Is That All There Is? Page 12
On a night at home in early 1947, Barbour suddenly doubled over, delirious with pain. Lee rushed him to the hospital. At thirty-five, Barbour had hemorrhaging ulcers, kidney damage, and acute nephritis. As he lay in the hospital awaiting emergency surgery, his health kept imploding; Barbour went into convulsions, and for a time couldn’t see. The fantasy that Lee had spun around him teetered in the balance, and she was hysterical with fear. But even as he faced potential death, his sense of humor didn’t fail him. As assistants wheeled him toward the operating room, Lee walked alongside the gurney, sobbing uncontrollably and blubbering, “I love you, I love you!” From under a sheet, Barbour quipped, “Stop nagging me!”
A surgeon cut away a portion of his stomach. Barbour survived, but stayed in critical condition for days. Lee drew comfort from her girlhood idol Bing Crosby, who had hosted her numerous times on his radio show and in turn become her friend. Crosby called her each morning to check that Barbour had made it through the night. He offered money, blood, even his babysitting services.
But Lee was inconsolable. Death had haunted her childhood; now here it was again, hovering over the man she loved. A neighbor urged her to read the sermons of Dr. Ernest Holmes, minister of the Science of Mind philosophy—a nonsectarian, metaphysical movement he had founded in 1927. Holmes’s religion combined Eastern sacred wisdom, positive thinking, and a tinge of Hollywood glamour; Cecil B. DeMille and Cary Grant swore by his teachings. Holmes was a small man with snow-white hair and a sagely calm about him. In his handbook, What We Believe, he wrote: “We believe . . . that all people are incarnations of the One Spirit . . . that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us . . . that anyone may become a revealer of Truth who lives in close contact with the indwelling God.” The soul, he declared, was immortal; and as for the body, any adverse conditions, including sickness, could be healed through the power of the mind.
For Lee, who already lived by the force of her imagination, Holmes’s edicts seemed heaven-sent, the confirmation of all she wished to believe. According to a 1955 profile in Redbook, Lee sought him out “for spiritual reassurance,” then rushed back to the hospital. There she received the shattering news that Barbour had died. “I refused to believe it. A path stretched before me down the hospital hall—like a great shaft of light. I walked it in faith.” It led her to his room. By the time she arrived, his heart had resumed beating.
With that, she adopted Holmes as her surrogate father. “She loved Papa, as she called him,” said her future assistant, Dona Harsh. “That religion took over her life. Peggy thought it brought her comfort.”
Within weeks, Barbour was home, but confined to bed. As soon as he could manage it, the couple took a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the coast of Mexico, where they camped out in the beach town of Ensenada. The warm, dry climate would do Barbour good. Lee was anxious for him to mend, and not just because she loved him; on April 15 she was set to open at a new Hollywood nightclub, Bocage, with his quartet. Though still frail, he made it.
For the rest of the year, she didn’t leave him much time to rest—especially when she learned that one more recording ban would stymie the industry on January 1, 1948. Labels rushed their artists into the studio to stockpile product. In November and December, Peggy Lee recorded thirty-two sides—flimsy novelties that had lain around on company desks, dashed-off originals that she and Barbour had written, an updated “Why Don’t You Do Right?”
Knowing that Capitol was desperate for product, Lee slipped in a couple of unknown art songs that had caught her fancy. “Don’t Smoke in Bed” was a chilling domestic drama by Willard Robison, a forgotten tunesmith from the infancy of jazz. “While We’re Young,” by the obscure, elitist composer Alec Wilder, reflected on the cruel race of time. Both Wilder and Robison were troubled men; and as a young woman who had grown up feeling unwanted, Lee responded instinctively to their songs, although she couldn’t quite explain why. “They’re sort of like poems, little character sketches,” she told Metronome’s George T. Simon.
Lee had met Wilder through Benny Goodman. Thirteen years her senior, he became a stern but loving father figure who unflinchingly told her the truth when even her closest friends wouldn’t dare. Wilder was the chain-smoking, intellectual black-sheep son of a wealthy banking family in upstate New York. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music in nearby Rochester, he wrote arty café ballads that the record industry usually snubbed, operas and classical works that went largely ignored. Wilder had found commercial success once, with the Mills Brothers’s hit version of his song “I’ll Be Around.” Otherwise, despite the support of Frank Sinatra—who went so far as to conduct some of Wilder’s classical works on a Columbia album—Wilder deemed himself “the eternal loser.” He certainly looked the part, with his rumpled tweed suits, food-stained ties, and a beaten-down expression on his craggy face. He sneered at commercial success, but seemed agonized by the lack of it.
Cranky and judgmental as that made him, he believed passionately in maintaining the highest possible artistic standards. Lee thought him a “lovable eccentric”; he, in turn, took a near-obsessive interest in the singer, whose complex psychology held endless fascination for him. Some in her inner circle felt sure he was in love with her, but Wilder’s sexuality was unclear, and he never married. Still, he cherished Lee’s friendship and the “sweet sadness” in her.
She was the first to record “While We’re Young,” his acknowledged masterpiece, written with Morty Palitz (who had produced the Goodman version of “Why Don’t You Do Right?”) and lyricist William Engvick. Hal Schaefer taught her the lilting but rangy waltz, and she recorded it with just him and Barbour, who played the music as formally as if it were Schubert. Singing about the preciousness of youth—“none can refuse, time flies so fast / Too dear to lose and too sweet to last”—Lee lingered over each phrase as though determined to slow the clock.
But the disc proved too esoteric to sell, and when Wilder heard it he was incensed. Schaefer had taught Lee an incorrect note, and she had flubbed a word. The fussy composer “really gave her hell about it,” said Engvick; Lee, in turn, lashed out at Schaefer for his mistake. Subsequently Wilder hurt her feelings by ignoring the fact that she had introduced “While We’re Young” to the public, if a small one. More painful still was an oft-repeated story about a letter he bragged of having written her: “Dear Peggy, when you get to the bridge, jump off.” But Lee couldn’t stay mad at him, and when she recorded another of his wistful ballads, “Goodbye John,” his caustic mood swung the other way. In a letter to Lee, Wilder wrote: “How absolutely dear and loving that record was! Every word you uttered I believed and every note you sang was definitive.”
If Wilder never remotely became a household name, Willard Robison at least had a halcyon past. Born in Missouri, Robison was a once-thriving stride pianist and bandleader who, in the twenties, had employed Bix Beiderbecke, the fabled jazz cornetist who had drunk himself to death by the age of twenty-eight. Robison recorded dozens of his own songs; they spoke fondly of the Midwest that Lee knew well—a land of tumble-down shacks, small-town train depots, and backwoods oddballs.
But Hoagy Carmichael had covered much of the same ground; and while Carmichael’s “Star Dust” had made him a superstar, Robison never had a comparable hit. By the 1940s he was living in New York amid boxes of yellowed music; the proceeds from his two most popular songs, “A Cottage for Sale” and “Old Folks,” helped keep him alive, although he drank to excess. “He was extremely weird,” said Dona Harsh. “I remember him telling Peggy, ‘I was coming to see you in California. And I got off the train in North Dakota. I went to Jamestown, where you were born, and I just sat on a curb and thought about you. And then I went home.’ ”
Lee so loved the heartbreaking “A Cottage for Sale” that she chose it for one of her first Capitol sessions. Now she was obsessed with Robison’s bleakest song. It was the first-person confession of a woman who leaves a predawn note for her husband—“Good-bye, old sleepyhead / I’m packing you
in, like I said”—along with her wedding ring; then she flees. Her letter explains nothing, but ends with some advice: “Remember, darling—don’t smoke in bed.”
Often in her career, Lee had to fight to record daring songs she believed in. Capitol producer Lee Gillette argued that “Don’t Smoke in Bed” was sure to bomb. The singer bargained with him. She would record a trite potential hit he had picked if he would let her do “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” Gillette agreed.
In later years, out of ego, self-delusion, or both, Lee claimed doggedly that she had written certain music credited to her collaborators. After Robison’s death in 1968, she insisted that the composer had come to her with a line or two of a song that he was too drunk to complete—and that she and Barbour wound up writing nearly all of “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” But Hal Schaefer, who had rehearsed the song with her from the start, then played it on her Capitol single, swore the allegation wasn’t true. “She and Dave may have contributed something,” he said, “but they never mentioned it to me.”
As they pored over the ballad at her home piano, however, Lee told Schaefer she was determined to “own it.” For a woman in denial over the truths of her married life, “Don’t Smoke in Bed” was a peek over a dark precipice. Before recording it, Lee sang the song over and over in clubs, accompanied only by Schaefer. She phrased and rephrased lines, stressing one word then another, determined to make it all ring true.
The record marked a dramatic breakthrough for Lee. A breezy, purring songbird with a hint of the blues had now entered the shadowy underside of “It’s a Good Day.” In three minutes and ten seconds, Lee conjured up all the intrigue of a film noir—those dimly lit, postwar crime dramas that exposed the threats and sexual tension that smoldered within a supposedly picture-perfect, triumphant America.
Arranger Harold Mooney lent irony to that tortured tale by placing it in a stark classical setting—an icy string quartet, an English horn wailing mournfully, a piano whose florid runs and arpeggios seemed disconnected from the plight of a woman who had just made the toughest choice of her life. As she sings the contents of the letter, Lee’s voice swells with defiance, fear, and finally resignation. An echo chamber blurs her parting words, making it sound as though Lee had vanished out the door.
Jazz singer Mark Murphy was a sixteen-year-old living in Syracuse, New York, when he heard “While We’re Young” and “Don’t Smoke in Bed” on his car radio. “You had to wonder, what were these songs about? Peggy liked to do that to people; she wanted to be serious, to think of herself as a far-out artist. She was the first singer of her level to go into slightly abstract songs.” The daring paid off: “Don’t Smoke in Bed” hit a surprising number twenty-two on the Billboard pop chart. Chicago deejay Dave Garroway began using it as a sinister closer for his midnight radio show. Decades later, Carly Simon and k.d. lang were so entranced by Lee’s performance that they mimicked it in their own versions of the song.
“Don’t Smoke in Bed” gave America an unsettling look at an all-American sweetheart of song. But as always, she kept people guessing, for the same group of sessions included a politically incorrect spoof sung in a vaguely Mexican accent. “Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)” had been born in Ensenada, Lee claimed, as she nursed Barbour through his recuperation. “It was so relaxed in Mexico,” she explained, and the folks there had a “wonderful attitude—do it mañana.” The Barbours whipped up a satire of a lazy Mexican: she lives in a falling-down shack with relatives who, like her, are jobless and snoozing; she’s housebound because her money’s gone and she can’t fix the car; a friend borrows what cash she has left and blows it in a horserace; rain pours in through a broken window and nobody cares. After each chorus comes the carefree refrain, “Mañana, mañana, mañana is soon enough for me!”
Lee showed the song to Johnny Mercer, who typically suggested improvements. (She told columnist Sidney Fields that the songwriter “wrote special lyrics” for “Mañana”; he never received credit, though.) As for who would play on the record, Lee needed a Latin sound, and she went straight to the top. She had recently met the “Brazilian Bombshell,” movie star Carmen Miranda, who had conquered Hollywood with her “tutti-frutti hat,” piled with tropical fruit, and her flirty songs and wisecracks that played every South American stereotype for laughs. “Mañana” did the same, and even though they were Brazilian, not Mexican, Miranda recommended her accompanists, the Bando da Lua.
On November 25, 1947, they joined Barbour, his band, and Lee at a studio in Hollywood. The arrangement was a hodgepodge of samba and rumba; Barbour and the other available males chanted the refrain. Lee used the Brazilians on two more novelty tunes: “Caramba! It’s the Samba,” another Latin lampoon; and “Laroo Laroo Lilli Bolero,” which wasn’t even about South America (“That’s a magic saying that I heard one day in Napoli,” went the illogical words).
But “Mañana” was the standout. Capitol released it in December. By late January, the song had jumped into Billboard’s top ten. It climbed to number one, where it stayed for a staggering nine weeks—a record-breaker at Capitol. Though Lee had meant no harm, the song’s ethnic parodies set off a wave of controversy. Naïvely, Lee seemed thunderstruck at the brickbats that “Mañana” sent hurtling her way. “It was never meant to be in any way degrading to the Mexican people at all!” she insisted.
But at the posh West Hollywood supper club Ciro’s—many of whose well-to-do customers surely employed Mexican help—the song unleashed so many cheers that Lee sometimes had to sing it twice. “Mañana” had helped pave her entry into that room, which became her Los Angeles headquarters from February 1948 until it closed in 1957. The Sunset Strip nightspot had a drab charcoal-gray exterior with a tiny marquee. Outside it, said Hal Schaefer, “these gorgeous limousines would pull up, and the doorman would lead people in.” The procession was eye-popping; on various nights it included the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, Betty Grable, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, and Clark Gable. The headliners were equally stellar: Judy Garland; Frank Sinatra; Mae West; Sammy Davis, Jr.; Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis; Nat King Cole; Jimmy Durante.
Inside, Ciro’s looked “like some great movie set,” recalled Schaefer. Xavier Cugat, Hollywood’s favorite Latin maestro, waved his baton on a raised stage; just in front of it, a small dance floor was awhirl with revelers in tuxedos, fur stoles, and diamonds. At the tables and booths, which seated about 450, martini glasses glimmered and cigarettes glowed; a fog of smoke hung in midair. Photographers scurried around with bulky press cameras, snapping “candid” photos of the stars.
(PHOTO BY JESS RAND)
For a North Dakota girl who had sat in so many darkened movie houses and wished she could step inside the screen, Ciro’s was a living dream. Lee wanted her friends to see her there; during that first engagement, she put so many on her guest list that their drink tabs wiped out her earnings.
Onstage, though, she typified less-is-more. Except for the goofy fun of “Mañana” or the feistiness of “Why Don’t You Do Right?,” Lee still seemed as tranquil and enigmatic as the Mona Lisa. In truth, Ciro’s and its boldface-name clientele struck fear in her heart. “She was always scared to death before she went on,” said Virginia Wicks, the lovely blond press agent who handled several of Carlos Gastel’s clients, including Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé, and Peggy Lee. Wicks stuck close to Lee in the terror-fraught moments before showtime. Then she watched the singer float from the wings into the spotlight. Lee stood almost motionless at a microphone, a red curtain behind her, and said hardly a word between songs; the club’s hypercharged ambiance made her seem like an oasis of calm. Beside her sat Barbour on a stool in the crook of the piano, legs crossed, electric guitar in his lap, lost in the music.
Minimalist though she was, all was thought out in advance. The better she prepared, the less likely it was that she would make some embarrassing mistake. She couldn’t afford that; important people were watching her. The discipline she’d learned from Benny Goo
dman served her well. “Most of the time, she worked with the musicians until she drove them nuts,” said Dona Harsh. “Nothing was ever done properly enough to suit her. She was the most ambitious person I know. She had to know every single thing. That’s why she was so good. She made herself understand music. Technically she was as smart as any good musician.”
But a singer as restrained as she needed more than just musicianship to get her points across. At Ciro’s she began to experiment with lighting, one of the future keystones of her shows. The club had almost as many spots and gels as a movie set, and Lee discovered the magic that dramatic illumination or a sudden blackout could add to a song.
Lee Ringuette, her nephew, went to Ciro’s as a child. He remembered his sense of awe as he sat “among the elite, in that completely adult setting of contained decadence and glamour.” Up front stood his aunt Peggy in her shimmering white dress. Ciro’s was a setting of “smoke and noise,” he recalled, yet when she sang, “the whole house was transfixed.” Maxine Sullivan had taught Lee the power of a light touch, while Lil Green had shown her how to convey defiance. But another singer was giving Lee the courage to dig deeply into her pain. “I used to listen to Billie Holiday every chance I got,” she confessed. “I idolized Billie.”
Mel Powell had turned her on to this most influential of female jazz singers, and Lee saw her every chance she got, whether at the tiny Famous Door in New York or at the Tiffany Club or Billy Berg’s in Los Angeles. Sometimes Margaret Whiting joined Lee. Whiting saw the worship on her friend’s face as Holiday stood on the bandstand, hardly moving—an elegantly gowned beauty with a gardenia in her pulled-back hair. Holiday’s small, wailing voice revealed a woman who lived for love and would possibly die for it. She both luxuriated in her suffering and gave it dignity, even in “My Man,” in which she sang: “He isn’t true / He beats me too / What can I do?”