Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  AMID THE CONSTANT pressure of her daily domestic drudgery and frequent crises, Mary set herself an absolutely incredible discipline of prayer and meditation, in the grip of the passionate urgency she had first felt in France the year before. Guilt seemed to press in upon her like a vise; clearly she was in the grip of a chronic mental disturbance. In a struggle both heroic and appalling, she beat back “the old self” and the old friends and lifestyle, all of which she now found noxious. She set herself goals to protect and purify herself from the wrongful ways and the vengeful impulses she called her “blocks.” Quite possibly she was suffering from paranoia; undoubtedly she needed good counsel and guidance. But it was not to come yet. For the time being, she withdrew into herself, sustained by an improvised philosophy that comprised Christian tenets, spiritualist practices, and African-American folk beliefs. The old spirits and hallucinations that had haunted her in childhood, and had returned in France, now flourished an array of good and evil emanations, on one side a firmament of angels, intercessors, and saints, and on the other, dark side, a host of demons, “ghouls,” and such-like. “The spirits are asleep during the day in the corners. One has to read the psalms, use holy water, etc. to get rid of them,” she wrote in a typical passage. She had psychic flashes, many of them concerned with troubled jazz musicians and with jazz as an art form in peril of commercialism: “When I stopped playing in 1954 (I had never been away from my music over two months straight), while talking to individuals the future would flash before my eyes as to what was going to happen to them. For awhile I was miserable, but I learned to live with it. And the future of jazz flashed before me. I saw the enemy (Satan, evil, negativity) trying to destroy the spirituality and healing of this great art.”

  In 1956, Mary composed long lists of people she prayed for every day. One list contains an astounding 900 names, a fascinating group that includes Babe Ruth, Valaida Snow, Bojangles, Charlie Parker, and Rudolph Valentino. That year also, she discovered a local Roman Catholic church that propitiously kept its doors unlocked all day. Soon, in addition to her regular (voluminous) prayers, she was making entreaties to saints for the removal of physical and emotional afflictions, and to guardian angels for the lost souls of the living. Nor did she fail to list admonitions for herself: “Watch out for nervousness, gossip, worry, anger, fear and anxiety. Don’t swear. Be calm, sweet, pious, helpful to all. Learn to be patient and God will help you, this is difficult but is for your future happiness. Pray madly for all our relatives. Please help my relatives with their jealousies.” She read aloud, morning and night, the Tenth, Fifteenth, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth psalms. And she sent up one simple prayer every day: “Stop Grace from drinking … care for myself … for all musicians.” Forgiving her mother was hardest of all. Says Peter O’Brien, “When she became a Catholic, the first thing she prayed for was not to hate her mother.” Mary held her mother responsible for the failure in life of many of her brothers and sisters—her mother, who drank as Grace did. “No one ever knew it but my people had always been a terrible cross to bear, worrying about how they were making out, especially my brothers and sisters,” she wrote in a draft of her autobiography. “I had always wanted to send them to a private school but my mother would not hear of this. I thought that doing this might give them a chance in the world.”

  But in the personal mythology that Mary evolved after her conversion experience, a myth of tragic female heroism, her mother— whom other family members never remembered as a musician—became a tragic heroine, a thwarted artist whom the white world insisted stop “improvising” and learn the “rules,” thereby rendering her incapable of playing music. Then along came Mary, the daughter who broke the spell, who restored musical power and speech—and thus the black cultural heritage—as a fiercely gifted and self-reliant improviser. In Mary’s myth, the black woman triumphs and does not allow her “soul” to be repressed or “taken.” Reinventing her mother (and herself) in such a way gave Mary the opportunity both to exonerate her mother and to cast herself as her mother’s rescuer. Mary could not wish away the envy and rage between herself and her vanquished mother, nor the guilt she must have felt at her own triumph while her mother’s life was such a failure; but her new spirituality healed much of the hurt within her. “I used to get mad every time I had to bring my money home to contribute to the support of Mom and the kids—now since I’ve reached God, I’m happy to do it. Gee! This is a wonderful feeling. I seldom get angry.” Still, as Peter O’Brien is quick to point out, “she would not stay at her mother’s house when she was in Pittsburgh.”

  BY THE FALL of 1956, Grace and her children returned to Hamilton Terrace from Mamie’s. In January 1957, Mary wrote to a sympathetic lawyer, Maxwell Cohen, who was trying to help Bud Powell: “Please help me! I had to take my sister to Belleview [sic] hospital Monday, what with three babies crying all day. I’d appreciate your calling the Doctor on Ward N7 and ask if they’ll keep her until we can get her a place in the country. I’m afraid that they will release her before the Catholic charity can do so.”

  Interestingly, Mary was now coming back to life musically and longed for privacy and peace in her own home. She had, she continued to Cohen, some “big, big projects” in mind, but “I’m so very very tired.” She even took a rare engagement later in the year at the Blue Note in Chicago, taking along her one-year-old nephew, Robbie, whom Mary was to part-raise and all but consider the son she never had. The family situation continued to be desperate, requiring her constant attention. Years later, Mary wrote of this period in a cri de coeur to Robbie, who had failed to turn out as she’d hoped:

  When you were between one and five years of age Grace would get her Welfare check, drink, fight and sing. And once she cut your brother Cab when they were in the Bronx. I had to tie her in bed to stop her. She couldn’t sleep for weeks when she drank. I took her twice to Dr. Miller [a psychiatrist] and now she can sleep when she drinks. What happens with most in the family is a nervous condition which does not allow one to sleep except when doped or full of wine and whiskey. Robert, when you were a baby I’d run to the Bronx and bring you home with me to keep you safe. Ask your sister Vic. It has hurt to hear you say at times that you hated me, but I push it aside because Grace was crazy and jealous and you heard her say this when you were small.

  “He was beaten with pipes, left hungry, stomped etc. when nothing but a baby, you see,” Mary added in a letter to a friend defending her continued support years later of a boy others called a “bad egg” and crazy. “He’s frightened half the time. He’d like to hurt his mother now.” Mary spoke prophetically. But it was she whom Robbie wished to hurt, and did.

  THE IRS CONTINUED to dun Mary for taxes, and again in 1956 she wrote the agency a letter notable for its degree of naked despair:

  My future in show business is very vague due to heavy competition and my ill health. I have been broke since 1947 and the few jobs I was able to obtain at indefinite intervals went toward my many mounting bills and expenses.

  Steady employment is just about impossible for me. I am completely bankrupt and my future in show business is closed until I can have a plastic surgeon fix my face which of course is impossible as I have no income and am unemployed.

  If it were through some miraculous way that I was able to work again it would take me at least a year or two to pay back the personal loans and get my few last possessions out of pawn, plus get the adequate medical treatment that I need. Kindly favor me with a humane reply.

  (There is no record of a response from the IRS.)

  In fact, Mary, whose frame of mind seemed as extreme as her financial straits, could barely bring herself to work as a musician anymore. She continued to turn aside jobs offers, as she had done since 1954. “I got the feeling that I would never play jazz again nor would I return to my old life, although people were offering me all kinds of good-paying jobs, all of which I turned down.” Instead, for the next several years, she lived on very little, her “quarterly ASCAP check [about $300],
occasional royalties from old records, and credit,” as she said late in ’57 to a Time reporter. She could not have survived without the credit, which came in the form of loans and hand-outs from old friends—the Baroness Nica, Nicole Barclay, and a few musicians, notably Dizzy Gillespie. Mary had tried to help the baroness, who was bereft after Charlie Parker died, with her own drug problem. As for the Gillespies, they “used to call and ask if I had enough to eat. Then a few minutes later the doorbell would ring and Lorraine would bring me a big basket of food,” Mary reminisced. The Gillespies were well aware of the help Mary was giving to other musicians.

  Indeed, Mary had taken on several new “cases,” including dancer Baby Lawrence, seldom mentioned today. Lawrence was known as a wonderful drummer with his feet, and Mary prized playing with him, so much so that in the spring of 1955 she briefly put together a trio with Lawrence and bassist Oscar Pettiford—an interesting concept, but one that could find no bookings. Baby Lawrence and Mary (she on a portable keyboard) began performing together on street corners, sharing a religious fervor. Lawrence would exhort passersby to come and be baptized. Lawrence wrote literate letters of penetrating insight, but he was also a troubled alcoholic, in and out of institutions.

  WITH WRITER ALLAN MORISON, Mary visited Bud Powell at Birdland. “Birdland’s vibrations are bad for him,” she wrote. “When Bud played, I was surprised to hear him playing like Shearing, Marian McPartland, and others. Later we went to his dressing room, and he was too knocked out to even talk. Heroin. The next day I prayed at the altar. Trying to shake off the vibrations of Birdland, I stayed in church five hours.” Mary managed to persuade some musicians—Kenny Clarke, Harold Baker, Dizzy Gillespie, even Thelonious Monk—to attend church with her, although one wonders whether it was worth the effort. “She offered to take Monk in her car to Our Lady of Lourdes to meditate for the first time in his life,” recalls Mary’s friend Joyce Breach. “He was reluctant to go and stalled her, then he tried to get his wife to come along too, but Nellie told him to go on by himself. Then, Mary said, he had her stop the car on the way up. Unbeknownst to her, he bought himself a pint of wine and drank it all up. And when they got to the church, he fell down inside and Mary kept pulling on him, trying to get him up, calling him a big ape. Fortunately, no one else was there in the church. Monk wouldn’t tell her what was going on but finally he got up and sat in a pew and prayed. Then a few days later he confessed he’d drunk the wine because he’d never been in a church and was afraid he’d die or something.”

  Some musicians refused to humor Mary. Miles Davis respected Mary’s musicianship (several years later he admitted to her, “I should have asked you to be in my band”); but he also mockingly called her “Reverend Williams.” Others, says Lorraine Gillespie, “started running when they saw her coming—she was always trying to get them to go in the church and pray. They’d tell her, everybody’s got his own way. And they said to me, she used to be wild. And I said to them, ‘If a person changes, isn’t that something?’ They should be praising her, not putting her down. But musicians, you know, ummmmhum.”

  “She was like a bag lady—not crazy, but odd, running here and there with bags of groceries, trying to help these strung-out musicians,” recalls Helen Floyd. “People laughed at her, you know.” Her apartment was like a homeless shelter, with musicians convalescing in her living room (Grace having been moved out to an apartment in the Bronx).

  Many of Mary’s white friends were as uncomfortable about the change in her as her family and the community of black musicians, but they remained loyal. Joyce Breach, a wealthy young jazz lover from Greenwich, Connecticut, simply accepted her. “She was very unrealistic about some things, like Alice in Wonderland, and street-smart at the same time. But that was Mary, and I never tried to change her.” Explains Gray Weingarten, “In the ’50s, I started having children and didn’t get into New York very much. Next time I saw Mary Lou, she was in a stage of intense religious conversion.” Weingarten herself had converted to Judaism, but remained intellectually skeptical of all religion. “I couldn’t deal with Mary Lou, almost a maternal figure in my life, becoming a religious convert—a fanatic. That was a big difficulty for me. Later on, Mary Lou got better about the religious thing. She ‘sobered up.’ But still, when she came to visit me at my home, she’d put her Jesuses and her Marys all over before she even unpacked.” Adds Elaine Lorillard pointedly, “She was very determined to do what she wanted to do—which was bad for her career.”

  Revealing that she was well aware of the criticism about her, Mary wrote to her friend Barry Ulanov, “Whenever God heals or performs a miracle they say I’m crazy, fanatic, a witch, anything evil.” She was exhausted and often discouraged by her efforts, and felt keenly the conflict between helping others full-time while her own material and artistic needs were neglected. “All my life I’ve thought that my greatest block to big success was my weakness in stopping along the way to help an unfortunate,” she wrote. “This set up many obstacles.” Yet she had so projected the urgency of her own situation onto the world at large that she felt compelled to keep trying to rescue burnt-out cases.

  Mary’s life narrowed to a monastic leanness. Mornings were spent at Our Lady of Lourdes, the church around the corner; then home to fix lunch for whoever was staying with her; then back to church to meditate. At times her meals consisted of apples and water. She often gave up her bed to some addicted patient, sleeping on a pad on the floor. If she had to go somewhere, she walked; the little money she had went to feed and care for her patients.

  Already comfortable praying at a Roman Catholic church, Mary began following Catholic disciplines well before she converted. Out walking one day, she “heard a sound”—her term for intuition—and bought a rosary she saw on display in a religious shop. She called her lapsed Catholic friend, Hazel Scott, for the words of the prayer. Then Mary began taking the classes in religious instruction required of all converts, at Our Lady of Lourdes. She loved her local church: its convenience and quiet, its cool meditative atmosphere, even the meeting room next to the downstairs chapel where parishioners socialized, playing penny-ante card games. In time, remarked Bernice Daniels, “I remember she was always playing cards in the church, even though she didn’t win very often.” And significantly, Mary was gradually drawn back to playing her music. Sitting in the quiet chapel for hours at a time, all sorts of “important sounds” came to her. “I’d go down and meditate in that church and hear some crazy arrangements. They come so fast I can’t write them,” she said. But she did begin to write them: her music notebooks from then on were full of fragments, riffs, sketches for pieces like “Gabriel’s Horn,” and “The 23rd Psalm,” which would in time become one of her important new compositions, blending jazz with a spiritual intent. And if she still had no desire to play publicly, even during her most reclusive period—1956 into late 1957—there was a piano in her apartment and a piano in the church basement next to the card tables; and friends from the period, like Joyce Breach and Conchita “Niki” Nakatani, a journalist from Philadelphia who stayed at Hamilton Terrace for several weeks in 1958, recall that Mary would, in fact, occasionally play. She even offered to perform for Our Lady of Lourdes Church to help raise money for the grammar school the church was struggling to keep open, and which one of her nephews was attending. (But there is no record that the parish priest, a Father Dolan, took her up on the offer.) “She remained very concentrated in her music, and I suspect she never stopped playing,” emphasizes Barry Ulanov. “Something musical happened all the time I knew her—from the early 1940s until her death. She was a true artist and music was everything for her. Too much weight is given to heavily publicized public appearances by musicians, while other venues—schools, churches, homes—are every bit as valid. If it’s an artist of quality, both arenas are important. And Mary is a superb example of this.”

  However, Mary soon became disenchanted with the instruction she was receiving at Our Lady of Lourdes, complaining in a letter to Father Do
lan of “strange vibrations.” Temporarily adrift again, she turned back to her marathon prayer sessions, obsessed, like a prophet of old, that doom was near for the whole world, and that striving for salvation was paramount. It was a home-grown personal faith that depended on continuously surrendering her own needs. “Sacrifice was it for her. If you were destitute, she would go in your house and give you food and clothing and clean your floor and all that,” recalls Helen Floyd. Mary herself had only one pair of shoes and a single dress, which she washed out in the bathroom basin and hung up to dry as needed.

  GIVEN MARY’S STATE of mind at the time, it can fairly be called providential that she met two priests who possessed the rare blend of sensibilities she needed. The first, Father John Crowley, was a Redemptorist missionary in Paraguay who loved jazz (he was a former saxophone player). While on a goodwill tour of South America leading a band in ’56, the Gillespies struck up a friendship with the priest, who encouraged Lorraine Gillespie in her desire to become a Roman Catholic. Later that year, Crowley was reassigned to a mission in Boston; on his way, he stopped in New York and looked up Lorraine, who introduced him to Mary. Their meeting was highly significant. At last Mary had met someone she would listen to: a priest who loved jazz. Crowley was able to temper her extremism. Concerned for her safety, he warned her not to take in any more people addled by narcotics or alcohol. In response, Mary quoted scripture to Father Crowley. “What a beat up guinea-pig I was,” Mary wrote later. “And Father Crowley told me that with all that praying, I was doing what he was supposed to do.”

  Crucially, Crowley succeeded in nudging Mary back to performing her music—in effect, integrating the roles of healer and musician. “Father Crowley told me to get back to my work and offer this up as a prayer for others. That I should be playing the piano again,” Mary remembered. The seed was planted.