by Linda Dahl
It was at Mason’s Farm that Mary began her lifelong habit of notating every expense, quite literally down to the penny, that she and her combos incurred. So from the receipts for the band’s food and drink we learn that the chubby Harold Baker customarily ate two platefuls of dinner, three or four cups of coffee, and ran up a large bar tab. Her record-keeping was a futile attempt on her part, then and later, to keep expenses under control.
For some reason, Mary noted in her diary, the other players, all Pittsburghers, had taken a dislike to Baker, a St. Louisian. Perhaps because he was already big time, having played with big bands (Duke Ellington’s, 1938; Teddy Wilson’s, 1939; Kirk’s, 1940–42), while they were locals hoping to break into the big time. Perhaps he swaggered. At any rate, they resented him, and he was made to feel the odd man out.
When members of the Ellington band stopped by Mason’s Farm in late September on their way back from a tour of the West Coast, Ellington, short a good lead trumpet, was eager to acquire the commandingly lyrical playing of Baker. He was easily persuaded to join (and appears on the payroll from the fall of that year). He would stay with the Ellington Orchestra, with intervals away, for eight years.
Mary was crushed, but loyal to Harold. “I felt depressed,” she confessed. “I made up my mind to join Harold as soon as I could.” In the meantime, she had dates to fill for the band. She’d not only lost her lover but her best player and had to find a replacement immediately. She was far from satisfied with the new man, Marion Hazel, whom Mary, typically, did not mention by name when she criticized him. “Art Blakey and the rest had me stop by Pittsburgh to pick up what they said was ‘the greatest on trumpet,’ ” she noted drily. “But we were playing tricky arrangements that called for a bit of reading, and I couldn’t find a sound reader on trumpet. No one in the band realized the value of Harold Baker. He could play 10 solos and fall back in a fast-moving ensemble without splitting notes. The new trumpet man would split a D in the staff.”
Mary went on to New York, along with Blakey and the others, but promised work fell through. “I was practically stranded in New York but I wouldn’t tell anyone. I got myself a room at the Dewey Square and I stayed inside that hotel. I ate and slept for about two weeks and thought over things and meditated as to which way I was going.” Just months before, in the summer, she and Baker had taken a lease on a house they planned to use as a base between road trips with their new combo. Now that plan was dashed and all her dreams were again on hold. “Then,” Mary went on, “I called John Hammond and he got me in touch with an agent, Louise Crane, who was an heiress.”
Crane booked Mary and her combo at Kelly’s Stable, a Fifty-second Street club. But her band couldn’t cut it; she still couldn’t find a trumpet player in the same class as Baker. “The people who were backing me had confidence,” she wrote in her diary, “yet I gave it up. I decided I’d join Harold as soon as possible.”
It was not quite as simple as that. Walking away from the job had brought her fresh legal difficulty: Louise Crane was demanding $1,300 in lost income from the gig. Feistily, Mary counterclaimed that Crane had tried to assert improper control over the music and the musicians. “She insisted I bring them in before I thought they were ready. Then, after two and a half weeks she insisted that I break up the combination and fire all the boys. She purchased them railroad tickets back to Pittsburgh and then charged me for them.” The union, however, found in Crane’s favor, although reducing Mary’s debt to $300. Meanwhile, Mary was seething at Art Blakey. He had returned to Pittsburgh, taking some of her arrangements with him without her permission—as she angrily informed him. He wrote back, attempting to defend himself. (Typically, Mary never said a word against him publicly, but she never worked with him again, either.)
After the Crane fiasco, Mary knew she needed a manager: she simply couldn’t handle the business end of the music. It was more than enough work to put (and keep) together a band of her own. She tried to form a new group—saxophonist Paul King and others telegraphed that they were eager to join—but it didn’t jell. “She was just interested in her music. She had nobody in her corner to be a son of a bitch on her behalf,” said Peter O’Brien, who would assume a manager’s role in the seventies. There was only one person she could think of. Humbling herself, Mary contacted Joe Glaser.
Glaser responded with another of his avuncular, condescending missives, dated November 10, 1942:
Dear Mary,
Your letter of November 8th received and I am really at a loss to understand some of the things you wrote about. First you say you want a combination and then you tell me that you are going to Pittsburgh because someone is sick there and that you are going to get in touch with me and work out a deal whereby I can book the combination in Chicago and now you turn up in Chicago and tell me that you went there because Harold Baker sent for you and now you tell me you have no money and have to live off Harold Baker. Personally I have the highest respect and regard for you and know that you are a great artist, one of the greatest pianists and composers in the country. Well, Mary, for you to write a letter and tell me that you haven’t any money and that you are financially obligated to Harold Baker, it doesn’t make sense. You know deep down in your heart that you are not doing the right thing and I assure you that it is time for you to come to your senses—it will only be a question of a few months before you again will be making the money that you used to make, but if you want to stay with Harold Baker and forget all about your music that is entirely up to you.
With every good wish, I am
Sincerely yours,
Joe Glaser
Mary chose not to “forget all about her music” and later that month signed a contract with him as her personal manager (an agreement more symbolic than real, since performers often signed “exclusive” agreements with more than one manager). Over the next decade in New York, Mary went through more than a dozen agents, managers, publicity people, and lawyers. But she always returned to Glaser, and not only because he was the one who got her the best work. There was another dynamic to their relationship, a kind of attraction-repulsion element that kept them crashing together.
Glaser, an astute reader of character despite his crudeness, knew that Mary’s backing and filling was not play-acting, but real angst. He could handle her as no one else ever could, mixing a long-suffering tone with hectoring and threats when he felt it was necessary. Eventually he became reconciled to the fact that Mary would move on a project only when she wanted to move. As for Mary, she took it as a great compliment when Glaser threw up his hands, saying, “You’re quite a woman. I can’t keep you down.”
In the late fall of 1942, Mary was clearly in much confusion, as Glaser had spelled out in his letter. Was she planning simply to live with Baker, tagging along with the new band, as she had done in the early years with John and the Clouds of Joy? A girlfriend, living off a musician’s irregular earnings, not performing? Impossible—Mary was now an established national presence in jazz in an era when swing was the national pop music, a glamorous music queen in sequined gowns who had written hits for the top bands.
Now began a curious interlude in her life, one that led to a great deal of new work, and one that is all but unknown. Mary went back with Shorty Baker to New York, and from there to Baltimore, where the Ellington band was booked for a long engagement at the Royal Theater. And in Baltimore, in a simple ceremony presided over by the Reverend Frederick Douglas, Mary and Harold were married on December 10, 1942. If there was a party or reception or any kind of celebration to mark the wedding, Mary never said. And although she was now officially Mary Lou Baker and would remain so for the rest of her life, it was a name she used but rarely. And, although the couple didn’t stay together long, they never bothered to get a divorce. When Baker died in 1966, at age fifty-two, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in New York, of throat cancer, Mary was, on paper at least, his widow.
Back in New York, in January 1943, there was a more momentous event than a wedding:
Ellington’s first Carnegie Hall concert, at which he presented his innovative and controversial composition “Black, Brown and Beige.” Mary’s ambitions for her own music were fired: Carnegie Hall? It was a great, groundbreaking achievement for a jazz composer. And within three years, she was to present a concert there herself.
But Mary, who had seen many incarnations of the Ellington Orchestra, was not at first impressed with the 1943 band. “What a strange group. I guess there were too many stars, because so many of them weren’t speaking to each other.” The band, she thought, was in a creative slump. “They’d go for months and months and wouldn’t play anything much. Harold and I hung out with Lawrence Brown, Juan Tizol, Tricky Sam. For about three months, nothing happened. Really draggy music.” Despite her love of Ellington’s and Strayhorn’s work, Mary decided she’d better go back to New York, find work and an apartment for herself and Baker. “I said to Johnny Hodges, ‘I’m gonna have to leave cause the band isn’t blowin’.’ And he said, ‘Oh don’t do that, Lou,’ because he’d write eight bars and would expect me to put 16 bars to it and finish the tune off. But you know he didn’t want to lose me. And there were several others like that.”
Then came an extraordinary night. “This particular time we were in Ohio. I said, ‘I’m gonna listen one more night, but I want to get out of here and leave.’ And I’m telling you, when that band hit, I’ve never heard anything like that before in my life. And I think everybody else was just in hysterics or something. Duke was vamping. They played ‘Caravan.’ When the band hit, his vamp—I never heard anything like that before. It sounded like Stravinsky and I said, ‘Well, this is the greatest band on earth.’ It was. Everything had fallen into place. When they finished I screamed and everybody in the place screamed. Everything they played was like that. I said, ‘Well, I can’t leave this.’ Duke’s chords and harmonies were way out,” she explained, “Different things that nobody’d ever heard before. You’ve heard all the masters but this was completely different.” Mary stuck around.
Back in New York with the Ellington band for a spring engagement at the Hurricane Club, Mary was badly in need of work. But she couldn’t perform in the city until accepted into Local 802 of the Musicians Union, a lengthy process. She took a few jobs out of town as a single, but just then a new avenue opened up for her: arranging for the Ellington band. For a week’s work in February 1943, for instance, she was paid $100 for arrangements, the same weekly salary that Billy Strayhorn got that year, and more than anyone else in the band at the time for her contributions to the band book.
Mary had hooked up with Harold just as the radio and recording ban rendered the bulk of the Ellington orchestra’s band book unavailable for play. “Suddenly Duke was screaming for new material,” says Derek Jewell, an Ellington biographer. “Ellington was still leading a band which went from dance halls to theatres, wherever the money and conditions were attractive enough. These venues usually demanded swing and sway rather than suites.”
“Duke,” Mary reminisced, “asked me to write some arrangements. I told him: ‘What in the world am I going to write for you?’ ”
His way of writing voicings “was quite different than what I was doing. I did learn some of the secrets,” she added. “Like one trumpet player played out of tune and Ellington had me write his parts in a different key; that had something to do with it. Instead of everybody playing in C, I wrote him in C sharp. And that gave a different sound. He was much better playing in C sharp than in C: it blended much better with what was happening in Duke’s band.” “Sometimes there was a mistake,” she added, “and I’d say, ‘Oh my goodness, I got sleepy and I copied the wrong parts.’ Once Duke Ellington said, ‘Let’s try it the way it is.’ And it worked out. It didn’t matter what I wrote, he said, “Mary, you’re a genius,’ and he’d hype me to write something else. He knew how to do it, you know. He talked me into it. He’d play anything that I gave him while I was traveling with them. For years and years afterward, he played ‘Trumpets No End,’ which I wrote for the Ellington Band.” Often she had a chance to rehearse the numbers she prepared with the band. Even after Mary stopped traveling with Baker and settled in New York, she continued to prepare arrangements for Ellington. In 1944 or 1945, while Mary was a featured artist at the important club Café Society Downtown, Susan Reed, who played zither there, recalled coming across Mary sitting in a closet with a music pad and pencils. “What are you doing?” Reed asked, and Mary replied, “Writing something for Duke Ellington.”
What Duke Ellington’s son, Mercer, then a young trumpet player and budding arranger for the band, described in a radio interview with Phil Schaap as “chaos” in the rehearsals of the band in the forties were the conditions Mary had cut her teeth on in the twenties; written arrangements were often only jumping-off points. For Mary, the creative ferment of an Ellington band rehearsal was heaven, although she was less comfortable with the man himself. “I never had too much to say to Duke,” she wrote. “I always liked being around sidemen or little people. This was my greatest enjoyment.” Although she never discussed it publicly, Mary simmered for decades about the way she felt misused by Ellington. In 1967, when she needed an income and was hoping he would pay her for fresh arrangements she’d tailored for his band, she wrote a pointedly worded letter (keeping a carbon copy in her files): “I really do not believe that you did not know that your personal manager did not pay me one cent for the 15 arrangements I did for the band then, including ‘Blue Skies.’ ” For his part, Ellington made certain to credit her musical imagination. “Mary Lou Williams is perpetually contemporary,” he wrote. “Her writing and performing are and have always been a little ahead throughout her career … her music retains—and maintains—a standard of quality that is timeless. She is like soul on soul.”
Mary’s best-known arrangement for Ellington was the aforementioned “Trumpets No End,” her clever reworking of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” in which the melody was coyly hidden, only to show itself in exuberantly cascading trumpet solos. The bravura high notes of “Trumpets”—it was intended as a showcase for Harold Baker—made it a perfect finale, from its debut in 1943 at a Carnegie Hall concert well into the fifties. Mary’s arrangement called for solos for clarinet, tenor sax, and trumpet but was edited by Ellington for unison trumpets only, and in the process Baker lost his solo showcase. “Harold called me and he said, ‘Guess what? All the trumpets are playing in my solo,’ ” Mary recalled. Mary also wrote a beautiful arrangement, now housed in the Ellington Archive, called “Variations on Stardust,” for the band’s ’43 Carnegie Hall date, as a present for Baker—she gave him two choruses. Besides “Trumpets No End,” several other of Mary’s arrangements for Ellington were recorded. Her version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” (identified as Mary’s by musician Loren Schoenberg), and featuring Ben Webster, then in the Ellington band, was recorded in June 1943. Five years later, Webster and other Ellingtonians (including Billy Strayhorn on piano and Al Hibbler on vocals) recorded Mary’s tune “Ghost of Love.” Mary’s slyly pretty ballad “You Know, Baby” was, Hibbler thinks, also recorded circa 1943, when he joined the band with Ben Webster and others, but the record was not issued. We know that Mary contributed at least forty-seven compositions and arrangements to the Ellington Orchestra between the 1940s and 1960s, and there may well be others. For example, Hibbler thinks that Mary arranged “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” and Mary’s papers indicate that she also arranged Ellington’s “Marquetta.” But with very few exceptions, her work for the band was soon buried in the mountains of papers that accrued during Ellington’s lifetime. It was not until his musical effects were put in order some years after his death that her contribution could begin to be quantified and assessed, an ongoing effort.
And though Mary’s contributions were quite secondary to the overall Ellington oeuvre, many of her pieces for him are resplendent, part of a very productive period of work for her that extended through the 1940s and into the 1950s.
UNWISELY, BEFORE
SHE had her New York union card, Mary took a nonunion job at a Bronx dancehall in the spring of ’43 as leader, with Illinois Jacquet on tenor and Oscar Pettiford on bass. The union got wind of it and Mary was called in for a hearing at which she risked a large fine. Luckily, she was let off with only a warning; and through the influence of John Hammond, a backer of Café Society, Mary finally did get her union card—and a job at that club. Hammond had long been after Mary to move to New York; back in 1938 he had tried to get her to help open Café Society Downtown at its highly publicized New Year’s Eve debut, and he kept after her. His persistence paid off. Mary performed for the first time at the Greenwich Village club early in the summer of ’43. But Manhattan nightclubs and businesses customarily shut down for August in those pre–air conditioning years, and with no other work, Mary joined Harold on the road again until October. When she was invited to open the new season at Café Society, she agreed immediately. As she wrote, “I moved around with Duke’s orchestra until we reached Canada, and I came close to freezing. Then I caught the first train out to New York, leaving Harold with the band.”
Though Harold wrote her affectionate letters from the Hotel Piccadilly in Toronto, where the band was playing, money problems predominated. “Go on and take care of things,” he urged. “I’m going to try and send at least $150 in the next three or four days. If I send you the money, take some of mine and put it with yours and pay on the coat. You’re going to get it, believe me when I tell you.” There is something touching about this craving for a mink coat at a time when it was hard for her to pay for her room at the Cecil Hotel on 112th Street. She was glad indeed for the Café Society offer.
In November, the Ellington band returned to New York. Mary and Harold spent the Thanksgiving holiday together, hoping to find an apartment despite wartime shortages in New York, and still talked about starting a family. A few months later, through a tip from Doc Cheatham, who was also working at Café Society in the house band, Mary heard about a vacant two-and-a-half-room apartment—a small kitchen, a bedroom, a sunny livingroom—in the building where he lived, near 144th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem. The building also had a doorman and was rent-controlled. Mary grabbed it. For the first time in her life, she had her own place: apartment 21 at 63 Hamilton Terrace, on a quiet, curving tree-lined block convenient to the shops and markets of uptown’s commercial thoroughfares.