Is That All There Is? Page 13

  Holiday’s singing was pure autobiography, tied to stylistic quirks that are copied to this day: seductively bent notes that sounded like sighs; a thin, brassy edge that evoked a muted trumpet; a languid delivery that could drag perilously behind the beat yet never fell out of time. Her life was cloaked in tabloid scandal, much of it involving her addictions to heroin and abusive men. She lived her saddest songs to such a reckless degree that she died at forty-four.

  Lee’s bitter childhood memories had left her feeling like a victim, and she identified with the downtrodden Holiday. She made mental notes of songs her heroine sang indelibly: “Easy Living,” “Trav’lin’ Light,” “Them There Eyes,” “You’re My Thrill,” “Crazy He Calls Me,” “God Bless the Child.” Lee went on to sing them all. They told of women hopelessly, often senselessly in love, willfully surrendering their power to men. As Lee studied Holiday’s every move and sound, key phrases from the great singer’s repertoire jumped out: “For you, maybe I’m a fool but it’s fun” . . . “Nothing seems to matter, here’s my heart on a silver platter” . . . “If he wants it, so shall it be.”

  At home, Lee played a Decca 78 of Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache” almost as often as she had spun Lil Green’s “Why Don’t You Do Right?” She marveled at how vividly Holiday could evoke beleaguered women, shiftless men, and scenes of domestic embattlement, coloring them “with all kinds of little facets.” Raved Lee to Metronome: “I honestly feel that I understand what she sings because she understands what she’s singing.”

  In several of her recordings of that period, notably “Stormy Weather,” Lee sounds so much like Holiday that she seems at risk of losing her identity. Critics noticed. In his review of a Holiday concert, Larry Douglas of the Atlanta Daily World noted how “singers like Peggy Lee try to copy her every move.” Onstage, Lee adopted not only Holiday’s vocal mannerisms but her body language—the sly sidelong glances and the saucy half-smile; elbows tucked in as the hands moved daintily. At certain parties or as an encore in the occasional late show, Lee would imitate Holiday so precisely that she seemed to be channeling her.

  She never got to know her idol well, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. After Holiday’s shows, Lee would ask the jazz star to sit at her table or appear at her dressing-room door. Holiday stayed aloof. Although Lee’s close friend, jazz critic Leonard Feather, quoted Holiday as saying that she had “always loved Peggy,” the former proved less charitable on other occasions. In her 1956 memoir, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday told of reluctantly accepting Lee’s invitation to a party she was throwing at Bop City, the San Francisco jazz club. There, Lee presented her with an adoring lyric about the gardenia Holiday wore in her hair. The book left little doubt that Holiday thought the song was awful.

  Years later, her biographer Donald Clarke cited a line about Lee that had been cut from Holiday’s book, apparently for legal reasons: “She stole every goddamn thing I sing.” Bassist John Levy, who played for Holiday, recalled her disdain for the young white songstress. “When Peggy Lee came around,” he said, “Billie would say, ‘Look, bitch, why don’t you find some other way to sing?’ . . . Peggy Lee wouldn’t take offense. She’d say to Billie, ‘It’s because I love you. I love everything you do.’ ”

  Holiday may well have resented the amount of money and fame Lee was acquiring through a style that owed her a debt. In a publicity photo, Lee posed amid tall stacks of “Mañana” 78s, a confident smile on her face. A three-page spread in Life, “Busy Singer,” profiled her as a beacon of achievement. Not only did she sing hit songs, she wrote them. Lee appeared frequently on radio and toured the country, guitarist husband in tow. In a forward-thinking business move, Capitol and Carlos Gastel helped her to found Denslow Music, a publishing company for the songs she wrote with Dave.

  Lee had gotten almost everything she had ever wanted, but it wasn’t enough. “She was always needy,” said Dona Harsh, the ultraefficient young blonde who worked both in Carlos Gastel’s office and as Lee’s assistant. Harsh found it unnerving that, at twenty-eight, her celebrated boss spent most of her nonperforming hours in the safe cocoon of her bed—a suggestion of how fearful and depressed she was. At night, with Dave asleep or passed out, Lee couldn’t bear to be left alone; Harsh often had to keep her company until she drifted off, close to dawn.

  So much self-obsession left minimal time for Nicki. A magazine photo showed the singer kissing her goodnight, but Life suggested that Lee’s conquests as a prefeminist career girl had trumped her efforts at motherhood. “Miss Lee sees as much as she possibly can of her four-year-old daughter,” explained the reporter. “When she cannot, Nicki plays herself to sleep with one of her mother’s records.” According to Kathy Levy, Lee’s later confidante, daughter, like mother, had experienced depression “from a very early age.” Food became the child’s key source of comfort, and she had grown quite plump. Other troubles marred her life, including serious farsightedness, the reason she wore thick glasses.

  Undoubtedly, Lee cared. Before a Canadian appearance, she told a reporter that she had traveled there by train. Asked why she hadn’t flown, Lee explained, “I never fly. It’s not that I’m scared for myself. I’m scared for my four-year-old daughter, Nicki. If anything should happen to me—poor little Nicki. I’m all nervous even at being away from her.”

  Yet she had left the job of raising Nicki mostly to Alice Larsen, a North Dakota friend whom Lee employed as housekeeper and nursemaid. The chasm between Lee and Barbour was also widening. To Hal Schaefer and other friends, Dave had never seemed as much in love with her as she was with him; increasingly he appeared trapped, and sought escape the best way he knew how. “Dave was drunk half the time,” said Harsh. “He’d just sit there and mumble.”

  Lee knew that much around her was going wrong, but took no responsibility for it. Everything in the household revolved around her needs. Although Barbour earned royalties as his wife’s writing partner, he was mainly her accompanist.

  Success had also changed the face of Capitol, which was now rolling in wealth. “Mañana” had contributed handsomely to making 1948 the label’s all-time financial bonanza. Three other Capitol hits that year—Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy,” Dixieland trombonist Pee Wee Hunt’s “Twelfth Street Rag,” and Margaret Whiting’s “A Tree in the Meadow”—had towered at number one for weeks on end. In 1949, the company became the first to issue singles both as 78-rpm platters and as 45s, a new, smaller vinyl format. Capitol also helped launch a revolution in the industry: the long-playing, 331/3-rpm album. The innovations kept coming, as Capitol adopted the groundbreaking technique of high-fidelity recording onto magnetic tape, rather than onto a spinning wax disc.

  Mercer’s dream of a boutique label, devoted solely to his hand-picked favorites, had vanished. Busy with his own career, he left daily operations to Glenn Wallichs, who had replaced Buddy DeSylva as president. Capitol had acquired stockholders who expected payback, and it was Wallichs’s job to see that they got it. “Glenn Wallichs didn’t fit in with all the creative people down there,” said Kay Starr, a country-blues belter whom the label had recently signed. “He was the machine that ran the business and kept the money coming in.” Dave Dexter compared his fussy, eagle-eyed new boss to a computer. Wallichs defended himself in Billboard: “Contrary to the belief of some folks in the entertainment field, a record company is a business with responsibilities to employees and stockholders, just like a manufacturer who makes steam turbines or cuts glass ashtrays.”

  Mercer watched in dismay as Capitol issued a rash of blatantly commercial sides and “covers”—competing versions of other labels’ hits. It was everything he had never wanted. After 1948, he kept his distance from the company he had helped conceive.

  Lee was still floating on a cloud from the success of “Mañana,” but on July 1, 1948, some upsetting news brought her crashing down to earth. She and Barbour, along with Capitol, were getting sued for plagiarism. A million-dollar suit had been filed in Los Angeles Federal Court by
folk singer Harry Kirby McClintock, better known as Haywire Mac; and Sterling Sherwin, a San Francisco publisher of folk songs. They charged that the Barbours had stolen the music for “Mañana” from “It Was Midnight on the Ocean,” a tune allegedly written by McClintock and published by Sherwin in 1932. Haywire Mac, then in his sixties, had a colorful history as a menial laborer and hobo troubadour from Tennessee. Throughout his travels he had collected many traditional songs, tinkered with them, and copyrighted them under his own name.

  The practice was common in the folk world, which viewed songs as evolving diaries of the common man; some of Bob Dylan’s early “originals” were recognizably based on folk chestnuts. But Lee’s accusers had only one American tradition in mind: the acquiring of money. McClintock had successfully claimed authorship of a beloved old children’s tune, “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” but had tried and failed to do the same with “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” a huge hit for Al Jolson in 1928. Sherwin published and took credit for an entire folio of borrowed tunes, which he titled Sherwin’s Saddle Songs.

  In the case of “Mañana,” however, the Barbours had cause for fear. Its singsong, nursery-rhyme tune was undeniably similar to that of “It Was Midnight on the Ocean,” a retitled version of a song that McClintock had recorded for Victor in 1928 under the title “Ain’t We Crazy.” But in a preliminary investigation, the court judged the melody to be in the public domain. By December of 1949, McClintock and Sherwin had dropped their suit.

  Before they withdrew, two other songwriters piped up, claiming that the music for “Mañana” was theirs. In February 1949, Luis Fronde Ferrazzano tried to sue Lee and Barbour on grounds that the couple had pilfered his 1929 composition “La Rifa.” He couldn’t gather enough evidence, and the case fizzled. But in July, the Barbours faced their most stubborn foe. Vaudevillian Walter C. McKay—better known as Hats McKay—filed suit in New York Supreme Court, claiming that “Mañana” plagiarized his “Laughing Song,” a ditty he had sung internationally, he said, since 1919. As evidence of the tune’s resemblance to “Mañana,” McKay’s lawyer produced several manuscripts of “Laughing Song,” which the troubadour had neither published nor recorded.

  Yet the tune in those manuscripts did sound almost identical to that of “Mañana”—and unlike McClintock and Sherwin, McKay wasn’t backing down. The Barbours’ attorney set out to argue that the tune in question was public domain, and that McKay couldn’t claim he owned it.

  The couple would have to wait over a year for the trial, and Lee refused to let anxiety halt her career. She intended to keep living like a star; never could she return to the threadbare existence of Norma Egstrom. In 1949, Lee learned that the married movie stars Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman were divorcing and selling their home in Westwood, an affluent community on the west side of Los Angeles. The two-story house stood on a tree-lined hill. Its price was steep, but Lee didn’t care. Using the “Mañana” windfall, she bought it.

  She hired a decorator, Charles Hagerman. Under her direction, he made 167 Denslow Avenue as frilly as a little girl’s bedroom. Hagerman filled the rooms with chintz, pink plaid taffeta, and ruffles. There was a large living room with French provincial furniture; a music room with a candelabrum on the piano; and a dark backyard pool that, according to Dona Harsh, looked “like a mountain lake.” Rock gardens surrounded the house. Above the garage was a small apartment that Lee turned over to her sister Della and her second husband, Jack.

  The Denslow home, said Harsh, was Lee’s “big sign of success.” But when Jean Burden of the Los Angeles Times dropped by, she noted that the couple had separate bedrooms. Barbour didn’t like the house; he much preferred their humbler Blair Drive abode and the Peggy Lee he’d known there. A Redbook reporter made a terse observation: Lee’s attention-grabbing had turned her husband quite “morose.”

  On May 26, the day of her birthday, he tried to even the score. Lee and Barbour were performing that night, and after the late show a few friends, including Hal Schaefer, came to their suite to celebrate. As ever, Barbour had stocked up the bar. He proposed a birthday toast, and insisted his wife join in. Until then, Lee’s friends had known her as a nondrinker; as she waited in the wings to go on, Virginia Wicks would hand the singer her preferred preshow beverage, ice water.

  Barbour had attempted before to coax her into drinking, and at her birthday party he stepped up the effort. “Peggy said, ‘No, no thank you, I don’t want to drink, I don’t like the taste,’ ” recalled Schaefer. “Dave said, ‘Come on, sweetheart, it’s your birthday!’ She said, ‘I really don’t want to. I don’t like alcohol.’ He answered, ‘Aw, come on, how many times a year are you gonna have a birthday?’ Peggy said, ‘Okay, okay.’ And she had a drink.”

  Gradually Lee developed a liking for brandy, then for cognac. “I had to be there to hand her a little snifter when she came back for the encore,” said Dona Harsh. As Lee discovered its relaxing effects, her intake grew. “Peggy drank a lot; we all drank too much in those days,” admitted Harsh. “But she was so much fun when she drank. She went to parties and enjoyed life. We’d sit around the house at four in the morning singing. I really loved her then. She could tell a joke better than anybody on this earth. She had the most wonderful laugh.”

  Steve Allen, the future TV variety-show host, met Lee around that time. “I never knew whether she had a drinking problem,” he said, “but her attitude was harmonious, shall we say, with people who do—I don’t mean the real alcoholics, but the ones who’ve maybe had one too many at lunch. There was always a momentary slowness, a second-and-a-half behind the beat in conversation. All her friends noticed that.”

  It was certainly perceived by Hal Keith, who directed one of TV’s first variety spectaculars, Star-Spangled Revue. The show, which starred Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Beatrice Lillie, and Lee, aired live over NBC on May 27, 1950. Posed in white satin and chiffon on a love seat, Lee gave a drawn-out, internalized rendition of Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched,” the confession of an older woman turned into a “simpering, whimpering child again” by lust. In a sketch, Lee played Hope’s philandering fiancée.

  During the rehearsals, she sounded so tentative and woozy that she threw off Hope’s brisk timing. In the New York Times, critic Jack Gould called her “out of her element” on the infant medium of TV; he echoed a complaint she had heard in her Goodman days when he tagged her “easy to look at” but “impersonal” and cold.

  She was certainly stone-faced in November, when Harsh accompanied her to New York Supreme Court to face down Hats McKay. Lee had hired Frank Gilbert, lawyer for one of the richest songwriters in America, Irving Berlin. McKay, recalled Harsh, was “this little funny guy,” over seventy and wearing a big hat. Judge Isidor Wasservogel sat at the bench in his black robe, projecting the requisite pomp. But as the trial proceeded, he didn’t seem to be taking the case too seriously. An upright piano had been wheeled in for McKay to demonstrate his would-be plagiarized tune. He performed “Laughing Song” repeatedly; sometimes it resembled “Mañana,” other times less so.

  One of the defense’s key witnesses, Lee’s friend Jimmy Durante, took the stand. There to prove that the tune of “Mañana” was as old as the hills, the star comedian played and sang a similar song from memory, inserting schtick in his Lower East Side accent and gravel tones. Everyone howled. McKay’s attorney, Julian T. Abeles, shouted, “Objection!” Wasservogel overruled—“in view of the fact that we have such a distinguished entertainer in court.” Even Abeles succumbed to the fun. “I withdraw only on the occasion that Mr. Durante do not one but three songs for the court,” he announced. Things were so clearly not going McKay’s way that he resorted to emergency measures. According to Variety, he “suffered a slight heart attack in court as a result of the emotional stress.”

  As her next witness, Lee had enlisted Deems Taylor, the esteemed classical music critic and original president of ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). Taylor, who presumably knew more about
songs than anyone, testified that “Mañana” was a samba—and that the form hadn’t been invented yet in 1919, the year McKay wrote “Laughing Song.” His testimony was accepted—but Taylor, in fact, was wrong. The first known samba, “Pelo Telefone,” had been published and recorded in 1916.

  On November 22, 1950, court reconvened. Wasservogel read the decision. McKay’s performances in court, he declared, were blatant attempts to copy “Mañana,” and his manuscripts of “Laughing Song” looked doctored. Furthermore, it seemed highly unlikely that the Barbours had ever heard McKay perform the song—he had barely entertained in twenty years—nor could they have found sheet music for it, because there wasn’t any. No recording existed, either.

  The case was dismissed. Barbour celebrated with Hal Schaefer by getting drunk. Lee joined them.

  “He said he didn’t love me anymore,” sobbed Peggy Lee. Santa Monica divorce court, May 15, 1951.

  Chapter Five

  NOW LAWSUIT-FREE, the Barbours resumed touring. But gone were the carefree lovebirds that Margaret Whiting remembered. Out of the public eye they walked around looking haggard, cigarettes in their hands. Lee’s weight ballooned, while Barbour grew so skinny due to constant drinking and not enough food that his legs looked like sticks. In later years, Lee spoke freely about her husband’s descent into alcoholism. “She didn’t tell you that she was pouring two drinks,” said her friend of the 1970s, Robert Richards.

  More than ever, Lee seemed like a fragile soul floating in a cloud of her own design. Her vulnerability won almost everyone’s heart, as did her charming daffiness. For a short time, Lee was the resident singer on Steve Allen’s lunchtime CBS radio show. In one episode, Allen polled viewers by phone, querying them as to which noises or visual eyesores made them jump out of their skin. He used fingernails on a blackboard as an example. Allen asked Lee what jolted her.