Is That All There Is? Page 33
Her Copa album awaited shipment. Promotional copies had been mailed, and Douglas Watt of the New York Daily News had written a favorable review.
But decades would pass before the public heard 2 Shows Nightly. To Lee, the orchestra sounded out of balance. On a few of her overdubbed phrases, the “ghost” of the original live performance peeped through. Applause faded up and down with conspicuous fakeness. Lee had grown neurotic about Capitol; she was sure they were eager to dump her. And to Lee, 2 Shows Nightly was nothing less than sabotage. The cover even sported the same nondescript headshot that had appeared on another album, Somethin’ Groovy!
When Lee felt spurned, she banished common sense and grew vengeful. Without giving a thought to how it might affect her shaky footing at Capitol, she halted the release of 2 Shows Nightly. Until it eventually appeared on CD, the album remained extremely rare. Lee diehards touted the “perfectionism” that had led her to yank it from the market. But those who found promo copies wondered what all the fuss was about. 2 Shows Nightly was one of her best albums in years, and its technical shortcomings were forgivable.
Her young producers moved on. “At that time, I was involved with a million projects,” said Koppelman. “I can’t tell you I was heavily invested in her emotionally.” Capitol hadn’t recorded her since the Copa dates, and after the 2 Shows Nightly debacle, months passed with no new sessions. Lee feared the worst.
Somehow, Dave Cavanaugh had survived the company’s upheavals. True to his father-bear demeanor, he feared for his remaining friends there, notably Lee. Cavanaugh sensed that the label was on the verge of dropping her. From his office in the Capitol Tower, he placed a call to Brian Panella, Capitol’s New York executive in charge of artist relations and promotion. The producer asked Panella if there were anything he could due to pump up Lee’s visibility and boost her sales.
A Boston University graduate, Panella was Italian, handsome, a mod dresser, and in his twenties. Lee was pushing fifty. But to him, she was a goddess. “From the time I was a kid I was a fan,” Panella said. “When she sang, it was very stirring to me. Also, I thought that she was absolutely beautiful. I’ve always been a sucker for blonds.”
After one meeting, Lee became his pet project. Knowing she had his attention, she leaned on him more and more heavily. Soon she convinced him to quit Capitol and become her manager. Naïvely, he took on a job that Larry L. King, in a Cosmopolitan profile of Lee, would term “about as relaxing as refereeing the United Nations while wrestling alligators on the side.” Panella didn’t know that yet, but Betty Jungheim saw trouble ahead. “The minute I saw him I thought, ‘She’s gonna be too much for you.’ Because he was so nice.”
He flew to Los Angeles to talk business with Lee on Tower Grove. “I had come out thinking that she was a big star,” he said, “and I find this horror show. She owed the IRS a fortune, and they put a lien on her house, which was in foreclosure.” Living in the guest cottage were Nicki, Dick Foster, and the three children born to them in quick succession, David, Holly, and Michael.
Panella realized that “managing” Lee would mean tending not just to her career but her life, and devising magical fixes for both. “There was a lot of pain inside Peggy and a lot of unresolved things,” he observed. At the house he watched a parade of friends, hangers-on, and musicians; Lee plied them with drinks and held them captive as long as she could. More than ever, her bed was her womb. Once home from the road, she hurried under the covers and left only when necessary. “She’d have breakfast, lunch, and dinner in bed. The grandkids would come in and pile on. She’d hit the buzzer, and the household help would come running.”
Lee couldn’t perform or otherwise make a move without hearing the grandmotherly voice of her faultlessly loyal friend, Adela Rogers St. Johns, then in her seventies. When a preshow panic attack seized her, Lee would send anyone at hand—Panella, Jungheim, Kathy Mahana, Bruce Vanderhoff—to the phone. “I can’t breathe,” she would gasp. “Get me Adela.” During a rehearsal at the Palmer House in Chicago, the air conditioning went out, and Lee dispatched Jungheim to dial up St. Johns. The Science of Mind minister responded with patient exasperation. “You know, Betty, I say a prayer for her every morning, and I say a prayer for her every night. She doesn’t have to call me about the air conditioning.”
St. Johns would recite Ernest Holmes’s edicts as Lee held the receiver to her ear. “Trust the divine self that you possess, the higher self,” St. Johns would advise. “Go there in your mind.”
But finally, Lee seemed beyond comforting. It troubled St. Johns to see her friend, an artist known for cool control, spiraling toward an emotional collapse. Having long ago conquered what she called “the curse of my life”—severe alcoholism—St. Johns saw into the heart of Lee’s addictiveness; no one else in the singer’s life was brave enough to confront her about it. “And she would take it,” said Panella.
And yet the drinking went on, as did her heavy smoking. All the while, Panella had to prepare the oxygen treatments that expanded Lee’s damaged lungs enough for her to sing for an hour. She asked whoever was nearby to jab her with injections of vitamin B12, Lee’s preferred energy booster. After the show, she tore into fried-chicken box dinners. Hours later, the singer who had just seduced hundreds of strangers with her love songs retired to a usually empty bed.
It seemed odd that Lee, who could make people feel she knew all their secrets, could so easily be fooled when “romance” stepped in—especially if it came in the person of a fatherly protector-figure, like a doctor. The pattern fascinated Grady Tate, a drummer who entered her band, and her bed, in 1968, and played for her until the late 1980s. A former English teacher, Tate was black, attractive, and a precise, swinging timekeeper. Lee was smitten. In college, Tate had minored in psychology, and she gave him a lot to ponder. “She was the biggest hypochondriac I’ve ever known. When we weren’t performing she was always under a physician’s care. It was as though when she wasn’t receiving the total admiration and involvement of the people, she had to get it from someone else.”
But more and more, she saw herself as a woman alone. In a Life profile, “A Queen on a Lonely Peak,” Albert Goldman marveled at how Lee had “sustained herself for an astonishing total of thirty years in a business that takes its toll swiftly and often fatally.” Lee and her music, he observed, “now represent one of the peaks to which popular art has climbed in America.” She was a survivor, but recent experiments aside, her attitudes were not of the present. For all she had achieved as a woman in the music business, she had no time for the feminist movement. Women’s Lib upset her, reported Ernest Leogrande in the New York Daily News. “Aggressive females,” he wrote of the frequently contentious singer, “put her on guard.” At a press conference in Dallas prior to Lee’s run at the Fairmont Hotel, a female reporter raised a hand. What, she asked, was the star’s opinion of Women’s Lib? “I’ve always been fortunate,” said Lee, “and have never regretted being a woman at all.”
As fifty approached, Lee feared love would never find her again. For most of her life she had put career before everything; now that her star was falling, she had little else to fall back on. “I’d like to have a happy marriage now, but, um, I don’t think that’s in my future,” she said wistfully to a reporter. All she could hope for was a “nameless something” that might bring her happiness.
There were always new songs. In September 1968, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller gave her a demo of two of their latest. Playing the tape at home, Lee was incensed. “Some Cats Know” was a slow, sinuous look at the art of sexual prowess. “Some cats know how to make the honey flow,” it declared, “but if a cat don’t know, a cat don’t know.” The song seemed like classic Peggy Lee. But the woman who had injected more sex into 1950s pop than almost any other female singer could be unaccountably prudish, and when she heard the bridge—“Don’t you know how the birds and the bumble bees buzz each other? Didn’t your papa ever tell you how he buzzed your mother?”—she felt insulted that the
partners would send her such filth.
Temper still flaring, she played the second song. It consisted mainly of talk—four monologues with a sung refrain, delivered by Leiber in his pitch-deprived but enthusiastic song-plugger’s voice and backed by Stoller playing barroom piano. The first line caught Lee’s attention: “I remember when I was a very little boy, our house caught on fire.” From there, the narrator recounted the milestones of his life, all of them oddly anticlimactic; he wondered what, if anything, ultimately mattered. Lee listened over and over, riveted. She had to sing this song.
Like her, Leiber and Stoller were weathering their own midlife crisis. Their familiar skill—the creation of black music that entranced white youngsters—no longer seemed to matter; now Billboard’s Hot 100 was a shrine to soul, the sound of late-1960s rebellion and the search for truth. The partners had scored one last commercial coup in 1964, when they founded Red Bird, an independent record label. Out of it came several girl-group hits, including “Chapel of Love” for the Dixie Cups. Now, in their late thirties, they were burned out on jukebox pop and searching for something deeper. They hoped to write ambitious theater music—but who would want that from the authors of “Hound Dog”?
In fact, Leiber was immersed in intellectual literature. He had discovered Thomas Mann’s “Disillusionment,” a short story published in 1896, when Mann was an old soul of twenty-four. The future Nobel Prize–winning German writer was struggling with his homosexual feelings; illness, death, and the passage of time obsessed him. “Disillusionment” describes a chance meeting in a Venice café. An elder man startles a young stranger by venting his most intimate regrets. “Do you know, my dear sir, what disillusionment is? Not a miscarriage in small, unimportant matters, but the great and general disappointment which everything, all of life, has in store? . . . From my youth up I have carried it about with me; it has made me lonely, unhappy, and a bit queer.”
A lifetime of traumas—even the loss of his greatest love—seem meaningless. “Is this all there is to it?” he asks. “So I dream and wait for death . . . that last disappointment! At my last moment I shall be saying to myself: ‘So this is the great experience—well, and what of it?’ ”
Leiber borrowed heavily from Mann’s story to create “Is That All There Is?” Lee was stunned by the song’s dreamlike recollections. They seemed torn from her life: the blaze that levels her entire world but leaves her oddly unfazed; a trip to the circus—“the greatest show on earth”—that doesn’t thrill her as hoped. Then down falls the love that seemed destined for eternity. “I thought I’d die,” says the narrator. “But I didn’t.”
Those words shook Lee the hardest. They made a lie of the love songs she had sung all her life, and they echoed the aftermath of Dave Barbour’s exit. She hadn’t died, although she had thought—perhaps wished—that she would. Now there was nowhere else to go, nothing left to long for. “Let’s break out the booze and have a ball / If that’s all there is,” went the refrain. It summed up a song about an emotional vacancy that seemed unfillable, combined with a dogged drive to press on. Stoller had set the words to a loping, “oom-pah” circus rhythm. The harmonies derived from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Weimar-era theater music, and their woozy dissonance fit right in with Lee’s semi-intoxicated, floating delivery. But Leiber and Stoller didn’t think so at first. Off they went to find some other artist of note who might take the authors of “Jailhouse Rock” seriously as writers of art songs. It would have incensed Lee to learn she was far from their first choice, but by the late 1960s, Leiber and Stoller felt sourly toward her. They had given Lee her last significant hit with “I’m a Woman”; since then, she had ignored every song they sent. To Leiber, Peggy Lee would have been all wrong for “Is That All There Is?”; he fantasized instead about Marlene Dietrich, the German movie and cabaret goddess whose cool glamour held infinite mystery. Burt Bacharach, her conductor, scheduled a lunch for him and Leiber at Dietrich’s apartment on Park Avenue in New York.
At sixty-six, the star who greeted them looked eerily frozen in time, with eyes that had seen it all, yet could still bore through people like an X-ray. “Well, gentlemen, I hear you’ve brought me a hit song,” she said in her deadpan, accented murmur. As Bacharach played piano, Leiber nervously performed “Is That All There Is?” Dietrich listened raptly. At the end, she broke into demure applause. “Gentlemen,” she said, “that is a lovely piece of material.” Then she turned to Leiber and asked if he had ever seen her perform. He hadn’t, he confessed, except onscreen. “I’m glad you told me the truth,” she said, “because I would have known the truth anyway.” Then she gave Leiber what he recalled as “the most consummate response” he had ever gotten from an artist. “That song is about who I am, and not what I do.” She declined to sing it. Leiber walked away disappointed yet dazzled. Marlene, he exclaimed later, was “a fucking genius!”
He and Stoller pressed on, determined to find a singer willing to give life to their oblique little creation. The first to consent was Georgia Brown, a lusty-voiced British theater star who had recorded an album of Weill. Brown performed “Is That All There Is?” on her BBC special, Georgia’s Back. It made little impression. Meanwhile, the writers were startled to find that Dan Daniel, an amiable New York DJ and sometime crooner, had gotten hold of their demo and cut a soon-to-be-issued single of the song. He sounded as dramatic as a friendly postman, and Leiber and Stoller—who had far loftier hopes for the song—blocked the release.
In the summer of 1968, they produced an LP for Leslie Uggams, the ebullient African-American songbird and actress. Uggams had graduated from teenage stardom on TV’s Sing Along with Mitch to a Tony-winning Broadway performance in Hallelujah, Baby!, a civil-rights-themed musical. On her new album, What’s an Uggams?, Leiber and Stoller tried to recast her as a pop-soul belter. Uggams sang the brooding “Is That All There Is?” to the rafters, a smile in her sunny voice. Leiber knew it wasn’t a match.
Almost as a last resort, he and Stoller sent Peggy Lee the demo, which also contained “Some Cats Know”—a much more likely choice for her, they thought. Within days, she phoned Leiber about “Is That All There Is?”
“If anybody else gets their hands on this song, you can forget it.”
“Forget what?”
“Everything.”
Lee’s last great love: WNET producer and host David S. Prowitt.
Chapter Twelve
LEE DECIDED THAT Jerry Leiber had written “Is That All There Is?” for her, or at least about her. “I’ve lived that whole thing,” she asserted. Still, the notion that her life was a giant anticlimax troubled her. She had to find the positive spin. Finally she came up with one. “There are two words in there that are quite important: if that’s all there is, and is that all there is. It’s not all there is! ‘Is that all there is?’ is simply a question. And if it makes you think, one might find their own answer.”
The song, she resolved, had to be her next single. No matter that even the authors didn’t think it had a chance of selling, or that her youth-obsessed label was on the verge of dropping her. Lee viewed “Is That All There Is?” as her salvation, and wouldn’t be deterred. Sidney Myer, the New York cabaret manager, compared Lee’s courage to that of Gloria Swanson in making Sunset Boulevard. “That movie was offered to so many actresses who didn’t wish to be seen in an unflattering light, in a context that was against the image they had worked so long to create. ‘Is That All There Is?’ wasn’t full of the romance and the glamour and the eye-batting of Peggy’s other hits. It was risky.”
She began planning the session. Leiber and Stoller opted to produce. But as usual, Lee took control. “As hard as they would try to tell her, you should cut it at this tempo, you should use this pianist, and don’t let anyone arrange it except this guy, they were talking to a wall,” said Brian Panella. “Nobody knew the best arrangers, the best players, like Peggy Lee.”
And for her, only one musician was up to the task of arranging “Is That All There Is
?” Johnny Mandel had played her one of Reprise Records’ costlier flops of 1968; it had captivated her ever since. Randy Newman was the debut album of a twenty-four-year-old, brainy smart-aleck who played piano and sang original dark-humored social parodies, steeped in irony. Lee had bravely sung Newman’s “Love Story” at the Copa. It portrayed the Great American Dream of marrying young and growing old together as a form of slow death; by the end, the couple in the song has been shipped off to a “little home in Florida,” where the only movement happens on a checkerboard. Another song on the album, “Davy the Fat Boy,” concerned an orphan who knew only the most condescending kindness. “Isn’t he round?” exclaimed Newman in his gravel voice—“a put-on of old and crotchety,” as Ben Ratliff called it years later in the New York Times.
Newman’s songs spoke to the side of Lee that feared a storm cloud behind every rainbow, but that also saw the humor of it all. With America’s youth questioning every value they’d been force-fed by family, church, and media, Newman’s intellectual cynicism had come at the right time. But still he seemed headed for commercial doom. As rock grew harder and blunter, Newman’s music leaned toward “ragtime or blues or Kurt Weill art-song dissonance,” as Ratliff wrote. Over the course of several albums, though, his public grew, and in 1977 his number-two hit, “Short People,” sealed his stardom.
Lee had “gotten” his “happy-sad” songs before almost anyone. “I really consider him one of the brightest of the new young writers,” she said. “It’s kind of interesting to think that such a young man could know so much about way back then, and way ahead, and right here. His music is full of a poignant satire.”
She commanded Leiber and Stoller to hire him to arrange “Is That All There Is?” He was stunned by the request to work with this icon, twice his age, who had her pick of the best jazz musicians in America. “I’d seen her all my life; I’d heard her since I was a little boy,” said Newman, a Hollywood kid whose three uncles, Lionel, Alfred, and Emil Newman, formed a triumvirate of esteemed film composers. Leiber and Stoller, to Newman, were also aristocrats. He called Leiber “about the best lyricist that pop music—the incarnation of it that begins with rock and roll—ever produced.”