by James Gavin
From the WNET documentary Miss Peggy Lee, 1969.
The critics, especially Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times, came down on her hard. Champlin deemed her “curious, cold and intensely disappointing”; her show, he wrote, was “too long,” her patter “self-conscious and unmoving.” Streisand struck him as a “dazzlingly efficient and invaluable but chillingly impersonal machine . . . who still, it turns out, has some lessons to learn.”
When the concert ended, many of her viewers headed to the Casino Theatre. Streisand’s missteps had predisposed the critics to love Lee, who exuded humility and warmth. Cue’s reviewer wrote a love letter. “The acclaim a glossy first-night audience withheld from [Streisand] it lavished extravagantly on Peggy Lee, giving her a moist-eyed, table-pounding, triple-standing-ovation send-off she could never forget.” Champlin chimed in. Lee, he wrote, had “suffused the room with love and good cheer. We gave her the roaring, whooping, standing ovation which we had hoped, I think, to be able to give Miss Streisand.” For John Hallowell of the New York Times, “the old pro clobbered the new. Miss Lee walked off with the night. . . . Streisand is a novice beside her.”
The next day, Streisand rushed to revamp her act. It worked: she won over the critics, and packed the Show Room International for the rest of her run. Lee, however, wound up sabotaging herself. Still wracked by competitiveness and jealousy, she began making demands. In one of them, she ordered the hotel to print tent cards advertising her show and to place them in every room—and in the space where Streisand performed. Told that this wasn’t in her contract, Lee demanded it anyway. Streisand ordered the removal of the cards. The hotel complied, and Lee began a war. “But if you were the management, of course you were going to go with Streisand,” said Brian Panella. “Peggy—screw her. Let’s get rid of her.”
They did. That engagement, which had begun in triumph, was Peggy Lee’s last at the International.
The recording she saw as her lifeline stayed captive in a box. Lee kept badgering Capitol’s executives to release “Is That All There Is?”; Peter Levinson, too, stayed on the case, but he got nowhere. “Is That All There Is?” was unreleasable, they said, because it was “too long.” Moreover, the record was mostly talk, set to odd music and sure to depress listeners. Who would buy it?
Levinson didn’t accept their excuses. Commercial pop had never seemed more experimental, nor steeped in doom, as it was in the late sixties, and a young public’s ears were wide open. In 1967, Capitol had issued “Ode to Billie Joe,” country singer Bobbie Gentry’s Southern Gothic tale of suicide in Mississippi. Just seven seconds shorter than “Is That All There Is?,” the record had reached number one. Soon after that, actor Richard Harris had filled two sides of a single with “MacArthur Park,” Jimmy Webb’s lushly romantic elegy for lost love. That disc had hit number two. In 1969, the Rolling Stones released their milestone album Let It Bleed, a violent portrait of what Mick Jagger termed the “apocalypse” of late-sixties life. Elvis Presley’s single “In the Ghetto” dealt with the endless circle of American poverty and crime; it stunned RCA by making the top ten.
The nihilism in Lee’s record sounded far gentler and prettier. Still, Capitol wouldn’t budge. As Mike Stoller told writer Franklin Bruno, the label deemed it “some kind of weird, uncommercial shit.” Randy Newman doubted it would ever come out. “It was unlike anything, ever,” he said, “and things like that are not the common hits.”
In August, a new change at Capitol Records indicated an almost certain end to Lee’s dream. Stanley Gortikov had been fired as president and moved over to Capitol Industries. His replacement was Sal Iannucci, the former vice president of business affairs at CBS. Even more than Gortikov, Iannucci flaunted a philosophy of out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new. “The principal thrust of this company,” he announced, “must be the idea of new artist development.”
That “sullen, cold-steel attitude,” as Dave Dexter perceived it, seemed like a death knell for the company’s few long-term survivors, including Peggy Lee. But as the last summer of the 1960s wound down, Lee figured out how to get her way. An invitation had come from The Joey Bishop Show, a much-pitied television flop. ABC had thought that Bishop—the Rat Pack’s nasal, testy jokester—could compete with Tonight show host Johnny Carson, the king of late-night TV. Carson pummeled him in the ratings, and The Joey Bishop Show didn’t last out the decade.
Back in 1955, Bishop had made his Las Vegas debut as the warmup act for Peggy Lee. He had loved her ever since. Capitol was courting him to book some of its new young acts. He agreed to feature them—if he could have Peggy Lee. When his request reached her, Lee saw possibilities. She said yes to Bishop—but only if he would let her perform “Is That All There Is?” Of course, she could.
Lee told Peter Levinson to inform Capitol that on August 21, 1969, she would introduce the song on network television. They had to release it first. Weak as Bishop’s ratings were, Capitol caved in. A meager fifteen hundred copies of “Is That All There Is?” were pressed—barely enough to take it to the bottom of Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. The B-side was “Me and My Shadow,” a song everyone knew. But people had never heard that hammy 1920s tearjerker performed like this. Lee breathed its sad-sack lines—“me and my shadow, strolling down the avenue”—over a wry one-finger piano line, a nearly silent bass, and the gentle rubbing of sandblocks, which shuffled like footsteps in the dark. Mundell Lowe had arranged it for her, and this track, too, seemed destined to bomb.
That month, Peggy Lee could not have seemed less relevant. All attention turned to two galvanizing social events that defined the polar extremes of the 1960s. From August 15–18, a small town in upstate New York hosted the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, an outdoor festival. It united dozens of rock and folk’s most searing voices—and three- to four-hundred-thousand music fans—in what Jon Pareles of the New York Times called “a moment of muddy, disheveled, incredulous grace,” all of it about “making love, not war.” Not even that grand oasis, however, could banish the sting of the bloodbath that had occurred days earlier, when Charles Manson’s cult “family” had savagely murdered seven people in two Los Angeles homes. The nation was left reeling.
On the night of Lee’s Bishop appearance, the normally acidic host introduced her as “one of the greatest performers of the era.” He read a series of critical raves that extolled her as one of the business’s great long-distance runners, and one who still mattered. “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Peggy Lee!” he announced. The camera cut to the overweight, fussily gowned and coiffed, forty-nine-year-old singer. First she plugged her album A Natural Woman by singing the title tune. The song was considered Aretha Franklin’s property; Lee’s version surely struck many listeners as an aging songstress trying to “get with it.”
After the applause, a pianist played the childlike introduction to “Is That All There Is?” Lee sounded nervous. Then anger crept into her voice. It might have come from her resentment of Capitol’s new guard, who had treated her as worthless, then forced her to connive in order to get a puny release of the best song she had found in years. Singing “Let’s break out the booze and have a ball,” she spat out the last word sarcastically. “I’m not ready for that final disappointment!” emerged as a battle cry. No matter what, Peggy Lee would not be cast aside.
When she sat on the panel, neither Lee nor Bishop said a word about the song. Instead, he segued into safe nostalgia when a film projector rolled “The Siamese Cat Song” from Lady and the Tramp. He and Lee followed it with benign small talk about Disney and the old days at the Sands.
The next morning, viewers woke up to more headlines about the spectacularly violent end of the 1960s. The Vietnam War’s American casualties had passed thirty-five thousand; and for all the strides made by the civil rights movement, its key leaders had gotten snuffed out, one after another.
Peggy Lee’s “weird” little song, which questioned the meaning of life and the future, struck a chord. After the show, said Mike Stoller, �
��the phones at ABC rang off the wall.” Enough viewers rushed to their record stores to wipe out the single’s first pressing and force another. Few DJs had received advance copies, but over the next two weeks, “Is That All There Is?”—all four minutes and twenty-two seconds of it—began to appear on the radio. On September 27, the disc debuted on the Billboard charts and began a slow climb. By October 18, it was number one on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. On November 8, it peaked at number eleven in the Hot 100. The artists in the top ten included the 5th Dimension (“Wedding Bell Blues”), the Beatles (“Come Together”), Elvis Presley (“Suspicious Minds”), and the Temptations (“I Can’t Get Next to You”). Beyond her wildest dreams, Lee had won.
Some youngsters, like the future New York Times writer Rob Hoerburger, hadn’t a clue what this “old woman” was doing on AM radio with this “gin-and-irony-soaked midlife crisis set to an oompah beat. Our parents loved it but to us it was aural castor oil.” But Sidney Myer understood. “I think most people my age had thought that she was just this middle-aged pop singer from the same conveyor belt that had brought them Patti Page, Connie Francis—singers who had nothing to say to them. Then suddenly came this song that was so odd and offputting, sung by a woman who was not Joni Mitchell or Judy Collins. There was nothing Easy Listening about this song! It hit people in so many ways. People were writing editorials about it, and having these fierce debates about what it meant. This wasn’t just a song on the pop charts. It was a headline.”
The success of “Is That All There Is?” struck its authors as miraculous. “Maybe the world needed some kind of thoughtful piece of material to ponder through all that noise,” reflected Jerry Leiber. Their “extremely pessimistic idea for a pop song” transfixed the playwright Neil Simon. “No matter what she finds in life, it’s not good enough,” he said. “Which at times I think we all think about, in our disappointment.”
Brian Panella felt sure the single could have done even better, had Capitol not fallen short on the job. “They still refused to believe in it while it was happening. They were a day late and a dollar short in getting the product into the field.”
Even so, Lee was gaining attention that her label had never anticipated. In another unlikely coup, she wound up alongside Stevie Wonder on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, the weekly cavalcade of jukebox hits, whose teenage fans, assembled on a dance floor, judged a new tune by whether it had a “good beat” and you could “dance to it.” Now a woman older than most of their mothers was standing before them and singing one of the strangest songs they had ever heard.
If “Is That All There Is?” spoke to them in some abstruse way, the song’s themes of disillusionment and death gave her older fans a jolt. It startled Lee to read tabloid allegations of suicides it had inspired. On the NBC radio series Monitor, Jack Eigen confronted her about her record’s true intentions. “Some people think that it’s a big putdown of life, that it reflects a feeling of utter futility,” he stated. “Many people are a little concerned, because you say, ‘Is that all there is? Well, let’s have some booze and have a ball.’ In other words you are trying to say, the only way to have fun is to escape with booze.”
“No!” maintained Lee. “If it were really that negative, I couldn’t sing it. . . . It’s more like saying that life is a comedy—or a tragedy. I was singing about—you show me all these things, and if love finds me worthy, there’s more. It’s not all there is!”
But the poet and psychologist Paul Pines saw little hope in the song, or in Peggy Lee. “When you’ve reached a certain age, images, fantasies, things that were protective, that were your survival strategy, just crumble. You look out at the landscape naked. ‘I thought I would die but I didn’t’—I think that explains the whole story. Children who suffer deep trauma, like Peggy did, remain in fearsome, unconscious pursuit of that same feeling of total emptiness. ‘Is That All There Is?’ to me can be read as the recognition of being trapped in a pattern to which there is no exit.”
Mike Stoller disagreed. To him, Leiber’s sentiments were “very liberating. Hey—if that’s it, then let’s have a good time.” Panella, too, chose to accept Lee’s philosophy. “When she went to the chorus she had a smile on her face that said, ‘Let’s go get ’em baby. Let’s keep dancing.’ ”
* * *
WITH “IS THAT ALL There Is?” scaling the charts, Miss Peggy Lee premiered on public TV to raves. It won her newfound respect for her painstaking craftsmanship. Professionally, Lee had gotten everything she wanted. She wasn’t a has-been.
But one crucial thing was missing. “In the life of Peggy Lee there always has to be a man,” wrote John Hallowell in the New York Times. “Past love or present, good or bad, flirtation or for real, a man is there and she sings to him.” In the preceding months, Lee had convinced herself that David Prowitt truly loved her. She had last seen him at a screening of the documentary. The next day she phoned him. He wasn’t there. She left a message. He didn’t respond. “She kept calling him and calling him,” said Betty Jungheim. A week passed, then another. Still nothing. “He was gone,” recalled Kathy Mahana. “He disappeared off the face of the map.”
Soon thereafter, she dropped by the house and walked into Lee’s bedroom. She found her friend in bed staring at the ceiling, “paralyzed with emotional pain.” Mahana had never seen her in such anguish. Sometime later, Lee saw Prowitt’s picture in one of the tabloids. “He was escorting Beverly Sills,” said Mahana.
To Brian Panella, the Prowitt affair “may have been her last shot at opening herself up to a real solid relationship. I don’t think she ever got over him.” Nearly twenty-five years later, she mythologized Prowitt namelessly in a song, “Flowers and Flowers,” that she wrote with composer Paul Horner for her one-woman Broadway show, Peg. “His eyes were gray / Oh, how he thrilled me / He belonged to the CIA / It nearly killed me.”
For Lee, “Is That All There Is?” was growing ever truer. Her latest white knight had gone, and she wanted to die, but she didn’t. And her renewed fame seemed hollow.
Having begun the decade as the sparkling, energetic First Lady of Basin Street East, Lee was ending it in a sea of depression. Songs about desertion increasingly defined her shows. Onstage, much of the life seemed drained out of her, and heartache wasn’t the only cause. In the wake of Prowitt’s exit, Lee found solace in Valium, the prescription tranquilizer that had become the American housewife’s best friend. It made its debut in 1963, and by 1969 it topped the list of favorite pharmaceutical drugs. Valium’s effect of slowing the neurological system made it a popular treatment for nervousness and insomnia, both of which Lee suffered from. It was also useful for easing the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, which came in handy as she tried to phase out drinking. Valium was highly addictive—but for Lee, excess was a way of life, and she began taking far too much. “Peggy Lee, I used to say to people, is like this,” explained Bruce Vanderhoff. “If one aspirin will fix your headache, take ten. It’ll go away ten times faster.”
The drug’s effects are obvious in a 1970 appearance on The Dean Martin Show. In both a surging arrangement of “Almost Like Being in Love” and a snail’s-pace “Watch What Happens,” Lee behaves the same. Her eyes blink in half time; otherwise her face doesn’t move. Her head swivels in slow-motion, and her once briskly animated hands hang down lifelessly. The long blond fall, curled at the ends, and the near-frozen face and body begged unwanted comparisons to the septuagenarian Mae West. Vocally, Lee’s rhythm was still secure, and always would be; but to some of her musicians, a spark was flickering out.
Recently Lee had shared a whole installment of the NBC series Kraft Music Hall with Johnny Cash, country music’s fabled “Man in Black.” America loved Cash, a tall, rugged outlaw from Arkansas with huge shoulders, thick dark hair, and weary eyes that had seen too much. His brother had died at fifteen after a saw at the mill where he worked nearly sliced him in two. Amphetamine and barbiturate addiction plagued the singer, who was jailed seven times, mostly o
n drug-related charges. He went temporarily clean in 1968, when he was thirty-six. Then he attempted suicide.
Cash poured it all into his songs, which spoke empathetically of the lost and downtrodden. His craggy bass-baritone had a permanent ache; it was an utterly human sound, strong but with a vulnerable quaver. It made him the perfect counterpart for Peggy Lee.
She concealed her now-shapeless figure with a free-hanging, black coat-style dress, brought somewhat to life by sparkly trim down the front and on the cuffs. On the show, a trio of Peggy Lees perform “Is That All There Is?”—first the real Lee, then two projected ones, who appear onscreen like ghosts to sing the subsequent choruses. It was an eerie depiction of a woman known for her multiple personalities.
Later on, Lee and her fellow lonesome traveler present a medley of somber story-songs, staged on a set that evokes a bare, snow-covered forest. As they lock eyes, powerful chemistry bonds the stars—one an icon of embattled masculinity, the other a wounded woman who could easily melt in his arms. Lee and Cash trade folksy ballads—the lazy waltz, “Down in the Valley”; a farm couple’s epic love story, “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” Leiber and Stoller had written Lee a new song, “Whistle for Happiness,” one of several attempted follow-ups to “Is That All There Is?” It opens with the slow beating of a marching drum, then expresses a tear-stained resolve to soldier on: “Whistle for happiness, and it will come / Crowned with a gaily-colored plume.” Cash followed with the young poet and songwriter Rod McKuen’s “Love’s Been Good to Me”: “I have been a rover, I have walked alone / Hiked a hundred highways, never found a home.”
