by Linda Dahl
She kept that apartment for the rest of her life, even after the neighborhood declined and it was broken into numerous times; even after she moved to North Carolina in the late seventies; it was cheaper than a hotel for stays in New York, she reasoned. And—it was home.
In the mid-1940s, Hamilton Terrace was ideal for Mary—a comfortable place to live and entertain. She made sure musicians felt welcome to drop in for music, food, rest. Mary decorated the place simply, painting the kitchen lemon yellow—including the appliances—reapplying the paint as the years went by. It was by the mid-sixties, says Peter O’Brien, who met her then, that the place had declined. The landlord had let the building go and everything was ancient. “A real rattrap of a refrigerator,” he recalls of the kitchen, the heart of the apartment, “an old stove, just one window, a sink that was tilting away from the wall, and no cabinets underneath, but rather an old-fashioned, built-in cupboard with glass doors. She had a little tiny round table and two backless stools, where she’d sit and talk. But she did so many things in that little kitchen. She would do her hair at the stove, with a curling iron in the fire. There was no maid, no nothing. She cooked the same thing, over and over: good chicken, fried in lard with garlic. Delicious. With greens, corn and a lettuce and tomato salad. Never anything sweet.”
Mary bought a large plush white rug for the living room for friends to loll on. And of course a piano—her favorite, a Baldwin upright, three-quarter size, decorated with photos that couldn’t disguise the many cigarette burns. In the bedroom were twin pink satin upholstered Hollywood beds, stacks of cabinets and files. “Mary wrote on her bed and conducted business from her bed,” says O’Brien. “Next to the bed when I knew her were her Princess phone and ashtrays, her horror comics—and her missal.”
It was meant to be a place for two, of course, but Harold Baker never moved in. Just when she got the apartment, Baker was drafted—either at the end of 1943 or the beginning of 1944. He had ignored his draft notice from the War Department, and, said fellow trumpeter Irving “Mouse” Randolph, “they came and just grabbed him off the bandstand. Taken right out off the Apollo where he was playing with Duke’s band.”
At first, Baker’s letters to Mary were cheerful and warmly affectionate. He was well fed (“getting fat,” he boasted), with a cushy job—no responsibilities other than playing in the army band. But by March, his invitations for Mary to come down and visit him for a weekend sounded rather perfunctory: his old sweetheart from St. Louis had resurfaced and she was pressing him to get back together.
The marriage was over in all but name sometime in the spring. In Mary’s words, she and Harold were too different in their likes and dislikes; they couldn’t compromise. There were also heated quarrels. A couple of years earlier, when they were still in the Clouds of Joy, Andy Kirk recalled to Peter O’Brien, “he saw Mary come running around a corner after a fight with Harold Baker. She’d hit him on the forehead with a Coke bottle and it was bleeding. ‘Save me!’ she yelled to Kirk, as she dashed by with Baker barreling after her. ‘Save yourself,’ Kirk reportedly replied.” “Yeah, Baker beat her up too when he was drunk,” John Williams asserted. “And that lasted about one year. But she never found another John Williams to encourage her in her music.” (Not so: the man who followed Baker as Mary’s lover, artist David Stone Martin, couldn’t have been more supportive of her art and would remain a lifelong devoted friend.) Mary and Baker did maintain a civil, if distant, relationship after they split up. When he was ill and nearly destitute in the sixties (having made a terrific record with Doc Cheatham in 1961 for the Swingville label) she sent him money—fifty dollars on one occasion, at a time when she was living on loans herself. She cooked and brought food to him at the hospital as well until he died in ’66. He had been a great musician, and Mary revered that above all else.
John Williams failed to see, for all his astuteness about Mary, that while he did play a kind of father-figure role in her life, he had been as much a disappointment to her as Ben Webster, Don Byas, and Harold Baker—but without their greatness as musicians.
Chapter Nine
Café Society Blues
1943–1946
ANY CLUB THAT liked to bill itself as “The Wrong Place for the Right People” had to be at least a little different from the usual nightclub. And Café Society Downtown was unusual: not just a business venture, but a social experiment, a somewhat raffish meeting place for the au courant of jazz and progressive politics, including many young and wealthy New Yorkers whose taste for the bohemian had been whetted by their parents’ experiences in speakeasies and Harlem boîtes in the twenties.
For some, Café Society was chic slumming. For others, it was, as one of its founders, journalist Helen Lawrenson, described it, “our first political nightclub. Jazz and politics were what it was all about. Some people hated it; others were all agog. It was the most exciting night spot in town and the proving ground for more remarkable talent than possibly any similar place before or since.… From the beginning, it was completely integrated: black and white performers, black and white patrons. This had never happened before, outside of a few Harlem places where whites got the best tables. Not at Café Society they didn’t!” “It was the only place for mixed couples to go,” confirms Johnnie Garry, the club’s bandboy and later Sarah Vaughan’s personal manager, who became a friend of Mary’s.
Not only was Café Society fully integrated—a radical political stance when de facto segregation was still the norm in the North—it was not a front for vice, as were so many mob-controlled nightclubs. At the Café, there were no hustlers, no cigarette girls or chorus girls. Indeed, Mary recalled that the club had a policy of barring entrance to unescorted female patrons after the first “family” show at eight o’clock (hardly a policy either feminists or the ACLU would applaud today, but effective in keeping out hustlers). Some of its founders—most notably Helen Lawrenson and John Hammond—were openly active in the Communist Party’s Popular Front, a radical leftist organization. Hammond booked the talent for the club, Lawrenson initially acted as hostess and publicity person.
It is impossible to say if Mary’s employment at Café Society made her vulnerable to suspicions during the McCarthy era when some artists were hounded from their jobs for their political beliefs. Certainly Café Society itself was suspect in the eyes of the many powerful people who saw Communism as a synonym for Evil. Then, too, entertainers who protested against segregation and unequal treatment of the races in America in the postwar years were suspected of “Communist leanings”—FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was not only a fierce anti-Communist but fearful that any attempt to upset the status quo might inspire a Communist takeover. The fact that Café Society was, at bottom, a music venue, and that a lot of people went to the club to enjoy the entertainment, was irrelevant: a performer (and especially a black performer) who worked at the Café was tainted, in the FBI’s view.
“I got hung up in politics through working at the Café,” Mary observed in her diary, “but I think all musicians or people like me would get mixed up in something, looking for some people to help them and help the race. But they can never be anything but a musician.” She played fund-raisers for the NAACP—Mary headlined a benefit for the Syracuse University chapter in 1947—and played for the left-leaning Committee for the Negro in the Arts. Probably most disturbing to the FBI, though, was her attempt to perform in an interracial, all-female combo at a revue in her hometown of Atlanta, in 1947. Such a “mixed-race” concert was of course old hat for Mary, who had played with white musicians for decades and performed in such shows as The People’s Bandwagon, a 1945 revue of white and black entertainers that sought to help reelect President Roosevelt. But her plan to play in an integrated group in the Deep South was a radical idea, as well she knew. Still, she, actor Canada Lee, and others persisted, going so far as to petition Georgia’s governor, Ellis Arnall, to override the local laws banning integrated performance. In vain, and to no one’s surprise: it would be too dange
rous and inflammatory of the “wrong elements,” Arnall wrote back, to put on an integrated jazz concert in Atlanta.
Did Mary’s career suffer on account of her involvement with the Left, the well-documented fate of many Hollywood writers? Anecdotal evidence suggests that entertainers as well as Hollywood writers and others suffered from a kind of behind-the-scenes blacklisting. Trumpeter Frankie Newton, for instance, was probably cut out of work as a result of his politics. “Frankie was going to Communist Party cell meetings, yes,” confirms bassist John Williams (not Mary’s John). “But this was part of the scene then. Newton never got the breaks he should have. He was a good arranger, but he ended up as a janitor.”
Even Duke Ellington, who once said, “I’ve never been interested in politics in my whole life,” participated in a raft of rallies and benefits, especially in the turbulent late thirties and forties. Benny Goodman appeared at some antifascist and war-aid efforts sponsored by the Popular Front in the forties. And later, Louis Armstrong responded to the ugly 1957 battle to desegregate a public high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, by saying, “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.” All three were under surveillance for years by the FBI. As for Mary, who, some friends from the forties have said, hosted Communist cell meetings in her apartment, no evidence of an FBI file has yet surfaced about her.
The Café’s owner, Barney Josephson, a shoe salesman from New Jersey who invested money (along with others) in the progressive club, is a controversial figure. At first he was the on-site manager—what Helen Lawrenson describes as the “front man” for the club bankrolled by leftist money—but soon Josephson bought out other interests. It was a business venture that he saw as noble, even self-sacrificing, telling the New York Post in 1946, “My friends thought I was balmy. But I was sick of discrimination, had seen too much of it. My first year was tough. I lost $20,000, was flat against the wall, but I wanted to keep going and in my own way. All I want,” he added, “is performers, Negro or white, on exactly the same artistic footing.”
He did better than that. In 1940, Josephson was able to open a second club, the more upscale Café Society Uptown on Manhattan’s East Side. But trouble brewed. Whispers of Communist ties within the Café became full-scale FBI investigations during the McCarthy era. “Not only were Reds assigned as entertainers, waiters and captains,” alleged an FBI report in 1947, “but Josephson was advised to use Communist propaganda in shows for the cover-charge customers.” The file was massive, some 2,100 pages of documents about alleged Red activities by Café Society employees and the boss. But though Barney’s brother Leon, an avowed Communist who had invested start-up money in the club, was sent to prison after refusing to answer questions by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1948, Barney maintained his innocence.
That Barney Josephson was not indicted was resented, both by forthright leftists like Lawrenson, who dismissed him as “spineless,” and by featured entertainers at Café Society such as pianist Hazel Scott. Like Mary and countless others, Scott had performed at benefits and charity causes during World War II, many of them sponsored by the Left. When pressured to testify against Josephson, in Peter O’Brien’s words, Hazel Scott “ratted on him.” Many years later, with tears in his eyes, Josephson confided to Mary, “I don’t know why Hazel would do that to me.”
But if Josephson saw himself as a kind of benefactor especially to black show people, they generally viewed him less benignly. Perhaps the entertainers’ expectations of him were unrealistic. “When I really got to know him,” comments Johnnie Garry, “I realized that he would seem to make you feel that he was in the black people’s corner—or in the black entertainers’ corner—but I never saw him do anything for them.” Hazel Scott felt she had been underpaid and manipulated. “Barney was extremely proud of his largesse towards others, but he was not a generous man,” concurs Peter O’Brien, who had dealings with him as Mary’s manager at a later club, the Cookery, in the ’70s. “In fact, he was a very good businessman: he had access to a lot of talent nobody else was at all interested in. He made out like a bandit. His idea was to not pay artists very much but help them in other ways.” Josephson helped Mary by providing her with gowns, securing her weekly radio show on WNEW, paying for the rental of Town Hall when Mary produced her long work, The Zodiac Suite. “But that’s how he got to keep the money, by doing other things for her but not paying her much,” O’Brien observes. “Joe Glaser was like that, too. He had all kinds of things in his office that he’d give the artist—a mink coat, a prize dog, a jeweled compact.”
But Josephson was a survivor in a very tough business. He was savvy enough so that even after Café Society was blackballed by several New York newspapers—right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler was particularly vehement—he was able to keep it going until finally, in the spring of 1949, he had to close it down. He not only kept his name clear with the government, but was able to salvage enough financially to open several new restaurants, including the Cookery, where Mary would establish a New York presence again in the 1970s.
WHAT WAS CAFÉ SOCIETY like during its glory days in the forties? The war-stimulated economy drew in southern soldiers and socialites, jazz lovers and political radicals—everybody who went out at night came to the Café, which got invaluable publicity by having its talent featured in broadcasts to the armed forces.
Club-goers would descend a flight of rather grubby stairs to a basement room where murals by Village artists adorned the wall. Tables lined the walls, there was a good kitchen and a short bar on the floor, with an elevated bandstand but no stage. Shows started at 8 P.M., when the house band began playing the first of three sets of entertainment; the 8 P.M. show was, in Mary’s words, geared for “dad, mother and the smaller kids.” Performers sought to be booked into the club: although Josephson did not pay big salaries, the exposure made it worthwhile. On a given night, a patron would catch great pianists—Mary, Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Earl Hines, Bud Powell, Hazel Scott—and singers like Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and Georgia Gibbs; the zither player Susan Reed; songwriter Cy Coleman; comedians Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, and Imogene Coca; and dancers like Pearl Primus, many of them at the start of their careers. “Then Sunday night,” recalled Doc Cheatham, who was in the house band led by pianist Eddie Heywood for about six years, “everybody in show business would come in—Billy Strayhorn, Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, Joe Louis, Canada Lee, Josh White.”
“The musicians would go out between shows, wouldn’t mingle with customers,” recalls Gray Weingarten (née Marjorie Merwin), who as a close friend of Mary’s did have the honor of mingling. “On pay night, after the performances were all over, about 2 A.M., they’d all take their paychecks and go throw dice against the back stairs. All the performers would play.”
DESPITE BEING A veteran performer, Mary suffered acute stage fright at Café Society when she began working there. “After being with a big band, I felt so alone,” she explained about playing with only a bass and drums behind her. “I missed many shows that first month—I wasn’t drinking at the time, but I must have consumed a pint that first night without effect.” But when she surrounded herself with excellent musicians, many of them old friends, Mary quickly adjusted. She put together arrangements for her rhythm section. “On my way to the club, I’d write an arrangement in my head, and I’d tell drummer J. C. Heard, for example, ‘I’d like to do “Limehouse Blues.” Follow me.’ And he did.” “There was the difference,” said Doc Cheatham, “from being an accompanist and a soloist, and every night she was better and better and she was very happy then.” “Being in one place was quite to my liking,” she wrote, “since I had traveled for at least 12 to 15 years.”
“You could always tell when Mary Lou was getting ready, when she really felt like playing,” recalls Johnnie Garry. “She’d take that right heel and she’d cock it and start stompin’ on that floor. We’d say she’s in the groove tonight.” Slim, attractive, and stylish, her captivatin
g piano style combining sensitivity with relentless swing, Mary became one of the toasts of New York’s hip society. A nationwide Mary Lou Williams fan club was established; presided over by her half-cousin, the comedian Nipsy Russell, it distributed a newsletter, pins, and posters. Glaser, cut out by her direct dealing with Hammond, was enraged again. Having signed an exclusive contract with her, he demanded she pay him his 10-percent commission from the Café Society job. But either the suit was dropped or a deal worked out. Mary’s career future had never looked so good.
AT THE CAFÉ, Mary sometimes alternated with Hazel Scott as the featured pianist. Like Mary, Scott had shown precocious musical talent as a little girl; she had begun by studying classical piano at Juilliard. But Scott also loved jazz. Ten years younger than Mary, she idolized her as the star of the Clouds of Joy and cut out Mary’s picture from the “window cards”—posters put up in store windows around Harlem that advertised coming appearances of the band. At eighteen Hazel Scott dropped out of Juilliard to front a band in Harlem and began to make a name for herself.
If the similarities between the two gifted women pianists are obvious, the differences are crucial. Scott was an extrovert who lit up the stage with her personality, a fabulous-looking player who developed a technique of “jazzin’ the classics” that was wildly popular with audiences. Mary, on the other hand, was a subdued beauty, shy and introverted, although once ignited, her inner fire could sear the listener.