by James Gavin
She continued recording copiously for Decca. A slew of new singles teamed her with Sy Oliver, a revered black arranger from the swing era. Oliver had heated up the Cotton Club in the 1930s with his low-down, bluesy charts for the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra; his writing had defined the budding sound of swing as surely as anything by Count Basie or Benny Goodman. Oliver had helped make the Tommy Dorsey orchestra a swing sensation in the forties. Now his style was back in, as R&B invaded the pop charts. In the hands of white musicians his sons’ age, it exploded under the name of rock and roll.
With Oliver conducting, Lee slurred and growled her way through “The Comeback,” a twelve-bar blues number by the raunchy-voiced king of jump blues, Memphis Slim. Singing a century-old spiritual, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Lee belted about eternal salvation as though in the pulpit. She and an all-male choir swapped phrases in the call-and-response fashion of a gospel church.
Soon those discs were spinning in the jukeboxes of black clubs from Harlem to Chicago’s South Side. But white America preferred to hear her sing “Mr. Wonderful,” the schmaltzy title tune of a hit Broadway musical with Sammy Davis, Jr. Lee’s version climbed to number fourteen. Its success bolstered her free rein at Decca to do whatever she wanted. Her song choices roamed far from the sanitized fluff that pre–rock singers like she were often assigned. In “Where Flamingos Fly,” she sings of an illegal immigrant from a far-off island who is plucked from his lover’s arms and shipped home. She and Oliver bring a stripper’s bump-and-grind beat to a Sophie Tucker hit of the speakeasy age, “You’ve Got to See Mamma Ev’ry Night (Or You Can’t See Mamma at All).” Willard Robison had written “Guess I’ll Go Back Home (This Summer),” a wistful travelogue about revisiting a town much like Jamestown, North Dakota, where old friends and lost innocence reside. In the happiest of goodbye songs, George and Ira Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” Lee swings joyously while barely raising her voice above bedroom level.
But it was in the long-playing format that Lee could let her imagination run the freest. Black Coffee and Sea Shells had helped pioneer the “concept album,” which turned the LP from a space-saving compilation into a unified work of musical art. Now, in Dream Street, Lee turned a dozen torch songs into an arty reverie about faded loves and hopes. The arranger, Shorty Rogers, was known for his cool, brainy West Coast jazz; but on Dream Street, Lee drew him into her ethereal world. The mood is set by “Street of Dreams,” a Depression-era classic that tells of a distant nirvana where “dreams broken in two can be made like new.” A strain of that Victor Young song weaves in and out like a benevolent angel; it haunts such ballads as “Last Night When We Were Young” and “My Old Flame,” whose protagonists live in mourning of their lost happiness. Dainty sounds—Stella Castellucci’s harp, Larry Bunker’s bell-playing, Bud Shank’s flute, Bob Cooper’s oboe—elevate the celestial mood; two new additions to Lee’s band, pianist Lou Levy and bassist Max Bennett, tiptoe through their parts.
For most of the album, Lee sings with lips nearly pressed to the microphone; still she seems as uncapturable as a smoke ring. In the songs, as in life, her mood swung dramatically. Slashing through the gauzy ambiance of Dream Street is a tough, driving jazz-trio version of “It’s All Right With Me” from Cole Porter’s 1953 musical, Can-Can. Porter had conceived it as the pained lament of a man who tries to ease his broken heart with a one-night stand. “You should cry when you sing it,” insisted the composer. But Lee gave that song the same predatory stamp she’d branded onto Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” “Meeting Mr. Right Now,” she blusters her way past every doubt—“It’s the wrong time and the wrong place / Though your face is charming, it’s the wrong face”—and moves in for the kill.
To many of the men she met, it came as a surprise that a woman who seemed so timid could stalk them like a tigress in heat. Mark Murphy once overheard Lee vamping an admirer: “Are you a fan or a man?” Professional boundaries didn’t concern her; she seduced many of her musicians. And if her prey had wives, so much the better. In 1955, columnists reported on her romance with her handsome doctor, Lewis V. Morrill, who was married, though separated, from actress Rhonda Fleming. More eyebrow-raising was her gossiped-about affair with a pastor of the First Church of Religious Science, which dispensed Ernest Holmes’s teachings. One of the practitioners brought her young daughter, Nancene Cohen, to services. “My mom told me she was dating our pastor at the time,” said Cohen. “Next thing you know, our pastor and all the church funds disappeared. My mom said he ran off with Peggy Lee. We never saw him again.”
Often Lee seemed resentful of happy couples, and tried to barge in between them. In 1955 she hired drummer Stan Levey, a six-foot, two-inch ex-boxer who played with surprising finesse for Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, and Benny Goodman. To Jack Costanzo, Lee’s percussionist at the time, Levey “was like the bouncer of the band. If anybody came up and bothered us, Stan was watching over.”
After his first rehearsal with Lee, the drummer leveled with his wife, Angela Neylan: “She’s after me. If you want me to quit I will.” Angela laughed it off: “She’s got good taste. I have nothing to worry about.”
Lee had gotten what she wanted from Levey’s predecessor, Larry Bunker. Currently she was engaged horizontally with her handsome pianist, Lou Levy, one of the most laid-back of beboppers. Born in Chicago, Levy had worked in the late forties with Woody Herman, one of the few swing bandleaders who embraced the far-out, experimental sounds of bop. After that, Levy recorded several solo albums. But it was as an accompanist to top-flight singers—Anita O’Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee—that he made his greatest mark. In his chorus on “It’s All Right With Me,” his fingers fly across the keys, but Levy, like Lee, knew how to burn without breaking a sweat.
For a woman who loved to be seen with manly men, there couldn’t have been a more fetching sight at the piano. His prematurely graying hair and ruggedly handsome face recalled the 1950s movie star Jeff Chandler; Lee introduced Levy to audiences as her “Good Gray Fox.” Onstage and off, he was Mr. Cool, laid-back and witty—largely because he stayed continually stoned on pot. “When the night was over,” said Max Bennett, “Lou disappeared, and we knew where he went.”
Her dallying with her musicians helped Lee to spawn her famously sexual vibe onstage. But at rehearsal time she got down to more serious business. Even Victor Young had bowed to her as a woman in charge: “She can’t write a note of music but she knows exactly what she wants to hear.” The singer voiced her ideas gently but firmly. “There was no, ‘Shall we do this?’ or ‘Shall we do that?’ ” said Jack Costanzo. “It was, ‘Do this’ or ‘Do that.’ I couldn’t fault her on anything, musically.” Lee’s lack of a technical vocabulary forced her to express her visions poetically. “Give me a clitter-de-bong,’ she’ll say, or she’ll ask for ‘feathers,’ ” reported John Tynan in Down Beat. Levy recalled other examples: “She’d say, ‘I’d like it to be like a cloud.’ And she always talked about Respighi’s The Pines of Rome. It sounds funny, but we knew what she meant.”
By the last rehearsal, she had added nuances to songs that their composers and arrangers had never imagined. Every musical detail, vocal and physical gesture, and snippet of patter had been planned. “I played the same thing night after night, and it never got boring,” said Levy, who stayed with her, on and off, for the next twenty years. “The music was always great. The band didn’t have to push her; she would generate the energy to us.”
Frank Capp was fresh out of the Stan Kenton band, and just past twenty, when he became another of Lee’s drummers. Rehearsing at her home, he recalled seeing the adolescent Nicki peering into a machine intended to strengthen her vision, which required her to wear thick glasses. Insecurity seemed to haunt her. Lee had enrolled her daughter in the Hollywood Professional School, attended through the years by Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Natalie Wood, and countless other showbiz youths. To mix with the entitled offspring of stars c
ould be intimidating. Sometimes Lee multitasked Nicki into her professional life by taking her along to movie sets or nightclubs. At best, Lee’s attention was divided.
She recalled the situation defensively. “I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with Nicki, which was unfortunate, but I was making a living. She always had one parent with her, because I used to have David stay at the house when I was gone. So she knew that she was loved.” But Nicki wanted more: “There were tremendous amounts of time when Mom just wasn’t available. And I was being cared for by someone else. So it was very difficult.” In their complicated relationship, love and resentment, envy and awe ran together. “She was way up there on a pedestal for me,” remembered Nicki. “Way up.” Seldom did they see eye to eye.
All her life, she had to live in the shadow of a glamorous and superachieving mother. Mark Murphy could see that Nicki had an “artistic gift” of her own: “I always saw her with pencil and paper, drawing something.” But she longed for a sibling to keep her company. Instead she played with the three dogs of the house: a collie, Banjo; Viking, a Norwegian elkhound; and cocker spaniel Lady, a gift from Sonny Burke.
As for human friends, Nicki recalled being thrown in with “this group of show-business children, and we all went to the same parties, even if we didn’t know each other very well. I look at pictures and I see my face looking up at the puppet show or something else that’s going on, and I’m like this little lost child surrounded by a sea of faces that I couldn’t recognize, except for a couple.”
Nicki begged her mother to stay home more often. “She makes a long face whenever I leave,” Lee confessed to a reporter. “And a mother can stand just so many long faces.” The singer told of opening her suitcase in a hotel room and finding Nicki’s favorite doll inside—the girl’s apparent reminder to her mother that she existed. “I almost cried,” said Lee. As the 1955 holiday season approached, she announced her decision to quit touring and devote more time to motherhood. But a reporter for Redbook was skeptical. “If it becomes a choice between one or the other, no one who knows Peggy Lee doubts which road she will take.”
* * *
IN THOSE SAME WEEKS of 1955, Lee returned to Ciro’s. One night a short but handsome young man eyed her from the bar. Dewey Martin was a rising Hollywood hunk whom Howard Hawks—the director who had helped cement the fame of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Cary Grant—had taken under his wing. Martin had played several he-man roles for Hawks: an Air Force sergeant in The Thing from Another World; a frontiersman in The Big Sky; and, most marketably, a half-naked hero in the Egyptian epic Land of the Pharaohs. To gay filmgoers, the Texas-born actor possessed “the thighs that drew a million sighs.” Jack Larson, who knew him, agreed: “He was spectacular looking. It wasn’t a Hollywood pretty-boy face. His ears stuck out a bit. But he had this extraordinarily beautiful body, before people went to gyms.” Another friend recalled him as “a huge flirt and a tease,” especially with men, whom he hugged freely.
Martin asked Dick Stabile, the club’s resident bandleader, to take him backstage. Lee drank in the sight of the hunky thirty-two-year-old actor, an ex–World War II fighter pilot who scuba-dived in the ocean near his Malibu home. Bare-chested beefcake photos of him adorned many a magazine.
According to Modern Screen, he greeted Lee by exclaiming, “I’ve been in love with you for ten long years!” In his Navy days, Martin had seen her at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre and “flipped.” Lee offered him a drink; he asked her out to dinner. They wasted no time in embarking on a whirlwind courtship. Both were traveling for work, but they shared nightly phone calls. In one of them, he proposed. “There were two gentlemen that wanted to marry her at that time,” explained Nicki. She urged her mother to choose Martin. “I thought Dewey was cooler than the other guy,” she said. But Dona Harsh detected signs of a temperamental young man. “He was kind of sharp, definitely moody,” she said.
Lee’s parade of beaus had failed to fill the gap left in her life by Dave Barbour and Robert Preston. “She was one of those people who are in love with love, and always searching for that,” observed Stella Castellucci. The singer left little time to get to know Dewey Martin. She and her trophy fiancé set a wedding date of Saturday, April 28, 1956. Martin was busy filming a TV pilot in Utah; Lee was in Los Angeles, suffering anxiety attacks over her rash decision.
Dewey Martin in Land of the Pharaohs, 1955. (COURTESY OF TOM TOTH)
At home in bed, Lee stayed awake until deep in the night, accompanied, as ever, by her Science of Mind literature and praying for the best. All too soon, the big weekend arrived. According to a perhaps apocryphal fan-magazine report, Martin, who was still in Utah, chartered a small private jet to take him home. A sudden storm broke out, and the pilot refused to fly through it. Brashly, the actor arranged to borrow a two-seat plane. All alone, he zoomed through the rainclouds and descended onto a Burbank landing field on the afternoon of the appointed day. “There, praying him in, was Peggy,” alleged Modern Screen. “They just had time to race to a Beverly Hills jewelry store, choose double rings, and make the license bureau five minutes before it closed.” From there they drove to Palm Springs, where Lee had bought a house. They were wed at the local Church of Religious Science.
The singer vowed this time to put marriage before career. Meanwhile, her husband seemed sure that the words “I do” would transform Miss Peggy Lee into Mrs. Dewey Martin. He was three-and-a-half years younger than she, but in the pictures snapped on their wedding night he looked at least a decade her junior. Nonetheless, he expressed a typical 1950s male attitude about who would wear the pants. “She knows she doesn’t have to work another day if she doesn’t want to,” declared Martin to a reporter. The actor bought Lee’s Los Angeles home from her so that he would own it, then they redecorated it to both their tastes. Martin made it clear that he did not encourage the parade of visitors that made the house feel like “Grand Central Station,” as Lee called it. “All that’s changed,” announced Martin. “Our home is for us, our family and friends.”
Lee informed her musicians that she was taking a year off from the road. She canceled her June and July engagements and joined her new husband in Utah, where he finished his TV pilot. Back in California, the newlyweds had a quick honeymoon close to home, seeing giraffes and elephants at the San Diego Zoo and driving across the border to Tijuana to attend the bullfights Martin loved.
The singer’s nephews, Lee and Lynn Ringuette and Glen Egstrom, were impressed by their new he-man, movie-star uncle. Glen, who had launched a lifelong passion for scuba diving, was thrilled to inherit a set of Martin’s old gear; the actor gave the two brothers an Italian bike and some of his screen memorabilia. “He seemed utterly sincere,” said Lee Ringuette. “He and my dad were quite good friends, and my mother liked him a great deal. He seemed to genuinely love Peg.” And she loved him, or wanted to believe she did. But by the summer, a familiar sense of emptiness had set in, and the lost soul in Peggy Lee returned. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m on a treadmill, not knowing where I’m headed, who I am, or what it’s all about,” she confided to a reporter.
Her Decca contract was set to expire after the New Year. Lee adored recording, and the label had treated her royally. Still she felt nostalgic for Capitol, whose top brass had nurtured her like fathers. As Thanksgiving approached, Glenn Wallichs, the company’s president, asked her to give them a second chance. She didn’t hesitate.
The Capitol of 1956 was far statelier than the company that had let her go four years before. It now resided in the Capitol Records Tower, a gleaming white, cylindrical building that soared thirteen stories above Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. (Until 1964, earthquake zoning restrictions forbade anything taller.) The Tower was shaped like a stack of discs; a spike protruding from the roof evoked the spindle of a record-changer.
All this opulence had been bankrolled by Electric and Musical Industries, Ltd. (EMI), the British electronics firm to whom Wallichs, Johnny Mercer, and the estate of
the now-dead Buddy DeSylva had sold a controlling interest. Some of the old Capitol guard feared that EMI would turn the company into a crass commercial enterprise. Rock and roll was officially two years old, and clearly more than a fad; the biggest hits of 1956 included Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog,” Bill Haley & His Comets’ “See You Later Alligator,” and Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers’ “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” Parents recoiled in disgust, and they prayed their children would escape the plague of youth running wild.
Capitol’s roster now included Gene Vincent, a twenty-one-year-old Virginian whose top-ten hit, “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” helped launch rockabilly, another new sound that grown-ups hated. But Capitol still prided itself as a house of sophistication, and adult tastes continued to reign, at least for now. To all who entered the building and walked the shiny lobby floor to the elevator, the framed photos on the walls served as reminders of who had made Capitol soar. There was Nat King Cole, whose sixty-nine top-forty hits—four of them number-one—had given the company its nickname, “The House That Nat Built.” Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Les Paul, Margaret Whiting, and George Shearing—Capitol pillars all—smiled out from their eight-by-ten glossies.
But the label’s emperor was Frank Sinatra. After capsizing in popularity around 1950, Sinatra had bounced back with his Oscar-winning performance in From Here to Eternity. Now, after a series of smash albums on Capitol, he defined winner.
