by James Gavin
The show’s true intentions eluded Lee, at least initially. It opened in the heat of the Red Scare—the rampant fear that Communist infiltration would overturn U.S. capitalism and replace it with socialism, thus destroying the bedrock of American society. Newspapers carried almost daily reports about Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, who was on a rabid witch hunt to ferret out Communists, real or imagined, from the federal government and the broadcast media.
Thus the need for Red, White and Blue, a caravan of squeaky-clean, anti-red American values. The Legion had declared that each local production would feature one of America’s most beloved household names—Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Milton Berle. But far-right legionnaires shot down many of the proposed headliners, simply because they “didn’t find their political associations pure.”
Peggy Lee passed muster. A corn-fed blonde from the heartland, she had seldom, if ever, made a public statement about politics. On the face of it, Lee was a happily wedded wife and mother. Her sex appeal crossed no offensive lines; and if her biggest hit, “Mañana,” made shameless fun of Mexicans, that didn’t concern the American Legion.
The organization wasn’t counting on the bombshell dropped on December 31 by gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. She wrote: “Peggy Lee plans to divorce Dave Barbour after the first of the year, when she goes to Chicago to replace Gertrude Niesen in ‘Red, White and Blue.’ That is when she will make the announcement.” Barbour had “told her he wanted his freedom.”
Lee wasn’t fired; the Legion didn’t dare lose her after a newspaper had reported “little or no interest” in the show. The bloated, critically panned five-hour spectacle was “limping across the country,” a reporter wrote. Lee’s presence had sold far fewer tickets than hoped. Claudia Cassidy reviewed Red, White and Blue in the Chicago Tribune. “The actors, brave souls, did what they could despite material you wouldn’t believe . . . Much of it sounded as if it had been mistakenly retrieved from wastebaskets.” Cassidy was no kinder to the star: “Peggy Lee, a shiny blonde, sings (a) briskly and (b) like a juke box slowed to a crawl.”
Red, White and Blue closed in Chicago on January 20. Variety called it “the second biggest flop in show biz history”; the other was an obscure 1920s musical kept afloat by an oil magnate. For Lee, Red, White and Blue’s demise had made the future seem even emptier. Ever since the age of four, when she lost her mother, Lee had lived in fear of desertion. Now the love of her life was about to depart. Barbour still lived in the house on Denslow—“her” home, as he called it—but the early weeks of 1951 were fraught with screaming arguments, crying jags from Lee, and some of Barbour’s most hostile drunken binges. Finally, on April 5, 1951, Lee permitted her publicist, Fran Jackson, to send out a press release announcing an imminent divorce. On April 28, Dave moved out.
All of Lee’s friends had their own theories as to what had gone wrong. To Dick LaPalm, Barbour “was tired of being Mr. Peggy Lee.” Marian Collier, the actress who became his second wife, felt that Barbour had run for his life: “I think he just wanted to sober up.” Dona Harsh had the simplest view: “It was just a marriage that was over. I think there was still affection between the two of them, but they grew apart.” In her most candid moments, Lee had to agree. “Getting along became impossible,” she told a reporter in 1953, adding that the relationship had been souring “over a longer period of time than anyone realizes . . . We really weren’t right for each other at all.” They had tried to hold it together for Nicki’s sake, she said, “but it was no good. I think we had outgrown each other.” Only in 1974, to a National Enquirer reporter, did Lee admit any responsibility. “I loved him dearly but eventually we began to come up against the problem of my career. You see, it is always very difficult for a man to be married to a career girl. She’s the one who gets all the attention.”
At first, Lee had announced plans to go to Las Vegas and obtain a fast, “friendly” divorce, but second thoughts overwhelmed her. The day after Barbour had left, Lee slowed things down by filing in Santa Monica. According to Southern California divorce law of the time, husband and wife had to wait out a one-year “interlocutory” trial period, giving them time, if need be, to change their minds. Then, if they still wanted to part, the court would grant a final decree.
On May 15, 1951, Lee arrived at Santa Monica Superior Court for the preliminary hearing. Her outfit—a somber black suit and hat and white gloves—would have befitted a funeral. As the family breadwinner, Lee wanted no alimony, only custody of Nicki. Lee had charged Barbour with “cruelty,” a standard claim then in women’s divorce filings. Yet a more truthful charge would have been rejection, and the weight of it had hit her hard. “He said he didn’t love me anymore,” blubbered Lee to a reporter present.
She didn’t add that she had already found a new Mr. Right. But the news broke the next month when a house photographer at Manhattan’s Stork Club, a nighttime playground for celebrities and society, snapped Lee dancing cheek to cheek with Robert Preston, a rugged Hollywood supporting actor. Debonair and mustachioed, Preston had played utility roles in island movies, westerns, and crime dramas, while never quite becoming a star. That wouldn’t happen until 1957, with his Tony Award–winning run as the star of the Broadway show The Music Man. For now he was appearing as José Ferrer’s replacement in the play Twentieth Century, but his still-minimal name value couldn’t sustain the show for long.
Friends of Lee’s were startled at how swiftly she had moved on from Dave. But she couldn’t bear to be alone, and the attentions of the swaggering Preston were enough to restock her head with fantasies. The blurb that accompanied the Stork Club photo had announced that the romance might “shortly lead to the altar”—a tidbit that Lee had supplied. She willfully ignored the fact that Preston was a well-known philanderer with a wife, though an estranged one, screen actress Catherine Craig. Lee felt sure that Preston would divorce Craig and marry her. For now, he didn’t discourage her illusion.
She identified Preston as “Roger” in her memoir. Her remarks suggest a needy woman who had happily let delusion run amok. According to Lee, she had met him in Las Vegas the year before—“and when I first saw that face,” she wrote, “I knew it meant trouble.” No one but Dave had ever made her feel quite that way. Preston had just come home from the Army Air Corps, and he told Lee that when he had heard her records overseas, he thought she was black. She liked that.
No romance ensued until 1951, she claimed, when he showed up in her dressing room at the Copacabana. “By now I was really on my own,” she asserted in her book. But the two-week engagement at the Copa began on March 15, 1951, and she hadn’t even filed for divorce yet.
That night after the Copa, Lee wrote, Preston offered to take her home. They took a moonlit stroll as snowflakes fell. Lee was renting an apartment in Manhattan, and Preston stayed there a lot; quickly she began grooming him as the full-time father her seven-year-old needed. When Nicki professed approval, one more Peggy Lee daydream took flight.
As Preston wined and dined her all over Manhattan, she felt he was hers forever. She begged him to divorce Catherine Craig, but he told her that was impossible, because she was Catholic and would never agree to it. Lee persisted—and the affair crashed to a close that October.
Many years later, she made the dubious claim that, before he died in 1987, Preston had phoned to say he had never stopped loving her. But he stayed with Catherine Craig until the end. Lee couldn’t bear to acknowledge that another man had walked out on her. When friends asked what had happened, Lee told them that she had “sent him home to his wife.”
* * *
SHE STILL HAD HER career, but by the early 1950s her record sales had dipped. Lee’s sound and demeanor had darkened considerably, and Capitol tried lightening her up. Commercial pop had entered its most puerile age; ditties like “Come on-a My House” (Rosemary Clooney), “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake” (Eileen Barton), and “Sparrow in the Treetop” (Guy Mitchell) became mass-consumed sugar pills at a t
ime of grim realities—the Korean War, the atom bomb, McCarthyism—that threatened to burst the pretty pink bubble of postwar contentment.
Now Miss Peggy Lee found herself recording such titles as “Don’t Give Me a Ring on the Telephone (Until You Give Me a Ring on My Hand),” “Ay Ay Chug a Chug,” “If You Turn Me Down (Dee-Own-Down-Down),” and “Pick Up Your Marbles (And Go Home)”—Capitol’s choices, not hers. All of them flopped, and the label strained to point Lee in a different direction. “For her latest release, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!,’ ” reported Billboard, “the diskery used an all-Negro jazz group, headed by Jim Wynn, in an effort to set off her pipings with a rough ’n’ ready backdrop.”
But in all of 1951, only one of her singles—“I Get Ideas,” a cover of a kitschy tango hit by Tony Martin—made the charts. Her recorded casualties of that year had included two duets with Mel Tormé, a Capitol golden boy whose sales had also waned. Like Lee, Tormé had the rare distinction of writing many of the songs he sang; one of his originals, “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” became a seasonal blockbuster. But neither singer’s career gained much from TV’s Top Tunes, a fifteen-minute CBS series that starred both of them but left Lee mostly in the dark. The show was a poor man’s Your Hit Parade, a radio phenomenon that had moved successfully to TV; it featured a resident company of singers who covered the favorite songs of the week. TV’s Top Tunes found Lee looking uncomfortably posed amid potted palms and hawking Chesterfield cigarettes to the monster TV cameras. None of that fazed the cocky Tormé. At twenty-five, the so-called Velvet Fog was a showbiz veteran, with MGM film appearances, major nightclub engagements, and a 1949 number-one hit (“Careless Hands”) to his credit. Tormé viewed TV’s Top Tunes as his show, and grabbed the best songs, leaving Lee with “Come On-a My House” and other trifles.
Various singing stars, including Patti Page and Dinah Shore, were succeeding as television hostesses, but no one offered that job to Lee. Instead, she returned to the now-fading medium of radio. Starting on Christmas Day of 1951, Lee starred in a twice-weekly, fifteen-minute recital on CBS. “You’ve got a date with Peggy Lee!” exclaimed the announcer of The Peggy Lee Show. Now free to sing whatever she wanted, Lee snubbed most of her current singles, which didn’t endear her to Capitol.
With Mel Tormé on TV’s Top Tunes, 1951. (COURTESY OF RICHARD MORRISON)
Since 1943, she had blossomed under the guidance of Carlos Gastel. But their relationship was faltering. Gastel found her bossy and temperamental; she viewed him as a key culprit in the downfall of Barbour, his perennial drinking buddy. Lee fired and rehired Gastel; he kept threatening to quit. In September 1951, they had a screaming fight in a Chicago dressing room. Gastel stormed out the door, while Lee shouted behind him that he would never work for her again.
Even Dick LaPalm, who loved her, had to admit that Lee had grown “very difficult to work for”—demanding, moody. Louis Berg of the New York Herald Tribune profiled her revealingly in “Life of a Canary,” an article that gave Lee a painful look in the mirror. “Nobody could be more assured than Peggy when she steps before the mike,” wrote Berg. “Behind the scenes it’s another story. This canary reveals herself to be as nervous as a cat. Her hands tremble, she puffs incessantly on a cigarette, holds herself under control with visible effort.” Another journalist proclaimed her “Our Lady of Sadness.”
Lee consulted her Science of Mind handbook for lessons in positive thinking, and applied them in odd ways. Before her shows, recalled Hal Schaefer, Lee “had these séances” in which she enjoined her musicians to sit with her on the floor in a circle and “think good thoughts.” She corraled LaPalm and other bystanders to hover in the wings and send her “rays of love” as she sang.
Barbour needed them too. On May 20, 1952, two policemen found him staggering down a Hollywood street, obviously drunk. He denied it, and kept protesting as they arrested him and drove him to the station. When they tried to take fingerprints and a mug shot, Barbour loudly refused; he would “stay here forever,” he shouted. Finally he cooperated, and paid a token sum of bail for his release.
Many saw him as a sad case—the former Mr. Peggy Lee who had fallen flat on his own. In 1952, Gastel took him to Europe, hoping the change of scene would help him start anew. Also rooting for Dave was Leonard Feather, the Down Beat jazz critic. Years earlier, Lee had introduced Feather to her friend Jane Larrabee, and the two had married. Lee considered him family, and it inflamed her to read a Feather column that seemed to incriminate her in Barbour’s self-destruction. “Here is a guy who, after years surrounded by leeches and phonies, living in a world where your only friends can be those who are as wealthy or successful as yourself . . . knew that he wanted to turn his back on what Artie Shaw has called the $ucce$$ story, and get some kicks out of music again.”
Depressed as Lee was, nothing could sap her creativity. The singer had devised a torrid reconception of “Lover,” a Rodgers and Hart waltz that Jeanette MacDonald, a Hollywood soprano, had sung daintily in a 1932 film, Love Me Tonight. Lee was left cold by MacDonald’s version, but not by the song, which she heard as pure sex. A new approach to it popped into her mind as she watched La belle équipe (The Good Crew), a 1936 French film in which Jean Gabin played a Foreign Legionnaire. As he galloped on a horse, Lee thought of Latin rhythms. “I also decided to change keys every chorus, which gives the illusion it is going faster and faster—from trotting to cantering to galloping.” She explained all this to her combo, and they worked out an arrangement.
“Lover” became the hit of her club act. “They just, as they say, ate it up,” she recalled. Lee asked Alan Livingston, now Capitol’s head of Artists and Repertory, if she could record it. He turned her down. Guitar virtuoso Les Paul, one of the proudest additions to the company stable, had already recorded the song, said Livingston, and Capitol didn’t want any competition.
But Paul’s “Lover” had come out three years before, argued Lee, and hers was completely different. Livingston wouldn’t budge—proof of how her label had cooled on her.
Lee was doing brisk business at the Copacabana, the nightclub that hosted the top headliners in the country: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Jimmy Durante, Carmen Miranda. In February 1952, several Decca Records executives came to hear Lee, hoping to woo her from Capitol. She performed “Lover,” and as usual, she recalled, “the audience went crazy.” When Milt Gabler, the head of Decca’s pop division, offered to sign her, Lee eagerly consented—but only if they let her record “Lover.” Gabler agreed.
Her Capitol contract had months to run. But when she asked Livingston to release her, he didn’t protest. Lee would do one last session for the company that had nurtured her as a risk taker, a lyricist, and a singer who now seemed as troubled as the times she lived in.
On February 18, 1952, she and conductor Sid Feller teamed at Capitol’s New York studio to cut six sides. Except for “Goin’ on a Hayride,” a clip-clopping tune from Three Wishes for Jamie, a new Broadway musical for which Capitol held recording rights, Livingston didn’t care what she recorded; Lee chose the other songs. Only “Hayride” and a smoldering love song, “Ev’rytime,” were released at the time; the other songs sat on the shelf for years.
The singing set the tone for the Peggy Lee of the 1950s—a torch balladeer for whom heartache was second nature, but who could latch onto moments of pure joy, swinging all the way. Her accompaniment, a jazz trio with muted trumpet, looked ahead to Black Coffee, her bluesy milestone LP of 1954; a string quartet added pathos when needed. “Oh, Baby, Come Home” was one of the last songs she had written with Barbour; in it she smiled through tears as she bemoaned the single life: “Tried to build a fire in the fireplace / I wound up with nothing but soot upon my face.” On a swing novelty, “Whee Baby,” Lee shared songwriting credit with Alice Larsen, Nicki’s nursemaid, who had voiced the title. The singer became a red-hot mama in “Louisville Lou,” a 1920s hit about a “vampin’ baby” with “no more conscience than
a snake has hips.”
All turned serious in “Let’s Call It a Day,” written by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson for Strike Me Pink, a forgotten Broadway revue of 1933. Lee’s recording stands as one of the saddest she ever made. As she sings about bravely moving forward—“Let’s have no regrets, or a word of blame”—she trembles audibly on the brink of tears.
On June 6, 1952, her divorce from Dave Barbour turned official. Lee was alone again and drinking to excess—this after growing up as the daughter of an alcoholic, then marrying one. But for her, reality had become too hard to face without anesthesia.
“He was too calm for Peggy,” said Dona Harsh of the singer’s second husband, Brad Dexter (right). With radio host Larry Finley at the premiere of The Jazz Singer, Fox Beverly Hills Theater, December 30, 1952. (COURTESY OF RICHARD MORRISON)
Chapter Six
LONG AFTER THE 1950s had ended, Lee summed up the richest creative decade of her life as “years of romance and suffering.” Barbour dropped by the house frequently—to pick up Nicki, not so much to see Lee. He regarded his ex-wife and musical partner with a deep fondness, but nothing more. Lee remained in denial. When an interviewer quoted her tearful divorce-court assertion—“He said he didn’t love me anymore”—she demurred. “He did say that once,” Lee insisted, “but he didn’t mean it.”
