by James Gavin
All this was more than Lee’s pride could take. She froze when the New York Times asked her to comment on how she had felt upon hearing the news of this twin billing. “Naturally I was thrilled,” she said tersely. “Barbra’s got talent.”
But Bruce Vanderhoff knew her real feelings. “If the truth be told,” he said, “Peggy hated the ground Streisand walked on.” In 1964, Lee had sat in the Beverly Hilton Hotel’s Grand Ballroom as Streisand’s first LP, The Barbra Streisand Album, blew away its competitors—including Lee’s I’m a Woman album—in three categories of the Grammys. Streisand had gone on to snag the film career that Lee had always wanted. Now the unhumble young superstar was poised to render Lee invisible in an engagement she sorely needed. Betty Jungheim heard Lee haranguing one of her agents on the phone. “She screamed and yelled—‘it was the lounge, the lounge!’ ”
Her insecurity belied the fact that she was simultaneously set to make the New York supper-club debut of her dreams. On April 7, she would launch a long-term association with the Empire Room of Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel—the luxury Art Deco dwelling that had played host to the likes of Cole Porter, Marilyn Monroe, and Herbert Hoover.
The extravagantly sized Empire Room was its “crown jewel,” as the hotel called it. Lena Horne had tigerishly reigned over the club’s habitués for years; Édith Piaf’s epic self-destruction had triggered a famous collapse onstage there during a show. Lately the Empire Room had added some safely “mod” acts—Diana Ross, Sonny and Cher, Petula Clark—to its roster of middle-aged idols, such as Sammy Davis, Jr. and Liberace. But no matter what, tradition had to be honored, for the Empire Room reached for the majesty of an imperial palace. Huge crystal chandeliers hung from a high ceiling; candelabrum sconces and faux windows with tassled draperies lined the walls. Against the rear wall, a riser held a tuxedo-clad orchestra; in front of it was a small dance floor. The headliners performed there, surrounded by a sea of tables. Majordomos in black tie circulated, taking drink and dinner orders with old-world courtliness.
The Empire Room had opened in 1931, and it was showing its age; besides that, many of the sightlines were poor. Soon it would be moved to a similar space across the foyer and given an even more dated design. But to Peggy Lee, the Empire Room was the last word in glamour. This was just the sort of place she had fantasized about as a teenager, when she sat in the Fargo Theatre and watched Fred Astaire twirl Ginger Rogers in some tony nightspot.
At the time of Lee’s Waldorf debut, Sidney Myer was a college boy in Philadelphia. Pricey though the Empire Room was, he made his way there again and again. “It was intimidating—the formality of it, this opulent grandeur,” he recalled. “But I thought it was beautiful. It had the whole mystique for me of Park Avenue. There was this huge orchestra. Everyone was dressed up. In those years the whole world was in chaos; it was all hippies and marches. In the Empire Room, none of that existed.”
Still, Lee wasn’t about to play it safe. For this engagement, she decided to spotlight the soul music from A Natural Woman. “Is That All There Is?” would form the centerpiece of the show. The master tape of her recording still sat untouched at Capitol, and Lee was desperate. She hounded Brian Panella and her publicist, Peter Levinson, to pressure Capitol; she begged Glenn Wallichs to intervene. She played an acetate of the record for journalists, hoping to win them as allies. Levinson—an exceedingly persuasive promoter of the biggest stars in jazz—didn’t have the heart to tell her that her campaign seemed hopeless.
Lee still didn’t know that Jerry Leiber had really wanted Marlene Dietrich to sing the song. There were few female performers whom Lee envied, but she worshipped Dietrich and had borrowed from her heavily. The clinging, bugle-beaded gowns that Lee favored had long been a Dietrich staple. So had a minimalism that surpassed Lee’s. Dietrich stood onstage with only a standup mike; the orchestra stayed hidden behind a curtain or in the pit. Dietrich’s phrasing was clipped and plain, but her acting was transcendent; all alone, she summoned up dramatic scenes with Technicolor vividness. Some of her concert posters bore a line drawing of her famous face; Lee commissioned one of her own.
Dietrich wasn’t offended. In Marlene Dietrich’s ABC, her book of alphabetized opinions on anything that had entered her head, the star had written under “Lee, Peggy”: “Honey-dripping singing, timing, phrasing; awakening no memories of other voices but awakening all senses to a unique feast.” Dietrich could afford to be generous, for the sight of her in concert still made audiences gasp. At sixty-eight, she looked not a day older nor a pound heavier than she had in her old films—a feat enhanced by makeup, adhesive strips that gave her an instant facelift, a punishing rubber foundation garment that she wore beneath her “nude” beige beaded dress, and the lighting alchemy of Lee’s own Hugo Granata.
Lee pumped him for backstage tidbits. When he told her that Dietrich employed a rare “chocolate gel”—a filter that subdued the harsh white spotlight in the manner of tinted glasses—Lee had to have it, too. Bruce Vanderhoff saw the results. At rehearsals, he said, “Hugo would be up in the booth. She’d say into the microphone so all the world could hear, ‘Hugo, it doesn’t feel like the chocolate gel is on my face!’ That was just to make the rest of us see that Peggy Lee was the ultimate perfectionist. Then she’d say, ‘Well, I think we need a double.’ ”
Lighting, of course, was a mere adornment to Dietrich’s larger-than-life presence, which in the 1960s had filled two of Broadway’s biggest theaters, the Mark Hellinger and the Lunt-Fontanne. Lee’s subtlety worked best in spaces no larger than the Empire Room, which seated four hundred. The management treated her like a queen. One of the most sumptuous suites in the Waldorf Towers, 37F—the one favored by Baron Hilton, the son of Waldorf owner Conrad Hilton—would be hers throughout each run. At Lee’s insistence, the Empire Room even halted food and drink service during the show.
On the night of Monday, April 7, a black-tie crowd waited for Peggy Lee to take the stage there for the first time. Just before the overture, Lee rode the freight elevator downstairs, which became her nightly ritual. Her friend Doak Roberts often accompanied her. “I helped hold up her gown as she got into elevator, which had about three inches of rotting food on the floor. The elevator starts going down, and she looks at me and says, ‘This is glamour!’ ”
Yet Lee strolled across the lobby like a queen, then slipped inside a hidden cubicle to the left of the Empire Room stage. From the piano, Lou Levy raised his arm, and the orchestra began a pulsing Afro-Cuban overture. As it burst into a drum fanfare, he voiced the magic words: “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Peggy Lee!”
Levy struck the downbeat, and out she bounded, smiling broadly with hands held wide in an earth-mother embrace. The hourglass figure of her Basin Street East days had swelled to Zaftig proportions; Lee had poured it into a voluminous white beaded dress with balloon sleeves. Blond ringlets dangled from a hairdo as high and swirled as a wedding cake. “What a day this has been, what a rare mood I’m in / Why, it’s almost like being in love!” caroled Lee—a mother angel in whose arms everyone felt safe. For the next hour she showed them a mature, glowing, but melancholy woman who had spent a lifetime in the romantic trenches, and seemed to know everything about love, sex, and the agony of watching them flee. Now here she was, still ready to “break out the booze and have a ball.”
Stereo Review’s Peter Reilly saw the stagecraft behind the enchantment. “She wings into view all of a piece, rather like a fully dressed set on a turntable stage, and remains all but stationary throughout. The lighting complexities alone would do credit to the Hayden Planetarium, and all the rest runs with the chill, glittering efficiency of a sequined computer. . . . She operates out of a self-created world, and to get the dramatic effects she wants she must control it absolutely.”
Yet at the core was a humanity that touched Sidney Myer’s heart. “So many things at the time were loud and assaulting, but there was something soothing about her voice and her sensitivity. A lot of the other
lady singers then, Barbra Streisand, Ethel Merman, Eydie Gormé—watch out! They sang the house down. It was fabulous. But Peggy Lee had this quality that compelled you to focus. You didn’t want to miss a thing.”
Lee kept finding new ways to manipulate reality. Hidden inside the piano were battery-operated fans. Flicked on before the show, they made the wisps of hair around her face flutter. If she looked as big as a gospel singer, she would use it to sexy effect. During the rousing refrain of “A Natural Woman”—“You make me feel . . . you make me feel . . .”—Lee hiked up her gown at the thighs and whipped it back and forth.
The Waldorf audience may have cringed when their children played the hit version of “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat and Tears. When Peggy Lee sang it, however, she swept the crowd along in the promise that life goes on, whatever the cost. “Let it ride! Let it ride!” she exclaimed, and the funky organ and rock drumming didn’t seem to offend them in the slightest. But failed romance was still the main theme of her show. In Jimmy Webb’s “Didn’t We,” Lee murmured dejectedly about one more love that had “almost” worked out. Each time she reached that word, she took a pained pause—“This time we almost . . . made the pieces fit . . . This time we almost . . . made some sense of it.”
Her fans had not heard “Is That All There Is?” until that night. Lee gave it one of her vague, breathy intros: “So many things today are . . . wonderful little stories, and little dramas. And here is one by Leiber and Stoller.” The song mesmerized journalist Albert Goldman. She performed it “with open yet unseeing eyes,” he wrote, “staring out into the glare of an arc lamp like a somnambulist and then suddenly awakening from each spectral memory to ask naïvely, ‘Is that all there is?’ She followed it by answering her own question with the alcoholic bravado of a Reno divorcée—‘Let’s break out the booze and have a ball!’ ”
At the end, following several encores, the show-me clientele rose to its feet. Days later, the new issue of Variety arrived in Lee’s suite. A critic had extolled her for her open-minded acceptance of “today’s trends” and young composers. He added: “In virtually all departments, Miss Lee is the consummate singer.”
Her stock was rising. Lee’s singular art in creating a show—specifically her approaching turn in Las Vegas—would soon be immortalized in a documentary for WNET. The idea had come from David S. Prowitt, a young staff producer who hosted science shows. Prowitt had assembled a weighty team. Producer Robert Foshko was the Emmy-nominated head of cultural programming at KCET, the network’s West Coast chapter. Nick Cominos had directed a string of historical and nature specials. Cameraman John Alonzo would later earn Oscar nominations for Chinatown and Scarface.
Mindful of the privacy of the high-rollers and mobster types who occupied prime tables, the International Hotel would only allow cameras backstage and at rehearsal. Foshko opted to mount and film a preview performance of the show at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles.
The first half of Miss Peggy Lee shows the star and her retinue at work on Tower Grove Drive. Foshko and crew captured a bustling swirl of activity, all orchestrated by Lee. She had asked Betty Jungheim to scurry around and play the role of secretary; one more had just quit. On camera, Virginia Bernard, in servant’s white garb, pulls dresses and shoes for Lee to consider. A butler lugs out suitcase after suitcase in preparation for the Vegas trip. In the living room, goateed Johnny Mandel pores over a score. Mundell Lowe, Lee’s newly appointed “music coordinator,” makes comments in his calm southern drawl. Arranger Dick Hazard is there too, wearing a 1950s hipster getup of dark glasses, buzzed crewcut, and a pointy pirate’s mustache. The perpetually cool Lou Levy plays piano.
Cast and crew move into the Yellow Room for a rehearsal. There sits Lee, a fiftyish woman in the guise of a Raggedy Ann doll. A long yellow fall hangs down on either side of her face, tied with thick pink yarn; her lavender, yellow, and white print pajamas look like a child’s bedroom wallpaper. Lee had painted on her big trademark lips with peach lipstick; giant false eyelashes wave like fans as she blinks.
Cecil Smith, a veteran writer for the Los Angeles Times, is shown in deep discussion with the singer. “Peggy,” he says, glancing at his pad, “you’ve gone through era after era and change after change in music and have always emerged at the tops of the waves . . . How do you do it?”
Lee mumbles a disjointed response. “I think it’s keeping a constant interest in what’s going on . . . But even now with the new trends of music . . . the component parts of it are really not new . . . well, they are different to the extent that they’re put together in, uh . . . a new way . . . It’s as though they’ve taken some of the old and then embellished that . . .”
But when it comes time to rehearse, her concentration sharpens as she and her rhythm section patiently work out dramatic and musical nuances. “Is That All There Is?,” explains Lee, “has a very Kurt Weill-ish kind of feeling. It’s really just the bass, drum, and the sock cymbal. Very strict. It’s what we might have thought of before as funny, but it isn’t . . . now. You know what I mean? This is a very . . . serious song.”
Then comes a rehearsal with orchestra. After running through a new Johnny Mandel ballad, “I Never Told You,” Lee glances at Levy. The arrangement isn’t pleasing her. “I think we should take five and discuss it,” she says with a steely calm. “Since there is such a difference in the way I feel about the interpretation and what is written there . . . then, we have a problem.” This arrangement, Lee says, lacks the “tender, sweet quality” she wants. “It’s lovely but it’s . . . spooky. As an instrumental it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t allow me to say what I feel the lyric is saying.”
Cut to Las Vegas in the forty-eight hours before opening night. A cameraman sweeps down the strip in a moving car, driving past the International’s huge sign. It reads:
CASINO THEATRE
MISS PEGGY LEE
As the vehicle passes, the camera catches a glimpse of what’s on the other side: the single name “Barbra,” in fancier type.
Inside the Casino Theatre, all is chaos. Stagehands and carpenters bolt around, carrying hammers and dragging wood; technicians precariously climb tall, skinny ladders. The second-floor pool is leaking into the gambling area, causing further mayhem. Hugo Granata barks out commands in his tough-guy voice: “Get the houseman in and get him to have that stage cleared! She will never, never open!”
Granata had underestimated Lee. As she and the orchestra rehearse “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show,” Neil Diamond’s new gospel-style hit about a traveling evangelist, the singer maintains an unearthly cool. “Peggy was the eye of the hurricane wherever we were,” recalled Robert Foshko. “She had a way of controlling things quietly without being unpleasant about it, even off-camera.”
Executive producer David Prowitt had left most of the creative choices to Foshko. But from the start of the project he had held private meetings with Lee at her home. At thirty-five, Prowitt looked like a clean-cut college professor; he had short, wavy hair and, like Lee, an air of unshakable calm. But he was a superachiever. By the age of twenty he had worked for the Chicago Sun-Times and ABC News; then he developed Spectrum, a WNET science series in which he played the onscreen role of a story investigator. According to the Los Angeles Times, Prowitt had “planned for five years to do a definitive study of Peggy Lee.”
Behind his half-smile was a man of secrets. He told Peter Levinson that, apart from his hectic TV career, he also did “government work.” Prowitt offered no details, but later he moved to Washington, D.C., ostensibly to become Bureau Chief for the station’s local program division. Lee “got it in her head,” said Lou Levy, that Prowitt worked for the CIA; no one knew if he had really told her that or if she had imagined it. She shared the provocative news flash with Betty Jungheim. “You’re not to tell a soul!” said Lee in an excited schoolgirl tone.
Jungheim knew, as did Lee’s other close friends, that she and Prowitt had begun an affair. The singer couldn’t c
ontain her joy. Just when she had given up hope of ever finding another man to love her, along came Prowitt—young, handsome, intellectual, and successful. She boasted about him to all her friends, while letting it “slip” to a reporter that she and a certain TV producer were an item. “She was just nuts about him,” said Jungheim. “Oh God, this was the romance of the century.”
But her excitement gave way to frustration, as Prowitt disappeared frequently to parts unknown. Lee left scores of messages for him at his office; sometimes he called back, often not. His elusiveness kept her on the brink of despair. But onstage or off, Lee craved drama, and Prowitt supplied it. He was a conquest, and Lee vowed to win.
A comparable challenge awaited her in Las Vegas. Many in her circle, not to mention Lee herself, feared that the extravagantly hyped Streisand engagement—“the toughest ticket in town,” as one newspaper called it—would thrust Lee into the shadows. No one had foreseen the wave of anti-Streisand sentiment that stirred up before opening. The young diva was notoriously uncooperative with the press, and that summer they wreaked revenge. “For lack of anything better to do,” wrote columnist Norma Lee Browning, “La Streisand hiked up to Vegas a week early and has been tooting around town in 95-degree heat with her mink hat and bubble gum. My Gamblersville spy tells me she was popping her gum so noisily at Dean Martin’s Riviera show that nobody within chomping distance could hear a note.”
Much of her fabled arrogance bespoke the insecurity of a superstar who seemed terrified about living up to her own myth. And on her opening night of July 2, Streisand misfired. In an attempted joke about the much-publicized million dollars she would earn for a month’s work, Streisand opened with “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ ” from Porgy and Bess. The crowd wasn’t amused. From then on, Streisand felt a mounting wave of impatience; she responded by growing more and more aloof.
