by James Gavin
Lee sometimes ran into a top Vegas attraction, the glamorous Polly Bergen, whose career skyrocketed after she won an Emmy Award for her TV portrayal of the tragic torch singer Helen Morgan. As Bergen noticed, the sexy, confident Lee of the stage could seem lost without a song to escape into. “She struck me as strange,” said Bergen. “She had this kind of blank look on her face all the time.”
Her enigmatic nature fascinated Jack Webb, the actor who played the most famous fictional detective of the 1950s—stern, deadpan Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragnet, the hit crime series of radio and TV. Lee was one of Webb’s favorite singers; now he had devised a project that he hoped would bring them together. Webb had launched a production company, Mark VII, in order to create a film inspired by Pete Kelly’s Blues, a Dixieland radio show he had produced in 1951. Now, in counterpoint to the slap-happy sound of 1920s traditional jazz, Webb had developed a tale about a cornet-playing bandleader thrust into a maelstrom of gangsters, insanity, and murder. Warner Bros. had agreed to distribute the film, to be shot in Cinemascope, the new widescreen format. Webb would direct, star, and invest much of his own money in this labor of love.
Early in 1954, Lee answered her phone and heard the grave voice of Joe Friday on the other end. True to the reputation of that character—who told witnesses, “Just give me the facts”—Webb leveled with Lee. He said he had a “wonderful yet unglamorous part” for her: that of Rose Hopkins, an alcoholic Prohibition-era gun moll and sometime speakeasy singer who loses her mind. Lee was intrigued. Webb promised to send her the script by Richard Breen, who had just won an Oscar for Titanic; prior to that Breen had written the script for Niagara, which gave Marilyn Monroe her first starring role.
Rose clearly mirrored Peggy Lee, whose blurry, distant quality suggested a woman not quite in touch with real life, but intimate with pain. Once the script arrived, Lee pored over it. The role both attracted and disturbed her. “She drinks too much and sings a little,” she said of the abused Rose. For obvious reasons, the part spoke deeply to her. Onscreen Lee would have to lose control, singing drunkenly out of tune and cracking under pressure—daunting prospects for an artist who only wanted audiences to see her at her most disciplined, edited best. But in her work, at least, Lee remained willing to confront even her darkest sides. Rose spoke to her. She accepted Webb’s offer.
His instincts about Lee were shared by Arthur Hamilton, Mark VII’s resident songwriter. A former delivery boy for a drug company in Seattle, Washington, Hamilton had come highly recommended by Webb’s ex-wife, the sultry singer-actress Julie London, Hamilton’s date at the high school prom. In 1955, his song “Cry Me a River” would make London a star.
Through Webb, he got to know Peggy Lee. “It was like meeting the Mona Lisa,” he said. Hamilton caught her attention with one tune, “Bouquet of Blues.” Its heroine—“the girl of great regret”—lives with the ghost of a vanished man who haunts her thoughts. Hamilton’s memorable description of her—“Misery in high-heeled shoes / Holding a bouquet of blues”—summed up every downtrodden dame ever mistreated in a film noir.
For “Bouquet of Blues,” the composer had envisioned “a beautiful woman walking the streets alone, no place to go, thinking about what brought her to where she is. You could hear the echo of her footsteps.” On May 26, 1954, Lee became the first major artist to record a Hamilton song. She performed “Bouquet of Blues” at Decca’s Los Angeles studio, where a jazz quartet spun an ambiance as chilling as any on Black Coffee. Benny Carter’s tenor sax wove icily around Lee’s voice, which shivered with a sense of impending doom.
“Bouquet of Blues” failed to make even the bottom of the Billboard pop chart. But the disc became a staple on many a late-night disc-jockey show. According to Mark Murphy, it became “a kind of hit among the bopsters and the hipsters. Peggy was the girl of great regret.”
Yet she presented so many masks to the public that it was hard for them, or her, to know who the real Peggy Lee was. On her recordings that year, the cool, swinging Lee and the tragic one alternated with several others. She joined the Mills Brothers, the suave black vocal quartet, to record her own “Straight Ahead,” a hand-clapping gospel tune about rocking down the road to salvation. Lee wrote the flamenco song “The Gypsy with Fire in His Shoes” for a Tony Curtis western, The Rawhide Years; she sang it in a faint Spanish accent while her coauthor, Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida, plucked away tempestuously and Sammy Davis, Jr., tap-danced in rhythm.
In a package tour set to play a month of one-nighters that fall, Lee traveled with a largely black cast—all of them stars at New York’s Apollo Theater including jazz crooner Billy Eckstine, doo-wop quartet the Drifters, and comic George Kirby. But luck was against them. During the first week, their bus passed through towns hit by Hurricane Hazel, a tropical storm that had blown from Haiti to the U.S. and Canada, causing many fatalities and wreaking devastation. The cast escaped harm; but whether through fear of Hazel, mismanagement, overbudgeting, or simple lack of interest, The Biggest Show of ’54 bombed. Several shows were canceled, and halfway through, Lee and Eckstine bowed out. The promoters had no choice but to halt the tour; they blamed an “illness that befell Peggy Lee.”
Lee wasn’t the sole culprit, of course, but the claim did seem to hold some truth. On December 18, the Boston Globe noted that she had undergone “major surgery” for removal of a benign tumor. It forced her to cancel all engagements until after the New Year. Once more, Lee felt she had escaped death. Thereafter she entered a short phase of “almost Zenlike peace,” as Lee Ringuette described it. On the surface, at least, her anxiety seemed lifted as she reveled in the comforts of family and home. The Ringuettes came over for barbecues, and joined her in the kitchen to do dishes while they all sang. Lee spent hours tending her garden and discussing philosophy and metaphysics with such friends as scientist Jimmy Marino, who worked with Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the left-wing physicist and nuclear weapons researcher.
Marino had a timely job; the Cold War was raging, and many Americans feared an atomic Armageddon. But Lee seemed little aware of such earthly concerns. Instead she treated Marino to a lengthy explanation of her theory that music emitted healing waves. The perpetually ailing singer was no case study for her own thesis, but she swore she was right, and asked Marino to tell Einstein. He dutifully reported back that the father of physicists thought there might be some truth to it.
In February 1955, Lee channeled her “Zenlike peace” into the most uncommercial LP of her career. To Bill Rudman, one of her later producers, Sea Shells was “a New Age album in the Fifties.” Lee’s manager Ed Kelly had given her a book entitled Music of Many Lands and People; it filled her thoughts with centuries-old images of fair-haired maidens, heavenly birds, and verdant fields of plenty. With that, she began gathering fanciful verse and folk songs—“The White Birch and the Sycamore,” “The Happy Monks,” “The Gold Wedding Ring,” “The Wearing of the Green.” A poem by Ernest Holmes, “Of Such Is the Kingdom of God,” tells of heaven’s mystical splendors; in a “Chinese Love Poem” Lee speaks calmly of desertion, a subject that haunted her:
I am alone in my room
I have put out the light
And I am weeping
I weep, because you are so far away
And because you will never know how much I love you
Stella Castellucci was on hand to spin celestial clouds on the harp strings. Gene DiNovi, the only other musician, arrived at Decca’s studio on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood to learn that he would be playing harpsichord, not piano. “I had never seen a harpsichord in my life,” he said. It looked like a small antique piano, but had two rows of keys, and the metallic tones it produced had formed the basis of much Renaissance and Baroque music. That was the ancient sound Lee wanted.
Her tranquility throughout the album could coax a child to sleep. “Peggy said, ‘You know, these songs are such small, delicate little things; why don’t we call them sea shells?’ ” recalled Castellucci. Decca
’s willingness to record such an esoteric disc suggests how highly the company thought of Lee. Hearing the finished product, however, they weren’t so eager to release it; Sea Shells wouldn’t see the light until 1958, after “Fever” had made Lee a hot seller again.
Throughout the sessions, Lee had summoned up a mental oasis she could never maintain for long. In the album’s most revealing piece, the Victorian-era “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard,” a little girl scolds her playmate:
I don’t want to play in your yard
I don’t like you anymore
You’ll be sorry when you see me
Sliding down our cellar door
The song evoked the petulant child in Lee who had never died, and never would; near the age of sixty she was still singing it. Anyone who had known the soft, spacy Lee would have been shocked at how brusque and bullying she could turn, especially with underlings. Her book of poems, Softly—with Feeling, contains the oblique line, “You pick up little habits from those BIG people and not all of it is good.” The “BIG” person was very likely Min. Although she would never have acknowledged or perhaps even perceived it, Lee had absorbed her stepmother’s powers of intimidation, and she wielded them in almost every relationship she had.
Secretaries suffered some of her harshest treatment. Just as Min had made her scrub the floors over and over, Lee forced assistants to redo tasks—such as typing letters and lists or vacuuming her plush carpeting—until she’d pushed them to the brink. Ignoring the fact that her employees had lives of their own, she kept them working as late as she could, evoking all the days when Min had done that and made her late for school. Della and Marianne maintained their almost saintly willingness to help, and still Lee wasn’t happy. “Marianne was the sweetest woman that ever lived,” said Dona Harsh. “They were both very loyal to her. And Peggy worked them half to death.” Harsh quit Lee around 1955. “My father was ill, but I would have had to leave because I was ready for a nervous breakdown, I was so tired. I had no sleep on the road for three years.”
By now the singer’s sunny California prettiness had hardened. Lee had adopted a short, coiffed, silver-blond hairdo “which is unlike any natural hair on anybody,” wrote columnist Sidney Skolsky. It made her look tough, and older than she was. Certainly she had lost her onetime country-girl charm, the sort that had made Dinah Shore second only to Doris Day as America’s premiere blond songbird. Born in Tennessee, Shore had emerged on the eve of World War II as a soothing symbol of home. Her drawling voice—whose confidential softness predated Peggy Lee’s—had a tinge of Southern blues, but it was her cheerful earthiness, free of dark undertones, that had made millions of people welcome her into their homes as TV’s foremost singing hostess.
Harsh recalled the night when Lee and Shore were on the same roster at the Hollywood Bowl. Lee’s dressing room was a bees’ nest of nervous activity. Assembling the “Peggy Lee doll,” as Mark Murphy termed her elaborate public persona, had become a trial. Lee’s broad shoulders, wide hips, shapeless legs, and fluctuating weight made her hard to dress; and years of peroxide use had thinned her hair, which required buns and falls to fill it out. Backstage at the Bowl, recalled Harsh, “somebody was doing her hair, and Peggy was doing her own makeup, and I’m fluttering around doing this and that, and the musicians are consulting with her.” In walked Shore to pay her respects. “She says, ‘Hello, everybody!’ She’s carrying this gorgeous gown over her shoulder. She jumps into the dress and says, ‘Honey, would you mind zipping me?’ I zipped up her dress. She runs a comb through her hair. Makeup is fine. And on she went. Peggy sat there for three hours getting ready.”
Yet all of Lee’s subliminal tension gave her singing a mystique that Shore’s would never have. Jack Webb drew on it for the tortured character of Rose. The spring of 1955 found Pete Kelly’s Blues in the heat of production. The cast had fallen into place. Recent Oscar-winner Edmond O’Brien would play Fran McCarg, the thug who muscles in on Kelly. In the role of Ivy Conrad, a society flapper in love with Pete Kelly, Webb cast Janet Leigh, future costar of Psycho. Martin Milner, later famous for his roles on TV’s Route 66 and Adam-12, would play Kelly’s drummer Joey, whom McCarg’s henchmen rub out to intimidate Kelly. Movie tough guy Lee Marvin would appear as Kelly’s clarinetist; the still-obscure bombshell Jayne Mansfield took the small role of a cigarette girl. Webb adored Ella Fitzgerald, and although she had never done any serious acting, he cast the jazz great as Maggie Jackson, a roadhouse singer.
He and his team sought to recreate, with pinpoint accuracy, the Kansas City of 1927. His research crew pored over that year’s issues of Vogue and Ladies’ Home Journal; they searched for period cars, liquor bottles, furniture, clothing, songs. Only items that had existed in 1927 were allowed. Webb was just as obsessed with authenticity of character. Casting a party scene in a dance hall, he hired a hundred nonprofessional couples to frenetically dance the Charleston and the Black Bottom. “I did not want them to be perfect in their steps,” he explained. Real musicians would dub for Webb and the actors who played his bandmates; still, the star spent months mastering the correct fingerings on the cornet.
Filming began in February. Webb and over fifty cast and crew members flew to Louisiana to shoot the prologue: a black cornetist’s funeral, set on a plantation near LaFitte, a small bayou village. Costly as it was, Webb had refused to film the scene on a soundstage; he wanted the action to unfold amid swaying oak trees, draped with moss, and riverboats that drifted lazily by. Webb engaged the gospel choir from the nearby Divine Spiritual Church to sing a funeral dirge, followed by a ragtime brass band to perk things up. He hired locals to play a gravedigger, a plantation worker, and other mourners. At the scene’s end, an antique hearse transports the coffin to its destination. Someone places the dead man’s cornet on top of it. As the hearse rolls away, the horn falls onto a mud road. Picked up by a stranger and pawned, the horn is won years later in a crap game by Pete Kelly, a returned doughboy from World War I.
From there, shooting moved to the Warner Bros. soundstages in Burbank, California. The center of the film’s action is a replica of a Kansas City speakeasy, with a dance floor, a stage, and tables. Pete Kelly and His Big Seven entertain. Mob boss Fran McCarg moves in on the band, demanding a fat cut of its take in return for bookings and protection. The hotheaded but righteous Kelly resists, and a war ensues. Throughout the film, Webb, as director, uses the group’s jubilant traditional jazz ironically, as a backdrop for murder and mental collapse.
Between takes, Webb rushed around, as dead serious as Joe Friday. “The only time I saw Jack sit down during the entire shooting was when he had lunch and when he posed for still pictures,” recalled Janet Leigh. During rehearsals, a stand-in did his part while he directed; Webb placed mirrors on the set that enabled him, literally, to see behind his back. He wore a grave, hangdog expression, his probing eyes heavy with concern.
But Webb wasn’t cold, especially when it came to Peggy Lee, whom he saw as fragile on several levels. Just before she began shooting in April, she received some troubling news: the State of California had once more liened her Warner Bros. earnings for unpaid back taxes. The amount, $1,410.14, was considerably less than her previous IRS lien, but for a woman who spent as recklessly as she did, the news was a rude awakening. Throughout the filming, anxiety dogged her, and she drank more than usual. Whether or not it affected her behavior during production was unclear. To pianist Ray Sherman, an onscreen member of Pete Kelly and His Big Seven, Lee “seemed the same as any actor—just as professional as anyone I had ever been around.” But Webb conveyed a hint to the contrary to Reva Youngstein, the wife of Max Youngstein, head of promotion and marketing for United Artists Pictures. Reva knew Lee slightly, and she asked Webb how it had been to work with her. “Reva,” he said, “you don’t have enough time for me to tell you.”
For The Jazz Singer, Michael Curtiz had tried to draw from Lee the same magical connection with her lines that she had with lyrics. Like Curtiz, Webb soon lea
rned that Lee had no acting technique at all, but she certainly had soul. He tried to help her to build emotionally by shooting her scenes in the order of the script. Otherwise, recalled Lee, Webb left her alone, telling her to trust her own feelings.
His instinct hit the mark. Lee’s identification with Rose is palpable and riveting—even in her first scene, in which she speaks not a word. Upstairs in the speakeasy’s office, McCarg and Kelly are butting heads over the gangster’s insistence on “representing” him. Rose, his mistress, waits uneasily in the background, wrapped in mink. Standing still without a close-up, Lee dominates with her eyes, which exude all the fear, dejection, and weariness in Rose’s broken heart. Those emotions had lived in her since childhood; Pete Kelly’s Blues suggests how close to the surface they remained.
With each of Lee’s scenes, the unwanted child at the heart of Rose merges more closely with the abandoned, belittled Norma. Rose doesn’t resurface until the film’s forty-three-minute mark, when McCarg has had the band’s drummer rubbed out as an intimidation tactic and pressured Kelly into hiring Rose to sing. “She comes free,” he rasps. Rose responds in a tone of chilling resignation: “Ten years he’s known me and all he can say is, ‘She comes free.’ But I guess that covers it.” When McCarg finds his alcoholic mistress with a drink, he grabs it from her and hurls the glass at the top of the wall. Rose murmurs her defining line: “Don’t worry, Fran—I can’t climb that high anymore.”
Some of Rose’s poignancy stems from the fact that she does have talent; it emerges at a rehearsal, when she is neither drunk nor scared. Yet while preparing to go on for the first time, Rose empties a bottle of gin and her reserve shatters. Upstairs at the club, she tells Kelly of her sad past and sadder present. Dead drunk, she insists on performing anyway. The rowdy crowd ignores her. McCarg shouts at them, “She’s gonna sing, you’re gonna listen!” But by now Rose is a confused, incoherent mess, and she stumbles offstage and runs upstairs. McCarg follows her. Moments later, the office door opens and there stands Rose, dazed, with a bloodied gash above her left eye. She faints and tumbles down the stairs. Kelly is so incensed that he vows to fight McCarg and get to the bottom of who killed his drummer.
