by James Gavin
By the time “Casa Cugat” had opened inside the Shelton Towers Hotel, the bandleader was past his prime; after a year the club had lost two hundred thousand dollars. Watkins and Green decided on an emergency fix; they would shutter Casa Cugat and make it a headquarters for the cool cats of modern jazz. The partners renamed their club Basin Street East, a twist on Basin Street, a failed Greenwich Village club owned by Watkins.
From its opening night in September 1959, Basin Street East seemed headed for the same fate. Green and Watkins looked despairingly at a smattering of beatnik jazz fans “with earrings, tattoos, and sweaters,” said Green. “They loved the music, but there weren’t enough of them.” For about a week, a bittersweet sight greeted them out front: the doorman was Stepin Fetchit, the black film comic of the 1930s who had become a millionaire by acting the part of a lazy, illiterate numskull. By 1959, he needed a job; the civil rights movement was raging, and Fetchit (born Lincoln Perry) had lost all his money and become a pariah to the cause.
Watkins and Green weren’t exactly thriving. As their club sank deep into the red, Watkins suggested a last-ditch solution. Instead of relying on hipsters and their shallow pockets, what if he and Green reached for the older, more affluent demographic who felt alienated from their kids’ musical tastes?
In October, Benny Goodman and a nine-piece band opened. “It was like someone had turned the lights on in a dark room,” Green recalled. The King of Swing’s fans streamed through the swinging doors at 137 East Forty-Eighth Street, continued past the checkroom and the cocktail lounge, and filled the Last Supper–sized tables in the main room. Goodman, now fifty and balding, took his place onstage with his familiar owlish smile, then tootled his old hits as deftly as ever. Spotlights cut across the long room, making jewels and eyeglasses sparkle. The “huge crowd,” wrote Bob Rolontz in Billboard, “enthusiastically applaud[ed] every solo Benny took . . . In a few words, ‘the king is back.’ ”
Ralph Watkins, Lennie Green, and Moe Lewis of Basin Street East. (COURTESY OF DEBBIE AND LENNIE GREEN)
On Monday, March 7, 1960, Basin Street East welcomed the singer whom Duke Ellington had reportedly named “the queen”—a royal proclamation indeed, and a bold one at a time when Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and a singer who had already dubbed herself “The Queen,” Dinah Washington, were at their peak. All of them just sang; Lee arrived with a production. She had hired Nick Castle’s brother-in-law Hugo Granata, a veteran wizard at creating elaborate lighting schemes for supper-club favorites. Jess Rand, a Hollywood publicist and manager, recalled him as a “homely” man who “never smiled”; to journalist Larry L. King, Granata had “the rugged face of a dance-hall bouncer.” Yet he knew how to bring out the radiance in such stars as Marlene Dietrich, Dinah Shore, and Debbie Reynolds, whose looks mattered as much as their voices. “I can take fifteen pounds off each side of a gal singer,” Granata boasted.
Lee needed it. With her seesawing weight and her proclivity for wearing too-tight dresses that clung to her like a sausage skin, clever lighting helped. It also served as an extension of her voice, adding color and shadow. In rehearsal, Granata sketched out exactingly timed charts while Lee fed him ideas. A few were outlandish, such as her request that he flood her flashy beaded gown with white light upon her entrance. “Peggy, I can’t do that, it’ll blind everybody!” he said. But according to Lou Levy, “her ideas worked fabulously when they worked. And Hugo’s lighting looked exquisite, even from the piano.”
As for the more mundane help she needed in order to create the Peggy Lee that audiences saw, she leaned on Phoebe Ostrow, the club’s secretary and all-around gofer. Then forty-one, Ostrow (who remarried and became Phoebe Jacobs) was a Bronx-born jazz groupie whose father had owned a speakeasy. “She looked like everyone’s Jewish Aunt Phoebe,” said Sheldon Roskin, one of Lee’s later publicists. Ostrow lived for jazz and the people who made it, and worked any job that would place her near them. At Basin Street East, Ostrow worked primarily for Moe Lewis, but her greatest joy came in performing personal errands for the stars, such as taking Duke Ellington’s suits to the cleaners. “She was loud; she was all over the place, like horseshit,” said Green.
In Lee’s presence, Ostrow felt as though heaven’s gates had been flung open. Smitten by “Peggy’s spiritual ability,” as she put it, Ostrow took proprietary hold of the star and never let go; she was there at a moment’s notice to heed her every whim. At the same time, Ostrow could be so bossy, interfering, and abrasive that theirs was a love-hate relationship. “If Peggy needed Phoebe she would call her,” said Lee’s friend Betty Jungheim. “If she didn’t need her, she didn’t call her.”
On the wall of her suite at the nearby Sherry Netherland hotel, the singer had pinned an English translation of a quote attributed to Michelangelo: “Perfection is made up of trifles, but perfection itself is no trifle.” Nothing less than that unattainable goal would suffice. Her shows had a balletic complexity; without the complete concentration of everyone involved, so much could go wrong.
Fear suffused Lee as she sat at her makeup table, cigarette burning in an ashtray, and created the face that audiences knew as hers. It wasn’t easy. Although Ostrow saw Lee as a “ravishing beauty,” Bruce Vanderhoff, who became her hairdresser and friend in the late sixties, found her unrecognizable without makeup. “No eyebrows, no eyelashes, and no lips,” he said, and “that white, white skin that goes red with the change in temperature.”
A rainbow of creams and powders spread out before her, Lee went to work. “She made up her face as if it were a canvas, and she was painting a portrait,” said Ostrow. Lee layered on foundation in varying shades; used eyeliner and shadow, eyebrow pencil, and thick false lashes to give herself the eyes of a lioness. She highlighted her cheekbones with blusher and painted on extravagantly plump lips, often in peach, her favorite shade. Overuse of peroxide had thinned her hair, and Lee quit trying to fluff it up. By now only the front strands of any hairdo were hers; the rest consisted of lemony falls and buns or sometimes complete wigs.
As showtime neared, Lee’s tension almost reached the breaking point. “You didn’t know whether she was gonna be shot out of a cannon, or jump out of a plane five thousand feet above the stage,” recalled Ostrow. “I don’t care how much reassurance she had forty times over. But Peggy enjoyed every bit of anxiety, every bit of pain. Nobody forced her to do this. If she wanted to get herself a little whacked out because she wanted to be more perfect than perfect, so be it. She loved what she was doing. She wouldn’t have changed one drop of it.”
Once Lee was ready, the final preshow ritual began: a mandatory gathering of her core musicians, and selected others, in her dressing room. “We got together and prayed that all would go well,” Ostrow said. “It was silent and it was intense, and we would hold hands. This was a privilege of very special people that could stand and pray with Peggy before she went on that stage.” As she kissed them one by one, Lee murmured the mantra she had devised for each. Stella Castellucci’s was “lima beans,” because the harpist liked the way she cooked them. To her daughter, Lee intoned, “Clouds raised, jets, beams, oceans, rays, waxtras.” Nicki, of course, had no idea what “waxtras” meant. Other insiders were sent away with simpler code words: “Power.” “Burn.” As she spoke them, her eyes bore into each recipient, transmitting the message that important business was about to unfold.
On March 7, 1960—her first night of a month-long booking at Basin Street East—anticipation was high, both for Lee and for the buzzing crowd of fans outside. This was New York, the city with the richest nightlife and the most jaded audiences in America. They expected only great things from the singer who had given them “Why Don’t You Do Right?,” “Lover,” “Fever,” and Pete Kelly’s Blues. “This was not just going to see a marvelous singer sing,” said Bill Harbach. “She was more than that. She was Peggy.”
A late-winter snowstorm raged, and still an overflow throng showed up. Onstage, a modern-jazz master, arranger Neal Hefti, st
ood in white tie and tails in front of thirteen musicians in tuxedos. As Lee trembled behind a curtain to the left of the stage, Hefti counted off a brief, high-voltage overture. Then came the announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, Basin Street East takes great pleasure in presenting . . . Miss PEGGY LEE!” Lee grabbed a glass of cognac from Phoebe Ostrow’s hand, downed it in one gulp, then ascended the three steps to the stage.
The ovation and the spotlight hit her, and a white-sequined Lee glowed like a heavenly creature. Fear had melted from her face, replaced by the cool, assured smile of a sphinx set to devour her prey. Each detail she had fretted over gelled into a seemingly effortless whole. Precisely on cue, a pinspot hit her snapping right hand—her idea, not Granata’s—as the bassist and drummer began the familiar vamp to “Fever.” As she sang of Juliet and Pocahontas in the throes of lust, Lee’s twinkling eyes and arching eyebrows gave the song salacious punctuation. Her elbows stayed close to her sides, and when a hand suddenly flew out to wave a finger in the air, or coquettishly brush her own cheek, she evoked a smiling Buddha on a mountain.
“(You’ve Gotta Have) Heart” led off a selection of songs from Latin ala Lee!; her expensively dressed, predominantly white audience chimed in with the band: “Corazón! Corazón!” She unveiled a frantic jazz waltz, “I’m Gonna Go Fishin’,” that she had yet to record. The words were hers, set to a theme from Anatomy of a Murder, a film that Duke Ellington had scored. Lee raced through a barrage of words about a two-timing man she was all set to replace: “He’ll be the loser, yes, he’ll find out / I’m gonna go fishin’ and catch me a trout!”
Unlike her bluesy La Vie en Rose act—performed soon after her breakups with Preston and Barbour and during her hopeless marriage to Brad Dexter—this one was a spirit-lifter. Critics couldn’t avoid hyperbole. In the New York Journal-American, Nick LaPole raved: “In all her yesterdays, Peggy was never better than last night. Only a superlative artist could sell out a club the size of Basin Street on such a raw, snowy night—and leave the stage after half-an-hour with the over-capacity audience applauding wildly for three solid minutes.” Arthur Godfrey, one of the most powerful TV hosts of the 1950s, gave a gushing but lofty endorsement of Lee’s show:
Peggy Lee is one of the very few performers who could ever get me into a nightclub. Her Serene Highness reigns over her subjects with such supreme authority as to place us all under her hypnotic spell. One forgets completely the torture of the place: the smoke, the reek of alcoholic breaths, the redolence of the perfume mixed with the sweat due to the horrible humidity, not to mention the libidinous intertwining of one’s lower limbs with those of complete strangers of either sex or both, under the table and on either side. Nevertheless I will go anywhere, anytime and pay any price to watch Miss Peggy Lee at work. Then I go home and play all twenty-one of her albums.
No one was happier than Ralph Watkins and Lennie Green. For two shows nightly and three on weekends, the club could barely squeeze in another customer. Green recalled walking into Lee’s dressing room and finding her new pal, Cary Grant, sitting on the floor. During the same engagement, Lee tore open a note sent to her dressing room.
Dear Peggy,
Tonight was one of the most memorable evenings of my life.
Thank you.
Love,
Bette Davis
Never had Lee known a success quite like this. The next run would be even better. “Basin Street East,” wrote Billboard, “belongs to Peggy Lee.”
* * *
LEE HAD NEVER SEEMED happier. Free of marital strife, she basked in the worship of her New York audience, the most faithful lover she had ever had. Great artists both in and out of her field embraced her. “People of intelligence and sophistication were drawn to Peggy,” said Stella Castellucci. “She had the most fantastic library—books on every subject you could think of. Literature, philosophy, history, science.”
In Los Angeles, the film composer David Raskin, a casual beau, took Lee to a concert of madrigals. The small audience included Igor Stravinsky. After the performance, recalled Lee, “he took me into the corner and he talked to me about the use of dynamics for almost an hour.” Then he introduced her to Aldous Huxley, the British writer whose science-fiction classic Brave New World gave an eerie glimpse into the future. Huxley listened with interest as Lee described her elaborate theory about the healing waves emitted by music. “We had a conversation like two old friends,” she said.
The guests at her frequent parties were no less impressive. En route to her house, expensive cars ascended the winding roads of Coldwater Canyon. They drove north on Bowmont Drive, past the home of Frank Sinatra, then made a sharp left onto Kimridge Road. Car doors opened, and out came the stars: Cary Grant, Jimmy Durante, Bobby Darin, Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows, Bing Crosby. Celebrities along with family members and musicians filed up her driveway and entered a home decked out with balloons, streamers, and flowers.
If planning a show brought Lee as much pain as pleasure, the creation of a party was sheer fun, though no less exacting. For days in advance, Lee sat in bed devising seating plans at the dinner table; floral arrangements; choices of china, silverware, table linens, and candles; and, of course, the most glamorous cuisine possible. Guests received menus such as the following:
Mousse of Salmon
Belgian Endive Salad
Veal Piccata
Fettucini
Petits Pois with Pearl Onions
Viennese Torte
Bavarian Ice Cream
The parties weren’t always chic; for one of them, people had to come dressed as clowns. “She did wonderful themes that really seemed to delight everyone,” said her nephew Lee Ringuette, who once found himself sitting “knee-high to Frank Sinatra.” Grown-up attendees carried champagne glasses into the Japanese garden out back and gathered around the goldfish pond, or stood on the bridge that crossed it. Some stayed inside, camping out in the music room or sitting squeezed together on the sofa.
The lady of the house drifted from room to room, a cognac in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Alcohol brought out her mellowest, and her soft low laugh cut through the chatter. Steve Allen recalled “that unique ‘Hiiiiii, baby,’ like she just woke up.” An invited journalist spotted the most memorable sign of success in that Beverly Hills cloud nine: the two Picassos, both from his blue period, that hung on the walls.
* * *
LEE HAD FINISHED A decade of extraordinary achievement. Reporters devoted columns of space to her accomplishments. At a time when women had begun to feel straitjacketed by the standard formula for feminine happiness—marriage, motherhood, domesticity—Lee broke rules. The singer was thrice divorced in an age when the vow “till death do us part” seemed ironclad; she was an overtly sexual presence long before the sexual revolution. Although the public didn’t know it, Lee had conceived her daughter out of wedlock—an act that, to much of America, would have earned her a scarlet letter.
But close friends, as well as a few journalists, sensed an emptiness in her. “Singer Peggy Lee’s Aim: To Succeed as a Person,” announced a Boston Globe headline. To one interviewer, Lee blurted out a desire “to gain control of my life.” The writer sensed her sadness: “All of the fame, glamour and success of her present life have not made up for the love and security she lost so early.” Bill Harbach, too, saw grief inside the fun-loving playmate he knew. It pointed back to the loss of her angel mother and her unshakable sense of herself as an abused child. “I would far rather have been Norma Egstrom with a real mother than Peggy Lee without one,” she said. Lee told Harbach her tales of Min’s atrocities, and he believed every word.
On April 7, 1960, just after she had closed the happiest engagement of her life at Basin Street East, Lee lost “Papa” as well. Dr. Ernest Holmes died of emphysema at seventy-three, and the news devastated her. The positive-thinking guru had been more of a father to her than Marvin Egstrom; with Holmes in her life, she had felt safe.
More than ever, Lee sought refuge in th
e womb of her king-size bed. The woman who had sung “Don’t Smoke in Bed” so persuasively kept a cigarette burning on the nightstand. She rarely slept more than four or five hours, and seldom before dawn. Work was the only activity that seemed to bring her solace, and as sunrise approached, the bedclothes became littered with papers containing song and poem fragments, drawings, and to-do lists. Throughout the night she reached for Holmes’s The Science of Mind, and reread its teachings on how to achieve an orderly life. “We are living in an Intelligent Universe, which responds to our mental states,” wrote Holmes. “To the extent that we learn to control these mental states, we shall automatically control our environment.”
But Lee no longer stopped at Holmes; books about worldwide religions filled her shelves. “She always spoke about Jesus,” said Stella Castellucci. The singer was also beguiled by the most Christlike of Roman Catholic deities, St. Francis of Assisi, the ultimate humanitarian. “She had a statue of him in the garden of every house she ever had,” recalled Stella. But his influence on her didn’t go far; while Francis had revered poverty, Lee lived beyond her means in homes that proclaimed the stardom and wealth of their occupant.
Her dependence on religion as a panacea was typical of the time, but Castellucci had trouble recalling much peace in Peggy Lee. “She was a great comic, and did a lot of wonderful clowning around her friends. But I think she was the kind of person who, even if she was unhappy, would go into some joking just for the sake of the other person.”
Lee had an abiding will to survive, but it ran on a parallel track with self-destruction. She indulged in rich food as well as cigarettes and alcohol; according to Max Bennett, “the most exercise she ever got was walking into her rose garden.” Lee kept several doctors, and leaned on them so heavily that she often had them over to dinner. On her own, she kept turning to crash diets to lose weight, vitamin C shots to boost her energy.
