by James Gavin
On June 15, eleven weeks after their wedding day, Del Rio moved out. Lalo Schifrin sheltered him while he looked for a place of his own. “We were a little hasty,” said an embarrassed Lee to reporters.
Divorce laws had changed in Los Angeles; the interlocutory one-year waiting period had gone. Lee’s divorce was granted in full on November 4. In her brief time before the judge, she placed the blame, as she had with Brad Dexter, on her soon-to-be ex-husband’s laziness. Del Rio had worked just once during their marriage, under her employ; therefore, said Lee, she was “forced to go to work to pay the bills.” Del Rio demanded a twenty-thousand-dollar settlement. They settled on four thousand.
In years to come, Lee entertained friends by spoofing his accent and claiming that her Latin lover was really a Jew named Isaac Erslitz. Neither the jokes nor the vitriol could ease her sense that once more she was alone. Lee was forty-four, and both her bedmates and romantic prospects had thinned. She doubted that another man would ever marry her.
The husband who haunted Lee the most was thriving without her. One night in Las Vegas, her ex-pianist Hal Schaefer ran into his old drinking buddy Dave Barbour at a casino bar, sipping a Coke. Schaefer was in the throes of alcoholism himself, and Barbour knew it. The guitarist had joined Alcoholics Anonymous a dozen years earlier; now he worked devotedly as a sponsor. Schaefer took the next stool and ordered a drink. “You have the same problem I have,” said Barbour. “Would you consider going to AA and seeing what they have to offer?” Schaefer was insulted. “I said some idiot thing like, ‘Good for you, if you want to be a Boy Scout.’ ” But soon he hit bottom and followed Barbour’s advice. Schaefer never touched another drop.
As much as Barbour’s addiction had tortured her, Lee had tipped many a drink with him and Schaefer. For old time’s sake, the pianist went to see her in her return to Basin Street East. Schaefer marveled at her authority onstage. Later he went to her dressing room. He was shocked to find Lee “so drunk that she didn’t even recognize me.” She stared at him blankly. “I . . . I . . . I know you,” she slurred. “I know you.”
“Yes, of course, Peggy!” He moved his hands back and forth as though playing the piano. “I’m Hal Schaefer. Hal Schaefer, Peggy.” She stared some more, then finally said, “Yessss . . . I knew I knew you.”
“Plump and unbecomingly coiffed but still glamorous”: Lee on The Andy Williams Show, May 31, 1965.
Chapter Eleven
ALCOHOL, FOR NOW, wasn’t interfering with her work; if anything, it enhanced the boozy, crepuscular quality that had haunted her persona ever since Black Coffee. But it wouldn’t mesh well with the new title she had just acquired: that of grandmother. In 1964 Nicki delivered her first of three children, David Allen Foster, named after Dave Barbour. For Lee, grandchildren were a chilling sign of growing old, and she bristled when journalists called her a “grandma.”
Now she lived alone, and no amount of friends and staff could fill the void. In August, Lee put her Kimridge Road house on sale. “The place is too big,” she told Louella Parsons. “I just want to get free of responsibilities for the moment.” She leased a penthouse on the thirteenth floor of the Shoreham Towers, a brand-new luxury apartment building at 8787 Shoreham Drive, a block above the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. The décor included her preferred over-plush white carpeting, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and a bedroom designed in pink velvet. “Pink makes me happy and docile,” explained Lee to a columnist.
But wherever tranquility appeared, Lee wreaked chaos. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist and TV interviewer Paul Coates wrote of having moved into the Shoreham with his wife. After bedtime on their first night there, a “piercing scream” from the next apartment made their heads fly off the pillows. Coates lurched out into the hallway in his underwear. Coming from behind the next door he heard “another high-pitched screech, and then hysterical laughter.” He ran back inside and told his wife that some woman was in distress. She told him to mind his own business, and the din finally ceased.
The next day Coates asked the superintendent who lived beside him. Peggy Lee, he was told. That night, the blood-curdling noises resumed. The next morning, he read a note pushed under his door.
Dear Neighbors . . .
I do hope you haven’t been disturbed by strange noises from our kitchen. It is not a neurotic cook or what have you. It’s my parrot, Gorgeous, who cries like a baby, barks like a dog and laughs like a maniac. If he projects too much, give us a ring and we’ll cover him. Also, if you need a cup of sugar, please let us know.
Peggy Lee
But the racket was just beginning. Lee found that she hated apartment living, and she raised as much din as she could, hoping to break the lease. Celebrities traipsed through the lobby and filled the elevator en route to her parties. At one star-packed gathering, the guests included the raucous singer-comedienne and movie star Martha Raye; comedian Bob Newhart; the singing TV host Andy Williams and his sex-kitten wife, French singer Claudine Longet; and Cary Grant. Lee enjoyed making people think that something was going on between her and Grant; she was secretly annoyed when he brought his fiancée, actress Dyan Cannon, who was thirty-four years his junior. Lee’s dog Sungyi-La—a shaggy Lhasa Apso from Tibet—scampered around, sniffing at guests’ feet. Lee proudly noted that His Holiness the Dalai Lama had given her the pet in honor of her work as chairman of the Thomas A. Dooley Foundation, named after the great American humanitarian who had established hospitals throughout the Far East.
As Sungyi-La rolled around on the floor, looking like a fur muff, a quartet played cool jazz. Once the revelers were in their cups, they got up to perform, amplified by Lee’s state-of-the-art sound system. Raye, a sometime jazz singer, joined Lee in improvising a madcap duet, “Scrub It Blues,” while guests shrieked with laughter. “Did you know that she’s a scrub nurse at Mount Sinai two days a week?” sang Lee of Raye. Turning to her friend, Lee asked in song, “Martha, did you ever give a man a bedpan and go out to lunch? Well, knowing you I just had a hunch!” Later, an intoxicated Lee quieted the room with her spot-on impersonation of a drunk and creaky Billie Holiday.
When the performing had ended, Lee played her new single, “Pass Me By,” a march that Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh had written for Grant’s new film, Father Goose. It was arranged playfully with piccolos and a parade drum. Lee cranked up the volume full blast, and her voice boomed into the night: “I got me ten fine toes to wiggle in the sand . . .” She tied strings of Indian chimes around her ankles, and Grant led a sing-along parade around the apartment. Everyone filed out into the hallway and stomped to the end and back, singing “PASS ME BY-Y, PASS ME BY-Y-Y. . . .” No one gave a thought to the sleeping neighbors.
One day Thomas C. Wheeler, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, dropped by to interview the woman who had made so many men’s pulses race. When Lee opened the door, Wheeler wondered how the woman before him could possibly be the same Peggy Lee he’d seen onstage. “She looks like a librarian or a schoolteacher,” he wrote. “Her face, with a nose a trifle too short, a chin too round, lacks any clear definition.” Questions about her art yielded New Age bromides. “I like to make my music change and grow,” Lee explained. “It is like a fruit tree becoming more fruitful.” She went on to tell him that she had “learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Cary Grant.”
Thanks in part to friends like Phoebe Ostrow, who marveled aloud at how “spiritual” she was, Lee had come to regard herself as a vessel of the paranormal. Johnny Mandel wondered if she might be right. Mandel held a high spot in her stable of favorite arrangers; he had also composed the music for several top films, one of which, The Sandpiper, yielded a future standard, “The Shadow of Your Smile.” At her home, Mandel played Lee the haunting theme from his score for The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming, a forthcoming Cold War farce. “Without explaining anything about it,” said Lee, “he asked me to listen to it and paint a word picture of what I heard.”
When he read Lee�
��s lyric, “The Shining Sea,” he was floored. Her portrait of a sensual encounter by the sea—“We’d sit there on the sand / He’d kiss the hollow of my hand”—closely mirrored the scene the music would underscore: that of two young lovers, a Russian submariner and a Cape Cod girl, together on the beach. Mandel took Lee to a screening to show her. “When this scene came on,” he recalled, “her mouth just fell open.”
Friends of Lee’s laughed over the line, “His hands, his strong brown hands”—a moonstruck reference, they believed, to Quincy Jones. But Lee credited that magical songwriting feat not to Jones but to extrasensory perception. She had tested hers by playing fortune-teller to her guitarist, John Pisano. “I see you in the future not being just a guitar player but doing other things,” she informed him. Sure enough, he soon went on to join trumpeter Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, whose hit albums included several Pisano originals. He earned a bundle in royalties.
An incident in the Christmas season of 1964 yanked Lee down to earth. A thief broke into her car, parked in the Shoreham Towers garage, and stole an expensive tape recorder. In turn, Lee had no trouble breaking her lease. She began shopping for a real house. Before she could find one, however, she headed back to New York for her seventh engagement at Basin Street East.
By now young people ruled the Manhattan night. They danced the Twist near Times Square at the Peppermint Lounge, the hottest disco in town; at Gerdes Folk City in Greenwich Village, they listened raptly as Judy Collins mourned a slain civil rights leader with “Medgar Evers Lullaby.” The long-beloved Blue Angel, the chicest of East Side cabarets, had closed after twenty-one years; Birdland, the “Jazz Corner of the World,” was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. Veteran showbiz columnist Hy Gardner looked at the changing city with fear and disgust. To him, New York had become a cesspool of “panhandlers, pimps, prostitutes, dope peddlers, con merchants, teenaged hoods, beatniks and short-changers.”
Basin Street East was struggling to survive. Its roster of stylish pop-jazz artists had thinned; many of them were now earning far more money in Las Vegas or on concert stages. Lennie Green convinced a reluctant Ralph Watkins to let him add rising comics to the mix. Green’s choices—which included Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, and Richard Pryor—gave the room a boost, but not enough to restore its past luster; all those comedians would defect to the much cooler Village Gate downtown. Next, Billboard reported that Basin Street East would “aim for the youth market via the allure of hot recording artists.” Watkins found himself presenting Lesley Gore, Bo Diddley, the Righteous Brothers, and Dusty Springfield—all substantial talents, but not the kind he had ever wanted to host, nor the company Peggy Lee preferred to keep. “They started to lower their standards,” complained Lee to two producer friends, Ken Bloom and Bill Rudman. “I kept telling them, ‘Please don’t do that, or I’ll just have to leave.’ And that’s what happened.”
Basin Street East had less than two years to go. On March 1, 1965, Lee launched her last hurrah at the most simpatico nightclub of her career. The old-fashioned opening was “crowded to the very limit,” wrote a critic, with “socialites, columnists, some of ‘the boys,’ and plain ordinary Manhattanites who had the wherewithal.” Her show now incorporated such middle-of-the-road hits of the day as “Hello, Dolly!” She still loathed rock and refused to surrender to it, with one exception. Lee bought moptop, Beatles-like wigs for the band to wear as she sang “A Hard Day’s Night,” one of the group’s seven number-one hits since they had joined her label, Capitol, about a year before. Lee’s graying fans rejoiced when Benny Goodman showed up to join her on that song; it made the bitter pill of “today’s music” easier to swallow. A spring-summer reunion tour with her old boss made Lee seem all the more like a nostalgia act.
* * *
AS OF THE MID-1960s, most Americans her age were spending their nights watching television, not gallivanting on the town. This was the golden age of the TV variety show, which brought a vaudeville-style bounty of talent into one’s living room. Three of the genre’s fatherly hosts treated Lee like visiting royalty. “Whenever she’s on the show it’s not an appearance, it’s an event!” enthused Dean Martin, the unflappable, tipsy-acting crooner-comic. “Here is one of the greatest of all time,” declared starmaker Ed Sullivan, whose woodenness won him a comparison in Time to “a cigar-store Indian.” Andy Williams, a sweater-clad, singing TV star in the Perry Como tradition, raved to Lee on camera: “I think I’m your biggest fan. I have every record you ever made.”
Color TV had swept America, and Lee’s Jello-hued gowns gave home viewers their money’s worth. They saw her in skintight magenta, blood orange, and lime green, trimmed with fur and feathers. Another dress, said Lou Levy, “looked like it was made out of Reynolds Wrap. It could have been an experimental uniform for astronauts to test in.”
Illustrator Robert Richards found most of Lee’s 1960s wardrobe dismaying. “Peggy wasn’t a fashionable woman,” he said. “She wore those heavy beaded dresses, which were expensive and too tight. She liked that sausage look that was prevalent at the time, but that made you seem thirty pounds heavier than you were. She wasn’t toned, and those dresses had a vulgarity about them.” Lee wore different wigs each year; and even though it was common then for female singers to don conspicuously fake and oversize coiffures, most of Lee’s looked as though she’d plucked them off store mannequins.
But the classiness of her music transcended all. And in the mid-1960s, Lee displayed it at its best on two hour-long TV shows. Both were part of a syndicated series called Something Special, a showcase for pop stars—Julie London, Tony Martin, Kay Starr, Patti Page—who had passed their commercial primes. On one show, Lee wittily traced the history of the instruments in her orchestra while spotlighting the men who played them. On a multilevel soundstage bedecked with pedestals and statues, she brought forth Levy, Max Bennett, percussionist Francisco Aguabella, guitarist Mundell Lowe, and the Belgian harmonica wizard Toots Thielemans, who toured with her for two years. Thielemans played with whimsy and a feel for the blues, and Lee spotlighted him nightly in “Makin’ Whoopee!,” the 1920s comedy song about the dangers of said diversion. As they stood shoulder to shoulder, Lee sang in mock distress of how sex disrupts lives; Thielemans let out wittily hot-and-bothered outbursts on harmonica.
Lee’s other Something Special closed with “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” The sight of her in her fur-trimmed gown, seated in a simulated gazebo on a TV set, hinted at why the bucolic wedded bliss in the song would never be hers.
She did get the home, however. Her ex-manager Ed Kelly had turned to real estate, and in 1965 he sold her a sprawling ranch house at 1195 Tower Grove Drive, Beverly Hills. It stood in the canyon called Beverly Glen, one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods, soon to bear the high-prestige zip code of 90210. From the moment she stepped inside that five-bedroom, five-bathroom abode, Lee just had to have it. Much of the house was taken up by what a friend called “this huge, gymnasium-sized living room,” sixty feet long, with a high ceiling, a dining area, a white tile floor, and an all-glass back wall. “You see the garden and that becomes part of the house,” she raved. The place was ideal for the grand parties she loved to throw. In preparation, she added a bar and a U-shaped, white modular sofa—“about twice as long as Broadway,” she bragged to a reporter.
The rest of the house was designed in colors meant to soothe its anxious owner. Lee would rehearse in the “Yellow Room,” with its blond Steinway piano and white bookshelves packed with books and records. Her boudoir, said her future hairdresser Bruce Vanderhoff, “was everyone’s idea of what Mae West’s bedroom would be. It was like a pink Fabergé Easter egg.” Chandeliers hung on either side of the bed, lending grandeur to the acts she anticipated performing there.
But those had dwindled mostly to sleeping. In August 1965, the Hartford Courant reported her torrid affair with former screenwriter Ali Ipar, the ex-husband of the 1940s B-movie actress Virginia Bruce. Lee pursued him with such a vengeance th
at, according to columnist Alex Freeman, the only way Ipar could escape was to claim he’d left town.
Only with her musicians, it seemed, could she find true intimacy. Lee considered them her soulmates, joined in a profound pact to lift songs off the page and turn them into flesh-and-blood slices of life. Before every tour or record date, her rhythm section spent weeks with her in the Yellow Room, analyzing tunes and arrangements. Although she couldn’t read music, Lee would hum instrumental lines or phrases to guide her musicians. She wouldn’t give up until everything shimmered or popped in just the right way. As crackerjack as her players were, she taught them that each note had to enhance her storytelling.
All this deliberation, said Lou Levy, felt “endless and sometimes excruciating.” But Grady Tate, her longtime drummer, understood. “Guys who played with her said, ‘Oh man, she’s rough to work with.’ And she was rough to work with. She demanded one-hundred-and-fifty percent every time you sat down with her, because she was giving it all she had.”
Once she and her combo had settled on a rough chart, they recorded it in the Yellow Room. She sent the tape off to whichever arranger she thought appropriate. One of her favorites, Bill Holman, had written for the giants of big-band jazz, notably Stan Kenton. But the screaming brass and orchestral tumult that Kenton loved had no place in a Peggy Lee arrangement. “She explained to me that saxophones made her sing an interval off from where she should be,” said Holman. “I never could figure that out, but she swore it was true.” Even his most explosive charts for Lee, including a propulsive arrangement of “Come Back to Me” from the musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, followed her rule.
