Is That All There Is? Read online

  Psychosomatic illness was Lee’s key expression of fear, and it may have begun at the Jade. The crowd talked through her singing, and she took that as rejection. One night in July she did something that grabbed their attention as no song had: she fainted at the microphone. Lee awoke in a hospital bed. The doctor, she recalled, showed no sympathy. “Why don’t girls like you go back home where you belong?” he snarled. Lee needed a tonsillectomy. “I didn’t want to go back, but I had to go back,” she explained later. “I was ill. I wanted to be close to my family.”

  The railroad pass that had taken her west had expired, and she couldn’t afford the trip. “We’d all grown to love her so much that all the bartenders, waiters—everyone who worked at the club—chipped in to get Peggy home,” recalled Chuck Barclay. Hubert Sweeney, an old boyfriend from North Dakota, picked her up at the Jamestown station. She moved in with her father, but the experience was painful. Min had finally left the Wimbledon depot and rejoined Marvin in Jamestown, and she looked upon her vagabond stepdaughter with all the disapproval of old. Once settled, the teenager called Artis Conitz and asked her to visit. Lee’s once-closest chum found the singer more depressed than she’d ever seen her. “We sat on the porch,” said Conitz. “She told me the trip was a total loss.”

  By August, Lee had moved to “a small town that looked all gray to me”—Hillsboro, North Dakota, where she settled into a crowded cottage presided over by Marion Egstrom, her hard-working sister. Marion was taking care of a brood that included brother Clair, a hard-drinking drifter who was continually unemployed and broke; another sibling, the now-divorced Della, who was recovering from tuberculosis; Della’s son Paul; and family friend Ossie Hovde, one more lost soul.

  Peggy was the neediest of all. Her tonsillectomy was overdue, and as she lay on an operating table in Hillsboro her throat began to hemorrhage. She had to be rushed to a bigger hospital in Grand Forks for another operation. “I nearly died,” she insisted. This surgery seemed to work, however, and Lee rallied. Back home, she stared out the window from her bed. “I watched a sparrow hop around chirping happily as he pecked away at some horse manure. I remember thinking, ‘If that little sparrow can make it, I can make it, too.’ ”

  But more sadness lay ahead. Just before Thanksgiving, her ailing sister Jean—born months before their mother’s death and adopted by their aunt in South Dakota—died at fourteen. One obituary blamed “cancer of the blood,” which might have meant leukemia; another reported long-term heart troubles. Jean’s aunt and uncle had taken her to specialists all over North Dakota, to no avail. The adolescent girl knew she was going to die, and had even arranged her own funeral.

  Marvin, Min, Norma, and Marion had visited Jean in the hospital; now they were reunited alongside her coffin. One more piece of Selma Egstrom had vanished, and Peggy stayed depressed for weeks. But nothing could squelch her ambitions, and she was anxious to get back to the big city.

  Another good word from Ken Kennedy got her a singing job at one of Fargo’s smartest dwellings, the Powers Hotel. Situated near the trolley tracks in the heart of downtown, the five-story, red-brick building attracted scores of locals with the Powers Coffee Shop, a bustling, black-and-chrome, Art Deco café. It seemed patterned on the dining room of New York’s Hotel Algonquin, where such 1930s literati as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and George S. Kaufman traded lunchtime barbs at a fabled roundtable. The Powers acquired one of its own, and invited the town’s smart set to gather there. But the clientele leaned more toward students from North Dakota State University, who sat at the soda bar, sipping Cokes and munching burgers.

  The Powers supplied live music from an organist, Frank Norris, who worked on a riser near the entrance. Starting on December 1, 1938, evening patrons walked in to find a singer standing by the organ. Many of them had heard Peggy Lee on WDAY; now here she was in the flesh, a gawky five-foot-seven teenager in a white prom-style dress, a sausage curl atop her forehead. As diners talked and china clattered, she crooned through a strained smile and tried to seem sophisticated. The Powers had booked her for seven nights a week; on three of them, WDAY broadcast her and Norris for fifteen minutes. An announcer made it known that this was not just some run-of-the-mill songbird; he introduced her as Miss Peggy Lee, the title she would favor for a lifetime. Lee liked its ring: the “Miss” slowed down her name, giving “Peggy Lee” more space to be heard; moreover, it implied a woman who deserved respect.

  Mary Young, a student from the university, often walked a mile with three or four classmates to see her. Young was a farmer’s daughter from Jamestown, but those outings made her feel like a woman of the world. “Us girls thought it was cool to go down to the Powers Hotel in Fargo to order a cherry Coke, and Peggy Lee would sing for us,” she said. Young heard a “soft style” that “masked a lot of confidence, I thought. Sometimes she’d just lift her eyebrow during a song. It was amazing, what those tiny little moves added.”

  In the spring of 1939, she moved on to another major North Dakota town, Grand Forks, where her brother Leonard managed the YMCA. Lee quickly found herself a new showcase at another restaurant, the Belmont Café, on fashionable North 3rd Street downtown. Guests drifted in from the Hotel Dacotah across the street after they’d heard the hotel’s resident act, the Clark Sisters, four North Dakota girls-next-door. In a few years, the Clarks—who changed their name to the Sentimentalists—would score two enormous dreams come true: a job with one of the most adored bandleaders in the country, trombonist Tommy Dorsey, followed by a big hit record with his orchestra, “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

  Between sets at the Dacotah, the Clark girls would check out Peggy Lee, who sang with the resident band, the Five Collegians, on a tiny platform in back of the Belmont. Her sotto voce style had continued to evolve. “She always sang in tune,” recalled Peggy Clark, “and her words meant a lot to her, you could tell that.” To sister Ann, Lee “sang very quietly, gently on the notes.” A friendship formed, with Lee and the Clarks crossing the street to hear each other. They sat together and made “little-girl talk,” as Ann called it. “We thought she was really darling,” said Peggy Clark. “But she was kind of quiet. I think she felt insecure. She was just getting her feet wet, trying to figure out how to do this.”

  The Clark Sisters were broadcast nightly; Lee wanted the same. And she got it—a half-hour each Sunday on KFJM. Newspaper ads proclaimed the “popular, pretty songstress” as “one of WDAY’s outstanding entertainers” one more indication of the Fargo station’s prestige throughout North Dakota.

  Her summer job ended in September when the Belmont’s usual singer, Jane Larrabee, known professionally as Jane Leslie, came home from vacation. The Powers Coffee Shop welcomed her back, and by year’s end Lee had taken on a grueling six-night-a-week performance schedule, sweetened by more live broadcasts. This time her organist was Lloyd Collins, a professorial lad who also played in church. On radio nights, the public was invited to come in and make its presence heard over the airwaves.

  They didn’t hold back, and Lee took their chatter as indifference. Offstage she chewed her nails and sulked, certain she was bombing. When she saw an ad for a course by Dale Carnegie, the self-help guru whose books and classes had taught millions how to face crowds with aplomb, Lee signed up. She learned a key point of Carnegie’s fear-conquering technique; it involved dredging up anger and using it to help one conquer an unruly audience. Thoughts of Min had always made her blood boil, and Lee used that rage in her shows for many years to come.

  But at the Powers she learned how to hide it behind a Mona Lisa smile; to mask it with sexiness or other emotions. It gave her singing a mysterious spark, and more eyes turned her way. She and Collins kept the audience involved by taking requests.

  Lee taught herself to memorize the names of regulars and their favorite tunes, which she sang as they entered. No music pleased her more than torch songs, and the 1939 airwaves and jukeboxes were packed with them. “In my solitude, you haunt me/With memories that
never die,” sang Lee in Duke Ellington’s “Solitude.” “Deep in a Dream,” a smash hit for the Artie Shaw orchestra and his singer Helen Forrest, found Lee wallowing in imagery as ethereal as a cloud from a cigarette: “The smoke builds a stairway for you to descend/You come to my arms, may this bliss never end . . .”

  (COURTESY OF RICHARD MORRISON)

  A song had become Lee’s most cherished escape. She discovered the exhilaration of stepping inside a lyric and “living it.” Whether or not the story had happened to her, she could make an audience feel that it had. The Powers advertised her as “A Revelation in Relaxation.” On Sundays, after Fargoans left church, they could go to the Powers for lunch and hear Lee and Collins perform a matinee of art songs, including “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” an Irish-style ballad about an immigrant couple’s longing for the old country. Many of the Powers’s Sunday customers had moved to North Dakota decades earlier from Scandinavia or Germany; during “Kathleen,” many brushed tears from their eyes.

  Collins found that the introverted eighteen-year-old who toted around a volume of Ralph Waldo Emerson could also be silly. When the bartender surprised them with hot fudge sundaes, she squashed hers with both hands, then chased Collins into the men’s room, threatening to smear him with ice cream and chocolate syrup. But at the end of the night, things turned serious again, and the youths sat at a corner table in the empty café, talking heart-to-heart about their lives and the future. Lee’s ambition, she told Collins, was to front a swing orchestra. She showed him a lyric she had written, “If I Could Sing with a Band.”

  Her success at the Powers had inspired a competing nightspot, Le Chateau, to try a copycat format with Jane Leslie, the singer whom Lee had temporarily replaced at the Belmont Café. The women resented each other; Lee relished her friends’ comments about how much better she was. But once she felt sure that Jane was no threat, they became the tightest of friends.

  Lee spent the last months of 1939 in her new home, the Hogan Apartments, right down the street from the Powers and the Black Building. She lived there in one drab unit with the whole contingent from Hillsboro. Marion had mild showbiz ambitions herself; she had adopted the more glamorous name of Marianne and posed for Hollywood-style headshots, one of which showed her as a dramatic beauty with upswept curls. According to Artis Conitz, both Marianne and Della sang at least as well as Peggy. But Marianne was employed as a doctor’s receptionist; someone had to pay the bills. Sickly Della couldn’t work; Clair earned a pittance as a grocery-store clerk. Ossie barely contributed. Lee wrote optimistically to an out-of-town girlfriend: “Sometimes we are a little low on food, but we’ve always got beds to sleep on.”

  Lee’s singing and waitressing had netted her a decent salary that year, but most of her income went toward dresses and other accoutrements for her career. Everyone in the house, especially Marianne, felt sure that Peggy Lee was a star in the making. “My mother was Peg’s one true friend, the one person she could count on through life,” said her son Lee Ringuette. “She very much wanted Aunt Peggy to have her opportunity to sing.” While Marianne stitched her gowns, others showed up to dote on Lee, such as Johnny Quam, a young admirer “who was really important in my life,” noted the singer in her memoir. “Not just because I liked him, but also because he worked in a dry-cleaning shop and could keep my ‘other dress’ clean.”

  Paula Ringuette, the sister of Marianne’s future husband, Leo Ringuette, lived behind the Hogan in the Jackson Apartments. “We would sit on the front step at night and wait for Peggy to come home from the Powers Hotel,” she said. Ten-year-old Paula couldn’t wait to see what the glamorous songbird was wearing. The grown-ups, she noticed, “were all excited about what Peggy was doing.” They seemed to know she wouldn’t stay in North Dakota for long.

  “I had the feeling I was being run down by a steam engine,” said Lee when Benny Goodman put her in the spotlight. (COURTESY OF RICHARD MORRISON)

  Chapter Three

  IN THE SUMMER of 1940, true-blue Ken Kennedy got Lee her first job with a serious swing band. Kennedy had raved about her to his cousin Severn “Sev” Olsen, a college boy whose orchestra played for dancing at the Radisson Hotel, the premier hotspot of downtown Minneapolis. Olsen needed to hear Lee before he could hire her, so she set off on a two-hundred-mile train trip to the hotel. The twenty-year-old auditioned with “Body and Soul,” the most gut-wrenching torch song of the previous decade. “You know I’m yours for just the taking,” she sang into the face of “Minneapolis’s most personable bandleader,” as Down Beat called him.

  Lee found him irresistibly attractive and witty. He returned her interest—and she embarked on what she would call her “first big romance.” It was messy, though, for Olsen had a wife. “I just couldn’t help it,” protested the singer. Word spread throughout the orchestra that Olsen’s prairie-girl find was on the verge of breaking up his marriage.

  Wracked with conflict, Lee cried on the shoulder of Jane Larrabee, who lived in Minneapolis. But the affair continued. On the bandstand Lee took care to keep her Scandinavian mask of control in place. Jeanne Arland, a pianist and singer whose future husband, Willie Peterson, played piano with Olsen, saw nothing but smiling restraint whenever Lee opened her mouth on the bandstand. “It was a sweet voice,” said Arland, who noted admiringly that Lee had “nice control” and “knew how to deliver a song”—all this with no formal training.

  But her offstage role as the “other woman” was torturing her, and in November 1940 she wrenched herself out of it. Lee grabbed the next job offer that came along, with a more famous (if less sexy) conductor at a rival hotel, the Nicollet. Before anyone had heard of Bing Crosby, Will Osborne had reigned as the first star crooner on radio. His whispery style, backed by the sticky-sweet strains of his dance band, was all over the airwaves in the 1930s.

  But by the time he hired Lee, his band had gone to seed, and he announced his upcoming tour as his last. Osborne was carting a bus-and-truck vaudeville show around the country; it included a hillbilly fiddler, a black baritone who sang “Ol’ Man River,” a buxom bombshell who turned cartwheels, the “fire-eating comedian” Chaz Chase, and a singing jokester, Dick “Stinky” Rogers. Variety singled out Peggy Lee: “The gal trills ‘Body and Soul’ and had to come back to do ‘Exactly Like You’ before the customers would cease the palm-pounding.”

  Just before the band went on tour, Lee spent five days at the Minneapolis Auditorium, guesting in the traveling version of what had been the most breathtaking show of the 1939 World’s Fair. Water Follies was a low-rent version of Billy Rose’s Aquacade, a flashy spectacular in which balletic swimming and diving met vaudeville. The road show had held onto its star, Buster Crabbe, the Olympic gold-medal swimmer who had played Tarzan and comic-strip hero Flash Gordon onscreen. The backup cast had been slashed from five hundred–plus to twenty-three. Water athletes dived into an Olympic-size glass tank and wriggled around like mermaids; scaffolding on the left held a stage, an orchestra, some clowning comics, and Peggy Lee. By the time she sang her one song, “God Bless America,” her gown was soaked. On press night, the loud splashing of the divers threw off her timing so badly that she came in two bars late and never found the beat.

  Variety mocked the “amateurishness and crudeness” of the show, which flopped at the box office. Lee was glad to rejoin Will Osborne in St. Louis for a holiday engagement. During the run, however, she felt a blockage in her throat. After all the vocal problems she had incurred at the Jade, Lee was terrified of losing her voice forever. She rushed to a doctor, who sent her to the hospital for one more operation. Newspapers reported her ailment as a “badly infected throat,” but Lee’s growing hypochondria took over. Four decades later she described the anesthesiologist as “mentally ill,” declaring, “He slammed me down on the table and started pouring ether down my throat. While I was asleep, I dropped off the table and my teeth cut loose my tongue and went through my lip.”

  During her recovery, Osborne turned his band
over to Stinky Rogers and moved to Hollywood to become a producer. Lee was fired. “I cried,” she told a reporter. “Then it seemed I was steel inside.” Once the hospital had released her, she “set out to meet the right people.” The place to find them, she decided, was back in Movieland.

  Shortly after New Year’s Day 1941, she hitched a ride to L.A. with some musicians. The Jade rehired her briefly for the same two-dollar-a-night salary. A songwriter she met there told her she could do better at the Doll House, a restaurant in Palm Springs that hired singers as dinner music. A tiny renovated cottage, the Doll House stood in a desert town that offered Hollywood folk a tranquil escape from the fast lane. Early in 1941, some of the most recognizable stars in America—Jack Benny, Franchot Tone, Peter Lorre—glanced up from their dinner plates and conversations to see a callow blonde singing love songs with a strained smile. A moment later, they resumed their chitchat.

  This time, apparently, her Dale Carnegie anger technique didn’t suffice; this crowd was far more blasé than any she’d encountered in Fargo. The Doll House became the site of a fabled (if probably exaggerated) breakthrough in her development. “I knew I couldn’t sing over them,” she said later, “so I decided to sing under them. The more noise they made, the more softly I sang. When they discovered they couldn’t hear me, they began to look at me. Then they began to listen. As I sang, I kept thinking, ‘softly, with feeling.’ The noise dropped to a hum; the hum gave way to silence. I had learned how to reach and hold my audience—softly, with feeling.”