Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Negotiations to end the recording ban were proceeding (it would end in January 1949), and Goodman—and probably Capitol—were anxious to have material ready to record. Mary went to work, polishing the material she had been providing Goodman since the spring and adding new compositions. On September 8, 1948, she showed up for an all-day rehearsal and recording date at Capitol’s studios in New York. The band had changed personnel somewhat—Fats Navarro was now on trumpet, and Mundell Lowe had replaced Billy Bauer on guitar—but otherwise it was the same as on the V-disc sessions. Yet it was an unknown pianist, the Brooklyn-based Gene Di Novi, who ended up recording with the group and not Mary.

  Tension had been building between Mary and Benny all summer. Venting her frustrations with rare candor in her diary, she wrote of the County Center dates, “That was one of the most awful engagements of my career. We never made it except when Benny had to go home early one night and left us to finish off. The guys really blew like mad this particular night. Babs Gonzales sat in one night and shook it up—and Benny was unpleasant. When Benny was on the stand he made everyone uneasy by the discouraging look he gave them. It seemed he wasn’t happy, which made everybody uncomfortable. Once in awhile he’d walk over to the piano and remark that he didn’t like the way someone played.”

  Although Mary had liked Benny Goodman well enough in the thirties and early forties, “now I had found either a real neurotic or a monster—he was either too rich to blow or too sick. And the job paid me practically nothing. I struggled along.” Mary chafed under the restrictions Goodman imposed on her as a writer. (She was not alone. The arranger Eddie Sauter also had to submit to numerous cuts by the leader.) “Of course she wasn’t going to allow herself to be under anybody after her early years, with Kirk and her husband,” says Gray Weingarten. “I’ve always been a leader of men,” was the way Mary herself put it. To be fair, Goodman was by no means the only bandleader to change his writers’ work: Count Basie, to mention one of many, is said to have red-penciled material blithely if he thought it unduly complicated. According to some of Goodman’s former sidemen, however, he was capable of a terrific insensitivity that led many to shake their heads in wonder—and others to quit. Mary, however, forced Goodman to do things her way, or at least tried. “When I was doing arrangements for Benny Goodman, he never liked for anyone to lead the band but him,” Mary told Marsha Vick. “So I’d step up and say, ‘You’re not messin’ up my arrangements,’ and he’d sit down and let me show them how to do them.” But Goodman was then likely to go ahead and change them anyway.

  By the day of the recording session, Mary had become so frustrated that, after something was said that upset her, she did the unheard-of: she left the studio and didn’t come back. Shades of 1943, walking off the bandstand of Clouds of Joy.

  The very next day, Joe Glaser, who was again representing her, dashed off one of his vintage epistles:

  Walter Rivers, the Capitol producer, was completely mystified as to your behavior on the Goodman recording date. He says one moment you were there and the next moment you weren’t and after a long wait, they finally made up their minds that you were nowhere around. They sat down to try to figure what had happened. Benny swore that he had done nothing and said nothing. But Rivers didn’t quite believe him, knowing Benny. Benny said that a call had come into him from a pianist that you might have overheard and that you took a burn believing that he had been dickering with someone else for the date. Anyhow, they got another pianist in your place and the date proceeded.

  That young pianist, Gene Di Novi, recalled “receiving a last-minute phone call from Hasselgard offering me the job. He told me that Mary Lou and Benny had just had a big fight, so I ran in from Brooklyn to make the date.”

  Mary privately expressed misgivings. “I was quite fed up anyway, so I walked out on the date, something I’ve never done in my life and regretted later on. This set me back financially for about a month. I did not see Benny until later when he was rehearsing for a new band.”

  It may have been coincidence, but without Mary the combo collapsed, and Goodman disbanded it within weeks, although in November he did record several tunes with Barbara Carroll on piano. Goodman was more interested anyway in assembling a new big band to take on the road, keeping Wardell Gray and Fats Navarro (who was soon replaced by Doug Mettome), and the then Bud Powell–inspired pianist Buddy Greco, who also sang with the band. But this plan didn’t work out either; it was very rough going financially by then for all the big bands that remained. By the end of 1949, Benny Goodman dissolved both his bop big band and his new combo and, one imagines, sighed with relief.

  IN THE FALL of 1948, Mary chose to hole up again. She wanted, she said, “to take the next six months off to write a symphony and several other compositions.” Since she had no income, she appealed to Joe Glaser for $5,000, which she calculated she needed to live on while writing. Glaser responded with a scolding:

  It is unbelievable that you should conduct your business affairs the way you do and my only hope is that you realize that is the only reason you are in the predicament you are in.

  But Mary soon patched things up enough with Benny Goodman to supply him with several new numbers, which he recorded with the big band or the new combo. He recorded “Oo-bla-dee” in April 1949 with Buddy Greco as vocalist and pianist, Wardell Gray and Doug Mettome on tenor sax and trumpet respectively; and he continued to play her arrangements (such as “Just an Idea”), while “Blue Lou” and “There’s a Small Hotel” were issued on a Capitol LP, now available on CD. Then in November of 1950, he recorded Mary’s new composition “Walkin’ Out the Door,” with Terry Gibbs on vibes and Teddy Wilson back again on piano, with Nancy Reed and the Pastels handling the vocals. It was a tune Mary was sure could be a hit, but it never caught on.

  Goodman fans, and Mary’s own considerable swing-era following, seemed to show no more enthusiasm for the new bop charts than for the earlier ones. D. Russell Connor spoke for the Goodman masses in dismissing the bop groups the leader put together as “a controversial chapter in his long career.… Few Goodman enthusiasts champion this band.” Yet decades later, the music, now mostly available on compact discs, sounds seamlessly smooth and airy, if Mary’s cooler approach to her piano is tinged with a note of world-weariness. As musician Loren Schoenberg has observed in writing about the 1948 Goodman group, “to present-day ears it is hard to understand what all the fuss was about between the musical generations when this recording was made.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Walkin’ Out the Door

  1948–1952

  BY AUTUMN 1948 Mary was in an ambiguous position. “No other pianist, male or female, has so steadily met the demands of the increasingly demanding art of jazz keyboard performance,” asserted Barry Ulanov. “A brilliant musician.… It is entirely possible that future generations will consider her as one of the few geniuses of this era,” concurred pianist and critic Sharon Pease. But not yet. Another critic and admirer, Ebony writer Allan Morison, noted sadly that “commercial success has eluded her thus far.” Just as her New York audience still associated her with Café Society and not Minton’s, so was she regarded by the recording industry in general as neither fish nor fowl, and a record deal continued to elude her. Even Moe Asch was recording only folk music on his new label, Folkways. Asch had paid her little, but he had been an anchor in Mary’s professional life.

  Not that offers for work didn’t come along. She was still, after all, a name. Glaser periodically called with offers of work. But Mary was essentially on her own. “How many Negro performers can afford a press agent of the caliber that put Sinatra across?” she asked rhetorically. “No, it seems to me that we must make it the hard way.”

  Even harder was making it as a serious composer. Mary had withdrawn for several months to write one of her most original and ambitious works for piano and mixed adult chorus. Called Elijah and the Juniper Tree, it presaged her involvement with choral jazz in coming decades, especially her masses.
Set to the poetry of Monty Carr, the biblically based Elijah concerned social activism. The work had been commissioned by the director of a sixty-voice choir in Pittsburgh who, as Mary recalled, urged her to “do something like that ‘Blue Skies’ you arranged for Duke.” But Elijah’s jazz-oriented rhythmic inflections and difficult harmonies presented major challenges for classically tutored voices. The piece had only one performance in 1948; it was simply too demanding a work. “It seems no one can sing it,” Mary wrote forlornly and put it in the drawer. Then, nine years later, she was reported to be scoring it for a hundred voices and orchestra for a Town Hall concert that did not come to pass, and Elijah and the Juniper Tree languished until 1996, when it was performed again at the LYNX jazz festival in Florida.

  Disheartened by the uphill battles she faced as a composer and pianist, Mary wrote in her diary in the winter of 1949, “I continued to stay up working nights and gambling, never getting any rest until I had a breakdown,” adding elliptically, “I went to a doctor and he gave me a transfusion immediately.” In all likelihood, however, the “breakdown” and “transfusion” actually referred to an unwanted pregnancy and a traumatic abortion, an event she referred to cryptically. She wrote in one diary entry that she had a “miscarriage” in 1946; another entry said 1948, and a third referred to a “procedure” in ’49. She made sure to keep the matter a secret. Even close friends were unaware of it at the time. Garry, who was a frequent friend and attendant, jokes, “I didn’t think she had time to lay down and have a baby.”

  It was not until decades later that she confided in a few friends about the procedure. Peter O’Brien says, “She said that Dr. Logan, the physician who treated Duke Ellington, came and gave her an injection of some kind, a muscle relaxant probably. This all happened in her bedroom. Then, she said, ‘Something fell out like a turkey heart. And I know how bad all that is because I saw the devil out of the corner of my eyes—it was like a great big ostrich with long legs.’ ”

  The abortion was certainly a great trauma for Mary. Years later, she sometimes suffered from apparitions of small children who had died, and there seems a special urgency in the efforts she made in helping to raise a nephew, whom she loved as her own child. Then too, Mary’s later conversion to Roman Catholicism must have underscored her guilt, even if she was taught that her sins were forgiven. In any case, she became overwrought and overextended in the months after her operation.

  MARY HAD SUPPLIED her mother with money as often as she could from the time she was a preteen wunderkind. But now, as she approached forty, with nearly a quarter-century of road life already behind her, her exhaustion, combined with long-simmering resentment, exploded into rage; for the first time she turned her back on the Pittsburgh Burleys. “I’d always sent money home, which wasn’t appreciated,” she wrote flatly. “Later when I was ill and went home to convalesce, my people wondered when I’d be working again. I sent money to my mother and sister. And I had a charge at Gimbel’s they’d use. And if I bought things too small or large for them, they wouldn’t return them. They gave them to the neighbors, saying, ‘Don’t worry, my daughter is rich.’ I was hurt and I didn’t send them anything, fully convinced they didn’t need it.” But guilt is rarely rational. As long as Mary had a decent roof over her head and three meals a day, she was ahead of the Burleys. Recalls Gray Weingarten: “She told me she felt so bad because her sisters back in Pittsburgh would have to go gather the coal that fell by the railroad tracks so they’d have fuel for the winter, while she was ‘living it up’ in New York.” By the Burleys’ standards, Mary, of course, was rich.

  Around that time, Mary’s younger half-brothers, Jerry and Howard, who were war veterans, stayed with her temporarily; Jerry, her favorite relation next to Mamie, was stable, finding lifelong work as a bellhop, but Howard was another story. He had clear talent and dreamed of becoming a visual artist. But he hung out in the bars, got involved with heroin, and soon left Hamilton Terrace.

  NOW CAME A disastrous time for her. Like many musicians, Mary had developed a taste for card games to wile away the long hours on the road. Everyone always played for money, including Mary, but now she took it more seriously—so much so that she became addicted. “I had always loved to gamble with musicians who played mild games of tonk or poker to pass the time away between shows, but I had never gone into it in a big way. I got mixed up with the wrong characters. When someone gave me a line I swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Someone I considered a friend had got me in a swindle and I lost so much money, over $12,000. I was so regularly drawing it from my postal savings that the authorities thought some goon was blackmailing me.”

  Her escort during that time was a seasoned player whom she referred to simply and dismissively as “the old man.” But he was no benevolent Roland Mayfield, bailing her out, no strings attached, and supplying her with Cadillacs. The “old man” in Harlem wanted a return on his investment. “I finally let him kiss me. Then I decided to stay home. But not too long, for the urge to play [gamble] got the best of me.” Her would-be lover staked her to $100, then finally ran out of patience the next time they met. “I was greeted at the door,” Mary wrote, “by a very angry old monster who picked up a knife as if to stab me. I told him off, telling him I never loved him, had no intention of being his girlfriend and that he forced the loot and trinkets on me. I went home. By this time he must have given me over $1,000 to lose in the games. I decided to change and stop.”

  The compulsion chipped away at her resolve. “I determined I’d only take a small amount with me. If I lost this, I’d stop. But I continued to lose—although they were smaller amounts.” The web Mary was weaving grew more tangled. She who had never been a drinker, wrote that she was suddenly drinking too much, a measure of what she called her “nervousness.” There was a raid at the house where she went to gamble; she just managed to escape. “But I still hadn’t had enough,” she added drily. She began running a game out of her own home. “My apartment was so packed that I thought we’d be raided any minute. There were four tables going. All the hustlers in town came up to see what the apartment looked like and the game lasted almost two days.”

  She had stopped working, lost her savings and much of her self-respect. Her old friends, and her ex-husband John Williams, blamed most of her troubles on her new friends. “She didn’t have nobody to treat her like a lady,” he protested. “That place that she had, her apartment, and fooling around with those dope fiends and all! You know, dope fiends will rob you, don’t care who you are if they can get more stuff. She should have gotten out of that neighborhood.” Nevertheless, she had her standards: “She didn’t use profanity. She always used a soft tone of voice and there were some rough characters. She was that kind of woman,” said Buttercup Powell (Bud Powell’s common-law wife, who had a son, John, by the pianist) in admiration. And yet, Mary couldn’t stop gambling. “I have been hungry and broke but never this,” she lamented.

  AND THEN MARY, who described herself during this period as a “bachelor girl,” was rescued, in a manner of speaking, when she met the man who was to be her lover for the next several years and who showed her, as she put it, how to “protect myself from cheaters.” She met him at Minton’s, no longer the cool bop club but still an important neighborhood bar. Lindsay Steele was “sharp looking and rather a fast talker,” Mary said, “and he and I became friendly.”

  “Lindsay was also a numbers runner, like a bookie for the numbers; that’s really how she met him,” adds Gray Weingarten; she and her then-fiancé Keeva Weingarten used to double-date with Mary and Steele. “Mary’d have a dream and translate the dream into numbers, then go down and play it at Minton’s, and Lindsay took the bets. That’s all I knew about what he did.” Apparently he had other talents, too—at least Mary thought so, describing him as a cook and a good mixer at the restaurant who often sang during intermissions. Others demurred. “Lindsay sang?” sniffs Johnnie Garry. “He was a numbers runner, understand? And he had no talent for music.” Significan
tly, the good-looking and suave Steele was the first of Mary’s lovers who was not an artist. That may have been part of the appeal. She’d had several unsuccessful affairs after Orent—with Orlando Wright, the tenor saxophonist, for one. Steele at least represented a different kind of life, at a time when she was particularly world-weary. “The trouble with me is that everything happened when I was young,” she told an interviewer, “and now nothing fazes me.” In Lindsay Steele, she may have felt she had also found a strong shoulder to lean on—at least in the Harlem sense. He seemed intelligent, street-smart, was well presented, and, in the beginning at least, was protective and watchful of her welfare. There was a disastrous encounter with Bud Powell and his girlfriend that Christmas at which Steele intervened to remove the troubled Powell. And he could certainly be charming when he wanted to be. “He didn’t live with her—she wouldn’t let anyone live with her—but they were lovers,” says Weingarten. “We’d go out partying. He had a sense of humor and was really handsome. I liked him better than any boyfriend Mary Lou had.”

  MARY COULDN’T AFFORD to rest long. There was the rent to pay. “I realized I must work again,” she wrote. “But as a result of disappearing for six months, it was like starting from the bottom all over again.” When a well-paying offer came her way from Critelli’s Nightclub in Des Moines, with a stopover in Chicago, Mary grabbed it. But she returned to New York to a ransacked apartment. Many of her prized records were gone, along with her fur coat, jewelry, and gowns. Papers were also missing, which made documenting the losses for tax purposes a problem. “I had lost most of my receipts when my apartment was broken into. One [IRS] investigator remarked to me that a Negro would never pay as high as $500 for a gown,” she added matter-of-factly. “So they wouldn’t let me deduct for my gowns. There was income tax, leeches, there was paying the funeral expenses of a couple of people.” And, she might have added, there were the losses sustained at poker.