or her rare and elegant cars. (She didn’t drive, but enjoyed being chauffeured.) Unanalyzed too is what catnip Fitzgerald was to many of the last century’s most incisive photographers, including Lee Friedlander and Annie Leibovitz. Her supposedly plain looks were a blank canvas, of a sort, into which others read volumes.
Tick’s book warms again as she approaches the end of Fitzgerald’s life, in 1996. When she was in failing health, she liked to listen to her old records and try to remember everything. On one of her last days, her son hired a trio of excellent musicians to play for her. They were downstairs, she was upstairs, and the beautiful sound traveled up to find her.
BECOMING ELLA: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song | By Judith Tick | Norton | 560 pp. | $40
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