by James Gavin
She wasn’t welcome at St. John’s, either. Her barely lucid friend lived there as grandly as she had at the Waldorf Towers. Lee occupied an executive suite with a bedroom, a waiting area, private nurses, and a full-time guard. The costs—approved by her representatives—were draining Lee’s already parched resources. One day Levy barged in and sailed past the guard, who tried to eject her. “I’m not leaving,” she said, while moving to the opposite side of the bed. “Peggy was starting to laugh,” recalled Levy, “because she knew damned well I wasn’t leaving.” A nurse finally said, “She’s okay,” and waved the guard away.
“Where . . . where have you . . . been?” stammered Lee.
“I’m here now,” Levy said.
But nothing could halt Lee’s deterioration. By February she had begun having seizures. A month later, she seemed barely cognizant. “She seems peaceful, off somewhere,” observed Levy.
Lee was home on March 26, 2000, her eightieth birthday. Nicki had organized a party, complete with cocktails and a buffet, and invited Lee’s closest friends and family members. Stella Castellucci played harp, adding a celestial air to this celebration of a woman who was evanescing more each day. Lee had been brought out in her wheelchair; a line of people waited with pasted-on smiles, ready to offer strained congratulations. Lee could only mumble in response, except for one phrase that Nicki overheard and repeated to Castellucci: “I don’t want this.”
Months passed, and a woman who seemed on the brink of death hung on. So many times she had defied expectations and rebounded from doom; several friends insisted that Lee would outlive them all. “Oh, she’s gonna get out of that bed,” declared Virginia Bernard. Levy wishfully agreed: “She’s gonna get well, and she’ll come in here and kick our asses like she always does.” Lee Ringuette came to visit, and marveled how healthy his aunt looked: “She had a little makeup on. The stroke and its attendant problems had caused her to lose weight. Her diabetes had gone away.”
Much of the time Lee lay with her eyes closed, but she sometimes responded to visitors. “She hugged me,” said Dona Harsh, who came to visit with their friend Jeanne Hazard, wife of Lee’s arranger Dick Hazard. “She smiled, and seemed happy. Her hair, which had been bleached all those years, was now brown, and it didn’t have one gray hair in it.” Then Dick arrived. “The minute that a man walked in she came to life,” said Harsh. “She absolutely loved men.”
According to Ringuette, Lee finally lapsed into a coma. The singer missed hearing a piece of news she would have liked. In 1999, Cy Godfrey had filed a class-action suit against the Universal Music Group, which owned the Decca Records catalog. Godfrey had charged Universal with underpayment of CD-reissue royalties to Lee and 160 other artists of her era, or to their estates. He set the damages at $4.75 million. On January 14, 2002, a judge issued a preliminary ruling (later confirmed) against Universal. The win would bring some much-needed income to Lee’s family; her long-term medical bills and spendthrift lifestyle had nearly crippled her financially. According to Bernard, the singer’s Screen Actors Guild insurance coverage had finally run out, and she owed an enormous sum to St. John’s.
As Godfrey later told a reporter, he preferred to believe that somehow Lee knew of this latest David and Goliath victory, and could at last let go. The doctors at St. John’s sent Lee home; they could do nothing more to help her. On Monday, January 21, Lee was back in the bedroom where she had long felt safest. Nicki, her three children, Bernard, and José were there. Around ten in the evening, Holly called Kathy Levy and told her to get to the house as quickly as possible. Levy jumped in her car and raced through the Hollywood Hills. As she hurried through the front door of 11404 Bellagio Road, she passed Nicki, who said, “I have to warn—” Levy ignored her and raced into the bedroom. She’d arrived too late. Just moments before, Peggy Lee had died of a myocardial infarction—a heart attack.
“I touched her,” said Levy. “She was still warm. I just stood there and said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for everything.” Levy held her friend’s hand until it turned cold.
Epilogue
LEE’S MEMORIAL TOOK place on Saturday afternoon, February 2, at the luxurious Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. The scenic West Los Angeles neighborhood was known for its multimillion-dollar homes, movie-star residents, and views of the Santa Monica Mountains. Nicki, who arranged the event, had spared no expense; this was “Peggy Lee’s last party,” as the Los Angeles Times called it. A reported 450-plus guests filled several large rooms; they milled around tables of rich food and sweets. “There were roses on every flat surface,” wrote the Times. “White-coated waiters passed hors d’oeuvres to guests who wore diamonds and furs.”
All over the Riviera were luminaries from the golden age of supper clubs and TV variety shows—Kay Starr, Steve Lawrence, Andy Williams, Jack Jones, Nancy Sinatra, Buddy Greco, Dolores (Mrs. Bob) Hope—and a few contemporary figures, such as k.d. lang. Lee’s hit songs filled the air, played by two bands stocked with her pet jazzmen: Frank Capp, Max Bennett, John Pisano, Emilio Palame, John Chiodini. Ninety-four-year-old Benny Carter braved the crowds; so did Billy May, then eighty-five. Scores of Lee’s friends and employees, including Brian Panella, Robert Strom, Virginia Bernard, and José Prado, reunited for one last time.
The ceremony began. After some sugar-dusted sounds from harpist Corky Hale—who had played at Lee’s 1953 wedding to Brad Dexter, and later married Mike Stoller—Reverend Mark Vierra of the North Hollywood Church of Religious Science took over. He recalled the Ernest Holmes philosophies by which Lee had tried to live—that God and the Kingdom of Heaven were within everyone, and that the power of the mind could control all.
There were tasteful reminiscences by Cy Coleman, Johnny Mandel, Leiber and Stoller, Nicki, and the grandchildren; and sassier ones by Phoebe Jacobs. Wearing a pair of Lee’s tinted glasses and one of her hats, she drummed up knowing laughs when she said: “When she was good, she was very good, but when she was bad . . .” As a finale, Lorraine Feather, the jazz-singing daughter of Leonard Feather, sang the star’s sentimental closers, “Circle in the Sky” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
The next day it was back to cold reality, as Lee’s family and business associates faced the task of sorting out her messy finances. Jon Hanson had been appointed executor of the will. For all her sincere desire to leave a secure future for Nicki and the three grandchildren, Lee’s insistence on living like a star had brought more headaches than riches.
Profits from the sale of her “home on a hilltop high” in pricey Bel Air had proven disappointing; an unchecked problem with mold had caused structural damage that sank the value. On August 29, 2003, Lee’s house was sold for $1.8 million, and later demolished. Further downsizing occurred when Cy Godfrey and Jon Hanson were released from the family employ. Nicki Lee Foster returned to Idaho. Despite serious illness, she turned seventy in 2013. Holly Foster-Welles took on the job of running Peggy Lee Productions from her home in Los Angeles, and doing her best to maximize her grandmother’s legacy.
* * *
DESPITE HER FEARS, THERE was no immediate danger of the world forgetting Peggy Lee. In Pulse magazine, Justin Green, a cartoonist known for his cheeky comic-strip recountings of famous lives, sketched out the panoramic journey of the star whose “Fever,” he wrote, was “one of the greatest torch songs/mating calls ever recorded.” He reached a conclusion that Lee would have liked: “While other singers might be emblematic of fads and brief epochs, the greater part of the twentieth century belongs to Miss Peggy Lee.”
In the twenty-first century, when commercial pop is overrun by a fleet of Auto-tuned robots, lip-syncing onstage to prerecorded vocals and camouflaged by smoke and mirrors, the achievement of Lee—who sang unaided by anything except musicians, lighting, and a microphone, and who exposed her heart at every show—seems even grander in its humanity.
Jazz singers revere Lee unanimously. “I love everything about her; her elegance, her wit,” said Diana Krall. “She is one of th
e greatest influences in what I do as an artist.” But her impact has proven far more pervasive than that. Since her death, Lee’s voice has turned up on the soundtracks of numerous TV shows (Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Las Vegas, Cold Case, Bones, The O.C., Chuck, Doctors) and films (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the 2005 remake of King Kong, Savages, Gangster Squad). It adds film noir intrigue to any scene, even with a song as bright as “It’s a Good Day.”
“Fever” and “Is That All There Is?” have surpassed nostalgia to take on a deathless mystique. Covering either song is risky, but many singers have tried. In 1980, Cristina Monet, a French-American New Wave songstress, joined with Kid Creole and the Coconuts to belligerently deconstruct “Is That All There Is?” in punk style. To a soundtrack of breaking glass, a police whistle, and a cuckoo clock gone berserk, Cristina yowled: “I remember when I was a little girl, my mother set the house on fire. She was like that . . . And then I met the most wonderful boy in Manhattan. We’d take long walks down by the river, and he’d beat me black and blue and I loved it!”
Leiber and Stoller were not amused. They had this “atrocity” yanked from the market, which only enhanced its cult appeal. “It wasn’t a parody; I was quite serious,” Cristina told Jeff McLaughlin of the Boston Globe. “The lyrics per se I thought could legitimately be made a springboard for an expression of a 1980s sensibility.” Her version, like another by the arty British singer-songwriter P. J. Harvey, pushed the song’s nihilism to the darkest limits. Harvey’s “Is That All There Is?,” made in 1996, had a dragging, drugged-out beat and a funereal organ. If Lee had sounded shell-shocked but still yearning, Harvey was the numbest of fatalists, without enough spark left to break out the booze and have a ball.
That certainly wasn’t so for Bette Midler. In 2005, the star paid whimsical and heartfelt tribute to Lee on the CD Bette Midler Sings the Peggy Lee Songbook, produced by Barry Manilow, her accompanist in the early 1970s. Midler, too, tried her hand at “Is That All There Is?,” as did Tony Bennett and Chaka Khan. But no one who sang it could match Lee’s mystery. The same held true for “Fever,” which a profusion of artists have covered. In the first of two versions, Beyoncé aped the barebones bass playing and finger-snapping, but larded her vocal with as much melisma as anything on American Idol. Later the statuesque diva remade “Fever” in a Lee-inspired husky whisper.
She used that track to promote her fragrance, Heat. A video showed Beyoncé in a steam-filled bathroom, writhing as she spilled out of a red satin dress. Stephen Holden took a dim view of such displays. “Lee,” he wrote, “could conjure more erotic sparks by lightly snapping her fingers, rolling her eyes and flashing the hint of a smirk than a dozen gyrating scantily clad pop sirens strutting their curves.”
In Wimbledon, North Dakota, the Midland Continental Railroad Depot Restoration committee and its treasurer, Mary Beth Orn, rescued a link to Lee’s past. The depot where Norma had lived and her father had worked—the only surviving one from the long-defunct line—was painstakingly restored and turned into a Peggy Lee museum. On view are depot artifacts, displays of Lee album covers and photos, and one of her 1950s gowns in a glass case. The launch took place on May 26, 2012. Many months later, the depot had an honored guest: Nicki Lee Foster. Despite impaired mobility, Nicki had made the trip from Idaho to see this shrine to her mother.
Other salutes came from surprising places. The instrument-smashing, stage dives, and savage drug abuse of Iggy Pop, the slithering, shirtless godfather of punk, would probably have distressed Lee, who liked her rock as soft as a pillow. But as a “symbol of unrepentant endurance,” as the New York Times’s Jon Pareles called him, Iggy and Peggy had something in common. In 2007, record producer Mark Vidler did a mashup of Lee’s “Fever” with Pop’s “The Passenger,” a punkster’s answer to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Pop was proud to be joined at the hip, electronically speaking, with Peggy Lee. “Peggy was a super-sassy super-hottie,” he said. “Her phrasing was unlike any other white woman’s. She had incredible confidence onstage. You could see she was justifiably thrilled with herself. She also had beautiful eyes and a bomb ass. There’s nobody like her now.”
In 2010, Lee entered the age of sampling. Marko Milićević, a Serbian DJ known as Gramophonedzie, took a chunk of her 1947 version of “Why Don’t You Do Right?” and remixed it into his song, “Why Don’t You?” He wound up with a number-one U.K. dance hit. In the video, a film noir–type babe appears at his door in a short sequined cocktail dress and stiletto heels, and lip-synchs to Peggy Lee.
The star’s camp appeal wasn’t ignored. In an act he debuted at the Manhattan cabaret Don’t Tell Mama, booked by Sidney Myer, female impressionist Chuck Sweeney channeled the 1980s Peggy Lee—replete with white wig, tinted Coke-bottle glasses, swarms of feathers, and spacy patter. Two of Lee’s dearest friends, Phoebe Jacobs and Mario Buatta, were seen in the audience, nearly doubled over in laughter. Sweeney’s performance of “Fever” included a hyperactive pinspot and a high kick Lee could never have managed. “I do Pilates,” murmured Sweeney. In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in 2011, the Scandinavian East Coast Museum hosted a Peggy Lee Impersonation Festival, with men and women performing her songs in Lee drag. Seventy-one-year-old Bob Carlson dressed as late-period Peggy to sing “Mañana.” “She’ll be turning over in her grave if she saw my replica of her,” said Carlson to The Brooklyn Paper. He added: “I hope I don’t get wrapped up in one of my boas.”
On June 23, 2003, a more august salute took place at Carnegie Hall as part of the JVC Jazz Festival; it was repeated at the Hollywood Bowl. There’ll Be Another Spring: A Tribute to Miss Peggy Lee was produced by Richard Barone, a downtown New York alternative rocker and music producer. Pop and jazz songbirds past and present, including Petula Clark, Chris Connor, Nancy Sinatra, Jane Monheit, and Dee Dee Bridgewater, dominated both shows. The moody jazz minimalist Shirley Horn evoked the oasis of Lee’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill”; the growling folk-blues belter Maria Muldaur brought a Cajun bite to “I’m a Woman.” Actress-singer Rita Moreno recreated the stark, early-morning bedroom scene of “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” Other women on the bill tried to channel Lee through off-the-shoulder dresses, boas, and purrs. Deborah Harry, former leader of the New Wave band Blondie, reached for camp irony by copying Lee’s white-blond, hard-boiled look of the 1950s. But when she tried to navigate the Latin rhythms of “Lover” she wound up in a train wreck—demonstrating, once more, how Peggy Lee had made the difficult seem easy.
Lee’s inscrutable smile, her simmering sexuality, her skewed sense of humor, the whiff of anger—all of it added up to that hard-to-define but compelling sense of less-is-more known as cool. Nowadays, said Barone, popular singing is “all about how loud and histrionic you can sound. Peggy could do barely anything and make her point. Most artists are love-me, love-me. She didn’t force you to like her. You had to come to her. There was a lot left to the imagination. She wasn’t overly smiley. She will always be cool.”
But cool only works if something hot is bubbling beneath. That Pandora’s Box of emotions has spoken to the young ever since the heydays of James Dean and Chet Baker—stars who knew the power of withholding. Tragedy was an essential part of the mix. Yet for all her crises, illnesses, and addictions, Lee was no Billie Holiday to the public. Instead she seemed tough and victorious—qualities that harked back to the iconic image of her snapping her fingers and barking “Fever!” with the sting of a well-cracked whip.
Playing the smiling vixen came easy to her. But Paul Pines wasn’t surprised that Lee had died of a heart attack. “She was a brokenhearted woman,” said the psychologist. No amount of luxury or universal adoration, it seemed, could ease the ache in Norma Deloris Egstrom. As doggedly as she told herself that “there is more,” “Is that all there is?” became the key question of her life. The song was a lost soul’s anthem in 1969, and it spoke to the angst in every generation that followed.
For Emilio Palame, the trembling tot in the first chorus wasn’t so different from
the Peggy Lee he knew. “Through all of what she went through,” he said, “she still saw the world through those child’s eyes.” He glimpsed them in the face of the old lady in bed, clinging to her cat.
On CNN’s obituary segment, Lee’s favorite myth was revived as fact: days before his death, an announcer stated, Dave Barbour had proposed to her anew. Lee appeared onscreen in an early 1990s interview. “I was in agreement, I was going to marry him,” she said.
Now she, like Dave, had made her final resting place at the celebrity-filled Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery in Los Angeles. A bench-style monument in The Garden of Serenity, a columbarium, held her ashes. It was poetically engraved:
“Music is my life’s breath”
Miss Peggy Lee
1920–2002
Angels on your pillow, Mama Peggy
One day Marion Collier, the second and last Mrs. Dave Barbour, went to Westwood to visit his gravesite. She was stunned to find that Barbour’s ashes had been moved from their original spot to a place below Lee’s bench. Nicki had maneuvered the switch, and reserved spaces for herself and her children. Mother and daughter would join together peacefully in death as they seldom had in life. Meanwhile, Peggy Lee’s fifty-year reverie had come true: she and Dave were reunited for all eternity.
Acknowledgments
This book might never have happened were it not for Wayne Lawson, former executive literary editor of Vanity Fair. In 1999, Wayne commissioned me to write a Peggy Lee profile; it burgeoned into the biography you now hold.
To everyone who submitted to my questioning, and whom I have quoted herein, thank you so much for your candor and insights. Others who offered memories, leads, or introductions include Morgan Ames, Ray Anthony, Allen Bardin, Perry Botkin, Lincoln Briney, Tom Burke, Steve Campbell, Francine Cherry, Marian Collier, Jim Czak, Dolores Hollingsworth DeMars, Gene DiNovi, David Allen Duke, Glen Egstrom, Connie Emerson, George Emerson, Carmen Fanzone, Danny Fields, Terese Genecco, Debbie Green, Denise Grimes, Freeman Gunter, Helen Hample, Robert Hicks, Megan Hogan, Charles Hsuen, Eliot Hubbard, Magda Katz, Cathy Kerr, Bill King, Hilary Knight, Dick LaPalm, Dana Marcoux, Vince Mauro, Helen Mawby, Bob Merlis, Audrey Morris, Barbara Morrison, Ted Ono, Kevin O’Sullivan, Stephen Paley, Patty and Linda Peterson, Bucky Pizzarelli, Mike Renzi, Christina Rosenthal, Shirley Hollingsworth Rott, Spider Saloff, Gary Schocker, Nan Schwartz, Yvette Shearer, Robert Sher, Donna Shore, Barbara Sinatra, Liz Smith, Corky Hale Stoller, Sorrell Trope, Veerle Van de Poel, Carson Vaughan, Lilian Wehler, John Williams, and Walter Willison.
