Elaine Lorillard; helped start Newport Jazz Festival

Duke Ellington in Newport with Mrs. Lorillard at a piano.

In a land and an era of decidedly mannered harmony, the notion struck a discordant, if not blasphemous, note: A jazz festival in Newport.

A few in the Rhode Island community were appalled that a celebration of jazz - which some at that time in the early 1950s called the devil's music - would be held among the coiffed masses and summer manses. Socialite Elaine Lorillard thought it was a brilliant idea.

Mrs. Lorillard and her husband, Louis, hired George Wein, then an owner of the Storyville jazz club in Boston, to make it happen. On Saturday and Sunday, July 17 and 18, 1954, at the hallowed Newport Casino on Bellevue Avenue amid the manicured courts of the Tennis Hall of Fame, the sounds of Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Gene Krupa, and Billie Holiday filled the night and day. A tradition was born.

Mrs. Lorillard died Nov. 26 of an infection at the Heatherwood Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Newport, where she had been treated for dementia. She was 93.

According to longtime Globe jazz writer Ernie Santosuosso, the idea for the festival was offered in 1953 at a garden luncheon by John Maxon, who was director of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Mrs. Lorillard visited Storyville later that year and told Wein that jazz might liven up the "terribly boring" social scene in Newport. The Lorillards, who lived on Bellevue Avenue, gave Wein a $20,000 line of credit to start the festival.

"When Elaine Lorillard walked into my club, it changed my life forever," Wein told The Newport Daily News last week. "It gave me a chance to do something big, to become a national figure instead of a Boston nightclub owner. Without her there would have been no jazz festival."

Under a makeshift cardboard-covered shell and on a tiny stage, the festival was kicked off by emcee Stan Kenton.

"Most of the audience sat in folding chairs, and the groundskeepers winced whenever cocktails splashed upon their revered greensward," Santosuosso wrote in 1988, detailing the first night. "Ella Fitzgerald set off an explosive ovation at the end of her segment, after which the opening of the Newport Jazz Festival at the Casino concluded at approximately 1 a.m. as everybody on stage jammed on 'I've Got Rhythm.' "

About 13,000 people attended the two-day event.

"We were absolutely floored by it," Mrs. Lorillard told the Providence Journal in 1986. "We thought it was going to be just a local kind of thing, and people came from all over the world."

The venue was shifted to Freebody Park the following year. The Lorillards even bought famed but dilapidated Belcourt Castle in the mid-1950s in the hope of restoring its splendor and holding the concerts on its large estate, but the task proved to be too daunting. Eventually, Wein split the event between New York City and Fort Adams State Park in Newport.

The festival established a model for what a half-century later would be an industry of outdoor jazz festivals around the world. It also inspired the Newport Folk Festival.

Her association with the jazz festival was not without heartache, however. During divorce proceedings with her husband in the late 1950s, Mrs. Lorillard sued the festival's board after she was ousted as a director. For several decades, she and Wein were estranged.

"I am proud of what I did, but it's brought me great unhappiness," she told the Journal in 1997.

She also would become dismayed over the shift from non-profit support to corporate sponsorship and disenchanted over the increasing scale of the event.

"My husband and I had a different vision," she said in 2004. "We wanted it to be local, and Rhode Island, and small and very tasteful."

Eventually, she and Wein patched some of their differences. In her later years, she would regale her friends and family about the early days of the festival, when jazz titans breezed in and out of her home. One weekend, jazz virtuouso saxophonist Gerry Mulligan slept in her yard, she said.

"As far as I'm concerned," famous jazz producer John Hammond once told author Burt Goldblatt, "Elaine Lorillard should have the whole credit for the concept of the Newport Jazz Festival."

Born in Tremont, Maine, Elaine Guthrie started playing the piano at age 6 and attended the New England Conservatory of Music. According to The New York Times, she went to work for the Red Cross in 1943 and eventually taught music and painting to orphans in liberated Naples, Italy, where she met her husband.

Army Lieutenant Louis Lorillard was a descendant of Pierre Lorillard, a tobacco tycoon who helped establish Newport as a sailing mecca and who owned the original Breakers home before selling it to Cornelius Vanderbilt, who expanded it into the famous mansion.

In Naples, the Lorillards would have dates at underground jazz clubs.

Mr. Lorillard died in 1986. She leaves a daughter, Didi Cowley of Newport; a son, Pierre of Los Angeles; and two grandchildren.