Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  It appears that she never shared her feelings about this transformation with her French lover. “Mary Lou and I would go in by train to work in the club, or in a taxi,” says Pochonet, “but she never talked about religion, the psalms, prayer, to me—absolutely not; we talked about music mostly.” They were bound by music, sexual passion, and his love for her, but they were as unlike as chalk and cheese.

  Thus alone did Mary go through her breakdown and breakthrough, confronting her guilt over the past: “I’d pray and thank God and cry for all the bad things I’ve done. I’ve never been selfish, mean or very bad. I had helped and listened to so many poor people and unfortunate musicians. But I had never reached God before and I was 44 years old.” It was prayer, she felt strongly, that helped her recover.

  The chaotic state of her emotions was mirrored by the disorder of her finances and business affairs. “She had a whole suitcase of contracts and music and letters all mixed up together. A complete mess,” recalls Pochonet. “I really tried to help her with that, but it was very difficult because she didn’t have much common sense. Much talent, but not much common sense. She would do things which I told her in advance wouldn’t work but she kept doing them.”

  She made attempts to straighten things out, contacting the Gale agency in New York to ask for a return ticket. On August 6 they replied with a Glaser-like lecture: “The only reason you are in this difficulty at the moment is due to the fact that you yourself decided to stay in England and on the Continent. We do not feel that we are in any way responsible for returning a performer to this country close to two years after an engagement has been played.” But friends in the States did raise some money for the ticket.

  By September, Mary had “gained some spiritual strength,” as she wrote in a frank and mystic-leaning article for Sepia Magazine several years later. That fall she agreed to go on a tour of concert halls and army camps in Europe on a bill with Sarah Vaughan, Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet, and sidemen. The money, recalls Johnnie Garry, who had become Sarah Vaughan’s valet, was very good.

  Mary was eager now to go back to the States, though Pochonet tried to persuade her to stay in France. He was thirty and thought Mary was thirty-eight, though she was actually forty-four. “But she didn’t look her age at the time. I proposed to marry her but she said no. Well, she was still married to Baker and she never got divorced—it’s too costly, she told me. And then, I was not in a position to get her the kind of work she could get in New York, and I was not ready to leave France and go to the States and emigrate.”

  Mary finally booked passage on a liner leaving the 15th of December, two years after she’d arrived for what she thought was a two-week tour. Pochonet accompanied her on the boat train to the port of Le Havre, still trying to persuade her to stay. Neither was happy when she sailed for New York. Mary stayed in her cabin, praying, asking God to help her live a different life, and “wondering what will I find there in America.” Her old partying friend Inez Cavanaugh was on board also, but Mary avoided her, staying in her cabin except at mealtime.

  Mary had begun to withdraw from the world in earnest. “It’s possible I was her last lover; to my knowledge I was,” muses Pochonet. “Before she got religion, she was not a nun at all, I can tell you. But after that, the pleasures of the flesh fell away.

  “She’d been offered some big engagements back in America by Joe Glaser, but she canceled everything before returning to America,” he adds. In her diary Mary wrote, “I was still looking for peace of mind, and I was determined to give up music, night life and all else that was sinful in the eyes of God. After that, I wouldn’t play anymore.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Praying Through My Fingertips

  1955–1962

  AS MUCH AS Mary longed to turn her back on “music, night life,” and other “sins,” when she arrived back in New York during the Christmas season of 1954 she was not able to do so right away. With no savings, she had to work at something. (When the IRS contacted her about unpaid back taxes, Mary responded flatly, “I arrived back from Europe on December 21, 1954, completely broke,” and invited the tax collectors to come see her spare living conditions for themselves.) Soon after she went to Europe, she had stopped corresponding with Lindsay Steele (and stopped sending him money), and he was gone, but her apartment had been ransacked. Mary all but accused Steele of having ripped her off, joked mordantly that at least he had left her Royal typewriter, so she could work on her autobiography.

  Needing money urgently, she turned to Joe Glaser and publicist Bert Block, both of whom held out possibilities of performance work for her, but at a lower salary than Mary expected. In vain they explained to her that her time in Europe had not added to her drawing power in the States. And conditions had worsened; there were fewer venues for jazz musicians. “The Street is gone,” Mary complained, a reference to the lively jazz-club scene along Fifty-second Street. She was offered a job in April at the Composer, a congenial club for pianists in midtown Manhattan, but she turned it down, ostensibly because of the money. And again, when she was lined up to play the Hickory House, another good spot for piano players, Mary canceled the date.

  In truth, Mary was simply loath to perform in nightclubs, and would avoid them as much as possible for many years. She readily agreed to appear on radio and TV that spring, including May appearances on the Steve Allen and Gary Moore shows. And she was still active in the jazz community. After Charlie Parker died in March, she agreed to serve as a co-chairperson of the Charlie Parker Foundation, along with Hazel Scott and Dizzy Gillespie. The foundation had a purpose dear to her heart—to raise money to help educate Parker’s children. But although a sum was raised for the Charlie Parker Memorial Fund, Mary became disillusioned and tendered her resignation in July. However, her experience with the Parker Foundation had planted an important seed: from it Mary got the idea to set up her own nonprofit foundation to help poor musicians and children.

  Buoyed by the interest and favorable press she’d received in Europe with her Melody Maker reminiscences, Mary set about getting a contract for a book. John Hammond was enthusiastic and showed the Melody Maker articles to Life and book ediors, and her friend the writer Allan Morison did the same at Ebony, where he was the New York editor. No one was buying. Though disappointed, Mary continued to write pieces of her story on an informal basis.

  Most important, she cut a record called A Keyboard History, the first example of the synoptic “history of jazz” approach she’d developed since the forties. The album, produced by the Jazztone Society (an offshoot of the Concert Hall Society, an established classical music mail-order club), was an excellent example of Mary’s lucid musicality and mastery of the various styles of jazz. “She used to say,” recalls Peter O’Brien, “that one of the things about good jazz is when it’s like a good conversation. No babbling, no wasted notes.” Her swinging, uptempo arrangement of the spiritual “(Joshua Fit the Battle of) Jericho”; her renditions of the ragtime piece “Fandango”; the old-time blues “My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me”; and her swing hit “Roll ’Em” demonstrate her great ease with the styles of jazz preceding bop, while her composition “I Love Him,” a study of “ ‘Round Midnight,” and her “Amy” are fine examples of modern jazz. In the liner notes, Mary wrote that she had been “part of each jazz era and didn’t realize it. It was my pleasure to bring you through the history of jazz.” Then with wry humor she added, “You may not realize this, but you’re lucky. On the other hand, to bring this history to you, I had to go through muck and mud.”

  The reviews were enthusiastic, almost pleading for the record industry to keep recording her. “She’s back in America now,” Downbeat reminded its readers, “and I hope a bright recording company will ask her to do a series of autobiographical LP’s because Mary’s history is that of an influential artist-composer with three decades of deep involvement with the growth of jazz.” Three years later, when A Keyboard History was reissued, came fresh praise. “This collection makes up one
of the most satisfying piano albums to be recorded in recent years,” wrote one critic.

  There was no hint of a troubled mind or anguished spirit on the recording; on the contrary, her clarity and precision of thought and execution were at a high level. Yet, although she recorded quite a few 45s over the next decade (some never issued), Mary did not make another LP as a leader for eight more years. Meanwhile, she watched as Marian McPartland clinched a five-record deal with Capitol, Thelonious Monk recorded for Riverside, and pianists like Horace Silver, Erroll Garner, George Shearing, and Ahmad Jamal cut albums.

  Even as Mary had picked up the reins again in New York, facing the old familiar problems of money and music, her personal life foundered in a disastrous second crisis of the spirit, as she was drawn back into old habits now hateful to her. As usual, she only hints at these habits—gambling, nightlife—in letters and her diary, writing to a friend called Dan (no last name was given), “After six months of devout praying, I was taken for a ride by two sinful people. It took me at least three months to get out of these people’s clutches and I have really prayed sincerely since first feeling God in Paris.” If she was, as usual, evasive about the details, Mary was eloquent about the effects of “sin.” Satan, she wrote, was “the man” who set cunning traps for the unwary. “An evil person will cause a good person to stumble, will throw you in a trance and take your natural soul if you are not really down with it, for the man is hustling madly for souls.”

  Mary’s decision to turn from the “sinful” world of entertainment to a self-cloistered religiosity, said some who knew her, was understandable—a matter of a tender nature crushed by abuse. Said John Williams, “She trusted everybody and was treated so bad.”

  Seeking solace, she joined the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which was led by the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (by then Hazel Scott’s ex-husband). It was a logical choice. Mary had been baptized by Great-Aunt Hattie in that denomination, her grandfather was a Baptist deacon, and, most significantly, the Abyssinian Church was the most powerful black religious institution in Harlem.

  But by June, disillusioned with that church, she handed in a crisp letter of resignation. At the same time she more or less stopped looking for work as a musician. It was, perhaps, an even more painful withdrawal than in France. The music that had always been at once Mary’s bulwark, her frame, her canvas, her delight—indeed, her reality—ceased to matter. “Music had left my head,” Mary said, “and I hardly remembered playing.” “About six months or so after she went back to New York her letters changed,” remembers Pochonet, a steadfast correspondent. It was as if the musical “faucet” had been turned off, yet Mary’s need for self-expression had to find an outlet. She developed a new passion in a gush of energy, an obsession to rescue the world. Mary set upon her new full-time work of rehabilitating troubled people—starting with her own family in Pittsburgh, some of whom were in a pitiful state. At Mamie’s house, when she announced she was giving up show business and everything that went with it, she stunned and angered her better-off family members. “The whole family thought I was crazy. I gave away my Dior gowns and sold a $6,500 mink for $50.” They simply could not understand her: Was this the same woman who was a famous piano star, the woman who had just come back from a triumphant European tour, as they thought? The same Mary who had regularly sent expensive presents to them in the past? “When I graduated from high school [in the thirties],” said Helen Floyd, “she gave me fox furs. She said, ‘If you’d have been on the honor roll, I’d have bought you a car.’ ”

  Mary explained that her life was different now that she had found God. She was quitting the world of nightclubs and simply could not stand by while, for example, her half-sister Grace Mickles lived in squalor, an alcoholic single mother on welfare with four children (and one grandchild). Although Mamie, who herself had tried to help Grace, warned her against it, Mary decided to take Grace back to New York and straighten her out.

  Into her car, an old but sturdy Cadillac, piled Grace, Victoria, Carl, Don, Cab, and teenaged Victoria’s son, Clifford. On the way back to New York, Mary got into an accident. Narrowly avoiding being thrown through the windshield, she had her face cut by glass and her knee damaged, and one of the children was hurt. Mary had always been a safe, steady driver; now she was shaken by guilt.

  With six people dependent on her (soon to be seven, for shortly after they arrived in New York, Grace was pregnant again), Mary became desperate for money. She wrote to her attorney, who was holding on to her ASCAP check, a quarterly payment of her royalties, until she paid him for legal services. She had to have that money, she wrote furiously: she had five kids to feed! And why were his fees so high in the first place? And where was all this money he had promised to recoup for her? Old familiar questions, old familiar battles. Meanwhile, Grace’s life was in predictable chaos. Heavyset, with beautiful brown eyes, she was usually meek and soft-spoken, but when she drank, Mary said, she was a “typical Jekyll and Hyde” alcoholic. In her drunken haze, Grace, a frustrated singer who sounded something like Billie Holiday, lashed out in jealous rages at Mary, the successful one.

  Grace had no marketable skills, but after she had her baby, Robert, in 1956, Mary lined her up a job with a well-to-do friend, Elaine Lorillard, called Robbie (she had cofounded the Newport Jazz Festival). “I hired Mary Lou’s sister as a maid,” Mrs. Lorillard recalls. “But she was a big fat woman, totally ignorant and not at all nice. And she couldn’t do anything—nothing. Not even clean silver.”

  Mary found herself completely responsible for Grace and her brood, recalling that “I cooked for them, washed for them and slept on the floor so they could live in my apartment in Harlem.” At times she even rented a small room down the hall from her apartment for other troubled souls she was trying to help. The strain was tremendous, the following diary entry from the winter of ’56 makes clear (Mary refers to herself sometimes as “Mary,” sometimes as “she,” and sometimes as “I”; Grace is “she” and the children “they”):

  They have just about demolished everything she has, yet she keeps them looking good. She gave her a cute dress from Saks Fifth Avenue for Christmas. She must have iron nerves for there are six of us in two rooms and Carl is awful! I imagine she has always been kindhearted but to go through what she goes through every day she must have a good story to tell us about praying to God.

  I know the only way one can make it through the world is through reading psalms everyday and doing the rosary. Mary even forgot about her artistic work and pitches in laundering, even big sheets etc., our clothes, like a regular wash-woman and thinks nothing about it, often saying I love God and it’s a pleasure to do all this. I bring my entire salary home, about $35 a week. None of us have anything but every little bit helps.

  After a year of caring for Grace and her family, Mary had had it: she drove them all back to Pittsburgh, where she left them with Mamie, the only other stable person in the family. Mamie was furious, but as Mary explained in a letter, “I had to get my strength back up.” “Carry your cross and cease grumbling,” she added, advice scarcely bound to mollify. Please, she begged Mamie, “keep the kids a little more. Very strange kids, grit your teeth and carry on.” She added that she had just taken in Bud Powell and helped him straighten out temporarily so that he could make a date at Birdland.

  By September, Mamie was at the end of her tether. She was charging Grace room and board—which angered Mary, who shot off a letter:

  We have always loved each other very much but my being away from Pittsburgh so much kinda separated that fine love of ours. You weren’t supposed to charge poor Grace. You asked in your letter why I didn’t buy them clothes etc. Well, I dressed those kids like rich kids. What happened to all the things I sent over there? Anybody would call me crazy the kind things I did for them. But don’t you remember I was born like that? Now I could care less for money and material things—the flesh is evil. I have given away practically everything I get.

  You must relax an
d read your Bible and wait on God—Believe it. I didn’t have furniture, street clothes and underwear and owe close to $900 or more on my charges because of the things I’ve bought for the unfortunates. And I was down to about my last $20 in the post office savings account. Yes, I got some money to rehearse and go to work, but God wasn’t ready for me to work yet. But I was completely relaxed. And a check came in for $608.03. Mamie, you were not doing God right, that’s why you had no work except for Fridays. I have prayed madly for you.

  She added about Grace,

  I have been going to church at 6 A.M. or 7 A.M. reading and praying madly and God is working fast miracles. Watch and see if you won’t be healing soon, just keep praying the way we used to. Let me know if I am reaching you spiritually. This is what I’m praying to be able to do.

  It would be many years of sorrow and destruction, however, before Grace is said to have stopped drinking. “Grace often acts like Lucifer,” Mary wrote a friend sadly. “I gave her everything I had, went without. She ruined five beautiful talented kids. Nobody worries but me about the relatives.”