by James Gavin
Before she and Goodman left Chicago, the leader gave her another chance when they recorded a lightweight love song for dancing, “I See a Million People (But All I Can See Is You).” Defying Hammond, he had her lead off the record rather than just sing the second chorus, as band vocalists typically did. Calmer now, Lee sang with dulcet purity, and Goodman was pleased. But Down Beat’s Dave Dexter, Jr., called her the bandleader’s worst singer ever. “Miss Lee,” he wrote, “should be selling discs behind a counter instead of on the grooves.”
All the potshots convinced her that this dream hiring was a hopeless thing. Columnist Frank Farrell recalled the sight of her onstage: “She couldn’t sing a line without gripping the mike as if it were a baseball bat she was clinging to in mid-ocean after a shipwreck.” Even in her fifties, Lee looked back upon that time as a marathon of rejection. Down Beat ran a photo of her with the header, “Never Been Hissed.” In Lee’s mind, the pun metamorphosed into a painful and illogical putdown that she misquoted for years: “Sweet Sixteen and Will Never Be Missed.”
She decided to quit before Goodman fired her. The man who in Helen Forrest’s words “never said one kind word to anyone about anything” stunned Lee by refusing her resignation. She offered to take singing lessons; Goodman told her not to. “He said, ‘I’ve heard you sing, I know you can. I believe in you.’ ”
Lee’s conviction returned. “She’s one of the gals who way, way back said, ‘I’m gonna make it, I’m determined to have a singing career,’ ” observed Helen Ward. To give up would mean that Min was right—she really was wasting her time. Still, Goodman kept her neurotic. He liked to play with his band members’ heads, perhaps as a way of keeping them in line. Dona Harsh, Lee’s later secretary, recalled the singer’s account of a panic-stricken day when she woke up late for work. Goodman was a stickler for punctuality, and Lee jumped into her clothes and ran all the way from the hotel to the theater. “All the way she thought, ‘He’s gonna kill me, he’s gonna fire me!’ She got there. All he said was, ‘Hello, Peg.’ That was it.”
* * *
THE BIG BANDS SURVIVED by maintaining a grueling itinerary—a night here, a week there—that took them all over the country, with spouses and lovers left behind. For Lee, life on the road “was like boot camp, tremendously tough to endure. But if you come through it, you’ll be in shape for anything that comes along.”
The job was such a grind, however, that visions of glamour faded fast. As Helen O’Connell, the beautiful blond songbird from the Jimmy Dorsey orchestra, later joked: “If I’d known it was going to be an ‘era,’ I’d have paid closer attention!” Goodman’s earlier pianist, Jess Stacy, recalled a schedule of fifty one-nighters in a row. When the Clark Sisters traveled with the Tommy Dorsey band, each stop in their haphazard agenda seemed “a million miles away,” said Peggy Clark. Everyone tried to sleep in stiff bus seats as cars traveled bumpy unpaved roads and turned hairpin corners. Finally they stumbled off the vehicle and into the lobby of some hotel or motel whose rooms they would pay for themselves. “They were all dumps—grim, grimy, just awful,” said Helen Ward.
Sometimes band personnel had time for a quick nap and a shower before the gig; more often they drove straight to the venue. Wolfed-down diner food or drugstore sandwiches would have to do. Lee applied makeup in ladies’ rooms and pressed her gowns in any nook of the venue that had a flat surface and an electrical outlet. With a curling iron, she rushed to create the sausage curls that hung on her neck and forehead.
At theaters like the Paramount, where a musical act alternated with a film, bands played as many as eight shows per day. In ballrooms they performed several sets per night, with short breaks. “I used to average about two hours’ sleep a night,” said Lee in 1986. “I’m glad I was young enough to take it.” Sometimes they barely could, and doddered through their paces on numbed autopilot. “We were like those little Swiss toys in a cuckoo clock,” she observed.
Off they sped to their next destination. Wildly disorganized agendas, backroad paths, and dark, wet nights comprised many an itinerary. Down Beat’s pages held hair-raising accounts of cars and buses that crashed, skidding over embankments or sliding on ice. Many musicians died in transit. Ballroom fires were not uncommon then; numerous bands found their instruments melted and gnarled and their music in ashes.
Yet for all the hazards, almost every jazz musician and aspiring pop singer in the country longed to work in a big band. It meant employment with the swing idols of the day, and the chance to perform songs that made millions of Americans sigh or sing along. On the bandstand sat fifteen to twenty-one musicians, neatly arranged and wearing jackets and bow ties. Vocalists stayed in chairs to the side, smiling frozenly as they waited for their turn to sing. They looked out at a sea of jitterbugging youths—girls in bobby sox and sweaters, hair tied demurely with a bow; clean-cut boys with Brylcreemed hair. The show-offs wore zoot suits, the flamboyant Harlem look known for its wide, padded shoulders, high waist, and billowy legs. Starry-eyed couples stood near the bandstand, swaying in embrace as the singers sang of eternal love. No matter how tired she was, Ann Clark recalled the experience of singing with a big band as “the biggest thrill in life. It energizes you; it gives you so much strength.”
That was something Peggy Lee had, however timid she seemed. “I was strong,” she said in 1982. “You can’t believe how strong.” North Dakota life—including Min’s iron hand—had made her that way. Pianist Hal Schaefer, who accompanied her later in the forties, caught her dual nature as he watched her from the piano. “My God, she had shoulders on her,” he said. “From the back she looked like a man.” Face to face, Lee appeared sweet, with a ready smile, but in her own inscrutable world. Autobiographical jottings about her Goodman days, written years later, give a sense of the dark and foggy creature he had hired. In a reference to the band’s Manhattan headquarters, Lee notes without elaboration, “New Yorker Hotel—all the suicides falling by my window.”
But the public saw a princess: five foot seven yet seemingly taller, with sunshiny blond hair (lightened by peroxide) and a winsome sexiness. Lee had upped the band’s box-office appeal, but to Goodman and most of his peers, singers were an attention-stealing necessary evil. Few had dared to withdraw into themselves, as Lee did, and make an audience come to them.
Goodman may have discovered her, but he wasn’t eager to give her too much of his spotlight. His band, she said, was “better to listen to” than to sing with; he demanded swing, and he liked it loud. Her heart sank when she heard the first run-through of the George and Ira Gershwin tearjerker “But Not for Me,” arranged for her. “He had it roaring,” she recalled. Boldly, Lee spoke up: “Benny, that’s not the way I would sing that.” Rather than slow it down, he scrapped it altogether.
Yet Goodman allowed his new arranger, Eddie Sauter, to give her what she wanted. “He didn’t like singers either,” said Lee. Still, he realized her potential, and began building sophisticated charts around her. A baby-faced, brainy twenty-six-year-old with a degree from Juilliard, Sauter had given swing arranging a new degree of finesse. He loved the French Impressionist composers such as Debussy and Ravel, and sought to bring their dissonant colors and dreamlike atmospheres to the band.
In the fall of 1941, during a long Goodman engagement in New York, Sauter showcased Lee dramatically in Duke Ellington’s “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good).” She, not Goodman, was the star of this side; breaking with big-band tradition, her chorus came first. Sauter’s moody sonorities, combined with the heartbreak of the song, had their effect on her. As Lee begged God to make her man stop mistreating her, flickers of pain shot through the poised, glassy surface of her singing. Mel Powell pushed her furthur into the spotlight with an arrangement of Cole Porter’s risqué come-on, “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love).” Lee sang the politically incorrect words—“Chinks do it / Japs do it / Up in Lapland little Laps do it”—with the blunt phrasing of a gum-chewing floozy on a barstool; she had copied it from Laura Ruc
ker. Her improvisations on the tune could have come out of Goodman’s horn.
“I Got It Bad” rose to number twenty-five on the charts—Lee’s first hit. In Down Beat, Dave Dexter, Jr., offered a mea culpa: “It’s with a double-swallow of guilt and with utter frankness that Miss Lee’s attempts can now be described as really good—judging from her ‘Let’s Do It’ and ‘I Got It Bad,’ she may shortly develop into Goodman’s best canary of all time.”
Lee passed one more test when the band played the Paramount, whose intimidating size—it held 3,664—made her gasp when she first walked in. In spaces that cavernous, singers tended to belt from the bottom of their lungs. But not Lee. On a few songs, Goodman featured her with just six of his sidemen, a configuration he called the Benny Goodman Sextet. In Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When,” Lee sang of romantic déjà vu as a celeste twinkled like a child’s music box. Ignoring the multitudes out front, Lee held her delivery at a near-whisper. “She sings with feeling in a pleasantly sleepy sort of way,” wrote a reviewer. Metronome’s George T. Simon, who had recently called her cold, marveled at how Lee had grown. She “hushed the house completely,” he wrote.
The more attention she got, the more Goodman cut her down. “He had a profound effect on her life by giving her that opportunity, but he also made her pay dearly for it,” said Brian Panella, who became her manager in the late 1960s. Lee could end a song to a roar of approval, and Goodman would merely glare, making her wonder what she had done wrong. During one rehearsal, he held his clarinet to her ear and shrieked out a measure he didn’t feel she had sung properly. When Goodman muttered a vague criticism of her phrasing, Lee hadn’t a clue what he meant. Later, she asked one of his graduates, trumpeter-bandleader Harry James, to translate. James advised her to change nothing—but to tell Goodman she understood him completely, and from then on would sing exactly as he wanted. Lee followed his advice. The next time Goodman heard her, he grinned in her direction.
* * *
LIFE FOR THE CREW remained a treadmill of bus trips, rehearsals, record dates, and shows; no one had much time to contemplate the worldly dangers that crept ever closer. War had broken out in Asia and Europe; it seemed just a matter of time before North America would be dragged in. On December 7, the Imperial Japanese Navy shocked the world by bombing Pearl Harbor, the U.S. naval base in Hawaii. The attack left 2,402 Americans dead, 1,282 wounded.
A day later, the United States declared war on Japan. And on December 18, just as Columbia Records was pressing copies of Peggy Lee’s latest Goodman showcase, a show tune called “Not a Care in the World,” World War II officially began.
For Goodman and other leaders, the post-Depression frivolity ceased; now their main job would be to lift wartime morale. Finding good sidemen would soon become a chore, for the draft would rob every leader of invaluable players. Many maestros themselves were drafted. But Goodman suffered from painful sciatica, and the draft board classified him physically unfit for service. Even so, he panicked, for the war was chipping away at the artistic perfection he had fought so hard to achieve.
With men at their most vulnerable, girl singers acquired a newfound power. Nobody would draft them; and overseas, the sound of a warm, sexy female voice, broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service, soothed many a lonesome soldier. In the winter of 1942, Columbia released Goodman’s months-old recording of a lightweight ballad of lost love, “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.” With the war at full tilt, nobody needed a sad song; Lee stayed cheerful as she chirped, “my heart is aching, soon will be breaking” in swing tempo. Both she and Goodman were stunned when the disc hit number one.
Lee’s girlhood ambition had come true; now she was a star. But she couldn’t help but feel like an imposter. “You know, I’m not really Peggy Lee of Benny Goodman’s band,” she told the New York Post. “I’m really just Norma Egstrom of Fargo, North Dakota.” Jane Larrabee, with whom she roomed in Greenwich Village while the band played New York, could see that success had not taken the prairie out of Peggy Lee. “Instead of buying six potatoes, she’d buy a twenty-five-pound bag. And she’d make bread and put the dough to set in a warm closet—and run down to Washington, D.C., to see a boyfriend.”
Lee and her Greenwich Village roommate, singer Jane Larrabee (aka Jane Leslie), in 1943. (COURTESY OF LORRAINE FEATHER)
Lee, of course, was a much more conflicted personality than the innocent some people saw. She craved a career, while pining for a strong man to take care of her. Meanwhile, she thrived on drama. It was no surprise when rumors sprang up about her relationship with the man who confounded and intimidated her, yet to whom she was professionally bound. The Valley City Times-Record posed a juicy question: “Are wedding bells soon to ring for Peggy Lee, the former Norma Egstrom of Wimbledon and present songstress with Benny Goodman in New York City?” When the squib ran on February 27, 1942, Goodman and Lady Duckworth were soon to marry, so he would not have been available for anything more than a fling. Lee herself was dating a string of swains: George T. Simon; personal manager Peter Dean, uncle of the yet-to-be-born singer-songwriter Carly Simon; and two World War II flyers, one of whom, according to Lee, shot himself in the head after they met.
She and Goodman occasionally hit the town after work, and musicians gossiped about the assumed liaison for years. If it happened, the affair would have been halted not only by Goodman’s marriage but also by the appearance of “the man of my life,” as Lee termed her new paramour. Years later she scrawled in some autobiographical notes: “Met David—love at first sight.”
In June of 1942, Goodman had hired a new guitarist, David Michael Matthew Barbour, better known as Dave Barbour. A thirty-year-old Italian from Queens, New York, Barbour had played with Artie Shaw, Maxine Sullivan, Teddy Wilson, and Mildred Bailey. But what Goodman liked the most about him was that he sounded much like Charlie Christian, a former star of the band. The black, Texas-born electric guitarist had performed with Goodman for nearly two years, and later died of tuberculosis. Christian’s single-note lines kept the orchestra swinging, and his harmonic wizardry looked ahead to the era of bebop, which was three years away. “He played like a horn,” said Steve Blum, Lee’s guitarist in the sixties.
Christian had quit Goodman in 1941. The next year, when he took ill, the clarinetist ignored him completely. Now he had hired Barbour to bring back Christian’s sound. To his close friend, pianist Hal Schaefer, Barbour was “a very good guitar player, not one of the best. But he was good enough for Benny Goodman.”
And for Peggy Lee. “There was a depth of feeling in his playing, a sadness that always draws me,” she recalled. “I always had the feeling that wherever he went I should run after him and tell him it was OK. I don’t know if he really felt that way or not.”
In fact, Barbour seemed perpetually cheerful and easygoing. But he had a problem. In 1941, the composer Alec Wilder attended a rehearsal at the Greenwich Village apartment of Mildred Bailey. Barbour arrived so drunk that everyone wondered how he could play. “He managed to get the guitar up in his arms somehow and get his fingers up on the frets,” recalled Wilder. “He was in terrible shape, but so cute about it that Mildred didn’t get mad at him.”
Almost no one did, because Barbour was lovable, especially to Lee. With his dark, wavy, slicked-back hair, rugged features, and masculine air, he was attractive, though not unusually handsome. And he had a touch of mystery. “There was a presence about the man,” observed Lee’s later pianist, Gene DiNovi. “He was very quiet.” When Lee looked at the guitar-plucking charmer, she saw the father-protector she had grown up longing for, and a man who played the blues as soulfully as she felt them. To her he was nothing less than a Prince Charming of jazz—but it was she who played the aggressor. She “watched his every move,” Lee admitted later. “You know, I had to chase him for a year! He is the type who wouldn’t admit he was attracted to me, but at night after the shows he was always there to drive me home. We never had any dates and he always acted very disinterested. He wa
s extremely serious about music and marriage and just a touch cynical.”
His indifference made her all the more determined to snare him. Finally Barbour succumbed. At first they kept their affair a secret for fear of inflaming Goodman, who forbade his sidemen from fraternizing with the girl singer. But the love songs she sang in that period—“The Way You Look Tonight,” “All I Need Is You,” “You’re Easy to Dance With”—now had someone dreamy to inspire them, even if Barbour was treating the relationship as a lark.
It was an odd time for Lee to become obsessed with one of the bitterest outcries to have appeared in the previous year’s R&B jukeboxes. But in her dressing room at a Chicago theater, she couldn’t stop playing a 78-rpm disc about a woman who was sick of playing the victim. Each time the worn, crackly platter came to an end, Lee lifted up the needle on her windup phonograph and started the record again. She heard a black woman slowly, defiantly tearing into her no-account lover for blowing his money and leaving her bereft: “I fell for your jivin’ and I took you in / Now all you got to offer me’s a drink of gin.” Twenty-one-year-old Lil Green didn’t have the walloping belt of the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith, but her soft, drawling voice still held the punch of an iron fist. Through minimal emoting, she conveyed all the stinging disapproval and eye-rolling sarcasm the song needed. Green sang “Why Don’t You Do Right?” with just piano and guitar; its intimacy conjured up a tenement bedroom and a woman who had downed plenty of belts before putting her spineless man in his place.
The writer, Kansas Joe McCoy, had sung with the Harlem Hamfats, an R&B group who crooned of reefer, booze, and sex. “Why Don’t You Do Right?” was a cleaned-up version of the Hamfats’ “Weed Smoker’s Dream,” which sounded like a pimp’s sales pitch to a potential whore: “Sittin’ on a million, sittin’ on it every day / Can’t make no money givin’ your stuff away.”
