by James Gavin
More and more, the public Lee seemed like an ethereal figure, not of this world. On TV’s The Colgate Comedy Hour, she sang “Johnny Guitar,” her somber title song (written with Young) for a Joan Crawford western. Posed in a Mexican-style gown with a hood, Lee caressed a prop guitar, gazed out into the eyes of an unseen man, and reflected yearningly: “I was always a fool for my Johnny / For the one they call Johnny Guitar.”
Johnny, of course, was Dave. Lee had continued to romanticize their parting; the two of them could have been Romeo and Juliet, ideally matched lovers wrenched apart by fate. The woman who had grown up on daydreams now sang from inside them, and the results, according to Mark Murphy, were “hypnotizing.” On television, observed the jazz singer, “you thought she was singing only to you. It was as though she knew you. Her face in those days was made for TV; it was a beautiful thing.” In her book America’s Child: A Woman’s Journey Through the Radical Sixties, Susan Sherman shared a youthful memory of attending a telecast of The Colgate Comedy Hour, which her stepfather booked. When Lee drifted before the camera, Sherman beheld a woman unlike any living being she’d ever encountered. “She was dressed in a gauzy white dress and I felt like I was literally seeing an angel—the closest image my child’s mind could conjure up.”
Lee’s innermost feelings radiated through her songs, but acting was another matter. The Jazz Singer hadn’t scored at the box office. Certainly Lee was no threat to Doris Day, yet the Hollywood Reporter hinted that Day wanted Lee out: “Warner’s decided Peggy Lee ain’t Doris Day and is giving in to Doris’ demands.” Certainly the studio’s enthusiasm for Lee had cooled. The Helen Morgan Story went to raven-haired Ann Blyth, an Oscar nominee for her role as Joan Crawford’s vixen of a daughter in Mildred Pierce. Wonder Bar and Everybody Comes to Rick’s were shelved. That fall Danny Thomas found his niche on the small screen in the long-running sitcom Make Room for Daddy; as for Lee, Warner Bros. canceled her option “by mutual agreement,” giving her a $20,000 payoff.
It was a crushing blow to Lee, and in years to come she seldom mentioned The Jazz Singer. But over at Disney, Lady and the Tramp was showing great promise. In a string of meetings with Walt, Sonny Burke and Lee presented their new songs in character. From there they made cleverly produced demo recordings. For “The Siamese Cat Song,” the duet of two mischievous felines named Si and Am, Lee dubbed one part over another, singing “We are Siamese, if you please” in a faux Thai accent. On piano, Burke plunked out a regal tune that could have greeted the King of Siam. Lee was all maternal warmth in “La La Lu,” a lullaby sung by Lady’s human owner, Darling, to her newborn baby. Another canine character, Mame, was a mangy, one-toothed old showgirl from the dog pound. For her, Lee and Burke wrote “He’s a Tramp,” a torch song with a stripper’s bump-and-grind rhythm.
The voices of Si, Am, Darling, and Mame had not been cast. Disney had rarely asked a star of her level to do voiceovers, but he offered all four roles to Peggy Lee. She was ecstatic. To perform in a Disney film meant universal prestige; now her mark would be all over Lady and the Tramp. Her joy took one more leap when Disney renamed a character after her. He had intended to call the vamping pound dog Mame, and to show her wearing bangs, a fashionable style for the woman of 1952. Then Eisenhower became president, bringing with him a wife, Mamie, who had bangs. Disney couldn’t risk insulting the First Lady, so he asked Lee if they could call the dog Peg instead. “Of course!” she exclaimed.
Her influence on the character didn’t stop there. “Peg” had to strut as sexily as a stripper. Animator Eric Larsen searched for inspiration at a burlesque house, but all he saw were tired women going through the motions. Lee, he recalled, “knew what we wanted—the biggest vamp we could get without being vulgar.” In his office, Lee sashayed back and forth as her “He’s a Tramp” demo played in the background. Larsen and his assistants sketched her moves. “Peg” came to life in those drawings—an over-the-hill but still sexy minx who brandishes her tail and rolls her eyes like Mae West.
According to the script, Old Trusty, a wise, elderly bloodhound, would die under the wheel of the dogcatcher’s wagon. But Lee, who had once carried her beloved dog’s dead body up the stairs of a train depot, couldn’t bear the thought. “Walt, please don’t let that dog die,” she pleaded. “Children won’t be able to stand that.” Disney argued that the story needed dramatic tension, but he proposed a compromise: “I will let him live, but the rat stays.” The rat was a snarling creature who sneaks into Darling’s house and waits at the crib, ready to devour the baby, until Tramp bolts in and kills the toothy rodent in the nick of time.
As for Si and Am and “The Siamese Cat Song,” Disney let Lee poke around in the sound-effects department for gadgets that could lend spice to the recording. A set of finger cymbals gave it just the right ancient, Far-Eastern sound.
Everyone at the studio agreed: Lee’s participation in a Disney film was an event. A company photographer trailed the star, snapping pictures of her in discussion with various members of the creative team. By now Lee had signed five contracts, four for the songs and one for six days of vocal work. She would receive $3,500 for the voices and $1,000 to split with Burke for cowriting six songs—respectable fees for the time, and Lee accepted them willingly. Because she was under exclusive contract to Decca, Disney added the provision that it retained no rights to “make phonograph records and/or transcriptions for sale to the public.” “Transcriptions” was the industry term for audio discs produced strictly for radio and not for sale; its inclusion in that phrase seemed like a careless slip by the legal department. Twenty-five years before the creation of home video, nobody at Disney could have foreseen the weight that the word “transcription” would one day hold.
With Disney animator Gerry Geronimi during the production of Lady and the Tramp, 1953.
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ONSCREEN, LEE WAS but a single cog in a vast machine; in nightclubs, she controlled her whole production as deftly as a puppeteer. Her marriage went on hold as she flew to New York to launch a lengthy engagement. She took her sister Della as assistant but left behind Dexter, who struggled to advance a slow-moving Hollywood career.
Lee’s newfound Manhattan headquarters was tonier than anything she could have envisioned in her North Dakota youth. La Vie en Rose stood on an upscale block—East Fifty-Fourth Street between Lexington and Park Avenues—but it aimed for the minimalist chic of a boîte on Paris’s Left Bank. Stylishly printed menus listed costly French cuisine; abstract wire sculptures hung on the walls. During her shows, Lee gazed out at a sea of shadowy faces, lit faintly from below by the candles on the tables.
La Vie en Rose was a departure for its owner, Monte Proser. For years, the British-born impresario had worked as a producer amid the sweat and greasepaint of Broadway. In 1940 he hopped in bed with the mafia when he and mob boss Frank Costello launched the Copacabana. By decade’s end, Costello’s thuggish front man, Jules Podell, had forced Proser out and taken over as manager. Proser was ready for some class, and in 1951 he opened La Vie en Rose.
The club lasted only three years, but it set a high bar of taste. Virginia Wicks described it as “an elegant nightclub where elegant people could go and hear usually well-known stars, who were always sophisticated.” They included the Portuguese fado singer Amalia Rodrigues, the beautiful black supper-club singer and film actress Dorothy Dandridge, Ella Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey, and Nat King Cole. La Vie en Rose also hosted the Manhattan cabaret debut of a still-unknown Eartha Kitt. With her humming voice and exotic, multilingual repertoire—Spanish, French, Turkish, English—Kitt struck that worldliest of audiences as weird, and she flopped.
But they adored Peggy Lee, and not just because of her singing. As a performer, Lee’s innovations lay in her presentation. “I wanted to make it as close to a Broadway performance as I could,” she explained. Increasingly she calculated every effect, from her precisely timed hand gestures to the subtlest vocal nuances. Unlike Billie Holiday, Lee seldom improvised vocally; she p
referred to deliver tunes as written while adding a dose of swinging rhythm. To have every detail in place before showtime freed her from worry, and allowed her to escape into a song’s essence.
Before the La Vie en Rose opening, Lee employed an arranger who was just as obsessively probing as herself. Gil Evans was revered for his work on a set of recordings that had launched Miles Davis and the art of cool jazz; he went on to arrange several of the trumpeter’s most celebrated albums. Evans wrote with a moody, cerebral richness inspired by his love of Kurt Weill and of French and Spanish impressionist composers. Exactly which of Lee’s songs he worked on isn’t known for sure, but he made a permanent impact on her taste—“not just musically,” she said, “but from the man’s thinking. That’s a key, I believe, in all fields of art . . . A musician must start to think before he can become great.”
As for who would play piano for her, Lee went back to the top. Jimmy Rowles was the hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, but exquisitely sensitive accompanist for many of the greatest singers in jazz; throughout the years they included Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Carmen McRae. Rowles typified Lee’s best pianists—white men who played with a laid-back funkiness. Songwriter Dave Frishberg, who also played piano, was in awe of his touch. “Rowles could milk sound from the bass clef register that was almost organlike. He splashed chords down with a rolling, blurry attack that was his alone.” No singer intimidated him; with Lee he amused himself by muttering expletives out of her hearing range: “Wait till you hear this intro, you bitch!”
Aside from Rowles, Lee shared La Vie’s tiny bandstand with Ed Shaughnessy, future drummer for the Tonight show orchestra, as well as bassist Joe Mondragon and trumpeter Pete Candoli, two fixtures of West Coast cool jazz. Lee took them all over the musical map. She sang “Good Morning Heartache,” the Billie Holiday trademark about a woman whose closest companion is grief; dipped into vaudeville with “Hard Hearted Hannah,” the tale of a “vamp from Savannah” who “loves to see men suffer”; and unearthed a mystical English folk ballad, “The Riddle Song.” On the night when Down Beat’s critic came, Lee’s scaled-down arrangement of “Lover” caused such excitement that she had to sing it twice at the first show, three times at the second. “Being very cautious about overstatement,” wrote the reviewer, “we will only say conservatively that Peggy gave the greatest performance we have seen delivered by any singer in a Manhattan club in the last five years—and that includes everybody, from Lena Horne and Sinatra on down.”
Shaughnessy glanced out at a sea of spellbound listeners as Lee stood in a pinspot and sang “(Ah, the Apple Trees) When the World Was Young,” a worldly Frenchwoman’s lament for her lost innocence. The song was a gift from Johnny Mercer. In 1953, a music publisher had asked the lyricist to craft an English adaptation of an Édith Piaf favorite, “Le Chevalier de Paris.” A French female poet, Angèle Vannier, had written the song with composer Marie Philippe-Gérard, a protégé of Maurice Ravel. Vannier’s words detailed an old knight for whom a “round and sweet” apple sets off as many recollections as Proust’s madeleine.
With Lee in mind, Mercer feminized the protagonist into “la grande femme fatale, the belle of the ball.” Wealth, fame, and countless men are hers, but love is not, and she yearns to recapture “the schoolgirl who used to be me.”
That spring, Lee recorded the song just as she had sung it at La Vie en Rose. Pete Candoli begins “When the World Was Young” with a bit of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. In comes Lee, singing coolly about the brittle glamour of her nights. As distant memories of true happiness take over—“On our backs we’d lie, looking at the sky”—Norma, the vulnerable child, and Peggy Lee, her conquering creation, come face-to-face.
The performance captivated Charlie Cochran, a cabaret pianist-singer who emerged later in the 1950s. He noticed “a kind of scrim between her and the listener—some kind of interruption between her and reality. She was blurred in the most beautiful kind of Cézanne-ish ways.”
“When the World Was Young,” along with much of her La Vie en Rose repertoire, appeared on an eight-song, ten-inch Decca LP. Black Coffee marked Lee’s breakthrough as a torch singer of utmost refinement—yet one who ventured fearlessly into the dark corners of the heart. At Decca’s studio in midtown New York, Lee and her quartet recreated the midnight jazz-club ambiance of her late shows. She always preferred to record late, and with her favorite vocal relaxant at hand—cognac spiked with honey—she entered the somber world of Black Coffee.
Just like saxophonist Lester Young on Billie Holiday’s 1930s recordings, Candoli served as Lee’s shadow voice. Sometimes brassy, sometimes muted and distant, his trumpet commented wryly as she sang; he added vinegar to her sweetness. Rowles played with such restraint that at times he was almost imperceptible, but he gave Black Coffee the pulse of the blues. At least some of the charts were his; they flirted with bebop, but Lee had made it clear that everything her band played had to enhance the drama. She asked Shaughnessy to “sprinkle a little with the cymbals” on one song and to “get a darker rhythm going” on another. Producer Milt Gabler mostly sat back and left the music in the artists’ hands.
The record that emerged is a portrait of addiction—to a man, to illusion, to the past. Its title song, written in 1948 by Sonny Burke and the movie lyricist Paul Francis Webster, is the plaint of a dead-end victim of love, alone at home. Candoli’s wailing horn helps conjure up a seedy apartment in half-light, a figure in a nightgown sprawled on the sofa. A Holiday-like cragginess coarsens Lee’s voice as she mourns a woman’s fate—to “drown her past regrets in coffee and cigarettes” while waiting for her “baby to maybe come around.” In a Down Beat Blindfold Test, Leonard Feather played “When the World Was Young” for bandleader Raymond Scott, a Juilliard-schooled pioneer of electronic music. Scott, who was known for his brilliant ears, couldn’t discern Peggy Lee from her idol. “It must be Billie Holiday,” he said, “but it’s so accurate and so precise, it’s so artistic that I can’t believe it. That’s the best I have ever heard her.”
Throughout the album, the fragile flower and the dominatrix in Lee collide. In “Easy Living,” she melts in the arms of the lover she lives for; the arrangement starts with a quote from a classical piece she loved, Ottorino Respighi’s The Pines of Rome. Cole Porter had written “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” as the coy boast of a kept girl who loves to tease her swains. Lee’s version strips away the cuteness; against Shaughnessy’s frantic double-time drumming, she sings as a mature woman in tough control of her heart. “Love Me or Leave Me” was a wilting torch song from the twenties; on Black Coffee, Lee barks it out in syncopated rhythm to a man playing hard to get: “I want no one unless that someone is you!”
The armor falls away in “A Woman Alone with the Blues,” written by Willard Robison. Lee’s performance starts and ends with the sound of tolling church bells. In between is a saloon song about lost love and self-pity, sung at a crawl that evokes the last slouching, tipsy figure at a bar. “I would make Pete Candoli go way to the end of the studio and play against the wall,” explained Lee, “because I was trying to make him sound like a French horn.”
On the LP’s lilac-tinted cover image, items on a table suggest a woman in waiting: a cup of coffee, a cigarette holder leaning against an ashtray, a faded rose. But it was the music that dazzled Mark Murphy. The jazz singer was twenty-one when Black Coffee appeared; he studied every note. “That record was her catalytic arrival,” he said. “Everything finally came together. She emerged as one of our great singers. The rhythm, the ability to do the ballads in such a communicative way—that album opened up a whole new world for her.”
Down Beat awarded it five stars, a rating reserved for instant classics. “Here, we suspect, is the true Peggy,” wrote the reviewer. “Warm, personal, Holidayish, sexy, and as unLoverlike as you could wish. Or, when the occasion demands it, fiery, swinging, with a beat few can beat.”
In years to come, Black Coffee would leave its mark
on a wide array of female artists. Joni Mitchell loved it; Petula Clark called the album “my Bible. I knew every note she sang, every note of the orchestrations. I did record the song ‘Black Coffee’ eventually, but I really shouldn’t have touched it.” k.d. lang did, on her first solo album, Shadowland. Marianne Faithfull pronounced Lee’s rendition so “virtuoso” that she didn’t dare study it before recording the song, lest she end up copying Lee. Seventies pop star Helen Reddy, who grew up in Australia, found a copy of Black Coffee and played it “to tatters.” Reddy told the columnist David Noh that “The problem arose when someone said, ‘You sound just like her,’ and I thought, ‘Uh-oh,’ and began to develop my own style.”
To Lorraine Feather, the jazz-singing daughter of Leonard Feather, Lee was “pretty well perfect. I never heard her rush a note or sing out of tune. She had a sense of humor; she knew how to pull the audience in and make them laugh with her, care about her. She had that gift that some performers have of being alluring to the audience yet keeping them at a bit of a distance without their realizing it. And Peggy had a very distinctive instrument; you couldn’t mix her up with anyone else. It was sweet yet kind of smoky. There was something poignant about the way she sang even when she was happy. There was a vulnerability. She was soft and ultra-feminine, but it was combined with a steeliness you had to have in order to forge a career in show business.”
