Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  But heroin was out for her—the scourge of her community, as Mary saw so soon and so painfully, although alcohol remained a big problem as well, particularly for some older musicians. It was then that Mary—aided by her friend Gray Weingarten—began a lifelong crusade to help musicians troubled by addiction. One of those they tried to help was Billie Holiday, who had been arrested in 1947 for possession of heroin. “I heard that Billie Holiday was on drugs and was not well and had been busted,” recalls Gray Weingarten. “I talked to Mary Lou about it. She said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s terrible, but I don’t know what we could do about it. She belongs to Joe Glaser, you know.’ But I convinced Mary to talk to him. She made an appointment, and we went into Joe’s office. There he sat behind his great big desk. And Mary Lou said, ‘This is my friend, she’s got something she wants to say to you.’ And I told him, since he made money off of her, why wouldn’t he help her? And he said he would put her in the hospital and try to help her kick the habit. He didn’t think it would do any good, though. And of course he was right.

  “Another time she called and said, ‘Gray, you got to get right up here, we got a lot of work to do, don’t ask any questions. Come on up. Wear your work clothes.’ It was Jack ‘the Bear’ Parker, the drummer from Café Society. His wife had been sick and he had some kids, two or three boys, and he just couldn’t cope. He gave Mary Lou the keys to the apartment. There were dirty clothes from one end of this place to the other and toys all over. So we went out and bought soap and Mary Lou and I washed the dishes and did all this laundry. Then we strung a big long rope we’d bought from one end of the place to the other and back again, three times, and hung up all this laundry. Straightened up the place and left. It took us all day. That was a typical goodwill trip with Mary Lou.

  “At another point, Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith was sick and really down on his luck. Mary and I went over and we cleaned house and brought him some groceries—he wanted some ice cream. He was very grateful.”

  But Mary was powerless to clean up the mess in many of her friends’ lives, a fact that caused her endless pain. “More than once I have gone up to 52nd Street to catch a favorite,” she wrote sadly, “and have found one of my best friends asleep at the piano, not even aware that there was an audience. Fifty-second Street by this time was loaded with dope peddlers … but my friends did not know that they were being destroyed and I dared not tell them for I loved them too much.… ”

  Mary herself never tried heroin, and in fact, she later forced an out-of-court settlement from then-media giant RKO (which owned WOR radio) for headlining an ad about an upcoming radio interview with her: “From Heroin to Heroine in the ’60s.” It was not that she didn’t have an interest in stronger drugs. “I consulted a doctor and asked him which of the dope I could try without becoming an addict the first time,” she recalled. “He asked me if I was crazy and said he’d not permit me to do it. He asked why I wanted to try dope. I answered that I’d like to know the kicks that my friends were getting. On my own I decided to try cocaine when the opportunity presented itself, for I’d gotten up enough nerve to do so.” If she did try cocaine, though, neither she nor anyone else who knew her ever made any mention of it. Perhaps the memory of her nightmarish experience with Benzedrine in ’45 was enough to check that impulse.

  EVEN AS HEROIN was digging its claws into modern jazz musicians, Mary’s attractive three-room apartment on Hamilton Terrace was a kind of haven, a salon for the music. “After finishing work at Café each morning,” Mary wrote, “I’d either pick up several musicians and take them along with me or else we would meet at my apartment when I got home around 4 o’clock. The guys used to come to my house then—Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron, Monk, Miles, Mel Torme, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy—all the boppers. Even Benny Goodman. See, they weren’t working and would write music and play all morning, almost ’til it was time to go to work. Sometimes Tadd Dameron would get stuck with his arrangements and he’d say, ‘Come on and play something, Lou.’ And while I was creating, it would push him off again. And Aaron Bridgers and Billy Strayhorn, plus various disc jockeys and newspapermen, would be in and out of my place at all hours, and we’d really ball.”

  Mary had a thick white carpet in the living room on which the group would all gather, snacking, drinking coffee or mixed drinks, talking. Mary enjoyed playing hostess. “The first thing I’d do was prepare breakfast or serve drinks.” And there was the scent and haze of marijuana in the air—Mary liked to relax with a joint after a gig—but no hard drugs: the musicians had too much respect for Mary. And above all, there was the music. Piano players especially liked to congregate around Mary’s Baldwin upright, which was rapidly gathering battle scars from cigarette burns and water spots. “We’d sit and talk until somebody felt like playing. Often a pianist would try out a composition he’d just written,” Mary reminisced. Adds Weingarten, who was raised in downtown white privilege, “I was never afraid to go there in the ’40s. Somehow, it was safe—except, Mary Lou said, for the park. You could drive up there alone, park in front of the building and go up. Or other times I’d walk the lonely streets down from Hamilton Terrace to the subway at three o’clock in the morning, not a care in the world.”

  STARS LIKE ART TATUM would drop by Hamilton Terrace, but most of the musicians were unknowns trying to prove themselves—like Sarah Vaughan, an awkward, high-spirited young nightingale from Newark. “I met her,” said Mary, “while she was touring with Earl Hines. John Williams, who was with Earl’s band then, told me how great Sarah was. Tadd Dameron later brought Sarah to the house and we became great friends. She’d either sing or play piano with me.” Dizzy Gillespie, one of Mary’s closest musical friends for life, was another visitor.

  Another unknown at the time was Earl “Bud” Powell. In ’46 he was just out of his teens when Mary, who’d heard him at Minton’s, persuaded Barney Josephson to give him a job at Café Society Downtown, as the house pianist with John Kirby’s group. Though his job at Café Society did not last long, a close friendship formed between Powell and Mary.

  Powell was already showing signs of the mental turmoil that was to torment him. The year before, a breakdown (allegedly triggered by a blow to the head) had taken him from the ranks of Cootie Williams’s band to Pilgrim State Mental Hospital on Long Island. It was the first of many hospitalizations.

  Mary became Powell’s guide and mentor. At Café Society, the show included comedienne Imogene Coca. Mary wrote, “I had quite a bit of trouble trying to get Bud to play the show music which was not too modern. He kept saying that this type of music was too corny and it was an insult to his musical ability. I told him that a musician was only considered great who played everything. It finally soaked in and he promised to let me show him how to play Imogene’s music, eliminating the modern harmonies. I insisted he play it as written.

  “Everything went along smoothly, until one night he came in polluted and the talk was they’d have to let him go. I got to Bud and told him he shouldn’t drink too much while working and if he’d listen to me I’d tell him when and how much to drink. I was so surprised that he listened to me and did just what I told him. After playing a set he’d go to the dressing room and sit in the corner waiting for me if I was out, frightening the girls in the show as he’d have the meanest expression on his face until I came in. I began feeling like Mother Mary. I’d sometimes give him one drink and later he’d ask if he could have another and I’d tell him to wait until later.

  “One night his little combo really blew and Bud was in the best of form. He had people standing around the piano, amazed at his technique and ideas. Out of 10 choruses he’d not repeat; he told the greatest story and I had to hug him when he came off. We were inseparable after this and he always came to the house and played new things he had written or tunes he was going to record on session, waiting for me to say whether or not they were good.”

  Mary’s mentoring included coaching Powell on the piano. She who had developed a great left hand from the stride-era giant
s told her friend Billy Taylor that she pinpointed a weakness in bop players, telling Bud Powell, “Everybody’s playin’ without a left hand, so let’s fill up the chords.” Johnnie Garry remembers after-hours sessions at the apartment where “she had a little ruler in her hand and she used to hit Bud on his hand and say, ‘Left hand, Bud, left hand.’ ” “She made them [Powell and Monk] both more aware of touch,” insists Billy Taylor. “You could hear the difference in touch between the early and later Powell records. You can hear the same with Monk: when he was recording for Blue Note, it was one touch. And then later he began to record for other labels … it wasn’t just the change in sound, he changed. And you could hear a more pianistic approach. This was, in my opinion, a result of his close association with Mary Lou.”

  But Mary was quick to acknowledge that she was also learning a great deal from Powell’s daring flights and brilliant turn-on-a-dime improvisations. She wrote that “the things Bud wrote for me improved what little originality I had and inspired me to experiment with my own things.”

  Although there was never any possibility of a love affair with Bud Powell in her mind, he pursued her for some time. He called her “Baby Doll.” Everything about her enchanted him: her musical brilliance, her looks; even her age gave her a sexy-maternal aura. Mary’s past difficulties in relationships paled before the chaos that emanated from Bud Powell. By the later 1940s he was becoming as much renowned for his unstable personality, exacerbated by drinking and drug-taking, as for his brilliance at the keyboard. Mary continued to try to exert a helpful influence on him. When Powell was at Birdland, Garry, working as an assistant manager at the club, recalls that “they called Mary because they were afraid he was going to tear the whole place up. And she could calm him down,” he adds. “He used to dip into the cash register. He got very angry, furious, that they weren’t paying him more.”

  “I was the only one who could do things for Bud,” she wrote in her diary. “Bud had a tendency to go overboard; I’d make him take a bath or go to sleep. At one time, Birdland wanted to pay me $75 to take care of him. But I said, ‘I have to look after myself, too. I can’t sit in the house for that. But I’ll help when he needs help.’ ” Yet there was not much she could do as Powell deteriorated. He was put into mental hospitals in 1947 and 1948, later taken to Bellevue, and again admitted to a state hospital in 1953. He became dangerous even to Mary. “Once or twice when he almost lost his mind I had to hide away because I think he felt he was in love with me—he wouldn’t allow me even to sit with one of my little nephews, and he kicked him—well, not hard. But the kid was only about three or four years old. He wanted nobody around me. If I walked down the street with anybody he’d push them away from me. He began to depend on me emotionally.”

  Then one night, drunk and in a rage of jealousy, Powell stormed into Mary’s apartment, threatening to kill her. Somehow she managed to reach a musician friend by phone, who came immediately and got Powell to go home. After that, said Mary, “I wouldn’t let Bud Powell in my house when he’d come in high.”

  Despite all this, there was a bond between the two, and years later Mary tried to help Powell again. She was touched by the dedication of his composition “Tempus Fugit,” written partly at 63 Hamilton Terrace, and she carefully preserved a poem that he had written at her apartment in block letters with a pencil:

  THE GREAT AWAKENING

  I was sitting in the garden one late afternoon

  And out of the sky a feather fell

  And not a moment too soon.

  I didn’t stop to regard from what source it came

  I only know it lifted me out of the depths of shame …

  After several more verses of increasingly maudlin confession, Powell, vowing to “live the way God intended,” ends the poem declaring that “God had sent the feather to me.” “I pray that some day Bud will know how straight he was when he wrote that,” Mary wrote in her diary. To her, every bop pianist after Bud Powell played Bud Powell.

  There were other extraordinary pianistic talents emerging then whom Mary nurtured. Like Bud Powell, the singleminded Erroll Garner was a brilliant original. Eleven years younger than Mary, Garner was a Pittsburgh-born pianist who went to school at Westinghouse School, Mary’s alma mater. When Mary first heard him, he was still a teenager. “He was about as fast as Art Tatum; fabulous. But sometimes he’d get overanxious and all I did was just keep him straight—I didn’t teach him. Like one time he was playing like Art Tatum and I said, ‘No, you’ll never make a success like that.’ ”

  When Garner moved to New York in 1945, a shy and inarticulate unknown, Mary took him under her wing. “We used to go out to concerts and listen to various musicians. We went to New York University to hear a big orchestra—I forget the name of it—and he came back to my house playing everything practically he had heard. He was going out to Inez Cavanaugh’s apartment, which was very inspiring to most of the musicians, composing and playing practically all day for Inez, who used to record some of the things he’d composed on the spot.”

  Garner couldn’t read music, but drew the line at her tentative offer to teach him. Mary understood: “If you touch someone like Erroll Garner or myself you can destroy everything,” she told an interviewer.”

  When Mary was making the switch from Café Society Downtown to the Uptown club in 1946, “I tried to get the manager to put Erroll in the Downtown club. I wasn’t successful until I got him up to the house to hear him play. He played my favorite, ‘The Man I Love,’ in his sensuous way. Oh what a morning! We enjoyed Erroll for at least three hours.”

  Garner went on to become famous, with an immediately identifiable style, an independent, rock-steady left hand and a far-reaching, melodic right. Mary recalled often, as here in her diary: “The four-four beat that he had going? That happened in my apartment. I was in the back room, I had gotten a little tired and so I had left him at the piano. Then he ran to the back room, he said, ‘I got it, I got it! I don’t have to be bothered with a rhythm section.’ You know how they sometimes don’t play with you?” Garner had worked out a way to be a one-man band.

  Mary always retained a special fondness for the elfin Garner. “He and Thelonious Monk never got up off the piano. And Erroll Garner tied ’em all up one night. There were about five of them there one night, including Bud Powell, and when Erroll played, they couldn’t play! Bud said, ‘Baby Doll, I can’t play!’ and I said go back and try. I never bothered them when they were there because they were composing things, finding things.”

  Yet a third pianistic genius became an intimate friend: Thelonious Monk. “When Bud came to me for help and if he got a little bit out of line, I’d say: ‘I’ll tell Monk.’ He’d say: ‘Don’t do that, Baby Doll.’ He respected Monk, he was crazy about Monk. We were going to do three-piano things. The three of us rehearsed on one piano and that was so funny. Yes, it was a very happy time. It seemed to me that no one could think as Monk did except Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke and a couple others.”

  Monk’s music, while consistent with bop, was that of an iconoclast. Mary recalled that during the thirties Monk had come through Kansas City, playing with an evangelist. “In Kansas City Monk was employing a lot more technique than he does today. He plays the way he does today because he got fed up,” she explained in later years. “Whatever people may tell you, I know how Monk can play. He felt that musicians should play something new and started doing it. He was one of the original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he’s playing now.

  “There’s no precedent for his conceptions,” she noted. “When he wrote a tune he’d bring it to me and I’d try to play it and he’d say, ‘No, you phrased it like this’—maybe a couple of 16th notes or something and that would be a part of the melody—but I couldn’t phrase the way that he wanted me to, so I just played it my way.”

  Mary found Monk’s elusive personality hard to describe. “Thelonious is a nice guy,” she said, but added, “He’s odd. He’s od
d. He doesn’t talk much at all. You can’t get words out of him at all. A very grand guy. And he was kind of a funny guy if you asked him to do something. Like he was working at Minton’s and the owner of the club told him to put the cover on the piano to preserve it. And he said, ‘No, I’m not a busboy.’ And he walked out.”

  Monk at times could provide comic relief: “One morning I felt extra tired and I left the guys in the living room to enjoy themselves and went to bed,” Mary wrote. “Eventually everybody went and the last one out left the front door open, since it could only be locked from inside or with a key. I had twin beds in my room. When I awoke around noon, I was surprised to see a figure stretched out on the other one with a beret on. I yelled and the figure jumped up and ran into my closet, where all the clothes fell down. It was Monk. He explained he’d come to see me. Finding the door open, he came in but since I was asleep he decided not to play piano but wait for me, which he did. And he fell asleep. We always laughed about that.”

  Yet, not only was Monk not well-known as a jazz pianist in the mid-forties, he was disparaged as a player by many. This did not bother him, Mary said, for Monk had artistic hauteur: he “always had that thing.” Like most musicians, too, he was poor, sometimes almost penniless, and Mary bought groceries more than once so that he could feed his children.

  “Usually,” Mary wrote, “when Monk composed a song he’d play it both night and day if you didn’t stop him. He always said that was the only way to find out if it was going to be good. It either grew on you or it didn’t. His music is … a conversation. It could be angry or love. Monk has an awful lot of that in his music.”