My mother, Mary Catherine Wood Heilker, was found as an infant lying in a basket in the last row of pews in a Catholic church in Port Arthur, Texas. Pinned to the basket was her birth certificate, and the only things listed on that document were her sex and a last name: “Womack.” She was adopted by my grandmother, Jesse Moran Wood, who had just had a third trimester miscarriage and was nearly suicidal in her grief. The seeds for tragedy were there from the beginning, then. Just a few years later, Jesse was able to have her own biological child, my aunt Helen, and that’s when things got *really* interesting.
By all accounts, Jesse was a “stern woman” who pushed both girls into show business at an early age. While Helen was classically beautiful and a prodigy in both dance and violin, my mother was not. Moreover, Mary was diagnosed with a serious heart murmur when she was eight years old, which meant the end of her dance lessons. From what I can tell, Mary was essentially considered damaged goods from that point on. Helen, on the other hand, was in the Radio City Music Hall Christmas production when she was nine. She eventually danced regularly in Broadway productions and on the Ed Sullivan Show on TV, and then with Sammy Davis Jr.’s show in Las Vegas. She also was on contract with MGM for a while and appeared in several movies.
When Helen was on Broadway, the family lived on Manhattan, and my mother attended the Juilliard School of Music. Her heart does not seem to have been in it, though. She once had her violin — an Amati — stolen out of a practice room at Juilliard. (Good Amatis are now valued at around $500,000, by the way.) The police found her violin, thankfully, and gave it back to her. But then it was somehow stolen again.
As my father tells the story, he met my mother at Juilliard on a Monday, and by Tuesday she knew his schedule and met him after every class. There is no doubt that my parents adored each other. But it also seems clear that Mary saw Vince as the way out from under her mother’s iron rule and away from the endless painful comparisons to her sister. She dropped out of Juilliard. They got married. They played music together for a while, in the Bob Arnell Orchestra, for instance. In the photo and video below, you can see them dressed to the nines and playing at a recording session at Nola Records in NYC in 1951. But that was pretty much the end of playing music for my mom. I heard her sing occasionally growing up, but I never heard her play the violin.
From the outset, my parents’ relationship was doomed. On the one hand, Vince’s identity and purpose in life was entirely wrapped up in music from the time Benny gave him a sax at 13. On the other hand, both of Mary’s mothers *gave her up*. There is not enough love in the world to make up for something like that. Not surprisingly, she soon began to resent whatever time my father spent away from her, to resent whatever time he put into writing, arranging, practicing, or performing. It became the central argument of their marriage, and it lasted another 50 years.
