Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  The tune that Mary pinned her hopes on was “Walking Out the Door,” a.k.a. “Walkin’,” her jaunty modern blues with bop piano accents and vocals, which Benny Goodman had recorded in 1949. A creditable take of “Walkin’ ” was finally made and released with “Sheik of Araby” on a 78, but it was not a hit, although musicians and hip listeners liked it. (The best version of “Walkin’ ” was made by Nat Cole for Capitol Records in an arrangement by Billy May.) Several other tunes from the June sessions were released on Circle 78s, notably “Caravan” and Mary’s amusing bop version of “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” the latter with a short intro by Dave Lambert. Rehearsal tapes Mary kept of “Caravan” are highly indicative of her wide-ranging musicality. In one take, she interpolates “her” Bud Powell tune “Tempus Fugit” along with bass and/or conga, while another builds a brooding, subtle bop version on piano alone.

  Then Mary cut what should have been one of her most important record albums of the post-Kirk period: for about twenty minutes, she simply improvised on favorite tunes alone at the piano, achieving the intimate feeling that her nightclub and living room listeners always said showed Mary to best advantage. Here were her advanced harmonies, her trademark ethereal-sounding chords (“Yesterdays” and “People Will Say We’re in Love”), her architectonic knowledge of jazz music (turning “Stompin’ at the Savoy” into a modern blues). On “For the Man I Love,” a.k.a. “For You,” dedicated to Thelonious Monk, she constructed a wistful spiral of emotion that climaxed with a perfectly placed quote from Rhapsody in Blue. But once again, a major effort went nowhere: provisionally titled Mary Lou at Midnight, the recording was never released.

  The disappointments surrounding Circle—her unsatisfactory ensemble sessions, the withdrawal of the promised release of much material, the poor sales of the few tunes that were halfheartedly marketed—all compounded Mary’s growing depression, and her sense of personal crisis deepened. “I really saw the toughest time of my entire life,” she wrote. Steele, no longer the romantic cavalier, grew jealous and controlling. “He was very narrow-minded and after a while, no one would come around. When I went out he’d almost get in fights if anyone looked at me. I was a nervous wreck. I’d say to myself, ‘Well you’ve gotten yourself in a real mess now, experimenting.’ ”

  Steele, who had notions of starting a singing career, used Mary as a springboard on the Circle dates; his voice is impressively present on several of the unreleased cuts, especially “Cloudy.” Steele also demanded that Mary give him cocomposer credit for “Walkin’ Out the Door” (which they both hoped would become a hit song), claiming she’d taken his idea, a line from a letter of apology he wrote after an argument: “I’m walking out the door (had you on my mind).” Mary refused: she had written the music and, with help from Orent, most of the lyric. Nevertheless, Steele threatened a lawsuit unless he got half the composer’s royalties. A fine romance. Reluctantly, Mary gave in. “I must have lost two years off my life, trying to analyze him and the situation,” Mary wrote, adding that he was loyal to his friends but had “no confidence in women.”

  Mary’s sense of frustration is palpable in a letter she wrote to ASCAP in 1951 canceling her membership. If she had been justly proud in ’43 to be the first black woman accepted into the organization that represented composers of the stature of Ellington and Gershwin and Kern, in 1951—less than a decade later—she could no longer afford to belong. “I have not made enough royalties from my compositions to be paying an additional amount of money for dues,” she wrote plainly. “I have received less money in the last five years than for my entire years of writing. Have visited your office trying to obtain help. I’m sorry but publishers do not pay me. I have spent a fortune with lawyers in New York.”

  The sad fact was, she had not registered many of her earlier compositions with the U.S. Copyright Office, with the result that she could not claim ownership. She tried to redress the situation, as thick files of letters and lists she typed of her songs attest. And though a stream of lawyers, short-lived personal managers, and publicity agents came in and out of her life, none of them was ever able to straighten out the tangled mess of copyright issues. “I really don’t think I’ll be writing music for publication again,” she said, adding with self-mocking half-humor, “I told a friend if he ever caught me writing again, to kick me.”

  At least there were a few bright spots in ’51. In the fall, she had engagements at the Savoy in Boston, at the Hi Note in Chicago, and at the Blue Note in Philadelphia. Then, bad news when she lost a royalty fight on “Pretty-Eyed Baby,” her tune that had begun life as “Satchel Mouth Baby.” An R&B singer changed a piece of the lyric and trombonist Snub Moseley, who had added a tag at the end of the song, sued for cocomposer credit. Mary fought them both. “But I finally had to compromise,” she wrote glumly. “There were a lot of meetings with lawyers, and Johnson and Snub Moseley got ⅓ of the song.”

  Badly in need of “loot,” as she always called money, Mary went once again to Joe Glaser, but he had nothing for her. In November, her pent-up frustration and rage poured out in a letter to Glaser, in which she accused him of exploiting Negro entertainers, especially women, and blamed him for her money problems. Everything was going wrong for her, it seemed. There was Steele, her ball-and-chain, and a fresh disappointment with a well-known publicity agent who had begun plotting a career for Mary in the new medium of television. At first, things looked promising. The agent booked her on a good number of shows, and she also received a tentative offer for a fifteen-minute weekly show of her own. But that fell through, too, when the agent fell in love with her. “I began having trouble with him. He did great publicity but was revengeful. He’d call me all morning, came to the house, tried to kick the door in.” Her only real friends, she wrote sadly, were “David Stone Martin and musicians like Milt Orent, Bernie Levin, Billy Jacobs and Allan Felman.” Gone from the list were family and the bop musicians who been such close friends only a few years before. Still, there were a few bright moments. Joe Glaser, who knew Mary’s moods very well, forged a reconciliation with her and by Christmas they were back on their old footing, with Glaser taking over where the possessive publicity man had left off.

  The year 1952 was an improvement over 1951. She was booked with her old friend Mildred Bailey in the summer at a club on Fifty-second Street, “a terrific engagement except that Mildred used to become disturbed.” In October Mary was fêted at Town Hall by a group called the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. Sidney Poitier was the host, and many of her friends performed, including Monk, Billy Taylor, Eartha Kitt, and others. That same year, the creamy-voiced Billy Eckstine, a fellow Pittsburgher, asked Mary to join his group at Bop City, which led to jobs at Kelly’s Stables, Storyville, and the Rhythm Room in New York, and clubs in Philadelphia.

  By far her most important engagement in 1952 was at the Downbeat Club, where she was booked with a trio on and off, starting in September. There Mary put together what she called a dream band with Kenny “Klook” Clarke on drums and Oscar Pettiford on bass. Clarke knew Mary from Pittsburgh and Pettiford was one of Mary’s favorites, though she noted he could be difficult when he drank his favorite cocktail, called a Moscow Mule. “There wasn’t a set we didn’t compose on the spot when I played with the trio. Pettiford would start something and I’d add to it with Klook carrying on in the background,” she wrote. Among those ideas was a tune called “Swingin’ Til the Guys Come Home,” that Pettiford cited as “Swingin’ Til the Girls Come Home.” (When Mary recorded it in France in 1954, she gave cocomposer credit to Pettiford.)

  Playing opposite Mary and her dream team was the young and fiery Billy Taylor with his trio. He inspired her further, helped “keep her up,” said Mary. Taylor adds affectionately, “She’d try to swing me out of the club. She was very competitive musically but she was never mean, and off the bandstand, she was quite shy.” They often exchanged lead sheets for favorite tunes, including their own. Fine players passed through the band: trumpeter Kenny Dorham, t
rombonists Bill Harris and Kai Winding, saxophonists Zoot Sims and Charlie Parker. It was around that time that Charlie Parker, she recalled, asked her to come down to Birdland (where he was regularly hired and fired, depending on his drug use); he wanted her to hear his experiments playing with strings there. Mary was all for it. A little later, kicked out of Birdland again, Parker was hanging around the clubs and stopped in the Downbeat. Mary wrote in her diary, “Charlie Parker came in one night and he said to me, ‘Lou, let’s get a band or something together. You know all the cats always want me to get a band with you.’ I said, ‘No, man, not the condition you’re in.’ He said, ‘Mary, anything you tell me I’ll do.’ He said, ‘You know I’m not allowed to play in Birdland or any of the clubs.’ So I told him, ‘Get up on the stand and let the people see how great you are.’ The place was really packed because a lot of the people had followed me from the East Side. Charlie Parker got up on the stand and he said, ‘Play the Kansas City blues.’ Listen, I’ve never heard Coltrane play what that boy did! No! During the time that he played I don’t know what carried us along with him because there were sounds that we’d never played before.… Charlie Parker kept going to keys and he kept going through changes. Oscar said, ‘Mary, where is he now?’ I said, ‘Man, don’t talk to me now.’ … When he finished everybody just screamed. He said, ‘How was that?’ I said, ‘Man, that was too great for me.’ ”

  That Charlie Parker should not be allowed to work at Birdland, the club named after him, registered deeply with Mary. “I was in New York when musicians were barred from several clubs, even those that weren’t using heroin,” she wrote. But she knew she had been stigmatized as well, by her close association with musicians known to be addicts, so that some people just assumed she was a junkie. She was also distressed by what she saw as the opportunism of some white musicians, who seemed bent on eliminating competition from black musicians. “All during the war when they were trying to learn bop and didn’t have time to listen to prejudiced talk, they were lovey-dovey,” Mary wrote. In her diary, she detailed a rare specific complaint against a fellow musician: “Oscar [Pettiford] had employed Lee Konitz and Kai Winding the first time he took his small combo into Snookie’s. Lee Konitz at the time hadn’t worked in quite awhile and was working part-time in a record shop. First he was happy to work with Oscar until an offer came for him to either join Stan Kenton or some other outfit, and then he made deprecating remarks.”

  AS SUCH THINGS tend to do, Mary’s dream band drifted apart. She went on tour and came back to find that Pettiford had joined another band. In her absence, Mary had been booked to play with a band made up of former Woody Herman sidemen. “Out of six musicians I was the only Negro. I played along with them until I felt it was the worst. So I left without giving notice.” There was an angry phone confrontation with the club’s management about the dearth of black musicians on the bandstand. Mary got her way. “I returned—after the manager consented to equalize—that is, use a mixed outfit.” Furthermore, she added with satisfaction, she was given a raise.

  But by then, Mary had received an intriguing offer to go abroad, by liner, from booking agent Joe Marsolais, who worked for Moe Gale’s agency, a rival of Joe Glaser’s Associated Booking. It was billed as a nine-day tour of England, with Mary as the featured star of an entertainment package—an excellent opportunity, Marsolais pointed out, to internationalize her audience. Mary hesitated. Europe was an unknown quantity. Also, England presented a special problem: its musicians’ union had, in effect, banned American jazz groups by demanding that for every American jazz musician who performed in England, an English jazz musician be booked in the United States. Worse, the only American musicians allowed to work in British nightclubs were singers.

  Mary turned the offer down, but Marsolais persisted: how much of a risk could it be? She would be the star of the show, with guaranteed salary and expenses. She could sail back after the Christmas holidays, and the Downbeat Club promised to keep her job open.

  A great sticking point in their negotiations was Mary’s insistence that she have a return ticket in hand before she sailed. In the end, Marsolais managed to convince her it would be waiting for her on the other side, so she consented, well aware that her career needed a boost. In fact, the only record she had made that year was a swing-style jam session in July; Mary led a septet that included Harold Baker on trumpet.

  Before sailing on the 28th of November, Mary went to Pittsburgh for an early Thanksgiving with the Burleys. While there, her aunt Anna Mae made her several stunning couture-copied gowns for the trip. Returning to New York, she was booked on the airwaves on Thanksgiving, playing “Lullaby of Birdland” with Roy Haynes and Oscar Pettiford on a CBS radio show, then down the hall to perform “Lullaby” again and “Tea for Two,” for Steve Allen’s show.

  All was not roses that night. Hovering in the background throughout was Lindsay Steele; he made certain he accompanied Mary everywhere, both to boost his fledgling singing career and to keep an eye on her. At the radio station, recalls Peter O’Brien, “She told me that he tried to intervene with an engineer at the studio and she told him to stay out of it, that he didn’t know anything about it. Then he knocked her down.” Mary, O’Brien added, sounded simply matter-of-fact years later when she related this latest incidence of physical violence.

  Afterwards, she partied until early in the morning with friends Oscar Pettiford and Erroll Garner, arriving home at dawn to grab some sleep before finishing her packing. In the afternoon she went down to the pier to board ship, still accompanied by Steele, to whom she had entrusted the keys of her apartment and who was supposed to look after things in her absence.

  Aboard the Queen Elizabeth, on which Marsolais had booked passage in a handsome stateroom in exchange for her playing nightly for the passengers, she must have felt a great sense of relief as the liner pulled away from shore. How bracing the sea air must have been—breathed alone, in the blessed quiet that feeds an introvert’s soul. Free of Steele at last. Later she would tell close friends like Barry Ulanov and Peter O’Brien about her apprehensions, but not then; as usual, she kept her troubles to herself. But Mary was afraid of Steele.

  As she faced the gray, cold expanse of the Atlantic, did Mary, as sensitive as she was, have a premonition that her voyage would turn out to be a sea change indeed? First, she would not be away only two weeks, as planned, but two years. And during that time, her life would take a painful, profound turn: she was about to enter her “dark night of the soul.”

  As the Queen Elizabeth headed out of New York harbor that November evening in 1952, away from the city that for a decade had schooled her in so many hard lessons, one can imagine Mary alone on the deck in the night, the collar of her mink coat turned up, until the cold air at last drove her inside, where the passengers waited to be entertained below by boogie-woogie in the lounge.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chez Mary Lou

  1952–1954

  DESPITE HER RELIEF at escaping her problems at home, Mary’s mood did not improve. As she wrote of the passengers who gathered in the lounge of the ship to listen to what they thought of as “jazz,” “I said to myself, here is that commercial shit again. Well, I know what I’ll have to do, return to the ol’ training, and play what they like. And I broke it up until we had to be run off to bed at about three in the morning.”

  She was rundown, and soon a combination of seasickness and flu made her consider canceling the English tour and simply heading for home again once they docked in England. Her mood worsened once the ship came in at Southampton and she’d cleared Customs. She was made to wait in the unheated station for several hours until a “weasel-looking chap came to pick me up. Now I was cold as a Norwegian turd and evil. Here I was alone in a strange country … blanketed in fog.… Being alone threw me off balance at first. Forget it and work if you can, I told myself.”

  In London, however, she was mollified when greeted with due ceremony by a small but extremely devoted jazz coterie: E
nglish jazz fans waving flags, presenting her with bouquets, sending mounds of telegrams and invitations to parties. They were starved for the real thing. She was booked for a radio broadcast on the BBC’s “In Town Tonight” before her debut concert at the Royal Albert Hall on December 7, and made an invaluable friend in a tireless young editor named Max Jones, who worked for the English paper Melody Maker. Mary’s fears were soothed, and her health somewhat strengthened, at her enthusiastic reception. “Firsts” were important to Mary, and for her the tour of England had missionary overtones. “I was sent to England to break the ban that prevented American musicians from playing in England,” she was wont to recall, adding with a touch of her typical bravado that she was allowed to play with all the bands and musicians there. Another first: this, she said, had never happened in thirty years.

  This was only partly true, as she soon learned. As far as the union was concerned, jazz pianists were not “concert musicians” but “variety” artists—the English equivalent of vaudeville performers. When she became aware of this distinction, so reminiscent of the patronizing of jazz she had detested at home, Mary’s mood fell. She felt “sick and blue,” she confided. “Being in Europe made me realize how great being black is. But, I haven’t the least idea what I’m doing in Europe. I’m here, so what.” Worse was to come. The big show, of which she was billed as the star—“The Big Rhythm Show of 1952”—was a package that consisted mostly of variety acts, and she shared headliner status with Cab Calloway and Marie Bryant, two unmodern entertainers. All of this had been put together by agent Harry Dawson, the same “weasel-looking chap” she’d met at Southampton, who promoted Mary in ads as “America’s Queen of the Ivories.” Hardly the serious artistic consideration she had been led to expect.