by James Gavin
The filming of that sequence shook Lee profoundly. “I remember that as being a very tense day,” said her daughter Nicki. “She was really within herself, sort of withdrawn.” Lee had brought Stella Castellucci to the set for moral support; as the harpist watched her, she felt that Lee was reliving the horror of her years “with that stepmother of hers.”
All this nuanced characterization gives proof of Webb’s and Richard Breen’s sensitivity. Kelly is both hotheaded and high-minded; McCarg turns to violence and even murder as a reflex, yet he loves Rose and wants her to succeed. The film’s sole anachronism is the singing of Ella Fitzgerald, whose boppish swing far postdates 1927. Yet in her small role as a timid roadhouse singer who becomes privy to dangerous information, darkness clouds her normally sunny façade. The childlike songstress had never done any serious acting before, and she felt painfully self-conscious as the principles filed out of their dressing rooms to hear her. “I was bothered by all the movie stars watching,” she said later. “Mr. Webb gave me my cue, and all I could answer was, ‘Huh?’ I kept thinking, ‘Here I am doing a scene with Joe Friday.’ ”
Elsewhere on the Warner Bros. lot, one of the watershed movies of the 1950s, Rebel Without a Cause, was in production. A melodrama about tortured suburban youths and their clueless parents, Rebel captured all the festering teenage angst that would soon tear the generations apart. The film’s twenty-four-year-old star, a leather-jacketed James Dean, was already the poster boy for every lost, angry, misunderstood son in America.
Peggy Lee’s age—nearly thirty-five—placed her on the elder side of the generation gap. But Dean was drawn to her nonetheless, and one day a surprised Lee found him sitting in her dressing room “like a friendly cat.” It happened more than once. “Our conversations were mostly silent, but he would stay for quite a while. He smiled a lot. You could feel things simmering and sizzling inside him, and his silence was very loud.”
Still, Dean had seemed so gentle that she was startled to hear otherwise from Jim Backus, who played his father. In the spring of 1955, Lee and Backus shared a goofy respite from the intensity of their film roles. Together they recorded a Decca single of two funny songs based on Backus’s alter ego Mr. Magoo, the bumbling, myopic codger of numerous cartoons. Lee and Gene DiNovi had cowritten both tunes. “Mr. Magoo Does the Cha-Cha-Cha” finds the character muttering and chuckling nervously while temptress Lee tries to teach him the dance. “Where are you going? Can’t you hear me calling?” she sings in mock terror as the nearsighted Magoo falls down an elevator shaft. In “Three Cheers for Mr. Magoo,” Lee heads the chorus that welcomes Magoo back to his alma mater to give a speech; an oom-pah circus band, with glockenspiel and tuba, pounds away comically.
At the session, Backus told her and DiNovi about the shooting of one of Rebel’s key scenes: the one in which Dean’s character, Jim Stark, explodes at his weak-willed father while his frightened mother looks on. Backus was stunned at the rage that erupted from Dean. “He really started slugging me,” said Backus. “He really hurt me. Look at this bruise!”
On April 29, Lee had her own trial to endure—her scene at the insane asylum where her character now resides. Rose sits in a cold, concrete-and-brick room, vacant except for the tiny stool she occupies and a toy piano beside her. Kelly has gone there in hopes of obtaining clues about Joey’s assassin. Slamming a heavy steel door behind him—a sound that signals no way out—he finds her wearing a hospital-type nightgown and clutching a doll. Rose pokes out a melody on the piano, then says in an anesthetized, little-girl voice, “This is my baby. Would you like to say hello?”
When Kelly prods her gently for the information he needs, she answers by murmuring a song: “Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue . . . I can sing a rainbow . . .” It was the work of Arthur Hamilton. It had grown out of a congratulatory wire he sent her hours before a Ciro’s opening. The message read simply, “Sing a rainbow. Arthur.” At around five in the morning, his phone rang. It was Lee, asking: “Which of us is gonna write that song first?”
Webb needed a song for the asylum scene, and Hamilton remembered the wire. He wrote “Sing a Rainbow” in minutes. “Jack loved it,” said Hamilton. “He called me the next day and said, ‘I played the song for Peggy yesterday and she cried.’ ”
“Sing a Rainbow” jogs Rose’s memory; woozily, she mentions a place called Coffeyville in Kansas. “Bad people” are there, she says. Kelly has his clue. Before he leaves, she turns to him and asks, “Were we good friends?”
That line had come from Lee. Back in North Dakota, she had heard it from a mentally ill girl, the memory of whom had inspired her portrayal. But life itself had taught Lee about the disillusion that had ruined Rose. Lee had seen key loved ones drift away—the mother who had vanished; the father whose alcoholism had made him as ephemeral as the trains that passed through his depots; the “dream” husband whose exit she refused to comprehend. On that asylum set, Webb had drawn from Lee a direct and harrowing connection with her bleakest fears. He called for only two takes, and used the first. “I got so emotionally involved in it, it really made me feel ill,” she said later. “It was so real to all of us that when I walked out that door I could just barely walk.”
Technically speaking, she hadn’t “acted” at all. “She was playing herself,” said Hamilton. Richard Breen had acknowledged Lee’s true name, and nature, in Rose’s introduction of her “baby”: “Sometimes she wakes up sad, and then her name is Deloris.” The poet and psychologist Paul Pines saw other connections. “Peggy Lee has always resonated for me as the most lyrical, elegiac voice of utter abandonment. You can see it when she’s hugging the doll. That’s the very image of an abandoned child hugging herself.”
In the summer of 1955, Lee luxuriated in two major film premieres. Lady and the Tramp opened at New York’s Roxy Theater on June 23. Shortly beforehand, a segment of the TV series Disneyland explored the creation of the songs. Lee and Sonny Burke are shown at staged production meetings and at Burke’s piano, where they reenact their songwriting process. In another scene, Lee stands at a microphone and records “He’s a Tramp” while a vocal quartet, the Mellomen, bark, howl, and ham it up for the camera. Lee purrs the song’s catchphrase—“What a dog!”—like Mae West.
The film’s animals have the charisma of movie stars. Columnist Henry McLemore deemed Tramp “as manly as Gable or Brando, as roguish as Gleason, as reliable as Cooper and, when he loses his heart, as romantic as Power or Boyer. And as for Lady, well, she’s just the sauciest, most seductive little bit that ever got her ears in her dinner or wore a license for a lavaliere.” McLemore, who wrote for the powerful Hearst syndicate, called Lady and the Tramp the year’s best film to date; “Bella Notte,” he said, was “the top song in any 1955 picture.” The comically schmaltzy ballad appeared in one of the most memorable scenes in any Disney cartoon: Lady’s candlelit date with Tramp in an Italian restaurant, where two waiters—one strumming a mandolin, the other playing accordion—serenade the dogs as they share a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. They slurp at one strand from opposite ends, and when their lips meet, Lady flinches and turns away shyly.
Yet other critics were unmoved. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called the animation “below par,” the story “sugary” and sentimental. “The Siamese Cat Song,” with its mischievous felines who cavort slyly in unison, then vandalize Lady’s home, amused him. Of Lee’s contribution, Crowther wrote begrudgingly, “The musical score has tinkle, and it is rather nicely sung by Peggy Lee.”
The movie failed to land even a single Oscar nomination. Still, audiences were touched by this story about two social classes united by love, and Lady and the Tramp went on to become the seventh highest grossing movie of the year. In 2011, it made Time’s list of the twenty-five greatest cartoon features in history.
On TV’s Disneyland, Lee and Sonny Burke recreate their recording of “The Siamese Cat Song.”
The film also proved that Lee was much more t
han a singer. John Tynan extolled her in Down Beat: “Few contemporary figures in show business possess her many applied talents and fewer still can match her consistent record of distinguished artistic achievement.” A future favorite of Lee’s, the Oscar-winning composer Randy Newman, called her lyrics “remarkable assignment songwriting.”
But as Lee said at the time, “I’m still not content.” Indeed, Tynan detected an “implied sadness” in all her striving. Few of her recordings pleased her, and her hunger for approval seemed insatiable. Friends feared she was working herself to death. During a return engagement at Ciro’s, the singer was rushed to St. John’s Hospital for treatment of “severe abdominal pains”; later the Washington Post reported that “Peggy Lee’s losing weight so fast she has the doctors nervous.”
It jolted her deeply when her similarly driven friend Victor Young, whom she called one of her “biggest influences,” died of a heart attack at fifty-six. “So much work probably hastened his untimely death,” she admitted.
Now here she was, facing the launch of another major movie just a month after Lady and the Tramp. On Sunday, July 24, The Colgate Variety Hour devoted a whole program to Pete Kelly’s Blues. It shows Jack Webb demonstrating his diligent directorial style, which included noting every move he made on index cards, pinned to a wall. A morose Peggy Lee sings “He Needs Me,” Rose’s “audition” song for Pete Kelly. Lee stands nearly motionless and stares into space as she sang of a willfully blind love, shorn of self-respect: “No matter where he goes, though he doesn’t care / He knows I’m there . . .”
Prior to the film’s release, Lee was asked to sing at one of the most glamorous events in Hollywood, Warner Bros.’ annual studio party, a lavishly catered bash on the lot. The hundreds of guests included almost every Warner star past and present, from James Cagney on down; and the company’s entire top brass, notably the president, Jack Warner.
Some time into the party, Lee, dressed in a plunging black cocktail dress, stepped onto a platform, where a trio awaited her, and began her show. It thrilled Jack Larson, a Warner contract actor who played photographer and cub reporter Jimmy Olsen on TV’s The Adventures of Superman. “You could tell Peggy was a bit zonked,” recalled Larson, but he wasn’t prepared for what lay in store. “She was beside the piano and had her right hand on the piano top. When she finished she made a low bow—and all but passed out. She didn’t get up; she was just down there with her head by her knees. The pianist came around and helped her get up, and he got her offstage.”
Uncomfortable murmurs spread through the crowd. “It couldn’t have been more noticeable,” said Larson. “This was not a triumphant thing to do in front of all the executives of Warner Brothers, after she’d just done a big film for them.”
The repercussions of that mishap were still ahead. For now, all looked promising as Webb embarked on a thirty-city promotional tour. Massive crowds cheered the arrival of America’s most beloved detective, who greeted fans with the firm handshake and laser stare they knew from Dragnet. In New Orleans, thousands jammed Canal Street as Webb inched along in a convertible, confetti and streamers raining down on him.
On July 27, 1955, Pete Kelly’s Blues premiered in San Antonio, Texas. It went on to gross five million dollars, impressive for the time, and tied with East of Eden and The Seven-Year Itch as the year’s thirteenth biggest box-office success. Lee’s performance helped it transcend a host of mixed reviews. Edwin Schallert in the Los Angeles Times called the film a formulaic gangster yarn, but praised the period detail and the music; like most critics he singled out Lee as “outstanding.”
Even so, Pete Kelly’s Blues was overshadowed in a year of outstandingly lifelike dramas—among them East of Eden, Blackboard Jungle, Marty, Picnic, and Rebel Without a Cause—that scratched the wholesome patina of American life to expose something raw and seething underneath. Lush romantic dramas (Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Summertime, The Rose Tattoo), splashy comedies (Mr. Roberts, The Seven-Year Itch), and the musical drama that stole all the attention, A Star Is Born, also dominated 1955.
Despite its vivid characters and eye-filling recreation of the Roaring Twenties, Pete Kelly’s Blues may have come off as a minor film, directed by and starring a man of the small screen. As with Lady and the Tramp, years would have to pass for it to get its due. Webb scored no award nominations; it was Lee who got the recognition. On December 3, the Council of Motion Picture Organizations announced the nominees in its First Annual Audience Awards, a poll voted on by a reported fifteen million viewers. In the category of Most Promising New Female Screen Personality, the candidates were Kim Novak, Joan Collins, Dorothy Malone, Terry Moore, and Peggy Lee.
More than ever, dreams of a film career filled Lee’s head. They soared higher on December 6 when, at a gala dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, British actor Alec Guinness presented the beaming singer with the award. Backstage, photographers snapped group photos of Lee and fellow winners Jennifer Jones, Natalie Wood, and Tab Hunter. Clutching an angel-winged figure holding a star aloft, Lee looked happily dazed.
Good news kept coming. That December in a film critics’ poll, Lee was voted best female supporting actress. As for the Oscars, Webb told Lee she would probably land a nomination, but wasn’t likely to win because she had no studio contract, and might strike industry voters as a lightweight contender.
On February 18, 1956, the nominees for Best Supporting Actress were announced: Natalie Wood (Rebel Without a Cause), Marisa Pavan (The Rose Tattoo), Betsy Blair (Marty), Jo Van Fleet (East of Eden), and Peggy Lee. The singer was ecstatic. For the next month, congratulatory telegrams and phone messages flooded in. Lee continued reading Ernest Holmes, hoping that maybe, through positive thinking, she could will the award to be hers.
On March 21, she attended the Academy Awards ceremony at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Edmond O’Brien, her Pete Kelly’s Blues costar, read the nominees in her category. When O’Brien tore open the envelope and announced the name of Jo Van Fleet, Lee’s heart sank.
Still, it seemed like she would gain other chances to act. The Los Angeles Times reported that Webb had signed her to a multifilm deal with Mark VII Productions. In the same newspaper, Edwin Schallert reported that Lee had received “no fewer than thirty movie scripts” since the release of Pete Kelly’s Blues.
The Mark VII signing, if it ever happened, went nowhere, and Lee never worked with Webb again. As for the rush of scripts, few, if any, came from major studios. Lee never made another film. Gossip about the Warner Bros. party had somehow eluded the press; and the question of why her film career ended so abruptly would occupy a central place in Lee’s mythology. In years to come, Lee alleged a campaign by some mysterious group of moral watchdogs who were leaving notes in nightclubs, outing her as the same sad figure of Pete Kelly’s Blues. “I was an alcoholic, passing out at parties, waking up all over town. Then, wherever I sang I used to find these little pamphlets on my dressing table. They were called The Twelve Steps to Alcoholism.” For the rest of her life, Lee swore that such accusations were nonsense. Drinking, she said, “was never a problem with me. They had me confused with David.”
Her daughter disagreed. “She did have a problem with alcohol,” said Nicki in 1999. Just after the film’s release, newspaper reports had suggested a woman slipping out of control; at times it had seemed as though Lee were channeling the unreliability of Rose. Dorothy Kilgallen reported that “Peggy Lee has the Ciro’s bosses irked for showing up late for her performances.” The star, added Kilgallen, had “begun to display a bit of dat ol’ debbil temperament . . .[she] walks off the floor if the waiters rattle a dish.” George Schlatter recalled a night when Ciro’s owner Herman Hover had asked Lee to shorten her early show to leave time to seat an unusually large late-show crowd, who would be arriving from a premiere. Lee did as asked. As she left the stage, said Schlatter, “she saw me and just drew a blank and went back on the stage and started to do the same show over again.”
Even if she had beha
ved impeccably, there seemed little chance of a Hollywood future for Peggy Lee. The golden age of movie musicals had died, and, of all her singing contemporaries who had broken into film, only Doris Day and Frank Sinatra would maintain lasting careers onscreen. Lee, it seemed, had only one great acting performance in her. Later on she would act in two TV dramas, playing variations of Rose.
Memories of her stellar onscreen moment brought her as much regret as pride. “I would have liked to have another opportunity to know for sure whether I could act well enough to deserve those awards, but it never happened,” she told the BBC’s Alan Dell in 1992. After Pete Kelly’s Blues, Lee claimed she had longed for more scripts—“but I’ve never been offered one since.”
Meanwhile, the film kept haunting her. Lee owned a 16-millimeter print, and loved screening it for guests. Her secretary Betty Jungheim watched it repeatedly. In the part of Rose, Jungheim, too, saw only Peggy Lee.
“Peggy is not the girl you’d run into at a high school prom,” said a deejay. (COURTESY OF RICHARD MORRISON)
Chapter Eight
THE LOSS OF that gold statuette helped keep Lee overachieving in other areas. After Pete Kelly’s Blues, she did such landslide business at the Sands in Las Vegas that the hotel brought her back, doubling her fee. The singer spent countless hours in her home studio rehearsing, writing songs, and recording demos. There she wore a special hat—“It’s orange and it’s very happy”—to channel the muses. Lee took occasional jaunts in her car, but preferred to leave the driving to others. “I can’t seem to keep my mind on the road,” she said. “I keep writing poetry or songs.” Tied in with her distractedness was a phobia about making left turns; to avoid them Lee circled blocks endlessly, or just made a U-turn and went home.
