by James Gavin
Marge Cowan walked around in shock. “They didn’t like it!” she moaned to a friend. Irv was less surprised. “What went on in that period of her life that made Peggy so hellbent on becoming Goody Two-Shoes, I have no idea. Everybody knew that was b.s. If you’re not willing to admit mistakes and faults then you have no business calling it an autobiography.”
Lee watched as people filed out quickly without saying good-bye. She knew why. Horner approached her. After having ignored him all night, she reached out and clutched his hand.
One by one, the other reviews came in. “The heaviest magic carpet ride on Broadway,” wrote Arthur Bell. Saber-penned John Simon led off his New York magazine critique by asking: “Have you paid a visit lately to a singing mortician?” Lee, he wrote, was “rather like a bleached sarcophagus placed upright on the stage and jerked about by a puppeteer who is himself close to mummification.” To Linda Winer of the Chicago Tribune, Peg fell “somewhere between a concert, This Is Your Life, and a songbird Christ story.” Variety’s Richard Humm deemed the music “virtually flawless,” and called Lee’s voice “one of the glories of popular music.” But Peg, he wrote, drowned in “self-glorification” and “sympathy-begging.” Bobby Drivas got panned for the stagnant direction. Nearly everyone agreed that Peg should have been a simple concert.
To open in the holiday season could not have helped. Advance sales were dismal—but according to Jon Wilner, bad word of mouth had spread fast after the first preview. Irv and Marge held a quick meeting with Georgia Frontiere and other Peg principals to see if there were anything that might save the show. “The unanimous opinion was that there was not,” said Irv. With heavy hearts, he, Marge, and Frontiere knocked on Lee’s dressing-room door the next afternoon. They broke the news: Given the poor box office and reviews, they saw no choice but to close Peg. Saturday night’s show would be the last.
Lee was thunderstruck. Whatever the critics had thought, audiences seemingly loved her. The Cowans, especially Marge, had enthused for so long about the surefire success of Peg. So had Zev Bufman, until recently. Lee felt massively betrayed.
Stepping into her dressing room later, D. Michael Heath found Lee on the phone, frantically trying to find new investors to keep Peg open. “She kept saying over and over, ‘I’ve put all this time and work into this, now we can’t even give it a chance to fly.’ ” Once the news got out, some of Lee’s fans rushed to see Peg while they still could. But there weren’t enough of them. Lee looked out from the stage at what she thought were sold-out houses. She didn’t seem to notice the near-empty balcony and back rows. Nor did she know that the main floor was heavily “papered” with comped or discounted ticket holders.
Even on Saturday, Lee wouldn’t give up the fight. She called Wilner that morning to tell him she was organizing a picketing of the New York Times. Would he join in? Of course, he couldn’t; he worked for the producers. But he understood her panic. “People feel helpless when there’s a flop. This gave her strength to go onstage for the final performance. She was hoping they’d come onstage and say, ‘We’re not closing!’ ”
But the Cowans were gone. They had flown home to Florida. Lee was furious; once more, she felt abandoned. “You get to a point,” she said, “where so many things have happened, you think, ‘Is this it, God? Is this the final disappointment?’ ”
Speeding on rage, she came alive that night. The sluggishness of her prior performances vanished; Peg became, at least in spirit, the show it might have been. She mustered up a fair degree of smiling-through-your-tears good humor, but sentiment was thick. Grady Tate began his monologue about Basin Street East by referring to “this particular night of anguish.” In a long speech of farewell, Lee reflected: “This is one of those happy-sad moments. Happy because you’re here, because you’re so wonderful to me. But it is our closing night. I can’t even believe it. We just opened. We had a party. And got a good night’s sleep. And they posted the notice.” Cries of “No! No!” echoed through the hall. Lee saluted the orchestra, the singers, even Horner, then went on to villainize the press for shutting Peg down. She implied sabotage—a full-page New York Times ad, she announced, had contained “a disconnected number.” People gasped. Years later, in her memoir, Lee noted the alleged misprint: 586-5555. It was, in fact, the correct number of the Lunt-Fontanne, the one that had appeared in all the ads.
But the sympathy she had sought in her script came rushing toward her. “It’s just beyond my ken to understand why I have to go back to California,” said Lee, eliciting more cheers. “I love it here. I wanted to stay.” Fans clapped and cheered: “WE LOVE YOU, PEGGY!”
Peg’s fifth and final performance, not counting thirteen previews, ended with another standing ovation. “I began to feel some tears coming,” she recalled, “so I had to leave and go back to my dressing room.”
In the days to come, denial helped see her through the pain. Speaking to George Christy of Interview, Lee magnified the show’s final two-minute standing ovation to forty-five. “People were in tears,” she declared, “calling out, ‘Don’t close this play!’ It would have been nice if the producers had been there to witness that.”
Privately, Lee blamed Bufman for deserting her. She cited poor promotion, ignoring the stacks of articles, column mentions, and ads, as well as an appearance on the Today show to sing “Daddy Was a Railroad Man.” Lee even decided that the Cowans had only done Peg as a tax writeoff. The claim ignored Marge’s complete belief in the show, right up to the opening-night party. Lee was stung by complaints about what a downer she had given the public. “If my life was depressing, that’s too bad,” she said. “I tried to make it funny. But it wasn’t funny when I lived it.”
Horner had seen almost every performance. To him, Lee was the main culprit in Peg’s demise: “She stamped her foot and got her way on everything, and that was the price she had to pay.” Jon Wilner didn’t disagree. “She was a nice woman who knew nothing about Broadway. She was one of those people whom everybody yeses and nobody tells the truth to. A lot of stars do these one-person shows. They talk about their husbands and their successes and their failures and they think everybody wants to hear that. They’re forgetting that what people want is to be entertained. I felt sorry for her because I liked her. I felt that she didn’t have much of a life anymore. She was needy. Everyone was treating her as a star. And she liked that.” Supper clubs, said Zef Bufman, were “the minor league. She wanted the big-league ego boost because she felt she deserved it. And she wanted people to say, ‘Poor Peg. What a life.’ ”
Of the Peg team, only D. Michael Heath retained his affection for the project: “The orchestra was incredible. The stories were fun. Fictional or true, we learned a lot about someone we loved very much. I didn’t find it depressing; I found it heartfelt, and I found a survivor in it.”
On Bufman’s extended lease, Lee decided to stay in her pricey East Side penthouse for a while. She had some espionage in mind: Lee wanted the arrangements, which she considered her property. They weren’t, in fact; they belonged to the producers, who had paid for them. Nonetheless, an accomplice at Cy Coleman’s office smuggled them out of the theater, copied them for Lee, then returned them. The move incited yet more bad blood between her and the producers. Ultimately it didn’t matter; the charts were never played again.
But the ill will remained. Seemingly it had spread to Vincent Roppatte and, in turn, found its way to Liz Smith, who printed one of the sternest rebukes she ever gave a misbehaving star. “The Peggy Lee flop, ‘Peg,’ has left the bitterest feelings up and down the Rialto that I’ve observed in many a turkey trot. Peggy did not cover herself with glory onstage for the critics, many of whom privately dubbed the show ‘The Lady and Her Misery.’ And she sure didn’t win any prizes backstage where she ended up almost universally disliked by the minions who toiled for the star. I think she was scared out of her wits, but it’s no excuse for mistreating people.”
Lee phoned Horner for solace. He didn’t turn away,
nor would he for years; the composer still seemed to hope that somehow the rift between him and his favorite singer would mend. But their battle over the songs’ ownership raged on. In 1990, Lee made a whole CD of originals, There’ll Be Another Spring: The Peggy Lee Songbook. She invited Horner to her home to hear it. He hurried over. They listened together to the album—which contained not one song from Peg.
Only after her death, when Horner went into litigation with her estate, were the proper fifty-fifty rights established. Still, the misbegotten score remained largely unknown.
After Peg, the Cowans faced their own hard times; a fire at the Diplomat had helped hasten the demise of the faltering resort, which eventually closed. Real estate dealings and a stable of prize racehorses kept them on top of Florida’s social loop, but never again did they invest in a Broadway show. Zev Bufman’s career as a theater owner continued to thrive; soon, though, he would wind down his glamorous but money-losing run as a Broadway producer. But not quite yet. “Zev never mentioned Peg again,” said Jon Wilner. “He wiped his hands clean and went on to the next show.”
“I’m not quite sure what God had in mind when he kept me around, but I know I’m still here for a purpose.” (MARINES MEMORIAL THEATRE, SAN FRANCISCO, JAN. 9, 1987; PHOTO BY STEVE GRUBER)
Chapter Seventeen
LEE STILL HADN’T a clue as to why Peg had exploded in her face, so she turned to her Science of Mind books for answers. Few came, but still she pressed onward. The singer told Michael Kearns of Drama-Logue: “This has probably been one of the most difficult years of my life but I have no real regrets. I expect something really wonderful is coming up.”
Quickly after Peg, Lee returned to what most people felt she should have stuck with all along: just singing, in clubs and intimate theaters. Lee toured Canada and the United Kingdom, then in the summer of 1984 she played a three-week, sold-out run in Los Angeles at the Westwood Playhouse (later renamed the Geffen Playhouse). There in that four-hundred-and-fifty-seat, state-of-the-art venue, audiences welcomed back the Peggy Lee they loved. Peg had encouraged her to talk more onstage; Leonard Feather, her diehard champion, scolded her in the Los Angeles Times for “reminiscences that sometimes rambled a little too long, about everything from London to Japan to her potassium intake.” But Lee’s nephew Lee Ringuette was glad to see that she could still mesmerize: “The audience sat quietly, absolutely transfixed throughout. They didn’t want to miss anything.”
In the 1980s, Lee adopted the last new set of musicians who would enter her life. All were Italian, like her first husband. All were young enough to be her sons. And all provided a steadying arm to a woman whom age and ill health were wearing down. They, in turn, gained an education they still raved about decades later—even if it came from one of the most exasperating, mercurial artists they had ever known.
Guitarist John Chiodini had worked with the Boston Pops before moving to Los Angeles. He had played on Lee’s Close Enough for Love album, then joined her band at the Westwood Playhouse. When she heard his graceful, spare guitar lines, tinged by the blues, she felt she had found one more heir apparent to Dave Barbour. Just past forty, Chiodini vowed to make the most of this opportunity. He placed himself at Lee’s beck and call, spending untold hours at her bedside, where they lovingly wrote songs together and laughed away the hours. Around him, the sixty-four-year-old singer wove her last romantic fantasy. “Look at those beautiful eyes!” she told one audience. Lee showered the musician with superlatives—“sensitive,” “talented,” “beautiful”—and dropped broad hints about their relationship. Discussing “Boudoir Productions,” as she called her bedroom, on CBS This Morning, Lee volunteered: “John Chiodini and I write in there, and that’s all we do! . . . I’m saying that for his wife’s benefit.”
After Lee fired three pianists in her first three nights at the Westwood Playhouse, Chiodini placed a post-midnight panic call to his friend Emilio Palame, a promising but unknown thirty-year-old pianist. Might he step in? Palame couldn’t believe his ears. Since moving to L.A. from his native Buffalo, he had eked out a living playing weddings, parties, and small clubs. Chiodini came over and coached him until dawn. The next night, Lee approved of his funky minimalism, in the Jimmy Rowles and Lou Levy tradition. He stayed for eleven years. “Being associated with her set my career on fire,” said Palame, “because everyone knew that Peggy Lee only hired the best.”
Until the end, he shared the job with Mike Renzi, who had played in Peg. For pop-jazz vocalists, Renzi was the gold ring of accompanists. Sylvia Syms, Frank Sinatra’s favorite saloon singer, had discovered him while he was a student at Boston Conservatory. Renzi went on to play for Mel Tormé, Lena Horne, Cleo Laine, and other greats. Seated at the piano, he had an eye-catching look—jet-black beard, Afro-style hair, gold wire-frame glasses—and a lush, impressionistic style, the opposite of Palame’s. If Lee rarely sang with strings anymore, she now had a pianist whom Stephen Holden of the New York Times would praise for his “extraordinary grace as a pianistic arranger” and “panoramic orchestral sweep.”
No matter how strong or gifted the men onstage, Lee still had to rule, both as musician and siren. Even though Palame was less than half her age, and married with children, his job, like Chiodini’s, involved maintaining an amorous spark. After a show, his parents wanted to meet her, but Grady Tate discouraged it. “It’s gonna blow the whole vibe,” Tate warned. “To be her pianist you’ve got to be like her husband.”
At the same time, if anyone forgot that she was Miss Peggy Lee, there would be hell to pay. Before a show at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis, Massachusetts, Renzi called her Peggy in front of a reporter. Later, Lee summoned him to a chair by her bedside, where she scolded him as though it were the principal’s office. He argued that he hadn’t known her rules, but Lee wouldn’t relent. Finally he did what few of her musicians ever had the nerve to do: “I just stood up and I said, ‘Get yourself another fucking piano player. I’m outta here.’ I walked toward the door. Off came the covers, and she jumped out of bed. ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I quit!’ ”
Lee turned to Tate, who was seated nearby, and clutched her chest. “Baby, you OK?” he asked. No, said Lee—she needed her doctor. “Oh, my heart is racing!” She turned to Renzi. “You can’t leave! I can’t find a replacement! Please, I have to be alone now.”
Renzi didn’t quit. The next day at soundcheck, Lee acted as though nothing had happened. “Hi, my darling,” she cooed with a smile. “After that,” he said, “she never bugged me again.”
Still, her word remained law. Chiodini knew what happened if you challenged Peggy Lee. “There were three strikes. The first was, ‘When was the last time you had a hit?’ If it went to strike two it was, ‘Oh, really? Are you a legend?’ The third one was, ‘When was the last time you died and came back to life?’ She definitely got me on that one.”
The more she declined physically, the more she relied upon anger as an essential drug to pump herself up. She kept pouring it from creative new bottles. Chiodini saw the latest of them in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where Lee and the group taped a TV special with the New Jersey Symphony. While they rehearsed, the lighting man experimented with settings. Lights kept flashing at the stage—and when he dropped something with a bang, Lee turned on him with a savagery that scared everyone. That day her band learned about the “vortex”—a swirling black hole, like purgatory, into which Lee claimed she could be sucked by forces of rage. “She said to him that she was now officially in a vortex,” said Chiodini, “and she had all of us as witnesses, and if she died, it was his fault, and she would make sure he was charged with murder after the fact.”
Sometimes she found serenity in the company of Palame, who, like her, considered himself on a spiritual path. Late at night he lingered in her suite, talking heart-to-heart. “Most of our conversations revolved around spirituality, going toward what was positive, going toward the white light. She wanted to heal the wounds of her past. She wanted to get into a sens
e of true forgiveness.” Lee’s Bible was Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood, a collection of anonymous letters written by Catholics and published in an old religious weekly. The theme was a quest to free oneself from the chains of sadness and fright.
Let us consider then this outer you, distraught, melancholy, lonely, hypnotized by his own states, without judgment, sound asleep in inertia—mental inertia. . . . The overcoming will be instant when you eliminate from your mind all thoughts and emotions which benumb, frustrate and leave cobwebs.
But it was hard for Lee to let go of fear when illness kept cutting her down, potentially for good. On January 22, 1985, she checked into St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, complaining once more of chest pains. This time they were real. Doctors discovered dangerous arterial blockages leading to the heart. The next day Lee underwent angioplasty—the insertion of inflatable catheters to let the blood flow through.
The more her body failed her, the harder she fought back. The operation had worked, but sooner than the doctors wished, she flew to Dallas and did eight shows. Once home, she had to have another angioplasty.
Part of her determination was practical: she needed the money—hence an action that shocked her friends. Long before, Lee had given her sister Marianne and brother-in-law Leo the downpayment on a house in the San Fernando Valley. But Lee demanded it be put in her name. “For years they tried to get it changed,” said Betty Jungheim. “Marianne and Leo paid on this property all their lives, but Peggy wouldn’t budge. What could Marianne do?”
