Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  That at last came about through John Hammond, who with his wife, Esme, often dropped into the Cookery to hear Mary. By 1971 the coolness between Mary and Hammond had subsided. He urged producer Hank O’Neal to record Mary for the debut of his fledgling record company, Chiaroscuro. O’Neal agreed, and Mary cut a solo piano album. From the Heart includes as poignant and expressive a version of her “Cloudy” as she ever recorded and a carefully constructed “Little Joe from Chicago” that one musician, Joel Simpson, who has transcribed a number of Mary’s important arrangements, aptly calls “solid food for the soul.” Around the same time, Mary also finished her jazz history project, melding narration and piano examples of the various styles of jazz, for Moe Asch at Folkways. The record was not released until the late seventies, however, when O’Brien agreed to make necessary cuts. “We had to do a huge number of edits—more than 150—on the tape she’d made, and those were the days when you used razor blades,” he recalls. The resulting History of Jazz is quintessential Mary. If it has a home-made feel, it is also intimate, totally unselfconscious, a deeply felt tour through the eras of jazz. And although some jazz “critics” at the time carped at Mary’s exclusion of then-popular styles—fusion, jazz-rock, and “free” jazz—her decision was solid: a quarter-century later they sound as dated and ephemeral as, say, bellbottoms and flower children, and as out of place, while Mary’s music remains.

  Another superbly sparkling set was captured on tape one afternoon that same year at the Overseas Press Club, when Mary played powerfully alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Bobby Hackett on trumpets, George Duvivier on bass, and Grady Tate on drums. The recording, titled Three Giants, was nominated for a Grammy, and reviews were ecstatic. Dan Morgenstern, in Downbeat, was practically hyperventilating: “This is one of the truly great jazz records of all time. Mary Lou Williams, a most remarkable musician, is not only the ideal accompanist to the heady work of the trumpeters, but contributes solos that maintain the level of inspiration. She swings like a demon, turns the changes inside out, and makes some musical statements that rank with the greatest jazz piano playing on record. The senior member of this gathering, she thinks and plays like a youngster, but with a dimension of wisdom beyond the grasp of youth.” It had been a shamefully long time since Mary was recorded with musicians of this caliber.

  Mary’s renditions of Scott Joplin music at a concert recorded with other performers in New York, called An Evening with Scott Joplin, document her continued love of earlier styles of jazz piano. Her playing of Joplin’s work did not adhere to the notated version, causing inevitable controversy among ragtime “purists.” But her admirers found her playing charming and graceful, true to the spirit of the music, if not the letter.

  NINETEEN SEVENTY-ONE marked the beginning of Mary’s comeback. “She’d had in mind working with the church, making religious records,” remarks O’Brien. “But all that changed overnight.” Despite the well-received performances of Mary Lou’s Mass, it was Mary the jazz musician the audience demanded. Though he was a priest, he was also Mary’s manager, and O’Brien prodded her to respond to that increasing demand. Besides the Cookery gig and the recordings, engagements at Blues Alley in Washington and the London House in Chicago, and an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, helped to reestablish her as a presence. “But Newport was an appearance and nothing more—that was the year that all hell broke loose,” recalls O’Brien. Hippies had crashed the festival, demanding to be let in free. “I remember that Mary was the next artist scheduled and I was talking to the stage manager about where to place the piano and then everything started to fly, broken chairs and so on. That riot stopped the concert. When it became clear she couldn’t go on, Mary asked George Wein, standing nearby, ‘Do I get my money?’ ‘Yes, Mary, you get your money,’ Wein said, not annoyed, just even-voiced.”

  It was the last year that the Newport Festival was held in its namesake city. In 1972, Newport changed its venue to New York, and Mary played there the next two years. Indeed, in 1973, she had one of her strongest performances at Philharmonic Hall, though sadly, it was not recorded. In a lineup that included Gil Evans’s orchestra, the Sonny Rollins quartet, and a solo Keith Jarrett, Mary, with her favorite bassist, Buster Williams, and Billy Hart on drums, stood out as the star of the evening, inspiring listeners to describe her as “hair-raisingly good,” “awe-inspiring.”

  Now she was being discovered by a new generation of fans. At the Monterey Jazz Festival in September of ’71, she and Jay McShann were hailed as the “rediscoveries of the year,” and she received a standing ovation. The recognition that now came Mary’s way—”her return is a major event in the jazz world,” wrote John S. Wilson in the New York Times—had little effect on Mary. When she played, she took her music seriously and brooked no nonsense or competition from the audience. One evening, her friend Jean Bach (who later produced the film A Great Day in Harlem) came to the club, and Bella Abzug, at the height of her fame as a feminist politician, came in and sat down. “She was a neighbor of mine and so we were talking,” Bach recalls, “and Bella was not a quiet woman. And Mary says something like, ‘I have two more songs to play here, then you can talk.’ ”

  Her private life remained problematic; she had been in debt and on the doorstep of poverty for a long time. Often she continued to find it hard to pay her bills. One afternoon at Gimbel’s her credit card was not honored when she tried to charge stockings and a blouse. (She had been proud to have charge cards with Saks and Gimbel’s since the 1940s, at times when credit was far from usual for black Americans.) Mary went home, cried in humiliation, and wrote an angry letter to the store; eventually her account was reinstated. Her neighborhood, meanwhile, had deteriorated badly. The once-elegant Hamilton Terrace, on Sugar Hill, had long since bade goodbye to the doorman and was down-at-heel. Mary petitioned to have her already low rent reduced further, citing years of neglect. And then her apartment was robbed yet again; but although the thieves went so far as to rip out an entire window frame, she refused to consider moving. Instead she paid a retired cop from the neighborhood to sit with a gun in case they came back. “It was her home and she wanted to be there,” says O’Brien. Clearly, though, she did have misgivings. At times, he recalls, “She would still talk about living in a convent. I’d tell her, oh no—same turmoil as out here. There’s no escaping it.”

  THAT BUSY YEAR of 1971, which marked O’Brien’s maiden voyage as manager, also marked the beginning of a relationship increasingly fraught with tension, one that made heavy demands on both of them. “When I celebrated my first mass in June of ’71, she felt I was not paying attention to her, and she got all hurt,” says O’Brien. “This went on all the time. For example, I wanted to use the church to put on concerts by other artists, too, and Mary said, ‘You’re paying attention to everybody but me.’ She thought I would be pulled away from her and would leave her out. It continued for years. Another time, for Palm Sunday in 1973, we presented Mary Lou’s Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola. This was my debut—make a big splash on the home turf. I worked for weeks on this and it was an enormous amount of work. We had six musicians and a choir. I said the mass and preached the sermon and ran the whole thing. The place was packed and it was a huge success. Then afterwards, she comes up to me with a shopping bag full of receipts and things about her income tax and says, ‘Take these down to Gemma,’ her friend who helped with her bookkeeping. Not ‘Thank God,’ not ‘It was great,’ but putting me down. Undoubtedly, that’s how she was treated when she started—rough, not acknowledged. The same kind of thing happened other times, too, but they never counted in her mind, because she’s Mary Lou Williams.

  “There were so many good times, though. I would have walked away if she were a phony. But she was real. However, I made her do what she didn’t want to do—go out in public. I put her back in the professional world she didn’t want to be in. So it’s a very different and a harder Mary Lou after 1970. She’s blaming me, getting angry at me for getting her back out there when she just
wanted to be off in church. Later on, maybe a lot of people thought ‘that priest’ got her to do these masses and things. No! They were her idea. I supported her, yes, but I didn’t give her a lot of encouragement about the masses—I wanted piano records, but she would not be deterred from what she wanted to do, and wasn’t going to have her creativity messed up by anybody, including me.”

  Professionally, there is no question that Mary appreciated what O’Brien was doing for her. In a letter to recently made friends, Dr. Sam and Mrs. Marge Atkinson, in the summer of 1972, she wrote: “Poor Peter is working so very hard for me. I feel sorry for him. He’s thorough in his work and seems to enjoy it. He loves me so much—which is what the world needs. He’s so dedicated.”

  Many people viewed the relationship between a young white man of the cloth and a black woman thirty years older with frank suspicion. A black priest once confronted O’Brien directly: “What are you doing around this old black woman?” John Williams echoed the query: “I often wondered, why her and Peter? He was right with her, night and day.”

  “Some people said that Peter and Mary Lou had an affair,” confides Elaine Lorillard. And Delilah Jackson adds, “People were saying that he was in love with Mary.” But those who knew them well actively deny it. “Was Mary in love with Peter?” asks Joyce Breach rhetorically. “Forget that. No: she thought that she was saving him.” Yet, the relationship resonated very much like an affair. “Part of the problem for me was getting lost in the relationship—that codependency bag,” O’Brien explains. “I went to the Cookery every night, for example. She wanted me right there, all the time. I didn’t live in the same house, but it was round the clock. It was a different kind of relationship, one that had everything to do with who the two of us were and trying to become. To her, love meant exclusivity. I was supposed to be absolutely devoted. Love meant I wouldn’t go away, I wouldn’t have anybody else in my life. I wouldn’t be apart. Whatever she imagined love would be. But no sex.

  “After a while, I paid no attention to that. I finally resorted to getting a private phone number that Mary knew nothing about; or she would have been calling me 24 hours a day. I was interested in all the arts, I was not limited to the jazz world and that was threatening to Mary Lou. If I got friendly with someone in the Cookery, she got mad. I was not allowed an opinion on any subject. If people ended up liking me, she got mad. I was not supposed to have a life. I tried to preserve some kind of separateness, but—and this is the point—she wouldn’t have thought of that as healthy.”

  Further complications arose when this quasi-marriage became a classic triangle, as Mary increasingly devoted herself to Robbie, whose behavior had worsened since Brother Mario sent him back from Rome. Mary helped place Robbie in various group homes, including Lincoln Hall in Westchester County, and a Catholic facility for troubled youngsters in Vermont, where the priest in charge wrote to her gently but firmly to stop sending the boy money: it would be better for Robbie to get a job and earn it himself. Mary’s letters to Robbie were the appeals of a desperate mother. “I got fed up one night and said: ‘Why don’t you just adopt him?’ ” O’Brien recalls. “She told me, ‘You don’t know nothin’.’ But she was really devoted to him and terrified that something would go wrong with him.” As it did. Later in the seventies, Robbie—severely asthmatic, prone to rages, and by then a chronic drug user—had a dope party at Hamilton Terrace while Mary was out on tour. She returned to complaints from the neighbors and an apartment in shambles, and wrote Robbie a letter full of raw hurt, begging him to stop hanging around with his friends: “I was happy when you left your job in Harlem. Why? Dumb niggers on the job who thought themselves smart were influencing you too much, even in clothing and wine. Only Harlem and dumb ignorant people wear the clothes they think are hip and the slang and other things are degrading.”

  Her sorrow and disappointment over Robbie’s self-destructiveness were her constant companions. “I had hopes,” the letter continues, “that you would be able to team with me someday for success. Robert I’ve always loved you and worry about you.”

  The letter was returned unopened.

  Mary’s continued loyalty to Robbie enraged O’Brien, who recalls an instance when he had finalized arrangements for an important concert at Trinity Church in Manhattan. “But she had to take Robbie, who was terrified, to the dentist and just refused to sign the contracts,” he says. “And I went out of my mind—the anger was so great I felt that something bad would happen.”

  During an engagement in Canada, it did most unexpectedly. In 1973, Mary was booked at a Toronto nightclub for several weeks, and scheduled also to perform Mary Lou’s Mass at the venerable St. Basil’s Church. According to O’Brien, after the performance he and Mary had stayed up talking most of the night, not unusual for two night people. “I was in her hotel room, in my suit. I hadn’t gone to my room yet. She was in her nightgown, but that didn’t seem untoward to me. There were all kinds of domestic situations we were in. And then—a horrific moment. She asked, ‘Why do you stay here?’ in a little-girl voice, so sad. It was a terrible moment—it was all indirect, all expectations, very threatening, although I didn’t even know what she meant for sure but I thought she meant the feelings she had for me. Then she fell on the pillow, crying, and said, ‘I just have to let it wear off.’ It was bad. I just left, I certainly wasn’t going to go over and hold her.”

  Was Mary’s question a painful declaration of passion that he then spurned, as O’Brien implies? Or was it something else altogether, perhaps even a figment of his imagination, as many who knew Mary suggest emphatically? Others simply deride the notion that Mary, then in her early sixties, could have passionate sexual feelings for a priest who was thirty years younger than she. Of course, older women, and especially highly creative older women, have been known to fall in love with much younger men—why not? Louise Nevelson adored her companion Arnold Glimcher, about forty years her junior, and artist Georgia O’Keeffe was very old when she fell in love with a youthful Juan Hamilton.

  As an explanation, O’Brien offers this: “For ten years, I was consistently there, available. I was really there. And although I was relatively inexperienced, the religious thing for me was a defense, a great bypass. And she had recently found out something about me that told her yes: here’s Peter, available.” His career as the personal representative of a major artistic personality coincided with his own coming-of-age. “I was only twenty-three years old when I met her, fairly innocent, very conventional in a way, all during that time. That was the period in the early and mid-seventies when there was all that liberation, including sexual, and we used to argue heavily. There was tremendous jealousy. It was terrifying, and preposterous too. My own attitudes and opinions and behavior—certain things Mary’d found out about me—could be looked upon as a betrayal of her. She discovered something about me, that I’m no longer little Peter her son but a man, a sexual person too.”

  Indeed, a few years later, a distressed Mary wrote, but never mailed, a series of frank letters to him that indeed seem to address her discovery of his loss of innocence as well as the “terrible moment” of 1973. In a letter dated September 3, 1977, she wrote:

  It would be a great loss if you do not do something about yourself. I’m very sorry about some things I have to say to you at times, but nobody was born freaked up [that is, given to sexual proclivities outside the norm].

  Think: I never cared for younger men. Got away from love affairs 30 [sic] years ago. Musicians almost drove me mad. But I could deal with men by avoiding such things. All of a sudden I’m mixed up. Think hard, Peter. You never realized this. My entire soul was in danger! Why? I was confessing what you felt for someone else, just terrible! But I continued to pray, allowing it to melt away.

  In her letter, Mary seems to be describing, in her hermetic, mystical way, a transference—a kind of visitation—of an unwelcome physical passion, but, crucially, the passionate feelings that O’Brien, as she had learned, felt for another: “I was
confessing what you felt for someone else.” If so, this would have been as “terrible” for Mary as for O’Brien, above all because of her deeply sincere belief in the sanctity of a priest’s vows of chastity, and her shock if she thought that he had violated them. But that may not have been all that disturbed her. On another level, Mary—who had taken a self-imposed “vow” of celibacy upon her conversion in the 1950s—might have been reminded by an eruption of unwanted passion that she still had sexual feelings. Although she had seemed to close the book on this side of her nature after her passionate embrace of religion, aspects of her sensual female nature continued, all right. Why would she, who had been slim and beautiful, have come to despise herself to some extent physically? “I am old, fat and tired,” she wrote.

  But if the scene between Mary and O’Brien in the Toronto hotel room was in part between a man, albeit a priest, and a woman who could still feel desire and be humiliated by rejection, there is another, more fundamental, layer of interpretation possible. For Mary asked the question key to any real relationship: “Why do you stay here?” What are your motives? What needs keep you, a man of thirty, with me, a woman of sixty?

  O’Brien provides at least part of the answer in a candid self-assessment: “When I met Mary,” he says, “I was all over the place pursuing certain artists. But Mary was the one that paid off for me. From an outsider, I became an insider and a mover in the world I wanted to be in.” Was she, Mary might have feared, only being used again?

  “It took awhile, about six months, I guess, for us to renegotiate our relationship after that night in Toronto. The goal was to salvage the real relationship and not the fantasy. But I had to renegotiate my independent position gradually and she had to negotiate her independence, too. But after Toronto, I was no longer going to get my personal life mixed up with how we were going to work.