by James Gavin
She scrambled to fill the vacant space in her life. Columnists couldn’t keep up with her romances, rumored or real. For a time in 1952, she focused on one of Hollywood’s trophy-boy bachelors, attorney Greg Bautzer, whose office handled her legal affairs. Wavy-haired and debonair, Bautzer was “easily one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen,” said Lee. He took advantage of that, doing double duty as lawyer and bedmate to some of filmdom’s most fabled women, including Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner, and Joan Crawford.
Like most of Lee’s affairs, this one lasted just a few months. Ultimately, no amount of male companionship could ease her sense of emptiness. In her singing, less was always more; but in all else she did, from applying makeup to decoration to sex, more was never enough. Aside from her chain-smoking and excess drinking, she binged on food; one of her weaknesses was Van Camp’s canned beans, a comforting treat from her childhood. As her waistline grew, gowns didn’t fit properly, compounding her panic before engagements. “She was always on a diet when she was young,” said Dona Harsh. Lee’s weight-loss schemes alarmed her friends. She tried an all-buttermilk crash diet and lost not a pound; before meals she gobbled an over-the-counter appetite suppressant.
Her public face had stayed soft-spoken and endearingly fuzzy, with a delivery so full of pauses that people tended to hang on her every word, wondering what would come next. But the calm hid a volcano. “I tried to bury myself in my work and I almost got a nervous breakdown as a result,” said Lee. She came home from shows and couldn’t fall asleep, so she sat in bed until dawn writing poems, drafting song lyrics, and drawing faces. “She was restless,” said Harsh. “She wanted to sing and she wanted to paint and she wanted to write and she wanted to sculpt. She had a small amount of talent in certain things and a lot in others.”
Lee’s whole future, she feared, rested on her Decca contract, which she signed on March 28, 1952. Her first singles session was a compromise. Lee performed two dreamy standards she loved, “You Go to My Head” and “I’m Glad There Is You,” in exchange for recording a pair of saccharin ballads, “Forgive Me” and “Be Anything (But Be Mine).” Gordon Jenkins, one of Decca’s resident maestros, draped the latter tunes in a blanket of weeping violins and solemn choral aaaahs. “Be Anything” charted at number twenty-one; the other sides were mostly ignored. In a Down Beat Blindfold Test, in which an artist commented on unidentified records, Dick Haymes, who had sung alongside her briefly with the Benny Goodman band, heard “You Go to My Head” and thought of the singer Lee most adored. “It could be Billie,” said Haymes. “She scares me a little at times, when she gets so far behind the beat that I’m afraid she’ll never quite wind up at the end of the bar, but she makes it every time.”
At that time, Holiday herself was just barely hanging on. The New York Age, a small newspaper, reported a bittersweet incident in which Peggy Lee once more crossed paths with her great inspiration, if only in spirit. It was two AM at Connie’s Inn, a Harlem nightspot that had once rivaled the Cotton Club. Into that cellar establishment walked a broken Lady Day, wearing dark glasses. With one arm, she held onto a friend; in the other she clutched two white Chihuahuas.
To Sonny Murrain, a reporter, Holiday reminisced of how she had gotten her start in Harlem. But drug infractions had cost the singer her cabaret card, the license to perform in New York clubs. Holiday had maneuvered without success to get it back. “I even went to Cardinal Spellman, being a Catholic, but it’s no deal,” she said in her cracked, raspy voice.
As she spoke, someone dropped a coin into the jukebox. Out came the voice of Peggy Lee, the rival who had climbed much higher than she, and whom Holiday had bitterly resented. The song was “You Go to My Head.” Murrain was startled by her response. “Almost without knowing, Billie Holiday joined in with that harsh, oddly sensual voice which no one can imitate.”
The moment was a truce of sorts between two women for whom happiness did not come easy. But if Holiday was on a long gangplank with no turning back, Lee had found safe harbor at Holiday’s former label, Decca. The timing seemed just right for Lee to record her Latin version of “Lover.” Just then, the campy “Kiss of Fire,” an ersatz tango, was sweeping the charts in six hit versions. As orchestrated by Jenkins, Lee’s “Lover” was an Afro-Cuban fantasia—a cacophony of bongos and congas that turned a maiden’s love call into a cry of lust.
On April 28, Lee arrived at Liederkranz Hall, Decca’s Manhattan headquarters, to record “Lover.” Jenkins had written a similar arrangement for the second song on the day’s agenda, Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Lee wanted everything big and brassy. She hadn’t had a major hit in years; this was no time for moderation. In that sprawling studio, Lee stood amid a sea of string and brass players, a rhythm section, a chorus, and eight percussionists. Even that wasn’t enough Latin fury for her, so she asked Ed Shaughnessy, her drummer, to play a conga, a tall Cuban drum with a hypnotic, tribal sound. Two top Decca producers, Morty Palitz and Milt Gabler, plus assistant conductor Russ Case, were on hand to manage the unwieldy session.
Jenkins raised his arm and struck the downbeat on “Just One of Those Things.” Violins and cellos sawed away over a teeming bed of percussion, while Lee’s voice sailed above the orchestra at half the tempo. Despite the bombast, the engineer caught a perfect take.
“Lover” was even noisier. It opened with a frantic whirlwind of cellos; then came the rush of percussion and the moans of four choral singers. The arrangement could have kicked off the chariot race in the movie Ben-Hur, but its clamor overpowered Lee. “They couldn’t hear one note of me,” she rued afterward. False starts and rejected takes piled up. After hours of failed efforts, Palitz had to admit defeat. Lee went home and cried, sure her recording career was over. “Oh, it’s just another dream gone wrong!” she thought.
But Palitz hadn’t given up. According to Lee, he phoned her in the middle of the night from Liederkranz Hall. His engineer had come up with a possible solution. Would Lee do one more session? “What time?” she blurted out.
Three days later, everyone reassembled. Palitz placed her far from the orchestra in an isolation booth—a rare device in 1952. With headphones piping the band into her ears, Lee sang “Lover” again. To her huge relief, the experiment worked. But she wasn’t taking chances. Instead of confiding Lorenz Hart’s erotic plea in a hushed bedroom voice, she grew louder and more heated with each chorus and key change. By the end, she was shouting Hart’s words—“Lover, it’s immoral, but why quarrel with our bliss?”—in a blast of female sexual aggression scarcely heard on record since Bessie Smith. Determined to make herself heard, Lee pounced upon certain words and repeated them like mantras—“Softly, softly in my ear / You breathe, you breathe, you breathe a flame!”
Her instincts proved dead-on. In June, “Lover” became the number-three single in the country. Male critics rhapsodized over it. In the Los Angeles Times, Philip K. Scheuer raved over Lee’s “orgiastic” performance: “While the ensemble beats out a furious tempo, the Lee gal moans, gasps, and shivers in ecstasy.” Orders for product piled up. Lee hadn’t felt such affirmation since “Mañana.” Yet her heart sank when she learned that her take on “Lover” had appalled Richard Rodgers. “I suppose this recording is about as far as you can go in the way of distortion and still have the nerve to use the title,” he groused. In A Fine Romance, a study of Jewish-American popular songwriters, author David Lehman cited a saltier quote by Rodgers: “I don’t know why Peggy picked on me; she could have fucked up ‘Silent Night.’ ” Her liberties with Hart’s words didn’t seem to bother him; Rodgers—a notorious stickler for note-perfect treatments of his songs—was offended that Lee had thrown away his lilting waltz meter and sung “Lover” like a panther in heat. Friends of Lee’s recalled an encounter she had with the composer at a party. “By the way, Miss Lee, it’s a waltz,” said Rodgers coldly.
Only in 1968, when Lee sang “Lover” in a salute to him at New York’s Lincoln Center, did Rodgers seem to have come a
round. He sent a conciliatory letter to be read onstage: “In the years since I wrote that song, ‘Lover’ has been played by everything from calliopes to symphony orchestras, and I am happy indeed to let Miss Peggy Lee have her way with it.” But Rodgers’s daughter and fellow musical-theater composer, Mary Rodgers Guettel, doubted the change of heart: “I do not remember his ever forgiving her.”
In this case, the record-buying public didn’t care. The unbridled libido of Lee’s singing was heady stuff in 1952, when soda-shop jukeboxes spun such chaste platters as Patti Page’s “I Went to Your Wedding” and Doris Day’s “When I Fall in Love.” Day, the sunshiny blonde whose movie musicals had depicted an idyllically wholesome America, sang, in lyrics rife with implication, of a “restless world” where boys bestowed “moonlight kisses” with no strings attached.
But outright sex had begun invading commercial pop, a field of such sterile blandness that it soon sparked a youthful backlash in the form of rock and roll. A few months after “Lover,” Karen Chandler caused a minor scandal with her number-five hit, “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me.” In it, the singer extolled those magic moments “in the dark” with the beau whose embrace, she declared, could “drive me slowly out of my mind.” And there wasn’t an altar in sight. Nineteen fifty-two saw the emergence of Eartha Kitt, a black singer, dancer, and recording artist whose serpentine writhing, combined with a voice as prickly as a cat’s tongue, flung open the bedroom door. The next year, Marilyn Monroe’s fame would skyrocket when she costarred (with Jane Russell) in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Monroe had seen Lee at Ciro’s, and although she never acknowledged it, the boudoir intimacy of her singing seemed patterned on Peggy Lee’s.
Both women knew what sex appeal could get them. Yet Lee was no submissive plaything; her allure seemed tough around the edges, wounded at the core, and a bit dangerous. “Peggy is not the girl you’d run into at a high school prom,” observed the DJ and columnist Eddie Gallaher. “Her voice is more that of the girl in the smoke-filled room at a truckline café or at a juke joint along a Texas highway.” While Doris Day was hired to plug Lux soap and Royal Crown cola in commercial ads, Lee endorsed other kinds of products. “Chesterfield is my cigarette—has been for years,” she proclaimed in one ad. Another paired a photo of her with the quote, “My beer is Rheingold—the Dry beer!”
Her publicity machine exploited this brazen image. “Peggy puts more sex into a song than most girls could into a strip tease,” exclaimed one press release. Wire services reported that the eight thousand marines in attendance at a Los Angeles Rams football game had voted Lee the girl they most wanted to date; surely few of them envisioned a night ending with a good-night kiss on the cheek.
A year or so after “Lover,” Arthur Hamilton, one of Lee’s songwriting pets, got a hint of how disconnected she felt from her public persona. As she sang in the darkness of Ciro’s, he glanced around at a sea of sweaty-faced men. “They were intrigued and moved in every way you could see,” said Hamilton. “She was like the other woman in every couple.” Late that night, Lee took him back to her house. As the cognac flowed, her defenses melted away. The temptress stepped aside, allowing Norma Egstrom to peep through. Like so many who met her, Hamilton found Lee’s timid charm and easy laugh irresistible; her vulnerability inspired protectiveness. She and Hamilton talked heart-to-heart until deep in the night. She recited her original haikus; he read her some unfinished lyrics. Laughter and jokes punctuated their exchanges. Around three AM, Hamilton decided to make her night by telling her about the mesmerized fans who looked as though they had wanted to jump into bed with her. Lee abruptly froze. “I don’t want to talk about her anymore,” she declared curtly.
* * *
TWO MONTHS AFTER THE release of “Lover,” “Just One of Those Things” had reached number fourteen on the Billboard pop chart. Lee certainly wasn’t the first American artist to use Latin percussion; but following “Lover,” bongos became a staple sound in the pop music of that era. At her fabled Carnegie Hall concerts of 1961, Judy Garland earned screaming ovations with “Come Rain or Come Shine,” arranged by Nelson Riddle in a format almost identical to that of “Lover.”
Lee never had another Decca hit to equal it, but she had won the reverence of everybody there. From then on, she had complete freedom to let her imagination roam. Other star songbirds, notably Rosemary Clooney, would grumble or laugh for years at the junk they had recorded in search of a hit; but at Decca, Lee was often defiantly noncommercial. Shortly after “Lover,” she and Sonny Burke, a fatherly Decca producer and arranger, teamed to write “Sans Souci,” one of the most outré singles of her career. The title is French for “carefree,” but Lee’s words, set to a throbbing bolero rhythm, spin up a whirlwind of exotic melodrama. An evil siren scandalizes a village; a choir chants, “Go, go, go, go!” Surreal images abound: “Oh, the mountain starts to giggle when the springtime waters wiggle down the mountainside,” sings Lee in a voice that bends as sinuously as a snake charmer’s flute playing. She sounds, in turn, like a purring kitten and a witch. “I’ve tried to figure out why I was so angry when I wrote that,” reflected Lee in 1990.
More and more, she was learning how to mine a wealth of texture and nuance from a seemingly meager instrument. “People say my voice is thin or small, but I have a lot more voice than I ever use,” she explained. Belting wasn’t in her plan. “I start with a small amount of volume, and sometimes I’ll sing softer and softer, and that gives me a long way to go.”
“Sans Souci” didn’t sell well, but her reigning place on the nightclub circuit was assured. Twice a year she returned to Ciro’s. “It was a very exciting gig,” said Gene DiNovi, Lee’s Brooklyn-born pianist, who accompanied her from 1951 to 1955. “You looked out, and every star you’d ever heard of was out there listening to you. It put a lot of intensity into the performances.”
This was an era of “smoking, drinking / Never thinking of tomorrow,” as Mitchell Parish wrote in his lyric for Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady.” Ciro’s general manager George Schlatter recalled the endless imbibing of the period: “You’d have two drinks before you went out to dinner, then a cocktail or two at the restaurant before dinner, then you’d have wine with dinner, a little brandy after dinner, then you’d have one more for the road, then maybe a nightcap.”
Even with all that swilling, Lee commanded rapt attention. Most of her shows sold out, and Herman Hover, who owned Ciro’s, treated her like a queen. “Anything that Peggy wanted, she got,” said Schlatter; that included a repainting of the dressing room in pink before each engagement.
Her June 1952 engagement was special. “Lover” had peaked, and the reservation book filled up weeks before the opening. Feeling even more jittery than usual, Lee hired a director: Mel Ferrer, who had cast Dave Barbour in The Secret Fury. Ferrer revamped her presentation aggressively, then discussed Lee with the press as though she were an old Jeep in need of a tune-up. “It seemed to me that Peggy was singing too long, talking too much between songs, and not singing the right songs,” he told Down Beat. “Every musician liked her, but not the general public. Another thing, she was too fat. Right away I put her on a high-protein diet and trimmed her down.”
Blunt as Ferrer was, his ideas worked. He made Lee wave a chiffon scarf for dramatic emphasis, and helped her create a dreamlike flow by bridging together certain songs with a few mysterious words, delivered over a musical segue. Ferrer brought in a Hollywood lighting wizard, Jimmy Neilson; from him, Lee learned even more about how light cues could enhance her art. As she sang heatedly of sexual intoxication in “You Go to My Head,” a pinspot cut a gray beam through the smoky room and lit on her face. Her fair skin and white-blond, short-cropped hairdo shone like a jewel against black velvet. But as columnist Sidney Skolsky observed: “She is in a world of her own and is oblivious to everything else when she is singing.”
On several nights, a corner table at Ciro’s was occupied by Michael Curtiz, director of such Warner Bros. classics as Casablanca an
d Mildred Pierce. Curtiz had discovered Errol Flynn and John Garfield, and had launched Doris Day as a movie star in Romance on the High Seas. Curtiz knew how to elicit magic from actors, yet he considered many of them phonies. Day, who had never acted before he found her, was an exception. As he told her in his thick Hungarian accent, “I sometimes like girl who is not actress. Is less pretend and more heart.”
For now, though, Curtiz was angry at Day, who had dropped out of his long-planned Technicolor remake of The Jazz Singer, the breakthrough talkie of 1927. Danny Thomas, a soft-sell nightclub comic, had been cast in the role created by Al Jolson—that of a Jewish cantor’s son whose heart is in the theater, but whose father is pressuring him to inherit his job. Day and Thomas had just costarred in a big moneymaker, I’ll See You in My Dreams, and the studio wanted to keep cashing in on the partnership. But according to the New York Daily Mirror, Day had decided that her second-fiddle role in The Jazz Singer—as Thomas’s girlfriend, a star singer who urges him to follow his heart—“wasn’t up to her, shall we say, stature?”
Warner Bros. needed a replacement. Studio president Jack Warner had heard Lee at Ciro’s, and he urged Curtiz to go. The director studied her laser-beam focus, her low-burning intensity. “I felt that anyone who could put so much feeling in a song could do just as well with the spoken word,” he explained.
After the show, he appeared at Lee’s dressing-room door. Curtiz’s steel-gray hair and expensively tailored suits gave him an imposing look; so did a demeanor so heated that sweat soaked his silk shirts. Faced with that intensity, Lee could barely speak. Curtiz found her reticence a refreshing change from the blowhard egos of other actors. He mentioned The Jazz Singer, and asked if she would be willing to screen-test for the female lead. She hesitated. As much as she had yearned for movie stardom, Lee was worried. She confessed to Curtiz that she hadn’t liked her performance in Mr. Music, and that she knew nothing about acting. Doris Day had voiced similar misgivings in 1948, but Curtiz had changed her mind, and he changed Lee’s.
