by James Gavin
Phoebe Jacobs lost patience. “I used to call her Camille. I’d call her up and say, ‘How do you feel?’ She’d start telling me about her coughing and her legs and her veins, and she couldn’t get out of bed. I’d say, ‘You’ve gotta force yourself, Peggy.’ I’d put the phone down, walk away. I’d come back—still complaining. I’d say, ‘I’m gonna call you up when I want to get depressed.’ I used to tell her, ‘You’re like an old Jew.’ That’s what Jewish people do—they kvetch.”
Lee had grown willfully accident-prone, and in February 1987, the mishap she had faked at the Waldorf happened for real. Caesars Palace in Las Vegas had booked her to open for the ninety-one-year-old comedy legend George Burns in a two-week engagement. One night as the band vamped, Lee strolled out in trademark fashion: walking in semiprofile, smiling broadly at the audience, arms outstretched. As she glided to center stage, her high heel got caught in a steel plate with a hole. Lee tripped and hit the floor hard. The audience let out a collective gasp. A stagehand quickly dropped the curtain, and everyone rushed over to Lee. She had fractured her pelvis. “Frankly, I prayed,” she said later. “I was in excruciating pain.”
Someone ran to call an ambulance, but Lee was adamant. The show had to go on. “I wanted them to know I wasn’t dead,” Lee explained.
A thronelike chair was brought out—and minutes later she was singing and trying to joke about the disaster. She finished her thirty-minute set; then orderlies carried her by stretcher to a waiting ambulance.
Caesars Palace, said Emilio Palame, shifted its concern. “Some people came up to me and said, ‘So she tripped on her dress, huh?’
“No,” he answered. “She didn’t trip on her dress.” Her heel, he explained, had gotten stuck in their floor. “They said, ‘No, she tripped on her dress, right?’ Almost as if they were telling me, ‘That’s what you’re gonna say.’ I said, ‘No! She didn’t.’ They were kind of giving me this strongarm vibe. I was like, ‘No, that’s my girl. No way.’ ”
Astonishingly, with a legitimate case to fight, Lee declined to sue. “I think she just didn’t want to deal with it,” said Palame. “It sort of fit into where she was spiritually—‘OK. I’m gonna let that go. I don’t need to do this.’ ”
Following the surgery, Lee lay restless in bed for weeks. She was so eager to recover and return to work that she ventured into her pool, where she had seldom gone, and did laps. Lee told Mary Campbell of the Associated Press that she even rented an exercise bicycle—“and overdid it. That put me back in bed for a little bit.”
From now on, she would sit for her shows. “She never really wanted to sit, but finally she had to,” said Nicki Lee Foster. Lee made the best of it. In March 1987, she was rolled onto the stage of the Pasadena Playhouse in a wheelchair. Balloons covered the stage and the chair—her way of making a strained atmosphere seem like a circus. Humor saw her through. As entrance music, the band played Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’s “Pick Yourself Up”; Lee opened with another Kern song, “I Won’t Dance.” By the time she played the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., Lee could walk onstage with a cane in her right hand, with her left arm supported by Mark Sherman. She lowered herself gingerly into a chair. “Your part is to applaud until I’m thoroughly seated,” she told the audience. “My part is to get there.” Pathos ran high. “Everywhere we played,” said Palame, “people loved her so much. She touched people’s hearts so deeply.”
More than ever, Lee had become a mash-up of contradictions. There was the needy star who, like Judy Garland, had a bottomless craving for sympathy. There was the sex kitten who had to feel that men still crumbled at her feet. And there was the Lee who now dominated the mix—the celestial figure who, having been “through that door you’ve heard about,” now saw herself as a divine messenger. White had always been her favorite color; now it obsessed her. The centerpiece of her new look was her stark white pageboy wig, made of Dynel, a synthetic fiber favored by low-end wigmakers. It had the texture of horsehair. Lee ordered the wigs in quantity from the Beverly Hills division of René of Paris, an international wig manufacturer that prided itself on its “natural” designs. Ten to twelve of her chosen style came with her on every tour.
She took that look to the extreme. Suddenly everything went white: the beaded jackets with fur collars, the satin gowns with feather trim, the nail polish. For years Lee had employed a rainbow of lighting tints; now she wanted technical directors to engulf her in white. “She was into the spiritual concepts of white light and how it was purifying and strengthening,” said Palame. The key to a great show, she told him, was to “cover ourselves in white light.”
For some viewers, the sight of her was not only otherworldly but macabre. At sixty-eight, she hadn’t a wrinkle. Her eyes remained hidden behind her tinted rhinestone glasses; onstage, one could hardly see any of her. “She was completely immobile,” said Robert Richards, “and suddenly a hand would come out of nowhere, and she looked like a singing laundry bag.”
Lee was hardly the guest to enliven a 1988 reunion of Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr., two now-fading survivors of the “Rat Pack.” Sinatra’s and Davis’s hell-raising was far behind them; after decades of overindulgence, their bodies were collapsing. A month earlier, their “Together Again” tour had lost its third Rat Pack titan, Dean Martin, whom illness had forced off the road. Davis now had throat cancer, and would die in 1990. Sinatra’s memory, along with his health, had begun to fail him.
Their star quality shone on, of course, and on April 6, the show made a sold-out, five-night stop at Radio City Music Hall. The last night brought a sentimental guest appearance by Sinatra’s onetime neighbor Peggy Lee, who hobbled out with a sequined cane. Davis and Sinatra tried their best to recapture their carefree brashness of old; Lee’s low energy didn’t help. Rumors that she would join them on tour never came to pass.
* * *
IN THE 1960s, WHENEVER Lee had wanted to show off her performance in Pete Kelly’s Blues to guests, out came a projector and a can of sixteen-millimeter film. Now it was the late eighties, and forty-eight million American homes—nearly half the country—were popping VHS tapes into the videocassette decks beneath their TV sets. Home video had become one of the fattest of cash cows, especially for Walt Disney Productions. In 1980, Disney had begun issuing its major cartoon features—Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, and many more—in Beta and VHS editions. Family staples all, they sold in landslide numbers. Disney’s 1987 releases included Lady and the Tramp. In 1955, the film had opened to mixed reviews; after one year on home video, Disney reported 3.5 million units sold and a $90 million profit; others estimated a much higher take.
To boost home-video sales, Disney liked to send its original voice actors out on the publicity trail. Most were retired, and happy to relive their pasts for the honorarium—or less—that Disney offered. Of all those performers, none was more famous than Peggy Lee. The singer was immensely proud of Lady and the Tramp, and she recalled it in a slew of TV and print interviews. Lee heaped respect upon Walt Disney, who had died in 1966; she introduced clips of herself as the mangy canine showgirl Peg and the other three characters to whom she had given voice. Reporters raved about her broad contribution to the film, including the songs she had written with Sonny Burke. “He’s a Tramp,” “The Siamese Cat Song,” and “Bella Notte” were as beloved as almost any Disney tunes.
Over and over, Lee heard about the huge success of the video. Disney had reportedly spent $20 million to market it—“five times what it cost to bring the film to the screen back in the 1950s,” said a reporter. And she thought about how little Lady and the Tramp had earned her. Lee would later tell reporters that she and Burke had agreed to split a one-thousand-dollar songwriters’ fee for sheet music and recording rights. Disney published the songs through ASCAP; from that point on, both she and Burke received a standard royalty for record and sheet-music sales along with other uses. Besides that, Lee had agreed to a fla
t fee of $3,500 for her performances on the soundtrack. The deal had seemed reasonable in 1952 when Lee had signed her contracts. Since then she had tried to buy back the publishing rights for her songs; naturally, Disney wouldn’t budge.
Now, as she heard reports that Lady and the Tramp had become the best-selling home-video title of all time, she tried to take it lightly. When Stephen M. Silverman of the New York Post asked her if she was sharing in Disney’s financial bonanza, Lee called her original deal “a little joke I played on myself. I signed on as an artist for hire. . . . Still, it’s a thrill today to watch something go like that, and that’s the way one likes to be paid.”
Her mind began to change as she fretted over her ever-shrinking funds. Lee told Paul Horner that Roy Acuff, the Grand Ole Opry star and music publisher, wanted to buy her Denslow Music catalog. Though tempted, she couldn’t bring herself to accept. Meanwhile she kept promoting Lady and the Tramp. Lee agreed to travel by car to Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California, to do a television interview in front of the Disney Castle. But when the company offered her what she deemed an “insulting” fee—$500—Lee was “outraged,” said John Saulle, the balding, bearded young Italian who worked then as her assistant.
Lee gave a halfhearted interview on her living-room sofa. Later, she summoned Saulle. “Pull my contract!” she said, referring to the agreement she had signed with Disney twenty-five years before. Off he went to the garage, where Lee’s lifetime of paperwork resided in a series of filing cabinets. There he found not one but two contracts. The earlier one involved her songwriting. The other, signed on October 20, 1952, governed her soundtrack performances. Nearly every Disney contract offered a flat buyout fee and no royalties or rights. But Lee’s was different. It stated: “Nothing in this agreement shall be construed as granting to us the right to make phonograph records and/or transcriptions for sale to the public, wherein the results or proceeds of your services hereunder are used.”
Disney had used that clause when signing musical artists who, like Lee, had outside record contracts. It promised that the company would not sell commercial recordings or sheet music of the artists’ Disney performances. The wording seemed sloppy, though. At the time, “transcription” meant a sixteen-inch disc of material distributed to radio stations for broadcast only. Transcriptions weren’t sold to the public—and the term didn’t apply to sheet music.
But according to modern dictionaries, transcription now held the broad meaning of “copy,” including one in a medium besides the original. By selling Lady and the Tramp on video without her consent, Disney seemed to have breached its contract with Peggy Lee. Never mind the fact that in 1952, the company could not possibly have foreseen the advent of home video.
The singer searched for a Los Angeles litigator who would take the next step. Every firm she called turned her down; none would dare cross swords with one of the toughest corporations in show business. Finally Lee phoned Alvin Deutsch, the Manhattan lawyer who handled her music publishing. She asked if he would consider pleading her case. Lee sent him the old Disney contract. He showed it to his partner, David Blasband, who specialized in copyright law. Spotting the transcriptions phrase, Blasband sensed potential. He and Deutsch said yes to Lee.
On June 17, 1988, Deutsch wrote to Michael Eisner, CEO of the Walt Disney Company. Deutsch called the clause to Eisner’s attention, then politely requested to hear from him “within a week regarding the appropriate compensation for our client.” A member of Eisner’s legal staff called and promised a response by July 1. It didn’t come. On July 11, Deutsch wrote again. This time, John J. Reagan, VP of Legal and Business Affairs for Disney, answered swiftly. Reagan insisted that Lee had “granted Disney all rights to the results and proceeds of Ms. Lee’s services, including the right to distribute ‘Lady and the Tramp’ in the home video market, without the payment of additional compensation. The sole reservation was not to the grant of rights for video cassettes, but to phonograph records and sheet music. . . . While no one questions the value of Ms. Lee’s contribution to ‘Lady and the Tramp,’ we cannot agree that Disney owes Ms. Lee any additional consideration for her services over and above what she has already been paid pursuant to the agreement.”
Disney had an arguable case, but so did Lee. The company, she told the Hollywood Reporter, “just acted as if that clause didn’t exist. . . . All I received was a condescending little pat on the head.”
Anyone who brushed off Peggy Lee did so at his own peril. On November 17, 1988, the New York Times, Variety, and other papers announced the news: Lee was suing Disney for twenty-five million dollars. Later she expanded the suit to include Buena Vista Home Video, Disney’s subsidiary company. War was on.
* * *
DESPITE THE RENOWN OF its heartwarming family tales, in which animals have a human sensitivity and good conquers all, Walt Disney Productions was viewed by many insiders as a steely monolith, as merciless as the evil queen in Snow White. Lee Ringuette, Peggy Lee’s nephew, had become a music producer for several film studios, including Disney. He and some of his colleagues called the company “Mouse-schwitz.” Disney’s lawyers, he said, were “ruthless business people,” its artist contracts “absolutely ironclad.” Nancy Olson, the costar of Disney’s Pollyanna and The Absent-Minded Professor, had liked Walt—but his company, she said, had “no respect for artists. They were frightened of spending a lot of money.”
According to a report in Video Age International, Disney kept a huge legal staff on hand and filed approximately eight hundred lawsuits and regulatory cases a year, a quarter of them related to copyright and trademark. “When it comes to intellectual property, you can’t be too litigious,” declared Eisner. The article explained: “Such a large legal staff allows Disney not only to ‘terrorize’ potential bootleggers, antagonists, competitors and business associates, but also to creatively leverage the fine points of the law to its advantage.”
As examples, the magazine cited Disney’s attempt “to sue three private children’s centers in Florida, for decorating their walls with Disney’s characters”; and a suit against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “over the unauthorized use of Snow White during the Oscar telecast.” The company seemed determined to avoid issuing royalties whenever possible; the Motion Picture Industry Pension Plan filed suit against Disney for nonpayment of residuals.
But Disney was a hallowed name, and many artists jumped at the chance to place it on their résumés, no matter how stingy the terms. Many years would pass before Disney agreed to pay eye-popping sums to such stars as Tom Hanks, who earned fifteen million dollars for his lead voiceover in Toy Story 3. For now, though, a deal was a deal—and Peggy Lee had signed hers with the likely knowledge that Disney would profit nicely from Lady and the Tramp, and that she was earning mostly prestige. Later she admitted having had full knowledge of the industry definition of transcription. “Sure, I thought it was kind of a coup to have a Disney credit,” said Lee in 1988. “But you can’t eat pride. When something makes that much money and everyone else is making money, why shouldn’t I?”
In her suits against Betty Jungheim and the Waldorf, Lee had built flimsy cases wielded out of rage. With Disney, she was on somewhat sturdier ground. Earlier in 1988, Paramount Pictures had been shot down in a case involving the scope of “sync” (synchronization) rights—the license to use music in conjunction with visual media, in this case film. Paramount argued that sync rights bought for the TV distribution of their films applied also to home video. The court decreed otherwise. “Numerous licenses have been renegotiated since that ruling,” reported Variety. Now here came Peggy Lee with a case that had equal potential to rock the industry. It involved a gray area: What did studios owe veteran performers and their estates, if anything, of their profits from the titanic new medium of home video?
Variety’s Tom Bierbaum consulted several entertainment lawyers. They thought Lee’s claim a “stretch.” How could she make a case that Disney owed her money for a format that hadn
’t existed? Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg discussed Lee’s suit with his friend and skiing partner Cheech Marin, the comic actor who provided voices for many Disney characters, including Banzai the Hyena in The Lion King. “He explained to me that she wanted to get remunerated for all the work she did. I said, ‘Why don’t you remunerate her? I don’t know if what you’re gonna get out of the case is worth the publicity.’ But he was adamant about making a stand.” A victory by Lee might open a floodgate of similar lawsuits. “They’d be forever in litigation,” said Marin.
Press and fans rallied to her side. Lee’s was a storybook case of a lone artist—in this instance, a sick old woman—fighting a corporate gargoyle. And she made sure they knew how frail she was, of body if not of spirit. On November 16, 1988, twelve days before she filed her suit, she held a press conference in a suite at New York’s Helmsley Palace Hotel. Reporters and photographers found her “seated on several pillows because of a back injury,” wrote Matthew Flamm of the New York Post. They were instantly sympathetic. “I’m not being a saint, saying I don’t want the money—I want it,” said Lee. “I think it’s shameful that artists can’t share financially from the success of their work. That’s the only way we can make our living.”
