Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Love, your pal

  At the end of May, Mary noted in a postscript in another letter that she was “a nervous wreck,” with Grace trying to borrow money again and refusing to empty out her whiskey bottles as part of the deal. “Poor sister Grace,” Mary concluded. As for surrogate son Robbie, worse was to come.

  IT WAS NOT quite true, as Mary half-joked to Joyce Breach, that “Mary Lou Williams waits for no one.” She had in fact long been waiting for someone to help run the business side of her life. She had approached a host of agents and public relations people, friends such as Weingarten and Breach; wealthy patrons; even her ex-husband. But nothing had worked out for long.

  For moral support Mary had Brother Mario and Father Woods. Then, in the winter of ’64, Brother Mario learned that he was being sent to the Vatican by his order. Mary was thrilled for him (and hoped as well that he could facilitate her wish to get a papal commission to write a jazz mass). But it meant the loss of her closest spiritual friend. Typically, she put her own loss to one side and threw a grand party for him at the Hickory House to which she invited luminaries like the Armstrongs, the Gillespies, the Ellingtons, and others. She had hoped the guests would provide the needy monk with farewell cash gifts, but, said Hancock, sounding bemused, he received “only a fancy bookmark. I don’t think they understood the purpose of the party.”

  But as one door closed, another opened: no sooner had Hancock departed for Italy than a new religious man entered Mary’s life—literally walked in the door of the Hickory House one night. This was Peter O’Brien, who was a young seminarian breaking his curfew, as he regularly did. He was to become arguably the most important person in Mary’s life. Of their first meeting Mary recalled: “My piano faced the door. I could see anybody that was coming. All of a sudden this little boy came in and he looked so funny I had to laugh. He had on a winter coat down to his ankles and it was too big for him. And he came and sat down at the bar and he was lookin’ while I was playin’. I said, ‘I wonder who that is?’ ”

  “He kept looking up at me,” she added elsewhere, “smiling and carrying on.… He came regularly the whole time I was there and he’s been with me from that day to this.” The “little boy,” altar-boy handsome, was actually twenty-four, not eighteen as Mary liked to tell it. He was smart and ambitious, with an appetite for the unconventional that belied his innocent appearance.

  Peter Francis O’Brien, from Fairview, New Jersey, was born into a working-class family, the first of eleven children and the golden boy intended for the prize of the priesthood. There was a streak of theatricality in the family that Peter O’Brien seems to have inherited. “Some of my father’s relatives in the twenties had a radio show called the ‘Hawaiian O’Briens,’ three Irishmen with Hawaiian guitar. And as early as three or four years old—some fifty years ago—I went to a dancing school called Helen and May. May Swift had been a member in George M. Cohan’s company. A dozen of us at the dancing school did routines—tap, soft-shoe, ballet—at shows for the Elks, the Rainbow Women and so on. There are photos of me standing on a table, wearing a straw hat, ready to perform. I got my lessons free. We couldn’t afford them. This was a world I loved. And also the Church. This arena like a stage set, that whole pursuit of something beautiful.”

  Apart from that, he cares to remember little of the childhood he described as “that awful, dysfunctional world. With the onset of puberty, off I went to New York. My father made certain good moves for me, got me into Xavier, a military high school, attached to the church where Father Woods was the parish priest. Xavier High School was a really wonderful place, with a really almost professional theater.” Young O’Brien was soon sneaking off to the forbidden world of Broadway—”I saw the second half of all the shows; that way I didn’t have to pay”—and even landed a job as an usher at Radio City Music Hall, which his father made him turn down. “Show business was the only place I felt safe,” he explains. “I had this deep fantasy all the way up to 1970 about my own career as an actor. But then I found my arena as a performer as a priest.”

  At eighteen, O’Brien made a move in that direction, entering the Jesuit-run Loyola Seminary in Shrub Oak, New York. In high school, he had already begun escaping into the specialized reality of black American show business. The catalyst was discovering Ethel Waters’s autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow. “I was determined to meet Ethel Waters—I just loved that book of hers. And the seminary was only a train ride from Manhattan. To get to Ethel, I sought out Carson McCullers. Ethel had starred in her play, The Member of the Wedding. So I used to go read to McCullers—F. Scott Fitzgerald. And I pursued other artists. I wrote them letters, I found out who knew them.” Among these were singer Thelma Carpenter, and the photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten, famous for his portraits of black entertainers—he would photograph the young, winsome O’Brien). And then—Mary. Time’s comeback article about her, titled “The Prayerful One,” with its twin photo images of Mary kneeling in prayer at church complete with lace mantilla, and in a tight, low-cut gown at a gig, made a powerful impact on the seminarian. O’Brien immediately wrote to her, then followed up with a visit to the Hickory House. “I’d never heard anything like that in my life. I’d heard a little jazz—Duke, Benny Goodman, Dizzy at sixteen at Birdland, Erroll Garner, but that was it. So this music just washed over me and overwhelmed me and that was it—wham. Two things were operative in my life, the performing arts and the Church. And then here comes this woman that embodies them both.

  “Early on, she would never speak, she was very reserved. I told her I was in seminary to be a priest, and that’s all we talked about. Very quiet. She used to go sit in the coatroom to get out of the way.”

  But their relationship blossomed quickly. “Part of my relationship with her, I needed a mother. I’m very jealous and looking for attention and Mary gave me that. I enjoyed an absolute preeminence with her. We would sit in that little yellow kitchen in Hamilton Terrace and talk for hours and hours on end. She would ask me questions about church or about God that I could not answer. I was so young, her searching perplexed me. Nor did I think there were outright answers to her questions. I ranted and raved about the Church, but I think she understood that I wasn’t really serious.” Indeed, Mary wrote to O’Brien at that time: “Father Woods told me to see that you make it as a good Jesuit Priest. To give you hell when you’re wrong, ha!” It was, however, hardly a joke to her: his vocation as a priest was a profound thing for her, as was their relationship. So profound that others who had known her longer came to feel that O’Brien manipulated Mary’s credulity and peripheralized her other relationships.

  Immediately, O’Brien became part of the warp and woof of her career plans; he had an appetite for the arts, huge energy, and an optimism that proved irresistible to her, as when he wrote soon after: “The Carnegie Concert should be a great thing next October; that should shoot you straight up where you belong.” (That particular concert, however, did not take place for three years.)

  Mary’s letters to O’Brien from the period are warmly confiding, revealing something of the innocent, little-girl quality that other friends remarked on as part of her charm. Apprehensive about an upcoming trip to Pittsburgh, and conflicted about playing publicly, she wrote him:

  Also pray that I’m humble and silent the way I use to be. Seems that people upset me and I speak my mind—and there’s that question of jealousy in our business. Really a nasty business and half of the musicians are either jealous or nuts! smile.

  I’m out here to try and make a big name so this way I’ll be able to help the foundation and other unfortunate musicians. I am so very sensitive (after being away from the public so long) to all the sounds on the outside … Before I leave this world I’d like to do many great things for our Lord. May God bless you,

  Love, Mary

  Her motherliness also surfaced immediately with the impetuous priest-in-training. Setting what was to be become a pattern for the relationship, she began sending him money and
dispensing advice: “Peter, when something goes wrong with our nerves, it’s sin—ask God to show you yourself. This is what I’m doing. I’m jealous, talk too much about others when angered.”

  Mary’s relationship with Anthony Woods was the most mature and intense and the healthiest that she enjoyed with a father figure. But Woods was no attendant; rather he was her confessor, provider of good counsel, restorer of good humor and balance, and a firm, if compassionate, disciplinarian who pressed Mary to focus on priorities. Brother Mario had been more of a companion, a kindly, patient, respectful, fun-loving but safe companion. Meeting Peter O’Brien so soon after the monk was gone from her life must have seemed highly auspicious to her—literally a godsend. He too was fun-loving, devoted—and also seemed safe, if somewhat wilder, edgier, and more rebellious than Brother Mario.

  But not long after Mary became close to O’Brien, Father Anthony Woods, ill with heart disease for some time, died suddenly in October 1965 (only a year younger than Mary). Mary was in Pittsburgh and received word from Gemma Biggi, her Village friend. “I remember she got a ride back to New York in a truck. Father was laid out full-length at Xavier in a small chapel. Mary and Lorraine were so upset. Outside the chapel, Mary said, ‘Why did they have to bury him with shoes with holes in them?’ Mary was usually stoic. But she was crying. From there, we went to the burial in silence. We were all sad, but Mary was heartbroken. He meant so much to her, it was such a loss.”

  “She told me later,” adds O’Brien, “ ‘I thought I was going to die myself, that I couldn’t make it anymore.’ ” Bereft, Mary needed a companion of the spirit more than ever.

  THE MID-SIXTIES held more difficult losses for Mary (Bud Powell died a year after Father Woods), yet she remained excited about various new projects she planned in order to reach the next generation. She had, of course, long been interested in jazz education; as early as 1946 she wrote an article proposing that jazz be taught in the public schools. Now, in the sixties, it seemed very likely to many people that jazz was in danger of dying out. “Black people don’t know anything about the history of their music,” Mary said bluntly, noting that they recognized pop star Diana Ross but not Billie Holiday.

  When the Jazzmobile began touring the neighborhoods of New York with the music, director Billy Taylor recalls that Mary plied him with questions. And in her diary she noted, “I decided to work with teens to try to save the one American-born art.” She set up informal jazz “workshops” on Harlem streetcorners. She’d play a tape and ask the children she had coached (in storefronts like “Our Place”) to demonstrate dance techniques for the kids on the street. After playing selections from familiar pop tunes with simple melodies, simple beats, “I’d switch it on them but not too much; the kids are smart. You can’t put too much over on them.” At the storefronts, she’d work on scat singing and dance patterns, to get kids into the jazz groove. Nor was that all. “She’d blend her music with other things such as etiquette, how to present yourself,” says O’Brien.

  She also produced records aimed at winning over teenagers to jazz. With Milt Orent she wrote several tunes (released as 45s on the Mary label), among them “Chief Natoma from Tacoma” and a rock-and-roll version of her forties ballad “You Know, Baby.” Later, she produced others, but the “hits” she hoped for eluded her. Instead, stacks of undistributed 45s piled up in her apartment. She looked to O’Brien, still in seminary, to publicize her records to disc jockeys. Dutifully, O’Brien tried to help, but he was bewildered. Why didn’t she put her energy into mounting another concert at Carnegie Hall (preferably a night of standards and originals with a trio, he thought, not the religious music she wanted to produce)? Why wouldn’t she agree, instead, to do a concept album—songs by Gershwin, say? That would interest record companies. “But I couldn’t get her to do things like that. And now I see that while it might have been nice to have the Gershwin album, it wouldn’t have been important,” O’Brien acknowledges.

  In late 1966 O’Brien made his maiden voyage as Mary’s manager. But Mary prevailed: instead of just a jazz concert, it was to be a sacred concert, an event billed as “Praise the Lord in Many Voices.” O’Brien negotiated her contract for this Carnegie Hall event of February 1967. Mary was in her element among the hand-picked group of contemporary composers of “new” and experimental sacred music, with narration by the eminent Jesuit musicologist, Father Clemens J. McNaspy.

  The concert took place in a period of intense controversy for the Catholic Church. By 1967, Vatican II was replacing centuries of tradition: not only was the mass now to be celebrated in the vernacular, but church music was to be modernized as well. Throughout the twentieth century, with occasional exceptions, drums, cymbals, and bells were banned from the liturgy, but Pope John XXIII had reversed the ruling—and jazz, too, was (tentatively) deemed worthy of inclusion. But by 1963, Pope John was dead, and his successor, Pope Paul VI, was more conservative. Said a Vatican liturgical expert, the Reverend Annibale Bugnini, pointedly, “Jazz masses violated the norms for sacred music laid down by Pope Saint Pius X, more than 50 years ago.”

  The timing of the Carnegie Hall concert was no coincidence and expressed the views of a large number of progressive Catholics, both religious and lay. Father Norman O’Connor, in the liner notes to Jazz Mass, a Columbia recording, stated bluntly that the Vatican didn’t know what was jazz and what wasn’t. Father McNaspy, in the Jesuit magazine America, joined in, writing that he was in favor of jazz in the Church.

  “It was a very exciting time. Such a thing as this concert would not have been possible before,” says O’Brien. In fact, a Vatican decree reversed the ban on jazz later that year. Mary’s involvement in the concert was considered a coup for progressive Catholicism, although her actual liturgical writing was to come a bit later. “Thank You, Jesus” was a modern spiritual with gently satirical overtunes arranged by Mary and Bob Banks for solo voice, sung by a young Leon Thomas. “Our Father” was arranged for piano trio and a chorus of thirty-five voices, featuring the creamy-toned Honi Gordon. Mary had also freshly arranged “Praise the Lord” for an ensemble that included French horn, piano, bass, drums, conga, and male vocal soloist.

  O’Brien and Mary had the first of many disagreements when she threw her energies into trying to market the recording made of the concert by Avant Garde Records. “Mary took these LPs all over to d.j.s,” says O’Brien. “That seemed sort of pitiful to me. What’s that record going to do for her?” Not much, as it turned out, for Mary later wrote that although she sought royalties, she never received “a dime.”

  Frustrated yet again by lack of response, Mary turned to Moe Asch with another project: an interpretation of the history of jazz. She was interviewing and taping her mother, she wrote, about ragtime and the aftershocks of slavery, but it was like pulling teeth. She wanted to tape others—Dizzy, Andy Kirk, John Williams. And she would include her own thoughts (narrated, she hoped, by Father McNaspy):

  From Suffering came the Negro spirituals, the songs of joy, and the songs of sorrow. Because of the deeply religious background of the Negro he was able to translate this into rhythms that reached deep enough into the inner self to give expression to outcries of honest and sincere joy. The origin of Jazz is the Spirituals and out of this comes the growth of four eras of music, Ragtime, Jazz, Swing, and Bop, or modern. Unfortunately however, before Bop was fully developed, some of the younger American musicians lost the heritage by playing modern foreign composers, destroying the basic creativeness, honesty, and truth of the great American art called JAZZ.

  Eventually Mary had to self-produce her history-of-jazz record, taping it in her apartment, at her old Baldwin, and O’Brien edited down the tapes to LP length. Asch, however, did agree to distribute the record on Folkways, and soon Mary was writing Asch about producing another project: her first mass. “There’s been nothing like it,” she exulted, “but all I have is a little tape recorder not worthy of recording it. The Catholic priests and nuns are making a lot of money on recor
ds now,” she added hopefully. But Moe Asch did not take her up on this suggestion.

  “EVERY CENTURY HAS had its best contemporary music written for the church, from Schütz to Bach to Mozart,” as Richard Westenburg, music historian and director of Musica Sacra, has pointed out. But it was only toward the final quarter of the twentieth century that jazz came to be included in the liturgy. Mary began formally writing her first mass—that is, composing music to fit the Catholic (and Episcopal) liturgy, or church service—in 1967. Hers was not the first, however. Jazz had been included in the worship service before. Perhaps the earliest example was a 1946 service at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, for which Leonard Bernstein, Morton Gould, and David Amram were commissioned to write pieces; and in the fifties and early sixties there were jazz bands and jazz-influenced masses presented in several Episcopal churches, though “jazz” was often a catch-all term, covering everything from Dixieland to folk guitar. Nor was Mary the first to write a specifically Catholic jazz mass. The Reverend Clarence Joseph Rivers of St. Louis wrote one in 1964; it was even performed at the Newport Jazz Festival that year, and again in 1967. Eddie Bonnemere, Mary’s one-time student, wrote a Missa Hodierna for jazz group and choir performed during a mass at Manhattan’s St. Charles Borremeo Church in 1966. But most jazz composers with a serious interest in spiritual music preferred to concertize on sacred themes rather than write music specifically for the liturgy.

  If Mary was not the very first to write a jazz mass, then, hers was successful as few others have managed to be, a happy marriage of the sacred and the profane, of the formal Western and the African-American approaches to rhythm and phrasing. As in Elijah, and the more recent St. Martin de Porres, she avoided improvisation, offering instead composed vocal and instrumental parts with the freshness of improvisation and the flavor of African-American swing, without falling back on well-known formulas of gospel music. In the evolution of Mary’s masses—three in all, in a number of versions—Mary reached her full artistic maturity, even greatness. Only Duke Ellington, with his own deep interest in the spirituality inherent in jazz, which he explored in compositions like “Come Sunday,” “David Danced Before the Lord,” and “In the Beginning, God,” could rival her in the realm of sacred jazz.