by James Gavin
What she really liked, said Vince Mauro, were “airy sounds.” As soon as she heard a song, specific instruments began playing in her head. Many of her ideas came from classical music. Respighi’s Pines of Rome had made her fall in love with the oboe, whose bright, ethereal tone, in a soprano range, set off her low throatiness. She adored French horns, whose mournful richness added pathos to her sad songs. So did the dark, woodsy quality of the alto and bass flutes. Holman cradled her voice in sounds so shimmering and delicate that Lee could sing at the volume of a sigh. In the Michel Legrand–Norman Gimbel ballad, “Watch What Happens,” she sang of love’s awakening as though it were a flower in bloom: “Let someone start believing in you . . . let her hold out her hand . . .” A mellow alto flute curled around her voice, while guitar strings quivered underneath, as though coaxing that love to life. “She didn’t have to get big vocally because her arrangements did everything for her,” said her actor friend Walter Willison.
On records and TV, nuances like these were easy to catch. In the concert hall, many were lost, which is why supper clubs suited Lee best—especially the more sensitive ones like Basin Street East. But near the end of 1965, the raucous Copacabana made her a money offer she couldn’t refuse. After twenty-five years, the cavernous, old-school showbiz emporium still epitomized “nightclub” to tourists worldwide. The Copa, said Mel Tormé, “was the pinnacle, the watering place for every jaded garment-district macher, mob guy, and talent evaluator in town.”
It stood on Sixtieth Street, just east of Fifth Avenue and a block north of the majestic Plaza Hotel, but it was a world away from chic. The horseshoe-shaped, tiered seating area surrounded a dance floor where, at the start of the show, the club’s famous chorus line, the Copa Girls, kicked in unison and smiled as though their lives depended on it. Mostly B-grade comedians warmed up the crowd. The main acts were proven comics and recording stars known for excitement but not for subtlety: Bobby Darin, Della Reese, Sophie Tucker, Jimmy Durante, Paul Anka. Greasing the maître d’s palm ensured a good table.
Beyond the footlights, the Copa clung to a gangster’s idea of class. Single ladies couldn’t sit at the bar—a move against prostitution—while band members were forbidden from fraternizing with the showgirls. Supervising at the back of the club was Jules Podell, the short, pudgy, mob-appointed owner. “When something irritated him,” said Mel Tormé, Podell “created early sonic booms by rapping on a table with a pinky ring the size of a grapefruit and venting his considerable wrath on almost anyone within earshot.” As waiters dashed around delivering trays of drinks and the club’s trademark Chinese food, Podell scowled and barked, “Move your fuckin’ ass!”
He saw Lee as a fragile, ladylike flower, though, and he met her every demand. He even let her use the club for a full week of rehearsals before opening—a privilege he had never granted a Copa act before. For this engagement, Lee played it safe. In a show that the New York Journal-American called a “triumph,” she leaned toward her hits and other songs that were sure to wow the tourists. In “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now),” Lee waved a white feather boa and sang with mock coyness about the domesticating effects of marriage: “He was stronger than Samson, I declare/Till a soft-skinned Delilah bobbed his hair!” Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh’s score for the upcoming Broadway show Sweet Charity had given Lee her newest showstopper, “Big Spender,” a chorus girl-cum-hooker’s salespitch, with a stripper beat. Audiences saw a speakeasy babe with a heart of gold, both vulgar and delicate.
Backstage, her vulnerability ruled. To Sheldon Roskin, her publicist, Lee seemed like little-girl-lost. “She needed people around her, touching her, holding her, just being there,” he said. The agency where he worked, Solters, Sabinson & Roskin, also represented Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, two closely protected stars. “But when you worked with Peggy Lee, no one was there,” he said.
Lee did have caring friends, like Dave Cavanaugh. When he appeared backstage, she threw her arms around him and gave him a big kiss. Roskin remembered him as “tall and kind of heavy-set; he had a lovely Irish face and cinnamon-colored hair. He was so sweet. They would sit and talk about new albums and projects.” Other dressing-room visitors found the sparkling performer weak and out of breath. After some cordial chit-chat, Lee excused herself, explaining, “I must do my breathing now.” Her wigged head disappeared under an oxygen tent with Charlie, her respirator.
An hour later she was back onstage, reigning over a tightly controlled musical world. This “woman of endless contradictions,” as the Saturday Evening Post had called Lee, “drives herself relentlessly to perfect her songs.” Lee loved to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: “God will not have his work done by cowards.” She was quick to show journalists the bulky, black loose-leaf binder that served as her traveling Bible. Her secretaries labored over it, typing pages that listed each detail of every show, from song lists and orchestra personnel to hand gestures, stage diagrams, makeup charts, and lighting cues:
“I’m a Woman”:
DIM TO LOW, WARM STAGE
SPOT 1: ON FACE IN PINK
SPOT 2: READY IN RED TO BUMP
ON [Cause I’m a] “WOMAN”:
SPOT 2: BUMP UP IN RED ON FULL BODY AND “RED SPECIAL” BUMPS ON DRESS AT SAME TIME (B28 DOWN LIGHTS MAY ALSO BE BUMPED WITH RED FRONTS HERE.)
The book also contained notes on new diets she planned to follow, and a numbered, coded inventory of what was inside the twenty or more trunks that she took on tour—“down almost to the last lipstick,” a reporter wrote.
In the 1960s, Lou Levy estimated that Lee spent upward of $25,000 on a new show—a massive amount in its time. She employed a retinue of people to carry out her whims. Lee’s new hair stylist, Kathy Mahana, was a perky California blonde who had apprenticed with George Masters, the Beverly Hills hairdresser who had designed Marilyn Monroe’s curly platinum bob. But for Lee’s staffers, job descriptions became meaningless; anyone around her might be asked to do anything. Bruce Vanderhoff, the boyishly handsome hairstylist who joined her in 1968, found himself driving Lee to the doctor and injecting her with vitamin B12. Kathy wound up packing her bags. “She’d hire a cook and a gardener, then she’d switch their jobs just to watch them struggle. I ended up doing everything but her hair.” But Kathy saw the bright side: “She exposed me to things I would never have had the opportunity to do, that were extremely helpful to me.”
It was Lee, of course, who needed the most aid. Each day she awoke so slowly and listlessly that, during an engagement, her assistants wondered how she would ever make the show. One of them would ease her into consciousness by serving her breakfast in bed; somebody else would prepare a warm mineral bath—another protective womb. Lee could hardly bear to leave it, and kept reaching for a bottle of perfumed oil. “She poured so much of it in the tub, I thought one day she’d go right down the drain,” said Kathy.
Then began the hours-long transformation of Norma Egstrom into Peggy Lee. Frequently she sat up all night in bed, making sketches of hairdos; the next day she would ask her designers to turn her convoluted creations into reality. “Most of the time my answer was no,” recalled Bruce Vanderhoff. Throughout their long friendship, he never hesitated to tell her what he thought—a stance that, surprisingly, gained him her permanent respect.
Attired in floral or leopard lounging pajamas, she sat before a mirror to do her makeup. Her friend Doak Roberts, a decorative painter and furniture refinisher who would manage Lee briefly, watched the process many times. “She had a conglomeration of things on her makeup table that went back to the forties. She would shade under her chin with this dark brown stuff. Then she would start working on her face with all these undercoatings and layers. She ended up looking like porcelain. She was a master of makeup, let me tell you.”
But Vanderhoff considered the whole process—which included two sets of false eyelashes—a typical exercise in Peggy Lee excess. “If she’d worn less makeup she would have been prettier,” he said. “She exaggerated everything
like a drag queen.” But without all the camouflage, observed Roberts, “she was just a matronly, Nordic grandmother.”
At the venue, Kathy would prepare Lee’s dressing room by spraying it with Arpège, the singer’s favorite scent. A half hour before showtime, Lee would gather the musicians in her dressing room for the nightly joining of hands and prayer ritual. Jack Sheldon, like her other band members, found it “pretty goofy,” but Lee, of course, was boss.
An essential step remained. Nothing gave the star as much energy or comfort before a show as anger, and her staff devised various ways of pushing her buttons. The stage manager, they would claim, had left her dressing room unlocked the night before; the lighting man had lit her in unflattering green. Lee herself joined in. One night a friend watched her place a drinking glass perilously near the edge of her makeup table. Then she asked another bystander to reach across and hand her an object. Inevitably the glass shattered on the floor. The resulting rage would turn Lee’s hazel eyes black. “She would just glow and be so beautiful,” Kathy recalled. Just before her entrance, Lee liked to stamp her foot and yell.
Like everyone else, Kathy saw the lunacy in Lee’s process. “You had to buy into it,” she said. “Some people thought she was completely insane and couldn’t deal with any of the nonreality of it.”
Rarely did Lee go on without a swig of cognac. Midway through the act, when Lee walked off briefly while the band vamped, Kathy or some other assistant waited in the wings with more of that grape-flavored liquor her boss loved. Lee gulped it down, then floated back onstage, where she grew mellower with each song. For now, at least, critics didn’t deduce why. Instead they swooned at her come-hither drawl in such ballads as “(I’m) In Love Again,” a ballad she had written with Cy Coleman. The redundancy in the first two lines—“I’m in love again / And the feeling’s not new”—distracted no one. “She seems almost to be singing to herself and yet never loses her mesmeric grip on the audience,” raved a reviewer.
Once the show ended, Lee could truly relax. Friends like Dr. Jonas Salk, the jazz-loving megaheiress Doris Duke, and Cary Grant, along with her musicians, crowded Lee’s dressing room. “Each time she reaches for one of the innumerable cigarettes she is surrounded by helpful flames from all sides,” noted a reporter. A photographer snapped pictures of her and Tony Bennett sharing a joint. Invariably the party moved to her hotel suite, where after several more drinks Lee would ask Toots Thielemans to whip out his harmonica and play a sentimental Swedish song that she loved. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
* * *
THE STUDIED QUALITY OF Lee’s recent shows seemed worlds away from the breezy fun of her music with Dave Barbour. Now, said her sometime publicist Peter Levinson, “everything she did was calculated. Ella Fitzgerald had no glamour but she had enormous jazz talent. She said, ‘Here’s the song.’ For Peggy, the dress had to be right, the makeup, the hair, and then came the song. There was a different priority.”
Norman J. O’Connor, a jazz-loving priest and critic, was distressed by the change he saw in Lee. His article for the Boston Globe, “Peggy Lee Manufactures Smooth Night Club Performance,” didn’t mince words. Her sex-symbol pose, he felt, was wearing thin. “Age has done the usual mean things to Peggy Lee that it does to all of us,” wrote O’Connor. The “girlish appearance” was gone; the voice had “thinned out.” Her act, he wrote, had become “contrived and automatic”; it could “fill a host of rooms across the country with people who are attracted to bogus emotions.”
Even in 1950, Barbour had sensed something shallow and desperate in his wife’s hunger for the approval of strangers. Leaving her world, then conquering his alcoholism, had freed him. Now, in his home near the beach in Malibu, California, Barbour played the guitar almost nightly for pleasure, but he performed and recorded little; the royalties from the songs he wrote with Lee helped keep him afloat. His new calling lay in attending AA meetings and sponsoring others who fought to stay sober. Otherwise he fished, walked on the beach, read, and spoke almost daily with Nicki.
Lee had stayed amicably in his life, more by her choice than his. In 1960, Barbour had married Marian Collier, a beautiful ex-model turned actress. Collier performed on a score of top TV shows, including Bachelor Father and Leave It to Beaver; in the film Some Like It Hot she made a memorable cameo as a clarinetist in an all-girl band. “When Marian married David,” said Angela (Mrs. Stan) Levey, “Peggy treated her like some little person off the street that had wandered in and was staying at David’s house or something, but David was still hers. It infuriated Marian.”
As much as Collier loved Barbour, they divorced after three years. Later on he formed a relationship with an easygoing Latin woman named Chileta. “After being with Peggy Lee, it must have been like getting out of a Turkish prison,” said Kathy Mahana. “Peggy was so intense and incredibly engulfing. Chileta was as unlike her as you could imagine.” Once again, Lee blocked out the existence of her ex-husband’s new mate. “David and I will get back together someday,” she told Dona Harsh.
Lee had no beau with her on Saturday night, December 11, 1965, when she attended a holiday party at the Beverly Hills home of Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol Records. The hostess was his wife, actress Nancy Olson, whose supporting role as a movie-studio script girl in Sunset Boulevard had earned her an Oscar nomination. An elegantly dressed crowd of Hollywood achievers milled about in clusters, clinking glasses and toasting in the holidays.
Olson excused herself to answer the ringing phone. It was Nicki, asking to speak to her mother. Olson plucked Lee out of a conversation and led her toward the phone in the library. The actress closed the door and left her alone.
A few minutes later Lee emerged, pale and dazed. “She just fled,” said Olson.
Nicki had broken the news: Dave Barbour was dead.
Barbour had been feeling achy and feverish; he assumed it was the flu. Saturday night had found him at home in Malibu with Chileta. He rose from the sofa and headed for the bathroom. After several minutes he still hadn’t emerged, and Chileta couldn’t hear a sound. She knocked on the door and called his name. No answer. She opened it up—and there was Barbour, slumped over. Hysterical with panic, Chileta called Malibu Hospital. Several agonized minutes later, paramedics arrived and loaded the guitarist’s unconscious body onto a stretcher. The ambulance sped off to the hospital, but it was too late: Barbour had died of internal bleeding caused by an ulcer. He was fifty-three.
Three days later, as lawns and windows in Los Angeles twinkled with Christmas lights, a few dozen people gathered at a funeral home in Van Nuys to bid farewell to David Barbour. The mourners included his closest family members, many AA pals, and some musicians. From her seat in the back of the chapel, Marian Collier had a view of the family section ahead. It included a tearful, hunched-over Peggy Lee. “She’s sitting in the front row with a black veil,” recalled Collier, “and I’m his last wife!” But to Lee, neither Marian nor Chileta mattered; she was the widow. She held a reception afterward at her house. Collier refused to go.
Predictably, every obituary identified Barbour as “former husband of the singer, Peggy Lee.” The surprise appeared farther down: “Recent reports from friends indicated the two were near a reconciliation.” Those “friends” went unnamed, but the only conceivable source was Lee, whom numerous writers had phoned for information. Everyone close to her and Barbour knew it wasn’t true. “My father was involved with somebody else,” said Nicki, “and I don’t think he would ever have gotten married again.” Collier put it more bluntly: “There’s no way in hell he was ever going back to Peggy!”
Yet the reconciliation became part of Lee’s homemade myth, and she recounted it in growing detail for the rest of her life. Later she told friends that she and Barbour had walked hand-in-hand through her rose garden, and that he had turned to her and said, “Peg, what do you say we try it again?” The theme was always the same, a fairy-tale love torn apart by fate, not once but twice. From her early childhood, Lee
’s fantasy life had helped protect her from the truth. But that shield had grown more brittle and transparent by the year, and her “daydreams” no longer brought her joy; reality was becoming harder to deny.
Having lost her guitar-playing prince, Lee tried to smother the pain with excess, and not just the alcoholic type. Previously she had employed one or two guitarists in her band; now she used four—a gang of imaginary Daves who might help her feel as though he were still there. The following summer, Lee recorded Guitars a là Lee, an album with seven guitar players on every track. Bob Bain arranged but didn’t play; those who did included her standbys Dennis Budimir and Laurindo Almeida.
Given the emotional nature of the project, the songs leaned surprisingly toward fluff hits of the day, such as “Strangers in the Night” and “Call Me.” But among them were two songs that became prominent in her act; they heralded her emerging persona—that of a spurned, disillusioned older woman whose hope had run dry. Given her liquor intake, one of the songs was ironically titled “An Empty Glass,” written for Lee by a pioneer of the bossa nova, guitarist-composer Luiz Bonfá, and lyricist Dick Manning. It set a chilling scene: the last toast between a woman and the man who had spurned her as soon as she fell in love. In what critic Peter Reilly called her “three A.M. pitch-dark-side-of-the-morning voice,” Lee lashed out bitterly. “Here’s to you now, for the last time . . . Here’s to love, an empty glass.”
Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, and George David Weiss, who had penned “Can’t Help Falling in Love” for Elvis Presley, had given Lee “Good Times,” the confession of an aging thrill-seeker whose fun was ending. “Be careful of the good times / They can fool you, make you cry,” warned Lee. Audiences didn’t realize how much of herself she had exposed.
