by James Gavin
Atop those voluminous gowns were hairdos to match: “vanilla-Whip-’N-Chill pudding tresses,” as Mary Daniels called them. Lee had a home hairdressing appointment almost daily. “We touched it up every fourth day,” said Bruce Vanderhoff. “Ridiculous. Sometimes I’d say, this is too much.”
But too much is what Lee usually wanted, and she got it from her new hairstylist, Bruce Richard. An ex-model, he had come to Lee via Vanderhoff, his former boyfriend, who wasn’t always available. Alongside Lee, Richard got most of the attention. Over six feet tall, blue-eyed, and sporting a mane of brown hair that anticipated the Bee Gees in their Saturday Night Fever phase, Richard was a stunner, and he knew it. “He looked like Hercules,” said singer Leata Galloway, who worked later in Lee’s backup vocal trio. Richard alternated between head-to-toe leather and mod suits, with shirts always opened to reveal his hairy chest. Aggressively charming, he cruised to appointments in a Rolls-Royce, while indulging after hours in recreational drugs and S&M. In his off time he had rock-star-like headshots taken.
Hairdresser Bruce Richard at Lee’s fifty-third birthday party, May 26, 1973. (PHOTO BY BOB MARDESICH)
Richard aspired to an aristocracy of flashy hairdressers-to-the-stars such as Jon Peters (Barbra Streisand’s future boyfriend and producer) and Gene Shacove (who inspired Warren Beatty’s lead character in the film Shampoo). But Robert Richards recalled him mainly as a “demented queen” who sniffed amyl nitrate poppers and wore chaps while doing Lee’s hair. Often he drove by Streisand’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. “Oh, you want to do Barbra Streisand’s hair?” asked Mardesich. “No,” said Richard, “I want to be her friend!”
For now he had Peggy Lee. “She’s the best thing that has ever happened to me,” he told writer Joan Rattman Heilman. “And the most phenomenal woman I’ve ever met. We’re very dear friends. I get five hundred dollars a week and all my expenses. And I go first-class.” If he coveted her fame, she loved to be seen with such a head-turner. Predictably, he assumed other responsibilities besides hairdressing. “Bruce is always out front during Peggy’s shows, and reports on how she looks and how she’s going over,” wrote Heilman. “Between shows, or when she comes off on bows, he hands her a glass of water, powders her face, touches up her hair.”
He did more than that. During her false exits, Richard waited with a Valium clenched in his left hand. Lee swept by, scooped it up with one of her long nails, and downed it with the glass of cognac he held in his other hand. This was the decade of proud chemical overindulgence, and to Richard it was all a lark. But Brian Panella saw calamity in the making, as all this anesthesia began taking a toll on her work.
In April 1971, near the end of an exhausting five-week tour, she began a weeklong booking at the fifteen-hundred-seat Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Lee seldom drank before rehearsing, but this time she did, and it left her in no condition to guide the band. She blamed the sound, the lights, the wait staff, the orchestra; Panella had to fight with everyone on her behalf. Hugo Granata walked around scowling, his arm in a sling after a fall off a ladder during a previous engagement. He had lost patience with Lee, who kept complaining about his light scheme. “This is the way it was last year,” he insisted. “Same room, same lights.”
“No, Hugo, it wasn’t.”
“Yes, it was.”
“No, I remember it differently.”
“Then you remember it wrong.”
For the first show, Lee would have to entertain a convention of car dealers. By showtime many were drunk, and as she sang they rose from their tables and milled around, joking and laughing. From the stage, Lee gestured in their direction. “I’m gettin’ a lot of conversation from over here,” she said testily. Panella rushed over and tried to silence them. It didn’t work. He too lost his temper. “I went to the obvious ringleader, the loudest, most boisterous buffoon with a cigar. I leaned over his chair and I said, ‘Look, you fucking asshole. I’m gonna pull you out of this fucking chair and I’m gonna break it over your fucking head. Do you wanna shut the fuck up? Or what do you want?’ ”
Instead of quieting down, they refused to pay their check. Shouts came from another table: “Sing ‘Fever.’ ”
“Oh, but that’s for dessert,” said Lee gamely.
“Come on, sis, sing ‘Fever.’ ”
“Sir,” she hissed, “I’ve . . . had . . . just . . . about . . . enough!” She cut the show short and fled in tears to her dressing room.
Moments later, Panella entered. He found Lee rummaging through her purse on the makeup table. “Are you all right?” he asked gently.
“Yes, I’m fine!” she snapped.
“Do you want something to eat before the next show?”
“No, I don’t!”
Lee took her purse into the bathroom. Quickly she emerged, slammed the purse down on the makeup table, and stormed out.
“She came back, looked under the purse, went back in the toilet,” said Panella. “Now she’s a wreck. I looked under the table and saw a little manila envelope. I opened it. Quaaludes.” For Lee to down them on top of the Valium and alcohol in her system would be “a cocktail for total disaster. I knew I’d have a freakin’ zombie on my hands. And it might kill her.” He stashed the envelope in his pocket. But he couldn’t stop Lee from ordering a double vodka. He believed she took a Valium with it. She did the late show “partially blitzed,” Panella said. “They loved her, but she was screwing up her lyrics.”
Back in the dressing room, he shored up his courage and showed her the packet of Quaaludes. “Are these yours?”
“What are you accusing me of?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. Is this what you lost?”
“No, it is not,” shouted Lee, “and I resent you accusing me!”
“You’re absolutely right. I apologize.” Panella walked into the bathroom, dumped the pills in the toilet, and flushed it. “She went nuts.”
Panella’s job had shifted from management to damage control. The rest of her innermost circle had caught on. Bruce Vanderhoff called Lee “the queen of self-medication”; Phoebe Ostrow (by now Phoebe Jacobs) agreed. “She was a sneak pill-popper. She used to hide them under the bed, under the pillow, in pocketbooks, in the coat pockets.” Lee had acquired doctors in various cities; she had researched symptoms of various ailments and used them to obtain “all kinds of prescriptions for everything,” said Jacobs. Her housekeeper Grethe couldn’t clean without finding pills. While Lee was still on tour, Nicki pleaded with Betty Jungheim to intervene. Jungheim urged her to call Lee’s most trusted doctor.
He agreed to admit her to the hospital for tests, while keeping the reason vague.
Jungheim accompanied her. “I don’t understand why I’m here,” said Lee. Then she glimpsed the word “detox” on a report. Lee exploded at Jungheim, who once more found herself caught in the middle. “I was trying to save your life,” countered Jungheim.
It seemed that no one could. Increasingly, audiences saw a stoned Peggy Lee. In July, talk-show host Merv Griffin featured a full program of Lee and Tony Bennett performing at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Lee appeared in flowing power-blue chiffon, with a Bruce Richard hairdo that consisted of two voluminously teased sacks of curls that hung like kittens from either side of her head. She and Bennett sang selections from their current acts. But when the two friends stood shoulder to shoulder for “Sing,” songwriter Joe Raposo’s childlike hit from Sesame Street, it looked as though creatures from different planets had collided. The eager-to-please Bennett had no mystique; a grin was never far from his lips, and he flung a hand toward the sky at the end of most songs. Sometimes he spun around in glee.
Lee stayed immobile and half smiling. Her face had the unlined perfection of a doll; she sang in a low-voltage drone. During “Is That All There Is?,” a strange disconnect overcame the singer; her eyebrows kept arching in a slow-motion vamp, as though she thought the song were “Fever.”
Within days of that taping, so
me bad news shook her temporarily out of her fog. Louis Armstrong, who for years had sent her an orchid and a good-luck wire on her opening nights, had died. His widow, Lucille, asked her to sing “The Lord’s Prayer” at the funeral, which took place at a small, sweltering church in his hometown of Corona, Queens. Armstrong was sixty-nine. He had suffered a heart attack, the result of a lifetime of fatty soul food and cigarettes as well as laxative abuse to control his weight.
Lee refused to face the truth about her own self-destruction. “Oh, I take very good care of myself,” she told a writer. But in November 1971, near the end of a tour, she began feeling ill. She canceled the last engagement and flew home to California, and from there went straight to St. John’s. Diagnosis: a return of pneumonia. Just as she had a decade before, Lee spent Thanksgiving in her hospital bed.
X-rays of her lungs revealed a high degree of scarring and the inflammation and tar buildup of a thirty-seven-year smoking habit. The doctor gave Lee a choice: quit or die. “I want to live,” she said. She had gotten the same warning in 1961, but this time she took the ultimatum to heart. With the help of a mentholated plastic cigarette, Lee gathered her deepest determination. This time it worked.
Far too soon, she went back to work. She could never have resisted two of the offers that came her way in 1972. In both cases, she was asked to act on TV—an opportunity she had thought she would never have again. On The Carol Burnett Show, Lee gave a bittersweet reprise of her asylum scene from Pete Kelly’s Blues. Seventeen years after that film, Lee’s inner Rose had risen much closer to the surface. The tinkling of a child’s music box again underscored “Sing a Rainbow”—this time to even more sinister effect, for Lee was over fifty, yet seemed more a lost child than ever.
The duality was spelled out further when Lee played a close facsimile of herself on Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law. The ABC series starred Tony-winning actor Arthur Hill as a defense attorney with a heart. Lee’s episode, “Smiles from Yesterday,” centers around Jenny Rush, a washed-up singer and songwriter who faces a plagiarism suit from an obscure tunesmith. John McGreevey, an Emmy-winning veteran of TV screenwriting, penned the script. McGreevey specialized in historical drama, etched with diligent research; he dug deep into Lee’s past—including the “Mañana” lawsuits—and filled in the gaps with intuition.
Consequently, Lee didn’t have to act. In most regards, she was Jenny Rush—a forlorn, faded woman who could still turn on her wiles when a man walked in. McGreevey had done his homework. Jenny had sung with bands as a teenager, money troubles plagued her, she had a troubled relationship with her grown child. Much of the dialogue touched upon Lee’s darkest fears; the fact that she had agreed to speak it suggested some degree of brave self-awareness. Songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, whom Lee had known since her twenties, played Jenny’s live-in “uncle” and protector. “Now he’s broke and old,” says Jenny. “That gives us something in common.” In her first meeting with Marshall, she describes herself as a “has-been” and a “loser.” Admits Jenny: “You know, the story got out that I was drunk.” After Marshall agrees to defend her in her plagiarism case, her ex-husband shows up at his office to swear that Jenny did steal the song. “She’s a camouflage expert,” he says, adding, “Jenny does a great job of forgetting what it’s inconvenient to remember.”
In the show, Lee wears her own colorful caftans and her Mae West fall. She also lets loose with an authentic Peggy Lee outburst. When Marshall asks her point-blank if the song is really hers, she shouts: “Of course it’s mine!” In the end, she learns that her ex-husband has been conspiring against her. She did write the song in question, “Smiles from Yesterday.”
After the taping, Lee resumed a growingly shaky singing career. The woman who had tapped into a nationwide sense of disillusion with “Is That All There Is?” once more seemed commercially irrelevant. She still spent about half the year playing clubs, but at Capitol, her time was winding down. Lee’s recent albums, including Make It with You and Where Did They Go, languished in a market now dubbed “middle of the road”—a commercial graveyard-in-waiting for singers of her vintage. The repertoire combined mostly forgettable new songs with current hits—“My Sweet Lord” (George Harrison), “Make It with You” (Bread), “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (Helen Reddy)—that buyers preferred to hear in the famous versions. Lee had always sung the tunes of the day, but now, when singer-songwriters ruled, to cover other artists’ hits—even as distinctively as she did—seemed lazy and square.
She couldn’t help noticing that her label’s top moneymakers—Grand Funk Railroad, the Steve Miller Band, Bob Seger, Linda Ronstadt, Helen Reddy—were young enough to be her children. Hot as they were, the label bled an estimated sixteen million dollars in 1971. That year, Sal Iannucci was fired as president of Capitol Records. EMI had appointed an aggressive young replacement, Bhaskar Menon, to turn the losses around. He did—but the lingering deadweight at Capitol would have to go. One final Lee album was scheduled for the spring of 1972.
Capitol had been Lee’s foundation for the better part of twenty-eight years. Their rejection of her was almost too hurtful to bear. “I helped start that company!” she railed to Jungheim. Futile as it seemed, Panella thought that somehow, if the new record were perceived as something fresh, and if sales picked up, even a little, Capitol might give her another chance. They’d done it before. He hoped that at the very least he could help create a record that would make Lee attractive to another label.
Panella reached out to Tom Catalano, a canny young producer who had groomed Neil Diamond and Helen Reddy into pop sensations who sold to all ages. Panella sensed that Catalano was arrogant, bossy, and flush with his own success. “His ego was as big, if not bigger than Peggy’s. But I knew he would give her the best production, the best engineer, the best studio environment—a lot of things she didn’t always have.”
As pianist and musical director, Catalano hired Artie Butler, one of his regulars. At twenty-nine, Butler had worked on hundreds of sessions with everyone from Louis Armstrong to the Dixie Cups; it was he who played the bells on that group’s milestone smash of 1964, “Chapel of Love.” But Lee was his true idol—so much so that he used to bribe the Copacabana’s doorman into letting him eavesdrop on her rehearsals. Now, he couldn’t believe that “a little pisher from Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn,” as he called himself, would have the chance to make an album with the great Peggy Lee.
Catalano picked most of the songs. Without even knowing her, he formed a mosaic of Lee’s emotional state in 1972. Running through his choices were themes of pain that wouldn’t heal, of last chances swept away, of time running out on hard-earned joy. Even in the happier tunes, like Motown songwriter Mike Randall’s “When I Found You,” Lee pinpointed a sadness that would make this album the most melancholy one of her career.
Prior to the four recording dates, which took place in Los Angeles, Lee never bothered to meet with Butler. That puzzled him; Lee was known for taking firm control of every aspect of an album. Now, it seemed, she simply hadn’t the heart. Lou Levy dealt with Butler, who rehearsed the orchestra without her.
April 24, 1972, the day of the first session, arrived. Perhaps as a parting slap against Capitol, or a reluctance to face the end, Lee arrived an hour late. Once there, however, she got briskly down to business. First up was the British songwriter Lesley Duncan’s “Love Song,” a slight piece with an early-seventies theme of releasing the past and starting anew. The words had a post-flower-child dippiness: “Love is the key we must turn, truth is the flame we must burn.” Yet the arrangement was anything but treacly; it surged ahead, with the horn section exploded into a high-flying storm of brass. A soft acoustic guitar added a sense of wistfulness. Lee connected with Duncan’s plea to move ahead, and she sang the refrain with a desperate urgency: “Do you know what I mean? Have your eyes really seen?”
“Everything just fit,” said Butler. “After the first take, the entire orchestra applauded.” The response softened Lee; she hugged Bu
tler and asked him where he’d been all her life.
Other songs threw her into a funk, for they dredged up her grief over David Prowitt. Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett’s “Superstar,” the Carpenters’ number-two hit, particularly depressed her. It tells of a groupie who pines for the guitar-playing pop star who stole her heart—maybe in one night, maybe more—then left town without a trace, except for the record of his that played on the radio. “Don’t you remember you told me you loved me, baby?” she asks over and over. “Superstar” became the lament of an older woman whose last chance at love had walked out the door, never to return. “Looooneliness is such a sad affair,” sang Lee in a moan as pained as any by Billie Holiday.
Leon Carr and Robert Allen, two writers of 1950s novelty hits, did an about-face with “It Takes Too Long to Learn to Live Alone.” Its protagonist is a woman whose man left her a year before; still she sees emptiness and desolation in every corner: “Habits are so hard to break; I think of you, and I still ache.”
Panella sat with Catalano at the control board; Lee stood behind the glass window of her isolation booth. “I’m watching her break down at the microphone,” he recalled. “Tom said, ‘Let it go. We want it on tape.’ ”
The most devastating song came from Snoopy Come Home, an uncommonly sad entry in the animated film series based on Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic strip. “It Changes” was sung by a crying Charlie Brown after his dog has left him to rejoin his original owner. The songwriters, brothers Richard and Robert Sherman, had scored such juvenile confections as Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Now, in Snoopy Come Home, a little boy sang: “All at once you’re all alone and scared / All the happy hellos that you’ve shared / Change to goodbyes.”
