by James Gavin
Sinatra had told Capitol to “get Peggy back,” but Glenn Wallichs already wanted her. That February, with the ink barely dry on her new contract, Sinatra—who lived up the street from Lee—dropped by the house and said offhandedly, “Let’s do an album.” He didn’t mean duets. She would sing and he would conduct, a role he had rarely played. Sinatra prepared a long list of moonstruck ballads and asked Lee to choose twelve. As for who would arrange them, he enlisted his main maestro, Nelson Riddle, whose sumptuous orchestral writing had made him the Rolls-Royce of his profession. During the swing era, Riddle had apprenticed with Sinatra’s former boss Tommy Dorsey. Then he joined Capitol, where he struck gold in 1950 as the arranger of Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa.”
Standing before the luxuriant orchestra on that recording was a twenty-nine-year-old whose thinning, wavy hair, double chin, and blank expression gave him the nondescript look of a small-town bank clerk. Yet out of Riddle’s pen came some of the most luscious orchestrations in pop history. He draped singers in plush, impeccably woven carpets of lyricism, with motifs and countermelodies that were often as beautiful as what the composer wrote. Short saxophone or trumpet solos popped up, but Riddle kept a safe distance from jazz; every edge was buffed shiny-smooth and played with the cinematic sweep of Hollywood soundtrack music.
That sound was ideal for the The Man I Love, his project with Peggy Lee. Despite the toughness in their façades, she and Sinatra were two of the dreamiest romantics in pop. But in the spring of 1957, when they taped that album in the standard time frame of the day—three four-hour sessions—Sinatra the conductor had to make good in front of three-dozen top-rank session players who knew a faker from a pro.
He couldn’t read music, but he knew how the best conductors breathed with singers, how split-second pauses or swells could make key phrases come to life. Riddle had coached him exhaustively, and Sinatra had brought him to the studio to watch over things. Band members Lou Levy and Stella Castellucci were surprised at how well Sinatra did. “He conducted as though he really knew what he was doing, I swear,” said the harpist. Lee sang from her glass-walled isolation booth, but she kept an eye on Sinatra, who wore his trademark fedora, cocked over one brow, and a tie pulled loose. “He was following the score and he knew every note in there,” Castellucci said.
On Black Coffee, Lee had sung from a dead end of despair; now she floated on a cloud of euphoria. The Man I Love bespeaks a postwar fantasy of eternal love. Throughout the album, Lee sings of forever—“However he wants me, I’m his until I die”; “When I am tired of dreaming, then I’ll be tired of you”—while Riddle casts her in an enchanted fairyland. A trilling flute evokes a bird of paradise; a distant tenor sax adds sexual intrigue. On the 1938 hit “Please Be Kind,” a virginal plea to a first beau, the strings ripple like lilacs in the breeze.
Lee sang in her airiest, most intimate tone. Jess Rand, a Hollywood manager and press agent, recalled watching her from the control room. “A lot of times she would have the lights turned down to do a ballad. I’m telling you, it was magic. She would lose herself in the music.”
The Man I Love included Lee’s favorite song. She had heard Maxine Sullivan sing “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” in 1944, when, as Mrs. Dave Barbour, she basked in the glow of newlywed life and young motherhood. Written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, it tells of a young couple’s goal to find a heavenly love nest “on a hilltop high”—a Shangri-La “with meadows green” outside the verandah.
Riddle bookended the song with a theme so melodic and lushly orchestrated that Gary Schocker, a classical flutist and composer, likened it to “Debussy meets Copland.” Above a shimmering bed of strings, harp, trumpet, and oboe play with a clean precision that Schocker called “so American”—evocative of Copland’s Appalachian Spring. The effect is that of a wide-open prairie lit up as the sun rises: an idyllic setting for a house on a hill.
Lee never really “acted” in song; nearly everything she sang was somehow autobiographical, and “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” captured her ultimate dream—one that her career had made impossible. Any illusions about growing old with Dewey Martin had crumbled, as Sinatra learned while directing the album-cover photography. Martin embraces Lee with his back to the camera; the singer stares into it with moist eyes, induced by a few dabs of menthol. “Frank wanted me to look romantic, with a far-off, misty stare,” Lee recalled. “But I told him that the man he had on the cover was not my true love.”
The marriage had misguidedly joined a career-obsessed star and a hotheaded he-man who thought he could tame his wife’s ambitions. “I don’t remember them ever spending a lot of time talking,” said Dona Harsh. “She was always in the bedroom getting made up or dressed, or going somewhere.”
George Schlatter, by then a Las Vegas producer, recalled a fight that erupted between the Martins late one night at the Sands. “Dewey ran out of their hotel room and down the hallway, and there was Peggy behind him in a nightgown, yelling, ‘Come back here, you son of a bitch!’ ”
Asked years later if Martin had been a good stepfather, Nicki replied tersely, “No. Let’s just leave it at that, OK?” But Stella Castellucci recalled “one instance where he was very abusive” to Nicki. “And I saw him scream and holler at Peg in front of me. He didn’t care who was around.” Max Bennett recalled him as “insanely jealous” of Lee; yet according to Dona Harsh, now Mrs. Fred Benson, the actor made a pass at her—and she was pregnant at the time. Lee claimed that Martin’s temper scared off many of her friends, who would no longer come to the house. According to Fred Apollo, one of her agents at William Morris, that was fine with Martin. “He tried to isolate her from all the people close to her,” said Apollo.
Meanwhile Apollo watched the singer’s liquor intake rise. Lee began to tell various people, including Castellucci, that Martin was beating her. None of them witnessed the violence, or recalled seeing her with bruises, but they believed her anyway. Lee’s most hair-raising story harked back to their wedding night in Palm Springs. According to Lee, the evening had begun cozily: as she cooked dinner in the kitchen, he sat in the living room watching TV. Then Robert Preston showed up on the screen. Martin knew about their affair, she said, and Lee alleged he flew into a rage. When she emerged from the kitchen, he hit her so hard that she fell to the floor, nearly blinded. “She had a joke about that—‘Instead of a wedding veil, maybe I should’ve worn a crash helmet,’ ” said the playwright William Luce. “It seems that each hurtful thing she claimed to have undergone, she also made light of, possibly as a martyr enhancement.”
Considering her almost certain exaggeration of Min’s brutality, it was hard to know which of her charges against Martin were true. But Lee Ringuette doubted the violence. “I never heard a word about that,” he said, “and I would have, through the gossip in the family.” He did overhear his parents talking about how the actor, like Brad Dexter, had wound up with the subservient job of holding her glass of cognac offstage. “She put him in the position that Brad had been put in. He might have had the prideful anger of a man from that era.”
Given the emotional chaos going on at home, Lee’s ability to adopt a cool, commanding, bright-spirited public face was all the more remarkable. But if her work gave her a place to vent her grief, it was also her safest and happiest refuge. And an ever-growing public paid close attention. Capitol released The Man I Love on July 22, 1957; that summer it became the twentieth biggest-selling LP in the country.
Rhythm-and-blues and rock and roll were now waging such a fierce war against mainstream pop that the old guard felt as if it were standing unarmed in the front line of battle. For the prerock idols—Doris Day, Joni James, Guy Mitchell, Rosemary Clooney, the McGuire Sisters, Jo Stafford—the hits were drying up. They took uneasy stabs at singing “the kids’ music,” but few of them, if any, sounded so at home with rhythm and blues as Peggy Lee.
Capitol remembered this as they tried to find her a new hit. Right after she had left the refined matur
ity of The Man I Love, Lee joined a doo-wop choir, a twanging electric guitarist, and a backbeat-pounding drummer to bounce her way through “Every Night”: “I’m gonna please you, hug and squeeze you / Hold your hand, make you understand. . . .” The arranger was, of all people, Nelson Riddle, who had whipped up a fair facsimile of rock and roll. According to Stella Castellucci, Lee still “detested” that music, but she seemed just as comfortable singing on the beat, in R&B fashion, as she did singing off it, which jazz required. Otherwise, she altered nothing in her style. “Every Night” and similar follow-up singles didn’t sell too well, but they proved, for future reference, that Lee could sing in a rocking manner and not sound silly.
At the end of that year, Riddle joined her for the first of several albums that countered her somber side. Jump for Joy was a party album of lighthearted swingers; the titles—“When My Sugar Walks Down the Street,” “The Glory of Love,” “Ain’t We Got Fun”—announced a toe-tapping good time. It charted even higher than The Man I Love, and its success came just when Lee needed it the most. Like many Americans in that decade of deceptive financial bounty, she had recklessly overspent and mismanaged her money. As 1958 began, the IRS embarked on a witchhunt of top-earning celebrities who had “erred” in their taxes. As a nationwide scare tactic, the names of the starry culprits were leaked to the press. The offenders included Charlie Chaplin, Mickey Rooney, Otto Preminger, Judy Garland and husband Sid Luft, Vic Damone, and Peggy Lee. On February 4, the Chicago Tribune reported an IRS lien against Mr. and Mrs. Dewey Martin for unpaid back taxes. Lee shuddered at the amount owed: $22,348, a fortune at the time. Martin’s earnings had dwindled; now she would have to work harder than ever to pay off their debt.
But nothing could make her downsize. In May 1958, Lee premiered an exorbitantly costly act, designed to bump up her star power. It opened at the Mocambo, the Sunset Strip emporium that had long rivaled the now-shuttered Ciro’s. Lee had gathered an imposing creative team. Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, who had just scored an Oscar for “All the Way” (sung by Frank Sinatra in The Joker Is Wild), wrote special material; so did Sid Kuller, a former Duke Ellington collaborator who would become an important one of Lee’s. Hollywood costumer Don Loper designed her glittering, forty-pound beaded gown, for which she paid a then-staggering five thousand dollars. A choir backed her on “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.” Nick Castle, who choreographed for Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ann Miller, and Shirley Temple, did the staging. Castle, whom Lee would employ for years, gave her a vampish new move: she dipped a shoulder then spun her pearls around her neck while batting her eyes.
For Lee, the show was uncharacteristically cheerful. There were no tunes from Black Coffee and certainly none from Sea Shells; instead, “St. Louis Blues,” “Lover,” and songs from Jump for Joy kept the energy high. Variety singled out one new song. By 1950s standards, it was boldly suggestive. The words, set to an R&B beat, were an ode to coital bliss: “You give me fever / When you kiss me, fever when you hold me tight. . . .” Lee punctuated the beat by stomping her foot.
“Fever” had come to Lee through Max Bennett. The bassist was playing in a band at a seedy joint in downtown Los Angeles, and a young male singer asked if he could sit in. He handed Bennett the sheet music to “Fever.” Like so much rock and roll, the song had only two chords, but its insinuating throb and smolderingly come-hither message made Bennett think: perfect for Peggy.
He called to tell her about it, and she responded excitedly. “Fever” was written by Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell, a black R&B songwriter from Brooklyn whose songs had attracted millions of white record-buying youths. Blackwell had penned “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up” for Elvis Presley; “Great Balls of Fire” and “Breathless” had sealed the stardom of Jerry Lee Lewis. While feuding with his publisher over contract terms, Blackwell had begun writing songs independently under the sardonically Waspish name of John Davenport; he used that pseudonym for “Fever.”
Lee found a 1957 recording by Ray Peterson, a white, Texas-born teenager whose Elvis-inspired voice soared eerily into the stratosphere. She played his 45 until it turned gray. In the introduction, Peterson wails wordlessly over bongos; finger snaps usher in a sultry R&B orchestra led by Shorty Rogers. The youngster’s voice quavers with pent-up lust; his yowled-out “fever!” is a cry for release.
The record—Peterson’s first—was a flop; not until 1960 would he reach the top ten with the chaste teenage ballad, “Tell Laura I Love Her.” After hearing his “Fever,” Lee sought out the 1956 original, a top-forty hit that had somehow escaped her ears. It was sung by an eighteen-year-old black singer from Arkansas, William Edward John, a pint-sized R&B star billed as Little Willie John. His “Fever” was even more aggressively sexual than Peterson’s, with a darker, nastier edge. Willie’s record has finger snaps, too; they punctuate a horn line that prowls like a stalking panther.
“Fever” augured well for his future. But within a few years he had torpedoed his career through drinking, gambling, and unreliability. In 1966, John was convicted of manslaughter; two years later he died in prison at the age of thirty.
After his and Peterson’s indelible versions, Lee wondered how she could possibly make “Fever” her own. Although she seldom acknowledged it, she got quite a bit of help. In a 1970 interview, Lee spoke of how the song’s existing lyrics “didn’t all sit,” so she wrote some new ones “with a gentleman I was working with at the time.” That was Sid Kuller, who had penned material for her splashy Mocambo act. A socially conscious New York Jew, Kuller had teamed with Duke Ellington in 1941 to create Jump for Joy, an all-black, pro-integration show. His name appeared in the credits of leftist revues, TV variety shows, and MGM musicals.
Kuller wrote with far more polish than Lee, whose lyrics, charming as they could be, often had a disjointed, first-draft quality. When she approached him about “Fever,” he suggested adding some substitute verses based on hot-and-bothered historical figures. Lee began writing—and with Kuller’s aid, she came up with several additional stanzas. One concerned Pocahontas, the daughter of a seventeenth-century American Indian colonial lord, and her “very mad affair” with John Smith, a British invading captain. Another was about Romeo and Juliet. Additional ones revealed her own case of “fever.”
As for the arrangement, how to avoid copying her predecessors? Lee had heard about all the black artists whose singles had been shamelessly mimicked by white stars. Georgia Gibbs had scored a number-two smash by aping LaVern Baker’s “Tweedlee Dee”; Pat Boone had covered tunes recorded by Ivory Joe Hunter, Fats Domino, and Little Richard and turned them into sanitized hits for white America.
Lee didn’t wish to rip off her forerunners, white or black. The singer thought of paring down the denseness of Little Willie’s and Ray Peterson’s versions of “Fever” and giving the song some cool. She had plenty of ideas, but couldn’t write them out. To that end, Dave Cavanaugh, the head of Artists & Repertoire at Capitol’s pop division, brought in staff arranger Jack Marshall. Lee explained what she wanted. The finger snaps from the previous recordings would stay. Peterson’s stark bongo sound appealed to her, as did his lasciviously barked “fever!” and rising keys. The horn line that had backed Little Willie John had also stuck in her mind. She hummed it for bassist Joe Mondragon, whom Cavanaugh had hired for Lee’s session. (Max Bennett was on tour with Ella Fitzgerald.) Just two other musicians would join him, drummer Shelly Manne and guitarist Howard Roberts.
According to Lee, she and Marshall had argued over the concept. He wanted to beef up the chart with added instrumentation; she refused. Her philosophy, she declared, could be summed up in a quote by Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States: “The eternal struggle of art is to leave out all but the essentials.”
She got her way. On May 19, 1958, all parties convened at Capitol’s Studio A in Hollywood. Lee didn’t want guitar, so Roberts and Cavanaugh were commanded to snap. Manne provided an array of subtle
sounds: he used his foot on the kick drum, whose low boom-boom throbbed like a pounding heart; with his fingers he thumped on the tom-tom and the large, round snare drum.
In the hour or so that it took to produce a finished take, the chart took on a life of its own: sparse, shadowy, and dominated by the calm but lashing voice of a woman in heat. “Fever” filtered the sizzle of R&B through the sparseness of West Coast jazz. With each key change, Lee cranked up the temperature just a bit—a tantalizing hint of sparks about to ignite.
At a time when the pop charts were full of schmaltzy, string-laden love songs and rock and roll bombast, the minimalism of “Fever” was disarming. Vocal critic Henry Pleasants used it as an example of how Lee could give the “effect of belting” while using a “level of sound which, in a Merman or a Streisand, would suggest a stage whisper.”
Eight times a week on Broadway, the same deliberate snapping that backed Lee on “Fever” formed the ominous pulse of “Cool,” the prelude to a gang war in the musical West Side Story. Both songs dealt with a ticking time-bomb of emotions. And if Lee’s concluding statement—“Chicks were born to give you fever”—befit a Playboy bunny, her steely tone made it clear that she, not any man, was in charge.
At the dawn of a broiling summer, “Fever”—with “those provocatively snapping fingers,” as a reporter called them—hit the stores. By August, it had climbed to number eight. In England it went three notches higher. For the first time since 1952, Lee was back in heavy rotation in jukeboxes and on the radio.
“Fever” would define her permanently. Various singers, including Elvis Presley, made imitative covers, but no one could upstage Lee. Asked to explain the song’s success, she offered: “The young people and anyone else, for that matter, will respond to good songs if they have a good basic rhythm.” It was a coy explanation of the disc’s appeal. As sexually free as she was, Lee operated in a decade of such stifling repression that, when the title character of I Love Lucy was expecting a child, CBS forbade use of the word “pregnant.” Media and religious censors argued that they were protecting America from things it didn’t want to know, but a series of hot-button events had proven otherwise. In 1953, a former Esquire copywriter, Hugh Hefner, published the first issue of Playboy. His purpose, said broadcast journalist Mike Wallace, was to “free the sexual slaves”—to drag sex out into the open and to make it part of a new, emancipated lifestyle. Hefner’s nude cover girl, Marilyn Monroe, was the stick of dynamite that enabled him to bust down those walls. Playboy became an instant smash.
