by James Gavin
Not until 1992 had Lee begun to realize how many younger artists she had affected. Another was Gilbert O’Sullivan, the sweetly nerdish singer-songwriter from Ireland. O’Sullivan’s number-one hit of 1972, “Alone Again (Naturally),” had spoken to the dejected lost soul in millions. They didn’t know that, as a teenager, he had studied Peggy Lee’s albums. “I was learning my craft,” he explained, “and I couldn’t have had a better teacher, in terms of interpretation.”
In 1992, he sent her a new song, hoping his idol would consider a duet. “Can’t Think Straight” tickled Lee’s obtuse sense of humor. A phone rings; a boy has called his new girlfriend to beg forgiveness after their first fight. Her friend answers instead and becomes his mother-confessor. “My name is Peggy and I know how you feel / Same thing that happened to you did to me,” she sings, while trying to talk sense into the sniveling lad.
Before she had left New York, O’Sullivan flew there with a finished backup track. The mundane lovers’ quarrel in the song took on the camp majesty of a Bette Davis melodrama. An orchestra boomed with an over-the-top lushness; bells tinkled; a heavenly choir added mock gravity. In a recording studio, a crew and O’Sullivan waited for Lee. The Irishman didn’t know her medical history, and his jaw dropped when an assistant wheeled her in with her oxygen tank. Once she was settled before a microphone, though, Lee sang with such sincerity that the silly scene became almost touching. Videographers captured a happy moment: Lee “counseling” O’Sullivan with a smile in her eyes as he watched her adoringly.
“Can’t Think Straight” appeared on O’Sullivan’s album Sounds of the Loop. When the track arrived at her home, Lee played it for some of her musicians. Its humor escaped them. O’Sullivan was dismayed when several British DJs declined to air the song—“because the Peggy Lee they remembered didn’t sound like the Peggy that was on our record.” Even so, it hit number fifteen on the British charts, and became a showstopper in his concerts, where he performed his part live while staring up at a projection of Lee singing in the studio.
Other famous fans of hers rushed to grab time with their ailing idol. The breathy-voiced smooth-jazz star Michael Franks enticed her to record a duet of his cotton-candy bossa-nova tune, “You Were Meant for Me.” In 1992, k.d. lang managed to score a bedside lunch date. Lee had never seen the likes of lang, a gender-bending, lesbian successor to Patsy Cline. Like that pop-country legend, lang had a full-throated, golden sound, but sent up her tales of troubled love with a hint of a smirk. In the New York Times, critic Jon Pareles described her in terms that recalled Lee: “Her voice sounds at once sincere and utterly controlled; compared with the frantic display of most current singers, Ms. lang can seem to be singing in a surreal slow motion.”
It was Latin ala Lee! that had gotten the teenage Kathryn Dawn Lang hooked—“profoundly,” she said. At home in Edmonton, Canada, she and her roommate “just lived that record. We were, like, mental about her. I was a total country punker, but Peggy Lee was intravenous. She had a way of taking lyrics and putting them in bold metallic print right onto your heart.” Amid the throbbing bongos and the congas, lang heard a lightning rod of truth. “It was astounding information that she gave me through her voice about phrasing. See, that’s like being a good painter. It’s like knowing when the movement of the brush needs to stop or when it needs to go left. That’s not an intellectual process. That is soul. That is direct contact with the muses.”
Before lang had left Edmonton, Lee went there for an engagement. The young singer was “totally broke,” but determined to meet her. Learning the name of Lee’s hotel, she showed up, hoping to get Latin ala Lee! signed. “I just hung out all day like some sort of weird stalker, waiting for her to walk past. And she did.” Lee didn’t have much time for her; but lang, undaunted, went to the lobby of the theater where Lee was singing and waited night after night, hoping to get inside. “Finally the manager felt so sorry for me he let me in.”
Less than a decade later, lang was seated in Lee’s bedroom in Bel Air. “Miss Lee loved k.d. lang’s singing,” said Jane David, and the star gave her a royal welcome. “She whipped out all her special satin,” David recalled. “The bed was all made.” The young star was “not dressed for the occasion,” David said, and Lee momentarily froze; with her old-Hollywood vision of femininity, she could never have appreciated a woman whose androgynous look sometimes got her mistaken for a man. But lang’s sincere awe won her over. Lunch was rolled in on a cart by Robert Paul, the bearded, handsome youth who had come aboard as her right-hand man. There in bed, Lee tossed a salad for two, then morphed into the Peggy Lee that lang had always hoped to find. After lunch, lang kicked off her boots and crawled up on the bed with Lee, who took out a small electric keyboard. The women talked music and “far-out subjects,” said Lee, like “philosophy and metaphysics, which I’ve studied for about forty years.”
Lee had a far more prickly rapport with Mel Tormé, even after nearly a half-century of acquaintance. But with so few singers of their ilk left, they had agreed to their first of three autumnal pairings. On July 17 and 18, 1992, Tormé and Lee appeared at the Hollywood Bowl as fellow guests of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. As ever, they were oil and water. Lee’s badges were small-scale nuance, interpretive mystery, and heart; Tormé was a vocal exhibitionist intent upon creamy perfection of tone and daredevil gymnastics.
Mike Renzi, who played for both, observed “a lot of phony friendliness” between them. But as fellow singer-songwriters and survivors of a fading genre, they were rivals. Their clash of egos didn’t surprise Ellie Fuerst, who had known them for decades. “Mel Tormé was a very, very difficult person,” said Ellie, the wife of George Shearing’s early manager, Ed Fuerst. “Mel was so multitalented, but anger and spitefulness penetrated everything he did. He was a man who wanted and needed all the attention, and he did some very mean-spirited things to see that he got it.”
Tormé made sure that in all their shared concerts, Peggy Lee would open for him. In his set at the Bowl he appropriated two of her trademarks, “Why Don’t You Do Right?” and “When the World Was Young.” At sixty-six he remained in peak vocal form, but Lee got a far more emotional response; and at the close of her set, the audience of eleven thousand stood up. Comic actor Jay Mohr was there. After Lee had left the stage, he recalled, “The Hollywood Bowl emptied to about half-full. Her crowd wanted no part of Mel.” During his set, said Mohr, Tormé “really goofed off.” At the end, he thanked the remaining viewers for “this wonderful sitting ovation.”
Lee returned for three duets with Tormé. Her critic friend Leonard Feather stayed faithfully in her corner. In the Los Angeles Times, Feather wrote: “She was able to walk onstage and sit down to offer glowing evidence that the Lee timbre, the Lee phrasing and the Lee sensitivity are undiminished.”
From then on, though, she had few chances to display them. Lee rang in 1993 with a show at the Beverly Hilton hotel; that year she played the Concord Pavilion in Concord, California, and Ruth Eckard Hall in Clearwater, Florida. Critics and loyal fans were never less than enthralled. But often during intermission, her granddaughter overheard “hurtful things” in the aisles or the ladies’ room. “Women in particular were brutal about her appearance,” Holly said.
It was safer for Lee to linger in bed and sing to Baby, her cat. “What she really needed was a girlfriend,” said Jane David. “She had alienated so many people over the years.” As before, the bedroom TV provided steady company. Whenever a violent show or news report came on, Lee joked to David: “As long as it stays in the TV set we’ll be OK.”
The women spent hours doting on Baby, the second queen of the household. David groomed the purring cat with a silver brush and comb, and she and Lee would polish Baby’s jewelry. The cat lapped water from a silver-and-crystal bowl; in the morning, Lee would feed her bits of bagel and lox from the breakfast tray.
On rare occasions, David coaxed Lee out into the world. José Prado would drive the women into Beverly Hills, where Lee shopped
or went to the dentist. Wheelchair-bound, with Baby in her lap, Lee ran into acquaintances and fans. Frequently, David’s heart sank. “People would stop her and say, ‘What happened to you?’ People don’t want to see an aging star. That’s why she pretty much stayed in the house.”
Holidays were still honored in the Lee home. Before her Easter dinner parties, she would send David out to buy rabbit ears and bonnets for the guests. In December, Lee dispatched David to Neiman Marcus with an extravagant holiday shopping list. One year, although she could ill afford it, each recipient got cashmere.
As Lee faded from the public eye, she grew more and more depressed. Requests for signed photos and fan letters poured in; Lee answered them all. But some of the mail, she confessed, “makes me want to weep, because they think I’ve retired already.” David tried to cheer her by playing videos of her old TV appearances; she kept the conversation focused “on her successes, on the good things. When she got press, any kind of clipping, I’d lay it out.” But Lee felt herself disappearing, and she continued to voice her longtime plea: “Don’t let people forget me.”
On May 11, 1994, she saw overwhelming proof that they hadn’t. An organization called the Society of Singers had taken up the cause of vocalists in financial need. Cofounded by former singer Ginny Mancini, the wife of Henry Mancini, SOS raised much of its funding through gala tribute shows in honor of various singing legends. In 1989, the group’s “Ella” award had gone to the star for whom it was named. The next year, Lee sang at a seventy-fifth-birthday salute to Frank Sinatra. Handsome Hollywood baritone Tony Martin had won the Ella in 1992. Now it was Lee’s turn.
George Schlatter, former general manager of Ciro’s who had graduated to TV producing—The Judy Garland Show and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In ranked high on his résumé—set out to give this siren of his youth the celebration of a lifetime. All would gather at the sumptuous International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills. Lee set out to look as glamorous as she possibly could. With David’s help, she slipped into a voluminous, robe-style white satin gown trimmed with mounds of fluffy white fur. On went her dark sunglasses, big dangling earrings, a glittery necklace, a bracelet of colorful stones, and several rings, which drew the eye to her talon-length, peach-painted nails. Lee painted on her biggest, reddest lips ever. She wore her own hair, parted in the middle and tied in a short chignon. Out of it stuck a Peggy Lee rose.
Lee was due at the Beverly Hilton in the late afternoon for the preshow reception and photo shoot. A limousine waited in the driveway outside her door. Robert Paul helped Lee out of her wheelchair and into the backseat, where she sat with Baby and Jane David. The car took off.
No one anticipated the comic turn of bad luck that happened next. The limo stalled on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, which bordered Beverly Hills. Her driver quickly ordered a replacement, but Lee couldn’t wait. She ordered Paul to push her in her wheelchair to the Beverly Hilton—two miles away. No one could dissuade her. While David waited in the limo, Paul rolled Lee for blocks. Finally they managed to hail a cab, and at last the guest of honor arrived at the hotel in her movable throne.
Paul moved her to a central spot in the jam-packed reception room. All over it were tuxedo-clad older men and surgically altered, senior Beverly Hills glamour girls, swathed in fussy sequined or beaded creations and fresh from the hairdresser’s. The celebrity guest list was like an episode of The Hollywood Palace come to life: Tony Martin and his wife, dancer Cyd Charisse; 1960s TV stars Connie Stevens (77 Sunset Strip) and Hugh O’Brian (The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp); comic Jack Carter, an Ed Sullivan regular; campy Latin bombshell Abbe Lane. But Lee was the snowy-white center of attention. As guests stood in line to congratulate her and flashbulbs popped, she basked in their loving praise. “This is incredible!” she exclaimed. “It’s like a movie of my life.”
Just before showtime, the star and her entourage were placed at a long center table strewn with pink roses. Lights dimmed, and the festivities began—a cavalcade of spoken tributes, archival footage, songs from a huge choir and a parade of pop and jazz luminaries. Ruth Brown, the R&B pioneer known as “Miss Rhythm,” sang “Fever” in the Little Willie John style; Rosemary Clooney recalled Latin ala Lee! with “Heart,” backed by a quartet of tuxedoed men chiming, “corazón!” Joe Williams, the singer whom Count Basie had called his “Number-One Son,” spoke of his youthful thrill at hearing Lee’s early Capitol single, “What More Can a Woman Do?,” in a black record store in Chicago. Jack Jones reprised his 1966 cover of “The Shining Sea”; Natalie Cole upped the funkiness of “I’m a Woman.” k.d. lang told of how she had tried, to no avail, to copy Lee’s phrasing. Then she sang “Black Coffee” and one of her favorite tunes from Latin ala Lee!, Cole Porter’s “I Am in Love,” as no one but she could.
Lee had nixed an appearance by Jim Bailey, whose 1970s impersonation of her was too close for comfort. But Cleo Laine, Johnny Mathis, Beatrice Arthur, and the Manhattan Transfer all met her approval, as did the 1950s Hollywood beauty turned cosmetics mogul, singer-actress Polly Bergen. The crowd cheered when Bergen chided Disney for having tried to deny Lee “what she truly deserved for her contribution to one of their major hits.” Lee’s triumph, Bergen added, “opened the door for all artists whose work hasn’t been properly acknowledged and compensated.” She peered into the audience in mock search of Disney’s top brass: “Are you here, Jeffrey? Michael? I live in Montana. To hell with them.”
After ninety minutes of salutes, a spotlight sought out Peggy Lee. Everyone turned in her direction and joined in a standing ovation. Once the clamor died down, she spoke. The audience hung on her every slow, measured word. “It’s been said by many great philosophers that love is the greatest force in the universe. And I think I’ve felt and heard more love here in this room tonight, and I . . . I know that that is the shining truth.” Lee talked empathetically of how “really rough” a singer’s life could be, then saluted SOS for stepping in to help—“quietly and with dignity. I don’t think I’d better say much more, or I’ll cry. I’ll try singing.”
A night of full-throttle vocalizing and effusive testimonials closed with the sparest, most leisurely, intimate, but heartfelt statement of them all: Lee’s version of George and Ira Gershwin’s “ ’S Wonderful” (“ ’s marvelous, you should care for me . . .”) set to a languid bossa nova beat by Mike Renzi. Lee hadn’t lost the rhythm that had enchanted musicians for over fifty years. A recording found its way to São Paulo, Brazil, and into the hands of author and former bassist Zuza Homem de Mello, the country’s most widely regarded expert on popular music. In Lee’s singing he found the leveza (lilt) that had defined the bossa nova. He marveled at “the ease with which Peggy Lee floats above the beat, independent of it,” with an “irresistible rhythmic movement” to guide her along.
Clearly, there was still life left in Peggy Lee. The day after the tribute, her phone rang almost nonstop with congratulations on how beautiful she had looked and sounded. But once the messages died down, Lee had little more to look forward to. Holiday time remained a special ritual. The singer lay in bed creating an elaborate Christmas Day menu, which Jane David had printed for guests as they arrived. The staff ordered a white pine tree for the living room; José Prado decorated it with balloons and strings of white bulbs. “Then we’d make a baby one for the bedroom,” said David—a twinkly beacon of whiteness for Lee to stare at from her bed like a child on Christmas Eve.
The New Year brought her several milestones. On March 1, 1995, the National Academy of Recorded Arts and Sciences (NARAS) gave Lee a Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Lee had earned twelve nominations, but won only once, for “Is That All There Is?” Now she sat in her wheelchair amid the audience at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. as she received her trophy. Later she watched the singer whose name alone made her cringe—Barbra Streisand, twenty-two years her junior—accept her own Lifetime Achievement award onstage, presented by Stephen Sondheim.
June 23 reunited L
ee with one more inescapable nemesis. For the first time in her career, jazz impresario George Wein had booked her to play his legendary summer series—first known as the Newport Jazz Festival, now called the JVC Jazz Festival. At seventy-five, Lee would sing at Carnegie Hall, the stage of her dreams since 1938, when she read about her then-hero Benny Goodman’s spectacular debut there. The bad news: Lee would again open for Mel Tormé.
In an obvious gesture of one-upmanship, she decided to hold an “intimate press reception” on the day before the show to announce her Carnegie Hall concert. To organize it, she hired Chen Sam, Elizabeth Taylor’s press agent. Lee would greet the media in a large conference room at Le Parker Meridien, the hotel where she was staying, down the block from Carnegie Hall.
Well before the three PM starting time, a table outside the conference room was arrayed with tall coffee urns, stacks of cups, and dozens of nametags for the invited journalists. At 2:55, the objects remained nearly untouched. Lee hadn’t anticipated such intimacy: only five journalists were inside, waiting in the front row of folding chairs. A very nervous Sam and her assistants stood in the back; Phoebe Jacobs paced around, expecting a storm.
Sam held off as long as she could, but when no further press arrived, Lee was wheeled out by her longtime friend and former flame, producer William Harbach. She had dressed with ladylike care in a black satin dress and matching cap. Lee made light of the mortifying moment: “Do you think they all got stuck in the elevator?”
For the next half-hour, that handful of writers saw the many sides of Peggy Lee: charming, quick-witted, resilient, revisionist, and, between the lines, clearly angry. Lee told jokes, reminisced, and fielded questions. Several concerned her long-standing association with Tormé. Lee damned him with faint praise: “Mel has really come a long way in developing his voice,” she said, smiling. Someone asked how she was doing. “I’ve been feeling fine,” Lee answered cheerfully, “but my body’s been quite broken. I spent about two and a half or three years in bed mending.” Soon, she said, she would resume her unfinished book about her Disney experiences—a perfect response to Disney’s new hit film, Pocahontas. “There he goes again, Mr. Eisner,” said Lee. “They really got it from ‘Fever.’ But I wish him all the best with it. I was madly in love with Hiawatha, so I don’t know how I feel about Pocahontas.”
