by James Gavin
The public eye could be harsher than his, however. On April 2, 1974, Lee appeared in compromised form before a worldwide audience—the viewers of the Academy Awards. As at the White House, Lee was a last-minute substitute. In an unexplained fit of diva pique, Barbra Streisand had declined to sing the nominated title song of The Way We Were, the film for which she had scored a Best Actress nomination. No amount of pleading from the tune’s lyricists, her dear friends Marilyn and Alan Bergman, or from the show’s producer, Jack Haley, Jr., could sway her. Whether by coincidence or as revenge, Haley chose as her substitute the singer who, five years before, had made mincemeat of her in Las Vegas.
Streisand wasn’t pleased. According to one of her biographers, Christopher Andersen, she declared to Haley: “I wanna do the song now. Get rid of Peggy Lee.” But Haley refused; Lee had canceled a show in Toronto to sub for her. In turn, Streisand refused to sit in the audience along with the other nominees; she would wait backstage and emerge only if named Best Actress. (The award went to Glenda Jackson.)
The crowd at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles included many stars who loved Lee: Best Song nominee Paul McCartney and his wife Linda, Burt Bacharach, Burt Reynolds, Sammy Cahn, Natalie Wood, Shirley MacLaine. Elizabeth Taylor would cohost.
At the end of the night, much bemused chitchat concerned the night’s two mishaps: the surprise appearance of a “streaker” behind actor David Niven as he introduced Taylor; and Peggy Lee’s performance.
When director John Huston brought out Lee to sing “The Way We Were,” many wondered why Streisand wasn’t performing it—especially when they saw a disoriented and confused Peggy Lee. Blanking out on the first line—“Memories light the corners of my mind”—she sang, “Memories . . . of the days . . . light the corners of my mind . . .” Panic flashed on her face. Until the middle of the song, Lee remained so thrown that the conductor, Henry Mancini, wondered if she would ever find her way. Finally she did, and “The Way We Were” won the Oscar as Best Song. Yet the Bergmans were mortified, and a New York Times critic called Lee’s appearance “disastrous.”
The humiliation proved unbearable. Hours after the performance, she entered St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She sent out word through a spokesman that she had undergone “minor surgery”—a possible smokescreen for her condition at the Oscars.
As always, Lee bounced back. In London, she had invited the McCartneys to dine with her at the Dorchester. This was Paul’s first meeting with the singer whose “Till There Was You” had inspired him to sing it with the Beatles. Initially the group’s deadlock on the pop music world had made her fear for her career, but in time she learned to love them. Now McCartney’s post-Beatles band, Wings, had released its second number-one hit, “Band on the Run.” His presence at Lee’s dinner table amounted to a royal appearance.
McCartney remembered thinking: “I’m either gonna take a bottle of champagne or a song.” Choosing the latter, he grabbed an incomplete effort of his and Linda’s called “Let’s Love.” It wasn’t much: “Lover, let’s be in love with each other / Tonight is the flight of the butterfly.” But Lee was overjoyed to receive a song from a Beatle, and when McCartney offered to produce a Peggy Lee recording of it, she felt another renaissance in store.
McCartney’s vow helped interest Atlantic Records in signing her to what the Los Angeles Times reported as a “long-term contract.” It would begin with an album named after the McCartneys’ song. For Lee to share a label with Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Canned Heat, and Aretha Franklin—and to go there hand-in-hand with Paul McCartney—was a stamp of relevance that none of her contemporaries could claim. “I am so thrilled about the whole thing,” she told a journalist. “The material is strong and I love the one Paul wrote.” Although some of her friends doubted he had actually penned it for her, Lee chose to believe he had: “To think that he would go to all that trouble. He said that it was his way of returning an inspiration.”
The McCartneys joined Lee for a second dinner, this time on Tower Grove. Lee did her best to impress them; household staff milled around, including a waiter in a white jacket who served champagne in long-stem crystal. After dinner, Lee sat gleefully at the piano with McCartney, who played and sang the final version of “Let’s Love.”
The new album, produced by the arranger and soundtrack composer Dave Grusin, would plunge Lee into the commercialized realm of mid-1970s soul—a world of burbling synthesizers, twangy electric guitars, slick black session singers, and swirling strings. The songs included a cover of the Stylistics’ hit “You Make Me Feel Brand New”; new tunes by James Taylor and Melissa Manchester; and a funk version of Irving Berlin’s “Always.”
On April 23, 1974, McCartney arrived at a Hollywood recording studio. He had brought along Linda and a finished backup track for “Let’s Love” on which he played piano. Lee still didn’t like singing to a prerecorded band, and Betty Jungheim saw the singer’s stifled annoyance when McCartney directed her within full earshot of everyone. “He said, ‘Peggy, do that again, you didn’t do this right, I think it would be better this way.’ She didn’t like that.” But she sang his and Linda’s song with a broad smile in her voice; and at the end of the date Lee was in her glory as she and McCartney stood by the piano and led a teeming press conference. The reporters were clearly there to see McCartney, and they pelted him with questions about a hoped-for Beatles reunion. He graciously tried to keep the spotlight on Lee. When Lee told him that she was his fan before he had ever heard of her, McCartney answered, “No, that’s not right. . . . I was a fan of yours before you knew about me, Peggy.”
The younger journalists seemed impressed to find that a star of her day had tackled the sounds her contemporaries loathed and feared. “Rock music tore everything apart,” explained Lee, “but it also opened the path for new freedom in songwriting, both in the lyrical content and the musical form. It’s no longer necessary for everything to rhyme, as long as it makes sense.”
Once more, Lee’s ear for the blues helped her connect with the pop-soul that comprised her Atlantic album. She had the sound of a worldly older mama—bruised but smiling, and still flirtatious. The new sexual candor in pop suited her just fine. Singing a ballad by James Taylor, Lee spelled out her needs in a lazy wail: “Save your goodbyes for the morning light / But don’t let me be lonely tonight.” The Stylistics’ hit of that year, “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” took on the postcoital dreaminess that Lee had been exuding since her twenties. Synthesizer, electric guitar, and horns turned Irving Berlin’s 1925 love song, “Always,” into 1970s funk.
In one original song—a departure from the album’s sound—she evoked the far-off innocence of her teens. Lee had penned words to the theme of The Nickel Ride, a new crime movie that Grusin had scored. The tune was a slow, bittersweet waltz, and since the film’s name reminded her of her girlhood stint as an amusement-park barker, she conjured up those days in verse. Seldom, if ever, had Lee written a more touching or self-knowing lyric. As Grusin played piano, she sang and spoke about a beloved old ride that broke down—a metaphor for the joy in her life that had gone awry. “Things were fun then, and I still had my pride . . . What went wrong then? Something went wrong inside.”
“The Nickel Ride” didn’t fit the album, and it stayed unreleased for decades. But in the summer of 1974, Let’s Love hit stores. In the magazine High Fidelity, Morgan Ames, an L.A. studio singer and lyricist who doubled as a record critic, marveled at how Lee “keeps on happening . . . To this day, Peggy Lee can sound comfortable in any style she wants to. She’s not a judger, but a doer.”
The title song, issued as a single, made a modest showing on the Adult Contemporary chart. But few young people were buying it. In his New York Times piece, “Not All Pop Legends Are Indestructible,” Shaun Considine scorned Frank Sinatra’s now-labored singing on his new album, Some Nice Things I’ve Missed, which included such AM-radio trifles as “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” and “Sweet Caroline.” As for
Let’s Love, Considine called the production “first-rate . . . but the lead star vocal is completely lost in the surroundings.” Such attempts at going modern were in vain, he felt; for both Sinatra and Lee, wrote Considine, “it seems the dance is just about over.”
Lee, of course, disagreed. That September, she launched Let’s Love in her new show at the Waldorf. More determined than ever to sound “with it,” she gave Betty Jungheim the woeful task of firing Lou Levy, who couldn’t stand her forays into pop-rock. “He’s not contemporary,” the singer stated. Following a tip from a friend, Lee hired Frank Fiore, a budding twenty-year-old pianist and conductor, to lead her group of seasoned pros. Born in Queens, New York, Fiore had amassed an impressive résumé, but the stars for whom he had conducted—including Ann-Margret and the 1960s TV actor and singer George Maharis—didn’t exactly place him on the cutting edge of pop. Now he would be conducting for the great Peggy Lee—a job he was brash enough to accept. “I was way too young for any of this,” he reflected years later.
Still, Fiore was hungry to learn, and his half a year with Lee proved the greatest education of his life. Above all else, he learned the meaning of restraint. “She taught me how to play a lot less notes—how dramatic and effective it can be to leave holes.”
Lee imparted the same lesson to Leata Galloway. The magnetic pop-soul songstress toured with Lee for months as part of a black female backup trio. Galloway had appeared in the original Broadway production of Hair; in her future were a return to Broadway in Sophisticated Ladies and her own album on Columbia. For now she, like Fiore, faced a new challenge with Peggy Lee. “Back then I was a soloist, but when I got offered the job I thought, ‘I’m gonna learn a lot from this woman.’ One day we were in a big concert hall rehearsing, and she never opened her mouth. And the place just filled up with her voice. I thought, how the hell is that happening? At that point I learned, you don’t have to scream your lungs out—just sing where you are, and it’s the sound man’s responsibility to create that ambiance and volume that you need in a giant hall.”
Onstage, said Galloway, “I was in heaven. I was doing what I wanted to do, singing with an orchestra, with Peggy Lee.” But the star’s minimalism had its stranger aspects. “There was never any real expression to her face, and I used to stare at it and wonder, why isn’t her face moving when she talks or sings?” It took Galloway a while to deduce the reason: “Plastic surgery had tightened it so much that there was nothing to move.” She never witnessed Lee’s Valium use, but she certainly saw its effects. Between songs, Lee spoke at the breathy crawl of a woman detached from real time. Audiences leaned forward, waiting through long silences for Lee to complete her thoughts. “When I was in Lonnnnndon . . . I had such pleasure in meeting . . . Paul McCartney after alllll these years of being friends across the ocean . . . and . . . when he came to dinner . . . he didn’t bring a bottle of champagne or . . . a bouquet of flowers . . . but he said he would write me a song . . . and he did. And so I’d say . . . that if you have a good friend . . . you have something verrrry . . . precious.”
Until now Lee had managed to spoon-feed modern pop, in modest portions, to audiences of her contemporaries. But the Let’s Love show, with its synthesizer sounds and funk grooves, took her out of her old fans’ comfort zone. Sitting amid them at the Empire Room, David Tipmore, the Village Voice’s young cabaret critic, felt mostly discomfort. In all her attempts to stay current, Lee had caught herself in a catch-22. The patrons at her beloved Waldorf-Astoria greeted her new repertoire with pale applause, and only perked up when she sang her hits. Rock-loving youngsters had no desire to come to the starchy Waldorf to hear Peggy Lee sing their music.
Tipmore wasn’t having much fun. There in that ornate shrine to the past, he watched a fussily coiffed, cosmetically altered chanteuse who, for all her teasing glances, seemed as remote and stonelike as a sacred relic. “To criticize her is to deface the Statue of Liberty,” wrote Tipmore. “Rarely does anyone address how disinterested and selfish a performer she can be, how scantily she uses her rather meager voice.” In “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” he observed, “the soul of the song was supplied not by warm singing or acting, but by the red gels and the bleached black back-up trio and Mr. Fiore’s electronics.” The dutiful standing ovation at the end struck him as equally mechanical. “The audience wants the old Peggy Lee back,” he declared. “So do I.”
As she and her touring caravan traveled their circuit of traditional nightspots, Lee replaced many of the pop-soul titles with safer, older tunes—“because we were dying, buddy,” said Fiore. To him, the venues were mostly “clip joints—overpriced, with padded bills.” Lee’s beloved Empire Room struck him as “scary and cold. It certainly wasn’t acoustically or architecturally designed to be a performance space. The audience was too far away, the stage and the ceiling were too high.”
Between shows, Lee stayed in bed. “She lived as a kind of recluse,” he said, “doing her business on the phone, doctors coming, food being delivered, oxygen tanks.” The star had ordered her young road manager, Robbie McAlley, to build ramps on either side of the bed so that her two matching shih tzus could run up and down. Hovering nearby was a flame of Lee’s from her Benny Goodman days: Peter “Snake Hips” Dean, an artists’ manager and the uncle of singer-songwriter Carly Simon. The white-haired sexagenarian had reinvented himself as a ukelele-strumming crooner of ditties from the 1930s. “But at that moment,” said Fiore, “he was Peggy’s best-friend-advisor-sort-of-manager, because she didn’t really have a manager per se.” While Bruce Richard took Leata Galloway on late-night, raucous sprees to local gay bars, Lee had no particular life beyond the stage. “When I first began with her, the musicians used to hang out in her suite, but after awhile she stopped that,” said her guitarist John Whitfield. “She would just go to her room and keep to herself with Virginia, who had a room right next door to Peggy.”
Galloway was too much in awe of Lee to pursue a friendship, much as both of them might have liked it. “Once she called me into the bathroom when she was taking a bubble bath. I was a nervous wreck. She was covered in bubbles, but I thought, god, where do I look? She wanted somebody to talk to. So I thanked her for having me in the group, and I started crying. She was sweet. But I don’t think she was happy at all. She had all these people around her, this money, beautiful clothes, but she didn’t really have a soul mate. She was just performing. It was sad.”
Lee tried in various ways to forge bonds with the people who worked for her. After each show, she summoned her band and singers to her suite, where they would listen to a tape of the show they had just performed. “We would get notes,” said Fiore. “She was extremely moody and obviously medicated, so we were at the mercy of whatever body chemistry kicked in at that moment.” On happier nights, she followed those listening sessions with The Laughing Game, one of her favorite postshow pastimes. “She got out of bed for this one,” explained Fiore. “Everybody had to lie down on the floor in the living room. One person would put his or her head on the stomach of the next person and we would form human dominoes. Miss Lee would always be in the front. And she would start laughing. And before you knew it everyone would start laughing. This would just tickle her silly.”
Whatever the intimacies, she remained “Miss Lee.” Perceived slights would bring chastisement—some of it hair-raising, some hilarious. “I remember a time when we got to the hotel and her room wasn’t ready,” said Galloway, “so she got a pillow and lay right on the floor in the hallway. I said, ‘Peggy, my room is ready; why don’t you come and crash in here?’ But no. She was trying to make a point.” So it continued, night after night—Sunset Boulevard as seen through a funhouse mirror. “It was the Hollywood I had read about,” recalled Fiore. “I thought, this is as weird as it gets—they really are like this!”
* * *
CONFRONTED WITH UNWELCOME TRUTHS, Lee reacted like an angry tiger. Her extravagance was decimating her income, and repeatedly Betty Jungheim warned her that her money
was running out. “I don’t want to know!” snapped Lee, while insisting that countless people were ripping her off. Each week Jungheim wrote checks for the star to sign; then she sat by Lee’s bedside as the star challenged each expense, including her own long-distance phone charges. “What is this for?” she asked accusingly. She refused to authorize certain payments, and Jungheim had to field angry calls from creditors. In turn, Lee blamed her for letting the bills go unpaid.
Soon she cut one more voice of reason out of her life. In February 1975, a friend accused Jungheim of having spoken critically of Lee. The singer flew into a rage. After Jungheim had left for the day, Lee rose out of bed and stormed into the office. The next morning she summoned Jungheim to her bedside. Lee declared the files disorganized, and pelted her with accusations. She told Jungheim to pack up her things and leave—“and you’d better not talk!” So ended five years of employment and twenty-five of friendship.
For a woman who, as Mike Stoller said, “seemed to run on anger,” there was nothing like the memory of Min to provide a jolt of survival fuel. Friends had wearied of the singer’s tirades about her stepmother. “Everybody’s sick to death of that Min!” said Robert Richards. For all of Lee’s fond reminiscing about North Dakota, she had no wish to return. Even in death, Min seemed like an ever-lurking demon there, and the place contained other ghosts. On her last visit there in 1950, Lee had seen her father in his deathbed; Dave Barbour had accompanied her on that trip when their marriage, too, was expiring.
