by James Gavin
Beyond that classy image, Peg was in ominous disarray. The show played its first preview on Thursday, December 1, 1983. Her performance, and most of the ones she gave thereafter, bore the familiar signs of Valium use, Lee’s longtime weapon against fear. Once again, it backfired. Both her narration and her singing sounded drugged. She stumbled over words and forgot lines or even long passages. Lee went blank during “Mañana,” and Andrew Sarewitz typed out the words, to be placed on a music stand nearby her at the next show. But there was no predicting what would go wrong next. Blanking out at another preview, Lee began singing, a cappella, a song from later in the show, sending Larry Fallon into a panic as he scrambled to alert the orchestra. The preview audiences, largely her fans, seemed to accept the flaws as growing pains, and they cheered for everything, even “One Beating a Day.”
“But in my opinion,” said Sarewitz, “everyone backstage knew we were in big, big trouble. The entire time, she was in denial. She was also not being told the truth.”
Bobby Drivas was still listed as director, and his reputation, he felt, was on the line. He ordered Sarewitz to sit, script in hand, beneath the soundboard, which was located inside the wing at stage left. Whenever Lee flubbed, Sarewitz would feed her the line.
“Bobby, she’s gonna kill me!” he said.
“I don’t give a fuck what she thinks. This is my show, it’s my name, and you’re gonna do what I tell you to do.”
After the show had ended, Lee called Sarewitz into her dressing room. Patiently, she explained that his cues were distracting her. “OK, Peg,” he said. The next night, he nervously resumed the job. Finally Lee told Sarewitz he was fired. But she hadn’t the authority—he worked for Bufman, not her. Back went the young man to the soundboard. “I became her absolute enemy,” he said.
At a subsequent preview, Lee made the brief exit that preceded a segment of songs she had sung at Basin Street East. She encountered Sarewitz in the wing. Lee glared at him with hate in her eyes. “You’re through!” she declared. The star sailed back onstage with a radiant smile to sing “I Love Being Here with You.” After the tension of the last few days, he cracked. “I started crying like an eight-year-old girl,” he said.
That moment typified the atmosphere of Peg, in which Lee dispensed a message of peace and healing while wreaking havoc behind the scenes. After a performance, Otis Blackwell came to the stage door to see her. His song “Fever” opened the show. But Lee refused to see him. She still seethed over the fact that her lyrics had been added to the sheet music and were recorded by many singers, with no songwriter royalties for her. She had a point. But Lee had almost never acknowledged Sid Kuller for helping her write them—and now she spoke as though Blackwell hadn’t penned “Fever” at all. “The world knows that I wrote it,” she said. “The people who are taking the credit for it should be ashamed of themselves.” Someone had asked her what she would like printed on her tombstone. “I thought, well, I could say: SHE WROTE FEVER.”
The advance press for Peg suggested a woman who, despite all the tumult, refused to believe her show could fail. Lee talked with the New York Post’s Martin Burden about the searing honesty of her script. “What we see could be unsettling,” she warned. “There is violence, but there’s humor in it, too.” Yet with the show a week from opening, Drivas and Coleman felt hopeless. To Bufman, Peg was “beyond salvation.” Lee took his skepticism as a personal insult. “I was accused of losing confidence in the show, which means I lost confidence in her. I was the enemy; I was the guy who said no, no, no. Nobody else would say no. Even Cy stopped saying no because it was useless.”
According to Bufman, he pleaded with Lee and the Cowans to close for two weeks and do emergency fixes. “Cy was in my corner,” he said. But the Cowans and Georgia Frontiere were not. “They thought it was the greatest show on earth,” recalled Bufman. “And they did not want the embarrassment of postponement.”
Years later, Irv recalled nothing of Bufman’s suggestion—which in any event was “ridiculous,” he thought. “The best people in the business were already aboard. And he would have had to come up with a great deal of additional money. We had spent a fortune in targeting an opening night and renting the theater. Him offering to be the White Knight and coming in as a rescuer—it’s kind of insulting.”
Lee stopped speaking to Bufman. She told the Cowans that he was herewith barred from her dressing room. At that point, he said, “I had no more role to play.”
In fact, Bufman pulled off a dramatic last act, one that Lee never foresaw. It happened on Wednesday, December 14, Peg’s opening day. By that afternoon, Frank Rich, lead drama critic of the New York Times, had filed his review of Peg, which he had seen in previews. The show’s team—if not its leading lady—waited in fear. In the crowded landscape of print and TV coverage that Broadway then faced, no review meant more than that of the so-called “Butcher of Broadway.” Since 1980, Rich’s barbed, intellectual pans as well as his raves had determined the fate of countless major shows.
According to members of the Peg company, David Powers, the show’s press agent, had somehow learned that Rich hated Peg. Around three PM, said Jon Wilner, “David leaked it to Zev.” Bufman denied it; Rich, he said, “was so guarded, cracking him was like cracking Fort Knox.” But although he knew nothing of the Peg backstory, Rich acknowledged later on that such slips could happen, “through typesetters or office gossips or whatever.”
With the opening-night curtain set to rise at six-thirty, Bufman sold almost his entire share of Peg to Irv and Marge Cowan and Georgia Frontiere. The investors had chosen to stay optimistic. “During previews,” said Irv, “everyone stayed in their seats. The songs were more than good. And they were played by some of the best musicians in the country. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of these things you don’t necessarily use the best judgment.”
Bufman claimed that the purchase was their idea. “They said, ‘If you’re that uncomfortable, then we’ll take over, is that okay?’ I said, ‘Whatever you want to do. This is not gonna make it.’ ” But in the 1986 book, New York Confidential: The Lowdown on the Big Town, by Sharon Churcher, Marge remembered it differently. “He never said that,” she declared. Before the deal was sealed, claimed Marge, the Cowans had asked Bufman if he had a sense of what the critics thought. “He told us he went out of his way not to have any knowledge of what was in the reviews.” According to Churcher, Bufman claimed that Cy Coleman had already told them about the Times. Irv’s response: “Maybe one of us had a lapse in memory, and it wasn’t me.”
In the end, the argument didn’t matter. The Cowans had seen the previews; they knew the problems. Nothing discouraged their loyalty to Peg and its star. “They wanted to be Peggy’s heroes until the end,” said Bufman. Shortly before showtime, they and Georgia Frontiere handed Lee an opening-night gift: a Blackglama mink coat and fur hat. It was Marge’s idea, not Irv’s. But the gifts were nothing less than she felt she deserved. “I’d say it was part of my salary,” remarked Lee afterward. “I worked very hard.” That night at the Lunt-Fontanne, the producers sat behind Paul Horner and his mother, who had flown in from England. Horner saw them “laughing and shaking hands,” although he didn’t know why. But Bufman did. “I was done,” he said later. “And happily so.”
* * *
PEG’S OPENING NIGHT DREW a fair number of celebrities: Anthony Quinn, Gina Lollobrigida, Joan Fontaine, Carol Channing, Stockard Channing, Judy Collins, Lorna Luft. Lee’s fans filled the Lunt-Fontanne, thrilled to see their idol on one of Broadway’s grandest stages with a big orchestra and fourteen new songs to sing, plus ten old favorites. Backstage, the Peg team prayed for a miracle.
The show began excitingly. In place of a traditional overture, Grady Tate beat out a pulsating drum solo; the name PEG appeared in king-size, lavish lettering on a scrim. At her insistence, the orchestra was onstage, not in the pit. Out walked the star—a self-anointed saint in blinding white and silver, from her glass-beaded headdress to her sparkly,
robelike gown. With no hair visible, Lee’s unlined face looked oddly like a newborn baby’s. Out of this sexless figure came “Fever.”
The Peg set, by Tom H. Johns, consisted of two beige easy chairs with potted plants behind them. For the rest of the show, Lee’s movement consisted of switching from one seat to the other and occasionally standing.
As soon as the crackle of “Fever” stopped, an etherized fog seemed to roll in, as Lee slipped into a tone of sluggish self-pity. In “Soul,” she held a sepulchral inner dialogue with herself: “Soul / I’m sorry for the time I’ve let you down . . .” Then Lee began to speak in slow, solemn tones:
It was the dawn of the Roaring Twenty
When flappers were dressed in diamonds and plenty . . .
In the time of the crocus
Came a child who could sing
To be troubled for sure, and beaten and all
But one who would rise each time she would fall . . .
Heaviness reigned as Lee unveiled her revisionist history. Norma was a Dickensian waif, robbed of her mother and her childhood home, abused daily by her stepmother, yearning for her traveling father. Their voices spoke from beyond—sometimes to the audience, sometimes to her, but always giving the sense of Norma as a lonely, abandoned little girl. “Where did she go . . . Mama . . . I need to know . . . Mama, Mama, Mama . . .” sang Lee at a snail’s pace.
Certain songs—“Daddy Was a Railroad Man,” with its chug-chugging percussion; the jaunty ragtime of “That Old Piano”—woke things up. And an occasional ray of self-insight crept through. Lee’s story about singing to an imaginary flock of chickens, with its tagline—“I was a strange child”—scored the heartiest laugh of the night. But when Lee began her intended comedy song about Min, “One Beating a Day,” discomfort swept through the house. Nervous titters greeted her roll call of Min’s atrocities, sung in Caribbean dialect. “This was supposed to be funny,” said Mike Renzi, “but it wasn’t.” And when Lee sang of the day Min broke her leg on the ice—“That was nice!”—her theme of compassion fell just as flat.
The stories behind her hits went untold; insights into her singing style were few. Instead, Lee filled the narration with greeting-card sentiments: “The night falling—falling like black velvet”; “And the years went by, full of comedy and tragedy.” The latter kept winning out. About to board her first train to California, Norma waved goodbye to her Dakota friends: “Good-bye, Ebbie Jordan. Remember how we used to drink Raleigh’s Mouth Wash and pretend it was liquor? Oh, Ebbie. I’m sorry you fell off that horse and got killed.”
Cut to the Jade club in Hollywood, then to Chicago and her dreamlike emergence as Benny Goodman’s “canary.” For Lee, that break of a lifetime mattered for only one reason—it placed Prince Charming at her feet. “One day he appeared—the handsome Italian . . . No shining white charger but a soulful guitar . . .” Lee, wrote Sharon Churcher, “cast her gaze upward, her lips embalmed in a motionless beatific smile.” And Act I ended.
After intermission, the star, now in a Druid-like hooded white gown, shifted to a fairytale account of her relationship with Barbour. Moony recollections of their early married life gave way to tearful tales of his alcoholism and near-death in surgery. “They gave him up nine times,” she said, inflating the number by at least seven. In “I Never Knew Why,” Lee denied any responsibility for his decline: “I used to blame myself and my career / But all the doctors said no, my dear / It isn’t you . . .” She and Dave were “still so much in love” when he asked for a divorce—solely to protect Nicki, Lee explained.
The act had its bright spots—“What Did Dey Do to My Goil?,” a fanciful account of Jimmy Durante’s appearance at the “Mañana” trial; “Flowers and Flowers,” a wry recollection of her many “Mister X’s,” arranged in “Fever” style; the Basin Street East medley, with a spoken preface by Grady Tate. But Lee anxiously segued back to Dave and the tragic denouement of their story. Now sober, he proposed that they remarry the next day. “How about next week?” said an ecstatic Lee. Then fate struck him dead. The dream of a lifetime—over. “Well, of course life had to go on,” said Lee with a sigh.
In a closing monologue, she attempted an inspirational speech. “Some of you have wondered where I’ve been for the last few years. And some of you who’ve seen me have wondered—why doesn’t Peggy Lee smile anymore? Why doesn’t she move the way she used to? Well, the answer is simple. I was paralyzed. My eyes wouldn’t close. My speech was slurred. And I went blind for a while. And I’ve even had that experience of going through that door you’ve heard about. And that’s why I have the right and I believe it’s a great privilege to tell you that I believe—in fact, I know—that there is more.”
Again staring toward heaven, Lee lifted her arms up from her sides, and her giant balloon sleeves made her look like a human chalice. Violins washed in, and Lee intoned “There Is More,” a dirgelike hymn to eternal life and salvation: “The sun will shine on all of us no matter who we are / We are only on a journey to a star.” Her diehard fans stood and cheered, and Peg ended.
Crew members saw Lee walk to her dressing room as though floating on air. She was sure she had a hit. Out in the theater, however, crowds moved to the exit “feeling mildly sedated,” wrote critic Jacques le Sourd. Many of the same patrons had left Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music in a state of giddy exhilaration. Horne’s finale, “If You Believe,” had found her wailing like Aretha Franklin, shaking a fist in the air and exhorting people to “believe in yourSELF . . . as I believe in YOU!” Peg’s ostensibly happy ending had come as too little, too late, and didn’t ring true. The famously cool-but-vulnerable star had lifted the veil on a Peggy Lee no one wanted to see: maudlin, self-obsessed, devoid of irony, and not much fun.
Her friends were stunned. “I was really distressed,” said Vince Mauro. “I thought it was awful.” Bruce Vanderhoff had squirmed in his seat. “I was so embarrassed,” he said. So was Artie Butler: “My heart sank. I saw it as a great artist, a hero of mine, making a big mistake. You can’t say anything to certain people, and Peggy was certainly one of them.” Mary Young, who had seen Lee at the Powers Coffee Shop in Fargo, raised an eyebrow at her childhood horror stories. “Somehow, Peggy just couldn’t walk away. People don’t want to go hear about wicked old stepmothers! Come on—it was hard to be a stepmother in the Depression.”
No one felt such crashing disappointment as Paul Horner, who saw Peg as “revenge on a stick.” For its star, the show meant reinforcement of her commercial validity. For Horner, it was the pipe dream on which his whole future rested. And he had just watched it crash.
He and his mother made their way to Top of the Sixes, a penthouse restaurant on Fifth Avenue, for the opening-night sit-down dinner. Three hundred guests were invited. Bufman came early and stayed only long enough to tell his investors and staff that he had quit; surely he didn’t want to chance running into Lee. But the star made a fashionably late entrance, observed by Arthur Bell of the Village Voice: “Peggy Lee swept in, a vision in vagary, and made the rounds, offering her cheek to everybody and everything in sight, including a waiter whom she mistook for a guest.”
Horner had arrived to find that he and his mother would be seated in a smaller second room, far from Lee. When photographers tried to take their picture together, she resisted. Cy Coleman had hardly been his ally, but nevertheless Horner brought the composer a gift. “Oh, aren’t you sweet,” said Coleman. Just then, a woman approached them. “Mr. Coleman,” she exclaimed, “I think your music for the show is just fabulous!” Coleman thanked her and walked away, stepping on Horner’s foot.
Bell approached several celebrity guests and asked what they had thought of Peg. “Yes, indeed,” grumbled Joan Fontaine, before “raising her eyebrow and walking away in a snit.” Gina Lollobrigida showed sympathy. “She has a beautiful voice,” said the Italian film goddess, “but she lived a very sad life. This would have been more entertaining as a concert.”
The party was still in pr
ogress around ten-thirty, when the New York Times went on sale. Mike Renzi and some of the other musicians took an elevator down the forty-one floors to Fifth Avenue, where they bought a copy at a newsstand. They took it to a local bar and thumbed their way to the arts section. There was Frank Rich’s review. It was even worse than expected.
The star, wrote Rich, “takes to the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne like a high priestess ascending an altar . . . There is some entertainment in ‘Peg,’ not to mention some striking musicianship, but the show is most likely to excite those who are evangelistically devoted to both Peggy Lee and God—ideally in that order.”
Rich had only begun. “In addition to sacrificing introspection for inspirational homilies (‘God has never let me down’), the star regards her personal history from an omniscient and self-deifying perspective . . . Many of the anecdotes sound as if they were long ago homogenized by press agents for mass dissemination through talk shows.” Rich termed the score merely “professional,” save for “Daddy Was a Railroad Man.” Peg, he felt, was swallowed up by the cavernous Lunt-Fontanne, which needed a larger-than-life persona to fill it. “Lacking so sizable a presence,” concluded Rich, “Miss Lee has let her ego inflate to fill the gap.”
Word of the review reached the party. Then a TV was tuned in to the eleven-o’clock news. Joel Siegel, film and drama critic for ABC, began to speak about Peg. “If this had been a concert, this would have been a good review,” said Siegel, for Lee, he said, was in “very good” voice and the orchestra was superb. But Peg, he announced, “pretends to be a Broadway show . . . pretends is the verb of choice because Peg isn’t fooling anybody. On a set that looks like they got it on the cheap from a canceled TV talk show, Peggy Lee tells us odd stories about her childhood. Shameless . . . The songs are good. She is a fine lyricist with one exception, a song about child abuse done in calypso.” Lee, he noted, had never identified the mysterious, paralyzing illness discussed at the end—“this after a first act where we learn the street address of her first apartment and what her father’s favorite lunch was.”
