Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  When you accused me of stealing and abusing kindness, I began thinking—what have I done wrong? I tried to teach you the business. I’m still thinking for you when I write Norman [Granz] and others. I have taught you and give you ideas to go on your own to make millions because you’re white. But now you’re throwing your money away, spend it all with nothing saved for a rainy day. Your not having any money ever, means I have to take work, overworking with bad health. You’ve almost made me lose my mind from your accusations. I’m almost hating you, but will never allow this to happen. I never would have taken such amateurish dealings from anyone as I do with you, if I hadn’t thought they needed help.

  Now my mind is in a mess. I can’t be around anybody long. Seems you have very strong powers and it ain’t too good at times. Man, I’m a creative artist. The mind has to be clear at all times. Being alone I can ward off distraction better.… You have done quite a few bad things to me and acted as if you knew it all. You listened to jealous sounds and returned attacking me. Recently I’ve felt like going into retirement. But I snap back. Have they got you believing that jazz isn’t needed? I’m tired of talking, man.

  O’Brien was not her only trial during this most difficult time. After Mamie’s death, having assumed the mantle of matriarch of the family, Mary took on the rehabilitation of her nephews Clifford and Robbie. As Helen Floyd bluntly puts it, “Motherhood kicked her right in the ass.” The problem children she had worried about were now problem adults, in some cases with problem children of their own. Robbie’s nephew, Clifford (Grace’s grandson), who was a few years older than Robbie, visited Mary in Durham, bringing his small son; Mary talked, pleaded, prayed over, and got angry at Clifford, trying to get him to stop using drugs. “Mary was terrified that her nephews, especially Robbie and Clifford, would get on dope and die,” explains O’Brien. “She certainly said that, almost crying one day.” Robbie, who wrote polite letters to Mary one day and abusive, name-calling rants the next (though invariably asking for money), finally joined the army.

  In a letter to Robbie (this one returned unopened) she felt obliged to defend the “expense” of her penny-ante card-playing hobby:

  I play cards with friends to keep my spirits up. I have a lot to do before I die. But my health is very bad and I’m weak. I didn’t want to tell you but I had to, I’m going into the hospital here.

  Robert, I am a friend, not an enemy. You are not supposed to treat me badly. I try to help you. I do not have the loot to do what you want done all the time and you do not have to threaten me, all you have to do is ask or talk to me. Is anyone using you to harm me? I told you that black people are dangerous to their own kind. Did you know or care that I’m sick? Don’t allow fears to anger you.

  I love you, Mary

  As Robbie’s behavior became even more erratic, and as Mary’s illness progressed, “she didn’t want Robbie in Durham,” says Brother Mario flatly. Still, she always carried his photo in her wallet, and kept his room in her house waiting, complete with the old drum set Dizzy Gillespie had given him as a teenager.

  Mary made other plans for the future she still hoped to have, flying in her sister Geraldine and niece Helen from Pittsburgh for company and paying them to help care for her as she weakened, even to accompany her on her travels. “She wanted to go visit Peru, where St. Martin de Porres was from,” recalls Helen Floyd.

  As for O’Brien, she devised a plan she thought would give him his independence, while keeping him near. “There was an empty lot next door to her house. After she got sick, she wanted to buy it and build a separate unit there for me,” he says. “She thought maybe I would come around if I was completely alone. She very rarely ever cried, but when I said I absolutely will not do that, she cried in her car, I remember. I was harsh in my refusal and she took it as hatred and rejection of her and she didn’t understand that I was terrified of being crushed. Although after that, she understood more.” But one thing he did not seem to consider: some of her tears may have flowed from her sorrow and fear for the way he was conducting his life.

  In the midst of all this, Mary played on. Of a concert in May with Milton Suggs, opposite the Ellington Orchestra led by Mercer Ellington at Lincoln Center in New York, the Times critic John S. Wilson rhapsodized that her “personalized history of jazz [was] a tour de force [with] a crispness and emotional richness that raised it from a series of brief examples to a developed whole.” She continued her high level of performance all summer: at Notre Dame in mid-June, Wolf Trap in Virginia, the Corpus Christi Jazz Festival for the Fourth of July, and the Knickerbocker Saloon (in Manhattan) in July and August. “No matter what she plays she swings,” commented Wilson.

  Mary had left Barney Josephson’s employ for the nearby Knickerbocker, the Cookery’s main rival. “Barney Josephson had a fit when I told him we were leaving the Cookery, like you were supposed to be his slave forever,” says O’Brien. Mary told Andy Kirk, says Delilah Jackson, who was visiting Kirk at his home when Mary stopped by, that she had borrowed $1,000 from Josephson and then gave notice. “And he said, ‘Wait a minute, how can you borrow money from me and then quit?’ I answered him, ‘Barney, I have to quit to get a job to make enough money to pay you back!’ ” This is pure, pungent Mary.

  As the holiday season approached in 1979, Mary’s favorite, Thanksgiving, was a happier one than the year before. She made turkey, candied yams, and all the trimmings for dinner, inviting Brother Mario, Marsha Vick, and several of her students. “It was very casual, sitting in the kitchen,” Brother Mario recalls. “We played cards and Mary showed Marsha various techniques on the piano. The next day we drove around, did a lot of shopping, went to a market and her favorite antiques store.” It was the last holiday she would experience without intense physical pain.

  In early December, she went to the University of Richmond to concertize. D. A. Handy, artist-in-residence there who had a background in classical music, had arranged the concert and panicked when Mary’s preferred Baldwin piano was dropped while being moved and could not be replaced. “I called Mary, offering to search high and low for something else,” recalls Handy. “But Mary didn’t even blink when she got there, she just waved me away. She didn’t even want to test it! She said that she had learned in her early years how to play in all the keys and on all kinds of beat-up, out-of-tune pianos. She just sat down and played.”

  Mary knew she had more hospitalization ahead as Christmas approached, but she wanted to see friends and family in New York first, so she took a Trailways bus up north. She shopped, saw family and friends, and tended to her New York apartment. But in a few days, complaining that she felt dizzy, weak, and nauseated with intermittent but severe back pain, she returned to Durham and Duke University Medical Center for a third scraping of the bladder. This time, the news was worse: the cancer had spread into her body, and the doctors wanted to remove her bladder and uterus.

  During her hospitalization for this major surgery, on January 10, 1980, Marsha Vick and Peter O’Brien visited her daily. She joked with the nurses. “One day she said she was in such pain that she closed her eyes and said to the nurses, ‘Goodbye!’ ” recalls Vick. “It scared them. But she was very frightened at the prospect of a serious operation. To pass the time, she either slept or played cards; she taught me to play many games, from poker to crazy eights.”

  O’Brien had fought against accepting the severity of her condition, even when she grew weaker as the time for her radical surgery approached. “I thought it was still manageable cancer. Mary was in bed and said ‘Bring me the bedpan,’ but I told her, ‘Stand up—if you don’t, it’s all over!’ So she said ‘All right,’ and stood up to go to the bathroom. The urology surgeon was convinced they’d got all the malignancy out. But then the oncologist, Dr. Paulson, came to talk to us. He said she needed chemo and so on. The diagnosis suddenly knocked the shit out of me.”

  Although she was now seventy years old, was enduring chronic pain, and had undergone major surgery, Mary continued to show r
esilience. As soon as she could, she had a piano wheeled into her room and would play for the doctors, nurses, patients, friends, and students who came by. Joyce Breach flew in, bearing a huge bouquet of Mary’s favorite red roses, and recalls that Mary wouldn’t be seen until she had her teeth in and her makeup and wig on. Home by the end of January, Mary was helped in her recuperation by her sister Geraldine Garnett, who came down from Pittsburgh to care for her, at Mary’s expense. Mary pressed ahead with plans. Some fell through, like her wish for a jazz festival at Duke. But one thing she decided she could no longer put off was a long-germinating idea for an extended composition: orchestrating her “history of jazz” for a Duke concert band called the Wind Symphony. Confusingly, she often referred to the project as the Wind Symphony.

  She wrote Joyce: “I didn’t realize that my operation was so heavy. Now I’m feeling better—almost ready to get going. A few days before you arrived I had begun to feel sorry for myself, was in tears etc., but am ok thanks to friends. I shall always remember you all. I’ll be ok now, anxious to get back to the Wind symphony. I feel very thankful and great inside—please believe me.”

  She set to work, but now had to deal with mounting pain as the cancer spread to her spine (though Mary stubbornly called it “arthritis”); medication with all kinds of side effects; having to use an ostomy bag; and the clear knowledge that her days were numbered. Despite many good days, her mood often dipped sharply. “She was in more and more pain from her back,” recalls Marsha Vick years later, who attended Mary faithfully during her illness. “Once she told me the pain was so bad she thought about suicide. On bad days, she said she couldn’t get any more inspiration, and would complain about ‘cornball’ music. And once she played a concert where her back was killing her, but then, she said, she started playing and the pain went away.” Vick jotted in her diary, “She relies on God for all things, to keep her going. She feels that God has given her the talent and will make her able to play as long as He wants.”

  GIVEN THE DECLINING state of her health, her musical coherence in the summer of 1980 is nothing short of miraculous. (Of course, Mary did believe in miracles.) After a performance in June at Duke for an alumni reunion that drew more than a thousand people, she played to a packed audience at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. “Just listening to her doesn’t even hint that she might be 70,” remarked a reviewer. After repeating the previous year’s superlative performance in New York at the Knickerbocker, she performed Mary Lou’s Mass in Newark, at Seton Hall.

  Then back to Duke, where she managed to play at a reception for Beverly Sills on September 10. Afterwards, she went to her birthplace, Atlanta, where despite the severe pain that now radiated down her right leg as the cancer spread, she prepared the Clark College Jazz Orchestra for a performance of her music (including a luminous “Gloria”) at the Atlanta Free Jazz Festival. While in town, she also received an award from the NAACP and visited with her half-brother Willis Scruggs.

  In October, she traveled by train with O’Brien to Canada to perform solo and in tandem with Oscar Peterson on a television show he hosted in Toronto. “Actually she went there,” says O’Brien, “because she wanted to buy a fur coat to replace the one that had been stolen in Chicago in ’79. It cost a lot less to buy one in Canada, and even less because she avoided paying customs duties when she reentered the States. She just folded up that new mink and sat on it!”

  But Mary appeared noticeably drawn from her illness now, and playing was often an extreme effort. Too exhausted that fall to play at a reception for Princess Grace of Monaco at Duke, she nevertheless made an appearance, and she played a concert in October in Tallahassee, Florida, with Milton Suggs. Saxophonist Ricky Ford, who deeply admired her music, met her for the first time there, and performed an atonal version he’d arranged of her “Whistle Blues.” But the pain escalated, and the Florida concert was her last professional performance; and back at Duke, October 23 was her last full day of teaching. By November she was in such bad shape that her doctors insisted she check back into Duke Medical Center for a month of tests and radiation treatments.

  “Mary was going to postpone going into the hospital again, partly because she had other things she wanted to do and partly because of Robbie, who had turned up again,” says Peter O’Brien. “She said, ‘If I’m not there at the house, he’ll get two girls in here, one will get him upstairs and the other will clean me out.’ We argued, and at last she consented to go in the hospital.”

  As Mary began to pack to go into the hospital, she called Robbie in, informing him she was giving him a hundred dollars and a bus ticket back to New York. Later she told Marsha Vick of the painful scene that followed. Robbie went berserk, smashing up his drum set and screaming. At last, Robbie stormed out of the house, shouting at her, “You’re an old woman going to die soon!”

  “So we locked up the house and put the alarm on, and Mary called the police to protect it while she was away,” continues O’Brien. “A black policeman, very nice, came. He asked what to do if Robbie came back and tried to get in the house. And she said in a low, matter-of-fact voice, ‘Treat him the same as you would treat anybody else.’ Then we went to a Chinese restaurant nearby. And she cried, not loud, but openly.” All her life, Mary had witnessed the destruction of people she loved in their dark dance with drink or drugs or rage: her mother, her sister, and musicians, both lovers and friends. The list went on and on. Although many of the members of her own family were leading normal, productive lives, her brother Howard, nine years her junior and a promising artist, died a heroin addict in the 1970s. Her nephew Clifford died of an overdose a few years later. But no unraveling ever hurt Mary as much as Robbie’s. She had prayed that music would redeem him, that he might become a professional drummer. But that was not to happen.

  MUSIC MEANT LIFE to Mary, and even while she was in the hospital undergoing a regimen of radiation treatments, she struggled to continue with her music. In November 1980, though too weak to dress without help, she made the trip to a Catholic Cathedral church in Raleigh, where she had agreed to play the Mass with a half-dozen children singing. But that would be the last time she performed it. Released from the hospital shortly before Thanksgiving, “She couldn’t even eat the turkey wing she loved so much for Thanksgiving dinner,” notes O’Brien. “The radiation had just knocked her out.” And the pain, for the cancer had spread to her liver: her life from then on revolved around pain management. In January of 1981, she was in and out of Duke Medical Center for a series of chemotherapy treatments, each time staying overnight in the chemo ward to recover from the nausea and exhaustion induced by the drugs.

  On January 27, after her last chemotherapy treatment, Mary attempted to teach at least one class—she knew she couldn’t handle a full day as before. Marsha Vick took notes on Mary’s last time at Introduction to Jazz:

  The students sat quietly waiting for her, and as she came through the door of the room, wheeled in and wearing a beautiful blue dress and lavender shoes, they burst into applause. She was helped out of the wheelchair onto the piano bench and began the class on unison singing of “Rosa Mae.” She critiqued their phrasing and rhythm as pointedly as ever, stopping to comment as they sang: “Put something on that note,” “Make a noise on that one,” and “there: almost.” In the middle of her solo on “Rosa Mae,” she motioned to Peter nearby. “I need to sit in the chair.” And Peter and two students jumped up and moved her from the bench back to the wheelchair, from which she continued to play. The class resumed singing and when they finished, she clapped for them. Next she set them to work on “The Lord Says,” from Mary Lou’s Mass. “This is the jazz gospel,” she told them. She tried to help a male student to sing falsetto. “Clear your throat—I’ll cover you.” Then, “I need someone to scat on the end—do you scat?” At the end of the piece, she laughed and everyone clapped. And you could feel the love in the room.

  When Mary gamely tried to reenter the classroom a week later, she lasted only a few minutes before
she was wheeled out of the room, nauseated and gray with exhaustion. O’Brien finished out her second semester classes.

  The excruciating pain that Mary now suffered constantly was the spark that ignited a long-simmering feud between Peter O’Brien and Joyce Breach. Both were desperate actors in the last act of Mary’s life. “I was looking for a miracle with Mary and the doctors couldn’t give me one,” says O’Brien. “I was pushing too hard, maybe I thought there were other medical things that could be done. But the doctors told me no, no.” For her part, Breach, who flew down early in ’81 from New York, was shocked at Mary’s condition, and could not accept the cruel reality of Mary’s physical anguish. Mary was receiving the American version of the so-called Brompton’s cocktail, the strongest pain medicine then available for terminal cancer patients in America, a mixture of morphine, alcohol, and cocaine taken by syringe. The British version also contained heroin. Says O’Brien, “Joyce was questioning me the same way I questioned all the doctors, but she was accusing me of doing the wrong thing. I let her have it. She had money. I said, ‘Why don’t you fly Mary to London and get heroin for her then? That’ll obliterate all the pain.’ ”

  But Marsha Vick and Breach (who, although she had lost most of her money by then, was quietly supplementing the salaries of Mary’s attendants and providing other touches of comfort) were both angry over what they saw as O’Brien’s inattentiveness to Mary’s needs as she lay dying. “I was upset with Peter because I didn’t think he was paying close enough attention to her condition,” says Vick. “Before the time he had nurses in around the clock, he and I would fill in when the nurse was not there. He started off spending the nights there, but then he couldn’t take it and he’d call me and I’d come over and sit with her. This was really not a good arrangement because I was not a nurse and she was bedridden. And he kept trying to get her up out of bed, thinking that if we could get her up walking around, she’d be better. There was a circle around the five bedrooms upstairs, but she really was not able to do that. And she couldn’t eat. I would make up the juices for her, carrots and apples and so forth, in her blender; then, fortunately, Geraldine came and she stayed for weeks on end, taking care of Mary.”