by Linda Dahl
Under such conditions, a normal life was impossible (part of the reason also cited for the lack of women in the business—though plenty of female singers stood the test). Food was taken on the run, accommodations were uneven, exercise and sleep inadequate, privacy lacking. Like traveling salesmen, musicians existed at the fringes of society, their lives a steady diet of boredom, loneliness, and chance encounters. Cards and crap games, pool rooms and dice, booze, drugs, and sex countered the tedium for many.
It was the world Mary had known since she was fourteen. She had learned to watch out for herself, but by 1941 the camaraderie and mutual support of Kansas City had faded. Mary herself had become, in her quiet way, one of the hip musicians, disdaining alcohol, developing a taste for gambling, marijuana, and men. But her living standard was hardly secure, though certainly more so than during the starved years of the early Depression. Much of her pay was still spent on road life, or sent to support her family. And how she resented never being paid royalties for her compositions for the Clouds of Joy, or compensated adequately for arrangements she had contributed to the band book! “I could not play or write my best for thinking about my share of the loot,” she wrote, “and my sacrifices before we made a hit.”
She pressed Andy Kirk for her share, as she pressed him for more money for the others in the band. But she accomplished little in this way and was increasingly restless with the routine. Before, she had been willing to put up with a certain amount of unpleasantness, as long as she could “expand with the band.” But as the 1940s (Mary’s thirties) began, and others were featured far more often, the same old material bored her. Her name now appeared in small print on the marquees announcing the band, while newcomer vocalist June Richmond’s name headlined with Andy Kirk’s. Mary turned her solos over to another new “star,” the guitarist Floyd “Wonderful” Smith (as he was billed). She would often sit doodling at the piano, working crossword puzzles, barely accompanying the band. “Our repertoire consisted of recorded hits, and the solos had to be exactly like those on the records,” she told Marsha Vick. “Once the boys said, ‘You’re snoring, what’s the matter with you?’ I was still playing—sleeping and playing.”
A few times she simply disappeared, contract or no contract. On one tour, “when we reached Kansas City, I ran off. I must have had $200 or more and I went to St. Louis and balled [forties slang for “partied”] and then ran into my old love, Ben Webster, in Chicago at a musician’s hangout called the Chicken Shack where I had too much fun. I didn’t have carfare home,” she added. “But I had a contract with the band—I had to return.” She borrowed the money that time from Mamie. Later, the Clouds of Joy went to California for an engagement, where all of her new clothes and shoes were stolen, even the tires on her car, she wrote.
By then Mary and Andy Kirk were not on speaking terms. They “hated each other,” confirms O’Brien. “She said he called her crazy, a destroyer of men and many other names.” By her own reckoning, Mary had had, among her many romances within the band, an affair with a married man (John Harrington) and an engaged man (saxophonist Earl “Buddy Miller), whose girlfriend tried to commit suicide in front of Mary by drinking a vial of iodine and ending up in Bellevue. Her lover Don Byas, who wrote Mary tenderly lyrical love notes, was fired from the Clouds of Joy by Kirk after slapping her around publicly at a gig: possibly the last straw for Kirk, who warned her to leave the men in the band “alone.” But the last straw for Mary was the chance discovery that she was not getting full credit for her compositions. “The valet was cleaning out a trunk and showed me a list of all my tunes and royalties being paid to two other people. I got only one-third.”
Though Mary and Andy Kirk strove to be cordial to each other in later decades, a sour-grapes attitude crept into their reminiscences of the swing era. Kirk alternated between praise and slights of her achievements, and was grudging at times in his praise, while Mary was at times frankly bitter, knowing full well her importance to the Clouds of Joy—and that she could hardly be replaced by another woman pianist. She told Peter O’Brien that when she had heard that Dorothy Donegan, a pianist whose show-biz antics she disliked, was claiming that Kirk had offered her a job after Mary left, Mary quipped, “Why would he do that when he’s in love with me?” For to complicate matters, the straight-arrow Andy Kirk, according to Mary, was or had been in love with her. When Mary took up with the last of her lovers, during the end of her tenure with the band, Kirk exploded. “Harold Baker and I hit it off quite well, causing the worst jealousy!” she wrote. “But Harold and I were doing very nicely together—he gave me everything I wanted.” If Andy Kirk had fallen for her, though, it is highly unlikely that it led to a romance: she liked hip musicians, while Kirk, she hinted, was rather the opposite of hip. Delilah Jackson, who knew both of them in the sixties and seventies concurs: “I don’t think they ever had an affair, no. Not Andy Kirk. I did ask Mary [Kirk’s wife] if she was jealous of Mary Lou in the band and she said, ‘Oh no, we used to do each other’s hair, clothes, we were like family.’ ”
Even if Mary had some sort of convoluted or sublimated lover’s quarrel with Kirk, their personal relationship did mellow in time. “When I would visit Kirk in the seventies, Mary Lou would come,” recalls Delilah Jackson. “And on the phone, Mary Lou would tell him her troubles and vice versa.”
Meanwhile, there remained Mary’s husband: Mary seemed to have stayed with John Williams from sheer habit, developing a kind of stubbornly placid indifference even as both pursued other romances outside the marriage. When Mary’s half-brother Willis Scruggs saw them together in ’37 and ’38, he described the marriage as “pleasant. He’d be in the hotel sleeping and she’d be gone with us. He’d always be very friendly. I never saw any problem as husband and wife. She was the HNC—Head Nigger in Charge—as we used to say.” But by then, said John, “There was never no kissing or hugging or sex, but we talked, drank, had our laughs, slept together.”
AT LAST, THOUGH, MARY had enough of her husband’s constant womanizing. “I had heard strange tales about John and chorus girls and decided to move,” wrote Mary of 1938. “I was kinda sick of being married anyway.” A year later they did split up. “Christmastime of 1939,” said John. “She asked me for a year’s space. She said then after that we could see if we wanted to get back together. But I said, ‘If you leave, that’s it.’ ” John quit the Clouds of Joy, to join Coleman Hawkins’s big band. “She asked me would I sign that I deserted her so she could get a divorce,” said John. “I said yeah, any way you want it. Joe Glaser had told her she might get famous someday and I might sue her. And he wanted her to change her name and a lot of stuff. And she had gone from $50 to $125 a week without even telling me, while we’re still married—well, she always wanted her money separate from mine.”
“John gave me a lot of trouble,” Mary wrote. “After trying to get me to return to him he finally left for Chicago. I felt sorry, yet he had destroyed what little feelings I had left. I never return to somebody after I’m finished with them. I could only be his friend, and I offered to help him get on his feet. He refused. I decided to get a divorce.” Mary filed for divorce from John in January 1941 and the divorce became final in February 1942. After Kirk’s restaurant failed, John went out on the road again with Earl Hines’s big band (where he played with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie), but by the mid-forties he quit the music business and got a job, first as a hotel porter and then as a factory worker in Chicago, remarried, and settled after his retirement in Columbus, Ohio, where he died in 1996.
Well before the divorce from John was final, Mary was planning to be married again, to Harold “Shorty” Baker. He joined the Clouds in 1940, and shortly after that, he and Mary began to live together. (Baker neglected to tell her about an unofficial engagement to a girl back in his hometown of St. Louis.) Both were unhappy with the mostly commercial focus of the Clouds by this time. As Mary complained to Baker, “They’re burying me in the band.” They began to make plans to leave and form a
group of their own. Moreover, they had sketched a domestic fantasy for themselves: they would get married, maybe buy a house and start a family, dreams that Mary had put on hold since the breakup with Ben Webster.
It was just a matter of time before Mary quit. At the Apollo Theater in ’41, while her highly creative arrangements for Ellington of “Ring Dem Bells,” “The Sheik of Araby,” and “Handy Eyes” were on the program, they were sideshows to vocalist June Richmond and guitarist Floyd “Wonderful” Smith. Also in 1941, Mary told Glaser she was going to quit unless she was properly paid for the music she’d written all those years. Glaser placated her, but also let her see his teeth: he would, he promised, “look into” the situation; in the meantime, she had a contract with the band. Didn’t she realize it would jeopardize her future career if she broke it?
Mary backed down and hung on for one more unhappy year, but finally she walked for good. Andy Kirk said bluntly that “June [Richmond] was … the cause of Mary Lou Williams leaving the band in 1942. We were playing a date in Washington, D.C., and at some point during the evening Mary Lou got up from the piano and walked out.… Mary Lou, although she was appreciated, would never get that kind of applause because of June’s showmanship.… I didn’t even know she’d left.… She’d usually walk off the stand to have a smoke, and with Floyd’s amplifier turned way up I didn’t notice a thing. She caught the train for Pittsburgh.”
“For 12 years with the band I’d known swell times and bad times, but barnstorming and the ‘New System’ of Management were bringing me down,” Mary wrote. “Towards the end, there was no more brotherly love. Nearly everyone, I discovered, either had a knife or a gun. I had lost so much through thefts that for a solid year I had to sleep with everything I owned. When someone broke in my trunk and took earrings, Indian-head pennies and silver dollars which I cherished, I decided to leave. No more respect left—everyone was loud and boisterous. I decided it was too tough in the band. There was no more happiness. Everyone was like a hoodlum. And the piano at the next job we played in Washington, D.C., was the worst. I was fed up. Dragging my trunk off the bus, I drove to Pittsburgh. So ended my long association with the Kirk orchestra.”
It was summertime, World War II was raging, and there was a ban on recordings. Mary went to Mamie’s, to wait for Baker. She had no work lined up as yet, but lots of plans.
Chapter Eight
Trumpets No End
1942–1943
June 4, 1942
Case #1445
To: the International Executive Board of the Musicians’ Union
Dear Sir and Brother:
I beg to file herein complaint against Mary Lou Williams, pianist with my orchestra, who left my band in Washington, D.C., on May 31, 1942, without notice of any kind and has failed to return. She has a contract with me which she utterly disregarded. This has placed me in a very embarrassing position as she was a featured member of the band and was advertised as such.
Fraternally yours,
Andy Kirk
KIRK (AND HIS driving force, Joe Glaser) were determined to punish Mary for breaking her contract and instigated legal action so that she could not get what was called a “transfer card,” a crucially important piece of union paper that gave a traveling player the legal right to work around the country. Without it, she was the musician’s equivalent of an illegal alien, reduced to working jobs too small for the union to bother policing and fining. Kirk replaced Mary with boogie-woogie stylist Kenny Kersey in July of ’42. Mary appealed to her old friend William Shaw, the well-connected president of Local 627 in Kansas City, for help. Shaw was interested in luring Mary back to K.C., where he assured her she’d find work, but he wrote her rather weakly, “I don’t think Kirk has the right to keep your transfer card as it belongs to you and I suggest that you request Andy to send it to you.” Mary had other plans. In Pittsburgh, she was soon joined by Harold Baker. “The Clouds came through Pittsburgh and he went to a movie with my brother-in-law while the bus was waiting for him downtown,” Mary wrote. After holding the bus for some time, Andy Kirk realized Baker had bailed on him, to join Mary. Both received letters from the musicians’ union, advising them they risked breach-of-contract suits. Mary fought back. “I countered this move by stating I would make it very unpleasant for the ‘new system’ if I answered. Nothing further happened to me. Baker was fined, I think.” She was playing a tricky game, however, when she threatened to expose Glaser’s “new system,” writing that she “knew things.” Glaser, furious, acted the part of the betrayed lover: after all, he had given her a personal contract and a raise when he took over the band. And he had plans, he’d told her, to make her a star. In exchange, he demanded loyalty. But now the mask of the doting papa, which he often donned in his letters to Mary, was gone: “I’ll bury you because you’ve fucked the band. I have advised my attorney to take your case before the American Federation of Musicians. I am at a loss to understand your attitude. Your behavior during the past year is a mystery to me and on top of that your letter just received is a mystery.”
Mary’s departure, while not a death blow to the Clouds, did signal its real decline. It would bob along for some time, recombining periodically into the 1950s, but the glory days for the band (as for nearly all big bands) were over. Modern jazz, eventually known as bop, would replace it, played mostly by smaller, more economical combos—precisely the kind Mary was planning to organize. At the time, however, many of Mary’s friends and family thought she had made a great mistake in leaving her secure spot in an established band that had given her national exposure, recordings, and a good salary. What more could she want, they wondered, in such a tough and uncertain business? Yet Mary never regretted leaving the Clouds, even though she did indeed undergo a professional roller-coaster ride afterwards.
She left during a time of terrific upheaval on many fronts. First, the nation and the world were at war. Of secondary importance, except to the musicians and their serious fans, of course, was the close of the era known as swing, at a period when the music business was in upheaval as well. ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) had demanded that radio stations pay their composers a higher fee whenever they played their work. When the radio stations refused, ASCAP forbade the stations to play any of its members’ music on radio for a full year. The fight escalated. James Petrillo, the powerful head of the American Federation of Musicians, joined the fight, banning his union’s musicians from making records. Unfortunately for Mary, who became a member of ASCAP in the winter of 1943—the first black woman in that organization—the ban coincided with the period when she and Baker played together, which meant that they and their short-lived group would never be recorded together; the recording ban stretched from August of 1942 until November of 1944. (Even without the ban, it would have been a bad time for the record business, as the government commandeered for the war effort most of the copper and shellac needed to make record masters. A limited number of records—the V-discs (V for Victory) were allowed to be made, but for the noncommercial use of the troops. Mary did perform on a few of these records.
That June at the Floyds’ in East Liberty, Baker and Mary set up camp in the attic. There they, or rather Mary, pulled together new arrangements and hired personnel for the combo. As much as he loved Mary—and he had proposed marriage several times while they were in the Kirk band—Baker was neither a practical man nor a man of much drive. Focused only on music and his horn, he was the quintessential improvising jazz musician and, like a good number of his contemporaries, he liked the bottle too much. It was Mary who made the contacts, who had the vision and energy to put a group together.
She found local men. For a drummer, she picked a very young Art Blakey, who was back in his hometown after a failed stint on the West Coast. “He was born bopping, like J. C. Heard with Teddy Wilson’s great band,” Mary wrote. “They had to hold them back to get a dance beat going. I had a difficult time with him on ballads and dance tempos. He was a real eager beav
er.” Other Pittsburghers who came to rehearse at the house were Oliver McLean on reeds (principally clarinet), Edgar Willis on bass, and Orlando Wright, who later changed his name to Musa Kaleem, on tenor saxophone. “We rehearsed the new outfit every day, Harold Baker and myself, and through John Hammond contacted some people who were able to find us work,” wrote Mary. “Our first job was in Cleveland, at Mason’s Farm, where we followed Coleman Hawkins’s group in, and the combo went over well enough for us to be kept on from August to October—way past the summer season.”
Mason’s Farm catered to a black clientele, including musicians, remembers tenor saxophonist Harold Arnold, an Ohioan then with Lucky Millinder’s band. It was “a place with a dancehall, a bar, a restaurant, and horses, at the Cedar Country Club in Solon, Ohio, about 10 or 15 miles from Cleveland. It was run by Bennie Mason, a prosperous numbers racketeer. You could rent cabins. And no, I don’t recall any whites out there at all.” On the bill with Mary’s band was Ted Blackman’s Revue, which featured the very young, undiscovered, and, Mary said, great and unique blues singer the late Joe Williams. When he sat in with her combo, Joe Williams was so poor, she said, that he had to camouflage a big gap in his smile with a stick of gum.
One can only speculate about what Mary’s group sounded like—Kansas City swing, probably (like the 1940 recording Mary and Baker and company had made as the Kansas City Seven for Decca), but with more of the forward-reaching harmonies she’d been employing. “Tadd Dameron and most of the musicians around came out to hear us,” she wrote. Dameron gave her some of his arrangements to try out as well.