by James Gavin
The clash between the public and private Peggy Lees startled Mark Murphy, who became friendly with her in that time. Capitol had signed the young jazz-singing hipster for whom Black Coffee had proven an epiphany. He longed to get to know her, and Lee—who liked the way he looked as well as sang—was all for it. Recently Murphy had joined another of her pets, the twenty-six-year-old pop sensation Bobby Darin, in the studio audience of The Bing Crosby Show, one of the crooner’s ABC television specials. Taped in Hollywood, it starred the golden summit of Crosby, Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, and Peggy Lee. This was the pinnacle of Lee’s dreams—to appear on TV alongside the country’s three most eminent male entertainers, not as an ornamental blonde but as their equal.
Lee had seldom looked prettier or more confident. She sang with all the men, separately and together, but Murphy was most riveted by her sultry solo rendition of “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” from the musical Kismet. That operettalike trifle told of how a bejeweled woman could land even more jewels, including a wedding ring. In a soprano range the song sounded coy and virginal; slowed down and dropped into Lee’s vocal cellar, it was as sexy as “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Lee performed it in a tight beaded dress amid a shimmery set of glass sculptures and chandeliers. Her bedroom glance matched her postcoital delivery.
Murphy couldn’t believe his luck when she invited him to her house. He had heard horror stories about Lee, who seemed plagued by illness and depression and who could rail defensively at well-meaning friends. But to him she seemed shy, funny, and dear. It was a hot California day. Wearing a one-piece bathing suit, Lee invited him out to the pool. Suddenly she grabbed his hands and put them on her waist. “Like the pretty view?” she said, fixing him with the same hot glance he’d seen her flash on The Bing Crosby Show. Unbeknownst to Lee, Murphy was gay. He fled out the door.
Lee had agreed to write the liner notes for his new LP, Hip Parade. He had used several of her favorite musicians, including Pete Candoli and Jimmy Rowles. She kept her word. But when Murphy saw the album, he was devastated. Lee had enthused over the band, but given him only the most backhanded praise. At the end came a line that made him shudder: “You might say, ‘He blows’ . . . and he’s attractive, single.” In the self-consciously macho and often homophobic field of jazz, Murphy lived discreetly, and her seemingly coded words left him depressed for days. Soon after he’d read her essay, Lee received a ribbon-tied box. Inside were a bunch of long-stemmed roses with the buds cut off. Murphy had enclosed a note: “Dear Peggy, I think you know what to do with these.”
He never stopped revering her singing, but his glimpse behind the curtain, along with others he gained through the years, haunted him. “There was a hostility in Peggy that really upset me, an anger. I couldn’t figure out how someone who looked so beautiful, who had terrific success at selling records, lots of money, could be this tortured.” He recalled her poignant last scene in Pete Kelly’s Blues, where she had reverted to a childhood state and clutched a rag doll. “I got to believe that Peggy Lee was actually a big doll that this woman had invented to escape from being so miserable.”
Peggy Lee and husband number four, Jack Del Rio, on their wedding day. “We were a little hasty,” she said later.
Chapter Ten
AS THE 1960s progressed, Lee stayed lost in a whirlwind of projects: two or three new albums a year; countless TV appearances; nightclub acts of such intricacy and cost that, according to Lou Levy, “putting together a new show was like invading France.” But for Lee, maintaining a relationship was even harder. Like other female singers who sang so knowingly of true love, Lee was usually without it. As much as she wished she could step inside the picture-perfect bliss of “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” her stature and ambitions intimidated almost every man she dated.
Afraid to be alone, she implored anyone she could to keep her company. A parade of visitors moved in and out of her home, where commotion reigned. People stepped (or tripped) over her scampering Pekingese dogs, Little One and Little Two. Lee’s dresser, Virginia Bernard, and her Swedish housekeeper, Grethe, rushed around, following the star’s commands. Every few weeks, Bernard helped her throw another lavish soiree. More than once, the lovely young film actress Stefanie Powers made the guest list. “They were the kind of Hollywood parties where behind every potted palm you saw a recognizable face,” said Powers. “And some of the best musicians in town. People got up and sang, like Danny Kaye and Sammy Cahn. It was stellar. I was in such awe of her.”
The rest of the time, reporters, secretaries, siblings, and band members found themselves greeting the dawn with Peggy Lee. She plied them with drinks and regaled them with hours of rambling reflections. In the absence of guests, there was always the phone. “It is not uncommon for journalists or disc jockeys to receive calls from Miss Lee when neither has all that much to say,” wrote the journalist Larry L. King. “One has the notion she feels the compulsion to communicate, as she does with an audience, but prefers to keep her relationships at a distance.”
Onstage or on record, though, Lee conjured up pink, frilly cocoons of fairytale love. In 1960, she gave her fans Pretty Eyes, another boudoir-ready LP. Unlike Nelson Riddle’s luscious but unrhythmic charts on The Man I Love, several of those on Pretty Eyes had a toe-tapping bounce, thanks to Billy May, Capitol’s rotund, jolly staff arranger. May liked to make things whimsical and bright, as he had on Frank Sinatra’s smash album, Come Fly with Me. But he also had a romantic streak, and in Pretty Eyes he swathed Lee in pixie-dusted strings, buoyed by a swinging rhythm section. Both of them devoured the sly sexual innuendo of “You Fascinate Me So,” a come-hither tune by one of her pet songwriters, Cy Coleman, who played jazz piano in New York clubs. His lyricist, Carolyn Leigh, was a Manhattan sophisticate whose barbed verse had a built-in bounce. Lee sang her words with a wink: “I feel like Christopher Columbus when I’m near enough to contemplate/The sweet geography descending from your eyebrow to your toe.”
Pretty Eyes included “In Other Words,” a ballad sung in the chicest of New York cabarets, notably the Blue Angel. There the song’s debonair author, Bart Howard, emceed and tinkled the piano between shows. “In Other Words” spoofed the lofty pronouncements of his idol, Cole Porter, and other highbrow lyricists who—as the verse of Howard’s song went—“often use many words to say a simple thing.” Howard waxed poetic about the moon and the stars, while giving a running translation: “In other words, hold my hand / In other words, darling, kiss me.”
Obscure recordings of his songs by the likes of Mabel Mercer, cabaret’s ladylike British doyenne, weren’t going to rescue Howard from his nightly grind. But Peggy Lee did. Gently she suggested that no one would remember a title as bland as “In Other Words.” Instead he should use the catchy first phrase of the chorus, “Fly Me to the Moon.”
Howard obeyed. The song’s fate was sealed when Lee performed it on The Ed Sullivan Show. Gowned in billowy chiffon, she strolled along a seashore—actually a filmed projection of one—and, like a cool Aphrodite, sang of a love too great for one planet to contain. That performance changed Howard’s life. “All the big artists were watching what Peggy did, because she was so successful,” he recalled. “And I had a hundred big records of my song after that.”
Her flair for creating such detailed minidramas had grown with every year. But no one, including Lee herself, knew if her acting coup in Pete Kelly’s Blues had been anything more than a fluke. She burned to prove that it wasn’t. Finally she got her chance—not in a film but on an episode of General Electric Theater, a CBS series hosted by and featuring Ronald Reagan. In “So Deadly, So Evil,” Lee played Natalia Cory, a department-store copywriter plagued by spooky calls from a stranger. He claims to know dark secrets about her, and ultimately breaks into her apartment in an ape mask and accuses her of murder.
Lee’s menacing foe was played by Gavin MacLeod, the shiny-headed comic actor known later as newsman Murray Slaughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and as the captain of The Lov
e Boat. “So Deadly, So Evil” was his first big television break. “When I realized I was gonna play opposite Peggy Lee, I almost lost it!” MacLeod recalled. Her “very sexy sound” had long made him swoon. “She was just a wonderful communicator,” he said. “She turned you on.” Now, in the apartment scene, he found himself pressed against her. “I was slightly aroused, shall we say,” the actor confessed. Apparently Lee noticed. During the shoot, she invited him back to her house. The fact that he was married, of course, didn’t faze Lee in the slightest. “I wouldn’t dare go!” affirmed MacLeod. “But I was quite enamored of her.”
Acting the sex kitten came easy to Lee, but there was only discomfort in this portrayal. Natalia, like Lee, was a woman of mystery; she had fled a far-off place, but it still haunted her. The character emerged as a watered-down Rose Hopkins with the slightly stammering speech of Peggy Lee. MacLeod sensed that the singer, once more, “was playing herself.” And the fear that had haunted both her and Rose flared up. On the first day of filming, MacLeod arrived to find Lee on the set. He asked the crew how things were going. “They said, ‘We had the hardest time. She didn’t want to come out of her trailer.’ Stuff was going on that they wouldn’t tell me about.” Someone had phoned Lee’s agent, who managed to talk her onto the soundstage.
Songs, not scripts, were her haven; stripped of those, she could seem awkward and lost. In 1960, the singer appeared on Person to Person, the prestigious TV interview series. The host, Charles Collingwood, talked to celebrities in their homes via remote hookup. His cameramen found Lee in her garden. She was svelte, attired elegantly in a Chinese silk pantsuit, and smartly coiffed. But she couldn’t hide her self-consciousness as she led Collingwood and the viewing audience from room to room, at one point bumping into a plant. As Lee sat on her bed and wrung her hands, the host asked about her childhood dreams. Her response revealed one of the great conflicts of her life. “Well, Charles, I had two goals, really,” she said haltingly. “One was to be a successful singer. And the other was to have a family . . . I think it’s good to have a goal, don’t you, Charles?”
She proceeded to the parlor, where her “wonderful daughter,” Nicki, sat on the sofa in a plain dress. Little One and Little Two sat in her lap. The sixteen-year-old was her “secretary,” Lee said, when she wasn’t in school. “She does many things. She types and shops for me . . . what else do you do?”
“Well, I answer the phone,” explained a tense Nicki. “I sort of chauffeur my mother around.” They must have a lot in common, said the host. Nicki’s face went blank. She turned to her mother. “Yes, we do, uh . . . Charles,” stammered Lee. “I think we have one of the nicest kinds of relationships. We’re really very good friends, and we have the same kind of sense of humor, and, um, we like the same kind of music, and um, the same kind of dogs.”
Lee entered the music room, where she opened two cabinet doors and turned on a reel-to-reel tape deck. Out came the lilting title song of Christmas Carousel, Lee’s forthcoming collection of swingingly arranged holiday tunes, many with her own words. She mentioned having looked St. Nicholas up in the encyclopedia; in thanks, said Lee, he gifted her with the ideas for three songs.
A children’s chorus joined Lee on the album. Even amidst a gang of kids, she forgot to shift from seductress to mommy. In “The Christmas List,” tots line up with their gift requests as Lee plays a saucy Mrs. Claus. “Do you have candy?” asks a boy soprano. “Mm-hmm,” purrs Lee.
“And cookies, too?”
“Mm-hmmmmm.”
“You got gum to chew?”
“Yessss.”
“And something for Santa Claus, too?”
“Oh, yes!”
Most fans preferred to see her in the adult atmosphere of Basin Street East. On Thursday, January 12, 1961, Lee returned there for a month to launch Olé ala Lee!, the campily titled sequel to Latin ala Lee! Just after the New Year, she waited with a sea of suitcases and trunks at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Then she boarded the Super Chief, the pricey streamliner whose wealth of celebrity passengers made it known as the “Train of the Stars.”
In the jam-packed club car at the far end were the Oscar-nominated starlet Natalie Wood; her husband, actor Robert Wagner (R.J. to his friends); and the Mississippi-born Mart Crowley, who went on to write the groundbreaking gay play, The Boys in the Band. Crowley worked as assistant to filmmaker Elia Kazan, who had directed Wood’s forthcoming star vehicle, Splendor in the Grass. Crowley and the Wagners were headed to New York to watch a rough cut. The club car teemed with a fashionably dressed, chattering crowd. Much buzz surrounded the Wood party, who sat crammed in a booth for two.
The door flew open, and in walked Peggy Lee, fully decked out for public view. “I was just in heaven,” recalled Crowley. “She was looking great. Lots of makeup.” Lee rushed over to Wagner. “Oh, R.J.!” “Peggy!” Wood was thrilled to be joined by her favorite singer. Crowley leapt up and gave Lee his seat. “She was as wide as Natalie and me side by side,” he recalled. “She kind of dripped over the edge a little bit.” Suddenly Lee grabbed Crowley’s hand and pulled him onto her lap. “Come on, honey,” she said. “I could change your whole life!”
“This woman knew I was gay from the get-go,” said Crowley. “We all just screamed with laughter.”
Lee reserved a table for them at Basin Street East. As ever, the jazz-loving smart set packed the room. Few of them seemed to imagine that this urbane chic would ever go away. The most tumultuous decade in American history was underway, but for that older, well-to-do crowd, the impending quakes amounted mainly to a bunch of headlines they read over breakfast. Most of them preferred to ignore the fact that their worldly values were coming under fire by their children’s generation. Surely few Peggy Lee fans set foot inside the folk clubs of Greenwich Village, where raw, untrained voices rang out in praise of freedom and equality—a statement, in many ways, against the superficial lives of their elders. For all but the most progressive of Lee’s contemporaries, “protest” was a dirty word. Lee herself paid scant attention to current events. Brand-new president John F. Kennedy’s immediate concerns—the founding of the Peace Corps, the attempt to send astronauts to the moon, the overthrow of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro—were not a part of Lee’s conversations in the winter of 1961.
But she did keep up with news items pertaining to herself. One of her favorites of that period came in response to her playful treatment of “Mack the Knife,” the murderous tale by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht that Bobby Darin had swung to the top of the charts. Lee was thrilled to read in the syndicated column of Alex Freeman that First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was “breaking up White House parties with a convulsing impersonation of Peggy Lee singing ‘Mack the Knife.’ ”
Happily, Lee’s favorite kind of soiree occurred nightly at Basin Street East. Behind its front door, rock and folk music didn’t exist, Brooks Brothers suits and cocktail dresses remained de rigueur, swing was king, and Peggy Lee was queen. “This is the house that Benny built and Peggy made,” exclaimed Ralph Watkins to a reporter. “She is the best draw we have.”
January 1961 was a month of nearly zero-degree coldness and snow. But Basin Street East, wrote Arthur Gelb in the New York Times, was “sizzling.” All month long, fabled celebrities—Sophia Loren, Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, Tallulah Bankhead, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich—filed past the bar and cocktail lounge and into the back room to see Peggy Lee. With her came the orchestra of a jazz singer’s dreams. “When Peggy went to New York, or Chicago, or Las Vegas, every musician in town wanted that gig,” said Lou Levy. “She got whoever she wanted, because she was so good.”
The oversold audiences waited, and waited. “Miss Lee is late,” observed reporter Jim Bishop. “She is always late. She has a chronic fear of failure and, when the time arrives to perform, she stalls.” As the band played an overture of her hits, Bishop observed Lee in the wing. Just as she was announced, the star downed a cognac in one gulp. “S
he forces herself onstage,” observed Bishop. Once there, of course, Lee was in shrewd command. Author Richard Lamparski observed the transformation a number of times. “As one would expect of a queen, she took complete charge from the instant the spotlight hit her. The audience were her subjects and the boys in the band, her court. She played off them and played them off each other. Nodding to one. Smiling at another. Making certain every one of them got sufficient stroking.”
The phalanx of manly men onstage maximized her femininity. Ex-boxer Stan Levey cast a rugged presence at the drums; bodybuilder Dennis Budimir held his guitar with muscular arms. Oftentimes Lee turned to the piano and locked glances with her “terribly good-looking conductor,” Lou Levy. She called him the Good Gray Fox, because of his leonine head of prematurely gray hair. It wasn’t always ardor that burned in their eyes. “His relationship with Peggy was funny,” said Steve Blum, one of her later guitarists. “They loved each other but they fought like cats and dogs. He wouldn’t take any stuff from her, which is probably why he kept the gig.”
By now Lee had a true saloon voice, rough around the edges—the sound of cigarettes, liquor, late nights, a frequently broken heart, and a never-say-die party spirit. With every song, she changed faces. Lee clowned her way through “Heart” with a Spanish peasant accent. For “I’ve Never Left Your Arms,” harp, flute, and wind chimes conjured up far-off lands. “I know the purple plains of Burma / The crystal waters of the Coral Sea,” she sang, and no one doubted it. At the end of her fifteen-minute salute to Ray Charles, she had the middle-aged crowd clapping and swaying in time to a swinging beat.
A reporter visited her dressing room between shows. There he saw a doleful sight. While a hairdresser primped Lee’s hair, “she sagged in a leopard-skin dressing gown, and seemed to flinch from the harsh light of the bare bulbs along the edge of the mirror.” The writer offered praise; she shook her head sadly. Lee, he wrote, “is never convinced by the ovations she earns.”
