Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Remembers Martha Salemme, the sculptor’s widow: “She called us and said, ‘I don’t know, Peter’s very ill, he’s not behaving the way he usually does. He wants money and he’s supposed to have taken a vow of poverty.’ And she wanted us to observe him and then to tell him he was not well, that he should see a psychiatrist—her Dr. Miller in New York.”

  Martha Salemme got upset at O’Brien herself. “Nobody should use that language—too rough.” Others remarked on ugly scenes. Father O’Connor at nearby Holy Cross Rectory, tired of the loud, angry phone calls O’Brien made to Mary that he was forced to overhear on the one rectory telephone, asked O’Brien to get a private phone while he roomed there. And, says Phyl Garland, who went to Durham in the late seventies to work on an in-depth story about Mary for Ebony, “He seemed like a nice charming young Jesuit when I first met him years before. Then I was working with her in her house in Durham when Mary Lou got a phone call from Peter, and Mary said in a fierce, pained way I’d never heard in her before, ‘No son of a bitch has ever talked to me like this before!’ And she was furious. And I could hear him being furious in the background.”

  Sometimes the anger was in the form of indirect cuts. “He would say little asides about her that were uncomplimentary,” recalls John Graziano, a friend of Mary’s who was a hairdresser. “Once when she asked me to comb her hair before a job, he asked, ‘Did you see the bald spot?’ ”

  But O’Brien was also doing a great deal of work for Mary by then, arranging bookings (that summer, she played in Nice, Montreux, The Hague, London), and attending to the myriad details her performances entailed. Her career had taken off, but for all the work he was doing, O’Brien felt underpaid. “I finally demanded more money and all hell broke loose,” he recalls. “We really had it out—it was vicious. After that, I got 20% commission instead of 10%.”

  O’Brien also felt that his work with Mary at Duke was unappreciated. The university had turned down his proposal to be put on staff as a teaching assistant and paid a modest salary, along with health insurance and a university-owned apartment. In the fall of 1978, he asked Mary to press his suit. At first Mary refused to speak to President Sanford directly, but after a rapturous reception to her performance at a university fund-raiser, attended primarily by prominent CEOs, she felt comfortable enough to broach the matter of O’Brien’s stipend with the president. “I expected her playing to be a pleasant interlude at a fund-raising dinner; the usual thing,” recalled President Sanford. “I was totally unprepared for the applause she got before she played a note and then the rapt attention she got—as if she brought tumbling from them childhood memories of happiness—not the music alone, perhaps not the music at all, but the aura that accompanied her performance. Here were grown, tough men with tears in their eyes as Mary Lou Williams finished.” After that, Sanford was ready to give Mary just about anything she wanted, including a raise for herself, and readily agreed when her friends Marsha and Paul Vick found a way to pay O’Brien and give him housing. “We at the Alumni Affairs Office wondered if Mary would go around the country and perform at concerts at four alumni meetings a year, in order to bring in the younger alumni,” notes Paul Vick. “And she was happy to do it to advocate jazz. We decided to pay Peter, whose role became vital as a manager, a small stipend against Mary’s doing those four concerts a year.”

  “So 1978, that second year at Duke,” adds O’Brien, “saw a truce between Mary and me, although things were never the same.”

  Now began the busiest years of Mary’s professional life, as she wove club dates and performances of the Mass around her class schedule. In spite of the “truce” with O’Brien, she felt more comfortable when she was at leisure with old friends and family. She especially valued her visits to Washington, D.C., where she could visit with Brother Mario. Her old friend had been reassigned from Italy to a post at Howard University’s Newman Center, a meeting-place for college Catholics. “I’d give her my room at the Newman Center and I’d take a foldout cot in the library,” recalls Brother Mario. “Sometimes she’d be puffing on a cigarette in bed, writing music. There’d be students here and they wouldn’t know jazz, but with her air, she drew people to her and she made friends with them. She’d never let an opportunity go by to let them know about their heritage. These young dynamic black students at Howard were the future leaders. She would go shopping for the food and bring it here, and she’d cook a little, some kind of pasta perhaps. Always made way too much. She was never a burden. On one of her trips, I remember she went to the National Theater to see the Pope, who was visiting the White House. She wore a special dress, dark blue, slippers too, and took a copy of her Mass to give to the Pope, but he was out of reach.

  “We seldom went out after her concerts. She enjoyed just coming back and relaxing, sitting with me for a couple of hours and talking.” Even when the President of the United States, then Jimmy Carter, sent her an engraved, signed invitation to a jazz party on the White House lawn in June, she had to be prodded. Why should she just go sit at some party? she asked grumpily. But she did, and played “Somewhere over the Rainbow.”

  Several months before that, in March, she’d had a bittersweet triumph as the featured performer at the first Women’s Jazz Festival in Kansas City. That she was not of one mind philosophically or politically with the festival’s organizers she made perfectly clear, both in the perfunctoriness of her performance and in her shoot-from-the-hip remarks at a press conference before the festival: “As for being a woman, I never thought much about that one way or the other. All I’ve ever thought about is music,” adding, “I’m very feminine, but I think like a man. I’ve been working around them all my life. I can deal better with men than women, and I’ve never heard objectionable remarks from men about being a woman musician.” After the Women’s Jazz Festival, she sent a letter trembling with anger to festival spokesman Leonard Feather, who had spoken pointedly about Mary’s “all-but anti-feminist posture,” while championing Marian McPartland, in an article about the festival that was picked up by the wire services and reprinted in newspapers across the country.

  “So many things you’ve done to me,” she wrote. “Was it because I asked for my compositions or what I know? I’ve worked all my life on my own merits. I’m out here trying to help poor souls which means nothing to you. You’re on your way to getting hurt through your awful methods. Don’t push me too far. I have a strong Taurus streak still, worse than ten ferocious lions.”

  Mary did best playing with highly talented players, as she did in Europe that summer: with Stan Getz and Jo Jones at a session at the Andernos-les-Bains Jazz Festival; in duet with John Lewis at the Montreux festival; and, especially, playing solo. “The old lady,” she wrote happily to Joyce Breach, “is wailing with foreign sounds, I’m playing my buns off.” In Montreux she made the last recording to be released before her death, titled Solo Recital at Montreux, for Granz’s Pablo label. It is an album representative of her repertoire, with a massively developed “Little Joe from Chicago,” a tender “Morning Glory,” and a “Honeysuckle Rose” with a rather sly “fungus-y” beginning—tunes she had played hundreds, maybe thousands of times, yet they sound fresh, at once modern, mellow, and majestic.

  AFTER HER SISTER Mamie died in the mid-1970s, Mary declared that she wasn’t going back to Pittsburgh ever again: the city held too many painful memories for her, including those of Mamie’s lingering death, which Mary had witnessed. Mary paid for the funeral, and played the organ at the funeral service, where she, who seldom cried, broke down. Instead, she tried to reassemble the family at her house in Durham for the holidays, paying for their airline tickets at Thanksgiving in 1978. But it would be the last time she had the clan gathered with her at holiday time.

  At Christmas in 1978, Mary, as usual, cleaned her house from top to bottom (she would not hire a cleaner) and bought a small fir tree, under which she set out her model train sets. She would have spent the holiday alone (neither Peter, Robbie, nor any other relatives were
around), if Marsha Vick, who’d begun taking private lessons, hadn’t dropped in for a friendly holiday visit. Marsha and (to a lesser extent) her husband, Paul, had become good friends of hers. When Paul Vick decided to run for city councilman, Mary dusted off her old “Ballot Box Boogie,” written in the early forties for FDR, now dubbing it “The Paul Vick Boogie.” (Vick won.) “From the time we were married, until we met Mary, I never heard Marsha play,” says Paul. “Then with Mary, Marsha was playing and transposing music—just this amazing change in her, that was all due to Mary, that amazing ability Mary had to bring things out in people.” Marsha gave Mary some heirloom Christmas ornaments for her tree. Touched, Mary offered her a drink. “But she was sort of blue. We both had a drink of whiskey and neither of us drank.”

  Mary fought the blueness by going to church. Her favorite place to worship was the little stone church of Holy Cross. Says Father Frank O’Connor, then the parish priest, “It was a friendly place and the parishioners didn’t press her. On home football days, the men of the parish would sell barbecued ribs and chicken, and they had a fair once a year. She enjoyed that.

  “She liked Saturday evening mass; she’d sit in the back. Her friend Jane Lynch, who taught classical piano at Duke, played the piano for the services. And I recall her putting on her jazz mass at Holy Cross where she used our choir as the singers. And I think she liked that because most of the choir were black people and they had a better sense of what the music was like. I remember at the choir practice, it didn’t take long before she had them ready. She took a couple of chords apart and showed how there was a kind of pain in the music. She’d play each note separately and say, ‘Did you hear the cry in it?’ It was just a parish mass that she did the music for.”

  ALTHOUGH HE NOW had his independence, an income, and a psychiatrist, O’Brien felt little relief from the anger that seized him in his relationship with Mary. “Then my analyst moved from Durham to Richmond. I used to say I had a blood disease I had to go treat up in Richmond. I did not trust her in terms of my own mental health. I could never let her know I was seeing him.”

  As head of the alumni office, Paul Vick had many dealings with O’Brien in setting up the concert series Mary had agreed to do for the university. “Peter was this very hyper person. You spent a lot of time trying to calm him. But Peter was useful to her. His concern was the finances, how to get the money. But even though he was the manager, she took care of him—like a mother taking care of her child. And he did what she wanted, how she wanted it done.” And if Mary was too often strict and overbearing in O’Brien’s opinion, she could also be contrite, as she was after yet another confrontation when she accused him of skimming her performance fees. She wrote later,

  Dear Peter:

  I have something to say to you concerning my unexcused behavior. You are truly an inspiration to me and my endeavors.…

  In a chilling prediction of her own failing health, she added, “There is something in my system that is poisoning my spirits and I don’t know what is.” She felt a sense of foreboding and was afraid. Mary clearly had not been feeling well for years, suffering from complications of obesity and occupational hazards such as finger and arm strains and back pain, a recent hearing loss in her left ear, and occasional discharges of blood. But lately her sense of unwellness, along with the pain in her back, had gradually worsened. She’d been suffering back pain since the late 1960s, visiting various physicians for temporary relief. Joyce Breach remembers accompanying her to a chiropractor in 1970. As she recalls, “He told me—but privately, not to her—that it wasn’t her back, but that something else was seriously wrong.”

  As a musician, Mary was bothered most of all by her hearing loss, probably gradually incurred while at the Cookery, where the large amplifier for the bass player had been placed on a shelf close to her left side. Among the first things she did when she moved to Durham was to visit the North Carolina Eye and Ear Hospital (then MacPherson Hospital), where she learned that the deafness in her ear was quite advanced and irreversible. During Christmas of 1978, when she was feeling low, Mary became ill enough to ask Marsha Vick to take her to the University Hospital clinic. There she was told she had a bad cold and sent home. But it was not long after that, in February of ’79, that she saw the first unmistakable sign that something far more serious was wrong—the persistent presence of blood in her urine. Terribly upset, she called Marian Turner, the secretary of the music department at Duke and another recent friend, for a reference to a doctor. Turner sent her to her internist, a Dr. Brown, who had the sad task of making the diagnosis: bladder cancer.

  Dr. Brown urged her to check into the hospital immediately, to determine the stage of her disease, but Mary said no, she had commitments to honor first; she would deal with the bad news in her own way. She took a bus to Washington, D.C., where she visited briefly with Brother Mario and played various engagements. Back in Durham, she went into the hospital on March 27 for a transurethral biopsy as well as a bladder-scraping procedure—what a doctor describes as like “peeling the skin of an apple”—and was at the piano bench the very next day, performing her Mass at the Durham Academy. Throughout 1979, Mary continued to concertize heavily. She who hated to fly even took the very long flight to Brazil for the São Paulo Jazz Festival. In May, she performed Mary Lou’s Mass again in New York, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the occasion of its one-hundredth anniversary, with Buster Williams on bass and a choir from Fordham Prep along with several Duke students—and even played for a Duke alumni reception afterwards at a suite at the Carlyle, where she was supplied with her favorite Baldwin baby grand and persuaded shy Marsha Vick to perform at her Fats Wallerish best. Present also was Mary’s old friend, the journalist “Popsy” Whitaker, who wrote an important and affectionate sketch of an ebullient Mary for The New Yorker. For Whitaker, Mary spun her fantasy (though real for her as long as she was performing) of being part of a big, happy, jazz-loving family back at Duke. “We’re all happy,” she said. “Peter plays records … I play piano for them, sometimes I dance for them.” The kids were so “eager,” she added, that she no longer felt “so troubled.” And as he listened to her play at the Carlyle that afternoon, Whitaker noted later with satisfaction that Mary had achieved an “air of quiet confidence—even of majesty … a Mary Lou Williams fully realized.” Mary’s playing, though buoyant as well as brilliant, was only a temporary surge of vitality, however, tied to her fantastic hope that she could beat the cancer, as a note she wrote to Joyce Breach from a Corpus Christi jazz festival appearance in July of ’79 makes clear: “Got news about my illness. Can get medicine (Laetrile) in Dallas, Texas—will cost $3000. I’m working hard, raising loot now! A miracle happened elsewhere in me.”

  Then, back in Durham before school began, to bad news: routine follow-up tests at Duke Medical Center showed that the tumor had returned. Again she was hospitalized and had the bladder scraping a second time on August 27, 1979. She viewed it as a routine procedure, however, was back home shortly afterwards, and again rebounded vigorously. Off she went to Washington in early September, where she performed her “history” and the Mass with the Howard University Chorale at Ford’s Theater. The next evening she began a week’s stint at Blues Alley, and played for a cocktail reception of Duke alumni. Recalls Marsha Vick, “She was glowing, masterful—the music went way beyond even the best I’d heard from her. She told me later that Suggs and Walker [Milton Suggs and Hugh Walker, bass and drums] were together with her like never before, and that she had felt more like playing than she had in 10 years.” When bassist Charles Mingus stopped in to hear her at Blues Alley (Ella Fitzgerald was another guest), he was knocked out and pressed Mary to go out with him on a concert tour for Norman Granz. But Mary said no. With rare exceptions, she had always liked best to work as a soloist or with her own combo.

  In fact, though, the results of her transurethral biopsy were not good: Mary had grade-III bladder cancer, an advanced stage of the disease. After an engagement in Chicago at Ri
ck’s Café Américain, where she played with her usual vigor, even exuberance, she faced a third scraping in December of 1979. By then, she seemed to sense that her condition, far from getting better, was worsening. In Chicago, she wrote to Breach in a tone that suggests a kind of flat acceptance of her fate:

  I’m supposed to go into the hospital when I get back to Durham. I lost my hair and lost the use of my left wrist and was peeing blood three weeks ago. Doctors found a growth on my bladder. I prayed so hard that I think it has melted away, ah. Oh, yes, I also have the gout in my knees and wrists. I ran into a cut freak at the hospital and I am thinking about not going into the hospital. Just opened at the club here, kinda nice. I tie my wrist up to play. Marsha got a raise for me so that I could continue to pay Peter.

  Love, Mary

  But although advanced bladder cancer does not respond well to chemotherapy or radiation, Mary still showed tremendous recuperative powers. “She sprang back and really went to work—she had her strength and lots of work,” says Peter O’Brien.

  UNHAPPILY, MARY’S RELATIONSHIP with O’Brien had not improved appreciably, as shown in another letter she wrote but did not mail him (there were several) after she was released from the hospital. It reveals the depth of her pained anger:

  Peter,

  You’re living above your means. I begged you to give me receipts for anything you did. There were no calculations. You’ve gotta talk to somebody like Dr. Miller to settle you to your good side which is tremendous. I always confuse you, you never understand me.… Try and put yourself in my place. Peter, I think you have a grudge somewhere because you’re telling lies. You see things in a very mixed-up way.… Right now I’m sad and lonely but not for long. God will help me, I’m sure of this. How someone can take the abuse I go through—but this is proof of God’s love and nobody can tell me anything else, you see.