by James Gavin
He enlisted a black clarinetist (New Orleans–born Jimmie Noone, a Dixieland pioneer) and a white one (Barney Bigard, who had spent fifteen years with Duke Ellington); a black piano player from Kansas City (boogie-woogie master Pete Johnson) and a white one from Chicago (Joe Sullivan, a pillar of the city’s jazz in the 1920s). Trombone great Jack Teagarden was a white Texas boy whose blues feeling enchanted Louis Armstrong.
Having branded the young Peggy Lee “no bargain” in Down Beat, Dexter now felt she belonged in this aristocracy. Just after New Year’s Day, he phoned her and asked her participation. Lee had not forgotten his painful snub, and her response was tinged with smug revenge. “I’m retired, Dave,” she said. “I don’t care to sing anymore.”
Dexter tried again later, and found that Lee had had a change of heart. “What does the job pay?” she asked. Dexter offered a hundred dollars for two songs. She admitted that she and Dave were hurting for cash. “If you can get me in and out of the studio in a couple of hours, I’ll be there,” she said.
On January 7, Barbour drove her to the C. P. MacGregor recording studio in Hollywood. Two months after Nicki’s birth, the singer was still plump but “smartly dressed,” said Dexter, and clearly happy to be there. He gave Lee her songs on the spot. “Ain’t Goin’ No Place” was a simple twelve-bar blues about a woman who was “hopin’, prayin’, waitin’ for my no-good man to show.” The musicians ad-libbed an arrangement in raunchy bordello style, with Shorty Sherock’s growling trumpet.
Everyone was surprised at the sounds that came out of the fair-skinned white housewife. The glassy, vibratoless tone and demure remove of her Goodman days had vanished; now she had a huskier sound and, away from Goodman’s withering glance, a newfound confidence. Dexter recalled a bandmember’s comment: “This chick sounds like a drunken old whore with the hots.” Lee surprised them again in a downtrodden torch song, “That Old Feeling.” Here she sang like a lovelorn teenager, shattered at having seen her former beau dancing in another woman’s arms. “I saw you last night and got that old feeling,” sighed Lee, making that pivotal word sound like a swoon.
Lee knew she had done well. Most of the airplay for New American Jazz went to Lee’s sides. Hearing herself on the radio repeatedly, she got even more excited; so did Capitol’s executives, who tried to talk her into a full-fledged comeback.
But she couldn’t bring herself to plunge into one quite so soon. Baby Nicki needed her, and the notion of surrender to a manly man still appealed. For most of 1944, Lee avoided professional singing. But amid warming baby food on the stove, changing diapers, and chatting on the phone with friends from her big-band days, she thought increasingly about music. Lee had toyed with writing lyrics and poetry for years, and she knew she had a flair for it. One day while Barbour was out at a record date, she was “standing at the kitchen sink,” she recalled, washing dishes “and thinking about how much I loved David.” Afterward, she scratched out the naïve stanzas of “What More Can a Woman Do?,” a portrait of wedded bliss. “If he told me that I should steal / I guess I would, the way I feel . . .” went the words. She showed it to Barbour, who worked out a simple tune on his guitar.
For a time, the finished song sat untouched. Meanwhile, memories of New American Jazz and what fun it was had stayed with her. Mercer had vowed to sign her; and that year, Lee accepted several invitations to drop by Capitol. On one of those outings, Lee watched a driver hit another man’s car in a nearby parking lot. Someone yelled to the latter that he’d been hit; he stuck his head out the window and said, “You was right, baby!” At home, Lee turned that phrase into an “I done him wrong” lyric in which a woman, not her man, was the lying cheater who gets thrown out into the cold.
Meanwhile, “the best (and best-liked) personal manager in America,” as singer Mel Tormé called him, was hot on her trail. Carlos Gastel was a hulking, black-haired, gin-guzzling Honduran who had forged a close relationship with Capitol. Many of the label’s stars—including Nat King Cole, Tormé, and bandleader Stan Kenton—were shepherded to stardom by Gastel’s Hollywood office, General Artist Corporation. According to another of his clients, the jazz singer Anita O’Day, Gastel “was on an artistic rather than monetary kick. He’d hear a sound, fall in love with it and go after the artist.”
Soon he was sitting in the Barbours’ living room as Dave played guitar and Peggy performed “What More Can a Woman Do?” and “You Was Right, Baby.” Gastel marveled at the fact that Lee wrote her own lyrics—an extreme rarity among pop singers of the day. And he knew that vocally, Lee sang like no one in the business, especially at Capitol. Margaret Whiting sang with a forthright clarity that composers loved, but she steered clear of the darker places. Ex–Tommy Dorsey vocalist Jo Stafford had a trombonelike tone along with flawless pitch and breath control, but not much warmth. Ella Mae Morse could swing the blues, but she was blunt and lusty, not subtle. Outside Capitol, sunny-voiced, singing girls-next-door proliferated; they reminded young American women to wait chastely until their men came back from war.
In that company, Lee had an enticing sense of the forbidden. Her vocal caresses evoked the bedroom, not the nursery or kitchen. Mystery lay in the silences between her phrases; her eyes shone with secrets.
It was Gastel’s challenge to pry her out of retirement, but Lee’s reluctance was fading fast. On Sunday afternoon, December 10, 1944, she took part in a jam session at the Philharmonic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. The cast included the 1920s cornetist Red Nichols and his band, the Five Pennies; guitarist Les Paul; and Joe Sullivan. Afterward, Lee agreed to talk business with Capitol.
Two days after Christmas, with the tree still up in her living room and presents for Nicki scattered on the floor, she showed up at a Hollywood recording studio for her first solo session. Barbour played guitar and led the band.
There was nothing white-bread about the fair Scandinavian singer’s sound. Weeks later, a Billboard critic deemed “You Was Right, Baby” and its singer’s “heated pipes” to be “geared mostly to the race locations.” In Harlem, Steve’s—which billed itself as the “Most Outstanding and Complete Race Record Shop”—advertised the disc alongside new singles by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Lil Green.
It caught the attention of Sarah Vaughan, the rising black jazz singer with a near-operatic instrument and a dazzling flair for bebop. “I like those nice breathy tones Peggy gets on her low notes,” said Vaughan, who went on to record “What More Can a Woman Do?” Lee’s version captivated Joe Williams, who went on to sing the blues with Count Basie and in an enduring solo career. Williams first heard the song in a black record store in Chicago, a fact that would have pleased Lee.
A housewife’s life was no longer enough for her—especially now that her honeymoon paradise had started to cloud. Years later, some biographical jottings by Lee identified 1944 as the year when Dave “began to drink again.”
For now she preferred to look the other way. As Nicki lay sleeping in her crib, Lee kept writing song lyrics. In July 1945, she and a quintet led by Barbour recorded “Waitin’ for the Train to Come In.” On the surface, it was a laid-back plea for the man she hoped would step off a locomotive and into her arms. But when Lee sang, “I’m waitin’ for my life to begin / Waitin’ for the train to come in,” she touched on the monotony that had marked her first seventeen years, and may have hung over her as a housewife. A drummer simulated the dull clacking of train wheels; Lee, by accident, sounded bluesier than ever. She was tired and hoarse from a cold, and couldn’t hold onto notes. Mercer told her to touch them lightly, then slide off them. That hint of a slur felt so right to her that she used it for the rest of her life.
Late in 1945, while Nicki was taking her first steps, “Waitin’ for the Train to Come In” climbed to number four. Lee was back. Gastel and the Capitol brass knew they had a golden goose. With the holidays approaching, the Barbours performed their newest tune for Mercer. In “I Don’t Know Enough About You” she adopted yet another face—that of a coy, baby
-doll temptress—as she chided a man for playing hard-to-get: “Just when I think you’re mine, you try a different line.” She told a reporter that she was “thinking about how a fellow plays hard to get, the way David did. He’s the only fellow I ever chased.”
Mercer had helped her with her lyric-writing considerably, as he would in the future. “He made me go back and rework the whole thing,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Put this here, and this here, and switch this around . . .’ ”
The day after Christmas, Lee stood at a microphone in a West Hollywood studio and delivered her words in a breathy purr that presaged Marilyn Monroe. Her spoken tag proved the most memorable line: “I guess I’d better get out the encyclopedia and brush up on schmerr to schmoo . . . hmmmmm?” Lee’s hairdresser, Faith Schmerr, had found her way into the song. The public, of course, hadn’t a clue what the line meant. But it got a laugh.
“I Don’t Know Enough About You” became her second top-ten solo hit.
Now that she had scored on record, Lee gave Carlos Gastel full license to book her for radio and shows. Watching her perform, Margaret Whiting saw a rainwater blonde who had found her bliss. Lee, she said, “was singing a song as if she loved every word, every note of it. She was a young woman who was coming into maturity and trying things, telling jokes and talking, having fun, free as a bird. The sophistication came later.”
Offstage, she often seemed in a fog. An interviewer visited Lee in her dressing room before an appearance. In the course of their chat, he asked if she dreamed of singing in Europe. “No,” said Lee. “I don’t want to see anything that was touched by war. . . . Do you smell gas escaping?”
“No.”
“I’m sure there’s gas escaping.”
He tried changing the subject: What was her favorite song? “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe,” she said. “It’s about a man and I guess it says more than anything else about how women feel about men. You’re sure you can’t smell gas? Would you call someone and ask them to find out if there’s gas escaping? Oh, good heavens! I’ve forgotten to find out the list of what I’m singing tonight and I have to go on now!”
Her ambitions, at least, were crystal-clear. “She always seemed a career girl, never a wife,” observed Dave Dexter. On July 6, 1946, Billboard published the results of its eighth annual poll of college music fans. Lee ranked third in the female vocalist category, after Jo Stafford and Dinah Shore. Six days later, she returned to Capitol to record another of the twenty sides she made that year. In a new anthem she had written with Barbour, “It’s a Good Day,” Lee proclaimed the world a sunny place, vibrating with possibilities: “It’s a good day for shining your shoes and it’s a good day for losing the blues!”
“It’s a Good Day” reached the top twenty. It was the anthem of a young woman who had reclaimed her raison d’être, yet it also captured a time of dizzying postwar optimism, when the country had triumphed over its enemies and the future seemed like a yellow-brick road to success. Employment rates and the economy had boomed; technology, medicine, and science were turning corners every month. War-torn couples had reunited, sending marriage and pregnancy rates skyrocketing. Nothing seemed more romantic than to settle down and start a family—the postwar recipe for eternal fulfillment.
The Barbours had wanted another child. According to an article printed at the time, Lee had written “It’s a Good Day” after learning that she had just become pregnant. “I looked out the window and said to myself, ‘It’s a good day,’ ” she explained.
Lee wound up miscarrying—and a doctor gave her the sad news that she would never bear another child. But to most appearances, Lee was much more a star than a mother or a wife. According to her publicist at the time, Fran Jackson, the singer was “just tasting the wine of success” and “loving every moment of it, for everything was new to her. Being famous. The money pouring in. She was pixieish and kind of witty and amiable and having such a good time with her first mink coat and her first white convertible, a three-hole Buick, and she adored shopping and buying jewelry and furniture and clothes.”
The label of “It’s a Good Day” billed her accompaniment generously as Dave Barbour and His Orchestra. Barbour was no leader; he preferred to pluck his guitar and let others do the hard work. In this case it fell to Lee’s new arranger, clarinetist Henry J. “Heinie” Beau. On the record, Barbour played a tricky instrumental refrain, written by Beau in the language of a revolutionary new sound called bebop.
But henceforth, he would be known first as Peggy Lee’s husband, then as her conductor, and finally as a guitarist. Lee couldn’t imagine he was any less happy than she.
For now her group needed a firm guiding hand, and Gastel found one. Hal Schaefer was a boy wonder who, at eighteen, had played piano for an esteemed saxophonist and bandleader, Benny Carter; soon he would launch a dozen-year stint as singing coach for some of Twentieth Century–Fox’s brightest stars, including Marilyn Monroe. Schaefer had a shock of dark wavy hair and a broad, toothy grin, but he was a sophisticated accompanist; and as Lee sang, concentration shone on his face. Most vocalists, he observed, held the last note of every phrase in a formal, trained manner. But Lee rarely sang a line that she wouldn’t have spoken the same way. In her case, silence meant as much as words. Schaefer punctuated her spaces discreetly, while still giving her a breezy lift. “Nobody could swing more than Peggy!” he said. “She would snap her fingers and it was already cooking.”
Her ears astonished him. “She wasn’t like me, who was raised in New York and went around to little jazz joints and heard a million people. For her it was instinctive. Her intonation was perfect. Her time was impeccable.” Lee showed a “feeling for orchestration,” he found, when she directed the drummer to use brushes instead of sticks, or asked the other players to pull back or to build.
Awards rained down on her. At the end of 1946, a readers’ poll in Down Beat named her the best female singer not with a band. The woman who had turned down almost every offer in 1944 was eagerly saying yes to anything that sounded interesting. Apart from her growing output of commercial discs, Lee cut a mammoth seventy-two jam-session tracks for Capitol’s radio transcription service, which supplied music for broadcast. She acted and sang in Midnight Serenade, a short dramatic film for Paramount Pictures. Having once lain on the floor with her ear pressed to her family’s Atwater Kent radio, Lee was now all over the dial; she guested frequently on the shows of Jimmy Durante, Frank Sinatra, and Bing Crosby, three of her superstar idols. But mainstream stardom hadn’t diminished her appeal in the “race” market. A year earlier, a black musical variety show on NBC, Jubilee, had invited her on, reaffirming her belief that she was “not really a white singer.”
“She felt she had a black soul,” said Leata Galloway, an African-American backup singer who supplied backup vocals for Lee in the 1970s. “She connected to the pain that black people go through. The blues.”
Proof of that came in 1946, when she lent her voice to an odd cartoon character—a harp that comes to life as a black chanteuse. Jasper in a Jam was one in a series of “Puppetoons”—animated shorts, made by filmmaker George Pal, in which clay figures were photographed in stop-motion, moving around in dollhouse settings. This short, set to the swing of bandleader Charlie Barnet, featured Puppetoon favorite Jasper, a black boy with oversize pink lips and huge pop eyes. Jasper embodied the racist depictions in countless cartoons of the day, from Warner Bros.’s Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs to Walt Disney’s Fantasia. But Pal softened the clichés by giving Jasper a humanizing sweetness, and the Lee character brought it out further. In Jasper in a Jam, the little boy runs into an antique shop to escape a rainstorm. When a cuckoo clock strikes, musical instruments come to life and start to play. The singing harp—a busty, bronze nightclub vixen in a gold gown—belts a Louis Armstrong hit, “Old Man Mose,” for a dazzled Jasper. Lee did nothing to “blacken” her delivery, yet it fit her character so closely that no reviewer questioned the casting. Black activist groups were inc
ensed over Jasper, though, and he made his last appearance in this cartoon.
As she toured a circuit of grand movie houses that alternated film showings with live music, Lee left male critics as awestruck as she had Jasper. At the State Theater in Hartford, Connecticut, she reminded a local scribe of Mae West. It wasn’t just her voluptuous figure and her near-platinum-dyed hair; to him, Lee possessed “that certain something . . . I wish there was another word for it than sex.”
Lee’s earnings had enabled the Barbours to move from their Monroe Street apartment to a small house on Blair Drive in the Hollywood Hills—not a glamorous abode, but a definite step up. Their lives had become a rush of deadlines to meet and planes to catch; songwriting for Dave now meant work more than fun. “He was not driven,” recalled Nicki. “I don’t think life in the limelight was for him at all.”
Mundell Lowe observed the Barbours at work. The drawling Mississipi-born guitarist was a discovery of John Hammond, who had launched him on a career that teamed him with Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Sarah Vaughan, and eventually Peggy Lee. But few people knew Lowe in 1947, when he played in the cocktail lounge of the Warwick Hotel, where Lee often stayed. She and Barbour used its ballroom to rehearse, and Lowe enjoyed eavesdropping. He saw which partner held the reins. “Peggy was a very strong woman,” said Lowe. “Dave was kind of mild and quiet. Things went the way she wanted them to.”
Any complaints Dave may have had stayed between them, but his drinking—which had burgeoned into full-blown alcoholism—implied that he wasn’t nearly as content to be Mr. Peggy Lee as he appeared. He swilled his preferred bourbon both at home and in clubs, where he closed out the night by sharing adjacent barstools with Carlos Gastel and Hal Schaefer.
Invariably, Barbour went to sleep drunk. He began to suffer a severe burning in his stomach. Lee hadn’t a clue why he seemed so intent on destroying himself. She blamed Gastel for keeping him drunk, while begging Barbour to cut back. But he didn’t in the slightest—nor did she reduce a performing schedule that was taking a toll on her husband’s well-being.
