by James Gavin
Black Coffee scored critically, but it was a far cry from commercial pop, and at a time when LPs were just starting to catch on, the album didn’t sell much. What’s more, it seemed as though Lee were living under the same black cloud as the woman she had embodied in the title song. Late in June of 1953, while onstage at Ciro’s, she was suddenly racked with abdominal pains. She made it through the show, but afterward she went straight to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. Doctors found nothing, but she canceled the next four nights’ shows. Once more, her friends pointed to exhaustion as the cause.
Just as likely, the pain was a manifestation of emotional duress. Offstage, Ed Shaughnessy sensed a conflicted woman. “I really loved her as a person,” said the drummer. “She was very kind and very dear. But I used to think there was an innate sadness in her.” Lee had felt for months that she was living a lie in her marriage to Brad Dexter, and their union was on the brink of collapse. “It was a big mistake,” she admitted later. As much as she had encouraged Lee to marry him, Dona Harsh had to agree. “I liked Brad a lot,” she said, “but he was too calm for Peggy.” Dexter had tried to persuade his wife to cut back on her travel for the sake of the marriage and Nicki; Lee flat-out refused. She had no intention of sacrificing any part of her career; she’d fought too hard for it. Alice Larsen still served as live-in housekeeper and nursemaid; Lee tended to avoid housework. “I don’t have time,” she declared.
While Dexter sweated out jobs, Lee’s earnings reached a hefty $250,000 a year. Someone, she argued, had to be the breadwinner. Yet much of that income went toward supporting her grandiose lifestyle, which included a staff. “With such disregard for the money she earns, Peggy has kept little,” wrote Redbook. Funds kept running low, which sent Lee into a tailspin. On the road she covered Dona Harsh’s room-service bills, but forbade her to order steak, “because it was too expensive,” said Harsh. “We ate a lot of ground round.”
Meanwhile, every week Lee gave her five hundred dollars as a not-so-petty expense fund. Harsh was so rock-solid reliable that Hedda Hopper saluted her in print as a model of efficiency; yet panic over money made Lee’s trust crack. “We had a fight about something,” recalled Harsh. “We were standing out in her driveway, and she said, ‘Where’s my five hundred dollars?’ I said, ‘You think I want to steal it, Peggy?’ She said, ‘I don’t know!’ So I took it out of my purse and threw it on the driveway. And it started blowing around. She went after it, let me tell you.”
That September, her luck crashed. In a notice sent to Warner Bros., the Internal Revenue Service announced that it had filed a levy against her wages in the amount of $8,315. She and Barbour had underpaid their 1949 taxes. Lee blamed “Dave’s business mistakes,” but the IRS took no excuses.
Within the same week, Brad Dexter moved out of Lee’s house on Denslow. Divorce proceedings began quickly. Nicki was disappointed, for she’d grown fond of her kindly stepfather. Dexter was even sadder, but he knew that nothing would change; in the course of nine and a half months of marriage he had metamorphosed from “husband to help,” as Lee Ringuette observed. Friends had watched Dexter standing in the wings of theaters, holding his wife’s glass of cognac. “This was a proud, good man,” said Ringuette. “He wanted no part of that.”
Back she went to the Santa Monica courthouse where just two and a half years earlier Lee had gone for her divorce from Barbour. She seemed embarrassed as she murmured a vague set of grievances to the judge. Dexter, she said, “didn’t like my friends or business associates”; pressed for details, she had none to offer. Her lawyer alleged that Dexter had “interfered with business transactions . . . and had argued with her business manager.” Lee added that Dexter had worked only three weeks since the wedding. “He asked me to restrict my career to local engagements,” she complained. “But that was impossible. I had to earn some money.”
An interlocutory divorce was granted on November 3, 1953; the final judgment sailed through on both sides.
Dexter went on to act in a few notable films, notably the 1960 western The Magnificent Seven, where he appeared alongside Charles Bronson, Yul Brynner, and Steve McQueen. Four years later, while in Hawaii to film the role of a World War II marine sergeant in None but the Brave, Dexter earned his true claim to fame. The director and star, Frank Sinatra, had gone swimming with Ruth Koch, wife of the film’s producer, Howard Koch. The two of them were swept out to sea by a ferocious undertow. Dexter, who had accompanied them to the beach, lunged into the tide; aided by lifeguards, he rescued them. The actor had saved Sinatra’s life; after that, his short marriage to Peggy Lee seemed immaterial.
“Sometimes she wakes up sad, and then her name is Deloris.” Peggy Lee, as Rose Hopkins, clutches her “baby” in Pete Kelly’s Blues. (COURTESY OF RICHARD MORRISON)
Chapter Seven
IN HER PRIVATE life as in her songs, Lee required drama. Following her separation, Lee sold the house in Westwood at a loss. She found another in Coldwater Canyon, the hilltop region that lies between Beverly Hills and the San Fernando Valley. Once moved in, Lee began to hear strange noises. She decided the house was haunted. A ghost, she believed, kept ringing the doorbell; and when her sister Della entered the basement through a trapdoor and it closed on her head, Lee blamed the ghost. She told Cosmopolitan of the sinister goings-on: “One day my manager was sitting alone in the living room, and all the cornices fell down.” By the time Lee published her memoir in 1989, the haunted-house tale had grown; Alice Larsen, she claimed, had seen a stool “walk” across the kitchen floor, while Della “tripped on absolutely nothing and broke her leg.”
For a woman who at age five had imagined seeing her dead mother’s face in the clouds, brushes with the paranormal, real or delusional, weren’t rare. In this case, Lee’s far-flung powers of visualization might have leapt out of a story she’d heard about that house. Allegedly it had belonged to actress Olivia de Havilland in 1948, the year she filmed The Snake Pit. De Havilland played a woman who is trapped in an insane asylum with no clue how she got there; unexplainable voices and sounds threaten to push her permanently over the edge.
Lee decided it was best to move. In between shows at Ciro’s, a friend informed her of a beautiful vacant home, also in Coldwater Canyon. Deep in the night after work, they drove to the address—2345 Kimridge Road—and investigated it by flashlight. Some of its ten rooms offered panoramic mountain views, and Lee detected no evil spirits; she fell in love with the house on sight. The next day she made arrangements to buy it.
Almost immediately Lee, who had just been in hock to the IRS, began an expensive renovation. The house’s entrance had a black gate with a Chinese motif; Lee extended the Asian theme by planting a Japanese garden out back. She added a thirty-foot goldfish pond with a bridge over it, birch trees, stone tiling, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool. Assisting her in the design was handsome, dark-blond Eduardo (Eddie) Tirella, a decorator, landscaper, and hatmaker. Tirella and Lee scampered about like children, buying goodies at nurseries and antique shops. Lee told TV Guide of walking on the beach and scavenging a cartful of colorful rocks and pebbles. Tirella turned them into a rock garden that Lee could see from her bedroom window. “She wanted every single pebble to be illuminated by the moonlight,” said Tirella’s friend, actor Jack Larson. “They were busy covering them with some kind of coating to pick up the light.”
When guests came, Lee pointed out such rare items as an Egyptian libation pitcher, a Dresden hinged box that came (she said) from Marie Antoinette’s castle, and a fourteenth-century bronze lamp from the mansion of automobile mogul Henry Ford. The white living-room carpet “was like Pekingese fur,” recalled Lorraine Feather. “It literally had long hair. People were always snagging their heels in it.”
The singer’s king-size, pale blue bed rested on an elevated white platform, like a horizontal throne. The push of a button made a filmy white curtain surround the bed. Elsewhere in the house were crystal chandeliers, Louis XIV chairs, and other accoutrements suited to the g
randest of stars.
Lee often greeted the press at home, but her comments could leave them scratching their heads. She told a writer from the New York Journal-American: “I get my ideas from odd little things. Birds in the garden. Trees. Trees always make me think of patience. If I write a song, I suppose it’s a kind of prayer.”
Lee seemed grateful for company—especially now, after two failed marriages. “She hates to be alone,” observed Jimmy Rowles. When they rehearsed in her soundproof home music studio, he said, “You would be lucky to get away before dawn.” Even for a man as hard-boiled as Rowles, though, Lee’s charm was hard to resist. She could make almost anyone feel like her new best friend; from then on, she expected round-the-clock availability.
One day Lee phoned Gene DiNovi in Brooklyn and commanded him to fly to her home to spend some days rehearsing. He wound up staying for weeks. “I was more or less a captive on the top of Coldwater Canyon. She would wake me up at three in the morning and say, you know that arrangement we’re doing on such-and-such? When we get to the bridge, could you give me a star? I said, ‘Sure, Peg. Can I go back to sleep now?’ ”
Lee’s sister Marianne lived in the San Fernando Valley with her sons, Lee and Lynn, and her daughter, Merrilee. But the singer kept her on Kimridge as often as possible to serve as girl Friday; Lee also phoned her at the last minute when she needed assistance on the road. “Aunt Peg was at ease until there was an engagement looming,” said Lee Ringuette. “At that point she turned into a she-lion. She had trouble keeping help. She’d give them lists and lists of things to do. She’d be getting down to the wire and mom had to go along. In my mother’s over-selflessness, this is something she would do, but it was really difficult for her and she didn’t enjoy it.”
In 1953, another angelic figure flew into Lee’s inner circle. Probably no singer besides she would have thought to add a harp to her jazz combo, but the instrument’s wafting, sugar-spun tones comforted a woman in perpetual need of soothing. Frequently at the house Lee played a recording of Ravel’s pastoral chamber work, “Introduction and Allegro,” built around the harp. She had a keen ear for instruments that would complement her ethereal quality, such as oboe and French horn; now she sent Pete Candoli in search of a harpist. The trumpeter thought of Stella Castellucci, who had worked with him in the ABC radio orchestra. Then twenty-two, Castellucci was a shy Italian girl from a religious family. She had never played jazz or even gone to a nightclub; one of Lee’s friends likened her to a Catholic nun.
Candoli invited her to a rehearsal, and the harpist’s fear turned to bedazzlement. “Peggy could swing her head off and really be a jazz singer, and at the same time she was a profound singer of ballads,” she said. Lee invited her to “jump in whenever you want.” The singer hired Castellucci on the spot. For the next seven years, her graceful, billowing glissandos swathed Lee’s voice in a celestial cloud. “She’s a complete musician,” said Lee. “The sweetest girl. I think she’s devoted her whole life to music.”
Further balm to Lee’s frazzled nerves was the spiritual counsel of Adela Rogers St. Johns, who worked under Ernest Holmes as a minister for his Institute of Religious Science and Philosophy. Then nearing sixty, St. Johns was one of the most accomplished women of her time: a pioneering screenwriter of the silent era, the author of numerous novels and stories, and a journalist whose reporting on crime, politics, society, Hollywood, and sports would help earn her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Both worldly-wise and down-to-earth, she struck Lee as an oracle; in years to come the singer couldn’t go onstage without phoning her nightly.
Lee needed bolstering, for she kept working at a neurotic pace, staying up all night and sleeping little. On November 2, 1953, she collapsed at home. A doctor diagnosed her with severe exhaustion and ordered her home to her powder-puff bedroom to rest out the year. Lee followed his advice for less than a week. In the first month of her recuperation, wrote Hedda Hopper, Lee “wrote three new songs, finished eleven oil paintings, and completed the booking arrangements for her 1954 tour . . . Contracts already signed will bring her in $380,000.”
The singer didn’t fully heal for months. But by the spring of 1954, she had rebounded enough to plunge what columnist Dorothy Kilgallen termed a “torrid romance.” Young Don Cherry did double duty as a pro golfer and a best-selling pop idol; when Lee met him he was in between two big hits, “Thinking of You” and “Band of Gold.” Cherry sang in an ardent baritone, but between songs audiences saw a bashful, drawling lad from Wichita, Texas. Lee had met him in Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Theater, where Cherry appeared on a bill she was headlining. Before the opening, Lee had spent hours rehearsing onstage with Jimmy Rowles; she paid no attention to anyone else’s scheduled rehearsal time, and Cherry was furious to learn that she had used up all of his.
At the first show, she heard him singing his latest single, “I’m Just a Country Boy.” Afterward, Cherry overheard her asking Rowles in a testy voice, “Why would they book a country singer to sing with me?” That night, Rowles approached him and conveyed an invitation from the star to attend a party in her honor. “Tell Miss Lee to go shit in her hat,” Cherry said.
When he arrived in his dressing room the next day, he found a rose in a small vase. Alongside it was a note from Lee: “The hat is full.”
Lee had no trouble acting the aggressor, and she promptly asked him out to dinner. Their late-night meetings became a ritual. Cherry fell under her spell. “Nobody in my life had ever happened to me like this!” he exclaimed in a golly-gee tone that proved he was just a country boy. Lee, he added, was “the greatest talent I ever met”; if anyone had asked him to name his dream woman, “it would have been her.”
In her hands, the Texas lad grew up fast. He watched her gulping cognac before the first show; by the time the two of them walked back to her hotel, Lee was feeling no pain. On their walks they passed White Castle, the fast-food chain restaurant famous for its small, square-shaped burgers. One night Lee commanded Cherry to go in and buy eight. He obeyed. Up in her suite, Lee ordered him to “take them to the bed and shake them out” as though they were playing cards. “Shuffle ’em!” she said. He obeyed. Then she said, ‘Deal!’ ” He tossed four of the greasy hamburgers on the bed in front of her, and Lee picked them up. “She said, ‘I am going down with one pickle!’ I said, ‘That’s no good. I’ve got to have the piece of lettuce.’ ”
Early in their brief liaison, Lee arranged for Cherry to open for her at her Las Vegas base, the Copa Room of the Sands Hotel. The Nevada gambling town would become the source of her heftiest earnings for the next many years. Lee began singing there just as Vegas was burgeoning into the most garish entertainment hub in the world. All along the fabled Las Vegas Strip of resort hotels, neon signs trumpeted the presence of Frank Sinatra at the Desert Inn, Liberace at the Riviera, Marlene Dietrich at the Sahara, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Flamingo, and countless other stars, all of them enshrined in the desert within castles of glass, chrome, and steel. The British theatrical legend Noël Coward, Vegas’s most high-flown headliner, marveled at the bizarre allure of his surroundings. “I am simply mad for all this plush and honky tonk,” he told Gilbert Millstein of the New York Times. “I am fascinated by the mountains looking like peach-colored cardboard. I love this curious, artificial vividness plunked down in the midst of the most primitive part of the world.”
In fact, the Strip was a shrewdly designed, mafia-run money machine. It lured in tourists with free chips, cheap booze, and glamorous but inexpensively priced shows, then seduced them into dropping every dollar they had, or didn’t have, in the gambling casinos. The gangster financiers could well afford to pay twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars a week to their headliners—staggering fees at the time. And if Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr., and other black stars were barred from using the pools or even sleeping in the hotels where they performed, few of them turned down the money. In some hotels, blacks were forbidden from crossing the casino floor, lest they offend raci
st but deep-pocketed whites. As George Jacobs, Sinatra’s black valet, wrote in his memoir, Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra, “Vegas was a Wild West cowboy town back then, and these cowboys didn’t cotton to colored dudes.”
Lee certainly did. But given her heartfelt devotion to black music and its creators, it seemed odd that she employed so relatively few black musicians in her rhythm sections. Her groups may have hinted at the “hot” sound of rhythm-and-blues and Harlem swing, but they looked cool, California, and white, which suited the needs of Vegas. Attention spans in the showrooms tended to run even shorter than the town’s racial tolerance; but Lee didn’t compromise her art, even if entertainers were told to wrap it up in less than an hour.
Her boss at the Copa Room was Jack Entratter, ex-manager of the Copacabana. Under his auspices, the club played host, in the 1950s and ’60s, to Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Durante, Bobby Darin, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett, and most famously the Rat Pack, the summit of five stars—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis, Jr.—who carried on like frat boys. They and their colleagues looked out into a vast, low-ceilinged showroom whose rows of neatly arranged tables for two, covered in white tablecloths, seated seven hundred and fifty. The stage, behind a rail, was large enough for an orchestra. Between shows, the dancing “Copa Girls” kicked and smiled in their scanties.
Still, Lee’s shows there were barely less subtle than the ones she had performed at La Vie en Rose. “She didn’t adjust to the audience; they adjusted to her,” explained George Schlatter, now a Las Vegas producer. “I don’t remember us ever having an inattentive audience,” said bongo player Jack Costanzo, who worked with Lee in the mid-fifties. The Sands, he said, “had security you wouldn’t believe”; noisemakers were brusquely silenced or thrown out.
