Is That All There Is? Read online

  For three days in Miami, payola reigned. Record companies had lured an estimated two thousand five hundred DJs and radio executives to the Americana, where paradise greeted them in the form of lavish hotel suites; gambling; endless alcohol and food; free TVs, phonographs, and clothes; and what author William Barlow called “one of the largest contingents of hookers ever assembled in a Miami Beach hotel.” A week later, Time magazine would accuse RCA Victor of plying DJs with a million dollars to spend on the aforementioned perks.

  The call girls and booze outshone the entertainment. It included a soft-spoken enchantress from North Dakota and a jazz pianist who had turned his aristocratic hands to the production of boudoir music for the modern bachelor pad. Shearing’s quintet, with its pastel sound of unison vibraphone and piano, played on such best-selling albums as Blue Chiffon, Satin Affair, and Soft and Silky. Playboy-ready models adorned the LP covers, which seemed to promise that if you spun those discs, girls like that might soon adorn your bedsheets.

  Immediately upon reaching the Americana, Lee stepped into strife. Shearing’s band, which included his black Cuban percussionist, Armando Peraza, had arrived first. Racism and segregation ran rampant in 1950s Florida, as they did in much of America; and when the front-desk staff got a look at Peraza, he was turned down for a room. “There we were,” recalled the musician, “standing in the hotel lobby being humiliated once again, but this time it was Miss Peggy Lee who took control. She threatened to sue the promoter and the hotel, and would in no uncertain terms tell this convention full of disc jockeys what Miami Beach really stood for. She went toe-to-toe with these guys until they relented.”

  From there, Shearing and Lee scrambled to cobble together an album. Each had a few songs in mind, but the pianist hadn’t notated a single chord—“because George is blind and doesn’t use written music,” Lee explained. “We had to memorize everything. How we lived through it and stayed alive, I don’t know, because it was seventy-two hours that we were up.”

  On Friday night, May 29, the drunken throngs were herded into a large conference room for a free show. Attention spans were wavery at best when the artists took their places on a center platform: Lee in a white, shiny, flaring satin dress, Shearing with his trademark tuxedo, dark glasses, and toothy grin. His group included Toots Thielemans, a jaunty Belgian guitarist who had played with many American greats, including bebop’s acknowledged genius, saxophonist Charlie Parker.

  Unfortunately, the session was sabotaged by technical troubles, the rambunctious crowd, and underrehearsal. On a surviving recording of Cole Porter’s “Always True to You in My Fashion,” Lee gets lost near the beginning—“Oh, wait a minute, I’m sorry, I goofed!”—and never settles into Shearing’s draggy tempo. Years later, Lee could hardly recall the performance: “I was so exhausted. I just remember standing there.”

  Producer Dave Cavanaugh, who was present, cut the taping short after a few songs. The next night, Lee and Shearing performed the whole show, but for some reason it went unrecorded. Tension clouded the proceedings, as the pianist seethed at Lee for some perceived snub onstage. Its nature mystified Eleanor Fuerst, the wife of Ed Fuerst, Shearing’s first American manager. “I never had the feeling it was anything that Peggy did,” she said, adding,“George was not the easiest person with whom to get along.”

  Rather than abandon the project, Cavanaugh tried a practical solution. Before they left Miami, Lee and the group would record the show without an audience. In a common practice at the time, Capitol’s engineers would add crowd noises and applause to create a bogus live album. Frictions notwithstanding, by the time the tape rolled, the music had fallen so impeccably into place that no one could have imagined the stars fumbling through it days before. Shearing’s charts were spare, graceful pieces of architecture, with tuneful intros, motifs, and tags springing out of the songs as though they belonged there. With such a background, Lee’s delivery seemed to float on air. As heard in the musical Kiss Me, Kate, “Always True to You in My Fashion” was the breathless admission of a philandering sexpot; Lee and Shearing turned it into cool, syncopated whimsy, Latinized by Armando Peraza. On “I Lost My Sugar in Salt Lake City,” a lament for a two-timing man, Lee wailed the blues without ever raising her voice. She offered Duke Ellington and Carl Sigman’s tender “All Too Soon” as a nod to one of her now-deceased forerunners, Mildred Bailey, a rotund jazz singer who had swung with a featherweight ease.

  Capitol called the album Beauty and the Beat! Above the artists’ names, the cover declared: RECORDED LIVE AT THE NATIONAL DISC JOCKEY CONVENTION IN MIAMI, FLORIDA. The label could just as easily have issued the disc as a studio session; one had to wonder about Capitol’s relationship to the nefarious organizers.

  Back home, Lee faced more drama. On June 16, she permanently shed the title of Mrs. Dewey Martin. The singer had asked no alimony, just reimbursement of attorney’s fees and full ownership of the house that Martin had bought from her. By now the actor’s film career had more or less ended, although he did occasional TV work through the 1970s. Along the way Martin became a bartender in Alaska, lived with monks in a Japanese monastery, and finally retired.

  Lee went from divorce court to the Flamingo in Las Vegas, where according to columnists she fell into the arms of its wealthy owner, George Capri. “The whisper around Las Vegas is that this romance is serious,” wrote a reporter. It went nowhere. On November 9, both the cool siren of “Fever” and her disheartened true-life self went on stark display before Steve Allen’s Monday-night TV viewers. They and the rest of the country had started the countdown to a new decade, but on The Steve Allen Show only his sponsor, Plymouth cars, hinted at the winds of change. Unlike many oversize, ostentatious 1950s automobiles, the company’s streamlined 1960 model was hawked as a gas saver for a belt-tightening future. The commercials signaled the end of a delusional postwar era—a time marked by reckless spending and a naïve assurance that the Lord would provide.

  The Steve Allen Show’s wry, bespectacled host didn’t know that his party, too, was nearly over. Allen’s smart sketch comedy and classy pop-jazz had aimed at a cultivated, adult sensibility; he loved lampooning America’s youth, and took special glee in solemnly reading the words to teenage hits: “Be-Bop-a-Lula, she’s my baby / Be-Bop-a-Lula, I don’t mean maybe . . .” Even the stodgy Ed Sullivan, who had pulverized Allen in the same Sunday-night time slot, embraced rock on his show, however reluctantly. That June, NBC would drop the ax on Allen.

  His November 9, 1959, lineup had looked to the past with the sixty-one-year-old ex-vaudevillian George Jessel and the suave but fading black crooner Billy Eckstine. Allen also featured the six-foot-five, rugged blond hunk Chuck Connors, who starred in the hit series The Rifleman. But the favored billing of his fourth guest—“Extra Added Attraction, Peggy Lee”—revealed who Allen deemed the most important. Five minutes into the show she glided out, smiling and radiant. A plunging, white beaded dress clung to her body, which was at its most curvaceously hourglass. Diamond earrings dangled from beneath a blond bun as large as a pillbox hat. In a brief exchange with Allen, Lee sounded like a slightly potted Mae West. “Well, uh, I have a, kind of a . . . swinging little . . . number, and I’ve been, uh, shopping around for just the . . . right program on which to perform it.”

  “Well, everybody around here swings pretty good, you know,” said Allen.

  Lee waited a beat, then, in the accent of a Vegas thug, answered: “Well, den, diss must be de place!” As she swept past him and took her spot, Allen turned bopster-groovy: “Here is the wild Miss Peggy Lee, who wails!”

  Snapping out the brisk tempo for “It’s All Right With Me,” Lee turned into a slinky jazz angel, shimmying slightly, eyebrows flirtatiously cocked, hands tracing little rhythmic patterns in the air. All the while, she gazed smolderingly into the camera and locked eyes with the viewer. She followed with “Smack Dab in the Middle,” an R&B swinger borrowed from Count Basie and Joe Williams. To see her riding a big-band beat with sheer abandon, hea
d thrown back and arms oustretched, was to understand what made Peggy Lee the happiest.

  But she was no less at home in the show’s heartrending finale, a suite of songs about lost love, arranged orchestrally by Nelson Riddle. It began and ended with the saddest ballad that ever bore her name. Sid Kuller had gone uncredited on “Fever,” but not on “How Do You Erase a Memory?,” whose lyric has a finesse that Lee rarely achieved on her own. The song poses a set of questions about a problem Lee faced constantly: the crashing of one more illusion. “How can you explain a change of heart? How can you hang on to hope?”

  Kuller wove together an extraordinary medley, in which songs of woe overlap like passing clouds, depicting a woman for whom dreams and reality are at constant odds. Allen’s gifted director, Dwight Hemion, staged the segment on an almost bare set; stacked-up chairs simulated a bar after closing. The host plays saloon pianist and confidante. “Yes, it’s bad when your loved one is gone,” sings Lee; Allen answers: “But it’s worse when you try to hang on.”

  From there, Lee turns a misty gaze to the camera and recalls her old lover in song after song. “He had kind of sandy hair, eyes so shiny blue . . . I get along without him very well, except when soft rains fall . . . I hear him call me baby, baaaaby. . . .” Conflicting emotions, from fear to girlish rapture to erotic yearning, pass across her face and through her voice. At times she slips into the raspy moan of Billie Holiday, who had died that summer of liver and heart disease. Finally, with a harp glissando and a cymbal crash, the truth grabs hold of her. Her body shudders, and she’s back to where she started: “How do you erase a memory? How can you replace a dream?”

  Fantasy couldn’t ease her frequent loneliness, but for a while, Bill Harbach could. As Allen’s producer and the man who had launched the Tonight show, the tall, lanky New Yorker, then forty, was a genuine man about town. He seemed to know every star in show business, in part because he had descended from musical-theater royalty. His father, the lyricist and librettist Otto Harbach, had helped evolve operetta into musical comedy; as Jerome Kern’s collaborator he wrote “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Bill, in turn, played a part in taking live TV from its awkward, primitive roots to the graceful production of Peggy Lee’s torch-song montage.

  Lee had seduced him from afar in her Goodman days; finally he got to know her when she played Ciro’s. “We had a crush on each other,” Harbach confessed. By 1959 she was unattached, but he had a wife and two daughters. The producer’s “unavailability” made him all the more enticing to Lee, and Harbach didn’t resist. One night she invited him back to her house. As he stood in her kitchen, drinking milk out of a bottle, Lee stared at him. “When you talked to her,” he recalled, “she was looking behind your eyes, into your thoughts.”

  They began a brief affair. Harbach and Lee had to be discreet, so they met secretly at her home. For all his eminence, Harbach had grown up amid too much greasepaint to be pretentious, and his playfulness brought out a side of Lee that many never saw. “She was funny,” he said. “It was cozy and easy—when it was one-on-one.” The two of them shared an endless stream of jokes. Lee had a favorite. “Hey, Bill,” she said. “A mother comes into her son’s room. She’s outraged. She says to the kid, ‘I found a condom on the patio!’ The kid says, ‘Mom, what’s a patio?’ She thought that was a riot.”

  Lee and Harbach enjoyed many of their tenderest moments while listening to records. Over and over she dropped the phonograph needle on their favorite song, “Just for a Thrill,” a track from a new album, The Genius of Ray Charles. Strings swooped around Charles as he sang, in his crushed-velvet cry, of how it felt to be tossed aside without warning: “Just for a thrill, you changed the sunshine to rain . . .” Jazz pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, the second wife of Louis Armstrong, had composed the song in 1936, five years after their divorce. The words, by Don Raye, reminded Lee of what Dave Barbour and Robert Preston had (she felt) done to her.

  Compared to the messiness of her personal life, an album or show brought Lee the comfort of absolute control. In February 1960, Capitol released one of her cleverest records. Dave Cavanaugh adored “Lover,” and he wanted Lee to make a whole Latin-style LP. He didn’t only have art on his mind; Capitol had recently made a mint with Cole Español, an album of Nat King Cole singing in phonetic Spanish to Nelson Riddle’s commercially south-of-the-border background.

  Lee had too much respect for Latin music to do something that sounded so artificial. With Cavanaugh, she decided to take a dozen showtunes and heat them up with authentic Afro-Cuban rhythms. If Jack Marshall’s arranging sounds Hollywood-slick, the band’s native Latino musicians bring out the spirit that Lee wanted. The four-man trumpet section plays together so precisely that each phrase lands like the crack of a whip. Five percussionists beat out a storm of Latin rhythms on conga, bongo, güiro, timbale, and cowbell. Eddie Cano, a Mexican nightclub pianist from Los Angeles, jabs at the keys in a fiery, syncopated style.

  Together they wipe away any hint of Broadway from the songs. My Fair Lady’s “On the Street Where You Live” becomes a rumba, “The Party’s Over” from Bells Are Ringing, a bolero. In the musical Damn Yankees, a baseball coach tries to boost his failing team’s morale with “(You Gotta Have) Heart”; Latin ala Lee! reworks it as a cha-cha-cha, peppered by a male choir chanting “corazón!” Surrounded by all that frenzy, Lee doesn’t have to do anything except sing straight and on the beat.

  During the session, the control-room door opened, and in walked Desi Arnaz, the Cuban bandleader who had costarred with his wife, Lucille Ball, on TV’s I Love Lucy. Arnaz had just left a studio down the hall. Dona Harsh, Lee’s guest, watched in delight as Arnaz “went over and sang with the guys singing ‘corazón.’ ”

  On the cover, Lee locks arms with two male models dressed as gold-jacketed matadors, their backs to the camera. Her short lemon-yellow hairdo is unbecomingly tousled and topped by a fake-looking bun. Kitschy as it looks, Latin ala Lee! zoomed to number eleven on Billboard’s pop album chart. Beyond the States, it won the hearts of two budding singer-songwriters. Although Lee had yet to sing in England, “Fever” had made her a star there, and “Till There Was You,” a Latin ala Lee! track, was released as a British single. Lee’s bolero version of that ballad from The Music Man caught the ear of future Beatle Paul McCartney. On the 1964 Capitol album, Meet the Beatles, McCartney awkwardly sings lead on “Till There Was You” in an arrangement copied from Latin ala Lee!

  Elsewhere in Britain, the album found its way into the hands of Raymond Edward O’Sullivan, the singer-songwriter whose feel-bad confessional hit of 1972, “Alone Again (Naturally),” made him internationally famous under the name of Gilbert O’Sullivan. Latin ala Lee! so captivated him that he dreamed of recording an LP called Latin ala G!

  In 1959, however, Lee was nearly forty and beloved not by O’Sullivan’s age group but by their parents, which placed her on the enemy side of the generation gap. Her efforts at R&B had failed to win many young hearts. Disc jockey William B. Williams, who played Lee daily on WNEW in New York, knew her audience’s demographic. “The kids consider Peggy Lee a nice elderly blonde,” he said. Then, referencing a twenty-nine-year-old fashion plate of film, TV, and supper clubs, Williams added, “I watched Polly Bergen do one of these television rock and roll shows and the kids looked at her as if she were their aunt from Toledo.”

  “The kids’ ” music, and the stay-at-home pleasures of TV, had begun to eclipse the upscale club circuit that Lee worked. But during a rehearsal for Swing into Spring, Benny Goodman had told her about Basin Street East, a new nightspot in the heart of Manhattan’s East Side. He had just played it, and it would be perfect for her. Later, as she vacationed in Palm Springs, one of her agents called to say that Basin Street East wanted her. The place sounded promising enough for Lee to fly to New York and check it out. She saw a long, rectangular room that held three hundred and forty—the right size for a singer who liked to see her audience’s faces. The stage was at one end, and the sightlines
on the other weren’t great. Lee agreed to sing at Basin Street East, but only if certain changes were made. She wanted the stage torn up and moved to the middle of the lengthwise rear wall. She demanded a wing to enter from and an expensive new bank of lights. “She cost us a lot of money,” said one of the club’s owners, Lennie Green. They paid it. And for the next five years, Peggy Lee was theirs.

  To pianist Mike Melvoin, who would conduct for Lee at Basin Street East, the place was a dream combination of hip and chic. “Back then you’d go out and say, ‘Where are the fucking nightclubs we see in movies?’ Then you’d go to Basin Street East, and here it was.” Located in the former grand ballroom of the Shelton Towers Hotel, one of Manhattan’s first skyscrapers, Basin Street East hosted the aristocrats of jazz: Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Buddy Rich, Stan Kenton. Just as her career was exploding, Barbra Streisand opened there for Goodman. But Lee commanded more money than anyone—ten thousand dollars a week. She and Basin Street East became synonymous.

  The club was the last hurrah of Ralph Watkins, a millionaire’s son who had founded an empire of historic New York jazz rooms, including the Famous Door, Kelly’s Stable, the Royal Roost, and the Embers. In a business run largely by thugs, Watkins was a tall, slim, impeccably dressed gentleman. “He was so knowledgeable, so intelligent, a really upstanding guy,” said pianist Barbara Carroll, a regular at the Embers.

  In 1958, Watkins had received a pitch from Leonard (Lennie) Green, a dapper ex-model and dancer who now booked dance bands. Green sold Watkins on the idea of opening a club for the mustachioed king of Latin maestros, Xavier Cugat. Watkins said yes, but he informed Green: “Moe will be with us.” Moe was his silent partner, Moe Lewis, a mafia-connected pal of Frank Sinatra’s and a front man who dealt with the inevitable mob infiltration of places that served liquor.