Is That All There Is? Page 17

  Following her closing at Ciro’s, she arrived—“scared to death,” Curtiz recalled. As he, a cameraman, grips, and makeup and hair designers hovered around her, Lee panicked. Retreating into her shell, she stammered through her script. Curtiz urged her to pretend that her lines were the words of a song. Her reading improved. Lee was no innately gifted actress like Day, but Curtiz sensed enough potential to sign her for The Jazz Singer.

  That July, with much fanfare, Warner Bros. announced its exciting find. Lee, spouted Curtiz, was a “great actress” who was sure to become “one of the biggest stars.” From the start, it seemed clear that her casting was, in part, the studio’s revenge against Day. Curtiz made no secret of his ire. “He’s still mad that Doris Day turned him down,” announced Variety. Knowing good publicity when they saw it, Warner Bros. didn’t discourage the spreading gossip of a feud between the singers. Day tried to do damage control. “When I saw her in the makeup department one morning,” she told Hedda Hopper, “I said, ‘All this is a lot of junk and I hope you’re not upset.’ ” Lee was not, insisted Day.

  Still, Curtiz was clearly grooming her in Day’s image, which included giving her a similar poodle-cut hairdo. “Peggy Lee is gonna look an awful lot like Doris Day when Mike Curtiz finishes having her teeth and hair fixed,’ ” wrote the Hollywood Reporter. Curtiz delighted in comparing the two young women, quite insightfully. “Doris is an extrovert, happy-go-lucky about every turn of fate,” he told a reporter. “Peggy is an introvert—a dogged analyst, tenacious, moody, sensitive, and shy almost to the neurotic stage.”

  Those qualities made Lee an odd choice for a role custom designed for Day: that of Judy Lane, America’s vivacious queen of musical comedy, full of can-do optimism. Lee’s role was far from deep, but fear of failure seized her. Danny Thomas got a hint of what lay beneath her detached façade when he complimented her on her economy of movement at Ciro’s. “I thanked him and said I just stood there because I was too scared to move,” admitted Lee.

  Shooting began on August 1, 1952. Following Curtiz’s advice, she analyzed her lines as though they were lyrics; when the camera rolled, she tried to envision herself singing instead of speaking. But the strain showed. Curtiz didn’t like her early scenes, but Thomas was sensitive enough to spot the “inner sadness” in Lee. “Michael Curtiz saw that, wanted to get it from her, but I don’t think she wanted to explore it,” said the comic. Though it had nothing to do with her character, Lee sang her arrangement of “Lover” in a nightclub scene. As though compensating for her tentative acting, she shimmied self-consciously in the crook of the piano.

  Lee on the set of The Jazz Singer, performing her hit “Lover.”

  All the while, she leaned doggedly on her Ernest Holmes–inspired positive thinking. Lee had offered to write a song for Judy to share with Jerry Golding (the Thomas character) when they appeared together, through Judy’s machinations, in a Broadway show. “This Is a Very Special Day” was a naïvely cheerful tune for the lovebirds to sing aboard a carousel. The ride wasn’t just a prop; Lee had spotted it in a Los Angeles playground where she’d taken Nicki. The eight-year-old was enchanted, and Lee convinced Warner Bros. to rent it for the film.

  Later on she tried, unsuccessfully, to buy it for Nicki—a wildly extravagant gift from a largely absentee mother. Around the time she was filming The Jazz Singer, Lee enrolled Nicki in the Westlake School for Girls, located in the fashionable Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. At home, Nicki’s parenting was shared by Alice Larsen; Lillie Mae Hendrick, Lee’s cheeky black housekeeper, cook, and wardrobe mistress; Dona Harsh; and Dave Barbour, whose minimal work load left him ample time to spend with his daughter.

  As far as Lee was concerned, her daughter had the best of several worlds. But all this pampering couldn’t keep Nicki from feeling lonely. She dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer; but more than anything, she craved her mom’s attention. “Peggy was typical of these show-business mothers,” said Harsh. “They spoiled their kids rotten, prepared them for nothing, and they weren’t there for them. In a sense, they couldn’t be. Peggy was earning the money to keep the whole show afloat. She had to travel, and she took Nicki with her when she was little. But then Nicki was in school, and she couldn’t go on the road.”

  No one doubted that Lee adored her little girl. That year, she wrote a poem about her:

  She’s so wise

  For one so small . . .

  Hard to understand at all

  It’s almost as though she had lived before

  And returned to show me heaven’s door

  But with work continuing on The Jazz Singer, Lee remained career-driven above all else, and no amount of fatigue could slow her down. “Whenever I go to do anything, I go all the way,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I knock myself out. It has to be that way. Do it or don’t do it.” At the end of many exhausting days of filming, Lee taped her twice-weekly CBS radio show; stayed up most of the night penning poems; then reported to Warner Bros. at dawn.

  Now another glamorous task would add to the consumption of her time. Walt Disney Productions had hired Sonny Burke to compose a handful of songs for an animated feature already in production. It concerned the midwestern romance between Lady, a high-class cocker spaniel, and Tramp, a mutt from the shady side of the tracks. Burke asked a thrilled Peggy Lee to collaborate. Somehow he sensed that the reigning femme fatale of pop-jazz could look through a child’s eyes into the film’s small-town Victorian world, where animals were as human as people, and capture it in lyrics.

  Disney’s thin mustache, graying hair, and patient voice made him ideal as the father of children’s entertainment—“a charming man, full of enthusiasm,” as Lee remembered him. Along with his brother and business partner Roy, he had brought children all over the world some of their dearest imaginary friends: Dumbo, Bambi, Donald Duck, Pinocchio, and most of all Mickey Mouse, for whom he had supplied the voice. In 1950, a thirty-year-old Lee had sat in a darkened movie theater, dazzled by Disney’s adaptation of Cinderella. She had always identified with the title character of that ancient fairy tale; now she, too, was about to become the belle of a heartwarming cartoon ball.

  On June 28, 1952, Hedda Hopper announced that Lee and Burke had begun the score for Lady and the Tramp. Before they had signed their contracts, Disney had shown them around his labyrinth studios in Burbank, California. He introduced them to the members of his creative team, including the Nine Old Men, as he called his chief animators. Their work on Lady and the Tramp hadn’t progressed far beyond storyboards; Disney showed them to his new songwriters and asked them to look for places to insert songs. Lee had lots of suggestions. “He liked every idea—I don’t remember being turned down on anything,” she said.

  The plot mirrored both of their early lives. Disney had grown up in Marceline, Missouri, a railroad town that inspired the one in Lady and the Tramp. As depicted in the film, it suggested Lee’s various addresses in North Dakota. Like her, Disney loved trains, which is why he had Tramp live by the railroad tracks. Having grown up feeling closer to animals than she did to most people, Lee was enchanted by the film’s truer-than-life canine characters. Lady, a tawny seductress, had ears that draped down like flowing hair and lashes that accentuated her batting eyes. Tramp’s trusting gaze, goofy grin, and hanging tongue made him the storybook image of Man’s Best Friend. Lady’s kindly human mother, Mrs. Darling, reminded Lee of her dear lost Selma. Throughout the animation process, Disney kept real dogs at the studio as a reference point for his artists.

  Lee’s head spun with ideas. That summer, she and Burke worked on the songs. Shooting on The Jazz Singer stretched through September, but Lee’s spell of happy prolificity fell prey to exhaustion. Erskine Johnson of the Daily News reported that a “sudden glandular illness” had stricken the singer, alarming everyone on the set. “Peggy’s doctors are deeply concerned about her condition,” he warned. She began having vocal problems, and her physician announced that she needed throat surgery. Lee�
�s imagination took a dark turn; she decided she was dying.

  Even so, she seemed incapable of cutting back. Upon finishing The Jazz Singer, Lee plunged into a demanding engagement at the Capitol Theatre in Washington, D.C. In between showings of a film, she headlined a variety show that played five times a day. Onstage she revealed no hint of illness. “She moves around stage in her slow, sultry style, and socks her tunes across with almost no visible effort,” wrote a critic. “This is an act which deserves the almost hysterical response it gets from the Lee devotees.”

  But each night after work, no matter how late it was, she phoned Ernest Holmes in tears over her anticipated death. “Papa,” as Lee called Holmes, didn’t buy it. More than once he had seen her think herself ill through worry, and her favored opiates—alcohol, cigarettes, promiscuity, and overwork—weren’t helping. The minister thought that a stable man in her life might make all the difference. In September, Holmes and his wife showed up at her house for dinner. With them was Brad Dexter, a film actor, then thirty-five, who specialized in playing tough guys. Born Boris Malonovich of Serbian roots, Dexter was a tall, rugged, round-faced man with thinning hair and a friendly smile—not exactly the menacing sort. “He wasn’t a great actor,” said Lee’s friend and future secretary, Betty Jungheim. “But he was a nice guy.”

  Lee had seen him in The Asphalt Jungle, director John Huston’s 1950 film noir. She remembered a bit part played by the still-unknown Marilyn Monroe, but couldn’t recall Dexter. At the dinner table they made polite small-talk. Dexter was attracted to her, but when he phoned repeatedly in coming weeks to ask her out, she wouldn’t commit. Holmes prodded them both, and eventually Lee began to halfheartedly date the actor. Dexter went out of his way to act paternal toward her daughter, a gesture that helped melt Lee’s reserve. “Brad’s wonderfully kind and generous and good and Nicki saw that,” she told an interviewer. After a short courtship, he asked Lee to marry him. The singer hesitated. She didn’t love him, yet nearly everyone close to her—Dona Harsh, Dr. and Mrs. Holmes, Nicki, even Dave Barbour—tried to talk her into it.

  Lee wouldn’t give Dexter an answer, but the pressure to do the right thing for Nicki’s sake weighed on her. Lee still believed she hadn’t long to live, and she wanted her daughter to have a full-time dad. On December 27, three days before the Los Angeles premiere of The Jazz Singer, Hedda Hopper broke the news about Lee and Dexter’s impending marriage.

  There were other tidbits to report. Warner Bros. had offered Lee a nonexclusive contract with an option for two more features. Recently she had donned a black wig to screen-test for the starring role in The Helen Morgan Story, a biopic about the tragic torch singer of the speakeasy era. The studio announced plans to reteam Lee and Thomas in two new films: a remake of Wonder Bar, another early Jolson vehicle; and Everybody Comes to Rick’s, a musical spinoff of Casablanca.

  On December 30, 1952, The Jazz Singer was unveiled at the Fox Beverly Theater in Beverly Hills. Warner Bros. had arranged a glittering premiere. Bleachers were built on the street to hold a huge crowd of Korean War veterans; they and mobs of civilian fans cheered as one luminary after another stepped out of limos and waved: Joan Crawford, Tony Curtis, Jeff Chandler, Greer Garson, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Mary Pickford, even Salvador Dalí. Lee’s arrival, on the arm of Dexter, brought a comparable roar of approval.

  The movie did not. In Cue, Jesse Zunser called the remade classic “modernized, glamorized and excessively sentimentalized.” Though Thomas had mimicked Jolson’s flamboyant body language and cantorial mannerisms, he came off as stiff and bland. Lee fared no better. Instead of exuding the ebullience of a reigning Broadway star, she seemed distant and unknowable, and mumbled her lines. As in her Benny Goodman days, fear read as aloofness. “Peggy Lee performed adequately, but hardly sensationally, in the feminine lead,” wrote one critic. “All the ballyhoo whipped up over Miss Lee is scarcely justified. She certainly doesn’t come across as a ‘warm’ personality.”

  But Hedda Hopper and her fellow dowager gossip queen, Louella Parsons, took pains to shower Lee with praise—a possible slap at Doris Day, whose refusal to kowtow to journalists would provoke the Hollywood Women’s Press Club into giving her their “Sour Apple Award” for uncooperative actors.

  As her marriage to Dexter loomed, she supplied gushy tidbits to columnists, perhaps to convince herself that she’d made the right choice. Lee told Betty Craig of the Denver Post that Brad was “one of the handsomest and most talented men I have ever met,” and that she would stand by him “until death do us part.” Brad’s more sincere comments invoked giggles among Lee’s friends; Dexter, wrote Parsons, “says his mother is crazy about Peggy because she can bake bread and is so sensible.”

  On the afternoon of Sunday, January 4, 1953, Lee prepared for a lavish wedding in her backyard. Bridesmaid Dona Harsh helped her squeeze into a pink taffeta gown with matching coat. But Lee felt no joy. “I think I shouldn’t go through with this,” she murmured into a mirror.

  An A-list Hollywood crowd had begun streaming into her garden, which was sheltered by a tent. Lee’s doubts hadn’t curbed her extravagance; the original guest list of two hundred had swelled to nearly twice that many. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Jane Russell, and Victor Mature mingled with the throng, as did Lee’s collie, Banjo. “It was a storybook wedding,” wrote a reporter, “with scores of movie and television ‘names’ milling about in Peggy’s beloved rock gardens, happily consuming seventy-one cases of imported champagne.”

  Several glasses were consumed by Dave Barbour, who seemed not at all wistful about his ex-wife’s new marriage. “Either that or he was loaded,” recalled Nicki, who served as flower girl. With no father to give her away, Lee had recruited Michael Curtiz. He walked her to the altar, a bouquet in her hands, and brought her face-to-face with Dexter. Holmes performed the ceremony. After he pronounced them man and wife, Lee tossed her bouquet to the women present. A reporter picked up on the wedding’s undercurrent when she wrote of Lee as “sometimes tense and moody despite her relaxed air in public.”

  With the words “I do,” Dexter stepped into his role as Mr. Peggy Lee. On January 7, 1953, the couple took the train to Manhattan for a three-week honeymoon that was all about Lee. The couple attended the New York premiere of The Jazz Singer at the Paramount; it was raining, and photographers snapped Dexter carrying his wife over the watery curb. Lee was scheduled to sing “This Is a Very Special Day” on January 20 at the inaugural ball of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but according to a news report, illness led her to cancel.

  According to Betty Jungheim, one aspect of the honeymoon lingered: “Brad said that she wouldn’t let him out of bed.” Otherwise, Lee found him far less exciting than Greg Bautzer, her recent glamour beau, who had stayed in her life as a friend and lawyer. That year, Bautzer paid for a vanity publication of a Peggy Lee book of poetry, which she titled Softly—with Feeling: A Collection of Verse. The forty-page volume, printed on off-white parchment, had a generic cover and looked more like a pamphlet. Most of the poems were wispy musings, jotted while Lee lay woozily under her blanket. Her frequent use of ellipses pointed to the spaciness of her thoughts. “I write in a very odd free form,” she explained.

  The book serves as a window into Lee’s nonmusical concerns at the time. Some of her verse ponders the psychology of mice, spiders, and her pet canary; time and again she channels her inner prairie girl:

  We have a new milkman

  I guess we’ll get to know him . . .

  He leaves the wrong amount of eggs . . .

  I guess we’ll have to show him . . .

  Storm clouds keep passing over the book’s sunny landscape, however, as Lee writes of “memories faded . . . lost and jaded” and of “great love / Obscured by mortal fear.” She talks to her own body (“You’re nothing but a fat shadow . . . you tell me lies . . .”) and exposes her fear of death (“the mortal me / Thinks it must / Be dying . . .”) There are rambling passages of what would later be called New Age phil
osophy: “But then, the peace that comes of leaving judgment to a wiser judge . . . the selflessness that leaves a love free to grow like the strongest, most beautiful tree you ever saw . . . to give to love, so that love can be given, to say, in effect, ‘Here I am . . . breathe upon me.’ ”

  If nothing else, her poetry is sincere, and both it and she touched Lea Sullivan, Bautzer’s secretary. The two women had never met, and when they finally crossed paths in the lobby of Bautzer’s office building, Sullivan blurted out, “Oh, my God, it’s Peggy Lee!” The singer took Sullivan’s hand, smiled broadly, and said, “And I’m glad to see you, too!” Lee could make a stranger feel like her new best friend, and so it was with Sullivan. She asked the young woman’s name, then suggested they sit together in the lobby to chat some more. “Do you like what I do?” asked Lee.

  “Of course I do!” answered Sullivan.

  “OK, I’d like to give you something to remember me by.” Lee reached into her purse and pulled out Softly—with Feeling, which Sullivan still hadn’t seen. “We talked about the book, and she read a few pages for me,” said Sullivan.

  Lee’s enigmatic manner gave even her most simplistic verse a between-the-lines profundity. So it was at the cavernous Hollywood Bowl, the outdoor bandshell where stars ranging from Louis Armstrong to the titans of classical music performed for up to eighteen thousand people. Two-thirds that many listened under the stars as Lee, accompanied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, recited and sang her epic poem, “New York City Ghost,” from Softly—with Feeling. The conductor was Lee’s sometime songwriting partner, Decca maestro Victor Young, the short, cigar-chomping composer whose stately music for such films as For Whom the Bell Tolls and Samson and Delilah would earn him twenty-two Oscar nominations. In black tie and tails, Young waved his baton before an army of musicians; out came an atmospheric soundscape that evoked Manhattan in the wee hours. Lee was the soul of stillness as she stood near Young and sang “I’ll be a ghost and fly from the coast . . .” Then she intoned, as though in a trance, her poem about the music of the dark city streets: “It came up from your subways and climbed up high; it circled your buildings and swept on with a sigh . . .” Albert Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times noted how she had “successfully established a nightclub atmosphere” in the mammoth space.