Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Friends and family came to visit her one last time. Another sister, Dorothy Rollins, spelled Geraldine, as did Helen Floyd and Edythe Belt, Mary’s Hamilton Terrace neighbor, a professional nurse. When Dizzy Gillespie dropped in, Mary invited the Vicks also. “We got there, Mary was sitting propped up in bed, Dizzy’s on the other bed, there’s like six or eight different little paper cartons of Chinese food, and they were laughing and talking,” remembers Paul Vick. “This was a time when she was not doing well, but there was a great spark between them. That great, rolling laugh of hers. She told Marsha, ‘You know Lorraine made him come.’ ”

  Mary had a last hurrah, throwing a party at her house on Valentine’s Day. Her house was packed with friends and students, plenty of food and drink, and a big cake with her favorite pink icing. At the party, her last piano performance was filmed for Music on My Mind, a documentary of her life (although it does not appear in the final version). She dressed—with assistance—in a newly altered blue gown, to fit her much-slimmer figure, and almost managed to descend the stairs from her bedroom. But the effort proved too much for her: she fainted and had to be carried to the piano bench. “Peter and I were both in tears,” wrote Marsha Vick. “It had been a long, painful slide down those stairs.”

  That Mary managed to rise from her bed that day, let alone play the piano coherently, was a stunning testament to her willpower and love of music. Not only did she play for nearly half an hour, old favorites and new, but the playing revived her. Afterwards, she was carried upstairs on a kitchen chair, and prepared for bed. “We visited,” wrote Marsha in her journal, “and she seemed fine, but she didn’t want me to go.”

  The next day she had weakened so much that an ambulance was called to take her to the hospital. The euphoria had given way to severe depression, a frequent side effect of her disease, and she began taking mood elevators, which gave her more good days—days when she talked of her composition plans, of playing a concert for the Duke alumni in Pittsburgh, of eating “home cookin’ ” again. She requested a bowl of hot chili, made to her own recipe, but could eat only juices now. Still, her wit returned in flashes. Watching pianists play during a tribute to Duke Ellington on television one night, she turned to tell Marsha Vick, “Billy Taylor just missed a beat.”

  She was as motherly as ever, guiding Marsha Vick’s nascent career as a piano player at local gigs. Advising her not to undersell herself in negotiating a salary, Mary challenged her: “Aren’t you worth it?” And from her sickbed, when Marsha couldn’t find a bass player for a job, Mary called around town and landed one for her.

  Above all, Mary found it wonderfully therapeutic to focus her mind on her History of Jazz for Wind Symphony project. Brian Torff describes the unfinished project as an “interesting combination of African-American blues and band music mixed with dissonant chords.” She had been turning over the new work in her mind for some time. With obvious relish, she explained, “I’m experimenting again with voicing and sounds, writing the blues for the oboe to play. And the bassoon,” adding, “If I can’t get anything new then it’s just a waste of time to me.” Most of the piece remained in outline form, but the several minutes of composition she managed to get down on paper are an important musical statement on what, at the last, was of most value to her. She sketched out five parts. According to O’Brien, the dense chords and long lines of the introduction, titled “Suffering,” were supposed to depict the lashing of a slavemaster; it was followed by two spirituals, a ragtime, and a blues. One imagines Mary, ill and aware that she was at the end of her life, reaching back as never before to memories from early childhood for the shape of the Wind Symphony: remembering the stories of the cruelties of slave times that she had heard as a little girl; the dimly recalled visits to Grandpa Riser’s storefront church where Virginia Riser may have danced for coins before the draped altar; the blues she heard when her stepdaddy Fletcher smuggled her into gambling dens. “The ragtime section of the piece,” says O’Brien, “focused on clarinets, which was as far as she got with that. And she also wrote seven or eight bars of a single melody line of the blues for the bassoon, but that writing ended in midstream, not yet orchestrated. That was the last note of music that she wrote.”

  The unwritten sections were to represent various jazz eras—swing, bop (possibly an arrangement of her 1940s piece “Knowledge,” which she was then revising for an octet), the postbop modern era—and a finale. As part of her research for the postbop, avant-garde, section, she resorted to a favorite pastime—watching horror movies. “She asked me to take her to Alien,” recalls Marsha Vick, “and I was scared to death. But she just sat there and said, ‘Oh, don’t pay attention to all that,’ and taped it on her recorder.”

  In the 1930s Mary had turned to Andy Kirk to learn how to read and notate her arrangements, and in the 1940s classically trained Milt Orent had provided technical assistance on Zodiac. For the Wind Symphony project, she sought help from two music professors at Duke (both now retired), Paul Bryden, conductor of the Wind Symphony, and Robert E. Ward, an opera specialist.

  Comments Ward, “Mary Lou was very ill by that time but she was avid for any help to complete her piece before the end of her life. Most jazz musicians live within their limitations, but interestingly, she was trying to stretch beyond that. She asked me to look at the score as she was doing it and I helped her with information about certain instruments: once she was outside the realm of improvisatory jazz, she had only the most rudimentary knowledge, but she aspired to those larger forms. She was very certain in her knowledge of the instruments she knew, but she didn’t realize the sound and range of others she was unfamiliar with, like the English horn. And the cello. For example, in the upper register it sounds higher than it is due to the intensity of the sound. So, I helped her to orchestrate.”

  Lead sheets and fragments, including the introduction of the work, were then given to conductor Paul Bryden. “Whatever I had in hand, I tried to score for the Wind Symphony. I went over to see her and we talked about it a few times, but there was not very much connection, as she was pretty far gone by that time. To complete the work would have taken a whole lot of energy, which at that time she no longer had. If she’d started sooner, chances are she’d have found a way to get from one thing to another to make it more of an extended composition. Kind of frustrating to realize that she didn’t get to that place, because it could have been pretty darn good.” By that time, Mary no longer had the strength to play the piano, but was buoyed by her composition in progress even as her health deteriorated rapidly. In a phone conversation, Barbara Carroll recalled that Mary enthused about the piece, “Baby, it sounds like Stravinsky!”

  Bryden conducted the sole rehearsal of Mary’s new composition, consisting of a little more than six and a half minutes of music, on February 16, 1981, with Mary’s longtime bassist, Milton Suggs, and a rehearsal pianist. Fortunately the session was recorded. And bits of the piece can be heard in the documentary film about her.

  IN APRIL, WHEN the rhododendrons in her backyard were awash in pinks and whites, Mary began a suffering descent toward death. Father O’Connor of Holy Cross Church came often to give her communion. Then Brother Mario came down from Washington to see her. “That was the saddest visit I ever spent with her. She was so highly drugged that she slept most of the time and she didn’t have her wig on or her teeth. But although she was dying, she was still very strong, I thought. I felt that she didn’t really want to talk about it—we were communicating nonverbally. I remember holding her hand and that’s when I became emotional. She woke up at one point and she said, ‘Oh, you’re still here,’ and fell asleep.” Peter O’Brien had by then moved into her house to spell the round-the-clock practical nurses; Marsha Vick was at the house every day. On May 8, Mary’s seventy-first birthday, they celebrated with a cake, and two days later, Duke’s president, Terry Sanford, came from the college’s graduation ceremonies—still in cap and gown—to present Mary with the Trinity Award, given to the best-loved facult
y member. “Mary looked beautiful with a new short hairdo and makeup,” wrote Marsha in her diary of the event, “and when I called her later, she said, ‘That touched me more than any award I’ve gotten since I’ve been playin’.’ ”

  Two days later, she was drifting in and out of lucidity, sometimes thinking she must get up and prepare for a concert. She was hospitalized again, and felt she’d lost her grip. “She talks about death matter-of-factly, with no sadness,” Vick had jotted in her diary. But as the disease tightened its vise of pain ever more cruelly, Mary became frightened. In the hospital, she grabbed Vick’s hand. “I used to be able to handle anything, but no more,” she told her. “I don’t want to die.”

  Father John Dear, who’d taken private piano lessons a couple of years before, was working as a hospital volunteer then. “I was in the hospital every day and I’d see Mary Lou. I asked her about her interest in faith and her life. She said love is the meaning of life, that’s what faith is all about. She was warmly welcoming. But at the end of March, she didn’t want to see me. She rolled over and wouldn’t see any visitors; she said she just wanted to die.” Yet as the end loomed, Mary did rally. “There were no complaints, no self-pity, and no anger. She was spiritually coherent, even great, as she was dying,” observes O’Brien.

  A hospice volunteer, Helen Keese, began to come to Shepherd Street several times a week in April. “My job was not medical at all,” explains Keese, “but to go buy things such as food that were needed, to check with the nurse, to stay an hour or so, and then leave—and to help with the dying, touching and talking even when she was comatose, to help ease the soul.” Hospice was then new in America; Keese’s husband, Father Peter Keese, an Episcopalian priest, had introduced it to North Carolina. “At first she didn’t like or perhaps understand what I was doing there,” Helen Keese continues, “but after a month or so, we had a rapport for several weeks before she died, although I never had any meaningful conversations with Mary Lou. By the time she couldn’t talk, we were friends. She was alert and lucid until the end. I didn’t know her music until then, but I went out and bought a record and I loved it—afterwards, I told her how much I enjoyed it and asked if I could kiss her forehead. Mary Lou consented.”

  “THE MORNING OF her death, May 28, 1981, I told my husband, ‘I think Mary Lou’s going to die today and I’ll stay till she dies.’ And I did,” says Keese. Jerry Burley, Mary’s brother, had come to visit her the day before and left for New York in the morning. O’Brien had left the house around noon, after calling Marsha to tell her that no one expected Mary to live much longer and that he couldn’t stand to be there any longer. “At the very end,” he says, “she told me she could hear the music, but she couldn’t reach the keys anymore.”

  Mary was alone in her house, with just the nurse and Helen Keese. “Things get quite still before someone dies,” says Keese. “And it was very quiet. She hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for several days and she was on that Brompton’s cocktail. Her favorite nurse, Ruth, had her arm around Mary Lou, and then she walked out of the room. I kept on talking and holding her hand and then she died. It was during the 3–11 P.M. shift, around 10:00 P.M.”

  “The worst moment was coming to her house with Marsha after she’d died,” says O’Brien. “I stood by the side of the bed and Marsha leaned over and kissed Mary on the forehead.”

  They finished the obituary and, in the middle of the night, O’Brien delivered it to the wire services; then he flew to New York the next day with Mary’s body. The undertakers met him at the airport. Determined to have her look in death as she had in life, he insisted that her hair, makeup, and clothes look natural. Her wig was styled in the smoothed-back pompadour she favored, and she was dressed in a long dark skirt and dressy blouse for the viewing on May 30 and 31.

  The next day, June 1, a crowd packed St. Ignatius Loyola Church for the first of two funerals. It was a quarter of a century after Mary had been baptized in the same church. Musicians, friends, and fans flocked to pay their respects. Hazel Scott and Benny Goodman sat near the front. Sarah Vaughan sent flowers in the shape of a piano. “Lorraine Gillespie never comes out, but she was there, and I had to calm her down,” recalls O’Brien. Mary’s favorite grandniece, Karen Rollins, spoke at the service, as did Mabel Mercer. There were quantities of musical tributes, among them Dizzy Gillespie’s “Con Alma,” Buster Williams’s “I Love You,” Hilton Ruiz’s “Medi II,” Ellis Larkins’s “Willow Weep for Me,” and others.

  After the funeral in Manhattan, Jerry Burley accompanied her casket to Pittsburgh for a Mass of Christian Burial on June 2, at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church in East Liberty. Again, the church was filled with family, friends, dignitaries, and musicians. Afterwards, Mary was interred in Calvary Cemetery in a peaceful, hilly section of Pittsburgh, close to other family members, in a plot that has been kept neatly weeded and supplied with fresh flowers. It was a fitting place of burial. Mary had liked hills. With a view spreading out before her, she had often taken out music paper and pencil and composed.

  Jazz critic Gary Giddins, asked to deliver the eulogy at the funeral in Manhattan, had confronted the basic reality of sexism in jazz, which Mary had preferred to deflect in life. Giddins noted, “When she later attributed her acceptance among the giants of the era to ‘that mannish thing in my playing,’ she was confronting a basic truth about jazz: that it was a driven, competitive music, and that its clubbish milieu and traditional celebration of masculine bravura made it difficult for women to participate as equals.” He went on: “She didn’t—couldn’t—completely succeed, but she made a crucial difference.” This assertion—that jazz was a macho preserve that largely excluded women, and that Mary as a woman player was not completely successful in overcoming the layers of resistance—was bound to rile some who were present. (In fact, it probably would have riled Mary.) But for others, especially the younger generation of jazz lovers, Giddins spoke a poignant truth by acknowledging the tremendous hurdles that a black American female artist of high caliber had to surmount.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Mary Lou Williams Foundation

  IN JANUARY 1980, soon after her major surgery, Mary, facing her mortality, made plans to update her will and revive her dream of helping others after she’d gone by founding a nonprofit organization. It was a dream she’d deferred since her unsuccessful Bel Canto Foundation in the 1960s. She had hoped too optimistically then for specific goals to be achieved: to divert some of her income to help fund her Cecilia Music Publishing Company and Mary Records, as well as to help support her ailing mother and her nephew Robbie’s music education, and to have enough left over to give to then-Bishop Wright in Pittsburgh for his youth ministry—“especially,” she designated, “for blacks and native Americans.” She’d had a tough time just maintaining herself, let alone funding a flurry of worthy projects. But by 1980, things had changed; her mother had died, Robbie wanted little to do with her, and she was reasonably prosperous.

  Although she kept her own counsel, Mary seems to have considered several possibilities for setting up her new foundation. She sought the advice of her old friend the pianist Billy Taylor, who had spearheaded the Jazzmobile, a very successful nonprofit organization in New York. She tiptoed around the topic of O’Brien’s involvement. “She did say she wanted to talk about Peter someday,” Taylor recalls, adding, “but she never did.” Similarly with her close friend Joyce Breach: “She said over the phone the next time she saw me that she wanted to talk about Peter, but I never pressed her about it. Nor did I tell Mary how I felt about Peter,” adds Breach, “because I didn’t want to hurt her.” In the end, when Mary incorporated the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, she chose Peter O’Brien as director, but she also asked Joyce Breach. The two were soon at loggerheads.

  Mary, according to the minutes taken by Marian Turner at a bedside meeting to plan the foundation in the winter of 1981, “wanted Duke University to be considered. She also made special reference that some place be chosen not al
ready involved in jazz—a fresh beginning may ensure more enthusiasm for her own purpose.” Duke’s president, the late Terry Sanford, was eager to cooperate. “There was enough money in the estate that with the university’s management policies, the endowment could have been grown to a reasonable amount,” adds Paul Vick. “And there are the resources at Duke to catalogue her material. But to do this, Duke would have had to manage the assets—it couldn’t be done as a structure to support Peter. But Peter wouldn’t let anybody else in—control of the foundation became central to his life.” The head librarian at Duke, Dr. John Druesdeou, adds, “We really tried to get Father O’Brien to leave her papers here. However, he took everything.”

  O’Brien remembers things quite differently, emphasizing that no one “at the top” approached him from the university about any such arrangements. He soon began to set his sights elsewhere; eventually, Mary’s archive came to be housed at the Institute of Jazz Studies, founded by Marshall Stearns and long overseen by Dan Morgenstern, at Rutgers University’s Newark campus. An important and prestigious institution, yes; but hardly “a place … not already involved in jazz.”

  Mary was quite clear about her goals for her foundation, as stated in the certificate of incorporation, dated February 25, 1980:

  To conduct activities which are exclusively charitable, literary and educational … including the advancement of public knowledge of the art of jazz music by teaching the same in all its forms to children between the ages of 6 and 12, individually and/or in groups, enabling them to perform before audiences, and giving them the opportunity to hear jazz in concert and studio performance.