Is That All There Is? Page 28

  Everyone else was, though, and that February Dave Cavanaugh recorded her at the club. Lee sounded hoarser than usual due to a cold, so various performances were taped, along with a studio session of songs from the show. From all those sources came the thirty-one-minute Basin Street East Proudly Presents Miss Peggy Lee, one of the defining albums of Lee’s career.

  The party, of course, didn’t end with the late show. Around three AM, the unmarked door of her dressing room would swing open. “Miss Lee comes out in a luxurious silver fur, preceded by a lackey carrying two bags,” wrote a reporter. She trekked back to her new Manhattan abode, the Park Lane Hotel, where celebrities who had come to the show partied with Lee until breakfast time.

  Among the more striking regulars was a handsome, tawny-skinned black man, clearly much younger than Lee, with a mustache and a burst of take-charge energy. At twenty-eight, he had played trumpet with Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, conducted albums for Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan, and toured internationally with his own big band. In a musical field built on black talent yet controlled by white businessmen, Quincy Jones was hell-bent on success.

  Long before Jones had earned world renown as a producer and amassed nearly thirty Grammy Awards, Peggy Lee discovered him in a big way. The orchestral albums he made with her in 1961, Blues Cross Country and If You Go, helped inch him closer to the spotlight. Their working relationship, effused Lee, was “absolutely perfect.” After hours, she partook of his other charms. “She was mad about him physically,” said Betty Jungheim.

  Professionally, Jones was so overextended that, in a common practice of the time, he employed ghostwriters (notably the Count Basie arranger Billy Byers) to complete his skeletal charts. How much he actually arranged for Lee was unclear, but any Jones band had his trademark tightness and precision and swung hard. “His skills at organization, motivation, and direction were tremendous,” said Bob Freedman, who sometimes ghostwrote for him. “Much like Duke Ellington, he knew just how to cheerlead and get the best performance possible from the guys.”

  Jones dropped by Lee’s house to work on their albums. “She wouldn’t let him go,” said Jungheim. “He was there for a month.” They wrote seven songs together for Blues Cross Country. Their affair was conducted discreetly, for Jones was married; moreover, interracial couplings were still so vilified that mixed marriage remained illegal in twenty-one U.S. states. On his dates with Lee, Dona Harsh came along as beard. “Quincy and I danced together more times than you’ll ever know,” said Harsh, “because Peggy couldn’t dance with him in public.”

  Their musical relationship, however, was a breeze, and she took the lead. Lee, explained Jones, “prerecords the tunes in her home studio and knows just what sound she wants.” Blues Cross Country is a swinging romp across America, set to the brassy sound of a Basie-style band. Jones stocked it with Lee’s favorite sidemen, including Lou Levy, Jimmy Rowles, trumpeter Jack Sheldon, and saxophonist Benny Carter, who helped Jones with the arranging. The album has a few standards, such as “St. Louis Blues,” which races along like a speeding freight train. But the Lee-Jones originals make Blues Cross Country much more than a retrospective of the past. “New York City Blues” opens as a sultry valentine to Manhattan, with Lee confiding, “I’ve got to get back to you, if I have to walk, or crawl, or fly!” Then the brass explodes, the tempo zooms, and the blazing velocity of the city comes alive as Lee exclaims, “New York, New York is my town!” In “Boston Beans,” Lee swings her way through that historic town, home to Captain John Smith, Paul Revere, and the Tea Party, but unfortunately not the asset she hoped to find: “They’ve got no beans in Boston / Plenty of fish!”

  Down Beat’s John A. Tynan called Lee’s words “uniformly good; they make sense; they contain humor and little lyrical twists and turns.” A month later, she and Jones got sentimental in If You Go, an album of coital ballads arranged with a Nelson Riddle–style plushness. Pizzicato strings quiver; bongos throb; a solo saxophone wails suggestively in the distance; a Spanish guitar adds Latin heat.

  Seldom would Lee feel so appreciated as she did that year. She sang her way through the poshest nightspots in the country, leaving a trail of delirious critical praise: “one of the most compelling experiences of your life”; “provocative, regal, and insouciant”; “the hub of the universe.” In the summer of 1961 she made her long-awaited British debut: a month at Pigalle, the London supper club that hosted the likes of Shirley Bassey, Sammy Davis, Jr., and (later) the pre-superstardom Beatles.

  Lee never traveled light. She brought four musicians (Lou Levy, Max Bennett, Dennis Budimir, and vibraphonist Victor Feldman), Marianne as assistant, Nicki as secretary, and trunks galore, packed with more gowns than she would ever need. That July Lee boarded the S.S. United States, the swiftest ocean liner, at Pier 86 in New York. Four days later the boat docked at the U.K.’s bustling Port of Southampton. Pigalle staff greeted Lee and her entourage and swept them off to London by limo.

  The next night, Lee was escorted in a restaurant for a press reception. So many reporters and photographers came that only a fraction could get near her. A writer from the British jazz magazine Melody Maker attended her first rehearsal. He saw Lee stalking the floor, chain-smoking and intensely focused on the music. “I’ve never known a singer who worked so hard at rehearsal,” marveled her British conductor, Jack Nathan. “And she never really gets upset.” Lee stayed aware of every detail: “That was dragging.” “Were the drums too loud?” “Can you hear me?”

  On opening night, July 16, Lee performed for a “diamond-studded gathering,” as the Evening News called it, of British VIPs, including Bassey and the British Elvis, Cliff Richard. From the moment she stepped onstage in a white, Grecian-style, sleveless dress, Lee could do no wrong. Fans shrieked as a pinspot lit her snapping hand at the start of “Fever”; they gazed raptly as she sang “Fly Me to the Moon” in front of a harp. “Big hunks of manhood stood up from time to time offering ‘You’re wonderful!’ and other congratulatory expressions,” reported The Stage. Lee had to do six encores. Intoxicating as the night was, a writer for the Evening Standard sensed a darker subtext; Peggy Lee, he wrote, was “a singer with a gift for the tragic interpretation of the happiest songs.”

  Lee may have become the toast of London, but Marianne wasn’t having much fun. Paula Ringuette, her sister-in-law, queried her later. “Oh, it must have been wonderful, what did you see over there?” asked Paula. “The inside of the hotel,” said Marianne. Nicki could be spied in the corner of the dressing room—a stocky teenager with glasses and a “painfully self-conscious” expression, as one observer noted. By day she stayed at the hotel, typing thank-you notes and doing other clerical chores. Nicki fantasized about a singing or acting career, but her tenuous hopes sank even further as she watched this tidal wave of acclaim for her superachieving mother. The Daily Mirror surprised Nicki by interviewing her for a feature about herself. It had a revealing title: “How I Wish I Were Like My Mum—Says Nicki.”

  The young woman’s attempts at singing bore that headline out. “Nicki could do Peggy,” recalled Phoebe Ostrow. “She memorized every finger snap, every gesture.” One night at Basin Street East, said Ostrow, Nicki donned one of her mother’s gowns and stood behind her onstage, aping her moves. That was as much of the spotlight as Nicki would ever claim. “I shall never make the grade as a singer like my mother,” she told the Mirror, adding: “I do wish I had a figure like my mum.”

  In mid-August, Lee sailed to Monte Carlo to sing at another opulent nightspot, the Sporting Club. Her jet-setting took her to France, then back to New York for her third Basin Street East engagement. That fall Ralph Watkins upped her salary to twelve thousand five hundred dollars a week. She spent more than the amount of her raise to squeeze nine string players and a French horn player onto the bandstand, along with a full horn section, a conga player, and her quartet. So many fans crowded the street outside that the club had to cordon them off with velvet ropes.

  The �
�majesty” that the New York Mirror’s Frank Quinn had seen in Lee hid the ravaging effects of too little sleep, too much smoking and drinking, and a never-ending crush of anxiety. The singer had felt ill since her return from France, but was too busy to pay attention. One night in her Basin Street East dressing room, she told Ostrow that her bra felt tight. Ostrow touched Lee’s forehead. It was hot. She announced that she was phoning the singer’s doctor. Lee barked at her not to do it, but Ostrow called anyway. The physician arrived just before the late show and quickly examined the now-woozy star. Her temperature had reached 103. He called for an ambulance, but Lee stubbornly insisted on performing.

  An hour or so later she stumbled back to her dressing room. The doctor and a pair of orderlies ushered her toward the waiting ambulance, which would rush her to the intensive care unit of Polyclinic Hospital. “Why can’t they X-ray me in the hotel room?” snapped Lee.

  For all of her hypochondria, this time she was in real danger. Doctors diagnosed her with pneumonia and pleurisy in both lungs, one of which seemed likely to collapse. Ostrow turned hysterical when the doctor told her to call Lee’s family. She served as spokeswoman to the press. “Peggy’s more than an entertainer to us here,” she gasped tearfully to a reporter. “She’s like one of the family. And she’s very, very ill.” As Lee put it later, “I came so close I saw through the veil.”

  Doctors pondered removing the failing lung. Instead, one of them suggested a technique called Intermittent Positive Pressure Breathing—a process by which a respirator inflates the lungs over and over with a stream of medicated oxygen, in hopes of restoring their normal function. To everyone’s astonishment, it worked. After several days, Lee left intensive care. But her lungs were severely scarred, and she remained in shaky condition. As she lay beneath the white sheets of her hospital bed, Phoebe and Nicki sat by her bedside, reading her telegrams, fielding concerned calls, and showing her the lavish bouquets that Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, and other celebrity friends had sent. According to Max Bennett, Sinatra picked up the hospital bill. On Thanksgiving, Lee remained in the hospital. A restaurant sent over a huge turkey dinner, but Lee felt too weak to eat it.

  Each day she improved, but she was still panting for breath. From now on she would have to use a respirator daily. A doctor stunned her by announcing coldly that she might as well buy an inexpensive one. “Most people with your condition don’t live very long,” he said. Lee was instructed to give up performing or die in six months.

  His remarks stirred up her defiance. Lee ordered a top-of-the-line model. Initially she would need to hold the mask against her nose and mouth two to four times a day for twenty minutes at a time, breathing in a mixture of oxygen, normal air, steam, and medicine. In order to “take the scare out of it,” she christened the tank Charlie. For the next ten years Charlie would trail her on the road, pumping up her lungs in dressing rooms so she could get through a show.

  By February, Lee was home. Doctors had warned her to stay in bed. She didn’t listen. Once, she recalled, “I wanted desperately to brush my teeth. I dragged myself to the bathroom very slowly and weakly. I took a portion of tooth powder and, in the midst of gasping for air at the exertion, pulled the tooth powder into my windpipe. My chest and throat made a terrible, explosive noise, and I thought, ‘Now I’ve killed myself.’ I lay on the bathroom floor, feeling no pain, and I decided that I’d gone to heaven. About a minute later, when I realized that I had not done myself in but was still alive, it struck me as an hysterically funny experience. I learned long ago that life is a comedy or tragedy, depending on how we choose to take it. I choose comedy.”

  Lee had also opted to ignore her doctors’ demands that she never smoke again. Within weeks she was locking herself in the bathroom and lighting up. Soon she stopped trying to hide it. Meanwhile, Ralph Watkins had given her another raise she couldn’t refuse, so in the spring of 1962 Lee was back at Basin Street East to promote her new big-band album with Benny Carter, Sugar ’n’ Spice. An appearance on Ed Sullivan guaranteed more sellout crowds; and Watkins, in turn, poured ever-increasing sums into keeping Lee happy. He closed the club for several days before her opening so she could rehearse until deep in the night. Watkins also had the stage rebuilt to accommodate her ever-growing orchestra.

  Neither of them seemed to think the party would ever end. But increasingly they were caught on the far side of a gaping generational divide. Teenagers were dancing their hearts out to Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion,” and Joey Dee & the Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist—Part I”—tunes that made parents cringe. Lee had a more open mind than most of her peers, but for all her love of R&B, she loathed its offshoot, rock. Capitol, she said, had begged her to record some. “I did only one number that might be called rock ’n’ roll and I fought against it. They kept arguing. So I gave in. But I told them nobody would listen to it. Nobody did.”

  Billboard gave artists her age a safe shelter from rock in the Easy Listening chart, soon to be renamed Adult Contemporary. Its mainstays—Perry Como, Andy Williams, Henry Mancini, the Lettermen, Al Martino—offered soft, nonthreatening comfort food for aging fans. Easy Listening hits gave time-worn careers a sense of chart action. But the sales represented just a sliver of the market; a top-ten Easy Listening hit could still rank low on the almighty Hot 100.

  Lee had barely made a dent on that chart since “Fever.” Still, Capitol kept issuing singles of her club material, hoping for a hit. Broadway remained a rich mine of material, and Lee and her arrangers knew how to turn a stiffly sung, on-the-beat showtune into jazz. Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh’s score for Wildcat had included “Hey, Look Me Over,” a heavy-footed rallying march sung by Lucille Ball. Quincy Jones revamped it for Lee as a syncopated swing tune; she sang it as a passive-aggressive come-on. Lee’s own “I Love Being Here with You,” with music by Dave Cavanaugh (writing under the pseudonym Bill Schluger), had wowed her audiences at Basin Street East. It was the swinging confession of a woman who would rather be onstage than anyplace else. The words—“I love the east / I love the west / And north or south, they’re both the best . . .”—were silly but endearing, and Lee sang them live for decades.

  All those singles sank without a trace. Lee feared that, at forty-two, she might be too old to have another hit. Still, she kept hoping. Consumed by preparations for her fall 1962 engagement at Basin Street East, she thrust a stack of demo recordings into the hands of Mike Melvoin, her new pianist and maestro, age twenty-five. “I have to go fix my hair,” she said. “Go through these and see if there’s anything you like.”

  Melvoin, who had stepped in for the unavailable Lou Levy, was at the start of a career that found him crossing the generation gap with ease; over the years he accompanied or arranged for Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, the Beach Boys, the Jackson 5, and John Lennon. Melvoin played all the shiny black metal acetates that Lee had given him. One of them, a feminist anthem with a stripper beat, caught his ear. The protagonist was a housewife unlike any on Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver—a sexy Supermom who ruled her roost with a firmer hand than the breadwinner. “I can make a dress out of a feedbag and I can make a man out of you!” she declared, after reeling off all the domestic chores she could ace like a champ. Why? “ ’Cause I’m a woman—w-o-m-a-n!”

  Lyricist Jerry Leiber came from Baltimore, composer Mike Stoller from Long Island. Jewish and in their thirties, they looked like bank executives, but they had written some of the blackest-sounding hits on the charts. Starting with “Hound Dog,” which Elvis Presley took to number one, Leiber and Stoller had cracked the code on how to make the black urban sound irresistible to middle-class white kids. Their songs were full of kooky characters, naughty scenarios, and catchy hooks. “Love Potion No. 9” (a hit for the Clovers) told of “that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth” who sold a brew that made libidos go berserk. In another chart-topping hit for Presley, mayhem sweeps through a cell block as a prison band gets everybody “dancing to the J
ailhouse Rock.” Two heated ballads, “There Goes My Baby” (for the Drifters) and “Stand by Me” (Ben E. King), tugged at youthful heartstrings on their way to the top ten. It wasn’t just the songs or the performances that had sent them there; Leiber and Stoller were also producers, and their ingenious way in the studio helped launch an age when hit songs were inseparable from their production.

  Leiber considered Peggy Lee “the funkiest white woman alive”; and it was no surprise that a woman whose style had sprung out of the blues would connect with his and Stoller’s work. Lee had included their very first collaboration, “Kansas City,” on Blues Cross Country. The partners had sent her their songs ever since, to no response. In the autumn of 1962, they were startled to read in the paper that “I’m a Woman” had found its way into Lee’s act at Basin Street East. They made a reservation. There at the club, their song, arranged by Benny Carter, stopped the show. Lee growled and purred it like a tough mama who ruled the bedroom and the kitchen.

  Lee didn’t know that “I’m a Woman” was Leiber and Stoller’s response to Bo Diddley’s aggressively macho number-one R&B hit, “I’m a Man.” The low-down vamp that ran through “I’m a Woman” had been lifted straight from Diddley’s record. Still, the songwriters had broken ground. “I’m a Woman” said much about the 1960s woman, a precareer housewife who had just begun to know her strength. The term “women’s lib” had yet to be coined, but the notion was percolating. In the suburbs of Rockland County, New York, housewife and freelance journalist Betty Friedan had begun to pen the movement’s manifesto, The Feminine Mystique. Her book urged women to break out of their domestic cages and claim their identities.

  Peggy Lee had seized hers in her teens, but she, like most of her female fans, had grown up with a traditional view of the female role. Lee had no greater idol than her mother, who had sewed superbly and who lived to make her children happy. Fifty years later, the protagonist of “I’m a Woman” was doing all the same things—but she wanted it known that it was she who wore the pants in the family.