Is That All There Is? Read online

  Presley had done even more to ignite American libidos. His pelvic gyrations on TV confirmed parents’ worst fears about what rockers intended to teach their children. A Catholic newspaper editor wrote to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, calling the budding superstar “a definite danger to the security of the United States,” with a menacing power “to rouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth.” When Presley appeared on Ed Sullivan, cameramen shot him only above the waist.

  Censorship efforts had helped turn various films and books into box-office gold. Producer Otto Preminger, screenwriter F. Hugh Herbert, and United Artists Corporation defied the Motion Picture Production Code by refusing to expurgate The Moon Is Blue, a saucy comedy that starred William Holden and David Niven. The Hollywood censor objected to the film’s “unacceptably light attitude towards seduction, illicit sex, chastity, and virginity”; United Artists released the film anyway, and the controversy helped make it the year’s fifteenth biggest box-office hit.

  For tearing the mask off a supposedly virtuous country, few could surpass Grace Metalious and Alfred Kinsey. Metalious, a tough New Hampshire housewife, inflamed America with her 1956 novel, Peyton Place, about the salacious goings-on in a fictional New England town—“truly a composite,” she said, “of all small towns . . . where the people try to hide all the skeletons in their closets.” The book unleashed a hailstorm of controversy, and several cities banned it. Yet by the time Peggy Lee was singing “Fever,” Metalious’s sexposé had outsold Gone with the Wind.

  Comparable furor and titillation greeted the phenomenally scandalous “Kinsey Reports,” which analyzed the American people’s previously uncharted sexual behavior. Released in two best-selling books, the Kinsey Reports shocked the nation. According to Paul Gebhard, who worked for the Kinsey Institute, “People were outraged when we showed that the great majority of people had premarital intercourse, and that the incidence of adultery was higher than anyone thought.”

  Out of that atmosphere came Peggy Lee’s “Fever.” From then on, many parents thought her quite improper. Sidney Myer, a New York cabaret manager starting in the 1980s, had grown up in Philadelphia after the release of “Fever.” Even at twelve he was mad for female singers, and when he read that Lee would be performing at the Latin Casino in nearby Cherry Hill, New Jersey, he insisted his parents take him. “My mother was a very elegant, refined lady, and we always were taught manners, and how to be respectful in every way. The first thing she said was, ‘Peggy Lee is vulgar!’ I didn’t know what she was referring to; maybe it was the plunging necklines or the hint of sex. That didn’t stop them from taking me in a car on a Sunday afternoon to the matinee at the Latin Casino. There was a spell from the moment Peggy Lee set foot onstage. I suppose I was responding to her beauty, her glamour, this dreamlike presence. People were clapping if she raised her shoulder or cocked her eyebrow in a sexy way. It seemed like a spell had been cast over us all. When we left I asked my mother what she thought. She said, ‘Well . . .’ There was this pause. Finally she said, ‘She creates a certain mood.’ ”

  In the company of such renegades as Metalious and Presley, Lee deserves at least honorable mention for providing a soundtrack to the burgeoning sexual consciousness of a nation. Yet no hue and cry followed “Fever,” for Lee knew how to package sex with class. She could segue easily from suggestive R&B to the writing of children’s songs. The latter was her task when George Pal, the filmmaker who had used her voice in his 1946 short, Jasper in a Jam, invited Lee to write two tunes for his next cartoon feature, tom thumb [sic]. Lee’s contributions, “Are You a Dream?” and “tom thumb’s Tune,” helped the film earn a Golden Globe nomination for best musical.

  She basked in the acclaim. But for the third time, Lee’s career had driven a difficult marriage to the breaking point. Professionally, Dewey Martin’s ego had taken a beating. “A year ago,” wrote a reporter, “Dewey was tipped as being a hot new male lead for TV and pictures but nothing has happened.” Alongside his wife he seemed almost invisible. After shows, Lee would spend hours greeting fans and friends while Martin waited at home. Around two AM she would march through the door, band members in tow. “Peggy would wake Nicki up and Nicki would have to make food, drinks,” said Joe Harnell, who had just joined her as pianist. “We’d drink, and Peggy wanted us to improvise Bach, Gregorian chants, contrapuntal things, just for fun. Dewey would make an appearance. He wanted us to get out of there so they could go to bed. The tension that was building was very clear. At four in the morning Dewey would storm into the living room and say, ‘All right, you guys, get out of here!’ And she would say, ‘Don’t you tell my friends what to do!’ There’d be a scene, and we’d all get the hell out of there.”

  Lee seemed clueless as to why Martin should have gotten so upset. Still, the decaying marriage had left her an emotional wreck, and her flair for manifesting ill health through worry had reached its peak. Her friends, as well as the press, couldn’t keep up with her reported illnesses. Fred Apollo wasn’t alone in thinking that Lee “exaggerated at times for sympathy,” but the ailments seemed real to her. A month after recording “Fever,” she collapsed on a train. The cause, wrote a columnist, was “infectious mononucleosis as a result of overwork.” As “Fever” rose on the charts, Lee was home in bed, nurses hovering nearby; the name of her illness had been amended to “glandular fever.”

  Typically, nothing could induce her to follow doctors’ orders and rest. While sick, Lee completed a short story, a song, and two paintings, and received a parade of concerned friends. Frank Sinatra arrived from his house up the street, bearing flowers, books, and LPs. Lee recalled him arriving with “a truckload of things” for a barbecue, “like the torches that you stick into the ground and light up, and the food. And he barbecued it and then he served it to us. I mean, personally.”

  As of July 15, 1958, “us” no longer included Martin. That day, the actor moved out. He went to New York on business, and when he came back to California a few weeks later, he was served with divorce papers. Martin didn’t show up in Santa Monica Superior Court in September, when his wife pleaded her case to a judge. Her husband, she said, had caused her “grievous mental suffering.” Lee declared him “hostile and moody” and “extremely jealous” of her career; she charged him with using “vile language to me in front of my friends” and claimed that “he always tried to upset me just before my concerts.” She made no mention of his alleged physical violence.

  Lee got her interlocutory judgment. But under the still-existing California divorce laws, she would again have to wait a year for the break to become final. To Max Bennett, the love life of this queen of romance and sex seemed doomed. “Nobody wanted to be Mr. Peggy Lee,” he said.

  “Basin Street East,” wrote Billboard, “belongs to Peggy Lee.” (COURTESY OF RICHARD MORRISON)

  Chapter Nine

  AS THOUGH TO offset her latest marital fiasco, Lee went back to Capitol in October to record the album I Like Men!, twelve songs about the can’t-live-with-’em, can’t live-without-’em opposite sex. Amid such carefree ditties as “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “It’s So Nice to Have a Man Around the House,” Lee sang a few tunes whose darker themes couldn’t have escaped her. She had conceived the album’s one memorable chart—the raunchy burlesque-style horns and stripper drumbeat that backed her on “My Man,” the 1921 tearjerker. “He isn’t true, he beats me too, what can I do?” sang Lee in the take-charge tone of a woman who embraced suffering. From Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate came “So in Love,” a song of determined sexual obsession: “So taunt me and hurt me / Deceive me, desert me / I’m yours till I die.” In an old Cotton Club tearjerker, “Good for Nothin’ Joe,” a streetwalker mourns the abusiveness of her pimp. “Still, there’s nothin’ I can do / Because I love him so,” she coos in a lullaby tone.

  Shared emotional cruelty was a motif in many of Lee’s relationships, and it seldom had a happy ending. The increasingly needy singer leaned on her musicians for support. “They were
her family,” said Fred Apollo. “She kept them from leaving her after each show, which caused some problems with those who had wives or a life and didn’t want to hang out until the early morning hours.” Those who refused, like Jack Costanzo, faced an angry Peggy Lee. Secretaries, too, had to plead with Lee to let them go before nightfall, even before midnight. Max Bennett’s sister, Mary, hadn’t lasted long in that job. “Mary told me she left because she was gonna have a nervous breakdown,” said Bennett. “Peggy ran her ragged.”

  As for boudoir companionship, Lee didn’t go lacking. According to Frank Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, her relationship with Sinatra wasn’t platonic. In his memoir, Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra, Jacobs wrote of how Lee was the “occasional beneficiary of Mr. S’s largesse.” Like her, the macho-acting superstar “couldn’t be alone,” Jacobs wrote. “He always needed a girl, and she didn’t have to be famous.” He would thumb through his little black book, phoning everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland to his favorite hookers. “If all else failed, he’d call Peggy Lee, who lived down the block.”

  Lee was usually the predator, but her liaisons with Sinatra suggested how pliable she could be in the presence of a powerful man. That was how she had envisioned Dave Barbour—as a fatherly savior in whose strong arms she could surrender. Ultimately, though, Lee was usually tougher and more dominant than any of the men in her life, and few of their egos could handle it.

  As she waited out her divorce decree, Lee, as usual, crammed every possible moment with work—this despite a new string of reported illnesses, among them “an acute virus infection.” Two weeks after that purported malady, Lee was at Capitol to record a song written by an embattled black survivor who had stirred her as deeply as Count Basie. In his three years as a star, Ray Charles had become synonymous with soul; many greats, including Sinatra, called him a genius. Born in rural Georgia, Charles had lived a hardscrabble life with which Lee could identify. He had grown up in poverty, gone blind at seven, lost his mother at fifteen, and become a drug addict a year later. His piano playing and raspy, aching voice were the heart of the blues; Charles added gospel, jazz, and boogie-woogie, weaving them all into an exultant, foot-stomping sound that had extolled the full breadth of black music. Lee recalled the first time she heard Charles’s trademark, “Georgia on My Mind.” When he sang, “Georgia, Georgia, no peace I find,” she couldn’t keep from crying.

  At a singles session on March 28, 1959, Jimmy Rowles, Max Bennett, Larry Bunker, Howard Roberts, Shelly Manne, and several more of her pet musicians joined Lee and Jack Marshall to record “Hallelujah, I Love Him So,” the first of several Charles songs that Lee would cover, with appropriate changes of gender. Her version was swinging big-band jazz—full of glee as she boasted of the man who made love to her all night then served her coffee at dawn. Charles loved her effort. It became a Lee showstopper, as did her cover of “Alright, Okay, You Win,” borrowed from Joe Williams and the Count Basie orchestra. Williams had grown up in awe of Lee, and she thrilled him again in 1959 when they crossed paths at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. He never forgot that moment: “She stopped and she looked at me and she said, ‘Sing, baby . . . sing!’ Now that’s inspiring!”

  On April 10, Lee was back in New York to appear on a CBS-TV jazz spectacular, Swing into Spring, in celebration of Benny Goodman’s twenty-five years as a bandleader. Other guests included Ella Fitzgerald, the Berlin-born classical and jazz piano wizard André Previn, and the daredevil vocal foursome the Hi-Lo’s. All of them worked in the vanguard of modern jazz except Goodman, who had remained stubbornly anchored in the swing sounds of the forties. He had aged into a vague-looking codger, but hadn’t grown any warmer. “He wasn’t a wicked man,” said Previn. “He just had no tact. I remember on that show, Ella came out for a dress rehearsal in a rather ill-chosen dress, because it was full of beads, and they glittered, and there was a lot of Ella. She said, ‘What do you think, honey?’ I said, ‘You look great.’ We walked down the hall. Benny came out of his room and saw her, and said, ‘Shit, you’re not gonna wear that?’ ”

  Previn bowed to Ella, and even more so to Peggy Lee. “I was crazy about her. Of that school of singing, she was my favorite. She had the best time I ever heard in my life. You couldn’t shake her.” As she sang “Why Don’t You Do Right?” in front of a flashing starburst, Lee stared into the eyes of America with no sign of her former terror. And this was live TV. “She owned the camera,” said the TV producer Bill Harbach. “It was her friend.” Alongside Ella’s bouncy swing and the “hot” jazz of Goodman’s group, Lee was the essence of stillness. She acted out songs almost entirely with her face; director Dwight Hemion kept her in close-up as often as possible. Lee had brought several songs from her I Like Men! album, including “When a Woman Loves a Man,” Johnny Mercer’s account of a woman who lays herself at her lover’s feet, blind to his flaws. Eyelids fluttering and head tilted back, she seemed in the flush of some private erotic reverie as she sang: “Tell her she’s a fool and she’ll say, ‘Yes, I know . . . but I love him so.’ ”

  Away from the cameras, said Previn, “Oh, she was eccentric.” Clark Burroughs, the tenor of the Hi-Lo’s, recalled her as morose and “very reclusive.” She perked up on May 4, 1959, a night she had dreamed about for months. At the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS) held its first Grammy Awards ceremony to honor outstanding achievement in the recorded arts. Early on that balmy evening, 516 industry figures in tuxedoes and evening gowns had filed past the swaying palm trees at Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, then headed toward the hotel’s International Ballroom. The big, round tables filled up with stars: Frank Sinatra; Sammy Davis, Jr.; Milton Berle; Dean Martin; Henry Mancini; Johnny Mercer; Gene Autry; Jo Stafford.

  The Grammys began as an untelevised insider event, with only twenty-eight categories. The nominees, including Peggy Lee, waited and squirmed. “Fever” had scored nominations for Record of the Year; Best Vocal Performance, Female; and Best Arrangement. The last category named Jack Marshall, which made Lee fume. The setting for “Fever” was her idea, she insisted to friends; all Marshall had done was notate the musicians’ parts.

  No matter, because The Music of Peter Gunn, the soundtrack album of a hit TV detective show, won its composer and conductor, Henry Mancini, the Best Arrangement award. As Record of the Year, NARAS voters chose “Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu” (“Volare”), a continental trifle by Italian crooner Domenico Modugno. Near the end of the night, Frank Sinatra announced the nominees for Best Vocal Performance, Female. A huge cheer greeted his announcement of the winner—Ella Fitzgerald, for her Irving Berlin Song Book.

  After such upsets, Lee typically called Ernest Holmes for solace; lately their phone chats had swelled into a near-nightly ritual. He tried to convince her not to take each disappointment so personally. Patiently the spiritualist told her she was an instrument of God, and that everything she accomplished was more his doing than her own.

  Lee was on such a self-induced treadmill that she couldn’t make the distinction. Many projects that bore her trademark polish were in fact thrown together at the last minute. Capitol had booked Lee to join George Shearing, the London-born, blind jazz pianist turned mood-music star, to record a live album. Dave Cavanaugh had chosen a chaotic setting: a national disc-jockey convention at the Americana Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. The two stars were too busy to coordinate advance meetings, so they agreed to whip up the repertoire and arrangements at the hotel.

  Lee flew through a storm to get there, and arrived at the start of the most bacchanalian party she had ever attended. Its grandiose title, “The Second Annual International Radio Programming Seminar and Pop Music Disc Jockey Convention,” suggested an event of high respectability. In panel discussions, authorities would pontificate on the state of music broadcasting; as dessert, a smorgasbord of disc-jockey sweethearts—Patti Page, Connie Francis, Vic Damone, Julie London, Pat Boone, Andy Williams—would put on a
gala show. Columbia Records producer Mitch Miller, host of TV’s popular Sing Along with Mitch, was on hand, ready to valiantly declaim rock and roll as the “worship of mediocrity” and “one step from fascism.”

  But the presence of cohost Morris Levy—the mob-connected industry mogul—hinted at misconduct. The convention helped trigger the first revelations of payola, the rampant record-company practice of bribing DJs into pushing certain singles. Six months later, Alan Freed, the slick-talking New York deejay—a hero to many teenagers—would take the fall for many of his peers when he lost his job for accepting payoffs. Widespread federal investigations of the radio industry followed.

  The payola scandal painted one more blemish on the country’s “wholesome” landscape. TV and radio had not fully recovered from the scourge of the blacklist, which in 1950 had set out to eradicate the voices of anyone with progressive social or political ties—all of which were lumped conveniently under “Communism.” Then, in 1958, came the quiz show scandals. It shook many Americans to the core to think that their trusted television sets could bring such hypocrisy into their living rooms.