Is That All There Is? Read online

  The Reno Club altered jazz history nonetheless. One of its broadcasts reached John Hammond, a wealthy white producer who would play a crucial part in launching many of the music’s greats, including Billie Holiday. Hammond heard the Basie band on his car radio as he passed through Chicago. He took Basie under his wing and set him on the road to stardom.

  Norma liked the gruff, nasal blues shouting of Basie vocalist Jimmy Rushing, but she didn’t try to imitate it. She related much better to a white singer who was bridging the gap between white and black music, while conquering Hollywood and selling millions of records. In 1935, Norma saw Mississippi, a movie musical set down South. It starred Bing Crosby, a superstar crooner whose voice caressed the ears of the scuffling masses. A discovery of the so-called King of Jazz, bandleader Paul Whiteman, Crosby was revolutionizing popular singing by turning it from declaiming into confiding.

  His art lay in his ease. Crosby’s rise coincided with the emergence of the microphone; before him, a singer’s key aim was to be heard. In vaudeville or on Broadway, performers had to belt loudly enough to reach the last row of the balcony. This left little room for nuance; bluster was the trademark of most popular singers then, including two giants, Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker. Pop singing still bore the trappings of operetta and European art song, which employed formal diction, strict adherence to the written note, a “produced” sound, and artily rolled r’s.

  Now, with the microphone, singers didn’t have to shout; they had a tool capable of hearing and amplifying a sigh. A world of interpretive possibilities opened up for vocalists, many of whom were touched by black music, which was invading almost every corner of show business. The star black singers of Crosby’s youth, notably Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, and the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith, freed pop of its musty formality and brought it to sassy, syncopated life. Waters and Smith pounced on sexual innuendos with glee; trumpeter Armstrong colored his singing with the same growls, slurs, and freewheeling swing phrasing that poured out of his horn.

  Their white vocal peers—Mildred Bailey, Connee Boswell, Lee Wiley, and most of all Crosby—learned much from them, just as they did from the white jazz innovators of the day, including honey-toned cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and the “Father of Jazz Trombone,” Texas-born Jack Teagarden, who played with a bluesy swagger. Crosby distilled all these influences into a style that had a laid-back flavor of jazz. His buoyant rhythm made his singing sound off-the-cuff and light as air. He sang words as though he were speaking them. “When I’m asked to describe what I do, I say, ‘I’m not a singer; I’m a phraser,’ ” he explained. “That means that I don’t think of a song in terms of notes; I try to think of what it purports to say lyrically. That way it sounds more natural, and anything natural is more listenable.”

  Even in his thirties, Crosby had a paternal air; and Norma, who clung to father figures, was hooked. “I literally saved pennies to go to see his movies,” she explained. “Tears rolled down my cheeks if the leading lady didn’t treat him right.” A hymn to lost love that he sang in Mississippi, “Down by the River,” haunted her: “Once we walked alone, down by the river/All the world our own . . .” His intimate delivery profoundly inspired her sense of how a song should be sung.

  Until then, singing for Norma had been an amusement. Now it became her reason for being. The fifteen-year-old saw it as her ticket out of North Dakota, and perhaps as a way to show Min—who had long since moved into the Wimbledon depot—that she wasn’t invisible. “She just went hog wild to make a name for herself,” said Artis Conitz. “She would have done anything to become famous.”

  Thus began the fierce drive that would spur her for the rest of her life. Norma was obsessed with swing; she heard it in the rhythmic chugging of trains as they pulled out of the station and in the gentle trot of the horse that carried a young suitor to her home. She couldn’t get enough of the jazz of the day. Norma and a high-school classmate, Lillian Wehler, would “lie on the floor by the radio and listen to music,” said Wehler. “She was singing then. She was very good. And very ambitious.”

  Even when she wasn’t singing, she craved attention. In September of 1935, at the start of her junior year, Norma was voted class president. She began writing lofty editorials for the school paper; in one of them, she piped out a rallying call to her own generation, heralding the news that “someday the torch of democracy will be ours to bear.” But Norma had her eye on the stage. Two months later, in Valley City, the Kiwanis Club held its seventh annual one-act play contest. Wimbledon Public School entered with At the Stroke of Twelve, a “mystery comedy” about a young couple haunted by a ghost. Norma wasted no time in auditioning. The Wimbledon News soon reported that the key role of “Liza, colored girl servant” had gone to her. Her part would require her to don blackface, but that, of course, didn’t bother Norma.

  At the Stroke of Twelve lost the competition. Undeterred, Norma joined a school committee that mounted further shows. That December she starred in The Little Clodhopper, a comedy about a poor girl who meets a tycoon from the big city and winds up an heiress.

  It broke Norma’s heart to stare out at a nearly vacant auditorium, the result of a nasty storm. But the Wimbledon News gave Norma her first rave review. Lauding her as “our comical and talented Norma ‘Eggy’ Egstrom,” the paper reported that she had “very splendidly” played her part. In between acts, the six-girl Wimbledon High School Glee Club, featuring Norma, offered a musical interlude. Norma soloed on “Come, Sweet Morning,” a turn-of-the-century French ballad. The song itself didn’t matter; singing, to Norma, “was the only time I ever felt important. . . . I could get thoughts out of my system that I didn’t dare express.”

  In the spring of 1936 she mostly felt sad, for her beloved father had moved away. The Midland Continental’s assistant president, who worked in Jamestown, had taken ill, then died; Marvin was sent there to fill in. Min took over as Wimbledon depot agent. Except for brief visits, Marvin never returned; semi-estrangement from Min suited him fine.

  To Norma, he had always seemed an elusive father, emotionally unavailable and frequently too drunk to give her the attention she needed. Now he had left her alone with Min—one more painful desertion. But her ambition saw her through. Norma became editor-in-chief of the class newspaper, while speeding ahead on her quest for stardom. She was excited to learn of a statewide talent contest that took place every May in Grand Forks. Over a thousand students vied for honors in everything from sports to homemaking to music. Norma competed in the “low voice solo” category and lost. Quickly she set her sights on another competition, the May Festival, which happened annually in Fargo. This one focused on domestic skills, a subject that didn’t remotely interest her. But according to contestant Jeannette Loy, Norma plotted a trip to Fargo anyhow.

  Once there, she went to a local dress shop and had herself fitted for a big, showy gown, the kind a singer would wear. Back in Wimbledon, Jeannette was asked to address the high-school student body about her experience. During her talk, she got her first sense of Norma’s hunger for attention. “She got up and said that I was waving at all the truck drivers. It was a big lie! Everybody laughed. I could have killed her. I guess that’s how she got where she did. I didn’t like her very much, but I admired her.”

  September 7, 1936, found Norma back at Wimbledon High for the first day of senior year. After her recent disappointments, she tore into the semester more determined than ever to stand out. That November, Valley City again hosted the Kiwanis Club’s one-act play contest. Wimbledon’s entry, The Man Who Came Back, echoed Norma’s life; it told of a damsel pining for her absent father. But Norma didn’t play that role; once more she confirmed her affinity with the black race by darkening her face to portray “Mammy Jinnie, Negro servant.” The play won first place in the dramatic category, and Norma luxuriated in praise. “I remember the kids in high school telling me, ‘Norma, you’ll wind up in Hollywood,’ ” she said later. “In my secret heart, I knew it, too.” She
started planning ahead. In Home Economics class, her classmates sewed shawls and aprons; Norma made herself a silk bra.

  For now, she earned survival funds by waiting tables in Wimbledon. As usual, she had put herself in the right place. A customer informed her that Valley City had launched a radio station, KOVC, that was scouting for talent. Its programs formed a mosaic of North Dakota life: Livestock Market, Lutheran Seminary Quartet, Valley Radio’s Kiddie Revue. She made up her mind that one of the vacant slots would be hers.

  Learning of her plan to audition, Min typically dismissed it as foolish, and forbade her to go. But at sixteen, Norma wasn’t so easily intimidated anymore, and the townspeople of Wimbledon were poised to help. A depot agent on the Soo Line arranged for her to hop a drive with the station’s resident singing duo, the Fehr Sisters. One Saturday, Norma and the Fehrs trekked twenty-five miles into Valley City, and pulled up near the Rudolf Hotel, which housed KOVC. The tiny street-level station was causing daily excitement; a glass exterior allowed pedestrians to peer into the control room at the people talking on the radio.

  Inside the studio, KOVC pianist Belle May Ginsberg greeted a fleshy sixteen-year-old in hayseed clothes. Belle led her to the piano. This was Norma’s first professional audition, and whatever moxie she had shown in the past deserted her; she sang in a small, sweet, but quavering voice. Touched by her determination, Belle arranged for the girl to come back and sing for the station director.

  To her astonishment, Norma won a Saturday-afternoon slot—3:45 to 4:00 PM. The pay was five dollars a show, plus a meal. Her show debuted on November 27, 1936. Norma sang four tunes, accompanied primly by Belle, and made some shy remarks. The Wimbledon News reported: “Miss Egstrom sang over KOVC for the first time and her program was enjoyed very much by her listeners. We are very proud of our home girl.”

  The next Saturday, a Lutheran minister drove Norma to KOVC. Thereafter, she hitchhiked—“The truck drivers all knew her,” said Jeanette Loy—or rode the train. Once there, she stood in front of her microphone and sang proudly to the gaggle of townspeople who had gathered outside the glass partition, waving and smiling.

  Back at school, word spread about Norma’s success. “All us kids were excited,” said Ginny Lulay. “We thought, ‘Wow, someone from Wimbledon is singing on the radio!’ ” In a place where girls’ ambitions seldom reached beyond marriage and home, Norma was a rarity. Previously her aspirations had seemed quaint, not like anything that might make her famous. Now, said Edith Lockett, “we thought, gee whiz, she’s really gonna do something.”

  Norma maximized her big break. That New Year’s Eve, she served as featured singer at a dance thrown by the Eagles, a high-flown social club. Her performance betrayed her inexperience, starting with her cornpone appearance. After she had become Peggy Lee, the Valley City Times-Record recalled that early appearance: “Some of the girls snickered at her evening dress. Peggy had the voice, alright, but not the clothes to go with it, and her outfit was a honey. . . . It was black, with an artificial flower of some kind hanging on her back.”

  Even if she couldn’t afford to dress like the sirens she saw onscreen, Norma still identified with them. She hoped her charms would melt Lyle “Doc” Haines, KOVC’s star bandleader, whose “orchestra” consisted of him and six of his fellow college boys. Each weekend they hauled their instruments in a trailer and played barn dances and social functions to earn tuition money.

  “To Doc Haines and his buddies,” wrote a reporter, Norma “was just a cute little girl with precocious vocal chords, and they treated her like a baby sister.” But Norma had other ideas. Photos of Haines reveal a pleasant-looking young man with spectacles and a shock of wavy hair. But Norma looked at him as though he were Clark Gable or Cary Grant. To her Haines was “dark and handsome”; even his glasses looked sexy to her. As a college man, he had the mature authority she liked, but it was his musicianship that made him irresistible. Haines became her first in a lifetime of crushes on jazzmen; for Norma, they possessed a magical connection to a higher force, the same one she had sensed in her piano-playing mother.

  Haines offered her fifty cents a night to sing with his band. She jumped at the chance. The school superintendent at Wimbledon, Ivar Knapp, came to her aid. Norma had maintained a near-perfect attendance record and high marks, and Knapp told her that if she completed all her homework by Friday morning, she could go straight to Valley City to sing with Haines.

  Those stints on the road testified to how desperately she longed to sing. Norma and the band sat stuffed in a freezing truck, trailer dragging behind as they plodded through treacherous snowstorms. None of the dance halls and recreation rooms they played had microphones. Norma tried in vain to sing over the band, but her voice was too soft to battle a brass section. Finally she took a cue from Rudy Vallee, a crooning idol of the day, and used a megaphone. Singing such close-dancing ballads as “Moonglow,” Norma was supposed to appear starry-eyed and winsome. Instead she trembled visibly. A musician saw how scared she was and offered her a cigarette, explaining that it would calm her down. She never forgot her first drag; as promised, it eased her stage fright. “I was so busy coughing that I guess I forgot to be nervous,” she said. With that, the singer began a thirty-five-year smoking habit of such intensity that it nearly killed her.

  Jittery and green as she was, Norma performed nicely. Doc tagged her his “little blues singer”—proof of how she could make listeners feel when she sang a sad song.

  Winter turned to spring, and she counted the days before each of those weekend trips. Though not quite seventeen, she was already a local celebrity, and Min seemed determined to put her in her place. Ginny Lulay recalled Norma’s downtrodden greeting as she arrived at Wimbledon High: “I had to scrub the floor before I got here!”

  Whether or not Haines called her, she vowed to spend as much time away from home as possible. Each weekend she hung around KOVC, hoping to score extra airtime by subbing for absentee guests on other programs. Norma caught the eye of Connie Emerson, a seven-year-old Valley City girl who sang “On the Good Ship Lollipop” and other age-appropriate tunes on a kiddie show. Even at that age, Connie saw that Norma was “extremely determined.” Connie’s dad, a jeweler, served on the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and he roamed the state, seeking out cultural events to bring to Valley City. In various dance halls, he and his wife spied Norma. “She would be sitting very close to the bandstand, waiting for the opportunity to sing a song,” recalled Connie.

  That bullheadedness had taken Norma far, and she set her sights on the next Grand Forks talent contest. For the Valley City preliminaries, Norma chose a formal art song, “Clouds,” introduced by lyric baritone John Charles Thomas, a radio star. The song interested her, maybe because she’d spent so much time looking heavenward for her mother’s face: “Clouds that drift in the sun of sky / Resemble life as they wander by . . .”

  It was a demanding song for an untrained singer, full of extended notes that required strong breath control. Whereas Thomas sang “Clouds” operatically, Norma thought it needed “a soft sound.” Astutely she realized that “it wouldn’t make sense to bellow, ‘Clouds that drift . . .’ You’d break the cloud.”

  Two finalists from Wimbledon were announced—a trombone player, Ernest Kupka, and Norma Egstrom. The youngsters starred in a benefit concert at the school gym in order to pay for their trip. Frances McConn, Norma’s school music teacher, borrowed her father’s car to drive them to Grand Forks. Other ladies pitched in with clothes and food.

  Norma competed on a Friday. Later the first- and second-place contestants for Girl’s Low Voice Solo were announced: Elsie Heiberg of Fargo and Marian Walker of Minot. Norma went home heartbroken, feeling she had let everyone down.

  On May 27, 1937, she had one last chance to emerge as the star of Wimbledon High. Graduation day had come, and an assemblage of proud families, dressed in their Sunday best, sat politely inside the school auditorium. Among them were Marvin, Min, Min’s son Edwin, and his wife
Lorraine. The ceremony was a small affair; the graduating class had only eight girls and three boys. Norma had lost out on special honors; Donald Evans, the school track star, was valedictorian, Edith Lockett salutatorian.

  But Norma managed to steal the ceremony. The class motto was “Success Awaits at Labor’s Gate,” and Norma had penned an epic poem that could have been uttered at the start of war. She intoned it passionately: There’s work to be done and a place to acquire / There’s a road to be blazed with ambition’s fire . . . After reciting stanza upon inspirational stanza, she came to the rousing final lines: Strive hard till your goal’s reached, for our motto doth state / That success awaits at labor’s gate!” She won a huge ovation. The poem appeared complete on the front page of the Wimbledon News. At a gathering after the ceremony, Marvin and Min presented Norma with a graduation watch.

  Now old enough to be on her own, Norma couldn’t bear the thought of living in the depot with Min. She had always felt safest near her father, whose health, worn down by drinking and smoking, had grown weak. A month after graduation she returned to Jamestown to be with him. She took a waitressing job in the coffee shop of the three-story Gladstone Hotel, the city’s most fashionable downtown dwelling. Norma rented a one-room basement apartment nearby. It had no windows, and the furnishings consisted of a bed and an orange crate. No matter; Min was out of her life.

  On June 5, Norma had given her farewell show at KOVC. But she made sure she wasn’t off the air for long. She could have waitressed anywhere; but as she had known before she took the job, Jamestown’s main radio station, KRMC, operated from an upstairs floor of the Gladstone. Norma rushed to make friends with a secretary there, who helped her get an audition. By July, the teenager—now dubbed “The Sunshine Girl”—had a fifteen-minute show, three mornings per week.