by James Gavin
The conference ended, and Harbach rolled Lee to the elevator. Chen Sam and Phoebe Jacobs were quickly summoned to Lee’s suite. Jacobs’s prediction came true: “Peggy hit the ceiling.”
The next day, as she prepared for the show, fear replaced her ire. “She was worried about how people would accept her,” said Jacobs. “She was worried if she could make it vocally. She was afraid that she was a has-been.” Her costar offered no comfort. Lee passed him in the Carnegie Hall stage entrance as Robert Paul wheeled her into the elevator. Tormé frowned and asked: “You’re not gonna be in that when you’re performing, are you?”
The New York audience didn’t know what to expect, either. They hadn’t seen her onstage since 1992, and Lee’s health had been shaky then. Tension was high as Stan Martin, a DJ from the Manhattan-based nostalgia radio station WQEW stepped out to introduce her. Once he had spoken the line that made her fans’ hair stand up—“Ladies and gentlemen, Miss PEGGY LEE!”—Lee appeared from out of the left wing, on foot and holding tight onto Mike Renzi’s arm. A roar erupted from the crowd of twenty-eight hundred, and it continued as Renzi led the star, tiny step by step, to a red swivel chair in front of her quintet. “One didn’t know quite what to make of the lush, creamy pink apparition,” wrote Gene Seymour of Newsday. “It seemed so fragile that one was almost afraid that the thunderous applause greeting its appearance would shatter it into a million crystalline pieces.”
She purred the first words of “I Love Being Here with You,” and relief swept through the house: Lee could still sing. “WE LOVE YOU, PEGGY!” shouted a fan. Lee called out: “I love you too! I missed you more than I thought I did!”
At times during the next hour, tempos grew so slow and the atmosphere so eerily still that the show felt like a séance. Attention stayed rapt, as though everyone, including the star, was trying to envision the Peggy Lees of the past. “That Old Feeling” reached back to 1944, when Lee was a gorgeous newlywed with an infant in a crib and a guitar-playing husband she thought was hers forever. “Mr. Wonderful,” her 1956 hit, brought to mind the Lee of that time, with her gun-moll toughness and yearning eyes. She offered “Fly Me to the Moon” in memory of the first place she had sung it, Basin Street East, the mention of which set off a wave of applause. The woman whom Duke Ellington had deemed an authentic blues singer proved it in Lead Belly’s “You Don’t Know.” Most of the audience had never heard her raise her voice; on this night she showed them she could, as she belted at the lover who had jilted her: “The flame that you left is still burnin’ / Burnin’ down deep in my soul!”
Lee had wished for years that she could leave out “Is That All There Is?”; tonight, at last, she did, along with “I’m a Woman.” But Leiber and Stoller got their due in “Some Cats Know” from Mirrors, the album that now stood as a monument to Lee’s courage.
She didn’t omit “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” In 1957, when Lee had first recorded it, she still dreamed that she, too, might walk into eternity with the love of her life. She got the house, but she was there alone as she faced the end. For Sidney Myer, who had seen her shows for twenty-five years, the impact of this one hit him in a single riveting second. It followed the line, “And when the kids grow up and leave us”—lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II’s signal of freedom for the aging couple. “She stopped, and slumped back in the chair,” said Myer. “And it looked like she was experiencing what she was singing about. It was like letting go. Desertion. Defeat.”
Her allotted time was almost through. “I have to leave very quickly,” Lee noted. “Mr. Tormé is coming out here.” By way of farewell, she looked into the great beyond with “Circle in the Sky.” It led into “I’ll Be Seeing You,” which had never seemed more final. As a standing ovation thundered, Renzi walked Lee off of the last New York stage she would ever inhabit.
Minutes later, an emotional Phoebe Jacobs spoke to a journalist in the lobby. “You will never know what it took to get her up there,” she revealed.
Reviews treated her as the headliner. In the Times, Stephen Holden wrote that Lee remained “a master of the small gesture that has earthshaking implications.” Her ballads, he said, “had the sad and disturbing quality of someone trying to remember an elusive dream.”
For weeks to come, Robert Richards, who had seen Lee’s show, kept running into performers who were her grandchildren’s age, and had experienced her for the first time on June 23. “They said, ‘No wonder she’s so legendary! Oh, she was so great!’ ”
August 2 found Lee at the Hollywood Bowl, this time on a triple bill with Tormé and the George Shearing Quintet. Shearing, who opened, had resented Lee ever since 1959, when the two had clashed while recording their album Beauty and the Beat! Backstage before the Bowl show, Lee sent a note to Shearing’s dressing room, asking him if he and his group might consider joining her for a song. The pianist read it and fumed for all to hear at the mere suggestion that he would consider such a thing. At the rehearsal, said Stella Castellucci, Tormé and Shearing “completely ignored her. She was very hurt.”
Prior to her entrance, Emilio Palame, her pianist that night, had never seen Lee more afraid. “She cared so much about what people thought of her. Every gig was, ‘Do you love me?’ She wanted that feeling all the time. She was an artist. And she took it really seriously. She wanted people to know how much it meant to her. She wanted to connect with them. To have them feel what she felt.”
Seated and obviously infirm, she began her set with a wink by reviving “I’ve Got Them Feelin’ Too Good Today Blues” from Mirrors. But nerves, and the cavernous Bowl, seemed to swallow her up. Warm but restrained applause followed every song. On came Tormé, primed to kill. He opened with “You Make Me Feel So Young”—“which no doubt he did in Lee’s pink and teary wake,” wrote Tony Gieske in the Hollywood Reporter. As with their other shows, however, swarms of people left after Lee’s segment, and the receiving line backstage was “endless,” Castellucci recalled. Lee stayed for nearly two hours, greeting everyone. She left in a somber mood. “Maybe she knew it was her last time,” said Castellucci.
On August 26, the harpist accompanied her to Group IV Studios in Hollywood, where Lee made her last recording. It was a single track on Benny Carter Songbook, an anthology of tunes written by the great tenor saxophonist and arranger. Lee and Carter had been friends and collaborators since the 1940s. And although the song assigned to her, “I See You,” was weak, she couldn’t refuse him. With the eighty-eight-year-old playing behind her, and Lee in weary but controlled voice, one of her fondest musical teamings had its last hurrah.
Lee looked forward to appearing on Tony Bennett’s Concert of Hope, an all-star CBS special to be taped on October 16 at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles. It would benefit the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. As the day approached, Lee hadn’t the strength to sing, but she did attend. On December 7, she went to the Society of Singers tribute to Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. From her wheelchair, she feebly sang “I’m Glad There Is You.” It was her last public performance.
Her friend Frank Sinatra had grown just as frail; for years he had needed teleprompters to get through his shows. But on July 11, 1996, Lee honored an invitation from Sinatra and went to Malibu, where he and his wife Barbara were celebrating their twentieth anniversary by renewing their vows. Getting Lee out of bed, dressed, made up, and in her wheelchair was an ordeal for Jane David; they arrived at the Our Lady of Malibu Catholic church well after the ceremony had begun. At the end, as he made his way down the aisle with his wife, Sinatra spotted Lee in the back. He rushed over to give her a hug. His concern meant more to her than almost anyone’s, and Lee left the reception elated.
Sinatra had sung for the last time over a year earlier. But Lee still had hope. “I intend to sing again, God willing,” she told Ray Rogers of Interview. “Once in a while I just try it out to see if it’s still there—and it is.” She told David of her dream to do a farewell tour, including Europe. “But first,” Lee said, �
�I need to find out what’s going on with my heart.” She mentioned her diabetes, too, as well as the mysterious polymyelitis, “which is terrible, like having arthritis all over your body.”
Medical scares occasionally sent Lee to the hospital, but she didn’t want any ambulances pulling up to the house in view of the neighbors. She insisted that David drive her. “On the way, she’s telling me, ‘Take the back roads!’ I said, ‘Miss Lee, no one would ever believe that it’s you in my Honda!’ All she could think of was bad publicity. Just to make her feel better I took the side roads.”
Yet the next glimpse she gave of herself was a sad one. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were basking in the success of a Broadway jukebox musical of their songs, Smokey Joe’s Café. Gene Davis, a documentary filmmaker, fêted them in Baby, That’s Rock and Roll: The Story of Leiber and Stoller, which aired on the Bravo cable channel. Lee agreed to an on-camera interview. A crew arrived at her home on February 25, 1997. It included a stylist who, at Davis’s behest, gave Lee a more natural look. She wore her own hair, which hung straight down, along with a peach blouse and pearls. Remarkably, a glimmer of the young Peggy Lee shone through. But she seemed in pain, and the few remarks Davis could glean from her revealed a mind that had begun to drift. “In the case of ‘I’m a Woman,’ ” she said, “I didn’t write that as a political . . .” Silence. “I didn’t write that, come to think of it. Uh . . . Leiber and Stoller did.”
One last outing awaited her. On May 20, 1998, David took Lee to the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills for the funeral of Frank Sinatra. The hard-living star had died of complications from heart and kidney disease, bladder cancer, and dementia, but he had made it to eighty-two. The seven hundred guests included various stars who had worked with Lee in better days: Joey Bishop, Tony Bennett, Anthony Quinn, Steve Lawrence, Don Rickles.
Sinatra’s passing gave Lee one more reminder of her own mortality. The time had come for some honest self-reflection, notably with regard to her ill health. “I did it to myself,” she admitted. In the fall of 1998, Lee shocked her daughter by telling her that she didn’t think she would ever sing again. “I never thought I would hear those words,” said Nicki. Lee had always attended lovingly to fan mail and requests for signed pictures, but arthritis had caught up with her; now her tiny penmanship and familiar inscription—“With love, Peggy Lee”—looked too shaky for public viewing.
Lee’s most faithful confidante was Kathy Levy, her longtime hairdresser. Levy now worked as a Beverly Hills realtor, but made ample time to sit at her friend’s bedside. The two women reminisced of a sweeter past. Lee reflected: “What is it that happens, that suddenly you just turn around and it’s gone? Was that a time pocket, a time warp? It just went, zoop, and everything is different.”
In late October, Levy noticed some alarming changes in her friend. The right side of Lee’s face looked stiff; she wasn’t speaking much, and what she did say sounded slurred. “I’m having problems with my words,” said Lee. The next night, Levy noticed that her friend’s mouth was drooping. A night later, her face looked purplish. A private nurse was on duty; Levy warned her—to no avail—that something seemed wrong.
The Peggy Lee Marionettes, together in Bel Air. (PHOTO BY JANE DAVID)
On the morning of October 27, Holly Foster phoned Levy at her office. Peggy Lee was in the hospital. Sometime in the night, the seventy-eight-year-old had suffered a stroke. Levy rushed to St. John’s. She found Holly, her husband Dan, and Jane David at Lee’s bedside. The star lay unconscious. Levy took Lee’s hand. Slowly, the singer’s eyes opened. She stared at Levy, then murmured: “Did I take care of you?”
“It doesn’t matter! Take care of you!”
Lee spent the next four weeks in intensive care. Nicki and Phoebe Jacobs had flown in, but Lee didn’t seem to recognize either of them, nor could she articulate words or swallow. The singer had suffered severe left-brain damage; no one knew to what degree, if any, she would recover. But at least she had survived. By January 1999, Lee still couldn’t speak coherently, but she was stable enough to go home.
From now on, the daughter who had felt so disempowered would be in charge. After the stroke, Nicki had left Idaho and moved into one of her mother’s upstairs bedrooms. “Nicki changed her attitude about her mother a lot during that time,” said Levy. As concerned calls, cards, and gifts flooded in, Nicki, said Levy, “was just so amazed by how many people loved her mother”; she even talked about “how sweet she’d been to her.”
A rigorous and costly program was set in place to revive Lee. It included physical, speech, and occupational therapists and five rotating, round-the-clock nurses. There were encouraging signs. One day in January, Nicki walked into the master bedroom to find her mother singing. “Didn’t necessarily make sense but it sounded great,” she said. Lee could clutch a visitor’s hand tightly and make eye contact; she seemed to understand what people were saying. Every now and then a clearly voiced, if hallucinatory, thought came out of her mouth. “Virginia would say, ‘Oh, my God, she’s on the bus with Benny Goodman,’ ” recalled Jane David. “Then she’d talk about eating, like, ‘I’ll have one egg and a muffin.’ ” Then Lee would revert to babbling. “She had different words, a different language,” said Kathy Levy. “But she was in quite a good mood about it.” In March came an unmistakable sign of the Lee that Levy knew. For days the singer had been almost comatose. Levy was there when her friend suddenly came to. Lee glared at the ceiling and asked imperiously: “Who picked this color?”
For the next year and a half, her condition seesawed dramatically. There were many hospitalizations. In July, an MRI indicated that her brain was healing, but a month later she could barely communicate. Soon thereafter, she got a pacemaker. By December, pneumonia had set in. Still she rallied.
However dire her health became, Lee’s living will had made one thing clear: any and all “heroic methods” of resuscitation were to be used to keep her alive. Lee hadn’t seemed to realize, or care, that such methods might leave her a vegetable, or in chronic, excruciating pain. Certainly she didn’t care what it might cost her or her family. The promises of Christ-like immortality in her favorite book, Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood, had to come true for her.
Back and forth she went from home to St. John’s. Pets were banned there, but Jane David was sure that Lee missed Baby terribly. David began smuggling in the cat, using a wicker carrier. One night Baby scampered out of Lee’s room and ran into another, “and just sat there with her big eyes. The next thing you know I’m evicted, never to come back.” Undeterred, David came back the next day, Baby in hidden tow. A sympathetic doctor was in Lee’s room. David boldly sat the carrier on the bed and opened the door. Out walked Baby, who immediately nuzzled up to Lee. The singer, who hadn’t spoken coherently in some time, suddenly exclaimed: “That’s my friend!” From then on, Baby was an authorized guest.
Each time Lee returned home, a little less of her remained. Certainly she was in no shape to fly to New York, where on June 9, 1999, she—along with Bruce Springsteen, Broadway and movie lyricist Tim Rice, “Fly Me to the Moon” composer Bart Howard, and (posthumously) Bobby Darin—would be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Nicki collected the award for her.
Lou Levy was in his own dire straits, but typically he found humor in them. The pianist had undergone surgery for a brain tumor and survived, although not for long. In 2001, he collapsed and died in the kitchen of Max Bennett, his and Lee’s longtime bass player. In his final days, Levy wrote his former boss a letter: “Dear Peggy, at last we are on the same level. I want a raise.” Kathy Levy brought him over for a visit; she was pleased to hear the singer laughing in response to his jokes—proof that she understood more than she seemed to.
Otherwise, silence and emptiness now filled 11404 Bellagio Road. “It’s very strange, like being in a dream,” said Kathy at the time.
Further changes were afoot. As so often happens with ailing stars of financial means—or with the p
romise of wealth to come—and no more ability to speak for themselves, a power struggle had erupted within Lee’s inner circle. Certain longtime members found themselves removed. A few months after the stroke, Lee’s attorney, Cy Godfrey, and Jon Hanson, the banker who served as her trustee and financial manager, fired Jane David. Given Lee’s condition, Jane was ostensibly no longer needed. But the true reason for her release, she thought, was her outspokenness about Lee’s care.
Kathy Levy looked with increasing dismay at the goings-on in the house. She detailed them in a letter to Godfrey. Levy mentioned the nurse who had ignored her warnings about the apparent danger signs prior to Lee’s stroke. Another of Lee’s nurses should have noticed them; now she denied responsibility. The emergency-room doctor, Levy claimed, had reported some disturbing news: Lee’s stroke had begun at least eight hours before she reached the hospital.
After the stroke, continued Levy, she had complained to Hanson, but the nurses were still there. Nicki had been smoking with one of them in her bedroom—“which Peggy never has allowed in her home.” Levy wrote of Nicki’s barking dog and of visits by Chileta, Dave Barbour’s final partner, whom Lee had never allowed there. The singer, semiconscious in a hospital bed, “gets nervous and keeps asking, who’s that?” But Hanson saw no wrongdoing, Levy said, and insisted that Lee was at peace. That letter, and a follow-up a week later, got Levy temporarily banned from the house.
