Happy 106th Birthday, Mary Lou Williams!

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Composer, arranger and pianist extraordinaire Mary Lou Williams was born 106 years ago today in Atlanta, Georgia. Mary Lou’s mother and grandmother both worked as laundresses, but on the weekends, they drank heavily and argued. Mary Lou was a child prodigy on the piano, earning money to help support her family by entertaining at parties thrown by well-to-do white families.

As a teenager, she escaped the unhealthy home environment she’d grown up in, playing piano in traveling shows before settling in Kansas City in the late 1920s; it was an era when jazz music was dominated by men, and few were willing to give a young woman like Mary Lou a chance. Her husband, John Williams, was hired by bandleader Andy Kirk, and when Chicago record executive Jack Kapp came to town to audition local talent for the Brunswick label, Kirk’s usual pianist didn’t show. Williams, who had been touting Mary Lou’s abilities, convinced Kirk to give her a try.

Mary Lou was called and she rushed down to the club. The gig was a success, and Kapp arranged with Kirk for the band to do a recording session in Chi-town. The trouble was, when they arrived in the Windy City, they hadn’t brought Mary Lou with them, considering her just a fill-in. Kapp didn’t consider her a fill-in, though; he told Kirk there would be no recording with her. She was hastily summoned from Kansas City, and the session was a success.

With Mary Lou providing innovative arrangements and excelling in her role as featured instrumentalist, the Kirk Orchestra became more popular than ever. Eventually, Kirk and Williams began to butt heads as she continued to try to stretch out as a composer and arranger. She began to hear from other bandleaders—Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong, among them—asking her to do arrangements for them, and that perhaps understandably didn’t sit well with Kirk. For her part, Mary Lou felt underappreciated and underpaid, so she parted ways with Kirk and moved to New York, where Duke Ellington invited her to do arrangements for his orchestra.

That wasn’t a full-time gig, though, and Mary Lou was looking for her chance to shine. It came when jazz producer John Hammond arranged for her to be a featured performer at Café Society. She played there with just bass and drums as accompaniment, which required something of an adjustment on her part, after years of being a key cog in a big band. It was all on her now. Her run at the nightspot proved to be a success.

Though others of her generation rejected the innovations that came to be known as bebop, Mary Lou, ever looking to grow and stretch out, embraced them. “I tried to encourage the Modernists,” she said, “because I believed that bebop was here to stay.” This, even though she felt that many of the leaders of the new movement had borrowed from her work without giving her due credit.

Mary Lou’s NYC apartment became something of a salon where young jazz musicians would gather. She was willing to serve as something of a mentor to these young up-and-comers. She even wrote a song, In The Land of Oo-Bla-Dee, that was a big hit for Dizzy Gillespie and his band.

Sadly, at this stage of her life, Mary Lou was associated in minds of many with an older style of music and she wasn’t able to secure a recording contract, though she had a popular radio show at the time. Inspired in part by Ellington’s groundbreaking jazz suite, Black, Brown and Beige, she aimed to have a series of piano sketches she’d composed, under the name The Zodiac Suite, performed by an orchestra, and she succeeded: In 1946, an historic performance of the suite was undertaken at Carnegie Hall. But the reviews were not positive: It seemed the critics viewed The Zodiac Suite as neither fish nor foul, neither jazz nor classical.

So Mary Lou Williams, like many African-American jazz musicians before her, looked to Europe, but unlike many who preceded her in taking their talents overseas, Mary Lou found no satisfaction there. She returned to NYC and holed herself up in her apartment, putting aside music altogether as she dealt with emotional and mental distress.

As she put it, “Music had left my head.” She began to experience bad dreams, which she tried to interpret through drawings. She felt frightened when she began receiving messages from comic books, television and radio. “One day,” she said, “I heard a sound, like, ‘Go and purchase a rosary.’ I wondered what was happening; yet, I followed my sound to a Catholic church and started wailing madly. I was 44 years old and never asked God for forgiveness.”

Mary Lou found solace in the church—a “feeling of eternity,” as she put it. She joined St. Francis of Xavier church, where she met Father Anthony Woods, who encouraged her to return to her music. “Mary, you’re an artist,” he told her. “It’s your business to help people through music.” Father Woods asked Mary to consider writing a mass, and she was energized by the concept of combining her faith with her gift for music.

That request from Father Woods led Mary back into her music, and she experienced a renaissance in her career, finding herself in demand again.

Mary Lou Williams passed away from cancer in 1981, at the age of 71. She had arranged and composed more than 350 pieces of music.

Happy birthday, Ms. Williams, wherever you may be.

In Your Hat, pt. 13

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In the 13th and final chapter of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars Renee Carroll, she admits, after a dozen chapters spent glorifying the world of show business and the performers who populate it, that she finds the whole circus a bit depressing. It’s the has-beens, more than the wanna-bes, that sadden her, it seems, and she insists that she’s content to stick with the going concern that is her hat check concession. “I know that’s going to last,” Carroll writes.

She was wrong, of course. Hats have fallen mostly out of favor (though some of us still wear them), and many restaurants today don’t even offer a coat check service. But, for the most part, hats hung in there long enough for Ms. Carroll.

If you read to the end of this brief closing chapter, you’ll find some updates from throughout Ms. Carroll’s life, written in 1947 and 1951.

WELL, I’ve finished my fifth year at Sardi’s. The only thing that have increased are the measurements of my hips, the number of people I know, and the size of my tips! But I’ve never been happier in my life.

Broadway is a funny place. It means so many different things to so many different people. To those who had to fight their way up only to find, as the great Winchell puts it, “It’s easy enough to climb to the top of the ladder—the hard thing is to stay there”, Broadway is just a tragedy of shattered hopes. To those who are just starting out, with all their illusions still glittering brightly, Broadway is “the greatest community in the world.”

But to me, standing on the sidelines and watching the whole panorama unfold past my hat check cubby-hole, Broadway is just another street. It may have more mazdas, but it’s just as good a place to keep away from as the proverbial pool-room on the proverbial Main Street. It has its rewards, sure!—But so, too, have Broadway in Podunkville, and Metropolitan Avenue in Sqeedunk Hollow.

I wouldn’t swap my job for all the five-year contracts (with options) in Hollywood! I wouldn’t change places with all the girls Earl Carroll hopes he’s going to “discover” in the next five years! A few years of my face and figure might be enough for the theatre and movie-going public—but they’ll always want to have their hats checked. And as long as I don’t get their derbies mixed up, they’re going to need me. But show business—phooey! You fade quicker than a bleached blonde.

In Your Hat, pt. 12

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In Chapter 12 of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars Renee Carroll, she reveals what various celebrities wrote in her collection of autograph books, and she follows that with tales of what the stars of the day liked to eat when they patronized Sardi’s.

If you took a rabbit out of those suckers’ hats
They would squawk just the same:
They all have two strikes on them
When they are born.

TEXAS GUINAN

THAT’S an autograph left in my book by Tex. I’m not quite clear as to its meaning, and I don’t think she is either. But vaguely, it’s Broadway’s philosophy. If somebody pats you on the back, he’s only locating a spot for the knife thrust. If you give a sucker a break, he’s liable to shove his hand in and rip it apart.

Of course, all this is only sentimental hooey, and the boys and girls on Broadway are just as maudlin about one another as boys in an English boarding school. They all want to appear like awful, terrible “bad mans” with no hearts at all. The visage is stern, but the head and heart are made of mush, and it oozes through your fingers when you squeeze it.

I’ve got three books full of autographs. Perhaps a glance at some of them might throw an interesting light on the writers. I particularly like that of Frances Williams, whose cheeriness and glibness is not limited to her appeareances on the stage.

“May every hat check bring you a fat check—and may no meanie neglect my Renee—who never wrecks hats each time she checks hats—Frances Williams.”

Most of the celebrities pore over the book, seeking inspiration in the lines already written. Very few show any originality at all. Al Jolson, in one of his brighter moments, scribbled:

“Oh, look, I am in your book—thanks for letting me.”

And Louis Sobol, the Journal‘s columnist, wrote:

“To Renee, who expects something clever from me but won’t get it.”

Russell Patterson, the artist, who very rarely wears a hat, said as much, regretfully, with:

“To Renee, from her worst customer.”

Tony Canzoneri, the prize fighter, dragged his trade in by the teeth when he inscribed:

“To a real and sweet girl, with loads of knockouts.
Tony Canzoneri,
Lightweight Champion of the World.”

The professional gate crasher, Tammany Young, waxed philosophical and wrote:

“To Renee—
“Who takes what you give graciously. All life is a game of give and take. For what she takes she gives in a return a smile, a cheerful greeting and your belongings. May you go a long ways and prosper. Keep smiling Renee, it’s what we all go for.”

I think George Jessel‘s autograph amusing:

“To Renee—
            Duchess of Sardi,
               from
               Baron George Jessel,
               Colonel of the Bronx Grenadiers
               And Vis-count of Brownsville.”

Sidney Skolsky, the paragrapher, gave me away with:

“You’ll always be Miss Shapiro to me—one of my best yarns. Sidney Skolsky
P.S. She sleeps in the raw!”

If you can remember Herbert Rawlinson, you’ll remember his signature, too:

“My hat’s off to you. (Get it?) Je parle français aussi. (I hope that’s right).”

And Jesse Crawford noted:

“My autograph I here inscribe,
A member of the organ tribe
Jesse Crawford,
Poet (?) of the Organ.”

The little movie star, Marian Marsh, gave me a a straight tip with:

“Keep your face towards the sun and the shadows will fall behind you.”

And Reri who starred in F.W. Murnau‘s Tabu and was brought to American by Ziegfeld, wrote in the only language she knew:

“A mon amie Renee en souvenir des Ziegfeld Follies 1931.”

I offer the inscription of Sam Shipman, the playwright, because it is more or less typical of Broadway sentiment and ways of thinking:

“A hat girl who has more in her head than all the brains those hats cover. A little princess on a door mat—An oriental pearl in a suffocating shell—a ruby in a musty purse, but watch her.”

And Everett Marshall, the lusty-voiced baritone, dropped this:

“To Renee. In memory of my first daughter of four kilos.”

While Faith Baldwin, the author of Self Made Woman, wrote simply:

“Because I like red-heads.”

I’ve got lots of drawings, too, by famous artists, all of them too risqué for reproduction, and in some cases too combustible for safekeeping. Some of our best known illustrators have garnished the pages of my little books with drawings that would make those paintings on the bathroom walls of old Pompeii quiver with shame.

But not all the good things happen in autograph books or at penthouse parties. I have a lot of laughs right in the restaurant.

In Your Hat, pt. 11

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In Chapter 11 of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars Renee Carroll, she shares tales of various characters she knew, including Jack Oakie, The Four Marx Brothers, Wilson Mizner, George Jessel, Harry Richman, Clara Bow, and Lilyan Tashman.

SARDI’S may be the place where the celebrities gather, but I get more slugs and buttons in my tip box than I can use in a year’s mending. Figure it out for yourself—the most highly paid performers and theatrical executives slip me slugs I wouldn’t even try on my molars to find out if they’re real or not.

And speaking of tipping and the things I find in my box at the end of the day, one of the most common phenomena are the little slips of paper upon which telephone numbers have been scribbled. I’ve got, or rather, I could have collected a private phone list than the Manhattan police department, not to mention the Broolynites and Bronxites who have been date-hungry.

Maybe I’m wrong, and that’s only one way of kidding me. Another way is the method Jack Oakie used, to make me feel like the butt of a bad joke.

Jack came into the restaurant one day and asked me in his really-not-obnoxious breezy manner how things were going. Just for the fun of it, I told him that I was going to get married the next day. I had no more idea of getting married, then, than the girl in the swing on the big Pepsodent sign. As some wit once said, marriage is an institution, and hwo wants to live in an institution?

But that clown of clowns, that zanie Oakie, set to work and circulated among Sardi’s guests, telling all his friends that I was an expectant mother. When people started to leave the place, I noticed that no one was looking me directly in the eyes, but instead were looking down at me and at the same time talking in a sort of reverentially hushed tone—the kind I gather that people assume when they accost young mothers-to-be.

I didn’t suspect then what was happening, but the next morning when packages began to arrive by every means of transportation except the pony express, I began to smell a good-sized rodent in Mr. Oakie’s direction. For people were sending me baby clothes—dresses, bibs, caps, towels, and all the other accessories necessary to have babies. The pay-off came when Oakie’s package arrived. It contained a dozen towels, stolen from a Pullman, three napkins from three different hotels and a couple of table cloths from a club. All of the Oakie presents were cut into reminiscent triangular shapes—with the names of the places from which they were filched neatly embroidered in the corner of each pseudo-diaper.

But the height of pure nuttiness was achieved by the Four Marx Brothers when they were making Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts at the Astoria studio for Paramount.

In Your Hat, pt. 10

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In Chapter 10 of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars Renee Carroll, she shares tales of the various scams, cons, and rackets one was likely to encounter along Broadway back in the day and the characters behind them, including Harry, the Rose Seller, Dick the Bicyclist, and Angelo, the Newsboy.

KNOWING Owney Madden and Rothstein and thinking of them as racketeers of a higher order makes it just a little bit difficult to train your telescope down the line and pick up such characters as “Harry, the Rose Seller,” “Dick the Bicyclist,” “Angelo, the Newsboy” and the others who infest Times Square with petty rackets.

Still, for sheer ingenuity, Faginesque cunning with any of the harder criminal tendencies, these petty workers of the Main Stem take some kind of cake—and it’s probably sponge.

Because I know Broadway so well, from the tallest to the shortest, I’m also personally acquainted with the petty rackets, but maybe I’m exaggerating when I say petty, because if fifty dollars a night as wages is petty, then I’m Clara Bow and Rin Tin Tin was my favorite nephew.

I got to know Dick, who owns a bicycle and wants everybody to know it, because I used to pass him every night on his beat. After a while he came to know me, too, and would stop me and exchange stories, which was quite harmless.

Dick’s right name is Abie Marcovitch and he was born down on Allen Street. He was one of those kids who get wanderlust at the age of sixteen. So one day, bidding his father a penciled note of a good-by, he bought himself a bicycle with the money he had saved from his Saturday job and pedaled away towards New Jersey.

When he came to Harrison he got discouraged (who wouldn’t?) and decided that the great Wets would probably remain so, without any part of him. So he turned around and started to wheel home. But a few miles later he conceived a brilliant scheme. He was going into the petty racketeering business!

He stopped off in Jersey City and began to carry out his plan. First, he traded in his new bike for a second-hand one. It was a sturdy but dilapidated affair that had seen service on the velodrome floor. Then he visited an old bookstore that carried a sideline of curiosities. Here he selected a collection of used postal cards showing the sights of various countries of the world. The postal cards he pasted on a triangular cardboard which he has mounted within a frame and attached to the rear of his bicycle.

Then he bought a second hand aviator’s helmet, a pair of goggles, a windbreaker and a pair of puttees. These he splashed liberally with mud. Later he purchased a knapsack and filled it with a few essentials including a towel and soap.

With this equipment he proceeded on his interrupted journey into New York. Oh, I forgot,—in red ink he wrote across the postcards of his prowess as a wheelman. “New York to San Francisco in Fifteen Days”, “Paris to Rome”, “Moscow to Vienna”, and other phony inscriptions.

When he came to Times Square, he parked his wheel with a friend until nightfall and then went about his plan. He had it figured out that people are gayest at the time that the theater is over, for then the carefree usually start out on their merry-go-round of the evening.

Well, he parked up on Broadway somewhere, just outside the very busy zone but still in the theater district. All he did was stand his wheel at the curb and lean against it. He was a curious sight for Broadway. Spattered with mud and dust, his wheel was obviously the veteran of thousands of miles, his postcards testifying to his integrity. In five minutes a sympathetic crowd had gathered. Some read the postcards or the messages he had scribbled across them from the mayors of the towns he supposedly had visited. Some asked him questions which he answered glibly.

The racket, as he went on to explain to anybody he could buttonhole, was that he was trying to get to Japan and anything they could help him with would be like manna. After the first night’s work, some two hours of standing and talking, little Abie discovered that he had collected almost $25 for his pains. People were very generous and interested. To some he told stories of hardship and privation encountered in his fake travels; other learned of his proposed jaunt to the Orient—and everybody helped.

It seems that most people have a feeling that they’d like to travel and if they find they can’t but are able to help somebody else to do what they’d like to do by donating a dime or a quarter, more than likely they’ll come across. Besides, Abie was a quick talker, and knew whom to talk to longest.

This kept up for about a week, at the end of which time he discovered tat he was a rich man indeed. During that first seven days he had collected $225, more than he had earned in his whole life and more than his father could earn in two months. Unlike other kids of his age he kept quiet about it, stuck his money in a bank, and kept on riding his wheel up to Times Square every night.

After people got to know him they took him more or less as a joke. But figure out for yourself how much $200 a week is for a year and it’s no joke.

Abie kept it up for about fourteen months. He had to be careful. He was getting too well known to the cops and his spiel to the people about getting off to Japan on the next day was a little worn when the same people who slipped him a couple of dollars on more than one occasion came back to ask about it.

Finally, he rode off one night and I haven’t seen him since. As far as I can remember he worked that racket for about $10,000. I’m not sure but I think I saw him once after that on Broadway. He was dressed up in fine clothes and was escorting a nice Jewish girl. I said hello but he gave me a cold stare that froze my appendix to the spot, and the girl looked at him very suspiciously. If it’s his wife I hope he doesn’t try any petty rackets with her. She didn’t seem the type.