Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Peter O’Brien recalls stopping by Mary’s apartment to find Mary and Banks “absolutely gleeful together at their work. I never saw her so content, so happy, so relaxed, as when she was working on her mass with Bob Banks.” (In addition to his contribution as a collaborator, Banks also recommended the gospel singers who appear on the 1971 recording of the mass.) Yet when the mass debuted—on July 15, 1969—at a memorial service for the recently slain Kenyan leader Tom M’boya, at Holy Family Church near the United Nations, it was a work in progress, still “quiet.”

  As usual, Mary needed money to pay bills as she concentrated on composing, so she pushed aside her fear of flying to travel to London for a lucrative gig at Jazz Expo ’69. It was the first time she’d been back in England since the 1950s, and it was her old lover, Jack Higgins, who arranged the trip. She got mostly excellent reviews, and one evening, she dropped in at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club to play a set during an engagement by Cecil Taylor, the powerful avant-garde pianist, with whom she would have a dual concert in the seventies (though some would see it as a “duel” concert).

  Back in New York, Mary set to self-producing Music for Peace, for which she tapped the efforts of many people, above all Father Ed Flanagan, then a Maryknoll priest and today a Boston-based psychotherapist. Flanagan had met Mary while riding the subway just weeks before she met Peter O’Brien, in 1964. “I was a seminarian and had my collar on and she introduced herself to me, and invited me to drop by the Hickory House and hear her, which I did.” After working in Korea for four years, Flanagan had returned to New York to study filmmaking. As part of a course, he had to make a film and, after reconnecting with Mary, persuaded her to allow him to make one about her outreach. The result is a rare glimpse of Mary in those still-reclusive years at home and working with kids.

  As for Music for Peace, “I put up six grand of my own money for it,” Flanagan recalls (worth far more today), and in his words, “ran interference” for Mary at the recording sessions. Later, when he tried to get his money back, Mary responded curtly that he had not sufficiently promoted the record: “You need to do a mission for the record, fast and furious, placards, buttons, throwaways and 100 large posters. In business one has to do business in a business way.” She concluded by snapping, “You see, I’d starve if I waited for you to do it.” Mary ran out of money to pay contributors at midpoint. “I was left to finish the arrangements alone,” she wrote candidly in liner notes to the album. “Was I ever weary, and my brain just seemed to stop with all the troubles and aggravating sounds that seeped through.” Her faithful old friend David Stone Martin was glad to contribute the cover art, a powerful line drawing of prayerful hands. Others, including the maligned Flanagan, contributed lyrics.

  Friends recall stacks of records piled everywhere in her apartment, and in the trunk of her car. She sold hundreds of copies at performances and through mail-order, but that was peanuts, not enough to break even. The old familiar story.

  Yet Music for Peace was building a reputation far beyond its record sales. In its full shape, the piece was premiered as a concert at St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University, in April 1970. Says Barry Ulanov, “Her jazz setting of religious material, the Mass, the toughest of all and the most central of all, is not just good, it’s secure. You feel with most composers it’s gimmicky, a novelty, not really quite appropriate. But Mary knew and felt the music and she knew how to notate it. I hear the Mass as a complete success—and I’m not that easy of a critic, I don’t like that many things. It works.”

  Indeed, Music for Peace was a succès d’estime. But Mary could not rest until it was performed as part of the church service proper. In 1970 she wrote to Brother Mario in Rome: “They all still think that jazz is pagan music.” She was more determined than ever to place jazz at the very heart of New York’s Catholic life—in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Again she urged O’Brien to approach Cardinal Cooke about the venture; again he demurred. Finally, at least as Mary liked to tell it, she “ran into” the Cardinal while with O’Brien at Fordham University. “So Peter hid behind a tree and I went chasing across the campus shouting, ‘Cardinal Cooke! Cardinal Cooke!’ I told him I’d written a Mass and I’d like to do it at St. Patrick’s. He said ‘fine.’ I said, ‘It’s kind of noisy and loud.’ ‘That’s what we need,’ he said. He thought it would be a wonderful thing for young people.” But it would be four more years before Music for Peace—known after 1971 as Mary Lou’s Mass—was heard in St. Patrick’s. In the meanwhile, Mary presented it at churches, universities, and other schools around the country, rewriting the sung parts to fit the capabilities of singers and streamlining the score to make it more accessible and economical for local ensembles to perform.

  Not everyone was happy about Mary Lou’s Mass. “NO JAZZ” read the pickets outside St. Francis Xavier Church in Kansas City, in May of 1973, when Mary arrived to perform it. How ironic, given that Kansas City was the city that had nurtured some of the most legendary figures in jazz, including Mary herself, and the city that honored Mary that same year by naming a street after her: Mary Lou Williams Lane (near Tenth Street and Paseo). But inside the church, a different spirit prevailed, with hundreds of enthusiasts jamming the pews to hear jazz in church.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1971, O’Brien was pushing to have one of the major dance companies choreograph Mary Lou’s Mass. In particular, he had his eye on Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater. “Mary warned me, ‘Don’t aim so high.’ But there had never been a jazz mass done in a big way in dance, and I thought the climate was right—Ellington’s sacred concerts and Leonard Bernstein’s own mass had opened the way. Mary advised me to go to Brother John Sellers: ‘That’s how you get to Ailey.’ ” Born a Holy Roller, Sellers was a blues singer from Mississippi and a fortuneteller who sang in Ailey’s Blues Suite, and in the Mingus Dances for the Joffrey Ballet. He became a strong advocate for Music for Peace. Ailey himself loved jazz, and Mary’s mass was rooted in the spiritual tradition he’d grown up in. He also loved Mary’s long connection with music and dance—her early vaudeville days, the tencents-a-dance “jitney” dances, the swing-era ballrooms, and Mary’s recollections of earlier greats like Seymour James, Bill Robinson, Bill Bailey, Pearl Primus, and Baby Lawrence.

  For Ailey, Mary expanded the mass, and Peter O’Brien rese-quenced the parts—the “common,” or unchanging, elements, and the “proper,” those that pertain to the day in question in the proper church order. The collaboration premiered on December 9, 1971. Mary played several works with her trio in a fifteen-minute prelude before the dances, for which the trio was joined by an ensemble of other musicians and a chorus.

  Expectations were high; Judith Jamison was singled out for her solo in the “Lord’s Prayer,” in particular. Clive Barnes spoke of the piece’s “spiritual exaltation, its concern with the special ecstasy of grace,” and another reviewer enthused over its “timeless richness of ritual and of music rooted deep in the Negro spiritual”; yet the New York critics were in general agreement that it did not approach the power of Ailey’s previous Revelations, which had been firmly anchored in Negro religious music, whereas Mary Lou’s Mass contained jazz elements in addition to her interpretations of spirituals and blues. Nor were Mary and Alvin Ailey completely satisfied with the Mass. Ailey, had worked very fast on the choreography—wrapping it up, as O’Brien recalls, in just about three weeks.

  Unhappy with what she called the stiff quality of Howard Roberts’s conducting of her typically difficult voicings, Mary insisted on taking over the direction of the eight-voice choir as well as the musicians, guiding the singers with her head from the piano in the pit. “But she didn’t know what to do when things went wrong—once when some scenery fell, and again when Judith Jamison got her toe stuck in the hem of a dress,” explains O’Brien. “Then, one night, Mary became distracted when the bass player, Suggs, wasn’t playing as she wanted. She missed a chorus of the music—just left it out. The dancers could not improvise and they had to stumble through. Ailey s
tormed out of the theatre into the night when the curtain fell. Of course Ailey always stormed out into the night, but that night he was furious. After that he said, ‘Howard conducts.’ ” The Mass passed out of Ailey’s company’s repertoire in 1973.

  A recording of the Ailey version of Mary Lou’s Mass had seemed a natural. Actually, the record was all Mary’s idea, a re-release of Music for Peace, along with several new pieces commissioned by the choreographer. For a while, it seemed there would be no record at all: Ed Flanagan, who had never been paid back his loan for Music for Peace, held on to the original tapes from that album as collateral. Feeling betrayed, Mary lashed out at the then-priest, who presently “had a change of heart,” as he recalls. “I decided it was my duty to give her the tapes for her new album because I thought she was a saint. I met her in midtown Manhattan one noon with two huge shopping bags full of tapes. She pulled up in a cab to get them and drove off. And after that, we were friendly again.”

  MEANWHILE, THERE WERE continuing problems with her nephew. Robbie’s behavior, always erratic, was now getting him in deeper trouble as he entered his teens. Mary feared and blamed the company he kept, and longed to get him far away from New York’s mean streets. After a fresh crisis, she enlisted Brother Mario’s help: Could he find a school run by the brothers in Rome willing to take Robbie? Brother Mario did, and ever-loyal Joyce Breach paid his airfare and drove him to the airport.

  Mary’s letters to Mario at that time reflect her frantic concern: “Will Robbie know how to get back and forth from school? Half the time Grace kept him out of school, be careful of him crossing the streets, everybody’s sad about him, he was mistreated all his life and was becoming bitter. He has asthma, is afraid of the dark, can’t sleep alone, nervous, constipated, lives on candy.”

  Within a month, Robbie was creating new problems: “Mario tell me the truth, Does he vibrate bad to you? Is he obedient? Is he sassy? I’m so upset I can’t think, this thing will put me in a bad way financially. I feel so sad, I feel like crying. I had no place to send him here.… Mario I have to know the bad things in order to correct myself and others I’m helping. There’s an epidemic of children using dope and several 13 and 14 year old boys have died. Can you keep him there until May? School’s over by June. Please get Robbie settled and find me a one-bedroom apartment in Rome with a foldout bed in the living room for Robbie.”

  She proposed that Mario set up concerts for her—on Vatican Radio again, in Rome, all over Europe. “I’ll live there until Robbie is schooled and I’ll be with you half the time.… I’ll make us a lot of money, just wait and see,” she wrote him. But within weeks Brother Mario was reporting that Robbie had flunked entrance exams to one school, and he could not find another that would admit the boy. Soon Robbie was back in New York.

  And though neither spoke of it, the Robbie experience apparently strained the relationship between monk and musician. Mary no longer wrote of her plans for a house together, no longer plied him with letters festooned with her pencil drawings of smiling lips, or her little-girl coquettishness (“you’re so sweet. Make sure you write me every day”). No longer did she confide all her doings to him.

  There was a new (religious) man in her life.

  MARY’S RELATIONSHIP WITH Peter O’Brien initially provided the good times she loved and missed in her relationship with Brother Mario. Yet it turned out to be as emotionally difficult as any grand passion she’d had in her busy life.

  The arts, especially the performance arts, continued to fascinate O’Brien, who still dreamed of being involved with the theater even as he completed his studies in seminary and was ordained as a Jesuit priest in June of 1971, when he enrolled in a summer school program at UC Berkeley, with the long-term goal of obtaining a doctorate in theater arts. In the meantime, he’d kept up his relationships with the artists he met in New York, including a phone conversation with Mary that turned out to be pivotal to their relationship. “I called Mary from San Francisco, which was all rock and flower children. I told her about the lack of jazz there and said she should come out and play.”

  Mary still had deep reservations about taking on performance commitments. Friends had been urging her to do so for some time, but she continued to hesitate: there were the ongoing problems with Robbie, the memories of her decades of struggle over pay and conditions on the nightclub circuit. And, crucially, who was to represent her? She had tried, without success, many times, to take care of the business end of her music now that Joe Glaser had passed on. Yet the young priest’s zeal, loyalty, crackling energy, and, most important, the empathy between them, satisfied enormous needs in both. As she talked with him, perhaps Mary sensed that her dream of playing spiritual jazz as a healing mission could best be fulfilled by having an articulate, energetic priest as her manager. Wouldn’t he also be able to help her tap into the huge network of Catholic schools and colleges as performance venues to get her mass out everywhere?

  When his summer course at Berkeley was over and O’Brien returned to New York for an assignment as a parish priest by the Jesuits, Mary asked him to be her manager. It was as quick, as moving, and as serious as a proposal of marrage. “I remember it was in her Cadillac,” he recalls, “parked on 102nd Street and Riverside Drive late at night, before I went upstairs to where I lived. Mary said: ‘I’ll go out if you come with me.’ And I decided my ministry should be Mary Lou and saving jazz. I said yes.” Although there was no precedent for such an occupation (even the “jazz priest,” Father Norman O’Connor, had been restricted to acting as an m.c. at jazz concerts and a d.j. on radio shows), O’Brien saw no conflict between being a priest and managing a jazz musician. “I was full-time with her and full-time with the Jesuits,” he points out. “The Jesuits are very flexible and I was authorized to travel and help her with her career. This would have been much more difficult for me in any other organization within the Church.” Actually, while managing Mary, O’Brien also worked from 1972 to 1977 as one of a number of parish priests on the huge staff at the important St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue (the same church where Mary had been baptized). And he was paid in both capacities, although he and Mary never had a written contract and his income as her personal manager was negligible. Was he also Mary’s religious advisor? “Certainly not!” he emphasizes. “If anything, she was my spiritual director, truly.”

  Mary and O’Brien, who has a smooth, oratorical style, began conducting workshops on jazz history at the Jesuits’ own Fordham University and at other colleges, with O’Brien presenting the remarks Mary had developed over the decades about the evolution of jazz, while Mary illustrated with examples at the piano. Often, they combined her popular jazz history “lesson” with performances by local choirs of Mary Lou’s Mass, for very quickly Mary had achieved that dream and was called on to produce her namesake mass around the country in the seventies.

  EVEN BEFORE HE became her manager in ’71, O’Brien facilitated a career move for Mary that had important repercussions for her. The year before, as editorial advisor for Fordham Prep’s literary magazine, he took his student editors down to Greenwich Village to interview a legendary show-business press agent, Ivan Black, who had represented Café Society in the 1940s. Black was now repping for the Cookery, owned by Barney Josephson, whom O’Brien met at the restaurant on a later visit. “Mary came with me; she was looking for a place to play jazz on a regular basis, because she had decided that she could build on that. And she said to Barney, ‘Why don’t you put a piano over there for me to play?”

  There were by then precious few places to hear jazz in New York City, Mary reminded Josephson. “We have to do something to help bring jazz back,” she told him. (“We?” he responded.) But realizing there were few risks, Josephson agreed to rent a piano for a few months. He could only pay her scale, he said—the union minimum. O’Brien, who had been doing publicity for Mary even then, learned a good deal from that experience. “I thought everybody was as nice as pie then. But after Mary paid her bass player (New Y
ork cabaret law forbade a drummer), she took in just $280 a week. And this for working five sets a night, six nights a week—he wanted her to do six sets, but Mary said, ‘Man, I play with my whole body.’ ”

  In the summer of 1971, just before O’Brien came aboard officially as her manager, Mary tried to negotiate a raise for herself, pointing out the increase in business she’d brought to the club. She made a vintage Mary Lou complaint to Josephson, writing, “My sister, poor Grace, makes almost as much as me, wrapping meat for the Food Union!” The comparison failed to move Josephson.

  “But Mary was playing there to reestablish herself, and it worked,” says O’Brien. “There was a lot of publicity. We were a smash hit and lots of musicians came in, people like Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor. I was furious at myself for not cracking the whip about money, but after that I negotiated raises every year.”

  The Cookery became Mary’s “room,” and she played long engagements there until 1978. She considered her success at the Cookery a vindication of jazz and her mission to keep the heritage alive. It was no coincidence, she told Josephson, that rock clubs in the neighborhood closed after she began to play at the Cookery. “She says to me,” Josephson said, “ ‘Since we put jazz in your restaurant, you and I with the help of the Lord Jesus Christ’—crossing herself—‘we closed Fillmore East, Fillmore West, the Electric Circus’!”

  AS FOR RECORDINGS, by 1971—despite the glowing reviews in the press, lines of people wanting to get in the Cookery, and new job offers—there was, sadly, not a single record album featuring Mary in print. “I was putting down 78’s to show examples. Nothing! I badly wanted her to do a record,” says O’Brien.