Morning Glory
Page 46
In May, while Mary was in New York, she met O’Brien and Breach at the Greenwich Village apartment of the late Gloria Josephson, a lawyer (and Barney Josephson’s former wife), to discuss plans for the foundation at some length. It was a poignant gathering: during the meeting, Mary turned to Gloria Josephson, who was to die of cancer not long after Mary, and said sotto voce, “I have cancer too.” Josephson, recalls O’Brien, replied simply, “Yes, I know.”
With her foundation now in order, as she thought, Mary delayed finalizing her will until the last stage of her illness. In March 1981 she summoned O’Brien and Marian Turner, as coexecutors of her estate, to her bedside and signed her last will and testament. Her nephew Robbie and her half-brother Jerry Burley were each left $1,000; everything else was left in trust to the Mary Lou Williams Foundation. Once again, according to the minutes of the meeting, she spoke specifically of her wish for the foundation. It was to be “a means of accomplishing after my death an objective that was very dear to me during my life,” an organization set up “to aid the musical education of boys and girls between the ages of 6 and 12 in Black American music.” Also, she emphasized, “the financial status of both the youngsters who will study music and the musicians chosen to teach through the Foundation should be considered when offering scholarships or making appointments.”
Although she was still able to articulate her vision for her foundation, Mary was too distracted by pain, too groggy from medication, to handle her personal affairs in the months before her death and had come to depend on others completely—Marian Turner, Marsha Vick, her sisters and niece who flew in periodically at her expense to help the nurses, and Peter O’Brien. She gave powers of attorney to Turner and O’Brien to write checks for household expenses and the like. Once she died, the melancholy job of putting her affairs in order fell to her coexecutors, although Mrs. Turner was content to remain largely on the sidelines. “For me,” remembers O’Brien, “there was a tremendously unhappy undertow all the time during that period when she was declining and dying and I was taking care of the house and all her business. Afterward, it was terrible for months—that huge house full of clothes and stuff that I had to go through.”
There was, as mentioned in the previous chapter, a long-simmering resentment of O’Brien on the part of those closest to Mary after she became ill. Only a month before she died, Marsha Vick recorded in her diary that Mary told her she “was upset by the way Peter talks to me.” The hospice worker Helen Keese, who was there to the very end of Mary’s life, observes that “Peter was a man much given to great enthusiasm, hyperbole, and anger. He’d get upset when things didn’t go right. I think he was scared of the dying process and the circumstances agonized him. Then he could speak rather roughly.”
With Mary gone, this resentment toward O’Brien by many of her friends and family members exploded into acrimony. The flash point came when O’Brien barred anyone from entering the Shepherd Street house without his approval—in fact, no one was allowed in except Helen Floyd, who was summoned to help him sort and inventory Mary’s belongings. Accusations of highhandedness and insensitivity, and also mistrust of his motives, followed. “We who were friends of Mary’s had to buy back things we’d given her,” says Vick. “I didn’t resent that—because it was part of the estate. But no one could get to the things for the longest time, because Peter wouldn’t let you in the house. Only he had access. We had to wait and wait and write him and implore him.”
Says Reeny Burley, Jerry’s widow, “I think Mary trusted him. But no one in the family knows to this day what happened to her things—all her jewelry and so on. Everything was sold after she died—it all had a price on it. Marsha Vick bought Mary’s old car eventually, I remember. And then Peter completely ignored the family. Just cut them dead.”
Many friends felt the same. “We weren’t important or useful to him, so he passed over us after she died,” says John Graziano, who’d been a good friend of Mary’s in the 1970s. Adds Bernice Daniels, whose friendship went back to the 1940s, “I liked Peter. We used to joke and carry on. We drove down to North Carolina together, laughing about these little towns. Then, when Mary was sick, she told me she wanted me and Joyce on the board of her foundation. But after this show-biz lawyer, Gloria Josephson, set the thing up, then Peter wouldn’t talk to me. I wasn’t on the board, so he just cut me out.” And bassist and vocalist Carline Ray, another friend of Mary’s, says, “Peter could be very articulate about her life and times, but he just clamped down on everything she owned after she died, and I find that a very underhanded way for a Catholic priest to act.”
O’Brien was also a priest in a peculiar position—dependent on himself for his livelihood, rather than having the support of a parish or of his Jesuit brotherhood at large. He eked out a living as a supply priest and cast about for a way to continue his role at Duke as spokesman for Mary Lou Williams. “The university continued to pay the stipend for him for a while when Mary was ill, and during the spring of ’81 when she was sick, he was teaching the course,” says Paul Vick. “But it was Mary who was the employee of Duke: everything was geared to Mary.” O’Brien’s was a peculiar and also a lonely position, surely. “After Mary died, I was one of his few friends around here in Durham for a little while,” says Marsha Vick. “Well, I sort of put up with him, had him to dinner a lot, and my boys in high school entertained him. He’d come over to our house and just sit there.”
“Peter,” remembers Paul Vick, “kept trying to find a way of becoming an employee at Duke. When there was an opening for director of the Office of Student Activities, he applied for that.” And Marsha adds, “At a university, you have to deal with academic affairs. They would have been crazy to hire him. He was always in this fog, and when things went wrong, it was always somebody else’s fault. He wanted it all taken care of and he didn’t want to deal with it.” The directorship went to someone else, but O’Brien did manage to line up a teaching job in the fall of 1981—one course, called “Introduction to Jazz”—through Duke’s Office of Continuing Education.
All of the assets in Mary’s estate had been immediately transferred by the clerk of the court into the foundation, to pay, O’Brien said, “for expenses for stationery and things like that.” O’Brien was also receiving from the foundation a salary of $300 a week plus expenses and 25 percent of his apartment rent (for six months, at which point it was supposed to be reviewed). Mary had left only a modest, if respectable, sum to fund her vision; her assets included her house, a life insurance policy, and valuables such as her car, jewelry, furs, and so on, all of which would yield roughly $200,000, according to a professional estimate that summer. (Contributions to the foundation from her wide circle of friends added more.) As the summer wore on, Marsha Vick and Joyce Breach began to have misgivings about oversight of the foundation expense account, and Breach successfully pressed for a policy of check cosigning as a way to control expenditures. “Because he was always writing checks,” Breach says flatly. And when O’Brien moved back to New York in 1982, remembers Jerry’s widow, Reeny, he would frequently come to their apartment for Jerry’s cosignature. Gary Giddins, another board member, recalls, “He’d come over to my office at the Village Voice all the time to have me cosign checks. It was convenient for him to go there. But they were not big checks, just constant small money.” Nevertheless, it could all add up. (The check-cosigning policy ended in 1987, when O’Brien moved from New York City.)
Marsha Vick approached Marian Turner about her concern that the estate’s assets might be frittered away. Turner, who was supposed to examine the accounts once a month, reassured Vick that O’Brien’s expenses were legitimate, but Vick was not convinced. She and her husband and especially Breach, who had a forceful personality, became increasingly estranged from O’Brien. As he remembers it, though, he and Breach had “got along perfectly” until Mary became ill, when their relationship deteriorated. “We had a good time together, going out. I just thought she was a wealthy friend of Mary’s, you kno
w. I did think it was a big mistake for Mary to appoint Joyce to the board, yes. I thought that Joyce would be useful only as a source of funds for the foundation.”
By August, Marsha Vick was having sleepless nights over what she feared was O’Brien’s lax stewardship of Mary’s estate. “Turner feels that O’Brien can’t do anything without the approval of the Board, so she feels safe. But she’s a yes-man. Joyce, you’re a fighter. You’re our only hope!” she wrote to Breach. The fight came at the end of that month, when a newly appointed full board of directors of the foundation met in New York—O’Brien, Breach, Turner, Gary Giddins, and Dan Morgenstern, with Gloria Josephson attending as attorney-advisor. Breach was furious at the outcome of the meeting: O’Brien, over her objections, was given what she viewed as continued carte blanche with finances. (According to the minutes of a board meeting in December 1982, the board pledged to “discuss financial matters in particular and in depth.” If such a meeting did occur, records of it have not been found.)
In Breach’s view, the new board made a second mistake when it voted to extend its activities to preserving Mary’s music. “She wanted scholarships for kids so they could create and grow,” says Breach. “But Peter was too busy to attend to what she wanted.” After the meeting, she submitted her resignation in a letter that, as she says drily, “my lawyer made me tone down”:
It is my belief that ultimately Mary Lou’s wishes for her foundation will not be realized. At the last board meeting held, Monday August 31, 1981, New York City, it was made eminently clear to me that the foundation would be run without controls. Considering the above, I could not in all good conscience to Mary Lou serve as a member of a board that refuses to institute and maintain proper procedures.
In response, O’Brien wrote a brief note accepting her resignation with almost palpable relief. Giddins also wrote; he was “surprised and saddened” by her resignation, “and what puzzles me is why you don’t think Mary Lou’s wishes will be realized. I have the feeling you know something I don’t and I’d be grateful to know where you think the trouble lies.” But Breach did not answer; she would have nothing more to do with the foundation.
A year later, O’Brien had finished disposing of Mary’s household goods, and he still had no firm commitment of a job with the university. Then, during that summer, he says, “I was told to come back to New York by the Jesuits. I’d had an agreement with them for one ‘clear year,’ as we call it, in 1977, and the next year I should have been evaluated, but through an oversight, I wasn’t until 1982.”
Back in New York, he worked at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus, becoming director of the Campus Ministry. At first, he also made ambitious plans for the foundation. In 1983, he started a “Mary Lou Williams Children’s Jazz Chorus, with 25 students under the directorship of singer Carmen Lundy,” according to a press release. The chorus, an expensive undertaking, soon folded, although the New York Boys’ Choir, drawn from Harlem schools, did perform Mary Lou’s Mass that December, and kept parts of it in repertoire. O’Brien also promoted a series of fund-raising concerts for the foundation, often featuring name artists like Dizzy Gillespie, but they failed to make money. “It became too expensive to do these things,” O’Brien says in retrospect, “and we were spending our capital fast.”
Meanwhile, O’Brien’s grief over the end of what he termed his “profound but needy relationship” with Mary, along with his inner demons, proved a steadily deteriorating mix in his life. “He did have personal problems after she died—heavy, big-time problems,” says Giddins. O’Brien adds, “When I was with Mary in the seventies, I’d go out all night and drink a club soda. I knew nothing about the world of uptown—it wasn’t dangerous yet.” Nite life was what Mary called the domain of the mostly illicit activities of Harlem after-hours clubs where O’Brien’s safe, club-soda drinking days were now over. And his disregard for many of the conventions, his moods swings and angry fits, continued to exacerbate the tensions between him and many of Mary’s friends and family.
Then, as the summer of 1987 approached, O’Brien left New York for Minnesota and what he hoped would be a fresh start. “I moved there for personal reasons,” he says. “There I had a different job, working in hospitals and at parishes. I also continued to do foundation work, though. But in Minnesota I didn’t find musicians to work on the Mass or other projects involving children’s choirs.” Meanwhile, the finances of the foundation dwindled. “Then, in 1989, I went to New York for a meeting of the board of directors to discuss the foundation in depth. It was really dissipating its money at that point, and we needed to build it up. It was decided that the Mary Lou Williams Foundation was to become a memorial foundation; because Mary Lou’s mission was to preserve jazz.”
With the new resolution to memorialize Mary and her music, the need to sort, order, catalogue, transcribe, transfer tape, and untangle copyrights—nearly a half century’s worth of music—as well as to preserve her other documents, would of necessity override the foundation’s original purpose of teaching jazz to talented underprivileged children. That would have to wait.
Now in recovery, O’Brien set to work. “I moved to Syracuse in the summer of ’91, and with that mission in mind—and with the help of Gray Weingarten, Mary’s old friend, a librarian who lived there—I got Mary’s music manuscripts in order along with her many personal photographs. A mountain of work.” Having moved back to the New York area in 1994, O’Brien has remained active, both as a priest, directing spiritual retreats based on the philosophy of the twelve-step programs, and as head of the foundation. “The board of the foundation has only met irregularly for the past several years,” he concedes, “but all the legal necessaries are fulfilled. Everything is up to date.” And now, as he says, “It is her music that provides the income to fund other projects; income from the important copyrights that are finally in order now.” Much of the work the foundation has accomplished is costly—for example, the commissioning of precise transcriptions of many of her compositions that had not been available before, pieces such as the radiant 1968 big-band version of “Aries” (a.k.a. “Knowledge”); the “Variations on Stardust” written for Harold Baker and the Ellington band in 1943; “Waltz Boogie,” a masterwork; and her bass clarinet version of “Oo-bla-dee.”
Marian Turner points out, “People might have thought there was a large legacy—and there wasn’t. Producing the transcriptions and, before that, getting her music transferred from acetates onto the modern equipment—all of that costs a great deal. So does organizing her music and putting on concerts, like an important one with the American Jazz Orchestra.” While alienated from O’Brien, especially by what they consider the harsh and arrogant way with which he treated Mary at times, his detractors do not dispute that his efforts on her behalf have been prodigious. Acknowledges Mary’s friend Louis Ruffulo, “Despite his personal life, Peter did work like hell for her at the beginning and even at the end, as long as she lived, to do the best he possibly could for her.”
Is the Mary Lou Williams Foundation fulfilling its mandate? Opinions remain divided. “The money was to be spent on talent, for children, for scholarships,” insists her friend Bernice Daniels. Others point out what O’Brien has accomplished in preserving Mary’s musical heritage, and O’Brien himself talks of the difficulty and expense of finding suitable students, adding that since the foundation has become more flush, it has recently been able to make grants for children’s jazz programming in New Jersey.
It should be abundantly clear by this point that Mary was a tenacious dreamer of dreams, a spinner of gold from flax, a most impractical person who lived her dream against great odds. In short, an artist. She had a grand vision—to rescue poor, musically gifted children from dreariness and defeat in the same way that music had provided a way out of poverty and despair for “the little piano girl of East Liberty.” Yet to fulfill this vision she left only a modest legacy. And at the time of her death, a great deal of her own music was falling into obscurity. One could
well argue, as O’Brien does, that Mary’s vision is better served by using that legacy to preserve her music, which in turn can act as a beacon for young musicians. Certainly it would be a terrible waste and shame to lose the luminous body of work that she produced, music that can be a standard bearer for creative musical minds to come.
Without question, through his hard work O’Brien has ensured that Mary Lou Williams’s music will not prove to have been ephemeral but will remain an accessible part of America’s legacy. He is frequently a guiding hand and a contributor to the growing number of events that celebrate her—symposia, carefully crafted concerts (including, since 1995, an annual Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.), museum exhibits, panel discussions, radio broadcasts, previously unreleased recordings, and so on. His presence at such events lends depth and a breadth of understanding of Mary Lou Williams the musician and Mary the human being.
Some artists learn their trade and then carry on with little variation for the rest of their lives. Others—and we know these are rare—are passionately engaged in self-discovery, in metamorphosis, in an often surprising, sometimes dangerous journey. Mary was this rare kind of artist.
Unpredictable, increasingly uninterested in placating the marketplace, such artists as Mary Lou Williams predictably confuse, anger, and even alienate that part of their audience yearning for the known quantity—for jazz fans, it is the hummable tune, the predictable variations. Yet to those who esteem the great tightrope adventure of art, Mary provides proof, as her music and her motives changed and deepened, that there is no one so interesting as the person who completely engages her soul in her work. As Peter O’Brien puts it, “She would have something to say, and then she was finished. And she had to wait until the creative thing came again.”