Is That All There Is? Read online

  But Steve Blum, her new eighteen-year-old guitarist, sensed her pain. At the time, he was a freshman and jazz student at the University of Miami. Just before a show in Miami Beach, Lee had needed a sub fast for an indisposed member of her guitar quartet. Someone recommended Blum. “A couple of days later we were rehearsing,” he said. Blum stayed with her on and off for two years. “She told me I reminded her of Dave Barbour,” he recalled.

  The young man didn’t comprehend the weight of that compliment; he barely knew who Barbour was. But soon he found himself in the bedroom of her hotel suite, listening to her favorite classical music and having deep discussions about life. Nothing sexual occurred, said Blum—“Not too many eighteen-year-olds are thinking of making it with a forty-six-year-old woman”—but for Lee, at least, the relationship took on romantic overtones. Young as he was, Blum felt an emptiness in Lee that seemed beyond filling, no matter how loud the applause or how many doting friends hovered near. “She had to have people around her,” Blum observed, “and when the party was over, really early in the morning, I think she was afraid to be alone.”

  * * *

  AS THE LATE SIXTIES began, everything in her career went on as before, or so it seemed. The successful runs at the Copa and elsewhere continued, as did the TV appearances and record dates. But Peggy Lee was receding into the past. In 1967, she costarred on The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., a campy and short-lived knockoff of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the popular espionage sitcom. The “girl,” an undercover spy, was played by twenty-four-year-old Stefanie Powers; guests were mostly faded names from the Golden Age of Hollywood. In “The Furnace Flats Affair,” Lee plays a purring, Mae West–like millionairess involved in an elaborate (and largely incomprehensible) espionage scheme in a western ghost town. Her stammering line readings, punctuated frequently by “uh,” reflected her real-life speech; but on TV it sounded as though Lee were struggling to remember the script or, worse, that she had been drinking.

  At film premieres, Lee looked up from her seat at the hottest young leading men of the day: Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Sean Connery, Warren Beatty. But one actor above all others still made her heart flutter, and he was now a gray-haired sixty-three. “How could you be a woman and not love Cary Grant?” she insisted. For some time, an executive at Columbia Records had been asking Grant to make a holiday single—perhaps a recitation of some time-honored holiday verse. The latter struck him as trite. Instead, he proposed having a friend write him a lullaby. “I’m quite nutty about Peggy Lee,” he said, “and I think many of her lyrics are quite profound—strangely profound. She has a unique choice of words.” When Cy Coleman agreed to write the music, Grant was sold.

  “Christmas Lullaby,” as Lee called it, wasn’t anything too special: “Angels bless you, little one . . . my little one, sleep well.” But as Lee sat alongside Grant at a Hollywood studio and gazed at him while he talk-sang her words, he could have been intoning Emily Brontë, at least to her ears.

  The record sold nicely, but it hardly helped update Lee’s image. Many reviews of her current shows depicted the singer as an enduring throwback in an age of youth. Her first facelift was behind her, and she would make many more trips to the plastic surgeon. Yet critics kept pointing out her age as well as her girth. “Plump and unbecomingly coiffed but still glamorous,” wrote Doug McClelland of Lee at the Copa. A critic for Time echoed Father Norman J. O’Connor when he wrote that her voice had grown “thin at the top and breathy at the bottom. So she spends her notes in the same way that dispossessed nobility lives on a dwindling income: with frugal selectivity but stylish aplomb.”

  Lee Wiley, a singer she had grown up admiring, would have none of it. In the 1930s, Wiley, an Oklahoma-born pop-jazz favorite, had perfected a languid, husky style, tinged with honeysuckle and Southern Comfort. Now retired, she reminisced, none too kindly, about colleagues of hers who had stayed too long at the fair. She named no names, but one of them wasn’t hard to guess. “For one thing they’ve gotta take oxygen or dope themselves up, and I don’t think that’s right. What they should be doing is being at home with their children. . . . Or they should be doing some volunteer work at a hospital or something—in my opinion.”

  But Lee had no intention of stopping. Capitol had kept churning out around two Lee albums per year—“so many it is difficult to keep track of them all,” wrote Rex Reed in Stereo Review. Often they were random compilations of singles and stray tracks, with skimpy running times and generic headshots on the covers. Extra Special!, Pass Me By, Big Spender, and In Love Again! contained some first-rate tracks; a few of her singles, notably “Big Spender,” had scored respectably on the Adult Contemporary chart. But Lee hadn’t gotten near Billboard’s Hot 100 since “Fever.” And at Capitol, changes were afoot that frightened her. Most of the veterans had left the roster. Nat King Cole had died; Frank Sinatra had defected to his own label, Reprise. Country star Tennessee Ernie Ford, comic actor Jackie Gleason (in his sideline as a mood-music conductor), and the sleek pop-jazz songstress Nancy Wilson had hung on since the 1950s. But Peggy Lee had spent more years there than anyone, and she knew she was getting edged aside.

  Money, youth, and changing tastes had taken over. For years, the megalabels—Columbia, RCA Victor, Decca, Capitol—had mostly fought rock, while the independent ones who nurtured it were reaping fortunes. The elder companies had to get with it or die—but their old-school executives were stubborn. In 1963, Dave Dexter, Jr., the pioneer Capitol executive, had opened up a carton of eighteen singles issued in England through EMI, the British conglomerate that owned nearly all of Capitol’s stock. EMI and Capitol shared right of first refusal on the release of each other’s product; each company, of course, was anxious to expose its artists overseas. Among the records in that box was “Love Me Do” backed by “P.S. I Love You,” the debut single of the Beatles, newly signed to EMI’s subsidiary Parlophone.

  The disc had made the British top twenty, but Dexter was “not impressed.” To him, the Beatles were “just a bunch of long-haired kids,” and his boss, Alan Livingston, took his word for it. Capitol passed on the Beatles. By February, the group’s followup single, “Please Please Me,” had topped the UK charts. By that summer the Beatles had become “the hottest thing that England had ever encountered,” as Dexter contritely admitted. Livingston had a change of heart.

  After he died in 2009, nearly all of his obituaries led with a variation of the same headline: “Music Executive Signed the Beatles to Capitol Records.” The group’s first Capitol release, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” overwhelmed the label; pressing plants could barely handle the demand for product. For the rest of the decade, if there were ever a question over whose record would get pressed first, or in the highest quantity, the Beatles won. Even Capitol’s previous cash cows, the Beach Boys, felt snubbed.

  The face of Capitol kept changing. In 1967, country singer Glen Campbell, a modest seller there for years, broke through with two top-forty hits, “Gentle on My Mind” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and won four Grammys in the same night. Now both rock and country were Capitol’s priorities. In 1968 and 1969, the label touted its new discoveries: the Steve Miller Band, Bob Seger, The Band, and Grand Funk Railroad.

  Peggy Lee had become commercial deadweight. By now she sang mainly to her contemporaries and to a coterie of younger gay men who cherished the female icons of the past. They saw her in old-fashioned supper clubs that could accommodate an orchestra—“exclusionary” places, as Vince Mauro called them. Lee and her peers, he said, “were playing venues that cost an arm and a leg to get into, and who could go? Older, affluent people.”

  Her R&B phase behind her, Lee clung mainly to what her fans wanted: romantic ballads and big-band swingers. Singers her age were pouncing on any contemporary song they could credibly sing that might make them look current in the eyes of the young. Lee had made a mildly rockish single of “Lonesome Road,” a gospel-style hit from 1927. Orchestra and strings gave it her traditional sound, and even though she
sounded right at home with rock rhythms, the record died. Lee feared that her time had passed. Whenever a rock song came on the radio, she rushed to change the station. “When you feel left out of something, you don’t like it at all,” she confessed.

  The Beatles’ success had dizzyingly raised the bar on what EMI expected to earn. Lately, Capitol had begun feeling pressure from its controlling stockholder to jack up profits. The label now stood as a single branch of one more umbrella conglomerate, Capitol Industries. Lee watched in dismay as her dwindling core of allies got shifted around, demoted, or let go entirely. Following his fabled rejection of the Beatles, Dave Dexter, Jr., had been downgraded to “a job with no title,” as he called it. Lee Gillette, a producer there since the 1940s, found the changes at Capitol so disheartening that he took early retirement. In March 1968, Alan Livingston was ousted as president of Capitol Records and appointed head of Capitol Industries. Now big business, not music, was his career. Four months later he was fired.

  His replacement at Capitol Records chilled Dexter’s blood. Stanley M. Gortikov, age forty-nine, had worked as the company’s head of distribution; his hard-nosed, bottom-line attitude pleased EMI. “To Gortikov a record was like a cake of soap, a pair of shoes, or a loaf of bread,” said Dexter. “He gave the impression, in his dealings with performers, that they functioned like bookkeepers or plumbers.” Gray heads were rolling fast, as Capitol’s executive offices filled up with cocky newcomers who sported mod suits and long sideburns. To them, Peggy Lee was their parents’ music.

  By December 1968, Capitol had seventeen staff producers, most of them under forty. “We have to broaden the number of people we depend on for hits,” explained Karl Engemann, who headed the pop division. The handsome young vice president had one foot on each side of the generational war. He had discovered the Beach Boys, one of whom was his brother, Bob; but he also liked Peggy Lee, and he wanted to save her. That meant somehow modernizing her image. Engemann looked outside the company and recruited a hotshot producing and publishing team, Charles Koppelman and Don Rubin. The pair were millionaires in their twenties, thanks to the seventeen gold records they had masterminded for Gary Lewis & the Playboys, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Turtles, and other sensations.

  But Engemann was more interested in the makeover that Koppelman and Rubin had performed on Bobby Darin. For much of the 1960s, Darin had been a finger-snapping Sinatra clone, singing “Mack the Knife” for an audience of his seniors. His bosses at Atlantic Records, president Ahmet Ertegun and producer Jerry Moss, seemed content to let him stay that way. At thirty-two, Darin felt like a cliché. His earliest hits, like “Splish Splash,” had sold to millions of teenagers; now those fans were grown, and many were protesting the Vietnam War and social injustice. Darin, who had grown quite political, wanted them back. In 1966, he approached Koppelman and Rubin for help. They produced his next single, “If I Were a Carpenter,” a folk-rock ballad by one of their clients, singer-songwriter Tim Hardin. Atlantic was stunned when the record made the top ten—and his own generation fell back in love with Bobby Darin.

  Engemann hoped for a similar magic act with Lee. It wouldn’t be easy. She was sixteen years older than Darin, and few in his age group cared about her. Why would they buy a record of Peggy Lee singing their music? Furthermore, Koppelman and Rubin were known for picking the songs, hiring the arranger, and dictating the sound. Lee had always kept tight control over what she sang, and how; everyone concurred that she knew best. She might not like being told what to do—especially by two upstarts who weren’t much older than her daughter. But this was the new system, and she knew she had to comply; her future was at stake. “I want to move along, to go wherever music is going,” she declared bravely.

  The producers met her at her home. They found themselves seated opposite a “tough broad,” as Koppelman recalled her—a woman shrewd enough to size them up fast and, if need be, to flatten them. Throughout the visit, she downed Black Russians and stared at the partners with probing eyes.

  Rubin was surprised at how open she was to their ideas. Lee liked the folk and soft-rock tunes they had picked out for her, written by Hardin and the Lovin’ Spoonful. It comforted her somewhat to learn that her arranger would be Shorty Rogers, the 1950s cool-jazz bandleader who had written for her before. Rogers now wrote for one of the hottest groups in the country, the Monkees.

  So far, so good. But Lee bristled when she learned that she wouldn’t get to sing in the studio with Rogers’s band; instead she would overdub her vocals onto finished orchestral tracks—a burgeoning custom that she hated. Koppelman saw it as a practical choice: “Her voice wasn’t that terrific at the time. It was difficult recording her.”

  In March 1968, Lee stood in an isolation booth in an otherwise empty Hollywood recording studio. Headphones around her blond hairpiece, she sang with a rock band for the first time in her life. The song was Hardin’s “Reason to Believe.” Lee heard Fender bass, twangy guitars, tambourines, horns, and strings, all piled into a monophonic “wall of sound”—the dense, echoey engineering technique heard in a long series of hit singles masterminded by producer Phil Spector.

  Koppelman was right; Lee sounded hoarse and low on lung power. But she connected with the song’s driving beat as well as its angry words: “Knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried / Still I look to find a reason to believe.” Stylistically, she didn’t change a thing. In the past, she had bridged swing, modern jazz, blues, and R&B; rock was a branch of the same tree, and Lee fit right into it. The other tunes had only faint trappings of late-sixties pop. Hardin’s “Misty Roses” was a folk ballad arranged with a tinge of bossa nova; the Spoonful’s “Didn’t Want to Have to Do It” a graceful waltz with strings.

  Before releasing the singles, Capitol engaged Koppelman and Rubin to produce a safe and economical Peggy Lee album, an on-site recording of her act at the Copa, which had opened to raves on April 11. Off they went to see it.

  Koppelman found the Copa an archaic land of “pinky rings and mobsters and fans of Peggy Lee,” but on its stage, the singer had taken one more step across the border of change. There she stood, stationary as a pillar, swathed in a pale-blue chiffon dress that looked like a nightgown. A rhinestone headband held her bobbed pageboy wig in place. As she sang “Reason to Believe” and “Didn’t Want to Have to Do It,” a slowly revolving psychedelic wheel was projected behind her—an incongruous backdrop for the now-matronly singer.

  Lee had made two wise selections from the recent charts. In “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” a hit for Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb details a lover’s escape, by car, from a blasé partner who “just didn’t know/I would really go.” Both partners were left alone—a bittersweet victory for the one who had fled. Lee sang Webb’s song with a quiet ache; Toots Thielemans’s bluesiness echoed her heavy heart. Lee was just as moved by “Until It’s Time for You to Go,” a hit for the Canadian-Cree singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. Images of lovers torn apart by the Vietnam War haunted its lines: “Although I’ll never in my life see you again / Here I’ll stay until it’s time for you to go.”

  Songs of farewell had become prominent in the shows of a woman for whom lovelessness remained a fact of life. “For some years now,” wrote Peter Reilly, “her best material has been that which allows her to project the ripe autumnal womanliness of someone who has been glad, been sad, and often been had, but who has extracted a wry wisdom from it all.” The latter, though, brought cold comfort.

  She unveiled one of her saddest new songs at the Copa. Lee had gone to the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway to see I Do! I Do!, a hit musical about the ups and downs of a fifty-year marriage. It starred Mary Martin and Lee’s second greatest love, Robert Preston. Lee watched in a funk. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s score included one song that riveted Lee. In “What Is a Woman?,” Martin voiced sentiments that tore at Lee’s heart: “Why is a woman afraid of not being in love? . . . To be a woman means being lonely.”

  Before the Copa opening, Le
e had sung “What Is a Woman?” on TV’s The Hollywood Palace. In her baby-doll blue gown, she looked like an older woman who had never quite grown up. Lee had taken to leaning on pedestals and chairs in her television appearances, and on The Hollywood Palace she clung to an aluminum block for support. The feisty prefeminism of “I’m a Woman” had crumbled away; with Women’s Liberation in full swing, Lee peered deep into her viewers’ eyes and declared that minus a man, a woman was as good as dead.

  The rest of her Copa show was a polished but predictable outing of recent showtunes, reprises of her hits, and originals, including “Here’s to You,” a salute to citizens of every nation. In a slightly woozy voice, she dedicated it to “all of you who have ever smiled.”

  None of this excited Koppelman. The show, as he recalled it, “was vintage Peggy Lee. Dated. Look, Bobby Darin was a performer. She was more a sultry singer.” When he heard the Copa tapes, the hoarseness in her voice concerned him. He and Rubin did all they could to create an acceptable album. That included having Lee rerecord songs and patter in the studio, then asking the engineer, Brooks Arthur, to patch them into the live tapes, surrounding them with bursts of actual Copa applause.

  During this process, Capitol released the Koppelman-Rubin singles. Lee’s tireless cheerleader, Leonard Feather, heralded them with a feature in the Los Angeles Times: “Peggy Lee Turns to the Now Sound.” It didn’t help. Seldom had any of her recordings flopped so badly. DJs shunned them, as did her fans. Youngsters, too, were not about to seek out Peggy Lee—nor Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Tormé, or Andy Williams—to hear rock. For Lee to slip “Reason to Believe” into her nightclub act was fine, but her followers, conceded Rubin, “weren’t gonna buy the kind of records that we made with her.”

  The response depressed her. Yet she became all the more determined to prove to them and to herself that she wasn’t just an aging chanteuse chained to the past. “Working with Koppelman and Rubin changed my whole approach,” she insisted.