Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Soon after, Mary met another critical religious influence, the erudite and brilliant priest Father Anthony Woods, a Jesuit, who was to have the greatest influence in shaping and balancing her religious energy with her musical persona. It was Barry Ulanov who introduced Mary to Woods. Ulanov, a Jew, had converted to Roman Catholicism and was a brilliant and articulate bridge between jazz and liberal Catholic theology and practice (later, after a divorce, he became an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian). Ulanov, who had by then left jazz journalism to become a theology professor, wrote for the magazine Jesuit Missions, which Woods edited. His urging and that of Lorraine Gillespie, who had begun taking catechism classes with Woods, decided Mary. She joined his classes of instruction once a week throughout the winter and spring of 1957, at the well-to-do (and lily-white) St. Ignatius Loyola Church, on Park Avenue.

  WOODS WAS TALL and large, kindly, but, says Ulanov, “tough minded at the same time.” Father Peter O’Brien knew him when he attended high school at St. Francis Xavier in Greenwich Village, an intellectually and artistically vibrant church where Woods became parish priest late in 1957. “He wore a Homburg, a Chesterfield coat and all that kind of thing.”

  Mary and Lorraine were both baptized on May 9, 1957, one day after Mary’s forty-seventh birthday. (Barry Ulanov was Mary’s godfather; Bricktop, the Paris-based jazz hostess, was Lorraine’s.) One month later, the women were confirmed together.

  From then on, “Woods was her spiritual adviser and they were very close,” says Peter O’Brien. Woods gave Mary the same advice that Crowley had: “Father Woods was telling me I was doing it the wrong way,” she told her niece Helen. But Mary enchanted Woods with her passionate, childlike ardor and her musical intelligence. He confided, “She has the beauty of being simple without any affectation—and simplicity with her is a very deep thing. And I have heard her discuss the aesthetics of music with great penetration. She seems to have an understanding of what is good, of what is beautiful. And in her uncomplicated way, she can’t understand how anybody can’t be sincere. To me, she is one of the greatest persons I have ever met—really a very great soul. She has exquisite taste, and where there is goodness, she gravitates to it naturally.

  “But,” he went on, “she is an emotional thinker, a disorganized thinker and sometimes she has to sort out her ideas. And that’s where I come in. She’s simple and direct, primitive in a very good sense, and not spoiled by the sophistication around her. I don’t believe that Mary is capable of producing anything except what is good.”

  Woods was an adept diplomat. By the time she began meeting with him for instruction into the church, Mary’s prayer list topped 1,000 names—each of which she prayed for daily! Mary calculated that between prayers and one or two attendances at mass, she spent nine hours a day in church. Woods curbed her excesses in a kind but firm way. “One of the first things I taught Mary Lou,” Woods said, “was how to pray for the thousand friends on her prayer list without naming each one.”

  Then there was the business of the visions. Her clairvoyance was, of course, long-standing—and not only visual; as a musician, she picked up information about feelings from sounds. But a good part of her spiritual rebirth was inspired by apocalyptic visions about individuals and society in general, causing her acute distress. “When I stopped playing, the sounds I picked up concerned the world,” she wrote. “God gifted me with reading minds and I was most disturbed, thinking I had evil thoughts. The worst. Some people,” she added, “lose their minds.”

  “I was a born medium,” Mary added in a letter to her friend “Dan” of her breakdown and breakthrough in Paris, “but I saw awful things because I was not praying. I asked God in Paris to not let me see anything more except good.” During the intensity of her early spiritual rebirth, she resorted to what many might see as superstitious practices, but the rituals gave her a measure of security. She sprinkled holy water on sites that seemed disturbed; she signed the cross over the area; she burned colored candles to shine on the dead and the psychically troubled that she saw in visions and dreams (in one, she wrote, trumpeter Buck Clayton was staring out of the darkness of a balcony). And, being Mary, she loved burning candles—candles to try to get a “lucky number” when she played the numbers, candles to “purify” a room of evil spirits, and so on. “I’ve tried the black cat, ladder, whistling, fortunetellers,” she wrote later of her various efforts to control fate by manipulating the supernatural, “as well as peanuts backstage, and the round truck,” practices passed along from black vaudeville.

  And there were more visions, at times ravishing, as of the Virgin Mary in Paris, but more often frightening. Recalls Father John Dear (now a Jesuit priest, but in 1979 a Duke University student when Mary was there as artist-in-residence): “She told me about this great priest, Woods, coming and telling her very gently that you should ask God not to have visions anymore, so that you can get back to having an ordinary spiritual life, loving people and serving them through music. A profound thing, I thought. She’s having these visions of the saints—and this Jesuit says there’s a deeper thing. I was very taken by it and she was too.”

  Under Father Woods’s guidance, Mary’s obsessiveness subsided. Her fears of being “tricked” by sad spirits and the souls of the unsaved lessened. Gradually, she no longer worried that a person might be hypnotized by bad spirits while awake, or one’s soul “taken” while asleep; at a deep level she let go of her magical thinking.

  “Woods was made to order for Mary—quick, accommodating, unjudgmental; so strong and strong-willed yet with delicate apprehensions,” reflects Barry Ulanov. “He was interested in music, yes, but the last thing Mary needed was somebody to deal with her jazz feelings. She needed somebody to deal with her feelings and her understanding of herself. He was her spiritual advisor, her counselor—and the man who accompanied her through the gates.” The happiest moments of her life, Mary wrote, were when she was going for instruction from Father Woods.

  FATHER WOODS, FRESH to tenure in 1957 as parish priest at St. Francis Xavier, at 30 West Sixteenth Street, provided Mary, as did Father Crowley, with the inspiration to create music again—jazz with a spiritual content. Xavier supported a thriving arts community. Besides a boys’ high school, there was a small, beautifully proportioned theater with a curving balcony and boxes, where the Village Light Opera Company, the Village Players, and the Xavier Symphony Orchestra performed. Xavier also hosted the St. Thomas More Society, a sodality, or Roman Catholic fellowship, that had quickly evolved into an intellectually vibrant forum for professionals to meet and discuss contemporary theology and its applications. Woods was the moderator, and Ulanov was a key member. Mary soon joined, and found there a bridge to Catholic activism, for the More Society definitely appealed to liberal and radical Catholics at a time when civil rights issues were heating up. But it was still the McCarthy era, a time of growing rifts within the Church, as within society at large. A Village friend of Mary’s and fellow parishioner, Gemma Biggi, recalls a homily given by Father Woods in the late 1950s admonishing his congregation “not to find a Communist under every pew”; afterwards, contributions plummeted, and he was admonished by higher Church authorities. Woods marched for civil rights and pressed for inclusion of jazz music in the liturgy. “Woods had guts,” Biggi says simply.

  Sometimes, Mary walked all the way from her Harlem apartment to the church, more than a hundred city blocks, to be with Father Woods. “She said she had to walk,” says Peter O’Brien. “She still didn’t have any money for transportation.” Yet she could only rarely be persuaded to play, even at private parties. A new friend she made in the fifties was the heiress Joyce Ekblom Breach. “At that time I still had money and gave a lot of big private parties, and my thing was the music,” recalls Breach. “Marian McPartland played at a number of my parties and I wanted her for my parents’ 35th wedding anniversary, but Marian was booked and she recommended Mary. We talked on the phone and hit it off, but Mary said she wasn’t into playing. No. ‘Too much evil
in the world.’ Jimmy McPartland ended up playing the party.”

  Deeply in debt, Mary was on the verge of turning her back on the world completely and becoming a nun, “so that I would be able to help unfortunates,” she wrote. It was Father Woods who helped her to realize how she could live, in the words of Romans 12:2, “not conformed to the world but transformed from the world.” He had a hard time, however, convincing Mary to return to performing. “I’m a loner,” she would protest; but he knew that she needed to balance her intense introversion with the gift that linked her to the world. “He told her, says Helen Floyd, to “use her music! It wasn’t the music doing her harm. And that’s how she got started into the liturgical music.”

  EVEN BEFORE SHE had met Woods, however, Mary had begun sketching plans for a comeback to involve music and religion, writing to lawyer Max Cohen in January of 1957, “I’ll have to talk with you about my plans concerning my return to the music field. I have great ideas for creative music that are at a standstill now.” She envisioned playing music as a means of helping down-and-out musicians, but pinned her hopes—at once grandiose and pathetic—on her autobiography becoming a bestseller. She wrote:

  I’m sure that when you read my letter and notes on my story [her autobiography], you will probably think that I’m either nuts, eccentric, a genius or a queer—there’s no end to the names one might be called. And I’ve gotta think how to write the good part of my experiences so I don’t hurt anyone … many big names.

  I’d like $700 advance on my story. You may think that is a big amount.… Then too a movie can be done with some of my compositions as the background. Anyone connected with this story will become famous overnight and it also means the return of creative music—every time I recorded modern music it brought back people like Monk, Bud—it may not have helped me but it certainly did help others. I need a great deal of money for other things I have in mind, too. But I’m very very very tired, it seems I haven’t slept for years. At the present, I need donations for rosaries and masses while I’m resting and practicing.… I had contemplated not working until after Lent—I’d rather write new material and prepare my story. My story will start me back in big money.

  There was no “big money” in the offing. However, when Mary made a rare excursion out in the spring with the Gillespies, sitting in on a date Dizzy had in Atlantic City (at Dizzy’s repeated urging), Mary played as well as ever. “And Dizzy was lecturing Mary, telling her she’s not helping things by not playing. She should get out there and play and hire musicians, keep them from trouble,” Lorraine Gillespie recalls. “He said, ‘God gave you all that talent—get back and work; maybe you’ll get some musicians so occupied they’ll stay off the streets.’ He wanted her to be arranging, writing, rehearsing.”

  Gillespie also convinced Mary that an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival would reignite her career. True, she would be paid only $300, but, he convinced her, her performance there could open up her mission to bring the spirituality of jazz to the world. “Mary hopes that her music will once more bring happiness to the world of music,” she wrote of herself with regard to that event. With Gillespie’s big band in 1957, she played three pieces from Zodiac: “Virgo,” “Libra,” and “Aries”—newly arranged by the talented young Melba Liston, then a trombonist with Gillespie—and a version of “Carioca” featuring Mary on piano. Father Crowley, living in Boston, called to make sure that she was practicing an hour every day, she wrote, to make up for the time she had been away from the piano, and the Gillespies bought Mary a gown, a mink stole, and a watch for the date. Mary tried to give the furs back. As for the watch, “I just lost it again.”

  Though Mary made a strong showing at Newport—Gary Giddins raved about Mary’s use of “dissonances, dynamics, wit, subtle quotations, liveliness of ideas and clarity of articulation”—the band was underrehearsed. With her characteristic keyboard mastery, Mary laid to rest any rumors about her mental state, although in photographs from the period she seems almost to sag with sadness.

  There is other evidence from 1957 of undiminished pianistic brilliance—evidence that has never been made available to the public. Later in the summer, Mary did a three-hour recording session for Roulette Records (now unavailable except on a tape Mary kept), working again with Melba Liston on updated arrangements of her own compositions, including a lilting “Waltz Boogie,” one of her finest tunes, scored for reeds, rhythm, and piano. And Mary began, reluctantly, to work in nightclubs again—in Canada, at the Town Tavern in Toronto with bassist Tommy Potter and drummer Denzil Best, and later in Manhattan, at the Composer, which she felt to be sympathetic to modern musicians, with her old rhythm section of Bill Clarke and Bruce Lawrence. Mary told Time about the gig that she was “petrified yet unafraid. I’ll play good. My fingers are faster than ever. Once I just played. Now I’m sensitive: if anybody don’t like me, I’ll know it. But I’ll pray, and offer up my music.”

  Although the reviews were excellent (one raved over an “amazing 20-minute specialty of The Zodiac Suite”), Mary was, she told friends, “mixed-up and disturbed,” her nerves paper-thin. Between sets she’d go directly from the piano to the cloakroom. “I have to watch that I do not allow others to goof me, making me crazy, eccentric etc. and is this ever difficult,” she wrote in a letter in October to her new attorney, Herbert Bliss. Ever the perfectionist, she found her friend Bruce Lawrence’s bass playing inadequate, writing in her diary, “Before I began praying, I would have broken up Bruce’s bass and not because I think I know it all. I just cannot stand hearing someone not trying, even if he cannot play as much as the next guy.” When the Composer date was extended to February of 1958, she calmed down and began to enjoy playing in public again. Opposite her was pianist Billy Taylor, her old Downbeat Club partner, who remembers her playing as strong as ever, but “quieter.” Together the two agreed to co-write the music for a show called After Hours, to be produced by the Composer’s owner Cy Baron. Although the show never got off the ground, it marked a sea change for Mary. She took on other jobs at important clubs such as the Blue Note and Bar O’Music in Chicago, and the Village Vanguard and the Cherry Lane in New York; there was even, as she wrote in February, “the possibility of a night club opened in my name.” She had moved out the ailing musicians, but Grace had had a relapse and was now back in the apartment with her kids.

  OF ALL THE ideas Mary came up with to fund her mission, none appealed to her more than an idea she would try to implement for many years after: a charitable foundation. As she wrote to Father Crowley early in 1957, she wanted above all else “to help bring back creativeness and healing of mental patients, cancer and many other diseases. I’d like to stay in the background except for my music.”

  The manifesto Mary prepared for her nonprofit organization, which she had named the Bel Canto Foundation, is a paragraph that speaks as much about Mary’s own thwarted dreams for herself as it does about her hopes for sick musicians:

  Bel Canto has been set up especially for musical performers out of a need to help them, which of course helps music.… It will be a home in the country where musicians, regardless of race, color or creed may go for a time to find peace and whatever “HELP” they may require to bring us the music we require.… Bel Canto has grown out of the need to help individual performers during periods of personal crisis. It hopes in the near future to purchase or build a home in the country staffed with medical personnel away from the pressures and stifling influences of the city.

  Through Father Woods, Mary had met a lawyer, Herbert Bliss, a partner in the firm of Egan and Bliss, who at the request of the priest agreed to take on Mary’s charitable legal work pro bono. He helped her draw up the papers to incorporate the nonprofit organization in 1958, and a revised version in 1960. The stated aim of the foundation was: “To voluntarily assist in relief of every kind and nature to those persons suffering from or exposed to alcohol or drugs to any degree, but primarily to musicians.”

  Almost immediately, Mary began dolin
g out money to sick musicians, money from the loans and gifts that she gathered from everyone she could think of. All an applicant had to do was give his name and address to receive a small check from Mary. This of course could not, and did not, last long.

  As another source of revenue, she tried again to retrieve lost copyrights, mostly on her own, as she could not afford even the reduced rates Bliss charged for helping with such services. She envisioned a raft of music-related jobs for her underemployed friends (and herself), if she could fulfill her plans to establish a recording company, a publishing company, a booking agency, and a magazine. She wrote to an organization called Catholic Educational Institutions, offering to give a two-hour concert at Catholic colleges and universities, for a fee of $1,250, with a portion to go to Bel Canto. There were no takers; it was a considerable amount of money, after all.

  Mary kicked off her fund-raising plans with a concert at Carnegie Hall on September 20, 1958, producing the concert with loans from friends, including two of the world’s wealthiest women, Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke (to whom Mary even gave piano lessons for a time). Mary’s relationships with her heiresses went sour, though, and Barbara Hutton was going to sue Mary to get her “loan” back, until Herbert Bliss persuaded her to drop the suit. As for the volatile Miss Duke, rumors circulated, said Elaine Lorillard, that she also filed a suit against Mary for unpaid loans. At any rate, the friendship ended abruptly. Lorillard herself lent money for the concert.

  The Bel Canto concert featured, besides a group of Mary’s old standbys and a new arrangement of “Roll ’Em” by Melba Liston, a jam session with everyone Mary could round up, an impressive lineup including Ben Webster, Thelonious Monk, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Anita O’Day, Shirley Scott, and Baby Lawrence; Sugar Ray Robinson put in a nonmusical appearance. Despite the lineup of talent, though, attendance was weak. “In fact, that concert lost every penny,” remembers Lorillard.