Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  But reviews of her Albert Hall concert were ecstatic; as Max Jones wrote, even those who were familiar with her work after the Clouds of Joy were unprepared for her high level of artistry. It was, he wrote, “nothing less than a revelation. It is the overall impact of her greatness that is quite overwhelming.” Mary was also overwhelmed, but negatively again, by the playing and living conditions. “The fog in Albert Hall was so bad I couldn’t even see my rhythm,” she wrote, and complained about the local sidemen (as she would do often back in New York). “I expected too much. The bassist should be so relaxed that if the pianist decides to make different changes, or to modulate, he can automatically follow.”

  Mary was unhappy, too, with her accommodations at the Airways Mansions (which did not live up to its name), the poor quality of the food, and the lack of heat that postwar England still endured. In a funk she wrote: “Terrible fog … What a dreary lonesome kinda world to be in, I’m sad, I wanta go home.” She went so far as to inquire about her return ticket at Fosters, the English booking agent handling the tour. But they were firm: she had to complete her contract first. There were eight more concerts to go—in Manchester, Southampton, Leicester, and elsewhere—culminating in one on the 28th of December, at which time she would be at liberty to sail to New York.

  It had been one thing to be young and foolish in the 1930s, living on poor-boy sandwiches and corn taken from the field, with her buddies in the Clouds of Joy. It was quite another to be a woman in her forties, enduring unheated bus trips through icy fog, and always, she wrote with astonishment, offered the same thing for dinner: fish and chips. And, ominously, in several theaters the house was only half-full and Dawson was having trouble making the payroll. Lil Hardin Armstrong arrived to take Cab Calloway’s place, played one show, then refused to go on again until she had cash in hand. Mary got in a fight with Dawson. “At one point, I went for my shoe to crown the Weasel—Higgins intervened.”

  “Higgins”—Jack Higgins, a young English agent—was one of the bright spots. Having instantly fallen in love with Mary, he was trying to help her sort out her problems. “Back then, in terms of the business, it was dog eat dog in Europe,” says British-born singer Annie Ross, who was to meet Mary there as a neophyte jazz singer who liked to hang out with expatriate American performers. “Agents would book you at one rate, but have a higher rate actually with the club. They would take in the difference plus their commission.” Not so different from what went on in America, but with maneuvers and hustles unfamiliar to a Yank. Still, Mary had learned to fight for her rights as a performer. “Women had to have a sense of aggressiveness to survive, it was absolutely necessary, and Mary had that,” Annie Ross recalls.

  Despite her unhappiness, Mary looked decidedly glamorous—and younger than forty-two—in chic gowns that emphasized her smooth satin skin and ripe figure. She wore her lustrous black hair short, or swept up so as to emphasize her beautiful cheekbones. And she had a demure self-possession tinged with hauteur that appealed to the English. It was only her eyes, often tired and wary, that gave evidence of her inner turbulence.

  Jack Higgins saw to it that Mary got her money, paid her little attentions, such as putting fresh flowers in her dressing rooms, and located more interesting food for her. They began an affair, according to singers Thelma Carpenter and Annie Ross, who were on the scene; she was, he wrote, his “dearest Mary Lou,” “my love,” and “Pussycat.” When they were apart, he counted the days until he’d see her again. But Mary tired quickly of the affair. He was, she wrote in her diary, her “kind associate,” nothing more. Then followed an argument: she had learned that he owed money to everybody in London. He became the “jinx,” an agent, someone to keep at arm’s length. Eventually, a rapprochement, but for Mary, the affair was over. Years later, Higgins and Mary did business again when he booked her at Ronnie Scott’s club in London.

  Toward the end of the run Dawson was not able to meet his “Big Rhythm Show” payroll at all and at least one or two concerts had to be delayed; in limbo, Mary could not return to the States as planned. The money was very important to her, but she was so angry that when the last concert was rescheduled for the first week in January of 1953, she had to be threatened with a lawsuit before she’d show up and play.

  After completing the tour, Mary told the British press she “was bitterly disappointed.” By then, though, she had second thoughts about going home, saying she “wanted to play and record with British musicians, compose and arrange for British bands.” Yet with no more work lined up, she would be compelled by British law to leave the country. Nor could she afford to wait for work. She was, by now, reduced to sharing a flat with two tap dancers whose tall figures it amused her to watch as they bent over a tiny alcohol stove, cooking a supper of franks and beans. Sometimes they got lucky: stewards she’d befriended on the voyage over snuck in steaks from America for favorites like Mary. As for restaurants, her friend Gray Weingarten, who was in London on her honeymoon in early January, recalls that “Mary advised us to eat just at this one little Jewish deli she knew, because at least it was clean.”

  Max Jones and other friends managed to get around the strict British music union laws and lined up some concert appearances for her, the first with jazz bandleader Ted Heath at the Palladium on January 25th. Three days before, Mary cut an impressive recording for the Vogue label with a British rhythm section, playing mostly bop compositions unfamiliar to many of her European listeners. Reviewers praised her phrasing and ideas. There was humor on “Koolbongo,” fire on “Titoros,” lyricism on “Lady Bird” and “Perdido,” and a pensive quality to “ ‘Round Midnight”—“so uncompromisingly grave,” wrote one reviewer, “that it will have limited appeal; yet its unsmiling beauty covers an inner warmth.”

  There were also negative reviews for the record. The “trads” stopped at the swing era, and one self-styled “critic” of their breed wrote, “Her ideas are so banal and cliche-ridden that any discerning listener must soon suffer an onslaught of ennui.”

  Probably around the same time (though discographies date it a year later) she recorded again for Vogue, with a different combo, several more of her original compositions and an outstanding bop-tinged treatment of “The Man I Love” that swings relentlessly but unobtrusively.

  After playing Royal Festival Hall on February 15 and Royal Albert Hall for a second time on February 22 with Sarah Vaughan, Mary was signed in March by the London label for a series of records. Disappointingly, only two of the four tunes she recorded were issued, and both in a style she did not often visit: ragtime. “Laughing Rag,” by Derek New, and “Rag of Rags,” by David Bee, were produced, as one review explained, “with an eye to sales to the general public.” But the idea may well have been Mary’s, for she had almost produced a ragtime album in the forties and would certainly play ragtime again. Although her foray into ragtime was received well by the “trad” critics, who noted that her playing was “gay and full of the tunefulness typical of years ago … [with] great elegance and precision,” the record passed quickly into obscurity.

  By March, Mary decided to prolong her stay. She had various plans in mind—and she had begun to work on her autobiography, a project especially dear to her heart.

  HER STORY, SHE felt, was unique; and Max Jones had offered to help. They planned for Mary to write up notes on her life for a series of articles that Jones would edit and publish in Melody Maker. After that, it seemed certain that a book publisher would express interest. But she soon discovered how treacherous the path to writing about one’s own past can be. Faced with the blank page, and the dilemma of what to reveal and what to suppress, she froze. Musicians were family, and Mary wrote to Jones that she didn’t want to reveal things that might damage their reputation. The letters that flew back and forth between them in 1953—while Mary was touring on the Continent a good deal—reveal Jones to be a patient man but harassed by missed editorial deadlines (his own editor’s motto was, he said, “I don’t want it good, I want it Fri
day”). Still, together they managed to produce a well-told, entertaining version of her life in eleven articles, totaling around 20,000 words. Entitled Mary Lou Williams: My Life with the Kings of Jazz, the series veiled Mary’s serious purpose in writing about her life. Headings like “Gambler’s Mascot,” “Then Came Zombie Music,” and “The Mad Monk” were calculated to appeal to the foreign fantasy of an America that had produced Al Capone, cowboys, flappers—and jazz. The BBC aired readings of some of the episodes, and Max Jones took steps to help her organize a book, providing suggestions, even a possible title, Piano for Sale. But for whatever reason, he bowed out as collaborator on a book, and after the series had run in the magazine, the project lay dormant for several years.

  Mary continued to concertize in the spring. Then, in June of ’53, she was offered a job touring on the continent with Louis Armstrong and the All-Stars, a well-paying, steady job for the rest of the summer. But, warned Joe Glaser, “I am sure you know the group plays a certain type of music and it would be necessary for you to conform, and if you are willing to do this let me hear from you immediately.” Not surprisingly, Mary turned down the offer, telling friends she wanted to form her own group and be happy in her work. In fact, she had plans to put together a big band in Europe for one-nighters on the continent, though she soon scaled things back to a more manageable combo size. But even that proved impossible. She did not have her membership card yet in the British Musicians’ Union, a necessity; and she could not get it for six more months, after she had been in Britain a year. Her friends and fans were furious. Wrote Max Jones: “As Mary Lou has been so ill-served in this country, it seems as though there is no real demand for good jazz pianists.” But she did at least make more records in May, including her originals “Music Maker” and the interesting, boppish “Musical Express.”

  After touring Paris and Holland in June, and playing several engagements in London, Mary decided to move to Paris in November. She was booked at a club renamed the Chez Mary Lou (the old Perdido Club at 49 rue de Ponthieu, which had gone bust) while doubling at the elegant Ringside (27 rue d’Artois), where she was touted as “la célèbre pianiste noire américaine.” A nice touch were the embossed cards distributed by nightclubs to publicize performers. “You are cordially invited to hear Mary Lou Williams,” cooed the Ringside—in French, naturally. Best of all for Mary, there were no hassles over union membership.

  In Paris, Mary met up with old friends like Don Byas and dozens of expatriate Americans who preferred France. She became friendly with the venerable clarinetist Sidney Bechet, who had settled there, and was much beloved. Mary took a reluctant young Annie Ross to hear Bechet, advising her not to close her mind to any music. “I was knocked out, Bechet swung beautifully, I loved it,” Ross says. “Bechet’s hobby was collecting loose emeralds, and he gave Mary a handful that evening.”

  From the isolation of England, Mary was plunged into the gaiety of Parisian society. “She knew everybody!” writes another expatriate pianist, her friend Aaron Bridgers. Mary moved into the modest Hotel Cristal on the Left Bank, home to such struggling writers as James Baldwin and Chester Himes, actor Canada Lee, and Eartha Kitt, and Baron Timme Rosenkrantz, who with Inez Cavanaugh ran a little soul-food bar. Hazel Scott, who was then at the height of her career and had a glamorous flat in another arrondissement, often dropped by to visit. Accommodations were rudimentary, recalls Annie Ross. “No one at the Cristal had a private bath. I remember Inez sang a song about ‘Pissin’ in the warm bidet because the loo in the hall’s too cold,’ something like that.”

  For a while Mary shared digs at the Cristal with Annie Ross (the dancer Taps Miller, who became Ross’s lover, was down the hall). Often Mary took Ross to jam with her in a basement room of a restaurant on the Champs Élysées; just like the Dewey Square Hotel, it boasted a piano, and whoever was in town would drop in to jam, Ross recalls: Jack Teagarden, Don Byas. And Jack Higgins hung around, still in love with Mary.

  Paris was then also full of American artists, veterans of the war who came to Paris supported by the GI Bill. Romare Bearden was there, though he had stopped painting at the time. James Baldwin had been there since ’49, and had just published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. “Baldwin was ‘Jimmy’ to us then,” says Annie Ross. “I remember we used to collect milk bottles for the deposit money. It was expensive in Paris. Nobody had any money, we lived day to day, including Mary Lou.”

  “I must say, Paris was the happiest place for me,” Mary wrote. Mainly she meant the music. There were plenty of places to listen, from the elegant Ringside to the musicians’ and writers’ hangout, the Mars Club, and the established but still bohemian Le Boeuf sur le Toit. In December, she recorded again for Vogue, arguably the best recording of her stay in Europe, with Don Byas providing sweet-and-sour poetry with his tenor saxophone on her bop blues “O.W.” and on a softly shimmering duet in the yearningly lovely ballad “Why?” With this recording, no longer did bop predominate in her playing but was, rather, incorporated seamlessly into the mix. Above all, there was a sheen of sadness that overlaid the recording, an accurate reading of Mary’s state of mind.

  She was still restless, unhappy, and decided to return to Britain after Christmas. Finally, she wrote excitedly in her diary, she had an offer to tour England with her own band, playing her new material instead of the swing-era pieces still associated with her from the Clouds of Joy days. Also on the bill would be the neophyte Ross, with Taps Miller dancing. On Christmas night, she played in a glittering concert billed as the “Concert de l’École Française Moderne de Jazz” at the commodious Palais de Chaillot in Paris and then took the boat-train with Ross and Miller to Dover. The plan was to fill an engagement at the Bandbox Club in London and then put together her band.

  It was a debacle. Max Jones was there to greet them—with a brass band, at that—but both Mary and Taps Miller were refused entry when their papers were found to be technically not in order (Mary lacked a work permit from the Ministry of Labor). “They just decided not to let them in,” remembers Annie Ross. “We had to go all the way back to Cherbourg, and then sleep in the waiting room there while we waited to get back to Paris. And everybody was broke.”

  “The Jazz Wagon,” announced an English paper in February, “starring the British band led by Jack Parnell, will not include Mary Lou Williams as originally planned.”

  MARY MOVED BACK to the Cristal, where her luck improved only a little. On the one hand, work was far more abundant than in England. “I had many job offers from Delaunay [the modern jazz enthusiast and impresario],” she wrote, “but I refused them due to the low salaries paid in Paris. Instead I played many radio and TV programs in Paris, Holland, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Italy.” Occasionally she also played in Paris clubs, like the Metro. But the work was more sporadic than it sounds, and Mary had resumed her old “nite life” gambling binges. The result was that she was scuffling, and decided she should go home, where surely things would get better. She turned to friends in the States trying to raise enough money for her passage (her original return ticket had long since been cashed in, or reneged upon). But she was unable to raise much cash, and when she gritted her teeth and asked Joe Glaser for a loan of $5,000, he responded with one of his vintage lectures—no doubt remembering how she had turned down the tour with Louis Armstrong the previous summer.

  Yet there was feasting in the midst of famine for Mary, who was fêted by wealthy continentals in Paris, even royals. “I was surrounded with the rich, it seems they go there to stay rich,” she wrote. She played for the Hon. Gerald Lascelles, for Lord and Lady Donegal, the Hennessys of the cognac fortune, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who, said a press release, “invited her to play ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and the ‘Birth of the Blues’ for them at a private party.” She also met and befriended the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, introducing her shortly thereafter in Paris to Thelonious Monk, who became her great protégé. And she met many others, particularly at the
elegant Mars Club. “She attracted both the jazz audience and the general public,” recalls drummer Gérard “Dave” Pochonet, who grew very close to Mary during her Paris stay. “There were stars, too—I remember Errol Flynn, for example. And of course she was friendly with Nicole Barclay, who was wealthy and of the jet set.” Indeed, Mary became even fonder of Nicole Barclay, writing, “She was such a fabulous friend to musicians, she always helped musicians when they were stranded or in distress. She’d see they got money or a ticket back to America. So I recorded a song and dedicated this to her.” “Nicole” is notable both for its spare, hornlike phrasing and its deceptively cool-seeming surface, a classic modern blues. The tune appears on an LP she cut that spring (1954), on which Mary plays several originals and standards in fresh, subtly modern treatments. “Not only in solos but also in her orchestrations [there is] a subtle sense of delicacy, an extremely sensitive temperament. These feelings give her music a special originality and a unique place in the world of jazz,” the uncredited writer of the liner notes (Nicole Barclay?) commented. Yet later, despite Mary’s fondness for her benefactress, she complained that she got no money by making the disc nor received any royalties. It was a lament reflective of Mary’s entire recording history, and common to many other American artists who cut records overseas.

  Professionally, it continued to be a slow time for her. “Although most of my jobs were successful,” she wrote to a friend, “one has to wait a month or more for other work.” A well-received tour of Holland and Scandinavia in the spring, for example, was followed by unemployment. Feast or famine. When Mary was flush, she bought gowns, furs, the best perfume, and so on, often on credit, and suffered the consequences during hard times. Once she was unable to pay a dressmaker who specialized in couture copies a fee of 60,000 francs. The dressmaker sent a detective and a lawyer to the Cristal, who somehow insinuated themselves into Mary’s room, where they demanded the money, threatening to take Mary’s new mink coat in forfeit. There followed a humiliating scene in the hall, a shouting match for all the hotel to hear—Mary refusing to be bullied, the lawyer threatening to have her thrown in jail if she dared wear her fur coat until her bill was settled. In the end, a distraught Mary called one of her benefactors for help. Colonel Edward L. Brennan, one of the wealthy American expatriates who frequented clubs like the Mars and the Ringside, settled that bill. To show her gratitude, Mary wrote a song for him, “The Colonel’s in Love with Nancy.” It was Mary’s lifelong habit to reward friends, especially wealthy friends, with songs. She wrote “Joycie” for Joyce Breach, and “Miss D.D.” for Doris Duke.