Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  But Colonel Brennan had far greater significance in Mary’s life than being her “bread and butter,” to use a phrase she liked. He was a devout Roman Catholic, and one afternoon he showed Mary a small church with a walled garden and statuary. Mary, in ever greater turmoil, soon returned to this peaceful setting alone. There, she experienced a religious epiphany, writing that “I found God in a little garden in Paris.” To friends and family she added that she had the most powerful vision of her life there, of the Virgin Mary, and marked it as the beginning of an intensely mystical journey, filled with supernatural symbolism. It was only after she became a Roman Catholic, several years later, and her spiritual life became regularized under the guidance of a wise confessor, that the visions subsided.

  AMONG MARY’S CLOSEST friends in Paris was an expatriate American pianist regarded as a fine accompanist for singers. Garland Wilson, who had lived earlier in Europe, had returned to Paris permanently in 1953. Wilson held court at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a club long famous among hip Parisians, but by 1954 he was very ill. Through the spring of ’54, Mary and Wilson clung together in an intense, though not sexual, relationship (Wilson was homosexual). “I’d either go by the Mars Club for Garland or wait up for him,” she wrote. “I often left my door open, and would wake up finding Garland snoring, lying on top of my legs, and I’d make him get in bed on the other side of me.” When Mary’s bags were seized until a friend’s bill was paid up, Mary packed up and moved to the Hotel La Boëtie. “Garland Wilson thought I was running out on him and he packed up and came with me. Then, one night I went by to pick him up from his job and he was crying and could barely walk. I took him home and put him in bed. The next day he was back on his feet and happy.”

  After her vision in the church garden, as Mary began to retreat from her friends and associations, she avoided Garland Wilson as well. “I unpacked, getting in bed and relaxing and going over my life to dig what I had done wrong. I seldom left my room except to eat or play gigs. Everyone began to enquire about my sudden disappearance. Garland ran into me on the Champs Élysées, and said, ‘I’ve been trying to reach you.’ Well, I was really depressed.”

  Yet she continued to pick up a good deal of work, including radio appearances and occasional television spots. On one radio program, poet François Valorbe, a disciple of André Breton, read a poem dedicated to Mary from his recent collection called Carte Noire (Black Card) inspired by American jazz musicians and decorated with an Art Deco cover. It begins:

  It rains bells over the nighttime laugh of the piano …

  A summer of tar hopes,

  another summer jingling the keys of this night

  in our fingers …

  As summer approached, Mary’s despondency had become debilitating. But she had to work. In June, she accepted a gig at a New Orleans–style jazz festival in June at the Salle Pleyel. At least she could take comfort in her unusual versatility: in France as in England, the “trads” and the “moderns” went to each other’s concerts to boo rival stylists, but both camps admired Mary. “Actually I’m the only pianist who can play with anybody,” she remarked in her direct manner. Yet after appearing in Germany—and a tape of that concert, in Baden-Baden, shows her to be in fine form, both soloing and accompanying a band led by Kurt Edelhagen—she wrote in her diary that she lost all appetite for her music. She kept going because she had to support herself.

  And despite her despair, Mary produced a fresh body of work, much of it excellent, although little known today—”Nicole,” “I Love Him,” “Twilight,” “Amy,” “Nirees,” “Musical Express”/“NME,” “Melody Maker,” “Blues Pour le Club Français,” “The Colonel Is in Love with Nancy,” to name several. As ever, turning to her music soothed and inspired her.

  But not for much longer.

  She kept trying to borrow enough money to get back to the States, but her cash shortages continued. Efforts to reclaim royalties were fruitless; her business letters are full of confused and frantic language and repetitions. And another record she made around that time, produced by the Club Français du Disque, marked the nadir of her recording career abroad, a squandering of her talent on mediocre sidemen and poorly rehearsed, ragged sessions. Mary, who provided businesslike but colorless comping, came to life briefly on the several tunes where the rhythm section was inoffensive, and especially where she was left alone to solo, out-Shearing Shearing on “Memories of You” and giving an Erroll Garner treatment to “(I Made You) Love Paris.”

  Soon after, on the 31st of May, Mary was sitting at the bar of her hotel with her old friend Mae Mezzrow when another friend rushed in to announce that Garland Wilson had collapsed and been taken to the American Hospital. Hysterical, Mary rushed there with her friend, only to be turned away. They were told to come back in the morning.

  As it turned out, Wilson had already died (pianist Aaron Bridgers says the cause was an “exploded liver”) soon after arriving at the hospital. “Garland Wilson was well loved by many,” writes Bridgers, “and the next night people came to the Boeuf in sympathy. That night no one played; they simply placed an orchid on the piano.” Added Mary in her diary, “There was a big expensive funeral for Garland Wilson.… I did a benefit for Garland and the Baroness [Nica] contributed quite a lot.”

  Wilson’s death was the catalyst for the next downturn in Mary’s spiraling depression. Feeling incapable of doing or caring much about anything, she simply retreated to her cheap hotel room. When M. Henrion, the manager of the Boeuf, called and asked her to take Wilson’s job at the club, she wrote, “I asked him, ‘Why me?’ And he said, ‘Because I looked in his billfold and he was carrying your photo next to his heart.’ ” “But,” adds Aaron Bridgers, “she was too upset over his passing to commence immediately, so I played a few nights until she felt capable.”

  LE BOEUF SUR LE TOIT, at 34 rue du Colisée, is a play on words: though the name translates literally as “beef over the roof,” but boeuf was also slang for “jam session.” Taking its name from a surrealist ballet by Jean Cocteau, with music by Darius Milhaud, the club, which opened in 1922, was a home to jazz enthusiasts and artists, including writers like Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Breton; painters such as Picasso, Picabia, Derain, and Marcel Duchamp; the composers Ravel, Honegger, Poulenc, and Auric. “Le Boeuf sur le Toit seemed to characterize French intellectual life in the twenties,” notes writer Chris Goddard. “The prevailing philosophy was not so much nonconformist as anti-conformist”; it was an era where European and especially French-centered art was informed by a new sensibility, fascinated by African and by American music and art, as he adds elsewhere.

  But by the 1950s, the Boeuf, seedy old bohemian that it was, was showing its age. Mary was unfazed. “It was a gay bar, but it wasn’t obvious,” explains Gérard Pochonet. “Many of the women were really dressed—and many of them were men. But it was also for the general public.” Mary put it with more characteristically prim indirection: “It’s a place where the customers that really frequent this place didn’t like women, but I got in because I was a friend of Garland Wilson’s.” Mary began working at the Boeuf in the middle of June, and between shows at the club, she also appeared at the Olympia Theatre on a bill with the very popular singer Jean Sablon. She received rave reviews: “a remarkable pianist, the best part of the program, the highest quality jazz.”

  These new engagements seemed to bring her out of her depression, and she went on a shopping spree, buying, as she put it, “all kinds of crazy gowns.” She was beautiful in a white lace dress with cut-out sleeves and heart-shaped décolletage at the gala party—a traditional French “presse cocktail” to officially welcome the “World’s Greatest Female Jazz Pianist” at the newest “Chez Mary Lou.” Everyone Mary knew in Paris came, people like drummer Kansas Fields, James Baldwin, the Brennans, the Baroness; also such visitors as Sugar Ray Robinson, Billy Eckstine, and Bill Coleman. But Mary cast an ironic eye on the hoopla. “The producer wanted to make money. There are certain seasons that the Americans are
in Paris or Europe and when they go home there’s nobody left. Well, they had only one musician left—and that was me.”

  At the Boeuf, Mary used Wilson’s bass player, the Austrian Heinz Grah, or the Belgian bassist Benoit Quersin, but she wanted more rhythm, so she brought in “the best brush man in Paris,” her friend Gérard Pochonet. “She was very inventive, always,” he remembers. “Nothing far ahead, modern but also back to boogie-woogie, which was her claim to fame, but normally no more bop. She always wanted to play it her way, always.” To Mary, her way meant keeping continuity with the blues: “That offbeat can easily throw you,” she said. “Those changes sound new but it’s the blues right on; the blues is a matter of feeling and the blues is basic and all the other styles telescope out of it.”

  Basie’s band had come to Paris the month before, and it was manna to her. “After fooling around with the frozen sounds since 1945, and hearing potentially good musicians playing this frozen sound in Europe, I was most distressed. But when Count Basie came to Paris in May of 1954, they floored everyone, including myself. I couldn’t sit down during the concert, I couldn’t stop dancing. Now I cannot readjust myself to listen to those frozen sounds anymore. They belong in the classics and not warm God-loving music like the spirituals and bop.” She still felt the blues when she played, but, she complained, she was increasingly distracted and jittery. Significantly, too, she was less and less interested in playing. “In Europe, I became a frustrated musical wreck,” she wrote later, “with a nervous heart and a kidney ailment.” But it was not her own musicianship that caused her anxiety: “I did feel discouraged, fed up,” but not, she emphasized, with her own playing. “I didn’t feel that way at all because I never become discouraged—maybe for a fraction of a second.” Yet in the intensifying isolation of her malaise, the music she made was becoming a mockery of her own agonized sense of inner emptiness.

  Clearly, her problems went deeper than music alone could cure.

  HER PAIN WAS almost palpable. Around Bastille Day, Mary wrote, “I stood the Boeuf as long as I could. Billy Eckstine, my good friend, came back to Paris and I threw a birthday party for him.” She invited her own crowd—Hazel Scott, Sugar Ray Robinson, the Mezzrows, harmonica player Larry Adler—and Pochonet, who by now was madly in love with her. Not that Mary noticed him. Gérard Pochonet, thirty years old, good-looking, and the best available drummer in town, was simply “the poor lil drummer” in her diary. “I met her at the end of November 1953,” he recalls, “and I became very interested in the way she played, so I played with her in a couple of places including the Boeuf sur Le Toit for free.” When, in late June, Mary’s mood blackened and she walked away from the club after a party one night, needing solitude, he was concerned. “The poor lil drummer followed me to my hotel saying ‘Lou, what is wrong?’ I screamed and told him to get out. He wouldn’t, he just sat there and looked pitiful. This got to me. He said, ‘Come and move out to the house with Grandmaman and me.’ I said, ‘What? Me? I’m used to being around young brilliant musicians and you want me to live with you in the country?’ (Oh, how I’ve regretted all these remarks.) Well, it was too late for his train so I yelled, ‘Here take this money and get a room here, why do you keep trailing after me, blow!’ He hung his head. The next morning he knocked on the door fresh and with a beautiful smile. ‘Lou, you need a rest. I don’t make much but you won’t starve. Come out with us. Grandma is an excellent cook. I said, ‘I’m sick of French food. Please go home,’ and slammed the door.

  “I felt I had absolutely no one to turn to, no one to talk my troubles over with. I grew bitter at life, at people, and for several days I walked around as though I were in a fog. I met people who spoke but I didn’t see them. My mind wasn’t on them. I was searching for something I did not see and I did not know what it was. But I know I was searching for something.”

  In the midst of her anguish and mental instability, Pochonet returned, a veritable white knight. “I was glad to see him. I was scared to no end, I had terrible nightmares all night. I said how’s about sleeping at the foot of the bed tonight? This the poor fellow did. The next couple of nights I let him sleep on top of the second sheet. I’d wake up and he’d have his arms around me. I’d go into the craziest fits. He’d look at me and smile or look sad.” They became lovers.

  And it was there, in a third-rate hotel far from home, that the end of one kind of life for Mary began—an exquisitely painful explosion of the validity of many of the assumptions she had developed since childhood. Instead: the anguish of awareness that her life held no redeeming purpose that she could see, no meaning. And as the old life was falling apart around her, there was raw pain and tremendous fear. As she came to view it later, she was being given a gift of great value: the old self dying in order to be reborn, a concept particularly resonant within the context of Christianity, which Mary soon embraced. But as yet, she felt very little hope.

  NO ONE WHO knew Mary well has suggested that she had any kind of chronic problem with drink or drugs. If anything, she much more closely fit the classic pattern of the para-alcoholic in her attempts (mostly futile) to manage, help and/or control the alcoholics around her. Yet quite clearly also, her spiraling despair and self-destructive behavior paralleled the downward progression of the alcoholic. While she was in Paris, Mary herself noted that she was self-medicating, noting: “I was never a heavy drinker for my system has never been able to take it. Yet I was quite high practically every night on champagne, my favorite drink.” “Quite amazing,” she added in a letter, “for before 1946, beverages made me sick, my system never could take strong drinks, but I began to cultivate a taste for it, etc.” Then there was the “partying,” as Annie Ross called it, with Mary’s old standby, marijuana. Did she try other drugs long familiar to the nightlife crowd—“poppers” (amyl nitrate), speed, cocaine, sleeping pills? If so, she was discreet; though years later, back in New York, Peter O’Brien recalls finding an old bottle of amyl nitrate with a French label in her medicine chest, and when he asked her about it Mary, he said, became “flustered.”

  In Paris, then, she hit bottom. “I was in my hotel room alone and all of a sudden it seemed as though everything I had done up to then meant absolutely nothing. I was despondent because everything seemed so meaningless and useless. Even my beloved music, the piano I played, all seemed to have lost their appeal. So had my former associates in show business, the musicians, the night club owners and the wealthy men and women who were my patrons and who had been dining and wining me—none of them seemed important any more. There was no feeling for me to end it all. It was just despondency based on the fact that I felt everything I had been doing was no good.”

  MARY MOVED OUT of Paris to live with Pochonet at his grandmother’s, commuting to work in Paris almost every night by train or cab in July. But in August, she severed her ties to the Boeuf sur le Toit. “Now, Mary Lou didn’t just up and walk out of the place she was playing,” emphasizes Aaron Bridgers. “She was going through a sort of spiritual calling. And she felt that she couldn’t continue the way her career was going on. She sat down with her employer and explained her feelings, after which he released her from her contract.”

  Mary herself saw her crisis in a spiritual context and used spiritual metaphors to understand her experience. She looked back over her European stay to find what she called “signs” and “messengers” that led her, eventually, to God. Her first messenger had been a soldier—a white soldier she’d met the previous November at a party thrown for Mary by the jazz-loving Hon. Gerald Lascelles, a member of the British royal family. Mary had too much to drink and was nervous and silly—her words—but the soldier, sensing her distress, began talking with her about religion, suggesting she read the Ninety-sixth Psalm. Misunderstanding him, she went home and dug out her little white Bible and read all of the psalms, continuing to do so for years afterwards in an unconscious imitation of the regime of the Benedictine monks. “The psalms cooled me and made me feel protected, but I still didn’t f
eel right.” Colonel Brennan was her second messenger, introducing her to the Roman Catholic church where she had her ecstatic vision. Her third messenger was Pochonet, a completely nonreligious person who showered her with love and provided her a retreat from the world.

  Now came the fourth and most powerful message, sent by an unlikely candidate on the face of it—Hazel Scott, whom Mary once described in a letter as “a wild chick, had tried suicide, was quite sinful.” But, Mary continues, “after absorbing what I had to tell her, she looked at me and said, ‘Lou, have you a Bible? Get one immediately, read it and pray, pray, pray. What you need is peace of mind.’ Hazel Scott, bless her soul. She made me see my oversight of God. I returned to my hotel room, closed and locked the door and fell down on my knees and I prayed for hours. I had never felt a conscious desire to get close to God. But it seemed that night that it all came to a head.”

  ON HER MOVE to Pochonet’s grandmother’s place, Mary commented, “I’m sure that I was on my way to a real crack-up. I had to walk at least two miles to the train station (this kept me home).” She added elsewhere, “I did not trust myself around the old gang and the places they frequented.” Grand’maman Pochonet’s was literally a refuge, an asylum. In her diary Mary wrote, “We call Grandma’s place ‘Paradise Lane,’ a garden of flowers, away from everybody, in the country.” (Mary exaggerates a bit: according to Pochonet, his grandmother’s house was in the small town of Vaucresson, twenty minutes by train from Paris.) “And Grandma,” Mary went on, “was a beautiful spry white-haired lady. She cooked for us.” There was no instant cure, however. “Life looked mean and ugly to me. Music bored and irritated me. I just ate and stayed in bed. I’m sure that I left the print of my body in Grandma’s bed. Late at night I’d go downstairs in the kitchen and pray and cry. Slowly, however, the deep spell of despondency began to lift and I saw things I had never seen before in my mind’s eye: bright things, clean and pure. I received a message: ‘Be calm.’ ”