Is That All There Is? Read online

  Lil Green couldn’t have sung that, but the rewrite tickled her. An orphan from the Mississippi Delta, Green had grown up with foster parents in Chicago, then sung her way to local fame in clubs on the city’s South Side. She also wrote a lot of her own songs—common among blues singers but still rare in the pop world.

  Green had gone farther than most of her peers; she recorded for Bluebird, which released Glenn Miller’s discs. “Why Don’t You Do Right?” charted in a segregated category called “Race Records,” where all but the most commercial black artists such as Count Basie and Duke Ellington were placed. The Race section housed many embattled black women who cried for attention, lashing out at the men who had wronged them. Far from making them sound weak, the blues empowered them; through it they could demand what they wanted, especially in the bedroom. “Ooh-WEE! Good to the last drop!” purred Green in her lascivious “Love Me.”

  Bronchial pneumonia would kill her in 1954. But she had gained a small stake on immortality thanks to “Why Don’t You Do Right?” On that record, Green’s voice stirred up feelings that had gnawed at Lee since childhood—a rage to fight back, a reclaiming of the power that Min had stripped from her. So far, almost everything Lee had recorded sounded neat, clean, and white; now she had found a song that connected with her darker side.

  For hours on end, Goodman heard “Why Don’t You Do Right?” seeping out from beneath the door of Lee’s adjacent dressing room—“until he couldn’t stand it anymore,” recalled Lee. “After a week, Benny finally noticed and made some profound remark like, ‘I guess you like that.’ ” Yes, Lee answered, she did. Goodman made a vague offer to have the song arranged for her. She perked up. For the next several weeks, she felt emboldened enough to pester him.

  Finally Goodman asked Mel Powell to write a chart. Lee wanted to sing “Why Don’t You Do Right?” with Green’s slow-burning intensity, “but Benny wanted it faster,” she rued. “He liked everything faster.”

  Lee begged him to let her record the song. He kept putting her off. This game was nothing new; that year, when Lee had given him her first published work as a lyricist, “Little Fool,” Goodman had let her sing it with the band, then broken her heart by omitting it from his many recording sessions. Finally, by accident, Lee got her chance with “Why Don’t You Do Right?” The musicians’ union was set to go on strike against the record industry in a fight to secure royalties for airplay. Until the issue was resolved sixteen months later, the union barred members from recording. Panic-stricken labels scrambled to amass product. “Benny ran out of things to record,” explained Lee, “so he recorded ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?’ ”

  On July 27, 1942, five days before the ban started, she and the Goodman men waxed the song in New York. Powell’s arrangement was big and bombastic. But it swung, and in its toughness it shook off any traces of Lee’s meek air. Pitted against icy stabs of brass, she sounded hard, bluesy, and sarcastic, with a sting of anger as she faced down the man who had failed her. “Why don’t you do ri-ight?” became an in-your-face threat.

  Producer Morty Palitz, who headed Columbia’s jazz department, was startled by what he heard. Lee had united white and black music more authentically than almost any band singer; even she was thrilled with how she sounded. Looking back, though, she wasn’t surprised. “I’m not really a white singer,” she told writer Shaun Considine in 1974. “I sing black. I always have.”

  But while subsequent Goodman singles hit the market within weeks, “Why Don’t You Do Right?” stayed on the shelf. Having given her the gift she wanted most, Goodman had seemingly taken it back. Certainly he had the clout to demand the disc’s release, but he didn’t. Lee felt brokenhearted and angry. She was sure he didn’t like the record, or maybe was punishing her for some unnamed sin.

  By December, Columbia had exhausted most of its Goodman backlog; at last, “Why Don’t You Do Right?” was released. On January 2, the song premiered on the Billboard pop chart. Later that month, it peaked at number four. For the first of several times in her recording career, Lee had found a song she loved, encountered resistance, fought it, and won.

  That winter she basked in glory. Metronome called Lee’s vocal a “big surprise,” adding in its hard-nosed music-biz slang, “The lass really chews it right off.” Look magazine displayed Lee in a full-page photo. The text declared: “You can hear her electric-blue voice from every juke box in America . . . And, only a few years ago she was just a corn-fed waitress in Fargo.” Lee even became the subject of a cutout book for little girls, who snipped out drawings of glamorous gowns and pasted them onto paper figures of Benny Goodman’s blond goddess.

  Hollywood—Lee’s girlhood dream town—now beckoned. With “Why Don’t You Do Right?” still on the charts, United Artists Pictures released The Powers Girl, in which she made her film debut. A wartime trifle about a girl who yearns to make it big with a famed modeling agency, The Powers Girl features a cast of second-rung stars of the 1940s (Carole Landis, Priscilla Lane, George Murphy). The film is mainly a showcase for the Goodman band, which appears in several dance-hall sequences. In a less-than-two-minute cameo, Lee sings a fluff novelty, “The Lady Who Didn’t Believe in Love.”

  She certainly believed in it off-camera, though. Jane Larrabee had vacated their rented flat in Greenwich Village, and Lee got to spend her New York nights there with Dave Barbour. At the start of 1943, her fame took one more leap when she appeared with the Goodman band in Stage Door Canteen, an all-star wartime extravaganza for RKO Pictures. It recreated the recreation halls in which stars entertained and hobnobbed with homesick soldiers. Lee shared the screen with dozens of stars, including Tallulah Bankhead, Jack Benny, Katharine Hepburn, Helen Hayes, Ethel Merman, and George Raft. Her moment onscreen was again short—a truncated version of “Why Don’t You Do Right?” Nervous and too eager to please, she smiled her way through the bitter song, arms glued to her sides. “I didn’t know they were filming,” she claimed later. “I thought it was a rehearsal. As a matter of fact I stepped on one of the extra’s feet.”

  In February 1943, some startling news spelled a halt to her ascent; she was pregnant.

  Lee confided later in the young singer Margaret Whiting about that bombshell moment. “She was elated,” said Whiting. “And she was terrified. This was the forties. She wasn’t married. And she knew Benny would be furious.” But it didn’t matter. To Lee, the pregnancy was a gift from God—proof that she had found true love in the arms of Dave Barbour. “Nothing, not the hit records, not the cheering fans, not the new stardom I’d achieved, nothing was as important to me as David and what we had together,” she wrote in her memoir.

  Dave was less enthusiastic. Whether he had planned to do so or not, he saw only one choice, and proposed marriage. He suggested they both leave Goodman and set up house in Hollywood.

  After they had finished Stage Door Canteen, Lee broke the news to Goodman. He was furious—but professional worry was the main cause. Goodman remained the King of Swing, but critics had begun pricking holes in his golden armor. He was still smarting from a pan by Metronome’s Barry Ulanov. “Never before, in this reviewer’s experience, has Benny’s band sounded so bad. In four numbers not one shred of distinction was uncovered, while every kind of humiliation and mistake and lapse was displayed. . . . This reviewer hopes he never again has to go through the humiliating experience of hearing such a performance from the great man.”

  Such jabs made Goodman more neurotic than ever. He went on a firing binge and dropped several sidemen; others, including Mel Powell, lost patience with his behavior and quit. Eddie Sauter left to recover from tuberculosis. Now Goodman was losing his star singer.

  The thought of escaping him gave Lee enormous relief. More important, every romantic ballad she had sung since her teens had come true. On March 8, 1943, the couple had a shotgun wedding at Los Angeles City Hall. Lee’s sister Marianne was her maid of honor; Goodman saxophonist Joe Rushton served as best man. Billboard inadvertently leaked the truth—“M
iss Lee was forced to leave the Goodman organization because of approaching motherhood”—but no one, at least not in print, noted that her pregnancy had preceded the marriage. Goodman gave them a gift that made their eyes roll: an ashtray.

  In years to come, some of Lee’s accompanists traded a rumor that Goodman was the true father of her child; a few swore that Benny and Nicki looked alike. Early on in their association, Lee had been hitting the town with Goodman. But given her longtime allergy to her prickly boss, the paternity theory seemed far-fetched. And now, Goodman’s only concern was to replace her. A parade of songbirds passed through the band; none of them pleased him. Because Lee’s contract hadn’t ended, he made her come back whenever he needed her.

  For Goodman, a sour glimpse into the future appeared in Billboard’s Sixth Annual College Poll, published on June 5, 1943. Lee scored more votes than he did; among female band singers, only Helen Forrest and Helen O’Connell outranked her. Frank Sinatra topped the male singers’ poll, but he, too, had left his employer, Tommy Dorsey, and was zooming toward a zenith of stardom that eclipsed every bandleader’s. Most of them had showcased their singers lavishly—and in so doing, had inadvertently groomed them to steal the spotlight.

  By the time World War II had ended on September 2, 1945, the swing craze had faded. Reunited lovebirds wanted to hear their ardor expressed in words, not in the frantic instrumental sounds of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” or Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” In any case, most leaders were buckling under the cost of carting an orchestra around the country. By the late forties, Count Basie was presiding over groups of six or seven; Goodman and the majority of his fellow leaders had disbanded.

  For the rest of her life, Lee weighed her public words about him carefully. Goodman, she said, had taught her the value of rehearsal and of painstaking discipline. But to friends like Dona Harsh, Lee admitted “what a horror Benny was to work for.” In 1951, the two of them reunited on a Los Angeles TV show, Kreisler Bandstand. The once-trembling singer bounded out, full of fire, to sing “Why Don’t You Do Right?” The King of Swing had become nostalgia, as he well knew. He reminisced sadly to a reporter: “Only yesterday, jitterbugs were dancing in the aisle of the Paramount to my band.”

  In 1973, when the TV series This Is Your Life honored her, Goodman appeared on video with a breezy salute. “You know,” he declared, “I remember so clearly the night that Alice and I went down to hear you at the Buttery in Chicago. I was so impressed that I hired you on the spot.” As he showered her with the praise that he had doled out so stingily before, Lee glared, let out a chortle, then lowered her eyes.

  “I’m retired,” said Lee to a record producer. “I don’t care to sing anymore.” That didn’t last. (PHOTO BY GENE HOWARD)

  Chapter Four

  THE BARBOURS RENTED a love nest at 42391/2 Monroe Street—“a little ole beat-up apartment,” Lee called it, on a side street in a dingy Hollywood neighborhood. It cost thirty-five dollars a month, an average rent for the mid-forties, yet the couple could barely afford it. “Those were our really lean days,” said Lee. Barbour awaited his L.A. musicians’ union card, the license to work legitimate jobs; for now he played in bars for a few dollars a night. But Lee was so much in love with him, and so excited about her impending motherhood, that anything short of starvation seemed romantic to her. For the rest of her life, Lee would remember this time as the happiest she had ever known.

  But as her pregnancy wore on, ill health plagued her. She developed preeclamptic toxemia, a condition marked by high blood pressure and swelling of the feet and ankles. On November 10, 1943, labor pains set in, and Barbour drove her to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. Her birth canal proved too narrow for natural childbirth, so in the early-morning hours of November 11, Lee delivered a girl by Caesarian section. She and Dave named her Nicki Lee, after Barbour’s father, Nicholas.

  Soon after the birth, pneumonia, uremic poisoning, and dangerously high blood pressure threatened Lee’s life. But in two weeks, the new mother was healthy again and ensconced in her humble apartment, where she breast-fed Nicki or beamed down at the chubby little girl in her crib.

  For now, Barbour wasn’t much of a provider. Even after he had received his union card, he barely earned enough to support his small family. His prewar, two-seater Ford was falling apart. Often he went to bed drunk. But nothing could puncture Lee’s bubble of domestic bliss. Friends who visited echoed a reporter’s idyllic assessment of the scene: “It’s the kind of marriage you read about in storybooks, but rarely see.” Margaret Whiting, whose 1942 hit, “My Ideal,” had made her a teenage star, dropped by often. “They were very simple kids,” she recalled. “Peggy was a darling girl, loved her baby, adored David. He was a beautiful, soulful man. I remember her cooking a lot and taking care of Nicki. Complete opposite of what she became.” When the Clark Sisters (by now the Sentimentalists) came to town, Lee invited all four to dinner. “She was just a housefrau then,” said Peggy Clark. “Dave was a neat guy, real friendly. You couldn’t not like him.” While Lee did housework, Barbour painted pictures for fun; he taught his wife to do the same, thus starting her on a lifelong avocation as a painter. Better still, he was trying to cut back on his drinking.

  Whenever they could afford it, Dave and his “Pegalah” hired a babysitter and hit the town to hear music. But for now, motherhood and newlywed life seemed to fulfill her completely; singing stayed far from her mind. “It was strange to see Peggy changing the baby with one hand and refusing fabulous offers over a telephone held in the other,” said her sister Della to a journalist.

  One of those offers came from a new label that had squeezed inside the near-monopoly that Victor, Decca, and Columbia had on the record industry. Capitol was the idealistic brainchild of two songwriters with money to burn, and a music-store owner who had tired of just peddling other people’s 78s. In 1942, when the three united, Buddy DeSylva was an executive producer at Paramount Pictures and a former member of DeSylva, (Ray) Brown, and (Lew) Henderson, the trio who had penned a host of wildly popular tunes, including “The Best Things in Life Are Free” and “You’re the Cream in My Coffee.”

  DeSylva had recently hired Johnny Mercer to cowrite the score for a war-themed movie musical, The Fleet’s In. Five more hits, including “Tangerine” and “I Remember You,” tumbled from the mind of one of America’s most bankable tunesmiths. A genial, portly Southerner from Savannah, Mercer had the nondescript air of a small-town banker. Mercer had a knack for turning the common man’s vernacular into lyrics that millions of Americans couldn’t get out of their heads—meticulous yet seemingly off-the-cuff, playful but full of heart. At the start of 1942, Mercer and his composing partner Harold Arlen had reached the top perch of the Billboard pop chart with “Blues in the Night,” a panoramic tale of American manhood’s most formidable foe: “A woman’s a two-face/A worrisome thing who’ll leave you to sing the blues in the night.”

  Mercer’s favorite hangout was Music City, a bustling record, sheet-music, and radio shop on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. In the back office, liquor flowed as he spent hours dissecting the business with Glenn Wallichs, a radio repairman who had founded the store with his father and brother. He and Mercer decided that they could run a better label than anybody’s—one that would make ample room for the black music that Mercer loved.

  Mercer and DeSylva pooled some seed money; Wallichs took on the job of treasurer and creative advisor. Their little start-up had a mom-and-pop-store quaintness. It made its first office above a tailoring shop on Vine, and rented outside recording studios and pressing plants. In June 1942, the company made what should have been a prestigious debut with a new single by Paul Whiteman, the venerable though faded “King of Jazz.” It bombed. Soon thereafter, the partners learned that shellac, the material used to press those fragile 78-rpm platters, was growing scarce due to wartime rationing. Worse still, the American Federation of Musicians was about to launch its strike against the record industry. The label seemed doomed.<
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  Nonetheless, recalled Mercer, “we forged ahead with the undaunted enthusiasm of young men to whom nothing is impossible.” Just before the AFM ban, the label released “Cow Cow Boogie,” a loping cowboy tune crossed with boogie-woogie and sung by Ella Mae Morse, an unknown teenager from Texas. “Cow Cow Boogie” stunned everyone by reaching the top ten. Within a month, magic struck again, this time with a naughty-for-its-day Mercer novelty, “Strip Polka,” sung by the lyricist himself. It reached number seven. Capitol was saved.

  Mercer and his colleagues didn’t forget their goal of diversity. They signed the King Cole Trio, whose leader, Nat King Cole, was an Alabama-born preacher’s son. Billie Holiday and the Texas bluesman T-Bone Walker took their place among the white canaries Connie Haines, Martha Tilton, and Kitty Kallen, all of them newly sprung from the big bands. Margaret Whiting—daughter of the late Richard Whiting, a grand name of 1930s movie songwriting—became the label’s princess.

  Largely because a lyricist helmed it, Capitol was mainly a singer’s house. The company’s first jazz album, a four-disc set entitled New American Jazz, wouldn’t have seemed complete without a vocalist. By December 1943, the recording ban was ending, and work on the project could start. Its producer was Dave Dexter, Jr., the former Down Beat critic and new Capitol staffer. Dexter was a smart-alecky white youngster with a swatch of wavy hair and enlightened racial ideas. To him, “new American jazz” was a biracial fraternity. Dexter’s project aimed to advance a revolutionary notion: that desegregation was the American way.