by Linda Dahl
Chafing against the constraints of marriage and family, mesmerized by Mary’s beauty and brilliance, Martin plied her with love letters, often written after she had left his Village studio to go uptown to her apartment. “I will love you always in spite of my fashion,” he wrote in one. He was the pursuer, she the pursued, throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1944.
[Undated]
Tuesday at 5:30 P.M.
Mary darling, I wanted to kiss you and I had a sinking feeling in my stomach when you left in the cab. I’m going to miss you darling, more than you know. I want you forever. We can make each other great people.
No rats can keep you down dearest, too many fine people love you. The fight underneath is bigger than us but we’re part of the side that’s winning. I’m sure you can trick your enemies and your friends are solid.
You are the kind of person who has a great purpose. Most jazz musicians are sitting on a dung heap and never will get off. You have the ability for creative invention and the feeling for modern music to make a big contribution to its realization.
I love you (David)
He was right: she was then in one of her most creative periods, as he was, and they did achieve great things together. Without realizing it, Mary launched Martin on a fabulous new career when she asked him to do a cover for an album of 78s for Asch, something to fill the square blank covers of the record box. The result was a moody portrait of her, the beginning of a new art form: record cover art. Martin “was the first visual artist to provide deeply felt imaging about jazz and jazz people.” Typically, Moe Asch not only recognized DSM’s gift but gave him a free hand. Martin went on to illustrate more than 200 record covers for Moe Asch, and hundreds more for Norman Granz’s record labels, including Verve, Clef, and Norgram, among others. And he continued to make record covers for Mary and draw her portrait. As she wrote, “David never forgot me and always credited me with his success.” He also remained fascinated by her high cheekbones, lustrous skin tone, her soft, inward-gazing eyes.
But though they remained close friends, their love affair did not last long. Martin’s sad and impassioned farewell gives a rare glimpse at the emotional turmoil that for Mary was only to build in the coming years.
[undated]
3:00 A.M. Thursday
Mary darling—
It would be too easy to say it’s finished—it’s not. Even if I never see you again you are with me like a burn in my heart. At odd times for the rest of my life you will be my eyes suddenly moistening, a sharp pain in my stomach remembering the times we hollered together. When a big lump rises in my throat I will remember the times you cried in my arms. Possessive—of course! The things we possess of each other will never be damaged—nor can they ever be shared.
The hard times you couldn’t endure, that annoyed you, that made you evil with distrust and suspicion and hard talk—these things I cannot love about you. But those things are understandable. There are too many wonderful things to remember.
My life will never follow the accepted patterns even without you. It seems so foolish and unnecessary being without you. The thought is very hard to digest. There was a big gaping hole in my life that you filled that will never be empty again, but it will grow to a bigger emptiness which is the loss of you—shutting off the growth of love. That will be a big painful emptiness which no one else will ever close up.
As usual, Mary kept her private life very much to herself. Friends and colleagues could only speculate about Mary and Martin. “Sometimes you see women with a boyfriend—but not Mary Lou,” emphasizes Johnnie Garry. “And I really liked David Stone Martin. But I don’t know what happened: he just wasn’t around any more.” “I can’t keep husbands or sweethearts. I forget about them,” Mary told an interviewer soon after, with candor and a peculiar kind of resignation. “I forget about friends, too. I guess the only thing I really love is music.” If Martin wrote with regret about his lost intimacy with Mary—”shutting off the growth of love”—she, on the other hand, seemed relieved when an affair was over, preferring to maintain friendships, as she did with most of her ex-lovers. Even after he had married again, Mary visited Martin and his later, and third, wife. Yet at that time, in the mid-forties, Mary must have felt deep regret over her inability to maintain an intimate relationship with a man who so clearly adored her: about the time that she split with Martin, she revised and retitled a tune she’d cowritten called “Man O’ Mine.” The new title: “My Last Affair.”
But she had little time to brood about an affair, as by 1945 she was as busy as she would ever be. For a planned musical of The Glass Menagerie (it never materialized), to be called Amanda’s House, she wrote at least one song, called “The Adding Machine.” The previous year, radio producer Norman Corwin commissioned her to write music for Josh White for a radio drama called “Dorie,” but the show was never aired. (Later, Mary wrote incidental music for a popular variety show, also produced by Corwin, called “We the People.”) She had lengthy engagements, six nights a week, at Café Society; benefit performances all over town for the Red Cross, war orphans, soldiers, and so on; radio appearances for Mildred Bailey and Paul Whiteman’s shows; plus her own radio show and even a part in a Broadway revue. As if that weren’t enough, it was also the year that she wrote and arranged her set of twelve pieces called The Zodiac Suite for a chamber-jazz ensemble at Town Hall (discussed in the next chapter).
So it was a time of constant work for Mary, and 1945 was a year of changes. She began to appear at Café Society’s sister club, Café Society Uptown. Where Downtown was relaxed and casual, Uptown, located on East Fifty-eighth Street, was chic, attracting a far different clientele that wouldn’t ordinarily go down to the Village. That club, too, was a success, until it was sold in 1947 and became a bistro, Le Directoire, which featured French music. (The buyer was Josephson’s downtown rival, Max Gordon, of the Village Vanguard. Le Directoire quickly failed.)
The entertainers and political leftists who’d made Café Society Downtown a success tended to look down their noses at the East Side venue as pretentious, more suited for squares. “Downtown was the more soulful, more of a jazz club, more intimate and less stiff. You would never have Meade Lux Lewis or Pete Johnson uptown. It was the tuxedo crowd,” says Johnnie Garry. “So who does he take with him as piano player? He takes Hazel Scott. If you were Mary Lou, you would have to resent that.” Then in late 1945, when Hazel Scott left to marry Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Josephson installed her as Scott’s reluctant replacement. “After the waiters and so on heard I was on my way uptown after Hazel Scott left, they tried to discourage me. They said the club was a jinx. I tried to get Barney to hire Erroll Garner uptown and leave me downtown,” she added.
However, Mary was a success on East Fifty-eighth Street, both with the audience and musically. She was surrounded by old friends in the house band—clarinetist and leader Edmond Hall (whom Benny Goodman used to drop in to hear), the exquisite Ellis Larkins on piano, “Mouse” Randolph on trumpet, John Williams on bass. Already moving away mentally from the swing-era music that made her a draw, she experimented with new arrangements for the house band to ease her swing colleagues into the modern sounds that were fascinating her after hours. Among her arrangements was a version of “Tempus Fugit,” Bud Powell’s composition that Mary claimed he dedicated to her (these arrangements have not been located). In the spring of the year, Mary got tremendous publicity from her weekly radio show on WNEW, which Teddy Wilson had turned over to her before leaving New York to tour. She and Wilson were among several black pianists—Billy Taylor was another—who gained invaluable exposure over the airwaves. Television was not yet popular, and film work was scarce. If Hazel Scott’s cameos in movies from that era had to be excised when they were shown in the Deep South, radio was like the “blind screen” auditions that orchestras later adopted (with the result that far more female, black, and uncomely musicians were hired). “You couldn’t see the performers,” Taylor remarks pointedly of radio.
Fortunately, a good number of those radio shows were taped. And while many of the indifferently talented guests, and certainly the announcers’ plummy, pseudo-English accents, date those 1945 radio shows, Mary’s playing remains fresh and uncontrived. There was often a kind of amateur-night quality to the proceedings—the star Josh White sang duets with his frantically off-key little daughter, Bunny, and so on. Even Mary sang from time to time, in her soft, shy voice—her own compositions, like “It’s Amazing,” a pre-bop goof, and “You Know, Baby.” The shows contain some simply outstanding examples of her ability as a musician, as when she played an incredibly swift and witty Gershwin medley, and her continued honing of arrangements of favorites like “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Limehouse Blues.” And although she didn’t record bop till two years later, she provided modern accompaniment on April 11th for “Put Another Nickel In,” sung by Joe Carroll, and on “It’s Amazing.”
While her radio show and performances at both Cafés were going full-tilt, and while she was running to do benefits between sets, Mary was offered that featured role in a Broadway revue—her first.
For all her success—and in part because of it—a shadow had begun to appear behind Mary’s shy smile, and she often had a tired, sad expression that became more noticeable as the forties wore on. There was her hectic schedule, of course. But the failure of her love affairs pointed also to an exhaustion that was fed by long-standing emotional and psychic conflicts. Then, not long before Blue Holiday was to open, Mary suddenly stopped performing at Café Society. The rumor swirled that she had been hospitalized for drug use. Hospitalized, yes; but not for drugs. Rather, she had abruptly decided to have a nose job, as a few close friends later learned. As Johnnie Garry recounts: “She calls, she’s in the Lincoln Hospital, you gotta come get me. I get her and she was all bandaged up like a mummy. I brought her to her apartment, I said, ‘Who mugged you?’ ” Mary replied: “ ‘You better never tell this ’til the day I die. I had a nose job. But you tell Barney I was in a car accident.’ Then I had to take her back to the hospital and they had to re-break it because it didn’t come out right.” Concerned and mystified, Josephson showed up at her apartment, offering her the name of lawyers who could help her sue after the “accident,” but Mary sent him away, arousing his suspicions that there had been no car accident but a deliberate and misguided attempt to make herself more glamorous. “It looked grotesque,” he complained. “She was much more attractive with her own nose.”
If Josephson was right to mistrust Mary’s story, the truth was darker than he supposed: her nose had been broken when she was punched in the face during an argument. It was only many years later that the truth came out. Jazz musicians are as protective and clubby as any other fraternity, with a great many closet doors slammed shut to this day. “One time when she was working at Café Society, Barney Josephson told me she came in with these big shiners,” recalls Peter O’Brien. “But not a word was said by either party. She just went on and played.” But bassist John Williams, who was in the house band at Café Society Uptown, eventually divulged the identity, if not the name, of the culprit: “That bass player with Eddie Heywood; he broke her nose. He was from Florida, came to New York with the Sunset Royal entertainers.” This was Al Lucas, one of Mary’s closest playing partners at the time. Why did he hit her? Nobody from that time knows for sure; but Lucas was at times a brawler, and Mary could be a demanding leader whose criticism could cut deep. Her half-brother, Jerry Burley, with whom she was close after he settled in Manhattan in the forties, once mentioned to O’Brien that he was surprised that somebody hadn’t killed her: he had often seen her deliver a stinging tongue-lashing to musicians who weren’t cutting it. She was even known for throwing a punch or two herself, for when pushed too far Mary could be a formidable opponent. “I come on like a bear,” she said proudly. The pianist and bandleader Phil Moore, who developed many careers, learned this at Café Society, where at one point he led the band. “He had a big diamond ring,” says Johnnie Garry. “My job every night was to wash and wipe off the piano keys, get the dust off them and stuff. And there would be these big nicks on the keys from his ring. Mary asked him, ‘Would you take that ring off? I’m cutting my hand.’ But he didn’t. He was arrogant that way. And then one night she did cut her hand, and she got up off the piano and walked over and punched him in the mouth. She was for real. I tell you, Mary Lou was the only thing that kept me in this business. And, after that nose operation she was OK—we laughed about the whole thing.”
THE BROADWAY VENTURE, mounted at the Belasco Theater in May of 1945—first called The Wishing Tree (after the great tree in Harlem that was a talisman for black performers), and then Blue Holiday—was meant to be a vehicle for Ethel Waters’s comeback. She had not had a good part in several years and was anxious to reestablish herself as the star she’d been in Cabin in the Sky. Unwisely, perhaps, she insisted on opening her new all-black show at the same time as her rival, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, was opening his—Memphis Bound. After years of few opportunities on the Great White Way, the theater was opening up again for African-American actors: Paul Robeson had scored as Othello on Broadway, Canada Lee had played Caliban in The Tempest and a role in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Lifeboat with Tallulah Bankhead.
Not only did the name of the show change; so did its cast, and it was finally decided to simply use Café Society talent. Besides Mary (who played two numbers), there was Josh White, dancer Josephine Premice, the Hall Johnson singers, comic Willie Bryant, and Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe. The pit band, with the awful name of “The Chocolateers,” featured Benny Morton, Wilbur De Paris, and a young Billy Taylor on piano. Though a press release promised music by Duke Ellington and Yip Harburg, it was apparently written by Al Moritz, who had conceived the revue and found the backers. (There was, however, at least one Yip Harburg–Earl Robinson tune, “Free and Equal Blues,” sung by Josh White.)
Ethel Waters worked frantically to pull the revue together, redoing the choreography—”which improved it, though not much,” wrote Mary. “The whole thing was kind of thrown together.” And the cast, Mary recalled later, treated Ethel Waters as an “old has-been” (though she was not yet fifty!), laughing at her star airs. (Five years later, Waters had her revenge with a glorious comeback in the Carson McCullers play The Member of the Wedding.) Blue Holiday folded after five nights. But if the reviewers complained that the show lacked continuity and conviction, they also singled out outstanding performances. “We could listen forever to the piano-playing of Mary Lou Williams, but in Blue Holiday she does exactly two numbers,” mourned critic Irene Kittle. Billy Taylor, down in the pit, recalls that she was “on stage with her trio for about six or eight minutes. And she was so great that she held her spot simply by her music—which was a very impressive thing to do for a theatrical, visually attuned audience.” “As usual,” Mary wrote resignedly, “I went back to work at the Café.”
All summer she continued working constantly—at the Café, with Josh White doing USO service shows for black soldiers and sailors, plus the radio show. Little wonder that in August, Mary collapsed. “When I went into the Café I was weighing 163 pounds. Someone told me to go on a Benzedrine diet. Not knowing the effects, I felt that it was harmless. And also I needed something since I never got any sleep at all—I worked all night and jammed all morning. Well at first the tablets gave me a lot of vitality and took away my appetite. But in about 10 days I couldn’t eat at all and was having chills. I lost a lot of weight and looked skinny and sickly. This one night before we went on, I took two tablets of Benzedrine plus
black coffee. On stage, I blacked out and fainted. Back at the club Barney sent for the doctor. He gave me something to counteract the drug and sent me home for a week.” Although she stopped taking pills, Mary, driven by a deeply felt need to be taken seriously as a musician, was unable to stop pushing herself hard.
Chapter Ten
The Zodiac Suite
1945–1946
IN 1942, WHILE still with the Clouds of Joy, Mary borrowed an astrology book from a bandmate and became intrigued with the possibilities of writing psychological portraits of musicians she knew based on their sun signs. “I wrote ‘Scorpio,’ ‘Taurus,’ and ‘Gemini,’ not finishing the rest until years later,” she recalled. Given her predeliction for the supernatural, the zodiac seemed an ideal vehicle for Mary as a composer.
Since her Zodiac Suite, first recorded in the summer of 1945, several jazz musicians have titled tunes after sun signs. (The English classical composer Robert Forsythe, Mary later learned, also wrote a suite about the zodiac.) But at the time she produced her suite, it was a unique idea in jazz that generated much interest, especially when she attempted to cross over into classical ground in the compositions. On December 30, 1945, the afternoon before New Year’s Eve, she presented Zodiac for chamber-jazz ensemble at Town Hall. This was followed six months later at Carnegie Hall by a full-scale arrangement of three of the pieces for piano and symphony orchestra. As Dan Morgenstern observes of the latter event, “The concert marked the first time, to the best of my knowledge, that a symphony orchestra performed music by a genuine jazz composer.” (Emphasis added.) Not the first time jazz apeared at Carnegie Hall, however: in January of 1943, two and a half years before Mary’s symphonic debut there, Ellington and his orchestra performed his groundbreaking Black, Brown and Beige, his first concert on America’s premier concert stage. Classical critics tended to pan Black, Brown and Beige, saying that Ellington, along with other jazz composers, lacked sufficient formal training to deal with the structural cohesion required in longer works. Mary and her Zodiac Suite were criticized along the same lines by some.