Elaine Lorillard dies

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From the Providence Journal today.

CO-FOUNDER OF JAZZ FESTIVAL DIES AT 93

By Richard Salit

Journal Staff Writer

The Lorillards, Louis and Elaine, and George Wein, right, in 1954. The Lorillards founded the Newport Jazz Festival and hired Wein to organize it.

Journal FILE PHOTO

NEWPORT — Elaine Lorillard, who has been credited with founding the Newport Jazz Festival, died Sunday at a nursing home a few miles away from the grounds where the summer festival continues to thrive more than a half-century later. She was 93.

While George Wein is often considered the festival’s founder, it was Lorillard and her former husband, Louis, who hired him to run it, according to histories of the jazz series. The festival was bittersweet for Lorillard. In a 1997 interview with The Providence Journal, she complained that Wein has described himself as the founder and that, despite its ability to attract big name sponsors, “I never saw a penny from that festival.”

“I am proud of what I did, but it’s brought me great unhappiness,” she said.

Lorillard, who was born in Maine, died at Heatherwood Nursing & Subacute Center, not far from her longtime home on Dennison Street. She had just moved to the nursing facility recently.

“She died in her sleep,” said Christine Lorillard, a daughter-in-law, who is married to Lorillard’s son, Pierre. They live in Los Angeles. Lorillard’s only other surviving child is Edith “Didi” Cowley, of Newport.

Lorillard never lost her passion for jazz or ceased seeing herself in relation to the festival.

“She took pride in it. She talked about it all of the time,” said Christine Lorillard. “It was one of the highlights of her life.”

Her house was adorned with festival memorabilia and plaques given to her commemorating her contribution to jazz. Among them was a White House invitation from 1993 when President Bill Clinton held a jazz concert to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the festival. She also held onto a copy of the original festival charter: The only names on it are the Lorillards and three lawyers.

In a book called Newport Jazz Festival: The Illustrated History, author Burt Goldblatt quoted famed music producer John Hammond as saying, “As far as I’m concerned, Elaine Lorillard should have the whole credit for the concept of the Newport Jazz Festival.”

Lorillard’s husband was a descendant of the original owner of The Breakers mansion and the founder of Lorillard Tobacco Co. In Louis Lorillard’s 1986 Providence Journal obituary, Elaine Lorillard traced the festival’s origin to “when I thought of the idea and he said he would back it.” Her husband hired Wein, of Boston, and cut him a check for $20,000 for expenses. The couple left town and returned for the festival.

“We were absolutely floored by it,” she said. “We thought it was going to be just a local kind of thing, and people came from all over the world.”

Lorillard divorced her husband and broke from the festival, eventually suing it in 1959. But she and Wein reconciled and in 1992 the two appeared on stage together on the festival’s opening night.

In 1997, she was honored at the Jubile, Franco-Americain, in Woonsocket. She served on the board of directors of the festival and pushed the organization to feature jazz during its concert.

In the early years of the Newport festival, musicians would hang around her house. She always remembered sax virtuoso Gerry Mulligan sleeping on her lawn during the festival. But it was the music as much as the players that she long revered.

“She had an original collection of albums that she gave to us that she prized,” said Christine Lorillard. “And she was passing that on as a legacy to her son.”

She said that the family will have a private memorial service at an undetermined date.

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The New York Times report on the death of Elaine Lorillard in their edition today:

ELAINE LORILLARD, 93, A FOUNDER OF THE NEWPORT JAZZ FESTIVAL

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: November 28, 2007

Elaine Lorillard, a socialite who with her husband, Louis, lured jazz greats to their hometown in Rhode Island for a two-day concert series in the summer of 1954, starting the Newport Jazz Festival and creating the model for what became a worldwide circuit of outdoor jazz festivals, died on Monday near her home in Newport. She was 93.

Her daughter, Didi Cowley, confirmed the death.

It was a casual remark during intermission at a classical concert in Newport in 1953 that inspired the Lorillards to sponsor the first Newport Jazz Festival. Mrs. Lorillard, already a jazz fan, was seated next to John Maxon, then head of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

“It’s too bad we can’t do something like this for jazz,” he said. “That’s another music form that’s worth a big-time festival.”

The Lorillards got in touch with George Wein, then the owner of a jazz club in Boston, and asked him to produce that first festival. The Lorillards and Mr. Wein, who went on to become a renowned jazz impresario, brought together for the first concert series, among others: the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Oscar Peterson Trio, the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet, the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, the George Shearing Quintet, the Erroll Garner Trio, the Gene Krupa Trio and the singers Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.

About 7,000 fans packed the grounds of the Newport Casino on the nights of July 17 and 18 in 1954.

“Because it was held in Newport, it gave an aura of social distinction to jazz that it had never had before,” Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, said in an interview yesterday.

The Lorillards led the nonprofit Newport Jazz Festival foundation for six years, providing financial support of their own and from their friends.

In 1960, when the Lorillards could no longer afford to support the festival, Mr. Wein found money elsewhere and moved the concerts to Freebody Park, the local municipal stadium. (His Festival Productions Inc., now a division of the Festival Network, runs festivals around the world.)

For a time, rock music was part of the mix. That ended in 1971 when angry fans, trying to see the Allman Brothers, crashed the gates. Festival Productions moved the Newport festival to New York in 1972. A more jazz-rooted festival later returned to Newport and is still held each summer.

Elaine Guthrie was born in Tremont, Me., on Oct. 11, 1914, the daughter of Walter and Eliza Pray Guthrie. Her father owned a printing company and her mother was a professional pianist. Elaine Guthrie attended the New England Conservatory of Music. But in 1943 she went to work for the Red Cross, teaching music and painting to orphans in liberated Naples, Italy.

There she met United States Army Lt. Louis Lorillard, a descendant of Pierre Lorillard, who founded the P. Lorillard Tobacco Company in 1760. They went to “underground jazz clubs together” in Naples, their daughter, Didi, said, “and she fell in love with this fabulous music.” The Lorillards were married in 1946, but later divorced. Mr. Lorillard died in 1986.

Besides her daughter, of Newport, Mrs. Lorillard is survived by a son, Pierre, of Los Angeles, and two grandchildren.

Mr. Morgenstern of Rutgers, a friend of Mrs. Lorillard, said she never lost her love of jazz. “I saw her in clubs just a few years ago,” he said.