ELLA REAPS JUST HER REWARDS

This will be a rewarding week for Ella Fitzgerald. Today, she will be at UCLA, where she will receive the prestigious UCLA Medal, the university’s equivalent of an honorary degree. Thursday, she will be at the White House to receive, from President Reagan, the National Medal of Arts, given by the National Endowment for the Arts.

When she is not busy receiving awards, she will also spend part of the coming months singing, which is more than she was able to do while recovering from a heart ailment that felled her last August. Norman Granz, her manager for more than 30 years, is pacing her carefully: There will be two or three concerts a month, including New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, June 24; the Montreal Jazz Festival, July 5; the Hollywood Bowl, July 15, and the San Francisco Symphony, July 24.

“I was off for close to nine months,” Fitzgerald, 69, said recently, relaxing in a living room decked with trophies, tributes and photographs in her Beverly Hills home. “That’s the longest I’ve ever been off, do you realize that? You really count ‘em when you’re not working.

“The trouble started after a date in Niagara Falls. I could hardly breathe, and my pianist, Paul Smith, had to help me down some stairs. I went to the hospital there, then came back home and the doctor put me in Cedars (Cedars-Sinai Medical Center) and they found out what it was--a heart attack, although I never felt it. I had a five-bypass operation, which they didn’t tell me at the time. It’s funny--when I came to, I thought I’d been on a boat ride. I was saying to people, ‘Boy, that sure was a terrible boat trip!’ Now I have my pacemaker and the doctor has helped me get back my strength.”

Killing time during the recuperation became an ever more onerous ordeal. “I now know all the soap operas. And I’d spend time thinking of ideas for songs I’d like to do. I think maybe I’ll make an album of Stevie Wonder songs--the real pretty ones. That would give me something of an image for today; I like to be up on everything, you know.”

When the boredom became intolerable, she received the doctor’s permission to try a rehearsal. “It felt so good. This gave me something to think about. I had spent so much time just lying with my legs up, wondering if I’d ever sing again.”

After 49 years as a major name in show business (she recorded her first hit, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” as vocalist with Chick Webb’s band in May, 1938), Fitzgerald remains unimpressed by her own fame. She speaks in wonderment of having received visits, phone calls or flowers from the President, Frank Sinatra, Bill Cosby and Dizzy Gillespie, seemingly unaware that she may be better known worldwide than almost any of them.

When the evidence confronts her, she reacts with almost schoolgirlish embarrassment. “I was sitting in a store the other day and a lady saw me and said, ‘Oooh--my dreams have come true! It’s my singing lady!’ And I looked my worst--I had my sneakers on, and an old skirt. But she stopped and said, ‘We love you,’ and then another girl came, and soon everybody was asking me for autographs. I said to myself, ‘Well, you can’t beat this kind of love.’

“I’ve got about three bags of mail here that I haven’t even answered yet--people who wrote me in the hospital. You start thinking, was it all worth it? And I say, yes.”

The broad span of her success can be attributed in large measure to her uniquely adaptable talent, and to the skill with which Granz has handled her affairs. It was he who steered her away from Tin Pan Alley dog-tunes and produced her classic series of “Songbook” albums devoted to the works of Gershwin, Berlin, Cole Porter, Ellington and others. This in turn led to her association with the late Nelson Riddle, whose arrangements she was able to use in appearances with symphony orchestras.

“The songbooks were a new beginning for me, and I gained more fans; but even at the concerts with symphonies, we still like to include some jazz, because that was where I really began. My education in modern jazz began when I was on the road with Dizzy Gillespie. I learned so much from him. After the one-night stands, he’d take me along to some club uptown where everyone was jamming. That’s how I learned my boppin’ and everything.

“I was saying to Dizzy just last week, we have so much to be thankful for. We had to ride the buses, and we’d be trying to get the money together to eat--you know, ‘How much you got, man?’ Yeah, we scuffled; but when you look back on it, you don’t regret anything, ‘cause it feels like you accomplished something.”

The pan-idiomatic character of her repertoire is similarly maintained in her records. Her latest LP, taped just before she fell ill and released last week, is “Easy Living” (Pablo 2310-921), a set of intimate duo performances with her frequent concert teammate, guitarist Joe Pass. But her next album may be a more pop-oriented set. “We have a lot of Nelson Riddle arrangements that we did in clubs but never got around to recording,” she says. “I thought it would be nice to do some of these and dedicate the album to Nelson. After that, I’d like to get back to some real jazz, like some of Dizzy’s things.”

Her records have incredible staying power; many have been reissued on compact discs. “Not long ago,” she said, “I was sitting in bed watching TV and someone was doing a miniseries called ‘I’ll Take Manhattan.’ Well, I’m wondering what this story is going to be about, and suddenly I hear the song ‘Manhattan,’ and I say to myself, ‘Why, that sounds like me!’ Well, it was the theme of the show--my record!--and when I did a private party soon afterward, someone asked for it. Isn’t that amazing? I recorded it in 1956. Now, wherever we go, we have to include ‘Manhattan.’ ”

The opportunity to spend more time at home has had its benefits, among them the chance to catch up on her family life. Her granddaughter, Alice, almost 2, has visited a couple of times; she lives in Sitka, Alaska, where her father, Ray Brown Jr., plays drums and leads a small band. (Fitzgerald was married from 1948 to 1952 to bassist Ray Brown.) “Young Ray and his wife have a nice little house there, and I think he’s happy. I haven’t been there--in fact, Alaska is one of the few places I’ve never visited.

“There are several places I still want to get to. I’ve been almost everyplace--Australia, China, Japan, all over Europe--but I still want to go to Africa. One of the countries there has a stamp with my picture on it: Ghana. You know, we used to open up the festival in Beirut, and it was a lot of fun--I’m just so sad when I think that I can’t go back.”

Staying at home and exercising regularly, coupled with the illness, has produced a startling weight loss; Ella has not appeared this slim since her Chick Webb days. “I felt good this morning,” she said, “when my skirt had to be pinned way over. I try my best to eat carefully--no salt; we use substitutes and I’m used to it. I like fish, I like chicken, I like veal, so there’s no problem. The doctors found I need more potassium, so I’ve got gobs of bananas.”

The equanimity with which she has faced all her tribulations (among them a serious eye condition that began to trouble her in 1971) is one aspect of a personality that seems extraordinarily resilient. She lives by a few basic truisms, three of which she recalled in summing up her philosophy.

“I remember one time, when I was torching over my ex-husband, Duke Ellington said to me, ‘You must remember, it’s just like a toothache. It hurts, but when you take the tooth out, the ache will be gone.’ Long before that, Chick Webb said, ‘Never try to be something that goes up too fast; remember you’ll meet the same people coming down.’ And a cousin of mine used to tell me, ‘If people say something bad about you, and instead of getting mad you just smile, it’ll make them feel bad, not you.’

“So I keep all these little thoughts in mind. And most of all, I remember what another cousin of mine said. He’s a preacher, and after my illness he came out to see me and said, ‘You know, Ella, God performed a miracle on you.’ And when I found out afterward about the five-bypass operation, I knew He did.”