Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  But moving from New York to Durham, from the freelance life to artist-in-residence, from North to South, was no simple adjustment. Mary was restless and blue at first, pining for her old life and friends. “Wish I could find some poker players down here,” she wrote Joyce. But once she began teaching, the feeling lifted. Twice a week she taught her two classes, and rehearsed a select ensemble of fifteen or twenty student musicians for whom she wrote fresh arrangements. (There were some unusual combinations, dependent on the talent at hand: one semester there were seven saxophones and no trombones.) Word of mouth filled her classes quickly, and by her second year she had moved into a larger space. Hundreds were turned away.

  Her teaching methods were those she’d honed since the fifties. She taught from the piano bench, playing—and calling out, sometimes singing—illustrations of jazz styles, coaching students to imitate the phrasing of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, and so on. She wanted the students to become active participants in the learning process, getting inside the music. And she lectured: “Rock puts you in a box and makes you stiff as a 90-year-old man. Jazz is love. You have to lay into it and let it flow,” she told her classes. When her students clapped and sang out the lines of the spirituals, of the Fats Waller and Art Tatum records she played, they were following the old, time-honored methods of African-American music-making. Her classes, mostly white (but more and more black students enrolled as time went on), loved it; alumni recall her with affection. “We’d spend three or four classes learning a song,” recalls a former student, John Dear. “She’d have us singing and talking about the song; bebop and blues. She’d perform one or two songs every class. Just getting a feel for it.” The impact she had on private students was even more powerful, for her goal was to teach them how to become their own teacher, emphasizing the strong left hand of the old masters. “I’ll write out a tune that they like, such as ‘Over the Rainbow,’ or ‘Night in Tunisia,’ ” she said. “I’ll give them eight bars each time they come to me. After four weeks, I make them apply all the chords that I’ve given them to other tunes—in that way guiding them, teaching them how to become their own teacher.… We’re living in a technical society, and people think that if they go to school and learn it, they’ll be able to play it right. Sure, you can play like a typewriter, but it’ll make your audience nervous to listen to it. It’s nothing that’s written down in a book, you know.” Technique was the jumping-off point, the servant of the muse. A jazz pianist needed, she added, to establish the authority of his or her presence, to create a mood from the first note: “Willie the Lion said … ‘Play that note, get the mood going, hold it, and you’ve got the audience.’ ”

  It was the same message she’d been spreading for decades, but the university brought her a different kind of student. Marsha Vick, who soon became a friend, was one such, a white college student (though older, in her thirties). Says Marsha, “I didn’t know much about jazz, but I had always listened to it and I’d played the piano—pop music. I was really interested in taking private lessons. She agreed to that and I went to her house, and I took with me this arrangement of ‘Sunny’ I had. I put it up there on the piano and I started. And she said, ‘Oh, don’t do it like this.’ And she started playing it. She tried to show me the various chords. She told me after that first lesson that I was playing ‘the way the cats used to play,’ and I later realized that was a great compliment, though I never really learned to improvise. For a student jazz ensemble, she made me play. She brought in Buster Williams for this concert in February 1979. I was scared to death, but he was very polite, and she’d say, ‘Steady now! Steady now.’ And she said if I went up there and played like a lamb, nobody would listen to me. I had to play like a lion.” Later, I played little jobs on my own. At one, for a Christmas party for President Sanford, she arranged ‘Jingle Bells’ for me.

  “Mary’s ears were amazing. She called me once when Eubie Blake was on television and said, ‘That old man’s on TV, he’s playing all in sevenths.’ And once I took her somewhere in my car, a Volvo. It had a certain sound to it. She said, ‘Your car is running in E.’ ”

  John Dear was studying classical piano, with dreams of becoming a rock star when Mary came to Duke. “I went to her class and I couldn’t figure jazz out. None of it made sense to me from the background I had. So I asked to take private lessons and she accepted me. She’d play for me and talk about what she was doing on the keyboard. I remember the width of her hands—great stretch—and I remember her playing with flat fingers, punching into the piano. She used to say, ‘Hug the keys.’ It’s the complete opposite of what I was learning in classical music, which was that everything flows together to create a whole. This—jazz—was all confrontation between the left hand and the right hand.

  “I always remember her entrance into the room in class, a big class. She was a presence. She’d be late and we’d be hanging around. She’d come in looking around, slowly taking it in. Everything would stop. She’d sit at the piano and just start playing. Powerful.”

  The administration was thrilled to have her. “It turned out to be a very happy arrangement to have her here,” said Sanford. “I got to where, as I was describing the various achievements and assets of Duke to alumni groups, I would add Mary Lou as one of our irreplaceable assets. She was a spirit, a presence, on the campus that was very important.” Soon, Mary even managed to win over the black students who styled themselves as radicals, by sitting and talking with them at their cafeteria tables at lunchtime. “If they’re not careful, they’re going to love this music,” she said slyly and she made a point of hiring local black talent when she performed in the area. Eventually, she became so respected that when, after her death, a black student center was opened, it was named in her memory.

  AS MARY WAS adjusting to her new role at Duke, her relationship with Father Peter O’Brien took a sharp downturn. Although the university had hired Mary alone, O’Brien left his job as a parish priest at St. Ignatius Loyola in order to continue to manage her career and to assist her with teaching at Duke. “It was when we taught that the relationship really got bad,” says O’Brien. “I could have let her just do the teaching, but I was looking for an identity, and after all, I had been a teacher. So, I took half an hour or 45 minutes to teach. But the very idea of doing this for so little money was enraging.

  “My Provincial Superior in New York had been reluctant to do so, but he released me for one year from my job as a priest at St. Ignatius, to go to Durham with her. A lot of it had to do with Mary’s big impact as a convert, with the Masses. My boss, the pastor at St. Ignatius, said to me, ‘I’m going to need your room, Peter, right away.’ I had no financial support, and no assignment now as a priest—and I’d have to pay my own health insurance. I was on my own—with her. However, Mary had fantasies of the Catholic Church somehow taking care of me. She said to me, ‘You got your Mammy and Pappy, you got the Church; I have nobody, I just have myself.’ Well, this situation led to catastrophe between Mary and me.

  “Mary wanted me to live in her house and get $50 a week! She wanted to clip my wings. In New York, I’d had a foot in two worlds and I could always retreat to one or the other. I moved in, but I don’t think I lasted a day and a half before my rage came up so hard. I went and packed up my shit again, and I sailed out of the house. She was sitting on the third step and she said, ‘When are you going to New York?’ That was sad. She thought I was leaving altogether and she was hurt terribly.”

  O’Brien, however, simply moved across town, taking a room in the rectory of Holy Cross Church, a small, attractive Jesuit mission church of stone built originally for African-American Catholics in the 1930s, when segregation was still in force. There he stayed for about a year. But he was still as involved with Mary’s career as ever. “For that whole year, I lived on $135 a week, plus 10% commission on her concerts. That was not enough to pay rent and buy food, but she didn’t understand and, of course, business details were never clear between us. But what bo
thered me was she treated me halfway like a lousy agent. I was scraping by and I felt she was using me. She bought all kinds of things—a new Cadillac, antiques, an $800 rug. She’d saved—it was her money—but I got very angry. She had a good thing going and she didn’t have to pay me much. On the other hand, if I’d gotten sick or were stuck, there’s no question that she would have taken care of me. Completely generous but stingy. A complicated, double thing, a way of controlling and making sure, because she’d been so done in.”

  O’Brien’s worsening psychic and emotional health, the rants and rages, took a terrible toll on both the priest and the player. “I was in very bad shape during my era with Mary, mentally and emotionally,” he affirms. “There was anger, fury, frustration. Mary would say, ‘Why would you mistreat me?’ That was a word she used a lot. And I admit the mistreatment, with regret. I wrecked Mary’s peace of mind.”

  This is painfully clear in a letter she wrote to O’Brien late in 1977 but never mailed to him:

  This year I’ve given Robert, Bobbie and you plenty of money (and others in the past) yet I scraped enough together to save a bird-turd. If I didn’t love God, I could be very lonely. But loving God means treating people right. You have lied to me a few times.

  Your mind does a lot of wrong things. I get a little tired of continuing to show you through experience. And how can you accuse me of cheating you when you work me to death traveling to make up a loss I can’t see.

  I have had crosses all my life. Father Woods helped me, he taught me how to live with them and stop complaining, then they became more bearable. Peter, everybody is sexually something—but learn how to control this. That is, balance it off some way, not allowing it to enter the work.

  My mind is so confused, half the time I can’t do music and it’s not the age, because I finally pull out of it. I do not have any peace at all except when I lie in bed, go to sleep, wake up fresh and suffer again. I can’t get out of bed half the time, trying to think how to maneuver out of hell.

  I have a job to teach and you have no job. I say I can give you $200 per week and I discover later this is all I have to live on. As a personal manager you ok’d the job without calculation! A personal manager saves his act from peril, people, saves him money, looks out for appearances, gets work, keeps wolves away, static, makes everything easy for his act to perform and write music and play. I’ve spent a great deal of loot having you with me but did you appreciate this? I felt something would grow out of it, but never! We do not have a goal and we are not together in mind and soul, and to be successful, togetherness is the key word.

  You do a lot of hard work without a goal. One has to have a goal or his work is aimless. So I go along, reach upstairs and say, Well here I go again, so please offer it up for the good of souls, etc.

  God has helped you through me, Peter, and I do not have an ego. Everybody knows about your mental condition. Yet I’m sick: I don’t know how long I’ll be able to take it.

  Robert is a different kind of annoyance. My first love (work) is involved with you. So I’ll put it this way: I’ll continue to offer up mistakes, suffering, etc. You were never treated as badly as I was. Well, we could have been put together for your aid. ’cause as you know you were kinda off mentally. Stop fighting God and let things melt away. Stop disliking people. Stop taking over other folks’ friends, find your own. Your work is to clear the way for my work, so we can help the poor and pay our bills.

  What are you doing about the vow of poverty and what are you doing about your vows? Tell me I’m lying and I’ll show you. Stop allowing the bad spirit to split your mind in two places.

  By the end of that year O’Brien was seeing a psychiatrist regularly, if secretively. Mary also occasionally visited a Harlem psychiatrist she respected, a Dr. Miller, who treated her fear of flying and other anxieties, and she corresponded with Dr. Chester Pierce, at Yale. At Thanksgiving, she wrote confidingly to Joyce, “Down here I feel crazy or senile. It’s really terrific but I can’t get myself together.”

  Always, there was her faith to help her. And her music. Personal upheavals had not the slightest effect on the power of Mary’s music-making then; quite the contrary. “As long as you keep working, you’ll be all right,” she was fond of saying. The music that she made from 1977 until her death in 1981 was charged with a vitality and maturity as never before, and a serene acceptance of her position—one writer called her “quiet queen” of jazz. Not that she disguised her conflicts and pain, but her dark side was transformed, lending tremendous vitality to her playing. She constructed her solos, said one reviewer, “like small dramas of the spirit in search of light.”

  She ranged the continent—always by train—to Buffalo in upstate New York, to San Francisco and Vancouver, and back to New York for the summer. And she persuaded Norman Granz of Pablo Records to let her record an album of the blues. “I returned to my first love,” she said. My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me is all blues, sixteen brilliantly phrased versions, seven of them piano solos, recorded in two sessions on one day. The shadow was there, a brooding, even somewhat somber but stately return to her past: Miss Ginnie and Fletcher Burley shuffle-dancing barefoot in their alley shack, then all dressed up, ready to go sport.

  On the first side of My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me are: “The Blues,” a slow and soulful entrance (with swooping vocal introduction by Durham singer Cynthia Tyson); “N.G. Blues” (dedicated to Norman Granz), a modern blues notable for its modal patterns and crisp attack; “Dirge Blues,” written after the assassination of President Kennedy; “Blues for Peter”; “Baby Bear Boogie,” quintessential Mary, with fast-working chords and riffs from the right hand and a steady boogie-woogie rhythm from the left; and “My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me,” a favorite that she had previously recorded. As a lagniappe, there was Mary’s pleasant voice turning in a lyric in memory of her stepfather, Fletcher Burley.

  On side two, Mary was joined by the rich-toned Buster Williams, and on “J.B.’s Waltz,” and “The Blues,” by vocalist Tyson. “Rhythmic Pattern,” with Buster Williams walking a strong bass, and Mary improvising over the changes to “I Got Rhythm,” one of her favorite exercises, is the sole uptempo tune on the second side. There is also an outstanding version of “What’s Your Story, Morning Glory?”

  Mary had arrived at a transcendent level of artistry, and the Duke community came to realize they had greatness in their midst. Her students presented ambitious programs. She created new arrangements of her compositions. CBS filmed “A Christmas Special with Mary Lou Williams at Duke University” that aired nationwide on Christmas Eve, 1977.

  Above all, earlier that December, there was her inaugural concert, accompanied by Buster Williams and Roy Haynes. It was a sensational concert. But it was sandwiched between violent quarrels with O’Brien. “Before the concert,” he relates, “I was backstage getting it all set up, and she came in, dressed beautifully with a long blue dress on and a mink coat. And when she saw that the place was packed to the teeth—the kids were hanging on the rafters and everybody who was important in Durham was there—she said to me, ‘Go out to the house and get those records because I’m not makin’ any money on this!’ Oh my God, the rage in me from that. If I had been more mature, I would have said, ‘Mary, go sit in your dressing room and calm down.’ But I went and got the shit. She couldn’t have made more than $300 total from me selling those records. And that’s not the worst. A faculty man was there setting up all these mikes out there to record the concert, and she has him take the mikes off the drums! And so the tape of that sensational concert is fucked up because there’s no mike on the drums! That relates to her own lack of confidence, the invasion of rock and all this loud stuff.

  “I called her up the next morning, early. She said, ‘I thought the concert came out pretty good.’ Well, I cussed her up and down. I told her she put me through shit. I said everything. Then I went to New York and I disappeared for several days.”

  “Why did she put up with this from him?” muses Joyce Bre
ach, who had known Mary well since the late fifties. “It was because she thought she could make him well. She believed in miracles. It was that simple. She wrote me in a letter in ’78: ‘I’m going to pray for Peter—the demons have him again today.’ ” And Mary continued to esteem the vocation of the priesthood, the special position of the clergy. Back in 1971 Mary had written of O’Brien, in a letter to Barney Josephson: “As much as I know about the cruel world, I put myself in his hands. A Jesuit priest is the highest form of religion.” This despite what she knew of O’Brien’s, and other priests’, failings. In the 1960s, before she had met Peter O’Brien, Mary had seen a number of clergymen tested on the spiritual firing line, several of whom had left the priesthood (thus placing themselves in mortal sin, in the view of the church). “Pray for the priests,” she wrote, “they’re in great danger of the man [Satan] using them—in fact all God’s servants are in danger.” All the more reason, then, to pray, counsel, and prod O’Brien into a healthier life in the late 1970s.

  Despite the problems, Mary was clear in the late seventies about the benefits that O’Brien brought her as her manager. “He opens things up and contacts people. He will not let anybody say no to him,” said Mary tellingly. Gary Giddins notes, “He could be very irritating; tenacious. He was constantly at me to go to her concerts. And so, I went.” But Mary’s loyalty continued to be tested with scenes and verbal battles. Mary wrote to Breach: “Joyce, Peter is out of it. One year down here and he’ll be cuckoo. He’s very grouchy and, well, nowhere, changeable—guess he’s turning into a werewolf. God forbid—smile—what a lovable person before now. And I’m tired.”

  At about this time, Mary had also turned to the late Antonio and Martha Salemme for some kind of solace or advice. Antonio Salemme was an artist who had sculpted a legendary life-size figure of Paul Robeson in the thirties; O’Brien had sought him out to immortalize Mary, which he did, in several bronzes and a portrait in oils.