Is That All There Is? Page 29
Lee and her band recorded the song at a New York studio on a chilly November afternoon, prior to a night’s work at Basin Street East. Stoller had already given Dave Cavanaugh some tips on how to heat up “I’m a Woman”; thereafter, Cavanaugh let the writers take over the production. Now the bumping, grinding vamp had a funky saxophone on top—Stoller’s idea. The frantic tempo of Benny Carter’s chart was slowed; this gave guitarist John Pisano the space for some bluesy strumming and let Stan Levey shake a tambourine as though he were in a Harlem church.
Released in the holiday season of 1962, “I’m a Woman” reached number fifty-four on the Hot 100—no huge splash. But deejays loved it, as did Lee’s fans. The title was true. Peggy Lee was a woman, not a girl; and at a time when a female over forty was regarded as over the hill, “I’m a Woman” made a lot of her contemporaries feel sexy.
That record launched her rocky relationship with the most important songwriting team of her career. As star producers, they liked things their way. But Lee wanted it known that she was in charge. She got wind of the fact that Leiber didn’t like her “too correct” singing of “I’m a Woman”; he had hoped for a blacker sound. From then on she stayed wary of him, as he and his partner did of her. To Stoller, Lee was “an impatient gal, a controlling gal, a volatile gal, and a gal shrouded in deep and impenetrable mystery.”
She put all those qualities on ample display in a medley that jarred the Basin Street East crowd. During her time in London, Lee had sat in the Queen’s Theatre, riveted by the biggest smash on the British musical stage. Stop the World—I Want to Get Off starred Anthony Newley as Littlechap, a circus mime whose loveless personal life clashes poignantly with his slap-happy stage persona. In his showstopping lament, “What Kind of Fool Am I?,” he looks at himself and sees “an empty shell / A lonely cell in which an empty heart must dwell.”
The image of the sad clown haunted Lee. Littlechap wasn’t far from the vision that jazz singer Mark Murphy had of her—the garishly painted doll that a frightened Norma hid behind. Lee might not have disagreed. Her rebuke to Arthur Hamilton after he’d gushed over the goddess he saw at Ciro’s—“I don’t want to talk about her anymore”—revealed a woman who seemed to sense just how much fantasy she lived in.
That was clearly on her mind as she spun “What Kind of Fool Am I?” into one of the bravest set-pieces of her career. She prefaced it with two new Hamilton songs. In “Things,” a relationship lies in tatters, reduced to lifeless keepsakes—old love notes, a music box, a singing doll—that had once seemed so meaningful. “All that is left of us—how did it happen?—All that is left is things,” sang Lee as though to herself. In “Funny Man,” she pleaded with a weeping clown to keep up his guard and “say something funny,” lest she cry, too.
Choreographer Nick Castle called upon his young protégé Dick Foster, a boyish hoofer of stage and TV. During “Funny Man,” Foster sprang into view—a replica of circus performer Emmett Kelly, who appeared famously as a hobo clown, his chalk-white mouth downturned and eyes brimming with tears. As Lee stood frozen, singing of lost illusions, Foster twirled behind her, dabbing at his eyes and dancing with a Peggy Lee–like doll. By the time Lee had reached Newley’s song, she seethed over living a lie—one built on “empty words of love that left me alone like this.”
Out went her Scandinavian reserve; Lee sang with such bug-eyed ferocity that audiences were stunned. But she didn’t have to “act” these songs; their words—especially the key one, “empty”—spoke to her on a gut level. No matter how many men passed in and out of her bed, she always wound up alone. And now her daughter, who had barely dated, had surprised Lee and everyone else by landing herself a cute fiancé. Nicki’s future mate was Dick Foster. Dona Harsh considered Dick “a sweetheart, such a charming kid”; but he was also a showbiz baby on the climb, and other friends of Lee’s questioned his motives. The star herself wasn’t pleased. Friends listened to her rail about Foster: she didn’t trust him; she thought his family low-class. Some of her confidantes suspected deeper conflicts. Lee had missed so much of Nicki’s childhood; now the young woman was fleeing the nest, perhaps eagerly, before she had even turned twenty. Friends like Betty Jungheim suspected how guilty Lee felt.
Nicki and Dick set a date in September 1963. A week before it arrived, Lee—who could easily think herself sick—canceled a tour due to illness. She had no choice, of course, but to accept the marriage. The couple were wed at a Catholic church in West Hollywood. Dave Barbour marched his daughter down the aisle. Lee held a glamorous second ceremony in her garden on Kimridge. Her guests included the man she still pined for, Robert Preston; seeing him made her all the more wistful.
But she didn’t let on. To most of those around her, Lee remained a woman in power, especially sexually. “That was just her nature—she was a temptress,” said Jack Sheldon, the West Coast trumpeter who worked with her often. “I don’t know if she even meant to do it.” But business came first, as Sheldon saw when he backed Lee on Mink Jazz, an album whose sleek sophistication matched its title. She and a handful of her favorite musicians—among them Lou Levy, Benny Carter, Max Bennett, and guitarist Al Hendrickson—had gathered in the studio with a bunch of standards and the barest lead sheets. Each tune, from her brisk nightclub opener, “It’s a Big Wide Wonderful World,” to the ethereal “Cloudy Morning,” was a neat package of laid-back elegance. Sheldon remembered her having a ball: “She was over there by her little stand, dancing to the rhythm.”
As always, her band members seemed like family, and she loved having them around. “She would always give everybody rubdowns at the house,” said Sheldon. Certain male guests, and not just musical ones, were singled out for more. The trumpeter was friendly with actor Burt Reynolds, a hunky ex–football player who had begun his climb to stardom via TV dramas. Lee had met him and swooned at his linebacker build and swarthy handsomeness. Reynolds was sixteen years younger than Lee; Sheldon—a boyishly attractive ex-swimmer—eleven. Lee invited them over separately. Later they compared notes. “She went into the other room to change clothes,” recalled Sheldon. “She was a great chick, but she was intimidating. We were both too afraid to fuck her. He left and I left.”
Anyone who looked beyond the “temptress” found unfathomable complexity. In the early 1960s, Lee kindled a friendship with Jack Jones, the young singer who led a new generation of post-Sinatra swinging balladeers. Lee declared that Jones had the best time sense of any male vocalist she knew; she also liked his clean-cut, Ken-doll handsomeness. He had seen her onstage for the first time at the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. For Jack, whose father, Allan Jones, was a booming tenor of 1930s Broadway and Hollywood, Lee’s show was a revelation in less-is-more. “Peggy hardly ever moved her body, but she danced with her eyes,” he observed. That glance held intrigue, and Jones spent hours looking into it as they talked heart-to-heart. She even read him some of her poems. “Peggy,” he explained, “was a delightful cuckoo clock. She was just out there, wistful, idealistic, had a great sense of humor. I used to make her laugh with dumb stuff.”
Others had a darker view of Lee. Gossip columnist Alex Freeman compared her with the first lady of unhinged pathos when he called her “just as volatile and hard to figure out as Judy Garland.” The difference, he wrote, was that Lee seemed “quieter about her unhappiness.”
On December 1, 1963, she joined the parade of luminaries who appeared on The Judy Garland Show, Garland’s short-lived but ultimately historic black-and-white variety series. Two years after her fabled concerts at Carnegie Hall, Garland—who was two years Lee’s junior—had reached the end of her prime. The public saw her unravel before their eyes, as alcohol and barbiturates broke down what little control she had left. Both she and Lee had risen through tough ranks—one in the roller-coaster, sleep-deprived road life of the big bands; the other as the golden girl of MGM’s so-called “Dream Factory,” the movie-musical division whose relentless pressures had left her permanently hooked on pills. Unlike Le
e, the pathologically needy Garland exposed all, tearing out her heart onstage and lapping up every drop of sympathy and applause. Lee had her own chemical dependencies, but the public wouldn’t see signs of them for years; alongside Garland, she seemed all the more like the soul of composure.
In a black gown with a scooped neckline, Lee evoked a voluptuous mermaid; by her side in white, Garland was a tiny bird. Yet they meshed like sisters. Garland launched the show in bubbling high spirits with “It’s a Good Day,” then joined her guest on “I Love Being Here with You.” An autumn chill banished the sunniness as Lee gave a tour de force rendition of “When the World Was Young,” sung against a backdrop of simulated stars. Lee shifted between the jaded sophisticate and the wide-eyed child who could still marvel at an apple tree. Panic filled her eyes as she beheld the brittle emptiness of her current life; fame and luxury were hers, but not joy.
Between songs, the stars bantered wittily. Garland was all slurred effusion—“Gee, Peggy, you were mahhrvelous!”—while Lee stayed halting and shy. Their dialogue spoofed her vagueness. “I saw you at Carnegie Hall,” murmured Lee, “and I want to tell you, that was one of the most exciting evenings of my life.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” answered Garland with faux grandeur. “What night were you there?”
“The night Leonard Bernstein had his concert,” continued Lee. “You were sitting three seats away from me.” Garland blanched hilariously. “Well,” she added, “I saw you at Basin Street East and you were just mahhrvelous, you really were.”
“Oh, where was I sitting?”
“You were sitting on the stage, that’s where you were sitting!”
Then they donned ratty feather boas and traded off a breezy string of songs about the men they loved. But it was all for show. Garland was now bitterly separated from her third husband, her former manager Sid Luft, whom she had accused of various abuses. Meanwhile, Lee’s recent romances—with Moe Lewis, Basin Street East’s hulking “protection” man; and Marvin Chanin, a wealthy Hollywood retail executive—had gone to seed. So had her once hot-and-heavy affair with Quincy Jones. “Quincy made a wonderful remark,” said Dona Harsh. “He said, ‘Dating Peggy is like dating General Motors.’ In other words, it was like dating a huge corporation. Too many complications.” In his 2001 autobiography, Jones barely mentions her. For decades, Lee’s musicians laughed over a tale in which she waited late at night for Jones to return to her hotel suite. As hours passed, she drank and seethed. Lou Levy filled in the rest. Around three AM, Jones finally appeared—not alone but with Billy Byers, his main ghostwriter. “The door was open, and there was Peggy, passed out on the floor in blackface. Who else would have thought of that?”
To whatever degree it was true, the scene revealed a desperate woman, quick to feel rejected, looking to hurt back. The “loneliness, emptiness” her daughter saw in her seemed incurable, but Lee kept yearning for the man who could fill it. In January 1964 she found him, or so she thought. While singing at the Riviera in Las Vegas, Lee caught a show by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. His bongo player was a dark-haired, blue-eyed facsimile of Ricky Ricardo, Desi Arnaz’s character on I Love Lucy. That night Lee cornered Gillespie’s pianist, Lalo Schifrin, an Argentine soundtrack composer with whom she had written songs. “Who is that?” she asked.
“That” was Jack Del Rio, who like Schifrin hailed from Buenos Aires. A former percussionist with Xavier Cugat, Del Rio had played with Ella Fitzgerald as well as Gillespie. But at thirty-nine he was still scuffling. Schifrin introduced him to Lee. The fact that he could barely speak English only made him more alluring to the singer. Del Rio told two pals that same night that he was going to “marry this chick.” Their first date took place quickly. Conversation was labored, but Del Rio made her so starry-eyed that she lost all reason. A few days later, Lee gathered her musicians in her dressing room to make an announcement: she and Del Rio were getting married—fast. According to columnist Herb Lyon, the lovebirds were “quietly hitched” before they left Vegas. “But they’ll be restitched,” he wrote, “at her Beverly Hills diggins in a religious ceremony.”
Lee ordered her publicist to rush out an announcement. Soon a large array of surprised friends went scrambling to buy wedding gifts. Pals of hers who had time to meet him were scratching their heads. Yes, he was reasonably attractive, but they suspected hidden intentions, and said so. Del Rio needed a green card, not to mention a career. As ever in times of emotional stress, she took ill. Home in L.A., she nursed a “chronic respiratory ailment.” Lee orchestrated the marriage from bed, planning the menu, the decorations, the dress.
On the evening of February 22, 1964, guests filed uneasily through her front door and assembled in the backyard. Swans circled gracefully in the fish pond and candles lit the twilight. A priest stood by to join the betrothed, who barely knew each other, in eternal wedded bliss. Lee’s friends and family stood by, discreetly rolling their eyes. “I think she knew as she was doing it that it was a silly thing to do,” said Nicki.
Soon after the couple were pronounced man and wife, the yard emptied out. Later on Lee would claim that, on their wedding night, Del Rio had stepped inside her house, glanced around, and declared, “All this is mine now!” A few days later, the Ringuette family dropped by. The Del Rios greeted him in their bathrobes. “Peggy introduced him,” said nephew Lynn, “and she did it almost sheepishly, like, ‘What have I done?’ Jack had big hugs for everyone—‘My new family, ahhhhh!’ ” Dona Harsh, who had moved to Seattle, spoke with Del Rio on the phone. “He told me they were happy like ‘tin-agers.’ That was the only thing I understood.” Betty Jungheim also paid a visit. With Del Rio out of earshot, Lee said of her Vegas Romeo, “I think the sand got in my eyes.”
Still, she gamely vowed to make this marriage work. Lee repeated a sentiment she had voiced before by pledging to put aside her career and live only for “the man I love. I know it will work.” It didn’t. “A strange force kept pushing me on with my singing,” she explained.
Lee had delayed her honeymoon until spring, to coincide with her monthlong debut at the Royal Box of the Americana, a commercial hotel in midtown Manhattan. The Americana had lured her from Basin Street East with a $4,000 raise (to $16,500 a week) and a reduced schedule (two shows nightly, not three on weekends). As always, she poured her pay hike into the production, which would boast a twenty-four-piece orchestra and a new maestro: Jack Del Rio, who had never conducted before. The marriage had earned him his U.S. citizenship. But when he told Lee he wanted to fly his whole family in from Argentina on her dime, the couple had their first blowout fight. Tension built as she put him on display at dinner parties. Del Rio struggled to converse in English with her important friends; Lee glared at him, furious and embarrassed.
At least he delivered in bed, and she hoped he would excel onstage, too. A week before her April opening, the star and her entourage—five musicians, a hairdresser, a secretary, a wardrobe mistress, and her hubby-turned-maestro—checked into the hotel. The Americana was a generic tourist trap, and when Lee entered the Royal Box she saw a sprawling, nondescript convention room done up as a nightclub. “It was a barn,” said Vince Mauro, a young recording artist whom Lee had befriended. “You thought, maybe it would work for a mafia wedding—the Jewish mafia.” The acts were hardly hip; they included Borscht Belt comic Myron Cohen; the slick Las Vegas lounge king Buddy Greco; and “The Singing Rage,” Patti Page, who couldn’t walk off without singing her number-one request song, “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?”
Author-journalist Richard Lamparski went repeatedly to see Lee, so tickled was he by the halo of strangeness that surrounded her. Lamparski gained access to the dressing room, where he saw the star engaged in her preshow prayer ritual. She clutched Dick Foster’s wrist, stared into his eyes, and demanded: “Say it with me. Straight up! Straight ahead! And strong! Straight up! Straight ahead! And STRONG!” Clearly Lee needed all the bolstering she could get, and it worked. “If both she and the young man had
gone straight up in the air like Peter Pan,” said Lamparski, “I wouldn’t really have been astonished.”
After the familiar introduction—“Miss Peggy Lee!”—Lamparski watched her cruise from the wings, smiling radiantly beneath her yellow bouffant wig. A long jacket hung over her beaded dress to hide excess pounds. “It was as if a custom-made, soft-pink Chrysler Imperial, with all its lights on low and blinking, was pushed into a slow glide out onto that stage,” wrote Lamparski. There waving his arms awkwardly in front of the orchestra was her visibly younger husband. “Isn’t he cute?” announced Lee. Del Rio looked merely uneasy. His wife had taken a good bongo player and put him in an unfitting role. The musicians mostly ignored him.
Onstage, Lee seemed as cool and graceful as ever. But she knew she had made a terrible mistake, and Lou Levy sensed a woman on the verge of snapping. When she glanced over and saw him focused on the keys and not on her, she fumed; after the show she tore into him for abandoning her. “I want you looking at me!” Lee saw a musician shift his wallet from one pocket to another during the show and exploded at him in tears after the show. Emilio Palame, one of Levy’s successors, would have similar experiences with Lee. “She really needed to know that you were right there with her. She needed that almost spiritual connection.”
Between tunes, she silently invoked a prayer that had comforted her ever since her first terrified singing appearances in North Dakota: “Father, if you let me sing this song, I’ll stew your pears, I’ll can your pears.” But there was no soothing Lee. She was annoyed at the sound system, the layout of the room, and most of all at her husband. When Lee turned to him onstage during the thank-yous, she saw his back, not his face, which made her even more furious. Weeks into the marriage, she had but one concern—“figuring how to get out of it.” There were fights in her suite before many shows, which began habitually late. Lee vented her frustration to her new manager, Barney Ward, who didn’t last out the year.