Is That All There Is?

by James Gavin

  Lee didn’t speak much of Min publicly until after her death in 1971. But from then on she attacked her stepmother with a vengeance, charging her with the beastliest of brutalities. Lee’s most damning recollections of Min begin, chronologically, right after the marriage. Washing dishes was one of Norma’s duties; she was so little she had to stand on a box to reach the sink. “If the water was not hot enough,” asserted Lee, “she would pour boiling water over my hands.” At the house, she said, she was held captive at the washboard, “scrubbing the shirt collars and cuffs with Fels Naptha Soap”—a lye-based laundry cleaner—“until my knuckles were bleeding.”

  Min, she said, had once whipped her so hard on her back that she drew blood—just because the child had slipped in a puddle. Atrocities mounted: Min bashed Norma on the head with a frying pan, hit her in the face with a metal-ended razor strap, grabbed her hair and dragged her around by it. The stories took a high place in Lee’s personal mythology, and her stepmother became known to the singer’s fans as the all-oppressive pinnacle of evil in her life.

  What was the truth? Betty Jungheim recalled working late into the night at Lee’s home with Marion (now known as Marianne), her sister’s occasional girl Friday. The two women spoke of Lee’s obsession with Min. “Peggy went on and on about how horrible Min was,” said Jungheim. “Marianne said, ‘You know what’s funny? I was there and I don’t remember any of this!’ ” Dona Harsh, who was close to both Marianne and Della, couldn’t remember either sister saying a bad word about Min. “But Peggy exaggerated everything,” said Dona.

  Certainly Min was no stranger to corporal punishment, then the norm in childrearing. According to Janice Wiese Duffy, Min had been raised with it, and practiced it toward her own son. Lynn Ringuette recalled hearing about Min punishing his mother Marianne for some indiscretion by whacking her on the back with the dull edge of a knife.

  It took Artis Conitz to give the most authoritative word on the matter. Norma was eight when she met Artis, and they were inseparable for the next six years—the prime time of the alleged violence. “Min never abused Norma physically,” she insisted. “I think if Min had beat Norma like she implied, her father would have killed her. He loved that girl to death.” The children used to skinny-dip together in a creek that ran through the Conitzs’ pasture. “I saw a lot of her body,” explained Artis. “I never saw her with a black and blue mark or a scar or a scratch or a Band-Aid.” Still, she said, “Min did everything she could to make Norma’s life miserable. For some reason she hated Norma with a passion. It was obvious to everybody.” One of Min’s key weapons was to ignore the child, which had an effect as painful as any beating. “Min made her feel unnecessary,” said Artis. “Invisible.”

  Lee recounted her version of Min’s abuse in such searing terms that one wondered if she actually believed it were true. Paul Pines, a jazz-club owner, psychologist, and poet, was fascinated by Peggy Lee, and he had his own theories. “I think that one has to make a distinction between the literal truth and the psychological truth. The story she told was the reality of how she felt about her experiences. One of the things that children often suffer from is not being seen. They feel like they exist in a landscape where they are lost, where nobody knows them. If they translate the emotional beating into literal, physical terms, their experience can be rendered the way they felt it. It’s a cry for attention.”

  But as Lee’s assistant in the nineties, Robert Strom, observed: “There are two sides to every story. It’s clear that whatever Min did had this lifelong, unforgettable impact on Peggy.” The furor of their clash nurtured Lee’s fighting spirit. All the while, she clung to her sense of abandonment and rejection and carried it into nearly all her relationships. As a girl, Norma learned about emotional abuse from Min; as Peggy Lee, she often wielded it against her loved ones.

  And against her stepmother. Norma detected Min’s weak spots, which gave the child the ammunition she wanted. She brought up Selma whenever possible, while stressing the fact that she was her father’s favorite. The emotional war escalated. Lee told of a time when Min found her in the attic, looking through old family photos in hopes of seeing her mother. Min, she claimed, retaliated by burning all the pictures. The older woman also ridiculed Norma’s hands, which were oversize. The child felt terribly self-conscious and kept trying to hide them. Later, as Norma began to show an interest in singing, Min belittled that, too.

  The businesslike German couldn’t help but resent daydreaming Norma. Instead of working, the child talked to a fictional playmate named Green Cida, and pretended to feed imaginary chickens. She identified with lost souls, such as the hobos that passed through town. Some of them traveled for free by climbing on top of railroad cars. When a wanderer crossed her path, the child would say hello, then invite him home for a meal. Inevitably Min and Marvin found out and put an end to Norma’s hospitality. She would have preferred the company of her father, but the more he drank, the more distant he seemed. Maybe because she saw him as another of Min’s victims, she forgave him everything. “He was a dear man, but very private,” she explained later. “I don’t think I ever knew him very well.” Still, she recalled him romantically: “He had light-brown hair, which never turned gray; he had beautiful gray eyes and a beautiful smile.” His touch, she said, was magic. “If I had a toothache he’d put his hand on my face and the ache would go away.” He sometimes stayed downstairs at the depot until past midnight, drunk and singing songs to the train tracks. When he finally came home, Marvin found Norma sound asleep at the dining room table, where she had waited up for him.

  Through it all, Norma was an excellent student. In school, she said, “I could get away from Min, so I studied hard and got good marks.” When class let out, she went to the Jamestown depot, where her father gave her small tasks. She preferred to playact the role of mistress of the depot. She waited excitedly for the train to pull in, and when her father let her run aboard, she pretended that the passenger coach was a restaurant car and she was in charge. Norma ran down the aisle, waited on imaginary people, then yelled the orders at a nonexistent chef.

  Her search for her mother continued. She recalled standing under a tree and talking to God, asking him where Selma was. No answer came, but the one-sided conversations eased her longing. Later, when she heard about a Bible school in nearby Nortonville, Marvin let her ride the train a number of times to attend. Maybe she would find her mother there, she thought. She recalled sitting on the floor and piecing together what she later called the first lyric she ever wrote; it began, “Mama’s gone to dreamland on a train.”

  Music may have struck her as a way to bond with Selma, who had loved to play the piano. Talent began to appear in Norma around the age of six. Her first-grade class had a percussion band, and a teacher held a rhythm class. In a 1993 interview with the record producers Ken Bloom and Bill Rudman, Peggy Lee remembered twenty children clapping in an effort to keep time. “There were only two of us that could do it. I thought, how strange that is. I wonder why they don’t know how much to measure between their hands so it’ll come out even. Obviously that’s something that comes with the genes.”

  With onstage microphones rare at that time, singers often performed with their mouths pressed to megaphones and bellowed with all their might. Recordings were made “acoustically” then; artists poured hefty volume into a big horn, which channeled the sound through a needle and cut sound waves into a spinning wax disc. Seventy-eight-rpm records were pricey, as were machines to play them on. But the Egstroms had somehow found the means to acquire a luxury item, an Edison Victrola with a huge metal horn for a speaker. What blared out sounded tinny and hissy, but the invention seemed miraculous. The record that Peggy Lee remembered best was “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” a chirpy number-one hit from 1926. The song promised brighter days, and little Norma could sing all the words.

  It was a huge hit for superstar Al Jolson, a Russian Jew whose nasal bray could almost shatter glass. But Norma
preferred the happy robin’s tale in a competing hit version by “Whispering” Jack Smith, a star vaudevillian. Smith had an unusual style for the time; he spoke-sang breathily, as though whispering secrets. Smith hit his peak in the mid-1920s, near the dawn of “electrical” recording, which employed a microphone. That revolutionary breakthrough enabled singers to tone it down. The mike could pick up gentler vocal contours and nuances, paving the way for an age of subtler, more refined popular singing. Smith’s style was an accident; as a World War I soldier he had inhaled poison gas, which destroyed his old lung power. His amiable plea to “Wake up, wake up, you sleepyhead/Get up, get up, get out of bed” sounded much sweeter to Norma Egstrom than Min’s impatient bark. Having come from a stoic Scandinavian tradition, where lids were kept on emotions of all kinds, Norma connected instantly with soft voices that expressed strong feelings.

  Her talent continued to reveal itself in small ways. Jamestown was full of accents, German and Russian as well as Scandinavian. She could mimic them with ease. But the sound that captivated her most was the blowing of the train whistle. In 1942, she told the New York Post about how “the sad whistle of the engines at a crossing” was the first music she had ever heard.

  Trains inspired a lot of songs, few of them happy. Their waaAAAHHH, waaAAAHHHs carried for miles throughout the empty prairie. That sound signaled the loneliness of the itinerant life, with pained good-byes at stations; it could echo like a wail in the night or a scream for help. “A freight train whistle taught me how to cry,” went “Freight Train Blues,” which Bob Dylan recorded on his first album.

  There were all sorts of whistles. Those on steam locomotives were sounded by a pull cord, which the train operator could manipulate to vary the pitch and duration, as though he were singing. He could create a bluesy slur, the kind heard in the singing of Bessie Smith and other blues pioneers. Some trains had several whistles, and clever operators could play chords or make choral sounds.

  Norma absorbed the vibratoless tone of the train whistle; once she became Peggy Lee, she used it in her singing. “When she wanted me to play bluesy she’d say, ‘trains,’ ” said Steve Blum, her guitarist in the late sixties.

  But Norma’s attraction to the dark side went far deeper than that. Ever since her mother’s mysterious demise, she was obsessed with what lay beyond. According to one grisly recollection, she and her Jamestown pal Everold “Ebbie” Jordan were out picking beans on a summer day. Wandering through a field, the two children spotted a snazzy Model A Ford parked off the road amid tall grass. They recognized it as the car of Fred Bitz, a man from the neighborhood. Moving closer, they peeked inside. There sat Fred at the wheel, maggots crawling all over him, his head slumped over amid a cloud of flies. Apparently he had sealed himself inside and left the engine running until the exhaust fumes suffocated him.

  Death seemed to be everywhere. She and Ebbie went to the wake of an acquaintance who had accidentally shot himself in the face. The two children stared down into the man’s open casket. “You could see all the black marks,” she recalled. Ebbie himself was still a child when he met a fate almost as grisly: the horse he was riding stepped into a gopher hole and fell, crushing him to death. When her dog, Rex, was mauled by a neighbor’s pack of hounds, Norma carried the dying animal up to her bedroom, then buried him beneath the railway bridge. She added spookier details in a story she jotted down for William Luce, the playwright enlisted to write the script for her 1983 Broadway show Peg. Wrote Lee of Jamestown: “Hank Schmidt—town drunk—wife killed herself. Came to get me and showed me how it happened—5:00 AM. Town thought he killed her.” So much early exposure to dying made her feel she had a direct rapport with the afterlife.

  But other brutal realities faced the Egstroms. In 1928, the general manager of the Midland Continental uncovered an embezzlement scheme among a few employees; Marvin was counted among the guilty.

  It was a grievous charge, but Marvin’s employer chose not to let him go. Instead, he transferred Marvin about twenty-six miles south to the depot in Nortonville, the least important stop on the Midland. A town of one hundred inhabitants, Nortonville was so minor that a mention of it could bring a smirk to anyone living in Jamestown or Bismarck. It was just a few blocks long—so small that the streets had no names, and the fifteen or so houses lacked numbers. There were dirt roads, three tall grain elevators, a lumberyard, a schoolhouse, a hotel where almost no one stayed, and—significant in that tiny but arduous town—two churches and two bars. Marvin became a regular in both saloons—no surprise, for apart from the blow to his ego, the demotion had brought a drop in salary from $175 to $100 a month.

  The Egstroms would live upstairs from the depot, which was decorated in drab Midland style, orange-yellow with green trim. The apartment had no phone, indoor plumbing, or electricity; kerosene lamps and candles provided light. Min worked as a train dispatcher at the same depot. Marion and Milford had left home, but Clair, Norma, and Edwin remained; Min enrolled them in the little Nortonville School.

  Norma got attention. “I envied her,” said Pearl Hickey, a local farmer’s daughter. “I always thought she was so pretty. I was a shy little gal from the country. Coming from Jamestown, she was a city gal.” Another classmate, Mattie Foy, recalled Norma as “just a new girl that we all came to like. She took part in everything that was held in our little Nortonville Town Hall. They used to have roller-skating and dances and movies and community plays. Her father was always in them, because he was quite an actor.”

  It was in Nortonville that Norma met her best friend, Artis Conitz, one of eight children born to a farmer and his wife. The Conitz home became her refuge, and she stayed overnight with the family whenever possible. Norma saw Artis’s mother as a beacon of kindness, her house as a peaceful place without anger. Mrs. Conitz ended up making most of Norma’s clothes, a task Min had no time to do. The children amused themselves by hiking in pastures, bending down to pluck wildflowers, and cutting out paper dolls and pictures from catalogs.

  On October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, plunging America into the Great Depression. But survival in North Dakota had already been pared down to bare-bones essentials; cows still produced milk, chickens kept laying eggs, the land yielded its harvest, the train rolled on no matter what. As the Jamestown professor Katherine Stevenson observed in 2010: “When you’re already dirt-poor, how do you know what the Depression is?”

  Having been branded a crook in Jamestown, Marvin now held the mantle of Nortonville town treasurer. His First Lady was seen as an upstanding community leader who could “be as sweet as apple pie,” according to Artis. Min hosted meetings for the local ladies’ club; the Edgeley Mail was rife with reports of her “delicious lunches” and of a stream of visiting houseguests given shelter by the Egstroms. But in the mornings there was work to do; all had to pitch in. And every day, Norma and Min crossed swords over it. When Min roused her brusquely at dawn to do her chores, the child seethed. “Min was strict, and very critical,” said Artis. “Norma would have to wash the kitchen floor. Min would make her do it again. She would keep Norma at home working in the morning, trying to make her late for school, so she’d get in trouble.” The principal found out and took sympathy on her. From upstairs in the schoolhouse, he could see the Egstrom home. He waited until she came out the door before he started ringing the bell.

  Norma never showed she was upset. “I think she was very, very strong-willed, and probably pugnacious and argumentative,” reflected William Luce. The girl began to purposely come home late from school, breaking a cardinal rule of Min’s. “She knew she wouldn’t get spanked because her dad wouldn’t allow it,” said Artis. “All Min could do was make her wash more dishes or whatever, work harder, longer.” Pearl Hickey saw Norma’s revenge: “She and Clair would tease Min and pick at her. Then Min would get mad and hit ’em.”

  On Sunday morning, January 5, 1930, Norma watched in glee as fate dealt Min a nasty blow. The young girl and her father had gone to church. In the middle of
the service, someone made a chilling announcement: the train depot was on fire. Mattie got in the car with the Egstroms; everyone else rushed over on foot.

  Approaching the depot, they saw smoke billowing out of the upstairs windows. A crowd had gathered. Moving closer, Norma, Marvin, and Mattie spotted Min on the ground, sprawled out and moaning in pain. Only minutes before, Min had lit the gas range to start dinner. Then she went downstairs into the barn. She heard an explosion—a sound she knew too well. Min grabbed a bucket and ran to the cistern pump. “She was gonna get some water and take it back up there, thinking she could do something for the fire, but she couldn’t, of course,” said Mattie. “It was winter, and there was a lot of ice.” Min slipped, and her weight took her down so hard she broke her leg.

  By the time a fire crew came, the depot was almost completely razed. Min was brought to the doctor in nearby Edgeley, whose newspaper wrote sympathetically of her plight: “Her many friends hope to hear that she will soon be back with them again.” A kindly local family took the Egstroms in until they found a home on the east end of town; the Midland hauled a small freight house to serve as temporary depot.

  Min’s accident gave Norma wicked satisfaction long after she had turned into Peggy Lee; in 1983 the singer included it in “One Beating a Day,” a comedy song about her stepmother’s evilness. For now, though, Norma was uprooted yet again, and the atmosphere inside their new home was almost as cold as the weather. She and Artis kept their distance from Edwin—the child whom Min naturally favored—and he from them. More than ever, Marvin found his solace in the bottle. Prohibition was on, and he brewed bootleg beer in the basement; after work he stopped at one of the local bars to keep imbibing. Spirits brightened, he would shuffle home, and the entertainment began. “He could tap-dance like nobody you ever saw in your life,” said Artis. “He only did it when he’d had too much to drink.” Marvin loved to sing an Irish jig about McGinty, whose wife Mary Ann took him out for a grand night of burlesque. Marvin belted out the song’s big finish: “He said, ‘Mary dear / Why did you bring me here? / I can never love you, you know / The way I used to . . .”