by James Gavin
And as Horner learned, challenging her was forbidden. Production meetings were typically held around her bed, and one day he and Luce sat alongside it as Lee told them of her eleventh-hour reconciliation with Barbour. Nicki was visiting from Idaho and attending patiently to her mother. Hearing that tale yet again, she silently fumed. Later, when the two men were in the kitchen, Nicki walked in. “This is bullshit!” she said. “My father was very happy with somebody when he passed away!” From inside the bedroom came Lee’s voice: “Be quiet, Nicki!”
* * *
IN THE HEAT OF a scorching New York summer, Peg’s creative team, including its star, convened in town in preparation for the show’s workshop. At the Minskoff Rehearsal Studio near Times Square, the still-rough script and profusion of new songs would (with luck) coalesce into a musical. Confidence was high. “We seemed to be floating in a kind of euphoria,” said William Luce. Despite her reservations about the claims her mother planned to make, Nicki told Paul Horner, “Somebody’s got to really fuck up for this not to work.”
Yet there was cause for worry. “Our star was a famous performer,” explained Luce, “but she had never acted on Broadway with other actors. Stage directions would be new to her. The interaction of dialogue between players, memorization, blocking—all these required training and experience that she had never had.” Then there was the issue of her physical condition. Although still quite ambulatory, she had begun using a wheelchair offstage. How would she manage to give eight two-hour shows a week? Horner met Mel Tormé at a party, and filled him in about Peg. “Peggy Lee,” said Tormé, “will never last in a Broadway show.” Zev Bufman secretly feared the same. “I chose not to worry about it,” he said.
The producer had found a challenging home for Peg: the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, home of Broadway blockbusters ranging from No, No, Nanette (1925) to The Sound of Music (1959) to Beatlemania (1979). Bufman had taken a three-year lease on the theater to house his productions. At 1,505 seats, it seemed perilously large for the soft voice of Peggy Lee. But there was still talk of a sizable cast to shoulder most of the burden. In any case, Lee approved of the theater. She had gone there in 1967 to see the Broadway debut of Marlene Dietrich in her one-woman show; if Dietrich had conquered the Lunt-Fontanne, so would she.
Now was Lee’s chance to feel as important as another goddess, too. She knew that Bufman had pampered Elizabeth Taylor with the most extravagant star treatment on Broadway, including a rented Rolls-Royce and three gold-and-diamond bracelets. Lee would not be outdone. When time came to choose her New York lodging for the duration of Peg, no mere hotel suite would do. She settled on a penthouse in River Tower, a luxury high-rise on one of the ritziest blocks in Manhattan, East Fifty-Fourth off Sutton Place. Staggering though the cost, Bufman complied; after all, he was spending his investors’ money, not his own. He had the apartment outfitted with a white baby grand and a plush matching carpet. Her teenage granddaughter would live with her as hand-holder and amanuensis. Holly Foster didn’t mind at first, for she adored her grandmother. “I was like a little Peggy Lee,” she said. “I loved to dress up in her clothes. I thought she was the most glamorous thing.”
Lee’s demands continued. While starring in The Little Foxes at the Lunt-Fontanne, Taylor had occupied a giant second-floor dressing room, painted lavender (her favorite color) and decked out with a jumbo fish tank and bathtub. Lee wanted the same space—and both it and the bathtub would be painted peach. Getting upstairs, of course, meant she would need an elevator. “I think that she wanted the one thing Elizabeth hadn’t thought of,” said Bufman. According to an arcane union rule, no elevator could be built. But Bufman pulled strings, and Lee got her way, at a reported cost of fifty thousand dollars.
She had dismissed the first two personal assistants assigned to her, but the third passed muster. Andrew Sarewitz was an aspiring actor-singer who had worked in Bufman’s office. When introduced to Lee, the twenty-four-year-old brashly called her Peg, not the mandatory Miss Lee. Surprisingly, she liked his audacity, and surely didn’t mind the fact that he was tall and good-looking. To Sarewitz, however, Lee was a strange sight indeed. “She fit a little bit of a stereotype of how I thought she’d be—talking out of one side of her mouth, having a tremendous presence but not great energy, dressing a little like a drag queen. Her hair had broken off, so she was wearing a wig and giant glasses. Whiter skin than you can imagine, pencil-thin lips. Always wore high heels even though she was in a wheelchair. I think she felt—not necessarily incorrectly—that everyone knew who she was and that she deserved respect.” She won his. “At the beginning,” he said, “it was very much a lovefest.”
His job was simple: to make sure she had her health foods and whatever else she wanted. Sarewitz held her hand throughout the demanding next phase, to begin on July 18: the workshop, during which a still-amorphous show is beaten into working shape. Bufman had allotted three weeks—a longer time than usual, and a costly one, for the twenty-six-piece orchestra would be present.
But so far, Peg was a shambles. William Luce had fashioned a draft script with Lee as narrator; she would comment on the action and converse with key actors, notably the women who would play her junior selves. But not a single actor had been hired, nor a director.
Instead, Lee had enlisted her composer friend Cy Coleman as Peg’s heftily paid “creative consultant.” With several Broadway hits to his name—Sweet Charity, Seesaw, I Love My Wife, Barnum—Coleman gave everyone hope that he could set the show on track. He decided that the only salvation for Peg was to turn it into a concert with autobiographical patter. Both the Cowans and Lee concurred. If it had worked for Lena Horne, how could Peggy lose?
From there, he called in Robert (Bobby) Drivas, who had directed the recent Broadway revival of another Coleman musical, Little Me. Greek-American and a longtime actor as well as director, Drivas was a pet favorite of Coleman’s—a handsome, hypercharged bundle of energy with a bitchy-funny sense of humor.
But there wasn’t much he could do for Peggy Lee. As though on principle, she fought Drivas on everything, and he rapidly grew to loathe her. At the Minskoff Rehearsal Studio, Lee sat in her wheelchair in the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat, and likewise in the dark about almost everything needed to make a Broadway show work. To yield to the experts meant giving up control, and this she could not allow.
What Lee did do was exude waves of intimidation to keep everyone in place. Choreography was out of the question: she had stipulated that she did not want to move onstage, except for walking on and off, sitting, and standing. This confused Luce, for he had heard her say repeatedly that the show should be more “like Lena,” a physical dynamo onstage.
Presumably Lee was referring to Horne’s inspirational fervor. To that end, she showed up every day with newly written passages of verse for Luce to cobble into the script. Lee proudly read them aloud. They provoked discreet giggles; Luce thought of Helen Steiner Rice, whose poems of faith appeared on millions of 1960s greeting cards and on TV’s The Lawrence Welk Show. Lee insisted that, after every long day of the workshop, Luce should go home with her to make more poetic revisions. He refused. “You’re here for one thing,” she announced, “and that is to take care of me!”
Luce wouldn’t budge, and Lee ordered Coleman to go over his head and make the changes for her. Later, without her permission, the playwright crossed out some of the more mawkish lines. Once more, Lee was enraged. She insisted that Coleman scold him the next day in front of the company. Coleman obeyed. Afterward he pulled Luce aside. “I’m sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “She has to have her way.” And if anyone challenged it, she gave them her stock warning: “You are upsetting me. My doctor has told me not to get upset because I could have a heart attack. And if I die it will be your fault.”
Surely, thought Bufman, Lee would appreciate the wardrobe design. He had hired the most prestigious costumer on Broadway, Florence “Flossie” Klotz, whose work on dozens of shows, including Follies and A Little Night Music, had
earned her several Tonys. When Klotz was ready, most of the Peg team—Bufman, the Cowans, Bobby Drivas, stage manager Larry Forde, Sarewitz, and Lee—sat around a table in Bufman’s office and waited eagerly to see her drawings. The designer unveiled drawings of long, glittery, voluminous gowns with shoulders padded to aid the illusion of a slimmer silhouette. Jackets would add further concealment, as would turbans, which Lee sometimes wore to hide her thin hair.
The singer was incensed. “I look like a football player!” she barked. After so many weeks on her new diet regimen, she considered herself svelte. And at that meeting, everyone got a glimpse of Lee’s fanciful self-image. She rose from her chair and, forgetting her wheelchair dependency, strutted from one end of the office to the other and back again, swaying like a model on a catwalk and bumping and grinding à la Mae West. Sarewitz watched every head in the room drop in embarrassment. Drivas scrawled a note and handed it to him:
SHE LOOKS LIKE TRUMAN CAPOTE IN DRAG
When he saw the young man fighting not to laugh, he tortured him with another note:
SHE LOOKS LIKE AN ALBINO GORILLA
As Klotz rushed to make changes, the singer once more blamed Zev Bufman. Her resentment of him “came out like acid when he walked by,” said Luce. She gave him the silent treatment, while not hesitating to bad-mouth him in front of others. “In a close-knit theater company,” observed the playwright, anyone who indulges in that sort of character assassination “forfeits respect.”
That didn’t apply to her talent, of course. “We were all in wonderment of her ear, what she demanded musically, how the orchestrations sounded,” said Bufman. “She was a perfectionist with the musicians. This was a commitment that other stars rarely have.” Still, Coleman doubted that an all-original Peggy Lee would sell many tickets. Some of the more somber songs, including Horner’s favorite, “Mirrors and Marble,” got the ax. Understandably, Coleman felt she had to please the tourists with some of her hits. Now Peg would open safely with “Fever.”
But she huffily denied his plea to trim the many pages of script she had written about Min. Instead she expounded upon them even further in a song she wrote without Horner, “One Beating a Day.” Coleman cringed when he heard it; so did many of the musicians. The words were a dossier of her stepmother’s abuses: “She hit me in the head with a frying pan / She shoved my face in the garbage can.” Lee had a vengeful laugh at the fall that had broken Min’s leg, while portraying herself as an angel of forgiveness.
Coleman begged her in vain to shelve the song. But she did heed his advice about lightening it up. Lee decided a calypso-and-reggae rhythm would do the trick. The composer still hated “One Beating a Day.” In response, she defiantly published it in sheet-music form—believing, apparently, that lots of people would want to sing it.
Lee had succeeded in emasculating one of her dearest friends and collaborators. One day, after a particularly heated scuffle, he stormed out of the building and didn’t return for a couple of days. After one of their uglier clashes, he ran up to the third-floor men’s room, where he hid. Rising from her wheelchair, Lee took the elevator upstairs “and boldly charged in,” said Luce. “Cy was trapped. He was terrified of her. I felt he was a weakling, the way he behaved.”
Paul Horner was feeling similarly helpless. No one had invited him to participate in the workshops; still, he had refused to believe that Lee could ever cross him. Now he feared otherwise. Whenever she heard anyone praise his music for Peg, the star bristled. “It’s my life!” she intoned. Lee’s psychic had urged her to make sure she controlled the copyrights to her songs; in this case, it would be at Horner’s expense. Lee had pressured him to let her publish their Peg collaborations through her company, Denslow Music. That would place them under her command, and earn her publishing royalties he wouldn’t share. Horner’s attorney, Abraham Marcus, advised him to found his own publishing company, and to send Lee a letter confirming their fifty-fifty split on all rights. In May, she received his cordial handwritten note.
Her written response stunned him. “How dare you question my honesty?” she demanded. Lee reminded him of what a “pretty lucky fellow” he was to be writing with her, and she dropped veiled threats of replacing him. “You have certainly put a dent in our relationship,” she declared.
Mortified, Horner dashed off an apology. He envisioned their partnership crumbling if he stepped out of line. Still, he didn’t cave in. When a Japanese composing partner of Lee’s wrote out new copies of all the Peg songs for her, she directed him to note at the bottom of each: © Denslow Music. Thereafter, Horner read an enthusiastic plug for Peg in the column of Liz Smith, one of the kindest of gossip scribes. “The music for the incoming Broadway musical ‘Peg,’ by the lady herself, is said to be simply fabulous,” wrote Smith. Horner couldn’t believe his eyes. But Luce wasn’t surprised. He had heard the gossip on the company grapevine: Lee had allegedly told Drivas and Coleman that she wanted credit for the show’s book, lyrics, and music. Apparently she then decided to capitalize on Coleman’s name. Smith ran another advance rave: “Already they are saying Peggy’s song, ‘Soul,’ written with Cy Coleman, will stop the show.” The true composer, of course, was Horner.
Decades later, Smith recalled her source for these tidbits: Lee’s adoring hairstylist and makeup man, Vincent Roppatte, who also worked for Smith. Horner’s name had thus far been so minimized that Smith barely knew about him. “I guess Vincent kept telling me bullshit,” confessed Smith, “and I would just go and write it as if I had ferreted it out.”
Abraham Marcus sent a letter to Bufman’s production company, Theatre Now, Inc., and cc’d it to Lee’s lawyer. Diplomatically he noted that there was “somewhere an effort to divert Mr. Horner’s credit”; he asked that “care be taken in the future” and that “improper attribution be prevented.” For now, the composer persisted in hoping that all would turn well. But William Luce deemed Peg a hopeless case. Not much of his writing remained in the script. Through his lawyer, he wrote to Bufman that Lee had “revised the libretto in a manner with which I disagree.” Luce resigned, and asked that his name be stricken from the production.
The backstage pressure mounted. Lee began a manic process of rewrites—anywhere from five to thirty pages’ worth per day. The more she changed, the less “like Lena” her show became. Horne had employed a tart, sassy tone of self-deprecation; Lee depicted herself as a tragic martyr-angel, saintly and defenseless as fate singled her out for its cruelest punishments.
Andrew Sarewitz sat at a typewriter in the producer’s office until deep in the night. His occasional typos enraged Lee. She went to Larry Forde, Peg’s stage manager, and accused her young assistant of trying to “sabotage” her. “Why would he do that?” said Forde.
In Horner’s view, Lee had sabotaged herself. He flew in from Los Angeles to watch the first full rehearsal of Peg, and his heart sank. “It was just a mess,” he said. Lee stumbled through the narration, sometimes jumping whole pages. An alarmed Bufman asked Horner if Lee had remembered her lines in Side by Side by Sondheim. “Well, no,” he said; she had kept her script onstage with her.
Lee was clearly in over her head; all she could do to save face was shift the blame. When someone commented gently on her memory issues, she gestured toward Larry Fallon, the conductor. “He’s got his script in front of him!” she snarled. During a rehearsal break, the show’s pianist, Mike Renzi, demonstrated a song mentioned by another member of the company. “What is this, a piano recital?” said Lee. “You’re not being paid to do that!”
Renzi had invited singer Jane Harvey, one of Lee’s successors with the Benny Goodman band, to watch the rehearsal from a distant seat. Harvey had performed with Renzi and the rest of Lee’s trio, Grady Tate and bassist Jay Leonhart. “I kept looking at Grady and Jay, who were rolling their eyes,” she said. Horner burned to make suggestions about his music, but hadn’t the nerve: “Everybody was saying to me, ‘Keep quiet, Paul. It’s your first Broadway show.’ Cy Coleman came up and s
aid, ‘Don’t say anything.’ ”
At one point Lee skipped two songs, and nobody wanted to tell her. D. Michael Heath, one of Lee’s six young backup singers, took on the task. Heath regarded her with awe; he also sensed a frightened woman. He walked up to Lee and told her of her mistake. She thanked him. Heath became her friend and one of her few allies; almost everyone else wondered how the producers could ever have thought that Peg might work. Lee even balked at doing the required eight shows a week. One day she didn’t show up for a rehearsal; she had gone to have her hair done. Heath sang her part.
Peg’s advertising director Jon Wilner dreaded the worst. Unlike many Broadway shows, Peg hadn’t opened out of town, where it might have improved or been canceled altogether, avoiding the shame of a Broadway flop. The star struck him as “sweet” but “totally wacko. If she was someone else, you would have put her in a home. But this was Peggy Lee. You wanted her to succeed.”
* * *
AROUND HALLOWEEN, THE SHOW’S poster began appearing around New York and in ads. It promised an elegant outing. Against shimmery silver, the name Peg appeared in lavish script; the curve of the “g” outlined a Dietrich-style line drawing of Lee’s eyes, nose, lips, and beauty mark. Along the bottom lay a Peggy Lee rose in white and pink, drawn by Nicki.
