by James Gavin
Home in Los Angeles, Lee had managed to fill the empty space in her bed. Her new flame was Brian Panella, two decades her junior. Why their business relationship had suddenly blossomed into an affair was hard to fathom. But her manager was in a failing marriage to the mother of his two children, and Lee was feeling especially needy. She convinced him to move in. “I can’t say that I fought it so well,” he admitted. It was an awkward situation, for Lee’s daughter and son-in-law and their three young children lived in the guesthouse.
He stayed only a few months, but the relationship gave Lee a temporary glow, and she continued her golden summer. July 27 found her back in Manhattan, where she and the post–hippie generation had a happy encounter. For the first of three consecutive years, Lee brought her touring show, orchestra and all, to Central Park for the highly popular Schaefer Music Festival. Founded in 1966 by promoters Ron Delsener and Hilly Kristal, it brought a bounty of pop, rock, and jazz stars into the park’s outdoor Wollman Skating Rink. For ticket prices of one to three dollars, New Yorkers could see the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, the Beach Boys, Neil Young, Sly and the Family Stone, Billy Joel, Buddy Rich, and Carmen McRae. Judy Collins performed there twice in the wake of her 1968 top-ten hit, “Both Sides Now.” The ethereal folk star loved the festival. “It was so accessible,” she said. “It was always packed with people. And it was very young. Sometimes it was pouring rain, and everybody had umbrellas, and they didn’t leave. You could see people in the other parts of the park listening from the trees, or trying to climb the fence. You could always smell a little grass in the air. It was so sixties.”
Lee was one of the oldest stars to play there, and she got a queen’s treatment. Most of the shows had double bills, but Delsener gave Lee the whole night. Behind her was a celebrated big band, the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis Orchestra, with a string section added. They sat neatly arranged on a huge, high platform surrounded by scaffolding, and backed by a panorama of trees and apartment buildings. It was a sweltering night, but the musicians wore tuxedoes.
After a rousing Afro-Cuban overture, Lee sailed onstage and kept the energy high with “Come Back to Me.” This was her rock-star moment; spread out before her, almost as far as she could see, were about six thousand people in folding chairs or on the grass. Long-haired young men and girls in halter tops were seeing the first Peggy Lee show they could afford. As a tape of the show proves, they screamed for her. Somehow, Lee’s nuances traversed the huge space; that alluring setting, combined with near-perfect acoustics, helped create a magical night. The band sounded hot; Lee’s voice floated over it. Roaring ovations followed songs as old as “Why Don’t You Do Right?” or as current as “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” as limpid as her Debussy-like arrangement of “Watch What Happens” or as raucous as “Spinning Wheel.” Fans yelled out requests and shouted, “WE LOVE YOU!” Lee did encore after encore. She was clearly touched. “I must say I will remember this night always,” she said dreamily.
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IN INTERVIEWS AND PUBLIC appearances and on first meetings, Lee seemed gracious, bashful, and sweet. “She led with that,” said playwright William Luce, her future collaborator. Those who knew her better saw what hid behind the mask: a volcanic brew of restlessness, anger, touchiness, fear, and growing eccentricity. “I think a big part of Peggy’s makeup was that she was a Gemini,” said Robert Strom, her assistant in the 1990s. “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.”
The woman who had grown up feeling so dwarfed by Min sat propped up under a blanket in her bed, ruling her kingdom as imperiously as if she were on a throne. All employees had to address her as Miss Lee. Robert Richards, who would later move in with her to collaborate on a design project, saw her in action. “If Peggy had had a staff of a hundred and fifty people,” he said, “she could have kept every one of them on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The thirst for ordering people around, for having people do her bidding, was frightening. She would consume you and have no respect for who you were, what your previous life had been, for your accomplishments. You were just in the service of.”
He also saw her flipside. More afraid than ever of being alone, Lee did whatever she could to hold employees after hours. She asked them to meditate with her, to join her for dinner; she told countless jokes and stories. So many secretaries had quit that employment agencies refused to send anyone else. In the past she had transformed family members like Nicki and Marianne into personal assistants; now she had begun asking friends such as Angela Levey, the wife of her former drummer Stan Levey, to work for her. Stan warned Angela that she’d be sorry if she did. But she said yes, with the proviso that she would work from eleven to five and not a minute later. Perhaps resenting Angela’s happy home life, Lee ignored that rule from the first day, while drawing her into a web of domestic intrigue. “She played everybody in the house against each other,” said Angela. There was no telling what innocent remark might set Lee off, but to bring up age was risky. “Don’t mention her grandchildren,” her publicists warned journalists. Lee insisted that David, Holly, and Michael call her Mama Peggy. “I don’t think that was a happy thing for her daughter to hear, because she was their mom,” said Brian Panella. “But Nicki would say, ‘I’m your mama and she’s Mama Peggy.’ ”
One day Angela asked Lee how old her dog was. The singer turned to steel. “How old are you, Angela?” she snapped. “When are you gonna die?” Levey just stared at her. “I thought, ‘I gotta get out of here.’ ”
Next Lee called upon Betty Jungheim, her friend for twenty years. Jungheim had grown up in Hollywood and knew showbiz intimately; now a divorced mother of two, she accepted Lee’s persistent pleas to work for her. With her blond bouffant hairdo, she could have passed for the singer’s prettier, more petite younger sister. She proved as patient and caring as anyone Lee had employed since Dona Harsh.
Now, as a paid assistant, Jungheim witnessed a Lee she had never quite known. “We used to have a lot of laughs together, but there was always tension, because you never knew who was gonna get it that day.” The bedroom TV stayed on around the clock. “I don’t think she ever really slept,” said Jungheim. Nor did the “perfectionist” seem to do much actual work. Sitting amid her bedsheets and pillows, Lee pondered what she wanted for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; maintained her peach-painted, talonlike nails; flipped through her address book and phoned friends to tell them jokes. Often the sheer oddity of her sense of humor was funny in itself. One year Lee spent months telling whoever would listen that male penguins held a female’s eggs between their feet for the whole gestation period. She thought this hilarious, and most guests couldn’t resist laughing with her.
Over time, Jungheim grew less amused. All day long, Lee kept pressing the buzzer wired to Betty’s desk on the other side of the house. Back and forth the secretary walked; often she had just barely left Lee’s bedroom when that impatient BZZZZ-BZZZZ sounded again. The employee who fared the best was Virginia Bernard, whom Bruce Vanderhoff had nicknamed Ginger. Before a show, Bernard—a small, thin black woman who smoked even more than Lee—trailed behind the star, holding up the hem of her floor-length gowns as she walked to the stage. Like all of Lee’s staff, she wound up doing far more than she’d been hired for. But she took none of the star’s guff. Bernard stormed out of the house if she didn’t like Lee’s attitude; the singer had to grovel in order to get her back. One day Lee decided to rest her voice by summoning Bernard with a bell. “Oh, no, honey,” came the response. “Don’t you be ringin’ no bell. That’s from back in the slave days!” When Lee tried to keep her past quitting time, Bernard turned on her heel and left. “My kids need me, and they come first!” she said over her shoulder.
Nicki had seldom come first in Lee’s life, and as much as they loved each other, there were constant tensions. Just as the singer could never stop pining for her lost mother, so was she an elusive pres
ence in her daughter’s life. “I think Nicki always yearned for her mom, because she never really had her,” said Dona Harsh. “Peggy always had to be Miss Peggy Lee, which of course kept everyone in money. You had to consider that.” The fact that Nicki and her whole family lived in her mother’s home didn’t seem to have bridged the emotional distance.
By now Dick had switched from performing to TV producing. Motherhood occupied Nicki, but still she yearned for a creative outlet that would make her more than just the daughter of Peggy Lee. She loved to paint, as did her mother, but Nicki was clearly the more talented at it. She specialized in watercolors, and produced a series that depicted heavy-set women. But because Lee was a star, she got the offers. Sylvania, the consumer electronics line, commissioned her to create four oils that they would reproduce in a portfolio as a gift to buyers of their new TVs. Lee’s “love” pictures, as she called them, depicted lemons, oranges, and wildflowers. The work was amateur, revealing little grasp of shadow or perspective.
But Nicki forged ahead with her art, as she did with her mother-daughter relationship. Years later she confided in William Luce that while Lee hadn’t abused her physically, she had certainly done so emotionally. Such behavior was Lee’s legacy from her stepmother. Min had long since retired from her job as depot agent of the tiny Millarton stop on the Midland Continental. She returned to Jamestown, where she occupied her time with church and civic work. On January 14, 1971, Marianne phoned Lee with the news that Min had died. She was seventy-eight. Her son Edwin, his wife, and other Egstrom relatives attended the funeral. Lee did not.
Now that Min had died, Lee railed openly about her to journalists. But venting didn’t comfort her. Longing for peace of mind, she plunged into Transcendental Meditation (TM), an international fad thanks to such celebrity followers as the Beatles. Harried American housewives learned about it from afternoon TV talk shows and bought instructional paperbacks from spinning supermarket racks. TM promised “a direct input of ease and order”; all it took was a twice-daily twenty-minute session of repeating a mantra (a symbolic word or phrase) in one’s mind. “At some point you transcend,” explained Lee to a reporter.
Certain pains in her life, though, were unconquerable. When her guru, Margaret, gave her a mantra, she insisted on another, because the first one reminded her of Min. Lee hoped to draw “ease and order” directly from TM’s creator, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to whom stars could gain access. On one occasion, the Maharishi held a ceremony at Lee’s house for her and her friends; at another time, she, Nicki, and Betty Jungheim piled into the car to attend his appearance in Santa Barbara. The women stopped for lunch in Malibu, and there Nicki brought up the name of Alice Larsen. Jungheim asked who that was. “Oh, that’s the woman who raised me,” said Nicki.
With that, said Jungheim, “Peggy pitched a fit. She said, ‘I was on the road working!’ ” She insisted they leave the restaurant; the trip was off. “We didn’t talk all the way home. She was furious.”
As a child, Lee had deduced Min’s weak spots and learned how to twist the knife. Now Nicki, it seemed, had mastered the same skill. One Sunday night at home, she sat her mother in front of the TV to watch Ed Sullivan. His guests included Jim Bailey, the hottest young gender illusionist in the business. Bailey was famed for his evocations of Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, and Phyllis Diller. Not for him the slapdash impersonations seen in drag bars; Bailey sketched his subjects in such probing detail that he made it to Carnegie Hall. Lee’s exaggerated makeup, hair, and dresses certainly had a camp factor, but Bailey was interested in realism, not satire. Sullivan announced him, and out he came as Peggy Lee, singing a medley of her hits. Lee stared in frozen shock. “I was watching,” she recalled, “so I thought, surely it wasn’t me.” After several silent moments, she finally spoke. “I think I’ve died,” she said. She left the room.
Lee told writer Shaun Considine that her phone kept ringing during the show. “Friends were calling to say, ‘You’re on Ed Sullivan and you look awful. What happened to you? You look embalmed.’ ” Bailey’s appearance, it seemed, had served as a deeply unsettling look in the mirror.
Nicki had helped him. Months before, she had heard that Bailey intended to “do” her mother. She and Dick Foster went to see him perform. Backstage, she invited him to the house for pointers and a screening of Lee footage. “What was I gonna say, no?” recalled Bailey. “As a kid I’d seen Peggy on television. She fascinated me. She was the hardest to sing of all the ladies I’d done. There was no belting. It was all about the eyes. Lips. A few hand gestures. I could see the pain. She wasn’t obvious about it, but I could tell she’d had a lot of unhappiness.”
A nervous Bailey showed up at Peggy Lee’s home. He feared that Lee might be there, but she wasn’t; Nicki had waited for her mother to go on the road before having him over. She took him into Lee’s bedroom and into her closets. His eyes scanned everything. “I was filing it away mentally. I was asking about eyebrow pencils, and what color lipstick. I felt guilty in a way. I felt that if Peggy Lee knew about this, she’d have me arrested.”
Grateful as he was, Bailey had to ponder Nicki’s motives. “Was this a way of getting back at her mother for some slight? I felt that Nicki doing this wasn’t in the best taste. It’s exposing somebody, in a way.” Nicki didn’t tell her mother about the visit, but she found out through Grethe, her Swedish dresser and alternate housekeeper. Predictably, Lee was enraged. Soon Bailey would be at the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria as Peggy Lee, which made the star even angrier.
Lee still had a circuit, if a dwindling one, of supper clubs to work. In Las Vegas, however, the fallout from her recent misconduct wasn’t forgotten; word had spread that Lee was demanding and difficult. By 1970, Panella couldn’t get her a job there. That fall he sought help from his mentor Sam Weisbord, a top executive at the William Morris Agency. “She’s burned a lot of bridges,” Weisbord told him. Panella offered a proposal. If, in the future, another Morris client were to bow out of a Vegas run, Lee could be brought in to sub. Panella vowed that she would cause no trouble.
She got her chance. On December 27, Lee opened at the Desert Inn on a bill with comedian Charlie Callas. Panella pleaded with her to behave. “And she did,” he said. The audience adored her: “Standing o’s every night.”
One Vegas kingpin had never left her thrall. After a show, Panella led Lee into the freight elevator that took her to her suite. Two brutish men followed, pushing a laundry basket, piled high with towels. As the elevator rose, all were silent. “I’m thinking, something’s not right,” said Panella. At that moment, his and Lee’s eyes fell upon a gnarly hand, with untrimmed, clawlike nails, that had reached out of the basket. Instantly they knew it belonged to Howard Hughes, who owned much of Las Vegas, including the Desert Inn. The madly eccentric and reclusive tycoon had lived in the penthouse until recently; why he was there now wasn’t clear. Hughes wouldn’t have dared enter the showroom, but for years he had made it known that he “was crazy about Peggy,” said Panella. “He wanted to sleep with her and never got to.” Apparently he wanted a peek at her. “We got off the elevator and I said, ‘Do you realize what just happened?’ She said, ‘Yes! Howard was in that basket!’ ”
Lee herself was turning ever more eccentric, but she still impressed most reporters as the apex of professionalism. “It’s no wonder that we love Peggy Lee, whose performances are so glittering and polished,” wrote a New Yorker reporter. Asked whose music she liked hearing, she reeled off a list of current names: Carly Simon, Leon Russell, Credence Clearwater Revival, Bread, Chicago. The writer attended a rehearsal for her new Waldorf show, in which poetry by Carl Sandburg and Lois Wyse, who wrote bestselling, greeting card–style verse, bridged pop tunes of several eras. “She stopped ‘Fire and Rain’ several times because a guitar figure didn’t sound right, and she hummed what she wanted until she got it. In a new tune called ‘It Changes’ she heard a wrong note from the cellist. Though the cellist was playing what was written, Lou
Levy agreed with Miss Lee that it sounded wrong, so it was changed.” Lee explained afterward: “Now, you don’t have an audience of musicians, but the music still has to be just right . . . I think the audience enjoys it more if it comes off well, simply because I enjoy it more, which gives me a sense of well-being and relaxes me, and enables me to do a better job.”
But when Mary Daniels of the Chicago Tribune sat in on a rehearsal at Chicago’s Palmer House hotel, she saw much that seemed out of whack. Daniels noticed the singer’s dramatic weight gain and the cigarette that burned constantly in her hand, despite her well-known lung damage. “The way she smokes seems to indicate that she has never seen a TV public health message,” wrote Daniels. “From a foot away her face is still very pretty and presentable, but magazines photograph her through heavy, gauzy screens.”
Lee changed her look with almost every show, searching in vain for a happy sight in the mirror. In her bedroom, Jim Bailey had gazed upon a huge expanse of shimmery fabric. “It was a dress, but I thought it was a bedspread. When Peggy gained all the weight, she made her own trap. It was tent city. Muumuu time.”
The star had entered her next fashion phase, swathing herself in flowing, high-necked chiffon caftans with jeweled collars and cuffs. The designer was Bob Mardesich. An apprentice of Marilyn Monroe’s famed costumer, William Travilla, Mardesich had fitted a near-emaciated Judy Garland for Valley of the Dolls before her drinking lost her the job. With Lee, Mardesich had other challenges. “There are different tricks of camouflaging weight,” he said. “We tried them all.” When Lee appeared on The Carol Burnett Show to sing Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move,” she wore a pale orange caftan with huge ruffled sleeves that hung to the floor. To vocal critic Henry Pleasants, the Lee of that period looked like Aimee Semple MacPherson, the flamboyant celebrity evangelist and faith healer of the 1920s.
