Is That All There Is? Read online

  Sadness in music touched Norma deeply, and it baffled Marvin to see tears falling from her eyes. “That’s a funny song, honey!”

  “No, it isn’t,” she said, sobbing. “He doesn’t love her anymore.”

  Norma escaped whenever she could. In the summer she and her siblings did local jobs to help support the family. One year, barefoot and clad in overalls, she went to work for a poor mother with a single infant, handling farm duties for two dollars a week. Joined by Artis, Norma traveled to a farm outside Jamestown to visit their friend Ruby Savage. Ruby suffered from a severely infected knee that had left her bedridden, but Norma diligently coaxed her onto her feet and even got her up onto a horse. To Ruby’s sister, Rose, Norma worked magic; she “made her walk.”

  As far as Artis could tell, music was just a hobby to Norma. The girls sang together in church, or while walking along dirt roads. “She didn’t sing any better than I did,” claimed Artis. “And I wasn’t talented.” But other friends saw a budding songbird in their midst. “She used to sing a lot,” said Pearl Hickey. “When we’d have a high-school play and they needed a singer in it, they’d let her sing with us even though she was a grade behind. We didn’t mind, because she had a pretty voice.” In her bedroom, she sketched out song lyrics, but didn’t dare show them to anyone. Norma yearned to take piano lessons, but the rigidly practical Min dismissed that as nonsense. Still, the teacher let Norma occasionally sit in on other students’ lessons. Just by listening and watching, then by practicing at whatever piano was available, she learned to play in a rudimentary way.

  For most of her friends, and certainly for the grown-ups in town, little existed outside their daily small-town grind. But Norma was getting a sense of the world outside. Movies entranced her, as they did all of America. The Nortonville Town Hall had occasional screenings, but the closest theater was in Edgeley, and on the rare occasions when Norma managed to go, she was dazzled. To small-town girls like her and her friends, films showed them women who looked and acted nothing like the ladies of North Dakota. Even back in Jamestown, show business had excited her. A top celluloid sweetheart gave Norma her first Hollywood thrill. “This man came to Jamestown with Janet Gaynor’s bra. He had worked in some Hollywood studio. He put it in a window on Main Street, and we all filed by to look at it. I was so impressed. I wanted desperately to be a part of show business.”

  Norma took special notice of Clara Bow, the silent-screen superstar known as the “It Girl.” Born in poverty to an abusive and mentally unstable mother in Brooklyn, Bow had bucked the odds to become Hollywood’s number-one box-office draw. A defiantly liberated flapper with a mop of short curly hair and a saucy glance, she exemplified the scandalously freewheeling sexuality of the Roaring Twenties. “They yell at me to be dignified,” said Bow. “But what are the dignified people like? They are snobs, frightful snobs.” Having the nerve to be herself, she said, made her a “big freak” in their eyes.

  Bow was everything that Norma longed to be. With her broad shoulders, thin eyes and lips, and extremely pale skin, the child hardly looked like a budding glamour queen. But she had started to learn how women could get attention. Starting around age twelve, said Artis, “there wasn’t a shy bone in her body. She made you recognize her. Whenever we went anywhere, she loved to be the one whom everybody looked at. She loved to tell stories and to exaggerate, and she told them so convincingly that people believed her. I wonder if she didn’t believe them herself half the time.”

  In 1932, Norma began traveling every Saturday to Jamestown to begin the two-year process of classes that prepared children for confirmation. She and twenty-five other pubescent youths sat in St. John’s Lutheran Church and listened to Reverend W. W. A. Keller expound solemnly upon the Bible and Christian behavioral ideals. Russell Krueger, a farm boy from nearby Eldredge, never forgot Norma Egstrom: “She was a big gal for her age, and she was loud. Quite a talker. Before class started, you knew she was around.” The other girls wore plain floral dresses and flat, austere hairstyles; Norma teased hers out into a modest facsimile of Clara Bow’s. As Reverend Keller spoke, Norma sat in her pew sketching movielike femmes fatales. Her flappers had furs, blond Marcel waves, bright lipstick, and brassy names—Trixie, Babe, Bumps. Meanwhile, popular song continued to seduce her. When Keller was out of earshot, another girl stood watch while Norma committed the sinful act of playing current tunes on the church organ. Dreams of fame began to fill her head. “I remember standing at the cistern pump,” she said, “and looking out across the wastes of North Dakota . . . and thinking, One day I’ll get out of here. And I’ll come back in a big car with presents for everybody. I’ll drive down Main Street, passing out gifts. When people thank me I’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s nothin’, it’s nothin’.’ ”

  Confirmation day at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Jamestown, 1934. Norma Egstrom sits third from right in the front row; others include the Reverend W. W. A. Keller (front row, center), Elga Woodell (front row, far right), and Russell Krueger (middle row, third from left). (COURTESY OF KATE STEVENSON)

  A serious illness yanked her down to earth. In September 1932, the twelve-year-old’s appendix burst, and peritonitis set in. Her brother Clair drove her to the nearest hospital, above a bank in Edgeley. Norma was carried up a long, steep flight of stairs and laid on a table. A nurse anesthetized her with ether. The surgery was risky, but it worked. On October 13, during the two-week recovery time, a report in the Edgeley Mail suggested that Min wasn’t as uncaring as Peggy Lee would claim: “Mrs. M. O. Egstrom and son Ed visited at the Edgeley hospital Sunday.”

  But in years to come, that appendectomy formed the basis of Lee’s favorite tale about Min’s viciousness. Before she was hospitalized, said Lee, Min had coldly ignored her fever, nausea, and vomiting. After her appendix had burst, she was doubled over in pain, but Min tried to hold her captive at home. “I’m quite sure she hoped I would not pull through,” declared Lee in her memoir. Clair, she wrote, had to threaten Min with a shotgun in order to get her to let him drive the child to the hospital.

  Her recuperation time spawned another morbid childhood memory: “Each day I would walk to the window and stare at an enormous tumor they had removed from some woman. They had placed it in a pan and put it out on the roof of the annex building. It started out as large as a small watermelon, and the last time I saw it, it was like a small cantaloupe.” How she could have recognized a tumor was mysterious, but the horror had just begun. Immediately upon her return home, she said, Min ordered her to scrub the floor. As she crawled on her hands and knees, brush in hand, Min supposedly began kicking her so savagely that her stitches broke. According to one of Lee’s accounts, she ran for bandages to close the wound; another version has her rushing to her father for help. Then Min beat him up, after which he fell to the floor and broke a rib. The child ran out of the house into a blizzard, as did her father. Min followed them, waving a fireplace poker.

  Back home, a traumatized Norma came close to poisoning herself by drinking Lysol. “You may well ask, ‘Where was your Daddy?’ Well, he was probably out trying to drown his sorrows, and, besides, I tried to hide everything from him. He was troubled enough on his own.” Apparently he was also powerless to prevent Min from hiring her and Clair out as day laborers—another of Lee’s claims. Their nephew Lee Ringuette doubted it: “Clair never said that, and he would have.” Lee’s story grew. From dawn to sundown, she worked for a threshing rig, shocking grain, driving the water wagon, and cooking for the crew. Years later, neither Artis nor other friends of Norma’s could recall any such thing.

  Over time, Lee strung those episodes into a Cinderella-like fable. It starred the idealized mother snatched away by the Grim Reaper and the wicked stepmother who forces the daughter into domestic enslavement. The girl tolerates the abuse, afraid to tell her father. Each night she retires in fear to her cold room, crying for her mother.

  Rage, pain, and victimization were the themes, all inspired by Min. “I often thought that if there had be
en no Min, maybe there would have been no Peggy Lee,” said Paul Horner, her composing partner of the 1980s. Added Horner, “Peggy never got past being four years old.”

  (FROM WDAY BROCHURE, FARGO; COURTESY OF RICHARD MORRISON)

  Chapter Two

  AFTER SIX YEARS in the bleakness of Nortonville, Marvin Egstrom got a slight reprieve. In the summer of 1934, the Midland Continental transferred him to the last stop on the line, Wimbledon, population three hundred. The town had abundant trees and a pretty park, but Edith Lockett, daughter of the local druggist, recalled it as “just plain.” The Egstroms set up house on the second floor of the depot, a drab wooden box.

  At least they had a furnace, plumbing, and electricity, new additions to all depots. And for a few weeks Marvin could revel in his freedom from Min, who had stayed in Nortonville to close up the house. She too seemed to enjoy the single life; the Edgeley Mail reported her adventures as the town’s social doyenne, along with her shopping trips and vacations in bigger cities, away from Marvin. “Daddy took advantage of that,” claimed Peggy Lee in her memoir, leaving the implication clear.

  By now all of Norma’s siblings had gone; at last she had her father to herself. But his drinking continued, and with Prohibition now repealed, Marvin could drink at the neighborhood bar until past midnight. In bed, Norma would hear him dragging himself up the creaky wooden stairs, almost too drunk to walk.

  She busied herself with high school, which she began on September 10. Fellow student Ginny Lulay spied Norma for the first time as she walked near the two-story, red-brick schoolhouse. She wore a drab skirt and a sweater that accentuated her broad shoulders. To Connie Emerson, who met her later in Valley City, she looked nothing like the glamorous songstress to come: “She wasn’t a real blonde; she was kind of a dishwater blonde. And she was stocky.” Still, recalled Ginny, “there was something exciting about her. Us girls stood there gawking. We thought, ‘Who’s the new girl?’ ”

  Under their scrutiny in an unfamiliar town, she lost the bravado she had developed in Nortonville. After that first sighting, Edith and a couple of her friends passed Norma on their way to choir practice. They asked if she wanted to come. “Oh, I can’t sing,” she told Edith despondently.

  During Norma’s second week of school, Marvin, who was sixty, took ill. Back he went to Nortonville and Min’s care. In years to come, local legend—fueled by Lee’s claims—held that the young girl valiantly ran the depot in his absence. But the story seems like one more figment of her imagination. The Wimbledon News reported that E. E. Kelleran, Marvin’s predecessor, was “back on the job at the depot at this time”; what’s more, if it had so incensed Norma to have to rise at six to do mundane household chores, it seems unlikely that she would have awakened even earlier to work harder at a train station.

  Worried as she was about her father, she thrived without him. Her schoolmates had nicknamed her Eggy, and now, feeling less self-conscious, she made her first attempt at public singing. At a PTA meeting that October, she and three other schoolgirls “sang two numbers which were enjoyed very much by everyone present,” wrote the Wimbledon News. The “something exciting” about her was starting to flower. “She could write stories, she could write poetry; she was very talented,” said Edith Lockett. As a child in Jamestown, she had seemed as straitlaced as any of her elders; school principal Ella Fetcher had proudly jotted down little Norma’s statement that people who “say bad words” would wind up “where they have to shovel ashes.” Now she was an adolescent of fourteen, and the Wimbledon News printed her saucy exchange with a pal:

  JEANNE: I know that fellow awfully well, in fact we’ve broken bread together.

  NORMA: Well, I know him even better than that. We’ve broken davenports together.

  Forbidden things attracted her, be they the sexual charms of boys or, increasingly, the Negro race. There in Wimbledon, as in all of North Dakota, a black person was a rare sight. Virtually the only ones in view were porters, dressed in livery and treated like servants. The show-business custom of blackface thrived in North Dakota. A few years earlier, Marvin had joined the all-white Nortonville Dramatic Club. In a play called Two Days to Marry, he played Simon P. Chase—“as black as his race,” quipped the wag who wrote the program notes. (Another character, Emily Jane Pink, was listed as “blacker than ink.”) Added the Edgeley Mail’s reviewer: “A little darkey boy and girl furnished music between acts.” Norma joined in on the fun. Pearl Hickey, her Nortonville classmate, recalled a “musical contest” in Edgeley, where father and daughter “dressed as minstrels and blackened their faces, and they sang Negro spirituals.”

  Norma meant no disrespect. To her, blacks were special; perhaps she identified with them as fellow maligned outcasts.

  Soon they would alter her world dramatically, via an innovation that was opening up American households to worlds unimagined. Marvin, who had returned to Wimbledon on New Year’s Day 1935, celebrated by buying a luxury item: a handsome floor-model radio produced by Atwater Kent, the most popular brand in America. He had splurged on a top-of-the-line model, priced at $165—a handsome piece of polished-wood furniture with lacy woodworking and five knobs.

  Careful twisting of the one on the top right made clouds of static part, revealing crystal-clear voices. They gave national and local news in comforting tones; they sang Verdi and Puccini at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. By day, radio kept housewives company with soap operas like Ma Perkins and The Romance of Helen Trent. At night, it made families laugh with the antics of Fibber McGee and Molly, a cornpone couple surviving creatively amid the Depression; or chilled the blood with The Witch’s Tale, hosted by the cackling “Old Nancy, witch of Salem, and Satan, her wise black cat.”

  Parents and children sat in semicircles around the magical talking box. Radio was the theater of the mind, and it conjured scenes more vivid than anything Hollywood could dream up. In his book Raised on Radio, Gerald Nachman recalled the impact the medium had on him in the forties: “Radio made me want to see the places I kept hearing about each night, sparking a wanderlust the way a passing train and paddle-wheeler might have for a boy a century before.”

  More and more families were finding the money to acquire these costly devices, the popularity of which signaled the start of financial recovery in America. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the W.P.A. (Works Project Administration), the latest phase of his New Deal program to combat the Depression. It provided construction jobs for millions of the unemployed. To buy a radio after years of monetary fear was to see a way out of the dark.

  For Norma Egstrom, radio had one overwhelming asset. It was the key accelerant of the swing era, which was unfolding just as her father bought that Atwater Kent. Clarinetist Benny Goodman, the bookish son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, had burst on the scene with his big band, which made swing a household word. Played by groups of twelve to eighteen men, it had a kinetic, syncopated swagger that made toes tap and shoulders sway.

  To Depression-weary Americans, swing was the rallying cry to get the lead out of their shoes and start dancing. The New York Times called it “more than a form of music-making; it is a social phenomenon.” Swing brought the white mainstream face-to-face with black musical culture, primarily the blues, which was its foundation. And it brought Norma Egstrom an epiphany. Dialing the tuner late at night, she happened upon WX9BY, an experimental station. She heard a broadcast from the Reno Club, a hangout for black jazz fans in Kansas City. Until now, Norma had only heard music made by whites—solemn hymns sung in her Lutheran church or her mother’s prim piano playing. Nothing in her young life had prepared her for the hot sounds of the Reno Club’s resident nine-piece, all-black swing band, led by Bill (soon to be known as Count) Basie, a young pianist from Red Bank, New Jersey.

  He and his bandmates had swing in their souls. Someone would play a riff (a short repeated phrase), and the others would follow. In this freewheeling fashion, the Basie band created its theme, “One O’Clock Jump.” Within th
at rollicking twelve-bar blues was a low-down, midnight feel. “We kept late hours,” said Basie. “The hours when the spooks came out.”

  His music worked on Norma like a drug. The rhythm conjured up her exhilaration when a train sped by; the bluesy wail evoked the train whistles she’d heard all her life. Basie’s piano defined the minimalism for which Peggy Lee would become famous. His gently touched, perfectly placed notes were all the band needed to set it swinging. Tenor saxophonist Lester Young’s silky playing was light, lyrical, and full of feeling, qualities that Lee’s singing would share. In that orchestra was the first swing guitarist she had ever heard, Freddie Green, whose quarter-note, strumming technique swung hard. Green triggered her lifelong infatuation with the guitar and the men who played it.

  Basie’s men had lived the hard-knock life, and it came through in their playing—a connection to hurt and struggle that would later be termed “soul.” But their prevailing spirit was joy—even if the band worked in a joint that, in sax man Buster Smith’s words, was “nothin’ but a hole in the wall.” Call girls lingered in the stairwell, pimps and thugs at the bar; cigarette smoke permeated a room that felt “hot as hell,” according to trumpeter Buck Clayton. Black patrons were confined to the balcony and a small space behind the bandstand.