by James Gavin
In her most arresting moment, Lee sings the lament of a Civil War–era maiden whose young man has been called to war. Inanimate as a statue, she intones soberly: “I must not doubt and I must not cry / My Johnny will come marching home.” Hope falters and her eyes flash with terror; then she hears “the familiar sounds of familiar feet,” and Johnny is hers once more.
Lee still dreamed that Prowitt might march back into her life, but he never did. Johnny Cash, however, had found what proved to be enduring love in his second marriage, to the singer June Carter. The couple invited Lee and Brian Panella to dinner at their lakefront home outside of Nashville. To Panella, the Cashes were “the most gracious, kind, supportive human beings you could ever ask for.” Their baby, John, was an infant in his crib; Lee gazed at him, spellbound. Throughout dinner, Cash and Carter regaled them with stories about their lives and their courtship. “They talked about their love for each other, and you could feel it,” said Panella. Lee nodded wistfully. Such a relationship seemed far beyond her now; all she could do was to “keep dancing,” alone.
“She had two sides. There was the little girl you wanted to protect, and the tough-as-nails lady who could destroy you with a few words.” (HEATHROW AIRPORT, LONDON, JUNE 15, 1970; COURTESY OF RICHARD MORRISON)
Chapter Thirteen
FOR PEGGY LEE, the 1970s began with staggering news. “Is That All There Is?” had been nominated for three Grammy Awards: Record of the Year, Best Performance by a Female Vocalist on a Contemporary Record, and Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s). Lee’s choice of Randy Newman had resulted in the young underdog’s first nomination. Lee had earned eight, but never won—and now the industry had stamped the forty-nine-year-old singer “contemporary.”
Journalists applauded her endurance. Benny Goodman had launched her nearly three decades ago; since then, most of her peers had descended into obscurity or camp. But John Hallowell compared Lee to “an obstinate volcano that won’t be declared obsolete.” His all-night interview at her home led him to a shrewd conclusion. “Those who can survive and go the distance in this most precarious, destructive business are usually like Katharine Hepburn or Angela Lansbury: strong, disciplined, healthy, temperate. Not Peggy Lee. I have never met a survivor who lives so close to the wire.”
Lee’s frail lungs sucked in oxygen from a tank along with a noxious fog of cigarette smoke. She ate rich food, didn’t exercise, and was now addicted to tranquilizers. Hallowell could only guess at how much pain she was carrying. Lee confided in more than one friend her certainty that no man would ever love her again; it was too late.
Still, new doors kept opening. In February 1970, she accepted a request to perform at a White House state dinner in a mere six days. Richard M. Nixon was welcoming Georges Pompidou, president of the French Republic, and his wife on their first visit to the U.S. Traditionally those dinners closed with a dinner show by some beloved all-American entertainer; recent ones had featured Bob Hope and Pearl Bailey. According to a press release, Peggy Lee was chosen for the Pompidou night “because she is rather like the French entertainers.”
In truth, the White House was desperate. Several artists had turned the offer down in protest of France’s anti-Semitic responses to the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. France had supplied Arab countries with its new Mirage jet fighters while neglecting to send any to Israel, which had bought and paid for a fleet of them. Demonstrations against France were breaking out in American cities.
None of that concerned Peggy Lee. “One of the reasons I was asked to sing was because I’m a non-political, non-prejudiced person,” she explained, and she meant it; close friends didn’t even know if she voted. For Lee, the prestige of the invitation trumped all. She would perform for about forty minutes in the East Room, whose high ceiling, gold silk draperies, and teardrop chandeliers recalled the supper clubs where she performed. The one hundred and ten guests at that white-tie function would include Nixon administration officials (among them Henry Kissinger, the National Security Advisor), the president’s family, and French and local journalists.
Allowed only a minimal entourage, Lee hurriedly phoned a few of her core musicians—Lou Levy, Mundell Lowe, Grady Tate—and Peter Levinson. On February 24, 1970, all of them passed through the White House’s stringent security check, then strode down the red-and-gold carpet of the Entrance Hall. The Nixons greeted Lee, but there wasn’t time for socializing.
After a rehearsal, Lee retired to her private quarters. She studied the French words to “La Vie en Rose,” her salute to the Pompidous, and sipped cognac to ease her flaring nerves. Hours later, it was showtime. Guests had moved into the East Room and taken their seats; the band was assembling on a riser. Levinson stood in the back, waiting for Lee. He hadn’t seen her since that afternoon, and he shuddered when a musician told him: “You’re not gonna believe how much cognac she drank.”
In walked the Nixons and the Pompidous to a standing ovation. They sat in the front row. Nixon stepped onstage for the introduction. Peggy Lee, he explained, had come from the heartlands of the U.S. and gone on to reach the “pinnacle of success,” just like President Pompidou. For that reason, he noted, she was the “most interesting and, shall we say, relaxing” choice possible to entertain such distinguished visitors.
With that, Nixon introduced “Miss Peggy Lee.” To a grand orchestral fanfare, she swept onstage in her most tasteful outfit, a high-necked, long-sleeved, black silk chiffon gown and a strand of pearls. During the first few songs, Lee sounded a bit breathless and frail, and she clung to the piano. Almost any observer would have chalked it up to nerves.
But at the seventeen-minute mark, the alcohol suddenly hit her, and the bewildered guests found themselves facing an obviously drunken star. In a slurred, dragging voice, Lee halted the show and began reciting snippets of favorite poems, including one by Princess Grace. Then she turned inappropriately risqué. “I’m very fond of poetry . . . among other things,” Lee groaned in her best Mae West voice. After a wobbly effort at “Is That All There Is?,” Lee switched to another non sequitur. “You’ve all been to Disneyland, I presume,” she slurred. Lee had forgotten that the Pompidous were French and in the States for the first time. The room went silent. “No? Well—you must go. I’m going to be Tinkerbell one day! Don’t you know what Tinkerbell does? She hits that peanut-butter jar and she flies over the Matterhorn. I think she’s about seventy-five . . . Now, she does something magic, because she turns the lights on. Now you will see, I do somethinnnng different! I turn them all off!”
That was the cue for a blackout, and a pinspot on her snapping fingers as she began “Fever.” During the song, she slipped into a Brooklyn accent that surely left the Pompidous clueless. “Yay, I boin! I boin? I burn? What’s with that, doth burn, doth boin? Ooh, look out for the Indians!”
All this was typical Peggy Lee humor, the kind that amused tipsy friends at her parties. Tonight, however, Levinson watched in horror as embarrassed glances and whispers were exchanged. The Nixons maintained frozen smiles; the Pompidous looked confused. Lou Levy noodled at the piano, powerless to get Lee on track. Mundell Lowe stared down at his guitar, cringing. “I was thinking, you shouldn’t do that, Peg. You shouldn’t do it.”
But Lee was just beginning. Now she addressed Nixon. “I had a pet chicken, Mr. President. I thought it was an Irish setter. But it was a Rhode Island Red. I fed that chicken gravel, promised it wheat, did everything. It went the way of all chickens. Don’t blame me, I was only four years old. I was a terrible cook!” She lapsed into doggerel Shakespeare, switched to baby talk, then began to wheeze out the words to “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” By now, few people were even clapping politely.
She turned to Pompidou. “Do I have your permission, Mr. President, in my very bad French?” He just stared. “Do I? I’m gonna try.” She managed a few muddled phrases of “La Vie en Rose,” then gave up. “She knew she was bombing,” recalled Levinson. And still Lee wouldn’t give up. “Well, I’ve written a very short number f
or just such an occasion, to break a mood like this. Will you pleeease sing along with me?” She murmured an original couplet she thought was hilarious:
I don’t know just what it was
But as long as it’s gone it’s all right!
From the back, a White House representative tried to signal her to stop. Finally Lee introduced her closing ode to worldwide brotherhood, “Here’s to You.” Her greetings in multiple languages—“Ciao! Viva! Pace! Salute!”—emerged in a near-catatonic drone. The band played her exit music, and Lee stepped off the platform to strained applause. She walked over to the Nixons and Pompidous. Lee had been instructed that presidents should not be touched unless they extended their hands. Lee bent forward and kissed Nixon on the cheek. Pompidou graciously kissed her hand.
Levinson had seen reporters scribbling in their notebooks, and he braced himself for the worst. It came. A French journalist called the show “a disaster.” To Washington Star columnist Betty Beale, Lee’s performance “was in such bad taste that it should convince the Nixons never to have a nightclub performer [sing] for a visiting chief of state.” No one called Lee drunk, but Vera Glaser, one of the city’s toughest reporters, scolded the star for her “sexy routines,” adding: “The buxom, blond Miss Lee went over like a lead balloon.”
White House spokesperson Connie Stewart tried to smooth things over in a statement: “We made a special effort to give the Pompidous a warm reception and Peggy was part of that warm reception. Everybody enjoyed her.” Lee attempted her own repair work. Speaking to Judy Klemesrud of the New York Times, she declared the stories about her debacle to be “totally inaccurate.” Defensively she added: “If I’m sexy, I can’t help it. Mrs. Nixon gave me a warm embrace and I returned it. I would never kiss the President. I just leaned forward as he spoke to me, and it may have looked like it, but I didn’t kiss him.”
No amount of denial, however, could alter the truth. In front of world leaders and dignitaries, Lee had sabotaged herself, just as she had at the 1955 Warner Bros. party that had probably sealed the end of her film career. Many years would pass before the White House invited her back.
Lee stayed in a funk for weeks. Depression clouded her excitement over the impending Grammy Awards; in any case, Lee felt sure she would lose. Nevertheless, on the evening of March 11, 1970, she took her seat in the grand ballroom of the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, and she braced herself for more bad news.
Her heart sank when Blood, Sweat and Tears’ “Spinning Wheel” won in the Best Arrangement category, beating out Randy Newman. Much later in the ceremony, singer Della Reese read the nominees for Best Performance by a Female Vocalist on a Contemporary Record. There were five other nominees, none of them older than thirty: Brenda Lee (“Johnny One Time”), Jackie DeShannon (“Put a Little Love in Your Heart”), Dusty Springfield (“Son of a Preacher Man”), Dionne Warwick (“This Girl’s in Love with You”), and Vikki Carr (“With Pen in Hand”). Reese tore open the envelope and announced the winner.
“Miss Peggy Lee!”
A roaring ovation rose up as the shocked singer walked toward the podium. Capitol’s executives—including some who had wanted to kill “Is That All There Is?”—looked on as Lee took her place between Reese and copresenter Glen Campbell, one of the label’s biggest moneymakers. Holding the award as though it might crumble through her fingers, Lee spoke in the calm but candid tone heard on the record.
“I’ve been so busy thinking about . . .”—she paused—“anything that I could think about, so that I wouldn’t think about this night. But I would like to thank Leiber and Stoller for writing the song, I’d like to thank Randy Newman for the arrangement, and I’d like to thank all the musicians who played in it. And I’d like to thank God, and I’d like to thank Capitol for putting it out. I wish I wouldn’t get so humbled like this—you’d think I would get over being shy—but it means a great deal to me, and I thank you very much.”
Record of the Year wasn’t announced until May 7, on a televised Grammy special. Lee would lose to the 5th Dimension’s version of “Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In,” the psychedelic hippie anthem from the musical Hair. But it didn’t matter. The Grammys had crowned a golden rebirth of her career, and the White House incident seemed forgotten. To Nicki Lee Foster, her mother had once more risen “like the phoenix out of the ashes.”
Usually these were the cinders of self-annihilation, though; and even though Lee had once again triumphed, she was so accustomed to turmoil that she seemed lost without it. On March 27, she had returned to Washington, D.C., now a city of depressing memories for her, to play the Blue Room of the Shoreham Hotel. During her run, Lee reported severe laryngitis. She made sure the press knew about her latest affliction and her valiant resolve to press on, as she headed straight to an engagement at the Waldorf. “What a remarkable trouper she is!” marveled columnist Marilyn Beck. She reported that Lee had gone on with the opening despite “stern warnings from doctors.”
Both stints drew raves. But as in “Is That All There Is?,” everything had begun to seem anticlimactic. A year after their breakup, Lee still pined for David Prowitt. During the Waldorf engagement, Capitol had released her latest album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, produced by Phil Wright. The songs cut a wide swath through the best current pop, notably the inspirational title song, a number-one hit for Simon & Garfunkel. But most of the album was a diary of her emotional distress. The titles said it all: “The Thrill Is Gone,” “He Used Me,” “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me,” “Have You Seen My Baby?” Lee threw in a tearjerker from 1937, “I See Your Face Before Me.” Wearily she sang, “I close my eyes and there you are, always.”
Bridge Over Troubled Water included a bitter rebuke, “You’ll Remember Me,” by Stan Worth and Arthur Hamilton. It copied the marching-band rhythm of “Is That All There Is?,” but not even Lee could call it a song of hope. “You can tear my heart in half if it makes you laugh,” she sang, “but I guarantee, you’ll remember me.” The number stopped her live shows, but as a single it failed to break Billboard’s Hot 100. No record of hers ever would again, even though she milked that circusy sound in such tunes as “Where Did They Go?,” a eulogy for “the sweet years, filled with laughter every day”; and “One More Ride on the Merry-Go-Round,” Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield’s whirling French-style waltz about innocence lost.
None of this pseudo-European despair held interest for the youth of the day. America had survived a harrowing decade, and the sun had come out on the pop charts; many hits of the early 1970s—the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun,” Cass Elliot’s “New World Coming,” the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” Ray Stevens’s “Everything Is Beautiful,” B. J. Thomas’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”—spoke of peace and acceptance and new beginnings. “Is That All There Is?,” popular as it was, had marked more of an end. And Peggy Lee’s record sales returned to their former slump.
On May 26, 1970, Lee celebrated an uneasy milestone—her fiftieth birthday—with one of her last grand house parties. Everyone had to come dressed as a clown. Lee had erected a tent in the garden and filled the swimming pool with balloons. Peanut vendors roamed the crowd while the hostess greeted guests in a pink-and-white, polka-dot suit with dead-white makeup and a white ostrich plume wrapped around her head. “It was so interesting to watch people, because they were not on guard,” she said later. “They were hiding behind some façade. They could be anyone they wanted to.”
To her British fans, Peggy Lee was still the laid-back sex kitten who had entranced so many of them at Pigalle in 1961. Finally, in the late spring of 1970, they got her back. On June 22, Lee played a concert at the venerable Royal Albert Hall. The space’s capacity—5,272—was far too large for a singer of her restraint, but most seats were full, and critics loved her.
During the same trip, Lee thrilled one of her most beloved disciples when she agreed to appear on Petula Clark’s ATV special, Petula. Its thirty-one-year-old star was a homegrown, wholes
ome pop sensation who had conquered the charts worldwide. In America, her 1964 number-one single “Downtown” had set off a winning streak of fifteen consecutive hits. Clark’s tangy-sweet voice was easy to recognize and utterly likable, though neither sultry nor mysterious; no wonder she named two of pop’s great temptresses, Lena Horne and Peggy Lee, as her favorite singers. But it was Lee’s “delicate touch” that attracted her the most. “She had that jazz in her life, but she never pushed it,” recalled Clark. “There was always something she was holding back, and I found that fascinating—extremely sexy, too. It was never, ‘Look what I can do’; it was, ‘Yes, I can do that, but I’ve decided I’m not going to.’ ”
Clark had never met her idol; now at a TV studio outside London, she reached “that scary moment when you come face-to-face with someone you’ve adored so long. But she seemed to be just as excited as I was.” Near the start of the show, the young star introduced Lee for a duet of “I’m a Woman,” rewritten to establish a mutual admiration society. “She was born in North Dakota but you’d never know it from the way she sings!” caroled a euphoric Clark, dressed in white. Then Lee appeared in the distance in her plain black gown and her long blond wig, and stole the show. Seated back-to-back, the women segued into a 5th Dimension hit, “Wedding Bell Blues.” Clark was the girl next door; Lee, with her saucy, gleaming eyes, seemed like her deliciously wicked older stepsister. “It was a great moment for both of us,” said Clark, “and we loved the way we sounded together.”
Smiles vanished in Lee’s solo. “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” was Michel Legrand and Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s Oscar-nominated ballad from the previous year’s The Happy Ending. Nearly every singer of Lee’s ilk had pounced upon the song, but her presentation was daringly unlike any other. The scene could have come from her affair with Prowitt. Lee sang while sitting up in a brass bed; next to her lay a bare-chested younger man, asleep. Outside the half-lit room, rain poured down the window. Staring wistfully at her motionless swain, she cut through the song’s sentimentality—“When you stand before the candle on a cake/Oh, let me be the one to hear the silent wish you make”—as she pleaded with him to never leave her.