Is That All There Is? Read online

  Having heard Newman’s album, the duo gave him carte blanche to revamp their song however he chose. All involved were thrilled—except for Capitol’s executives, who rolled their eyes. To them, the plan promised another expensive bomb—one that would unite a faded singer, two has-been rock-and-roll tunesmiths, an obscure young maestro who wrote mostly unsalable tunes, and a chatty art song that was slow, depressing, and way too long.

  Clutching at straws, Lee took the Leiber-Stoller demo to Glenn Wallichs, Capitol’s original cofounder, who had helped launch her there. EMI had bought out his shares, and even as chairman of the board in the 1960s, he had seen his clout declining. But now he was in a position to help her. Following the dismissal of Alan Livingston, Wallichs had been appointed interim president of Capitol Industries. He succeeded in green-lighting “Is That All There Is?”

  Randy Newman went to work. He thought the song “needed something in the front” besides the rote and undramatic chords Stoller had written. He threw them out, along with the barroom jauntiness of the demo. As Lee spoke about watching “the whole world go up in flames,” an eerily childlike waltz would play behind her. And when she told of the circus visit that had left her cold, the horn section would play a sinister countermelody in the background.

  Before they recorded, Newman went to her house to talk things through. Finally he met Peggy Lee—a singer tarnished by life, faltering commercially, and hoping against hope that his work would help save her. Lee’s white outfit matched the nearly all-white décor. As they spoke, her vulnerability struck him. So did her lack of self-confidence—a surprising thing, he thought, “for someone of that attainment.” But her future, Lee felt, rested on this song, which her label didn’t like; they didn’t even want her.

  * * *

  ON JANUARY 24, 1969, the participants convened at United Studios in Hollywood for a nighttime recording session. As the thirty or so musicians set up, Newman walked in with Stoller, who was exhausted from having spent eight hours producing a record by “some pseudo-rock group,” as he called it. Then Leiber showed up, as did Lee. After saying her hellos, she quickly took her place inside a glass-walled isolation booth. She sat in near-darkness—her choice. The fewer distractions, the better, for a song that was all about her and her memories. Tension was high. The key parties all needed a hit, and no one was sure if this strange, experimental song had a chance.

  Newman counted off the first take. Pianist Maury Dell played the timid introduction and Lee began to speak. “I remember when I was a little girl, our house caught on fire . . .” She could hear the musicians through her headphones, but they couldn’t hear her. “We’re playing this thing,” recalled trombonist Mike Barone, “and I thought, this is a piece of shit! All I heard behind me was, oom-PEE, oom-PEE—trumpets behind me playing afterbeats.” At the end of the first take he stepped into the control room to hear the playback. He couldn’t believe his ears. “I thought it sounded fantastic!”

  But the writers weren’t pleased. What they had heard from Lee was an exaggeration of her familiar bedroom delivery—not the “something a little new, something different” they had hoped for. What they wanted, they couldn’t quite explain. “Is That All There Is?” was an acting job, and while Lee communicated superbly in song, spoken lines were another matter. They called for another take, then another, then another. Even these, said Leiber, “weren’t great.” Lee was getting angry, and taking frequent gulps from a bottle of cognac. After her sixth effort, she snapped: “Listen, I never do this many takes!”

  Yet Leiber and Stoller were determined to nail the perfect one, and they kept pressing for more. Stoller chain-smoked nervously—that day he finished five packs—and tinkered with the arrangement, while giving pointers to a quiet Randy Newman. Tony Terran, one of the trumpeters, had played on Newman’s dates before. “I was always impressed with him. He was easy to work with. He took care of business and didn’t bullshit.”

  Lee’s cognac kicked in, and as she neared the twentieth take, Leiber and Stoller began to relax. Her strained attempts to “act” had given way to a Zenlike calm. A critic later wrote that she uttered her “hallucinatory recollections in a hauntingly low, flat, emotionless voice.” Finally came a take that startled the writers. “I almost fainted,” said Leiber. “It was perfect.” Every layer of the song—the cynicism, the resignation, the humor, the perseverance—had come together. And when she uttered the line about the ultimate disappointment of lost love—“I thought I’d die, but I didn’t”—she gave Leiber goose bumps.

  Flush with success, all of them filed into the control room. As Lee sat down in an available chair at the console, Leiber asked the engineer for a playback.

  At twenty-six, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt—a pageboy-wearing, good-looking hippie—had as colorful a history as anyone there. The brother of New York Times writer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Sandy had begun using hallucinogens well before they became the rage. He met the countercultural, drug-crazed novelist Ken Kesey, later famous for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and joined his Shakespearean-named Merry Pranksters, a gang of hippies who rode cross-country on a psychedelically painted school bus, getting high and raising hell. Their hijinks became the subject of Tom Wolfe’s bestselling book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

  No one knew whether Sandy was under the influence on January 24, 1969, but when he pushed “play,” nothing came out. “What’s wrong?” asked Lee. Sandy didn’t know.

  “Either he didn’t record it or he erased it,” recalled Leiber. “The kid was mortified and contrite, but there was nothing that could be done.” Leiber and Stoller were sure that Lee would explode. But she surprised them. “Guess I’ll have to sing it again,” she said with a sigh. She walked back into her booth, the orchestra reassembled, and she delivered a performance that Leiber called “nothing short of marvelous.” Still he mourned the “perfect” phantom take. In years to come, Leiber—who seldom let the truth stand in the way of a good story—recalled it as the thirty-sixth. Yet the box that held the final version said “take 20”; Mike Barone couldn’t recall anywhere near thirty-six takes.

  It was almost eleven o’clock; the session had ended. The planned B-side, “Me and My Shadow,” would have to wait. Lee felt good; so did the writers, and everyone headed out to dinner.

  The next day, he and Leiber got their hands on all of Lee’s takes and went to work in an editing room. They used the last performance as a template. The sung refrains were fine, but Leiber grew obsessed with creating flawless versions of the monologues. He and Stoller listened to every previous take and isolated line readings that sounded dead-on; then they strung them together. Lee had made a few changes in the text; one of them so galled the lyricist that he never forgave her for it, even though he had let it pass. In the final spoken chorus, the singer had altered a reference to death. Commenting on why she didn’t just do herself in, she explained, “I’m not ready for that final disappointment”—not “I’m in no hurry for that final disappointment,” as Leiber had written. The distinction would have escaped most people, but not Leiber. Lee’s rewording was “somber,” he felt; what he had written was wry and ironic. “She really didn’t understand the song on the deepest level,” he groused.

  Neither did Capitol’s executives, as Lee and the songwriters would soon learn. But thanks to Dave Cavanaugh, Lee had earned a surprise reprieve at the company. Cavanaugh had maneuvered a deal for one more Peggy Lee album, but not another recital of standards. This disc would recast her as a soul-singing mama—a shift she was eager to embrace. Cavanaugh placed her in the hands of Phil Wright, one of the young producers whom Capitol had hired to shake up its A&R department. Then thirty, Wright had come from Chess, the Chicago R&B label. There he had arranged and produced a wealth of hits, including “Rescue Me” (Fontella Bass) and “We’re Gonna Make It” (Little Milton).

  By the time Wright joined Capitol, Aretha Franklin was the reigning queen of soul, with a gospel-bred, melismatic wail that reached for the heavens. Lee
was a white pop-jazz songstress who purred into the listener’s ear. But to Wright, soul was soul, and he heard it in Lee. “She had a feeling for the blues,” he said. “Things like ‘Fever’ were not that far away from soul music.” Lee, he believed, was up to the task of covering Franklin’s exultant 1968 hit, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”—a song coauthored by a white woman, Carole King.

  At her dining-room table, Wright sat with Lee for hours, “deciding what we were gonna do, how we were gonna do it, the musicians she wanted.” Lee kept a pack of cigarettes and a never-ending flow of booze at hand. “Her butler made drinks in very large glasses,” said Wright; Lee made it clear that she expected him to drink with her. He wondered how he would ever drive home.

  They jotted down some rock and soul hits of the day, including “Everyday People” (Sly and the Family Stone), “Spinning Wheel” (Blood, Sweat and Tears), “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” (Otis Redding), and “Can I Change My Mind?” (Tyrone Davis). Lee added Randy Newman’s desolate “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” and one of the most wounded songs she’d ever heard Billie Holiday sing, “Don’t Explain.” From Percy Mayfield, a West Coast bluesman of Lee’s generation, came an R&B prayer to God, “Please Send Me Someone to Love.”

  Virtually no pop singer of her era could have tackled such a program without sounding silly. But Mike Melvoin, who arranged and played keyboards on several tracks, knew that Lee could do it. “She was not a rock-and-roll singer by any stretch of the imagination, but she had internalized the blues melisma. She got it musically and she got it emotionally.”

  The funky orchestra included Lee’s sometime flame, Grady Tate, and Bobby Bryant, a fierce trumpeter who had played with the Charles Mingus band. There were tambourines, gospel-style piano, and Melvoin on organ, along with backup vocals by Sisters Love, a wailing black trio who toured with the Jackson 5. “I could hardly wait to get to the studio,” Lee exclaimed. Vermettya Royster, one of the Sisters, made Lee feel right at home. “I fell in love with her and that voice of hers,” said Royster. “And when I opened my mouth to sing she just stood there.” Lee thrilled Royster by exclaiming, “Oh, you’ve got such a wonderful voice!”

  Capitol employees drifted into the control room. John Hallowell of the Los Angeles Times came, too. “It is cold, stark, butts on the floor, big shiny black mikes, a clock on the wall, paper cups with coffee and more, but no one notices. For as the lady sings she turns that recording stage into the Mississippi Delta; a strobe-light show; two lovers in bed after love.”

  Lee was in a playful mood. When a sung phrase emerged as a croak, she announced, “There’s a frog for ya!” and started croaking, “Ribbit! Ribbit!” Everyone laughed.

  But the singer ruled with force. “She knew what she wanted and that was it,” said Wright. “If you tried to force her into something it wouldn’t work.” After the Koppelman-Rubin sessions, she had vowed to never again sing to prerecorded tracks. “There’s no overdubbing on the album, no sweetening,” Lee enthused to a reporter. “The emotions are full and strong.” She still relied on her respirator, and in between takes she vanished into a side room and put the mask on her face. Wright noticed her breathing troubles, but they seemed to vanish when the tape rolled.

  As usual, she didn’t have to raise her voice to sing the blues; they were there in her every train-whistle bend and slur. In “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” Lee mourned a dead-end life spent “watchin’ the ships roll in / And I watch ’em roll away again.” The horns blared and Sisters Love piped in—“ships roll in, oh yeah!”—but nothing disturbed Lee’s brooding introspection. Aretha Franklin had turned “A Natural Woman” into an ecstatic gospel cry; Lee delivered it in confidence to the man who had saved her life. To Melvoin, her version had all the passion of the original. “I think she sang the shit out of it,” he said.

  She let loose on “Don’t Explain.” That torch song, coauthored by Holiday, depicted a woman as willing victim, helpless without a man and willing to endure anything rather than be alone. Desperation, weakness, rage, and denial collided in Lee’s voice as a forlorn oboe snaked around it. “Cry to hear folks chatter, and I know you cheat!” she snapped in anger; then she crumbled. “Right or wrong don’t matter / when you’re with me, sweet.” At the end, she exploded with the rawest yells she had ever recorded—“Don’t explain! Don’t explain!”

  When one of the planned songs didn’t work out, Lee proposed the first tune she had ever sung with Benny Goodman, “My Old Flame.” Singing in 1941 about a vaguely remembered lost love, Lee had sounded dulcet and virginal; the flame could have been a prom date who never phoned again. Now, after decades of smoking, drinking, and saloon life, combined with serious lung damage, she sang it four tones lower, in a husky, weary voice. “My Old Flame” became a slow-motion bar song, blurred with drunkenness and disorientation. Near the end, Lee let out an off-key wail; she didn’t try to fix it.

  That track was saved for a later LP, but her soul album came out that spring. Many of Lee’s old fans seemed to feel she had crossed over into the enemy camp. Yet in Cosmopolitan, jazz critic Nat Hentoff called her disc “a stunning illumination of her capacity for self-renewal.” To Cliff Smith, the “new” Peggy Lee was “a bundle of seething but controlled emotion” with “a style no other white woman I know of could get away with.” Jerry Shnay of the Chicago Tribune compared Lee’s singing to “a long fingernail running down your spine.”

  One essential contradiction jumped off the cover. Lee appeared in a photo by John Engstead, who specialized in glamorously artificial portraits of stars from the golden age of Hollywood. She stood amid what looked like a wheat field, but was actually a patch of shrubs at the end of her street. Long, straight hair fell past her shoulders—the folksy look of Joni Mitchell and Mary Travers—but in Lee’s case, most of it was pinned on and colored her preferred lemon-yellow. The hair framed a flawlessly unlined face, which owed much to surgery and a mask of makeup. Huge pasted-on lashes highlighted expressionless eyes. The look suggested a Beverly Hills Mona Lisa. Above her head, in greeting-card script, was the album’s title: A Natural Woman.

  Sales were slim, but a single of “Spinning Wheel” hit number twenty-four on the Adult Contemporary chart—the same demographic Capitol had hoped to transcend. To Melvoin, it was a “fool’s assumption” that a middle-aged artist like Lee could sing rock and soul and attract the young. “Peggy managed to preserve the black identity better than most,” he said, “but she did not sell records to young white people. She sold records to adults.”

  The gap was obvious when she sang “Spinning Wheel” on The Andy Williams Show. As good as she sounded, her segment was a symphony of misjudgment. Lee had squeezed her girth into a fussy, old-fashioned yellow beaded dress. Dangling earrings swung beneath a campily ornate headful of blond sausage curls, so coated in hairspray that they didn’t move. She stood in the center of a mechanical wheel; protruding rods of light bulbs revolved awkwardly around her as she sang. Afterward, as she and Williams shared a duet of the Mamas and the Papas hit “California Dreamin’,” a fly buzzed persistently around her lacquered head. Even Lee had to laugh.

  * * *

  IN LAS VEGAS, NO amount of excess was too much. The town had remained a pot of gold for singers like Lee, whose past hits could lure gamblers into its web of showrooms and slot machines. But Lee’s engagements there were thinning out. Her temperament and demands—not to mention her fading name—had exceeded her drawing power, and Lee’s agency, William Morris, was finding her harder to book.

  On March 9, 1969, some surprising news hit the press. That summer, Peggy Lee would inaugurate the Casino Theater of the International Hotel, the most hyped and bankrolled new resort in Vegas history. For sixty million dollars, megamogul Kirk Kerkorian—later named the richest man in Los Angeles—had ordered up the world’s biggest hotel: thirty stories containing 1,519 rooms or suites. The International would become the Las Vegas performing headquarters of Elvis Presley. For now
, however, it was a mess of plaster dust, exposed planks, and swinging electrical cords, as workmen scrambled to get it ready for a July opening.

  Peggy Lee could hardly wait. The monthlong run would launch a two-year contract for the heftiest fee she had ever received. She owed the invitation to the hotel’s entertainment director, Bill Miller. A grand old man of the nightclub business, Miller had presented Lee in the late 1940s and early fifties at his star-filled Bill Miller’s Riviera in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The white-haired, permanently tanned impresario had gone on to book various showrooms in Vegas. Now he was in a position to give Lee a much-needed break. Word of it brought a snicker out of Joyce Haber, an acid-penned gossip columnist in her twenties. “Remember Peggy?” she asked in print. “Shades of Jack Webb and G.I. Joe.”

  But nothing could quell Lee’s excitement—until she learned about her competing act at the International. For every night of Lee’s run in the five-hundred-seat Casino Theater, Barbra Streisand, age twenty-six, would headline at the hotel’s seventeen-hundred-seat Show Room International. Lee would provide the late-night “dessert” after Streisand’s prime-time main course. Four weeks of singing would earn the young superstar a million in cash and hotel stock—four times the salary Lee was getting. All over Vegas, it was Streisand who had set the town abuzz. This was her first nightclub appearance in years; behind her were a smash star turn on Broadway in Funny Girl, a dozen hit albums, a Time magazine cover, four TV specials, and one Emmy; soon she would score a Best Actress Oscar for the screen adaptation of Funny Girl. Currently Streisand was filming another grand-scale movie musical, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.