Harlem Nocturne (19 page)

Jack Teagarden, Dixie Bailey, Mary Lou Williams, Tadd Dameron, Hank Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, and Milt Orent in Mary Lou Williams's apartment, New York, August 1947. Photo by William P. Gottlieb.

 

In short, Williams made a home at Hamilton Terrace. Her marriage ended, but she created her own family and community. The apartment became a salon for musicians, writers, painters, journalists, and photographers. The younger musicians, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell, who pioneered the bebop revolution, were especially welcome. They would find the door open, an inviting pot on the stove, and, when she was there, Williams—as mentor, collaborator, and friend. They respected and admired her as an elder in the music world and a model artist.

Williams's status as a single, childless woman, as well as the stability afforded by her move to New York, helped to stimulate
one of her most exciting and productive periods, ushering in a new phase of artistic creativity and political activity. The crowds, the vibrancy, and the excitement of the city found its way into her music. The city's institutions—its libraries, museums, and performance venues—offered material and inspiration. The marriage of progressive political activism and innovative art forms provided a space for her own creative growth and political maturation to occur. In other words, the city served as an incubator for the further development of her inherent musical gifts, her spiritual sensibilities, and her desire for social justice. It is during this period that we see the beginnings of the spiritual, musical, and activist flowering that would occur in later decades.

Interestingly, at a time in life when most women were creating a home space and nurturing husbands and children, Mary Lou was creating a space that nurtured her own creativity and that of her fellow artists. As a result, she embarked upon a phase of her life characterized by fecund creativity grounded in place and community, as if she had been searching for a way to give back and had discovered a way to better her community and her nation. Her time in New York was not without its difficulties. Williams's later involvement with gamblers and other denizens of the Harlem night revealed the underside of New York's glamour, but Williams would use this to fuel her creativity and her humanitarian efforts.

During the 1940s, while writing and arranging music, Williams also wrote prose essays about her music, mentored and taught, recorded a number of albums, and performed
throughout the city. On many nights, she took the subway, composing music in her head as the train rattled through the tunnel headed to The Village. “I get my inspiration from modern things,” Williams said, and she counted the subway as one of them. Just as the subway gave Petry images and ideas for her fiction, it delivered musical ideas and sounds to Williams. She would arrive at the club “with the complete arrangement worked out.”
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Duke Ellington's “Take the A Train” is more famous, but Williams penned and recorded her own tribute to the famous subway line: “Eighth Avenue Express,” which she recorded in 1944.
¹⁸
The choo-choo of the drummer and Williams's hard left hand drive this highly energetic boogie-woogie blues song. The piece is complete with train stops and announcements beckoning arrival in Harlem.

Williams opened at Café Society sometime in June 1943 to a full house. “My opening, the people were standing upstairs,” she recalled. “Pearl Primus, my favorite dancer, was also in the show,” she later wrote. “I don't know of any other place quite like it. I must say that Barney was the greatest nightclub owner in the business. He'd give most anybody that was talented a chance to make good by putting them in the club for a long run. If they didn't become great then they just weren't good to begin with.”
¹⁹
Williams, of course, would become great. Years later, in the seventies, Josephson jump-started Williams's career again when he booked her at The Cookery, a club he opened in the 1970s.

Williams befriended many of the other artists at Café Society, including Primus and Imogene Coca, but her most enduring
friendship was with fellow pianist Hazel Scott. Some thought that there was a professional rivalry between the two, but this was far from true.
Time
magazine even tried to stoke such a rivalry by comparing the two women—without naming Scott, who was known for her glamour, her sexy presentation, her low-cut gowns, and her “swinging the classics” style. The July 26, 1943, issue of
Time
noted that Mary was “no kitten on the keys.” The reporter went further, writing, “She was not selling a pretty face or a low décolletage, or tricky swinging of Bach or Chopin. She was playing the blues, stomps, and boogie-woogie in the native Afro-American way—an art in which, at 33, she is already a veteran.” Barney Josephson wanted Williams to act more like Scott, but she refused to do so. As it had with Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, the press often made comparisons between Scott and Williams, noting the former's coy sexiness and the latter's artistic seriousness. However, unlike the two dancers, Scott and Williams were devoted friends. When Scott left Café Society Uptown to marry Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Josephson replaced her with Williams.

For Williams, Hazel Scott was a beloved younger sister. Scott, in turn, adored Williams and referred to her as a “Saint.” Scott had access to greater opportunity than Williams did and was the more famous of the two, but she would later fall upon hard times. In 1950, Scott became the star of the first television program hosted by a black woman. The fifteen-minute show first aired on July 3, 1950. But later that month her name appeared in the
Red Channels
, the notorious anti-Communist publication that led to the blacklisting of a number of entertainers.
Although Scott denied the charges, her show lost its sponsors; it was canceled in September. Scott's political problems were exacerbated by personal ones. In later years, after having separated from Powell, she moved to Paris. She recalled receiving checks and money orders from Williams, who may have been suffering her own financial difficulties. Williams was even maid of honor at Scott's second wedding. The two women loved and respected each other profoundly and had a lifelong friendship.
²⁰

At Café Society, Williams did three shows nightly, at 8:30 P.M., midnight, and 2:30
A.M.
The 8:30 audience included parents and children. But as the evening grew late, the audience would change as well. Williams recalled: “Our 8:00 show was packed with dad, mother and smaller children. . . . After 8 females were not allowed without an escort. . . . It was really like being in a big family. . . . The clientele consisted of the elite yet even the poorest was welcome whenever they came to see their favorite artist.”
²¹

She described Café Society as a community, almost a family: “On Sunday nights we had a little party, just the staff and a few musicians. Hazel Scott, Thelma Carpenter, Billy Strayhorn, Aaron Bridges and Lena Horne and friends would come by and we'd have the most enjoyable time.”
²²
In between sets, Williams would sometimes sit with her close friend Gray Weingarten, a college student at Syracuse, in Weingarten's car. Sometimes she would join other musicians and the club's emcee, Johnnie Gary, at the backstage door for a game of cards and a smoke.

On any given night at Café Society one might have found the artist David Stone Martin sitting in the audience, listening to and looking at the brilliant, beautiful pianist. Martin wrote notes to Williams on postcards depicting the club's famous murals; sometimes he jotted down something on napkins as well. The two became very good friends; if his passionate letters to her are any indication, they became lovers as well. In her writings, Williams referred to him only as her good friend: “I met a very talented artist named David Stone Martin who today is very well known in the jazz world. I asked him to do an illustration cover for me for one of my albums. . . . We became quite chummy.”
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She may have been reluctant to acknowledge their romance because Stone was married at the time of their involvement. Williams helped to start Martin's career; he produced many fine line drawings for jazz album covers throughout the 1940s and 1950s. His aesthetic concept helped to shape the mood through which the music would be heard.

Whether they were friends or a couple, when they were together in public Williams and Martin were subjected to the same prejudice and attacks that other interracial couples had to endure. Williams sometimes met Martin at his Village studio, and they took long walks through the winding streets of that legendary neighborhood. Once they were harassed by a group of young white men who disapproved of them. The confrontation became violent, and though David tried to fend them off, the men seem to have gotten the better of him. In spite of its long history of political progressivism, the Village was not always welcoming to black people or to interracial couples.
Richard Wright's biographer Hazel Rowley noted that because there were several violent incidents in the Village, where Italian gangs assaulted interracial couples in the spring of 1944, Wright never allowed his wife to take his arm or hold his hand in the street. When Wright and his wife Ellen, who was of Polish Jewish descent, decided to buy a home in the Village, they had to have a white surrogate act in their behalf. The real-estate agents, banks, and neighbors would not have welcomed a black resident. They set up a corporation, “the Richelieu Company,” to purchase the home.
²⁴

Martin also visited Williams in her Harlem apartment. There is no indication that they experienced similar harassment on the streets of Harlem. Ultimately, it seems, the inconveniences of Martin's marital status may have worn on the couple. Or perhaps Williams was able to maintain a relationship because he was married—and thus unable to really interfere with her artistic ambitions and her independent lifestyle. In any event, by 1945, the romantic relationship, if there was one, appears to have been over. Williams and Martin remained dear friends for life, but by the mid-forties, Williams was involved with another musician, Milton Orent.

Significantly, both Martin and Orent were white men. Williams had been married to only black men, and all of her romantic attachments before Martin had been to black men—all of whom were musicians. The love of her life was the great Ben Webster, a highly regarded jazz saxophonist, with whom she became involved in the thirties. Prior to moving to New York, her world had been primarily black. Although New York
was segregated, her social life in the city was not. There, she found herself in the company of young, hip, progressive men and women of both races. This was her community. It centered on the music.

Williams began performing at Café Society Uptown in 1945. Located on East 58th Street, the larger club lacked the warmth and intimacy of the downtown venue. Williams preferred the downtown venue, noting that, “for all its looks, the Uptown Café was nothing like Downtown—though it catered for the same kind of Eastside crowd: movie stars, millionaires and the elite. Downtown was groovy, more relaxed than uptown.”
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Josephson felt Williams could be as big a star as Hazel Scott, however, and he believed the move uptown would expose her to a broader audience.

Following the move uptown, Josephson helped secure a weekly radio show for Williams on WNEW. Called
The Mary Lou Williams Piano Workshop
, the show gave her an extraordinary opportunity to reach listeners who did not come to Café Society. It also gave her the chance to try out new works before premiering them.

Some nights between shows, Williams went to 52nd Street, “the Street,” to hear Billie Holiday at the 3 Deuces, or over to the Hurricane to see Duke Ellington's band. One night she sat in with the band when Duke was late. Fifty-second Street, between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, housed a number of clubs where on any given night you could hear stars from all eras of the short history of jazz: 3 Deuces, Kelly's Stable, the Hickory House, Leon & Eddies, Club Carousel, the Famous Door, the Onyx, Club Downbeat. Musicians, fans, and college students found their way to the Street, and so did the hustlers and the drug peddlers. Billie Holiday famously said, “I spent the rest of the war years on 52nd Street and a few other streets. I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they'd bring me the white gardenias and the white junk.” Williams never used heroin—nor did she drink; her substance of choice was marijuana. But she never passed judgment on those who became addicted. In fact, she later tried to set up a one-woman rehab in her apartment. She claimed, “It doesn't matter what a person does as long as I like him or he is blowing.”
²⁶
This was Mary's major criterion: first and foremost, she liked talented musicians who were disciplined and serious about the music.