Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Living on credit, she spent time window-shopping, tempted by beautifully crafted Danish silver, furs, and clothing. But mostly Mary sat waiting and stewing. She was worried about the war in Vietnam, about the Black Power movement, about hippies, drugs, and the recently elected President Richard Nixon—and she worried about Peter O’Brien. “Mary was forever counseling me not to get hung up on my family. I didn’t give a damn about my family! I guess she couldn’t imagine that. She was absolutely the opposite of that.” She also worried about his career plans and associations outside of the sheltering wing of the seminary. He was making plans to go out to the University of California at Berkeley to pursue a doctorate in theater arts. Mary wrote: “I’d say no to going to San Francisco—it’s tricky out there.” It was a typically veiled reference to the sexually free-wheeling life, including the gay scene, which had burst into the open there. Says O’Brien, “Years before, in 1964, Mary Lou finds out that I’m going down to the Bon Soir, a club in the Village, and has her first major hissy in regard to me and my sexual purity. She thought anything could happen down there because the Bon Soir was very gay, number one. I didn’t know this; they were perfectly nice to me, wonderful; and it was a great show. But Mary wanted Father Woods to straighten me out, so she arranges this meeting and Woods says, ‘Stay away from those people—you can’t trust them. They’ll do things, say things.’ I paid no attention. I had no notion that the world was evil and was never disrespected by anybody. She had this idea about me. Maybe she saw even then that I’d better watch out. And she was right, as it turned out. I used to resent that because my life was so goddamned straight it was crazy at that point. I certainly did go off the deep end—but it was after she died.”

  Mary, maternal, wise, prescient, overbearing, wrote letter after letter of advice to O’Brien throughout his life. In 1968, it was: “You’ve gotta get closer to God before you go anywhere with anybody. Listen, get on your knees and cry the way I’ve been doing here. I was a mental wreck when I came here. Stood in the middle of my room and asked God to help me.”

  While Mary was waiting for Timme’s Club to open—it finally did, about two months behind schedule—she put the finishing touches on big-band arrangements for Ellington, Basie, and Herman, also amending them for performances by the excellent Danish National Jazz Orchestra, heard on radio programs produced by Baron Timme.

  She was less happy about the beautifully decorated but tiny Timme’s Club (“small as a bathroom”). The place was the swan song of the amiable but hard-drinking baron and his equally hard-drinking but less amiable companion, Inez Cavanaugh. In October, Mary wrote to Brother Mario in Rome to complain: “Inez is nice one night and yells at me and the waiters the next night—I cussed her out a couple of times and she cooled it for several days. She went too far, then too I’d heard that everybody hated her so I made her focus her attention on me so she’d be loved again, but it started tonight again. Guess I’ll have to put a tack on her seat.… But one thing I can say,” she added, “when angered or pestered, I play good.”

  Mary’s nerves worsened. When the Gillespies arrived for a tour, Mary confessed she felt depressed and anxious for her future. “There’s not enough work for jazz people,” she said flatly. Nevertheless, Mary canceled an upcoming Continental tour. “I’m too nervous and then, too, the promoters are making all the money,” she explained. Both she and Teddy Wilson, who followed her at Timme’s, turned down offers to return to the club, rattled by Cavanaugh’s scenes. “He [Wilson] almost ran amuck running to the kitchen after playing,” Mary wrote in a letter to Brother Mario. “On his second set I grabbed his hand and told him to sit quietly next to me, to play ballads ’cause he was racing on the piano so fast the bassist couldn’t keep up with him.” Wilson was given Mary’s room at the boardinghouse attached to the club, to which she had moved, and Mary, she wrote, “was asked to go, with nowhere to live.” But then her luck turned: a friendly priest found her a room with the Benedictine sisters at the serene old St. Lioba Cloister in the heart of Copenhagen. Her room was sunny, clean, inexpensive, filled with fresh flowers and fruit. “I’m rehearsing, eating and praying. The Holy Spirit came to my heart so strongly New Year’s Eve while I was in Church I had to go outside for two or three minutes and cool off. I thought my heart would burst!” she wrote, festooning a letter to Joyce Breach with her trademark sketches of smiling faces and lips. “I’m so happy I could kiss a mule!” she added, even though she was reduced to playing one-nighters: “Like the good ol’ Andy Kirk days, horrors! Old cars and the musicians are sort of boring and the piano bad. But I didn’t insult anyone or become angered, I just played, whammed and banged, etc. I sounded like a nickelodeon, put on an act and aped the action going down.”

  Mary focused on Rome, planning to leave Denmark for Italy in January. She buzzed with plans; maybe Father Bob Ledogar would be able “to get me a salary to do the Lenten Mass in upstate New York. And it would be nice to do it in Rome at Lent, huh?”

  She read Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in the fall, identifying closely with Merton—his ardent conversion, and, perhaps more important, his combination of mysticism and earthy practicality. (Merton would have been amused at her bedside reading: beside her missal and his book lay the Sunday comics, sent over from New York, piles of crossword puzzles, and copies of True Detective and other lurid crime rags, to which Mary was addicted.) Merton was a champion of universal civil rights and insisted, as Mary wrote in a letter to Joyce Breach, on “the white man’s taking responsibility for wrongs to the black man. He wrote some eight freedom songs in 1965 along with a church composer. My life is parallel to Merton’s but I think I suffered more when I was 3 and 16,” she added, a rare mention of her painful childhood.

  Inspired by Merton’s memoir, Mary set to work on her own book again (and indeed her first sentences mirror Merton’s opening passage). She now had a title to frame her philosophy: Zoning the History of Jazz. Zoning, also the title a few years later of one of her outstanding LPs, had a specific, musical-spiritual connotation for Mary: “It means getting rid of the elements that destroy music and putting them in their right place,” explains O’Brien. Although Mary did eventually type up some eighty pages of a new draft of Zoning, she did it piecemeal and never completed the project.

  As the Christmas season approached, she planned to go to Rome, but she was delayed by the sudden illness in Copenhagen of her old friend Mae Mezzrow, who was alone and without funds. As she tended to her, Mary jotted a warning to herself in her diary, “Have to watch my budget or I’ll give all of it away. Have to use my common sense, something I wasn’t born with.” Taking a gig in a hotel restaurant, she plunged into depression. “Felt a breeze (bad vibes),” she noted. “Played very badly, piano keys slick, rhythm section bad, sabotage, miserable feeling after I played. Sick people, poor Mae and Inez, God have mercy on their souls, show them the light. I can’t make it but with God’s help, yes. Pick up my cross and make it. At 58 the old bones are pretty tired, have difficulty with my back, pains, gas, etc. Much blood from hemorrhoids, coughing. Everything is offered up. But then, sometimes the Holy Spirit comes.”

  At last she was ready to quit Copenhagen for Rome. Rosenkrantz and the convent sisters saw her off at the train station with packets of sandwiches—and money. It was the last time she saw the baron and Inez. The following year, Timme Rosenkrantz collapsed and died in a New York hotel room. He was fifty-eight. Inez Cavanaugh, still attractive, left Copenhagen without a word of goodbye to anyone. Brother Mario met her in Rome, through friends: “Inez wanted some money to get back to New York but she was indirect and casual about it. She didn’t talk about the music world, just about hard times and how she wanted to get back to work.” “I met her not long after that in New York,” adds Peter O’Brien. “She was like a skeleton and looked horrible. And then she disappeared.”

  MARY ARRIVED IN Rome inauspiciously. It was a cold and rainy January and, after having to change trains five times, sh
e had slept past her destination, arriving hours late and exhausted. Disappointed too, when she was met not by Brother Mario but a seminarian, who took her to her room. But after she rested she felt better temporarily. “Went out to dinner with Mario, drank wine and beer and got dizzy and couldn’t walk, next day sick, but made it to church in time for the Pope’s blessing. Rome OK, nothing exciting. Would like to be here in the spring.”

  Rejoining Brother Mario improved her mood. “We used to have great spiritual talks,” he reminisced. “She loved talking about God and the experiences she went through and she’d want your sincere opinion about things, although my experiences were so different and some of the deep things I couldn’t relate to—her visions and premonitions.” Through him, she met influential Romans she hoped would help with her mass project. One, Bishop Rembert Weakland, was not only the Abbot-General of the Benedictine Order but a pianist himself who had taken advanced studies at Juilliard.

  But even Weakland and other highly placed clerics were unable to persuade the Vicariate—the ecclesiastical authority for the city—to lift a sudden injunction on Mary’s presentation of her Mass for the Lenten Season (also called at that time Jazz for the Soul) at a church service on February 2, in honor of the forthcoming first anniversary of Dr. King’s death. Instead, it was ruled, she would have to play the mass at a recital. According to an Associated Press report: “Cardinal Angelo Dell’ Acqua, vicar general for Rome, was asked about cancellation of Mary Lou Williams’ jazz Mass for the slain civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Cardinal disclosed that he cancelled the jazz Mass at the Pontifical Latin American College and substituted a recital after the Mass. He said it had been his policy to ‘compromise’ by permitting jazz Masses as long as they don’t involve a drummer. Mary Lou’s group had a bongo drummer.” A “spokesman” for the local church added that they had had some beat music and folk masses, but they needed to “rethink” Mary’s performance.

  Although Mary told a reporter at the time that she was “not upset” over the Vicariate’s ruling, her diary reports otherwise. She walked the streets during an icy rainstorm for hours that day, trying to decide what to do: “O Lord, am I supposed to move on, go home? What shall I do?” In the end, she blamed herself for “pushing too hard,” and made up her mind to accept the decision gracefully. By the day of her recital, soon after, she was tremendously excited, not least by a visit she paid to a convent with Brother Mario. “Holy spirit strong, can’t cool myself. Mario took me to see the sights, but of all, the poor little Sisters are the greatest—I can truthfully say I’m jealous of them, tears, feeling of Jesus’ presence.” Later that day, she presented the Mass for the Lenten Season to a packed house in a seminary chapel. After the concert came the crash. On February 10, she was “blue again, always cold and my teeth are going bad.” Worse, a strike in Rome made a coming paid concert—money she badly needed—impossible to schedule. There was no work for her in Rome, she wrote Joyce Breach: “No nightclubs here. It’s all folk music. The loot I have will not sustain me for two or three months.… In working for God (don’t think I’m nuts), one does not charge a fee. And they can’t give me a salary.”

  She persevered, playing a sprinkling of concerts in other Italian cities. As the mass was by then usually celebrated in the vernacular, she also tried to get the text for the Lenten season translated into Italian for the Vatican to review. The deepening depression she regularly wrote home about—feeling “off,” eating and drinking too much, and constantly “trying to adjust”—was nowhere in evidence in live broadcasts taped in the studios of Vatican Radio, which had a worldwide network. Rather, she sounded in a warm and inspired mood in a solo set of standards and originals. She also prepared new arrangements of her King songs and pieces from the Lenten mass for a chorus of some twenty seminarians (which included, she wrote happily in a letter to Breach, a few blacks), plus flute and bass. No drums or bongos, however.

  “Could be the concert will end up in the lap of the Pope,” she wrote ebulliently to O’Brien, adding: “The students sang their butts off, except the bass player who couldn’t swing to save his soul.” She attempted to press O’Brien into service. Would he take copies of the tapes of the Vatican concerts around to radio stations? Could he “maneuver” a performance at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for her? That would make the Pope sit up and listen, she continued, ignoring the doubts of “handsome soul brother Mario” and Abbot Weakland, who thought her plans farfetched. “If I send you the money, will you go to New York and see Cardinal Cooke? and write to Bishop Wright in Pittsburgh to help us get to the Pope?” After O’Brien protested to Mary that he was just a student and could hardly be expected to track down these eminent churchmen, Mary backed off, but the push-and-pull of their relationship a few years later as manager and artist was already set then.

  Finally, Mary did see Pope Paul in a semiprivate audience. “He grasped my hand and said, ‘Thanks for the work you are doing with my brothers,’ and gave me a blessing and rosary beads, and I blurted out that I’d like to do a concert for him. He almost blushed and smiled like a little boy, but nothing said.” Wrote Abbot Weakland afterwards to O’Brien, “It might be just what he [the pope] needs if she doesn’t play too many blues. But chances of working that out are less than nil.”

  Waiting for a signal or a sign, Mary struggled through March, finding occasional work—”little gigs around Rome where I didn’t know myself; I composed as I played. The Italians are starved for jazz, love it.” With her choir of seminarians, she played selections from the Lenten mass along with other originals and standards in a concert on March 12 in an ancient Jesuit church, for an organization called the Approdo Romano. “They were beat-out nobilities,” Mary wrote (somewhat inaccurately), “who tried to understand the scene but I’m afraid it didn’t reach them … until I started playing a funky blues beat,” she added.

  At the end of March, she got a break. “Guess what,” she wrote exuberantly to O’Brien, “a big-shot priest asked if I’d write another Mass for the peace of the world. He’d pay me—what! ha! and will use his influence to get it to the Pope.” Monsignor Joseph Gremillion was indeed an influential priest: secretary of the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace. Having obtained her commission—to write a votive, or devotional, mass that Gremillion suggested be titled Mass [or Music] for Peace—Mary was ready to go home. She booked passage on the ship Michelangelo, sailing for New York on April 17.

  She was upbeat and full of plans: the mass; her book (again); and work—for cables were piling up from Joe Glaser about an attractive job offer in New York at a new club, Plaza Nine, that was opening in the Plaza Hotel. It was to be an unlimited run at a good salary with a sextet of her choice. Mary waffled with the kind of maddening hesitation that had put off managers and agents for decades and would infuriate Peter O’Brien when he became her manager a couple of years later. Although the job offer was, on paper, the best she’d had in many years, Mary was convinced that the New York media were generally against her. Her reluctance had another source, however; she simply hated the prospect of working long-term in the corrupting atmosphere of a nightclub, especially now that she had her papal commission to write a mass, as she confided to O’Brien.

  So Mary turned down the Plaza Nine offer. But by then Joe Glaser, lying in a hospital bed, was too ill to react. When he died a month later, at the age of seventy-two, Mary sincerely mourned him. While for some he was crude and overbearing, she preferred to remember Glaser’s kindnesses, writing that she considered him to be “the most charitable,” the highest praise she could give.

  MEANWHILE, DURING THE summer of 1969, Mary began work on Music for Peace. If the first mass had been written in the “worst hell imaginable,” her personal life two years later was mired even deeper in that same region of hell. In May, Roland Mayfield drove Mary’s mother and her sister Mamie from Pittsburgh for a visit to New York. Never did Mary write more candidly about family than she did in her journal then; nor did she spare he
rself:

  Mamie had to fool Mom to get her over here. Been on my knees cleaning for days. Mom wanted to leave. I got nervous and started my prayers. Wonder why Mom gets mad when I mention church. Had her to go to confession. Later, went to Gimbel’s to shop for Mom, wanted to make her look good.

  Mom and her snuff and gin. I am old, fat and tired.

  The next day, an agonizingly sad, troubled passage about a disastrous picnic in a park with the entire lot of them:

  I became very nasty after drinking, started confusion, lost my watch. Fought sister Grace, wanted to punch her in the mouth for throwing a lighted cigarette in Robert’s face. She’s fast as a cobra, poor Robert is a nervous wreck. I felt so sorry for him. I got so drunk I don’t know how I drove home with Robert.

  Please forgive me God for not being more charitable. Must get the weight off, am choking in the throat. Grace doesn’t want Mom or any of them to her house. Poor Mom.

  Eventually, her mother returned to Pittsburgh and, with relief and resolve, Mary turned to the sanctuary of writing Music for Peace. Certainly, early, undated music manuscript pages show a far denser composition than the final version of Music for Peace, which was recast into jazz-rock or gospel idioms—“young-thinking,” as Mary liked to call it. Having struggled so long with amateur choirs, was it then that she made the crucial decision to streamline and simplify her writing? For help, she enlisted her friend the arranger Bob Banks, who was at ease with rock rhythms.