by James Gavin
Lee turned to Panella and said, “You’re fired!” She grabbed the mike and floated onstage, arms spread, beaming.
In the audience were several William Morris executives, including the agency’s wheelchair-bound former president, Abe Lastfogel. After the show, Lee kept them waiting backstage for an hour. Panella made every excuse he could think of. Finally he entered her dressing room. “Miss Lee, whatever your problem is with me, these people are important to you. They have been waiting for one hour. They are about to leave. I suggest for your own good that you go out to see them.”
“No! Bring them in.”
He ushered in the now-testy group, while acting as though all were well. In front of them, Lee turned to Panella and repeated her preshow edict: “You’re fired!”
Panella nodded. “Thank you all very much,” he said. “Have a good night.” And he left.
He was understandably devastated. “I had worked so hard to build things back for her. Then to have this happen, to be undermined by people on the periphery . . .” But in the end, no one could control Peggy Lee. “Peggy didn’t fall out with people,” explained Bruce Vanderhoff. “She used them up till they had nothing more to give.” The musicians threw a little party for Panella. “They did not want me to leave,” he said. Thereafter Lee wouldn’t take his calls, nor pay him his final commissions. At two AM on the night of the blowup, Lee phoned Betty Jungheim from her hotel suite. “I want you on the next plane!” she declared.
Decades later, after he had successfully managed a string of other artists, notably the singer-actress Diahann Carroll, Panella looked back wistfully on his five years with Lee. “I learned so much about music, staging, ambiance from her—I could go on and on. It was a million-dollar education that no university could teach.”
David McMacken’s cover illustration for Mirrors, the most courageous and reviled album of Lee’s career.
Chapter Fourteen
NICKI LEE FOSTER’S life was in its own upheaval. In her father’s final years, Nicki had accompanied him to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Dave Barbour wasn’t the only member of her family to have struggled with a drinking problem, of course; so had Peggy Lee and Marvin Egstrom. “It was very nice for me to realize that I had the predisposition for alcoholism,” explained Nicki. “ ’Course, a little later I forgot about that, and went out and became an alcoholic.”
By 1973, her marriage had fallen apart. She decided she had to escape Los Angeles and her mother’s world. “I was really unhappy with the value system I saw,” she said. “I had said a lot of times that I would never do for my children what was done for me.” Nicki thought of Sun Valley, Idaho, where Dick Foster had once taken her on business. Sun Valley embodied the drastic change she wanted, and she moved there with the children. Searching for creative fulfillment, she became lead singer of Nicki Knight and the Hoops, a band that covered the hits of Gladys Knight and the Pips. She also opened a framing shop, Nicki’s Hangup, in nearby Ketcham; it became a casual art gallery.
Her daughter’s move depressed Peggy Lee greatly. But she refused to fly to Idaho, claiming the altitude would hinder her breathing. Her relationship with Nicki shifted mainly to the phone, which struck Robert Richards as the place where mother and daughter got along best. “The conversations always seemed to center around money,” he recalled. “I think Peggy usually helped her if she could, with a generous spirit.”
Lee herself was rudderless; now she lacked not only a record deal but a manager. Just before her spring 1973 engagement at the Waldorf, Lee sought interim management from Doak Roberts. Never mind that Roberts, who did decorative painting and design tasks in private homes, including Peggy Lee’s, knew little about running a singer’s career. Almost instantly, he learned what Brian Panella had been up against. “There was the fragile part of Peggy, then there was the ball-busting part. She always insulted the wrong people. She was like the little girl with the little curl. At times she was sincerely wonderful, but that person didn’t appear too much.”
The more she felt her career slipping, the more Lee tried to compensate by pulling rank. As soon as they had checked in to the Waldorf Towers, she ordered Roberts to go downstairs and inform the management that she expected nothing less than star treatment. Timidly he entered the executive office to state his case. Roberts was cut off in midsentence: “We know why you’re here. Yes, yes, we will certainly give Miss Lee all of the attention that she deserves.” Later, at the Fairmont in San Francisco, Roberts stood by as Lee “raised holy hell” in her suite over some perceived snub by an employee. “One of the hotel managers was up there,” said Roberts, “and a bellboy who was getting ready to leave. Peggy said, ‘I am a star, and don’t you forget it!’ As the bellboy passed, he muttered, ‘If you gotta tell ’em, you ain’t!’ ”
Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco. (PHOTO BY TAD HERSHORN)
If commercially Lee had seemed obsolete, few doubted her eminence as the premier white, female survivor of a classy age of pop-jazz. On February 11, 1973, Lee, now fifty-two, appeared as senior songstress on an all-star TV spectacular, Duke Ellington . . . We Love You Madly. Quincy Jones had convinced CBS to televise his latest production, a tribute to one of his idols at the New Shubert Theatre in Los Angeles. Jones liked to modernize his jazz elders by teaming them with current pop stars; for this show he mingled Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, Billy Eckstine, Joe Williams, Count Basie, and Sammy Davis, Jr., with Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, and the jazz-rock fusion band Chicago.
At the time, Lee wasn’t too happy with Jones. She didn’t like it when her bandmembers, past or present, married other women; if the musicians had once been her bedmates she got even angrier. When her hairdresser Kathy Mahana married Lou Levy, both landed temporarily on the outs with Lee. Jones had never proposed to her; then he had the temerity to wed another blonde with the same initials—Peggy Lipton, the former model and costar of TV’s The Mod Squad.
But Lee couldn’t quibble with the showcase he gave her on primetime TV. Jones presented her in a setting copied from the 1943 MGM musical Thousands Cheer, which featured his ultimate goddess, Lena Horne. In one scene, the brass players of the Benny Carter orchestra stand in a circle and play a chorus of “Honeysuckle Rose” filmed from above, their gleaming gold instruments set against an all-black background. Jones’s special finds Lee gowned in black and standing in the center of a group of trombonists. She sings the song she had written with Ellington, “I’m Gonna Go Fishin’.” Later in the show, Lee shares a blues medley with Vaughan, Franklin, and Flack: three reigning black divas teamed with the woman who may have been their only white peer. Former schoolteacher Flack wore a huge Afro and sang with a pensive soulfulness; Franklin turned every stage into the most euphoric of revival meetings; Vaughan had a sprawling bebop instrument with an operatic grandeur.
Alongside them stood the Lee of 1973: diminished of voice, though larger than ever inside her Bob Mardesich gospel-singer gown. The star who had so long identified with black singers seemed inexplicably shy amid these three. On camera with them, she almost disappeared.
Another performer she loved was experiencing his own slow fade. Onstage, Bobby Darin had lost little of his charisma, but at thirty-six he was dying of a failing heart, the consequence of childhood rheumatic fever. That April, Lee sang on the last episode of his short-lived NBC variety series. Before the shooting he paid his last of many visits to her home. Betty Jungheim welcomed him in. “He sat down on the couch and he was white as a sheet,” she said. While waiting for Lee to appear, he asked Jungheim for a cup of tea. He barely finished it. By the time Lee greeted him, he felt so ill he had to leave.
Backstage at The Bobby Darin Show he was ashen, and breathing from an oxygen tank. Yet once the camera rolled the trouper in him took over, and he became a close semblance of his old vivacious self. It was Lee who seemed feeble and overmedicated. Still trying to promote her failed final album for Capitol, she performed one of its most poignant songs, “Someone Who Cares.” She sounded pin
ched and wavering; illness, combined with smoking, had robbed her of her husky chest resonance. Her weakness enhanced the pathos as she pleaded quietly for “someone who cares, someone who dares to love you.” A duet of sad standards underlined the low ebb that both stars had reached.
Lee’s spirits perked up briefly when Blackglama, the manufacturer of shiny mink coats, added her to its array of legendary poster girls, including Bette Davis, Lena Horne, Maria Callas, and Marlene Dietrich. The yen to appear as young in real life as she did in that heavily retouched advertising photo obsessed her. “If she looked in the mirror and saw that even a slight sag was forming,” said Doak Roberts, “she’d go have surgery, to the point where the hairline got higher and higher.” Roberts joked to friends: “If she gets one more facelift she’ll have a beard.”
Lee had always used binge eating to soothe her troubled mind, yet she couldn’t understand why she kept ballooning up “for no reason.” Some cursory research on eating disorders led her to a bizarre conclusion: Lee told friends she had contracted a rare disease that only astronauts got, whereby standing up caused pounds to accumulate. The fact that she spent most of her life in bed didn’t strike her as a contradiction. On the eve of her tours, when self-consciousness seized her, Lee went on alarming crash diets. She discovered a new brand of appetite-control candies and “started eating them by the handful,” said Roberts. Later she tried a meal-substitute shake mix whose recipe called for the bizarre addition of half a cup of cooking oil. Believing that the powder contained some magical weight-burning component, Lee drank six or seven shakes a day. At the end of the week she rose from bed and weighed herself. The number on her scale sent the depressed singer back under her blanket.
Toward the end of 1973, she withdrew from public view for several weeks. After that, a “new” Peggy Lee appeared, thinner by about forty pounds. Lee shared details with the National Enquirer. A thyroid specialist, she explained, had attributed her weight gain to goiter. Rather than undergo surgery, she “turned to God for help.” By focusing intently on her neck and massaging it with her fingers, she managed to channel His healing force. A few months later, the goiter was gone. “It was a miracle,” she declared. “I knew then that God had done this for me. He had saved my career.”
Friends had their own theories. Bruce Vanderhoff suspected that Bruce Richard had scored her “some fantastic diet pills.” Bob Mardesich met a nurse who had just tended to Lee at the hospital; she told him that the singer had undergone liposuction. Whatever the cause, Lee hadn’t looked so good in over a decade. “It’s so marvelous to be thin!” she exclaimed. No longer did she need Mardesich’s caftans—or Mardesich.
Lee felt as regal as a queen that November, when she flew to London to appear on Julie’s Christmas Special, an hour of English cheer with her dulcet-voiced admirer, Julie Andrews. Doak Roberts was there to help Lee check into the Dorchester, another of her preferred five-star hotels. Lee required the Oliver Messel Suite, an exorbitantly priced two-bedroom, two-bathroom paradise designed by the acclaimed British stage designer. The toilet seats were gold leaf, the walls yellow silk; a private terrace offered a stunning view of the city. The Messel Suite was also the preferred London dwelling of Elizabeth Taylor and Marlene Dietrich, the two women whose glamour and notoriety she most coveted.
Accompanied by Roberts, Lee went to the TV studio to rehearse. The script had a slim premise. Andrews has been diligently taping scenes for her Christmas special, and slips into her dressing room for a brief nap. Drifting into a dream of Christmas past, she finds herself at the portals of the sexy Sugar Plum Fairy: Peggy Lee, lounging on a chaise in clouds of white chiffon. Lee beckons Andrews in and they “improvise” a medley of standards.
Despite her drastic weight loss, Lee remained highly self-conscious about the width of her hips, and she complained to Roberts that the blocking emphasized her rear end. It was then that he observed her backhanded approach to confronting problems. Lee retired to her dressing room, where she had a mysterious collapse that halted rehearsal—“simply because she did not like the blocking,” said Roberts. When the ambulance came, Roberts discreetly conveyed to the medics that they should use caution in medicating her, lest she overdose. “I was trying to say, she’s zonked.”
Lee was rushed to Intensive Care. The next day Roberts visited her. “Where have you been?” yelled Lee. “How dare you leave me here? You’re fired!”
“Fine,” he thought. “I’m out of here.”
But he stayed in London. And on Monday, Lee was back on the set. In her gentlest tones, she explained that her scene would have to be reblocked to give her maximum comfort. She got her way. The shoot caught her in glowing command. “She was fluttering her false eyelashes, loving every minute of it,” said Roberts. The women playfully swap old tunes—Andrews with her operetta-style light soprano, sincere and demure as a singer could be; Lee with the smoldering purr that flung open the bedroom door. On “Just in Time,” she vamps the camera with the glance that had seduced countless men.
For her solo segment, Lee had chosen a song by a young man who enchanted her: David Gates, the former lead singer and songwriter of the soft-rock group Bread. “I think he’s really a poet,” she said. Bundled in a fur coat, Lee stares out an airplane window and sings her favorite Gates song, “Clouds,” the lament of a traveler who never settles down long enough to stay close to anyone. To fly above a bed of white, she sings, “makes me wonder why I’m up so high, when really I am down so low.” She segues into “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” sung with the heavy heart of a woman who didn’t foresee one for herself.
* * *
IT WAS HARD NOT to respond to such open-hearted vulnerability, and for years that quality had helped Lee to seduce the press. Interviewers walked away convinced that she had opened herself up to them as she never had before. As with most stars, however, Lee’s stories and sound bites came from a tried-and-true repertoire. “Success is the reward for loving your work,” she told countless journalists, “and my work is the one thing that has never let me down.” Over and over she repeated a quip she thought hilarious: “My favorite color is plaid.”
Back in Los Angeles, Colin Dangaard of the Washington Star visited Lee at home. She dazzled him. “An English butler has carried in a bottle of fine Chablis for me,” he wrote. “Peg pours hot tea from a silver pot in whose polished side is reflected the fire of a California sunset. She nods to the butler, calms her poodle and says very quietly: ‘The journey is so incredible, I often wonder how I made it. From starvation to . . . to all this.’ ”
The occasional writer was skeptical. Before leaving the Dorchester, Lee had received Scarth Flett of the London Sunday Express. He sensed a woman as fantastical as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Lee, wrote Flett, wore “a flowing gown of candy-pink silk” and “an inordinate amount of beige makeup; false eyelashes; thick pink lipstick outlined in dark pink pencil and above her mouth a large beauty spot.” Her sense of unreality bewildered him. “I once played classical music to the trees in my garden,” she remarked, “and they began to dance and sway. Honestly, and there wasn’t a breath of wind.” Flett’s profile was divided into subheadings—“Damaged,” “Deficiency,” “Weird.”
Bruce Vanderhoff wouldn’t have argued. One night he drove Lee home after a concert at the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles. “By the way,” asked Lee, “did you turn Charlie off?” Charlie was her respirator.
“No, Peggy. I’ve never turned Charlie off.”
“Well, I don’t think Ginger did. We’ve got to turn around and go back.”
“If the valve isn’t off, it doesn’t know, it’s perfectly OK.”
“Oh, no! It could turn into a missile!”
“A missile?”
“Yes, it could turn into a missile. It could blow up the Music Center.”
“Then I surely don’t want to go back.”
They didn’t. Vanderhoff deposited a miffed Lee at her front door.
Truman Capote was one of t
he few who could look past the oddness and see the wounded soul inside. The great Southern-born writer also lived on an emotional tightrope. Like her, he had yearned for his absentee mother, who divorced his father then moved to New York. In the story One Christmas, he wrote of a “crushing pain that hurt everywhere” and wouldn’t leave. Like Lee, he leaned on alcohol, drugs, and delusion. Capote would die of liver cancer at fifty-nine.
Eccentric, emotionally scarred characters fascinated him. Knowing and loving her singing, he had to meet Peggy Lee. His author friend Dotson Rader arranged a dinner for the three of them. It started with drinks at her home, where Lee greeted them in white chiffon. “Oh, my God!” exclaimed Capote in his childlike Louisiana drawl. “I’m in the presence of an angel!” They ate in Beverly Hills at Le Restaurant, a trendy and expensive eatery opened by Vanderhoff. Through the cacophony of mealtime chatter, Lee brought up the subject of past lives. According to Rader, she explained: “I’ve been reincarnated many times. I’ve been a prostitute, a princess, an Abyssinian queen.”
“Oh, really?” asked Capote. “What else do you remember?”
“I remember being a prostitute in Jerusalem when Jesus was alive. I remember the crucifixion very well . . . I’ll never forget picking up the Jerusalem Times and seeing the headline ‘Jesus Christ Crucified.’ ”
Lee excused herself to use the ladies’ room. “She’s totally bonkers,” said Capote to Rader. After she returned, however, “something happened that I noticed a lot with Truman,” Rader said. “He would meet someone, make fun of them, although they weren’t aware of it, and then they would say something that revealed a vulnerability, some heartache or pain, and suddenly Truman’s attitude would change.” Lee volunteered grisly stories about Min’s violence; Capote sensed the sincere hurt within them. She talked about her early struggles to make herself heard as a singer in noisy rooms. “Suddenly he became very protective of her,” said Rader. Capote asked Lee to sing for him; she obliged, and they merrily traded songs for the rest of dinner and on the drive home.
