Is That All There Is? Read online

  Lee had sung that way for years, but finally, it seemed, she had learned its power. “By that accident, I discovered that if I could really find my way into a song itself, people would listen more readily. I began to think about meaning, about words, rather than just singing.”

  One night her listeners included Freddie Mandel, who owned the Detroit Lions. He returned that week with Frank Bering, a Chicago hotel mogul. One of Bering’s properties, the Ambassador West, had a lounge, the Buttery, that offered entertainment; Mandel had told Bering that Lee might make a pleasant addition. It was late, and the Doll House musicians had gone home, but Lee took Bering to another nightspot and sat in with her preferred audition song, “The Man I Love.” He wasn’t that impressed, but out of faith in Mandel, he offered her a job at the Buttery. “I’m hiring you more because of your enthusiasm than anything else,” he told her.

  Even though she would once more serve as background music, Lee wove visions of grandeur around her debut at this big-time hotel in Chicago—the town that had launched many a jazz great, including Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman. With the extravagance that would nearly ruin her when she acquired real money to lose, Lee spent what little cash she had to buy a new wardrobe at a Palm Springs boutique. The splurge left her without enough money to eat or pay her way to Chicago. She wound up borrowing the funds for the trip.

  In May 1941, Lee embarked on a long set of connecting rides to Chicago. Once there, she found her way to the “Gold Coast” neighborhood—one of the most affluent in all the U.S.—and to the Ambassador West at 1300 North State Parkway. The hotel wasn’t as posh as its partner across the street, the Ambassador East. Yet to Lee’s eyes, the place was a palace. She had invited Jane Larrabee to come and share her room. Soon, as the Buttery’s new singing star, Lee would be earning the unfathomable windfall of seventy-five dollars a week. But her first paycheck was days away, and both girls were broke; no one had told Lee that her contract included free room service. “There I sat in this fancy suite,” she recalled, “feeling like a fairy princess in my new clothes, but starving in the lap of luxury.”

  She and Jane survived on cookies, vending-machine crackers, and peanut butter. Returning to her quarters one afternoon, Lee found a surprise outside the door: a tray of food she hadn’t ordered. The same thing happened the next day, and the next. She viewed this miracle as further proof that if she concentrated hard enough, she could manifest whatever she needed. Soon, though, she figured out that the magic had been wrought by two resident angels, Tillie and Ivy, the black housekeepers who worked her floor. Years later, when a by-now-famous Lee stayed in the same hotel, she spotted Tillie. Lee asked her how they had known she was hungry. Explained Tillie: “We didn’t see no grub coming in nor any bones going out!” Whenever they found leftover food on a room-service tray, they saved it for Lee.

  All over town, nightcrawlers had their pick of smoky lounges where demure songbirds sang amid a din of chatter. The Buttery was a casual alternative to the Ambassador East’s Pump Room, a swanky restaurant with dancing. Instead of indulging in that tuxedo-and-evening-gown scene, one could stroll inside the Ambassador West, make a sharp right, and spend an hour drinking and enjoying the lounge acts that performed in the Buttery’s rear corner. They included Lon Sax & His Saxonaires, the Noteables (“those hilarious kids who play such cute music,” wrote the Chicago Tribune), and hoity-toity songstress Maggi McNellis, a future New York socialite and radio host.

  On May 7, Peggy Lee wove her way through the noisy crowd to give her first show. Backing her were The Four of Us, a perky all-male singing band. Lee smiled gamely as she crooned “Body and Soul” and “These Foolish Things,” two of her usual showstoppers, to a barely responsive crowd. One customer who took notice was Jean Enzinger, a blond, pretty Vassar graduate and local society columnist. Later she would marry TV producer Bob Bach and move to New York, where, as Jean Bach, she became known as a jazz-crazy party-thrower and the producer of radio’s The Arlene Francis Show.

  Though just twenty-two at the time, Jean was already a jazz connoisseur, and she wasn’t too impressed by the Buttery’s new vocalist. “Peggy’s singing was OK,” said Jean. “She didn’t have any particular style.” Lyricist Johnny Mercer also dropped by. To him she sounded out of tune, in keys that were obviously wrong for her. But no matter how unnerving the din, Lee wouldn’t raise her voice. “You had to really pay attention when she was on,” Jean said.

  Lee was determined to learn, and she soaked up knowledge from her elders. Chicago had a feast to offer. After work, she trekked to Rust Street in the city’s jazz-laden South Side—an area known as Bronzeville, and not a place for unescorted white girls. She kept returning there nonetheless to hear her new discovery, Laura Rucker, a fixture of Chicago blues since the twenties. Rucker held forth like a haughty grande dame, but there was nothing pretentious about her voice, a cool, salty wail edged with sarcasm. She played piano and sang songs, sometimes original, about the two-timing men she had known. Rucker kept her phrases short and clipped, as though dishing with a girlfriend over a glass of gin. Her art reminded Lee that less could be more, and could swing just as hard. Back at the Buttery, she tried to phrase the way Rucker did.

  The management kept extending Lee for months. One August night, a smartly dressed and coiffed brunette sat at a table, “gaily puffing her cigarette,” as a reporter noted. Alice Hammond Duckworth—known as Lady Duckworth—was both the estranged wife of a member of British parliament and a descendant of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the magnate who spawned a historic American family.

  The next night, Alice came back with two men. One was Mel Powell, a lanky blond wunderkind of the jazz piano; the other his boss, Benny Goodman. As soon as her divorce came through, Duckworth and the world-famous King of Swing were set to marry. Goodman’s band had come to town to play the College Inn, the ballroom of the Sherman House hotel. There, and virtually everywhere else they appeared, so many swing-crazy jitterbuggers fought to get in that police had to be called. Goodman was a shining American success story—an immigrant couple’s son who had triggered a musical revolution. A virtuoso clarinetist, Goodman had brought swing to every major ballroom in America and even to Carnegie Hall.

  From her microphone, Lee spotted him—a thirty-two-year-old, bespectacled egghead in a tweed suit. She froze. Like most of America, she worshipped the Goodman band; at the Fun Zone in Balboa, she had fed hard-earned nickels into a jukebox to play “Don’t Be That Way,” Goodman’s bouncy number-one hit.

  At the Buttery, Lee didn’t know that Helen Forrest, Goodman’s celebrated singer, had just quit in disgust. Forrest would recall that twenty-month stint as a “life sentence.” Goodman, she said, was “by far the most unpleasant person I ever met in music”; she had loathed his bad manners, his cheapness, his egocentrism. At the Sherman, Goodman, true to form, had driven her crazy by distractingly “noodling” on the clarinet throughout her vocals. After the set, she had stormed off and told him, “This is it. Find another singer, and find her fast.”

  Her departure had left Goodman in urgent need of a replacement. Alice had suggested Lee as a convenient and adequate substitute, and the bandleader reluctantly agreed to give her a listen. The Four of Us were ecstatic over Goodman’s presence. Lee tried not to stare, but through the darkness and smoke she couldn’t take her eyes off him—a glum, fidgety figure, glaring in her direction while chewing his tongue. Lee was experiencing the fabled Goodman “ray,” a stare of seeming disapproval that “went right through you,” as his previous singer, Martha Tilton, recalled. Some who knew him claimed that this was his perverse way of listening intently, but Lee felt sure he hated her. Out came her worst insecurities, rooted in all the times when Min had told her she was wasting her time trying to sing.

  Goodman neither smiled nor applauded. After one set, he and his companions left without greeting her. Lee told one of The Four of Us sadly, “I wish he would have enjoyed it.”

  She hadn’t thrilled him, but as he lat
er put it, he heard “character in her voice.” A day or two later, Lee came home to her suite to find Jane Larrabee beside herself with sisterly glee. Larrabee sputtered out the news that Benny Goodman had called, asking for Miss Lee. Peggy insisted that someone was playing a cruel joke. “I know he didn’t like me!” she said.

  “What can you lose?” asked Jane. “At least call.”

  Lee waited a day before dialing the number. “It was a very short conversation,” she recalled. “He just said, ‘Would you like to sing with the band?’ and I said, ‘Well, y-yes.’ ” He wanted her to join immediately at the Sherman, and he would match her seventy-five-dollar salary at the Buttery. “I was in a state of shock,” admitted Lee. Mel Powell later told her that, during her Buttery set, Goodman had murmured half-heartedly to Alice: “I guess we’ve got to get somebody for Helen.”

  * * *

  LEE’S NEW JOB PLACED her in the eye of the hurricane known as swing; if she lasted with Goodman, fame was guaranteed. But she would have to learn how to bend to the quirks of one of the most maddening personalities in jazz. Benjamin David Goodman was a towering example of what could happen when gut determination met talent. Goodman and his eleven siblings had grown up poor in a Chicago ghetto with their parents, Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe. David, the father, shoveled lard in a stockyard. He vowed to give his kids a better life; to that end, he sent several of his sons to music school. David bought Benny a clarinet and found him a classical teacher, but the budding art of jazz stole the boy’s heart. By sixteen, he was already good enough to win a spot in the pioneer jazz orchestra of drummer Ben Pollack, a Chicago idol. Soon thereafter, David was mowed down in a car accident. For years, Benny would struggle to live up to his father’s exacting dreams for him.

  Black musicians struck Benny as the authentic voices of jazz, and he vowed to work with them, although the racism of the day made that a risky prospect. At the same time, he had inherited David’s goal of upward mobility, and burned to join the upper crust. In 1933, one of its members took up his cause: the lawyer and Columbia Records producer John Henry Hammond II, the man who introduced his sister Alice to Goodman.

  A Yale graduate, Hammond had sprung from a family tree that included a Civil War general, the U.S. Ambassador to Spain, and a Vanderbilt. He was a moneyed snob to the manner born; but whereas most people of his class associated only with the blacks who cleaned their homes and served their meals, Hammond—a know-it-all hipster with the high-flown speech of an aristocrat—insisted upon the “Negro’s supremacy in jazz,” and wanted the world to share his obsession. His discovery of Count Basie was one example of his canny ear. In another, he teamed a still-obscure Goodman with an unknown Billie Holiday on a 1933 single, “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law.” Hammond became Goodman’s trusted advisor; it was he who urged the clarinetist to hire four incomparable black musicians: pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, guitarist Charlie Christian, and arranger Fletcher Henderson.

  In 1934, Goodman launched his first big band. He landed a regular spot on an NBC radio program, Let’s Dance, but nobody yet knew how to dance to swing, and a ballroom tour nearly bankrupted him. His fortunes turned in 1935 when Victor Records signed him. Critics and deejays raved about his new singles; that August, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, the orchestra—and swing itself—exploded. Fans had devised a frenetic new dance, the jitterbug; by year’s end, they had dozens of swing bands to dance to.

  Goodman piled up number-one hits. In January 1938, mobs waited in the cold outside New York’s Paramount Theater for the ten AM show on his opening day. When the leader strode onstage, clarinet under his arm and a self-satisfied half-smile on his face, “bedlam broke loose,” according to the Herald-Tribune. Jitterbugging couples jammed the aisles, “and during a jam session a group of addicts invaded the stage and began to dance the Big Apple. Ushers stood by helplessly.” Twenty-nine thousand people came that weekend, breaking attendance records at the hottest theater in Manhattan.

  That same month, Goodman brought swing to Carnegie Hall for a sold-out concert that lives on in legend. Conducting from resident maestro Arturo Toscanini’s spot, Goodman gave jazz and swing the prestige of concert music. The high point was “Sing, Sing, Sing,” a furious ten-minute tour de force that built into ever-rising crescendos until it drove fans to a near frenzy. Drummer Gene Krupa sat hunched over his tom-toms and cymbals, wild-eyed and dripping with sweat as his sticks flew in a blur.

  For the older generation, Goodman’s music, like most of swing, was a dangerous sign of youth run amok—perhaps in the throes of marijuana, the most feared drug of the day. The jitterbug was as threatening to the establishment as the future sights of Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips, the Beatles’ long hair, and Jim Morrison’s leather pants and numbed doomsday prophesies.

  The 1930s equivalent of those hurricane figures was an owlish professor-type with a white jacket, bow tie, and a vacant gaze. His playing revealed nothing of his heart; for Goodman, swing was the thing. Offstage he was a fierce taskmaster, both toward himself and others. His early vocalist Helen Ward couldn’t remember seeing him offstage when he wasn’t practicing. He made his band rehearse songs ten, fifteen, twenty times through, as he pushed for an elusive dream of perfection. “If something went wrong,” explained his singer of 1939, Louise Tobin, “all he had to do was lower his glasses and look. That was devastating to whoever was at the end of that look. There were very few guys who were not intimidated by Benny. Because of his accuracy, his fluency, everything.”

  To his daughter Rachel, “this self-absorption enabled him to go where he needed to” musically. “It also drove everybody else crazy, because it shut the rest of the world out.” Goodman’s eccentricities became jazz legend. The leader made no attempt to learn musicians’ names; he called them all Pops, including girl singers like the Clark Sisters, who sang with him briefly. Peggy Clark told of one memorable rehearsal. “The guys complained, ‘Gee, Benny, it’s so cold in here.’ He said, ‘Oh, OK. I’ll be right back.’ He went out and came back in with a sweater on.”

  Ed Shaughnessy, one of his drummers, saw Goodman torture his musicians, intentionally or not. “I think he liked to keep people off balance. He was a weird man.” Arranger-composer Johnny Mandel, who emerged in the swing era, also knew Goodman’s ways: “He’d break down the confidence of first-line players, and demoralize them, and they’d quit.”

  Benny Goodman, New York, 1946 (PHOTO BY WILLIAM F. GOTTLIEB; COURTESY OF LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  Bizarre as his methods seemed, few could question the results. “Benny made musicians play better than they could,” explained Tobin. “They never wanted him to be disappointed in them, because they were so thrilled to be in that band. These guys were at the very top of their profession with him. Most of them could never hope to get any bigger.”

  On her opening night at the Sherman House, Peggy Lee, age twenty-one, sat on the bandstand between two other singers, Tommy Taylor and Helen Forrest. The latter remained silent and glum; she had quit a month before her contract expired, and Goodman had forced her to stay—though he didn’t permit her to sing—until it ended. If anyone asked, he said she had laryngitis. Meanwhile, the maestro had given Lee no rehearsal; she didn’t know where to come in on her songs, and relied on Mel Powell to cue her. The singer took her place at a center microphone that faced the one enormous spotlight that lit the band. “I had the feeling I was being run down by a steam engine,” she said later.

  Backstage, Forrest was frigid to Lee, who was singing her arrangements. Lee would complain for years of having had to sing in Forrest’s keys, but in fact they were close to her own; her strained, wavery vocalizing had another cause: “I had a psychosomatic cold from being terrified to be with Benny Goodman. Benny really wasn’t crazy about singers.”

  Neither John Hammond nor another of Goodman’s advisors, George Avakian, cared much for this one. Avakian, a producer at Columbia Records, Goodman’s current label, heard her for the first t
ime at a rehearsal. Fear had kept the young woman hiding in an aloof shell, and she struck Avakian as “ice-cold—very reserved and austere looking and quiet,” with a “certain artificial quality.”

  Hammond dismissed her more bluntly. It happened at Lee’s first recording session held in Chicago on August 15, 1941, a week after Goodman had hired her. The song was a light but catchy novelty, “Elmer’s Tune,” whose author, Elmer Albrecht, was allegedly an undertaker. “What puts the kick in a chicken, the magic in June? / It’s just Elmer’s tune,” went the silly words. Glenn Miller, Goodman’s runner-up as the hottest bandleader in the country, had just recorded the ditty, and Columbia had pushed Goodman into competing.

  In an interview with Goodman biographer Ross Firestone, engineer Bill Savory recalled the session as extremely tense. During the first take, said Mel Powell, Lee “stood at the mike with the sheet music in her hands—I’m pretty sure she couldn’t read it—and it shook so badly it sounded like a distant forest fire.” As usual, Goodman kept calling for more takes. Lee felt sure she was failing. Hammond, there to supervise, began deriding Goodman’s judgment in a loud voice: “Benny, she can’t sing. She just can’t sing.” Goodman did not like to be challenged. Finally he picked up a chair and hurled it at Hammond.

  This war over her singing mortified Lee, and it left her feeling that Hammond was right; during playbacks, the sound of her voice made her heartsick. According to Down Beat, Goodman wanted the disc shelved, but Columbia refused. In fact, the record betrays no backstage drama. Inexperienced as she was, Lee sounds relaxed and swinging, with a cool touch that set her apart in the “hot” arena of swing. But the jazz press, which had grown hypercritical of the King of Swing, brushed off his singer. Lee, complained Down Beat, was no Helen Forrest. Hammond aired a stinging public opinion: “Miss Lee is a lady whose attractiveness occasionally makes the listener forget that she has no vocal or interpretive talent.” Lee’s debut single died more swiftly than almost any recent Goodman release. She was shattered. “I’d like to stomp on it . . . break it . . . smash it to bits!” she declared.