by James Gavin
Disney’s lawyers declined comment. But they had to respond to Lee. Buena Vista pulled the Lady and the Tramp video off the market, and a deposition with Lee—the pretrial exchange of information by the litigants—was scheduled. Claiming illness, she succeeded in having it held in her living room. Typically, she turned it into a lunch—one more ploy to soften her opponents. The participants, including both sides’ attorneys and a stenographer—filed one by one into her foyer, wearing suits and toting briefcases. An early arrival from the Disney camp was startled when Lee beckoned him warmly to the piano and played and sang one of her songs.
It was a cunning reminder that she wasn’t just any plaintiff; she was Miss Peggy Lee. And some of her opponents loved her work. During the visit, a Disney lawyer took Saulle aside and asked: “Do you think that Miss Lee would autograph a photo for my wife?”
Saulle stared at him. After a pause, he answered: “I’m sure she would love to.”
Once the deposition had begun, Lee’s poise impressed Saulle. “The attorneys asked questions and she answered them. Never raised her voice. From the moment we started she knew she was right and was gonna win.”
The case kept growing. David Blasband saw the need to bring in a lawyer based in Los Angeles, where the trial would occur. His choice couldn’t have made Lee happier. Blasband engaged Elizabeth Taylor’s lawyer, Neil Papiano, a Beverly Hills litigator who was known for fighting seven- and eight-figure lawsuits for his clients. Bald and portly, with a hint of a sneer, Papiano would win a whopping suit against the National Enquirer for libeling Taylor. He also represented David Levy, who devised the TV series The Addams Family, in a fifty-million-dollar suit against Paramount Pictures, whose hit film based on the show allegedly posed “unfair competition, trade libel, and title slander.” But to him, all those fights apparently paled in comparison to Lee’s. “This is the case of a lifetime!” he told Blasband.
Papiano’s firm, which included his tirelessly efficient associate, Deborah Nesset—“She did all the grunt work,” said Blasband—charged a reported two hundred dollars an hour; Deutsch’s averaged $228. Lee could ill afford such out-of-pocket costs. But as she knew, attorneys could choose the option of working on contingency (a fee drawn based on a percentage of a winning settlement) if they felt confident of success, or liked a case’s prestige. Lee lucked out.
Now she wanted her day in court. And she didn’t wish to wait. The singer asked one of her doctors to spell out her failing health in writing. Soon John Chiodini understood, as never before, her ability to manifest psychosomatic ills. “I saw her get sick after she read that letter,” he said. At a rehearsal, she waved it around as a weapon against her musicians, lest they challenge her on anything. “I remember her yelling at Mark Sherman,” recalled the guitarist. “She was quoting the letter that I think she helped dictate and paid for.” Its theme, said Chiodini, was clear: “Everybody says I’m faking, but now I have proof!”
Where the Disney case was concerned, however, Lee’s ploy didn’t help. By depicting herself so aggressively as a woman on the brink of death, she gave the company unforeseen rope. As the suit proceeded, she grew convinced that Disney intended to drag things out until she died. Not even Blasband could support that theory. But whatever it cost her, Lee was prepared to do battle. She raised the damage amount from twenty-five to fifty million. If Disney didn’t know it, Peggy Lee did: the longer anyone fought her, the angrier she would get—and that anger only fueled her to keep going.
* * *
MUSICALLY, TOO, LEE BARRELED forth, breathlessly busy. “I can’t stop,” she told a reporter. “I mean, sit there and wait for what? My last breath? What do I have to lose?”
As ever, her king-size bed doubled as her office. One side of it was covered with paperwork, boxes, and a small white towel; placed upon it were a bowl of food and a brush for Baby, her tiny, prowling silver chinchilla cat. On the other lay the star, false eyelashes in place whether guests were coming or not. “She didn’t get out of bed,” said John Saulle, “but the gardener came every day, the cook came every day, the housekeeper came every day, I came every day.” The French doors in her room stayed closed. “She never saw the light of day,” explained Saulle. “She hated going outside. She was the whitest person ever.” Occasionally her friend Helen Glickstein flew in from New York to visit. Once there, she found herself chained to Lee’s bedside. “I didn’t come out here to sit in this bedroom!” groused Glickstein.
Two invitations did get Lee out of bed and on planes to New York. Not since 1979 had she made an album, but to her joy, some serious independent record producers wanted to capture her autumnal work before it was too late. Now she would have two new albums. Both of them nodded to the blues, which many critics felt she understood better than any other white singer.
MusicMasters, an independent label devoted to classical works and historic jazz, signed her to record Miss Peggy Lee Sings the Blues. It gathered the embattled, low-down plaints of several pioneers, notably Ma Rainey (“See See Rider”), Bessie Smith (“Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do”), Lead Belly (“Birmingham Jail”), Lil Green (“Love Me”), and Billie Holiday (“Fine and Mellow”). The other CD, Love Held Lightly—Rare Songs by Harold Arlen, saluted a Jewish songwriter who loved the blues, and who referenced them in songs of such refined urbanity that they worked perfectly on Broadway and in Hollywood. Arlen had written dozens of standards, among them “Blues in the Night,” “That Old Black Magic,” “The Man That Got Away,” and “Over the Rainbow.”
But the producers, Ken Bloom and Bill Rudman, wanted to shine a light upon obscure Arlen, notably “Happy with the Blues,” a song he had written with Lee in 1961. Bloom was a much-published authority on the American Popular Song, Rudman a theater director; as record producers, they loved to place singers of Lee’s class in jewel-like settings. Maxine Sullivan had made far too many sloppy discs; Bloom and Rudman showcased her in choicely programmed tributes to the composers Jule Styne and Burton Lane and to the Cotton Club.
Lee found the two producers “thoughtful and supportive and enthusiastic,” and when they proposed their Arlen project, she said, “Yes, I would be interested in talking with you!” At steep expense, they flew her and her nurse into New York and, per her demands, housed them in Cole Porter’s former suite at the Waldorf. Once in the studio, Lee sat in a wheelchair and turned out impeccable performances. Pianist Keith Ingham led a nine-piece band that included her anchors, Grady Tate and John Chiodini.
But Lee had meant it when she vowed, after Peg, never to drag people again onto gloomy ground. The smoldering fire of her old Black Coffee performances had cooled to the faintest flicker; the tumult of love seemed a distant memory. Lee was trying her best to replace hurt with humor. Just to leave her bed was painful; she looked to music for comfort. “When I sing, I seem to go into another dimension,” she explained. “Things just don’t hurt so much there.”
On the MusicMasters CD, she held her desperate survival tales at a safe emotional distance; a quintet of New York jazzmen played them with clean conservatory precision. Lee’s sound was now pinched and dry, but her time and pitch remained flawless, her phrasing as wise as ever. In Stereo Review, Chris Albertson, Bessie Smith’s biographer, raved: “Jennifer Holliday, Diane Schuur, Patti LaBelle, and all the other screamers who mistake volume for soul ought to be locked up with this album until they get it right.”
Love Held Lightly had a rockier birth. As an act of respect, Bloom and Rudman had granted Lee approval of the master. They sent her a cassette. Word came back that she was appalled at how they had recorded her, and wanted the disc shelved. The producers were floored. To everyone but Lee, it sounded first-rate. Lee explained her issue to a reporter. Her voice, she said, was “a center core with rings of overtones. If they don’t record it properly, it just picks up the center core, and it shaves off the layers of overtones.” She heeded the advice of her psychic. Mercury was in retrograde, which tended to make things go wrong. This was no time to rel
ease an album.
Only later did Rudman and Bloom get to the heart of the problem. The audio system in Lee’s bedroom was a boombox with one dead channel. Long after her initial refusal, she left Rudman a voicemail: “You know dear, I don’t know why we shouldn’t release this if you still want to.” Love Held Lightly at last came out on Angel, a high-toned classical label.
Miss Peggy Lee Sings the Blues appeared in time for Lee’s fourth run at The Ballroom, which opened on January 31, 1989. Each year her New York fans had watched her grow frailer. Determined to stand onstage for at least a few moments, Lee hobbled out with a sequined cane. In honor of the blues, she wore a black velvet gown, not her usual white. Neal Karlen of the New York weekly 7 Days detailed her entrance. “Miss Peggy Lee peeks out from behind the curtains, her upper body glowing in a heart-shaped spotlight, her cartoony eyelashes flapping . . . The crowd claps encouragingly and tries not to notice as she haltingly walks the few steps to her center-stage armchair.” Once settled in, she purred her stock greeting: “Are you enjoying yourselves? . . . That’s the whooooole idea!” Out among the tables, customers traded uneasy glances.
They relaxed, particularly when Lee announced she was about to tell “the story of the blues.” The room went dark. Wind chimes tinkled, chains jangled, then came a sound akin to a hammer pounding nails into train tracks. With only her white wig visible in ghostly silhouette, Lee sang: “Been working hard on the chain gang/Still got so terrible long to go . . .” The stage turned bright, and she began to narrate a blues suite:
I love the blues . . .
They’re happy, sad; they’re lighthearted, downhearted.
They came out of the jails . . . in from the fields . . . little snatches of life.
And sometimes it helped to sing. It was a release . . . an expression of the soul.
Immobile in her chair except for a slow swaying of the head, Lee was a living monument to suffering and survival. According to Stuart Troup of Newsday, the singer “left more than a few in the full house emotionally overcome.”
But most of them were diehard Peggy Lee fans, and one had to wonder how the odd sight of her struck the uninitiated. An answer came when Rob Hoerburger, a young music writer and future editor for the New York Times, showed up at The Ballroom with a group of friends. “To us she had always been an old woman,” he wrote, starting from the time when she “crashed our Top 40” with “Is That All There Is?” Now, wrote Hoerburger, “she was beyond old, seemingly held together by laminate and scarabs, and we laughed because we couldn’t decide which was more ludicrous: that she looked like a retired bordello matron, that she was still trying to perform when she could barely stand or that we were paying money, money that we didn’t really have, to watch.”
They kept returning, however, lured by her peculiar charisma. Hoerburger learned more about her along the way, and gained respect for her as a vocal and sexual trailblazer—a “purrer” throughout ages of shouters. Lee’s voice, he wrote, “had grown heavy and slow”; still it “navigated the fissures of time like a luxury liner.”
Reporters of all ages came to interview at her hotel suite. She held them rapt with tales from a life more colorful than any of them had lived. Most of them believed every word—and if someone looked askance at her in print, she fired off a huffy response. Comparisons between Lee and Norma Desmond weren’t new, but when Lee read one of them, she fired off an inflamed letter to the editor: “I believe the fictitious character of Norma Desmond was insane. Are you saying I am insane?”
Even though the public had rejected Peg, Lee was still intent on telling her story her way. In 1985, while bedridden after open-heart surgery, she had started her memoirs. The book found an independent publisher, Donald Fine, who had issued the life story of New York’s notorious “Mayflower Madam,” Sydney Biddle Barrows, and Eye of the Needle, Ken Follett’s bloody espionage thriller.
Lee’s story had no end of violence and mayhem, but Fine wasn’t keen on the book’s sanctified tone or the singer’s curious primness about her love life. He tried to argue his points, but Lee resisted so adamantly that he ultimately gave in and hoped for the best.
Like Peg, however, Miss Peggy Lee revealed how little perspective she had on her life, times, or on anyone who had passed through them. Her endearing wit was again in short supply. “Sometimes life is sadder than death,” she wrote, establishing that even her survival skills were a burden. Critics who viewed her as eternally sexy and indomitable were baffled by the saintly martyrdom of her self-image. Rex Reed, in the New York Observer, called the book a “morass of morbidity.” Aside from the expected pages on Min’s abuse, Lee, wrote Reed, “was almost sold into white slavery, nearly drowned, suffered from sore throats, fainting spells and malnutrition. After surgery and a lump in her throat, she was dropped on a tile floor, breaking her front teeth and slicing her tongue after hemorrhaging from blood transfusions . . . Plagued by raging fevers, she also developed diabetes, the inner-ear affliction called Meniere’s disease and a heart condition. Packed in ice, she went blind.”
Once stardom came, the portrait turned from black to rose. Recalling her triumphs at Basin Street East, the singer observed: “I sang and sang and sang. They loved it all, and so did I.” As for social context, Lee offered: “Clothes and the fifties . . . It was a big time for both.” God had blessed her with so many celebrity friends. Frank Sinatra, she wrote, “has always been somewhere near . . . just touching the elbow . . . holding the hand.” The tough-guy actor Robert Mitchum was as misunderstood as she; they drank lemonade together at parties, and he loved to sing “America the Beautiful.” Predictably, she devoted a hefty chunk of the book to her misbegotten love of Dave Barbour, but brushed over Brad Dexter, Dewey Martin, and Jack Del Rio.
Michael Musto, one of the dishiest of gossip hounds, gave Lee begrudging points for discretion, while noting the “gloppy unrealness” of her accounts. “If we don’t want her to wallow, we would at least like to know how suffering has transformed her, onstage and off, and how she’s different from all the other dark ladies who turned dejection into art.” The book, he said, contained “nothing about how she digs into her soul and comes up with a singing style that’s sexy and chilling at the same time.” But the bubble she lived in had no room for frank self-reflection; she saved that for her music. “Singing is both Peggy’s expression of angst and her escape from it,” he wrote.
Miss Peggy Lee exasperated even Phoebe Jacobs. “I told her, ‘Maybe you think you’re gonna grow into that person you created for the book. She hasn’t got flesh and blood, it’s just like a paper doll.’ But it was important for Peggy to keep up an image. She wasn’t gonna let her hair down in the book, in an interview, or anywhere else.”
After the book’s release, some of the friends who were in it confronted Lee about her fanciful, edited, or sometimes imagined accounts. She gave a standard reply: “No one would ever believe the truth.”
* * *
WHEN SHE SANG, AT least, Lee never uttered a false word. And in January of 1990, plans were made for her to lift her voice throughout the U.K. in a nearly monthlong tour. Getting there was an ordeal. “She was tired,” said Emilio Palame. “She was weak. It was difficult for her to get around. She was always in a wheelchair.” Yet she wouldn’t give up. A TV interviewer asked Lee if she ever thought of retiring. “No!” she said. “I think it would frighten me to death. I shouldn’t say that!”
Lee was set to play London, Manchester, Brighton, Cardiff, and Edinburgh. But her ego took a blow when most of the tour was canceled; for the first time, her British ticket sales were too low to justify continuing. Understandably, she sank into a funk. Later bookings in Australia went off as planned, but Lee was in a foul mood there, and complained about almost everything.
At least she could look forward to her fifth run at The Ballroom, in the town whose acceptance she cared about the most. This engagement would last three weeks, down from the six of 1985 and 1986. It marked the release of her second MusicMa
sters CD, The Peggy Lee Songbook: There’ll Be Another Spring, coproduced by John Chiodini and Mike Renzi. The repertoire spanned decades of Lee’s songwriting from the 1950s (“Where Can I Go Without You?,” “Things Are Swingin’,” “Sans Souci”) to her newest songs with Chiodini and Palame. For the occasion, Lee tossed out almost all of Otis Blackwell’s words to “Fever” and replaced them with new ones of her own. The disc offered a reminder of what clever, catchy, and endearingly spacy lyrics Lee could write at her best. On “He’s a Tramp,” Lee even regained her old bouncy swing. The addition of strings made The Peggy Lee Songbook seem that much closer to one of her 1960s albums.
Inside her cubicle of a dressing room, the singer placed a silver-framed photo of her cat, Baby, on the makeup table. Lee did her own makeup, but now, as she approached seventy, it wasn’t so easy to look in the mirror. Injections of prednisone, a synthetic steroid commonly prescribed for heart-failure patients, had made her face as round as Raggedy Ann’s. Her Dynel pageboy and the huge rose she inserted into it added to the doll-like effect. This time Lee had bravely foregone wearing glasses, which necessitated a ritual: With a doctor’s rubber reflex hammer, she tapped the area around her sagging eye to wake it up.
Night after night, on the arm of Mike Renzi, she struggled onto a small stage crowded with her rhythm section—Chiodini, bassist Sean Smith, drummer Peter Grant, and Renzi—and a string quartet. “I really hate falling into that chair,” she said wearily. But once there, she became charming, relaxed, and full of loopy Peggy Lee humor: “I always wonder, when I wear these gowns, how do those ostriches sit on their feathers?”
At other times, audiences saw a woman who seemed to live on the threshold of some otherworldly abyss. In “Circle in the Sky,” written with Palame, Lee gazed toward space, spotting the eternal love that had eluded her on earth. The song was as slow and somber as a baroque adagio, and Lee sang it as though in a trance. Dave Barbour seemed to rise again as she sang the first lines—“I drew a circle in the sky / Inside I wrote ‘You and I’ ”—and traced a finger in a clockwork motion through the air. “Forever,” sang Lee, “our love is stronger than a star.”
