Is That All There Is? Page 14

  “Teabags,” she said.

  “Um . . . What about teabags?”

  “Well, I just hate it when people leave wet teabags around.”

  Meanwhile, echoes of Ernest Holmes’s teachings worked their way into her interviews, in terms that left reporters perplexed. “When you see unloveliness in others,” she informed one writer, “it’s because you have some unloveliness in yourself.”

  Such pontification made it all the more jarring when the iron butterfly in her leapt out. Harold (Hal) Jovien, an agent at GAC (General Artists Corporation) and her former neighbor on Blair Drive, watched her become “a very demanding person. Saying this has got to be and that has got to be. People had always known her as acting very nice, saying ‘thank you very much.’ Now she was getting a lot of attention, and it had gone to her head.”

  At the same time, Kay Starr saw a young woman who had become almost paranoid about what people thought of her. Starr, who was born on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma and whose mother raised chickens, had never seen anyone act like Lee. “I think I was kind of put off by her attitude,” said Starr. “She knew who she was and how important she was. She had gone with half the guys who ran Capitol. Johnny Mercer was one of them. She had her tiptoes in the door and all around the house!”

  Inebriated as he was, Barbour had a dead-on sense of how she had changed. “Dave used to cut her down all the time for being the princess,” said Harsh. “She had started to turn into Miss Peggy Lee. And the sweet girl he married was no longer.” In a typewritten, all-lower-case letter to Harsh, he scored a lot of laughs at his wife’s expense. He asked Harsh to give “Miss Lee” a song he wanted her to learn, even though he knew that stars as big as she were “too busy swimming in their pools, riding around in jaguars and eating rich food.”

  Barbour took a jab at Lee’s growing penchant for rewriting her own history—“i suppose now she says she was born in switzerland daughter of a ski instructor or something”—but he didn’t spare himself, either. “i hear her husband is a manishevitz wine addict,” cracked the guitarist. “i know how that can be.” He cited A Star Is Born, the 1937 film in which an actress’s faded actor husband sinks into depression and alcoholism, then kills himself by walking into the ocean. Barbour signed the letter Hats McKay. His sense of humor seldom left him.

  For the first time, he took steps to fashion a separate career. Columnist M. Oakley Stafford cheered him on: “Dave’s a modest man who shines in reflected glory, when he has plenty of what it takes to shine alone.” In 1949, he put his wife’s needs aside and went to Cuba to play with the Woody Herman band. Capitol encouraged Barbour by letting him record as a leader. He gave them some clever novelty sides, including “Forever Nicki,” a jaunty instrumental salute to his daughter; and “Little Boy Bop Go Blow Your Horn,” an ambitious pastiche of bebop, Latin rhythms, Russian-style guitar, and klezmer trumpet. When the press took interest, Barbour became more vocal about his plans. He told George T. Simon of his “big ambition” to lead a twelve-piece Afro-Cuban band; soon a Capitol single of his, “The Mambo,” became a modest hit. Metronome generously reported that Barbour was “breaking into the bandleading game with a vengeance.” He became musical director of radio’s The Curt Massey Show, which starred a popular Capitol baritone. Barbour even acquired a manager, Marty Melcher, later famous as Doris Day’s husband and producer.

  Dave was less available now, and his wife wasn’t pleased. She certainly had never expected him to beat her in scoring something she had wanted all her life: a dramatic role in a feature film. The Barbours had become friendly with Mel Ferrer, a budding movie actor and director with a bright future in store; it included roles in Lili and War and Peace and a marriage to Audrey Hepburn. Ferrer had been signed to direct The Secret Fury, an RKO film noir. Claudette Colbert would play a classical pianist and heiress who, at her wedding ceremony, is suddenly accused of bigamy by a stranger. Evidence stacks up against her, but she can’t remember a prior marriage. She locates her would-be husband, a guitar player. Minutes later he is mysteriously shot, and detectives blame her. Initially Ferrer had planned to cast a professional actor as the musician. Then he thought of Barbour. “It occurred to me that it might be easier to make an actor of him than to make an actor look and act like a guitarist. We gave him a screen test and—well, he’s great!”

  Hedda Hopper, the crotchety Hollywood gossip doyenne, reported the casting of “Peggy Lee’s husband” in a Claudette Colbert film. Mel Ferrer, she wrote, “thinks Dave is star quality.” Barbour saw a new life unfurling before him, and he liked it. Small as his part was, he proved utterly believable as an arrogantly cool jazzer in on an evil con game. “After the first couple of days I got over the twitches and kind of enjoyed it,” he observed. “I worked about ten days altogether—and may I say there’s a very large amount of money in that type of work. . . . I’d like to do some more pictures.”

  But Hal Schaefer, who played piano in the Barbour character’s onscreen band, thought a film career unlikely for his alcoholic friend. “I don’t think he was ever entirely sober,” said Schaefer. “But he kept his drinking down enough during the shooting schedule so that it didn’t interfere.”

  The Secret Fury opened in June 1950. New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther dismissed it as “cheap and lurid twaddle,” and didn’t even mention Barbour. The guitarist received no further film offers. Likewise, his short-lived Capitol solo career had gone nowhere. Three years earlier, his alcoholism had nearly killed him; now, with only a portion of his stomach left, Barbour began drinking even more ferociously. “It was sad to see him disintegrate like he did, because he had really become a screaming alcoholic,” said Dona Harsh. “And Peggy couldn’t take it.” Her father, of course, had been one, too; certainly the danger signs had been there for Lee to spot in Dave before she married him. But like many children or spouses of alcoholics, she had unconsciously perpetuated the cycle of codependency in her life. At the same time, she continued to drag Dave around the country with her while ignoring his own needs.

  Now she had to tend to those of her ailing father. Marvin Egstrom’s career as a depot agent had ended in another tiny North Dakota town, Millarton. When he retired in 1944, Min—well into her fifties but as tough as ever—took over his job. Glen Egstrom occasionally paid his now-aimless uncle a visit. “He was beaten down. He was thin, his face was a little gaunt, and he was stooped. His face was pretty animated when he was talking to strangers, but there was definitely unhappiness there.” As a small child, Norma Deloris had been the apple of his eye—at least in her perception. From there she grew up with an emotionally unavailable father, tied to the bottle. Marvin seemed to know it. In a 1948 profile of Lee, the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune reported that her father spent “much time at the barber shop telling about his famous daughter.”

  But he hadn’t seen her since the early 1940s. As freely as she talked about her North Dakota roots, Lee wasn’t keen to revisit them; her home state held bitter memories. Lee had stayed in touch with almost none of her old pals—not even Artis Conitz, who had since married and moved to California. “I saw her a few times, because I made the effort,” said Conitz. “She was familiar to me, but she didn’t act like she used to act. She was somebody I grew up with, who grew away from me.”

  Ginny Lulay, her girlhood friend from Wimbledon, had sensed Lee’s resentment of her father for having married Min. But in her memoir, Lee detailed a sentimental surprise visit from Marvin, who suddenly appeared, rail-thin and with a hacking cough, at her Denslow Avenue home. His words, as Lee detailed them, revealed a man who knew little about his daughter beyond what he’d read in the papers. It thrilled him to see how high his little girl had climbed. The reunion ended, said Lee, when Min phoned to demand his return.

  Her stepmother remained an ogre to her. Marianne’s son Lee Ringuette could sympathize. In the late 1940s, Min and her son Edwin had come to Los Angeles to visit the Ringuettes. “Her appearance scared the hell out of me,” he recalled. H
is description of her evoked Miss Almira Gulch, the mean spinster who turned into the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. “She had gray hair worn in that braided kind of bun that we remember from that era, and those oddly heeled shoes that older women wore, and an inappropriately loud dress. Everybody was trying very hard to be polite, but I could feel the strain.”

  Having been widowed once, Min now faced the imminent loss of her second husband. Early in 1950, she phoned Peggy with the bad news: Marvin, a lifelong heavy smoker, was home in Millarton, dying of lung cancer. If Norma (as she still called her) wanted to see her father again, she had better come now.

  Coincidentally, Lee had agreed to serve as Grand Marshall of the annual North Dakota Winter Show, an agricultural festival in Valley City, and to give four concerts. Thousands were expected to attend the March event, which would showcase prize livestock and include a rodeo. Afterward, Lee could go to Millarton. She dreaded the prospect. It would mean facing Min again, and seeing her father for probably the last time.

  She and the Dave Barbour Quartet flew to Fargo on the Sunday before their shows. As they descended the stairs of the plane, a blur of flashbulbs greeted the return of a homecoming queen. Barbour himself went nearly unnoticed. A driver took the couple to Valley City. Soon nearly everyone in town was packing Central Avenue for a ticker-tape parade in Lee’s honor. Marchers led with a big sign that read, WELCOME HOME PEGGY LEE! Behind them came a brass band dressed in blue, baton-twirling little girls, and boys in farm clothes.

  The “glamorous Hollywood star,” as a town newspaper called her, rode along in a convertible driven by Dean McConn, the brother of her Wimbledon High teachers, Frances and Edith. Lee sat perched on the backrest of the rear seat, bundled in a mink coat; she waved and smiled broadly to the cheering crowds. Her husband wasn’t there. McConn, who chauffeured him around without her, saw how impatient he was with all the festivities: “It was like, he had to be there.” Locals recalled Dave’s sarcastic remark that they probably hadn’t seen many mink coats.

  By contrast, Lee went out of her way to treat everyone graciously, and struggled to recall the names of childhood acquaintances. But stardom and its perks had carried her far from the prairie lifestyle; no longer could she relate to it. Later she told the New York Post’s Earl Wilson that going home was painful—“because the people work so hard. They seem to get so little pleasure. You wish you could send them all on a cruise.”

  As Millarton loomed on her agenda, Lee panicked. She repeated Ernest Holmes’s texts to herself and to anyone who would listen. “Closer is He than breathing and nearer than hands or feet,” went her credo. God, she chanted, was “within me, working through me”; so long as she let His love flow through her, no harm could come.

  Lee’s brother Milford had offered to drive her there immediately after the last show on Tuesday, March 6. Barbour refused to accompany her; he went home to California. As a blizzard raged, Milford showed up in Valley City, behind the wheel of a farm truck. Joined by her road manager, Joe Cancelleri, Lee embarked on a forty-mile journey over snow-blanketed and unpaved roads. Finally they reached the Millarton depot. Min ushered them upstairs; there, they found a seriously ill Marvin in bed. Father and daughter exchanged loving words. Handing her a Bible, he asked her to read him Psalm 23, the passage recited by priests at funerals or as a form of last rites: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me . . . and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”

  Lee could hardly keep from crying, but the visit was short; she flew home immediately to California, where she launched a tour. On the road, Alice Larsen was there to play nursemaid to Nicki; Dona Harsh did the same for Lee. Luxury suites and star treatment greeted the singer everywhere. Barbour wanted none of it. After a heated argument with his wife in St. Louis, he abruptly went home, leaving her to scramble for a replacement.

  On April 27, 1950, the Jamestown Sun reported that Marvin O. Egstrom, “father of Peggy Lee,” had died that morning. He was seventy-five. Lee had felt a premonition on the flight to Los Angeles: “Something told me very clearly that my Daddy was making the transition.” She flew back to North Dakota for the funeral, which Min organized. After visiting briefly with her siblings, Lee fled. Twenty-five years would pass before she set foot in North Dakota again.

  The rest of 1950 brought her mostly disappointment. Lee’s dream of motion-picture stardom had flared up again in July 1950, when MGM screen-tested her for a remake of Show Boat, the classic Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical. Lee was one of many contenders for the pivotal role of Julie, the story’s mixed-blood heroine. Ava Gardner got the part.

  Her nightclub career went on as before. Lee had hired a young promotional director, Dick LaPalm, to travel with her and interface with deejays and the press. LaPalm witnessed the continued unraveling of the Barbours’ marriage. He recalled a heated scene in Lee’s dressing room at the Cocoanut Grove, the palm-tree-adorned supper club inside the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Show time was delayed as everyone awaited the arrival of Louella Parsons, one of the most powerful gossip doyennes in the country. Barbour wasn’t impressed. “Screw Louella Parsons!” he barked. “Let’s do our show. Who the hell is she?” Lee pleaded with him to be patient. Gloria DeHaven, MGM’s pretty singing starlet, had come backstage to say hello; she knew the couple, and managed to explain Parsons’s importance to Barbour and calm him down.

  But his impatience with his wife’s professional needs continued to explode; at times it seemed as though he were determined to sabotage her. During one of Lee’s trips to New York, her publicist, Virginia Wicks, arranged a press party for her at the Royal Roost, a popular jazz club near Times Square. The celebrity turnout astonished Wicks—especially the presence of Billie Holiday and Tallulah Bankhead, who were invited separately but turned up together. Holiday and the flamboyant Southern actress-comedienne had met in New York and become close friends; rumors had spread that the two were lovers.

  The next day, Wicks got a phone call from Barbour. “You’re fired!” he snarled, adding that he didn’t want her to have anything to do with his wife again.

  Wicks was stunned. “I said, ‘What did I do?’ He said, ‘You knew very well when you invited Tallulah Bankhead and Billie Holiday . . . you knew what they were!’ I protested, and he just said, ‘Don’t contact us. We’ll send you whatever we owe you.’ ” Later on, Lee called Wicks to apologize for Barbour’s behavior and to thank her for doing a wonderful job. But she didn’t offer to rehire her.

  The distance between the Barbours kept growing. Lee confided in friends that she had begun an affair with comic Hal March, one of her fellow performers at the Jade in 1938. March was now famous as the host of TV’s hottest game show, The $64,000 Question, but his career would crash amid the notorious quiz show scandals—the revelation that several of those programs, notably March’s, had been rigged by the producers.

  In the 1970s, Lee told her assistant Magda Katz of a mess that her fling with March had triggered. Somehow Barbour had heard of his wife’s philandering. She and the guitarist were home with the TV on, and March appeared on the small black-and-white screen. According to Lee, a drunken Barbour picked up the TV and hurled it through the window. “Whether this is true or not I don’t know,” said Katz.

  Evidently Barbour had his own wandering eye. Just before an engagement in Las Vegas, Lee invited Dick LaPalm and his wife, Jean, to spend a week with them in the sun. They encountered a painfully drunk Barbour. One night Jean returned, shaken, to their hotel room. Dave, she said, had made a pass at her. According to LaPalm, this wasn’t the only time Dave had seemed eager to stray.

  Those in the know detected the marital strain in the ten songs the couple filmed for Snader Telescriptions, a company that supplied musical filler for early TV. “Snaders,” like “soundies” before them, were cheap precursors of the music video, with shabby sets, kitschy premises, and awk
ward camera work. Nonetheless, they provide early sightings of Nat King Cole, June Christy, Sarah Vaughan, and other pop and jazz greats.

  Lee’s Snaders, made in September of 1950, serve as snapshots of a waning marriage. The selections span their songwriting history, from “You Was Right, Baby” to “Mañana”; in the latter song, Barbour wears a sombrero and sits cross-legged at his wife’s feet. Incongruously, Lee performs “What More Can a Woman Do?” on a nightclub set, where, garbed in an off-the-shoulder black sequined gown, she sings of a housewife’s contentment. In “I Don’t Know Enough About You,” Lee is a prim schoolteacher at her desk; Barbour sits on a stool with legs crossed, lost in his guitar. Throughout the Snaders, Lee turns to him with longing eyes; he barely looks at her.

  With most of their chemistry gone, Lee withdraws into a private world where songs had become dialogues with herself. Conversely, her rapport with the camera had blossomed. When she stares at the lens, she lures viewers into her dreamland.

  Just before Christmastime, audiences caught one of their last glimpses of the Barbours together. Bing Crosby had thrilled Lee by recommending her for a cameo in his latest film, Mr. Music. At a penthouse party, surrounded by revelers, she and Crosby, accompanied by Dave’s combo, sing Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen’s homespun slice of philosophy, “Life Is So Peculiar.” Lee had grown in confidence since her nervous appearances in The Powers Girl and Stage Door Canteen, and she and Crosby prove a perfect match—a rising minimalist alongside the king of nonchalance. At a break in the song, Marge and Gower Champion, the Hollywood dance team, twirl gracefully throughout the room and even up on the terrace ledge. Barbour stays on the sidelines, barely visible.

  Mr. Music opened during the 1950 holiday season to pleasant reviews. It was a minor entry in the Crosby filmography, and earned Lee only passing mentions. But that December her hopes rose again when she was invited on short notice to join the national tour of a lavishly hyped, hugely budgeted stage spectacular. Produced by the American Legion, Red, White and Blue: All American Revue was an evening of patriotic propaganda, with a cast of 123 and twenty-five sets. The show trumpeted a message of nationwide prosperity; proceeds would benefit veteran rehabilitation and child welfare. But the lead performer, Hollywood singing siren Gertrude Niesen, had quit, hence the urgent need for a bankable substitute. Lee’s job was easy: amid flag-waving sketches and songs, she and her husband’s group would present a chunk of their club act.