by James Gavin
After singing, she walked downstairs to the coffee shop, put on her white uniform, and spent the rest of the day delivering scrambled eggs and burgers to customers. Off time, local celebrity Norma scored herself a trophy beau. Floyd “Red” Homuth was the curly-haired, redheaded captain of a Jamestown football team. Though just a teenager, Red struck her as one more manly protector figure of the kind she liked. Her casual dating of the much-coveted jock made her self-conscious of her “excess poundage,” as she called it in a letter to Red. She joked uncomfortably about the summer temperatures: “You know how heat bothers those who are afflicted with a need for a diet!”
Peggy Lee’s memories of Homuth suggest she pursued him with a vengeance. One night she insisted on borrowing his mother’s car and taking the two of them for a spin. Driving down a dark road, she crashed into a crossing herd of horses. Miraculously, the teenagers survived, but one of the horses died, and the car was mangled. “I guess I better get out and see what I did,” said Norma sheepishly. Answered Red: “I don’t have to get out to see what you did.” Any chance of a future with him ended then.
One day at the Gladstone Coffee Shop, she waited on a tableful of players from a visiting baseball team, the Fargo-Moorhead Twins. They flirted with her playfully. One of them, Bill Sawyer, told her he had heard her sing on the radio. If she could get herself to Fargo he would introduce her to Ken Kennedy, program director of WDAY, North Dakota’s premier station. Sawyer said it half-seriously; the offer may have only been a come-on. But Norma insisted that Sawyer make that connection for her. Once he did, she made him drive her to WDAY.
This was her first trip to Fargo, the Manhattan of North Dakota. From outside the car window, a whoosh of big-town sights sped past her eyes: office buildings taller than any she had seen, department stores almost the size of a city block, a fur salon. On Broadway, she and Sawyer passed the Fargo Theatre, a first-run movie house; and a posh restaurant where a string quartet played amid potted palms. “Luxury” Plymouth and Ford cars crossed paths on the roads. Everything Norma saw revealed a rising national prosperity; the economy had regained its 1929 levels, and employment had jumped nearly seven percent since the year before.
At 118 Broadway stood Fargo’s crown jewel: the Black Building, which locals called the Cathedral of Business. At eight stories, it towered above every other structure in town. The Black Building was actually white; the name came from its developer, George M. Black. He rented out the lower floors to Sears, Roebuck & Co.; WDAY filled the penthouse level. Throughout town, one couldn’t walk a block without hearing the station’s beloved voices booming out of shops and cars.
In early September, Sawyer took Norma inside the WDAY reception area. There she encountered a “beehive of activity,” as a station brochure termed it. The waiting room had an Art Deco checkerboard floor, just like the ones in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. People filed in and out briskly—announcers, comedians, singers, members of the resident staff orchestra. The walls were hung with pictures of the station’s star entertainers: the Gals in Gingham; the Texas Ranger; hillbilly bandleader Lem Hawkins and his Georgie Porgie Breakfast Food Boys; and Ken Kennedy, who not only ran the station but starred as Uncle Ken in a hit kiddie show.
Norma, in her prairie garb, knew she was in the big time—at least by North Dakota standards—and fear paralyzed her. “Bill literally had to shove me toward the door,” she recalled. Still, Kennedy encountered a driven young woman. He, in turn, struck her as dazzlingly worldly, even though he was only in his twenties. Tall and lanky, he wore a pinstripe suit and wire-frame glasses; his slicked-back hair and thin mustache seemed patterned on Clark Gable’s.
As a favor to Sawyer, Kennedy allowed her to audition on the spot. A minister’s daughter played piano for her. She sang a ballad, and Kennedy stunned her by offering, in his sonorous radio voice, to put her on the air immediately. “But I told her that I couldn’t pay her enough to justify her making the move from Jamestown,” he explained.
Two weeks later, Norma phoned him. She had found a waitressing job right down the street from WDAY, and was all ready to start broadcasting. Fine, he said, but there was another problem: her name. It had to go. Before WDAY, he had been Kenneth Sydness; Norma Egstrom sounded like a dowdy girl from the sticks. “He sat and looked at me for a minute and said, ‘You look like a Peggy.’ He thought a little longer and said a couple of names as his choices for my last name, and then he said, ‘Lee—that’s it—Peggy Lee.’ ”
Unlike the soft, sluggish sound of Norma Egstrom, “Peggy Lee” had rhythm; it popped, like a drumbeat. She accepted it without argument. But the young woman pictured in WDAY’s next ad brochure looked anything but hip; she was chubby and wore a floor-length dress with puffy short sleeves, suitable for a Dakota housewife. The accompanying bio noted: “Guess she hasn’t any hobbies, all we know is that she’d rather sing than eat.” A cryptic aside—“Of course, you know Peg is single”—made one wonder if her age or her looks had kept her unhitched.
Kennedy took her out for some decent clothes and a more flattering hairdo. Initially he placed her on the Noonday Variety Show; then he added her to Hayloft Jamboree, a small-time forerunner of Hee-Haw, the 1960s TV show that brought hillbilly humor and song to a mainstream audience. Kennedy emceed the Jamboree and appeared in it as ragtag farmer Ole Anderson, who clowned with Tekla, a Norwegian comedienne with a comically thick accent. Lee became Freckle-Faced Gertie, a hick who sang hillbilly ditties. In between shows Lee earned extra cash by donning a straw hat and gingham dress and making live appearances with the cast.
All this exposure earned her a dollar-fifty per fifteen-minute show—too little to survive on, even in 1930s Fargo. Kennedy steered her to Regan’s Moorhead Bakery, a bread factory. For thirty-five cents an hour, Lee sliced and wrapped bread on the graveyard shift. “In the bakery I used to slide these big bread racks around,” she recalled, “and I would sing when I did it, and they didn’t seem heavy at all. You get a rhythmic thing going and it’s sort of fun.” By day she did secretarial work at the station. All the while, she begged Kennedy for her own series.
On October 16, 1937, only a month after she had first set foot there, WDAY premiered Songs by Peggy Lee, a ten-minute recital. At 7:45 in the evening, just as housewives had finished washing the dinner dishes and joined their families around the living-room radio, a cooing voice wafted from the speaker. Lee had been warned that radio microphones didn’t have limiters, which cushioned loud sounds. So she held back, which felt natural to her. “I think basically I was born with that timbre in my voice,” she said years later. “My mother was a soft-spoken woman. It’s just the way that I feel about music.” Singing, she decided, was “almost like giving someone a kiss.”
So it was with a newcomer who captivated her. Maxine Sullivan was a black jazz singer, nine years Lee’s senior, who had burst into the big time. Sullivan sang with the lightness of a falling leaf, yet she made everything swing—even “Loch Lomond,” the traditional Scottish air that had made her famous. The hit had won her a show on CBS radio; for the next few years her lilting voice permeated the airwaves. In an age of frenetic swing bands and their eager-to-please songsters, Sullivan stood out. Her elegant delivery, with never a wasted note or cheap effect; her way of dancing blithely on the surfaces of deep emotions, rather than spelling them out—all this left a mark on Peggy Lee. “I liked the way she phrased, the way you would conversationally,” she remarked. And while Lee would learn to probe the darkest layers when she sang, she held on to Sullivan’s cool, minimalist approach. It had taught her that she didn’t have to shout or emote in order to make her point. Given her innate reserve, Lee found that notion very appealing.
But the allure of Hollywood kept calling her. With the Fargo Theatre right down the street from WDAY, she spent countless afternoons and evenings sitting in the air-conditioned dark, watching her idols act out melodramatic scenarios about love. She rushed to see Stage Door, in which her first screen idol, Ginger Ro
gers, and Katharine Hepburn costarred as a pair of aspiring actresses in a boardinghouse. Lee, who was still living in one, could relate.
North Dakota friends were tempting her with tales of Southern California, where many of them had gone, either on vacation or permanently, to escape the brutal cold. As the autumn thermometer dropped, rhapsodic letters about orange trees and balmy breezes arrived in her mailbox. Around the time she had met Lee at KOVC, Connie Emerson’s family took its first trip to Los Angeles. Crossing San Bernardino on their way to Hollywood, the Emersons drove down a boulevard lined with swaying palm trees. A sunny, shimmering blue sky was their roof. “This must be like entering the gates of paradise!” exclaimed Connie’s dad. In Hollywood, she and her mother stood near posh hotels and watched chauffeurs drop off and pick up ritzy-looking people. When Connie turned eighteen, she and her family moved to California.
Lee received a letter from a North Dakota friend, Gladys Rasmussen, who now lived in Los Angeles as well. Gladys raved about the city’s sun-drenched splendors, and urged Peggy to join her. Gladys promised her a job at the Circus Café, where she worked as a cashier. For Peggy, who would one day recall “practically no sun for the first twenty years of my life,” L.A. “became like the promised land.”
All winter long, she teased her friends with the wishful announcement, “I may go to California.” But she never named a date. The more they egged her on, the more jittery she became. In February, with Fargo’s weather at its most bone-chilling, Lee finally said, “I think I’ll go next month.” When her landlady and fellow boarders threw her a surprise going-away party, she knew she had to go.
But the seventeen-year-old decided on a compromise. She would visit L.A. briefly, then try her luck in Chicago. When she told her father of her plans, he got her a railroad pass with which she could travel anywhere in the U.S. As for how to eat along the way, Peggy, who had no savings, sold her graduation watch to her landlady for thirty dollars.
In March 1938, an excited but very nervous Peggy Lee boarded a train in Fargo. The long journey would take her to Valley City and to Butte, Montana; then to Salt Lake City, Utah; then finally to L.A. Some Dakota ladies gathered on the platform to see her off. As they waved goodbye, she disappeared inside a railroad car.
After several days, she stumbled onto a station platform with her suitcase and felt the balmiest air she had ever felt—and winter wasn’t even over. Gladys waited there with a group of friends. But as they took off for her rooming house in Hollywood, she gave Peggy the bad news. A heavy rainstorm had flooded the Circus Café, which was below street level, and the place was shuttered.
For the next several mornings, Peggy waited on line at an employment agency downtown. The streetcar cost ten cents; that, combined with daily peanut butter sandwiches—the cheapest meal she could find—was erasing her tiny nest egg of cash. In her desperation, she accepted the first temp job offered her: that of a substitute short-order cook and waitress on Balboa Island in Newport Beach, fifty miles southwest of Los Angeles. She thumbed the lengthy ride; once there she managed to find a spare bed in a beachside cabin occupied by several girls. As her two-week diner stint ended, Peggy panicked. But her boss—a retired sideshow lion tamer—told her there were many jobs available at his old place of employment, the Balboa Fun Zone, the mini amusement park alongside the beach.
Off she went, on foot, to the Fun Zone. The park was nothing special: a few rides, some concession games, a penny arcade. Peggy applied for any job she could get. On the spot, she was hired as a barker. A manager fed her the line she would use to coax passersby into pitching balls at a target: “Three for a dime, you break one, you win!” It made for a laughable scene—a Dakota bumpkin trying to shout over clanging bells and carnival music with “the softest voice you ever heard,” as she put it later. “You couldn’t hear me unless you were standing on top of me.”
Feeling lost and far from home, she identified with every outcast she saw. In one attraction, Hit the Wino with the Baseball, a “poor old soul” sat on a little bench above a glass tank of water. Whoever pitched a ball at a bull’s-eye watched the seat collapse, dropping the “wino” into the tank. The sight of it broke Norma’s heart.
Still, she knew she had come far from North Dakota, and the energy of the Fun Zone seduced her. So had the sexiness of the Strong Man. “He let me touch his tattoo,” she said, adding cryptically, “Oh, I was so young and trusting of everyone.”
She probably didn’t work there for more than two weeks, but as always, she used the time to advance her career. One of her roommates had a guitarist boyfriend. Late at night, he and the girls convened on the pier. Learning that Peggy sang, the guitar player picked up his instrument and invited her to do a song. “ ‘The Man I Love’ in A-flat,” she said. Once she had finished, he asked her why she wasn’t singing more. He urged her to audition at the Jade, a new Hollywood nightclub that often hired unknowns.
On her next free day, Lee set off for the Jade. It stood on Hollywood Boulevard a few blocks away from the Pantages Theatre, one of L.A.’s grandest movie palaces. Late at night after a film, Pantages customers and others drifted into the Jade to enjoy some Chinese food and vaudeville-style entertainment. Occasionally the customers included such boldface names as Hedy Lamarr, James Cagney, and champion prizefighter Jack Dempsey, who would arrive with a gaggle of pretty girls.
The place inspired some of Lee’s most fanciful tales about her hard knocks on the way up. She claimed she had hitchhiked to the Jade, but apparently her driver had let her out too soon; she spoke of trudging along Hollywood Boulevard, her threadbare platform shoes falling more apart with each step. She tried a quick repair with the sash from her dress, but arrived at her destination barefoot. Later, Chuck Barclay, the Jade’s emcee and talent booker, told a different story: that Lee had “spent her last money on carfare to come see us.”
However she got there, the young woman walked past a bar adorned with a huge carved dragon, then entered the main space, the Dragon Room. There she met Barclay, whose height and looks made her swoon. She asked him for an audition. Barclay let her sing. Owner Larry Potter took a bemused look at Lee: “corn-fed, milk-cheeked, and with hay practically falling out of her hair.” A hard-boiled old-time restaurateur, he wasn’t impressed. “Larry said we had plenty of singers,” recalled Barclay. “But I hired her anyway.” For two dollars a night plus dinner, she would sing a song or two per set amid a parade of performers. Quitting time was two AM.
Lee found the Jade tantalizing and mysterious. She recalled “the smell of the gardenias and Chinese food, the waitresses in their satin coats and satin pants moving silently about on the thick carpet.” On the wall hung a giant painting of a nude blond goddess worshipping at the feet of a pot-bellied, Confucius-like figure.
Over time the Jade would evolve into a haven for black performers, including a forefather of jazz, trombonist Kid Ory; and the “Sunburnt Sophie Tucker,” blues singer Lillian Randolph, later known for playing radio’s most famous black housekeeper on Beulah. But in 1938, customers saw a raucous grab bag of mostly white oddballs, including “midget entertainer” Yvonne Moray; “head-balancing act” Bill and Dotty Phelps; and Jabuti, an Amazonian beauty with a mane of flowing red hair and a trombone.
Out wandered Peggy Lee in an evening gown loaned to her by Potter’s wife. She couldn’t hide her almost comical awkwardness. Potter, she recalled, “thought it was charming, or so he said, the way I clenched my fists and left my thumbs stuck up in the air when I sang.”
She stayed for weeks, despite the presence of a more seasoned songbird, Mary Norman. And she gained some poise. “Both girls know their showmanship,” wrote Billboard’s critic. “While neither one is what could be termed sensational, still they are adequate for a place of this kind. Both gals are lookers.” Norman took an interest in Lee, giving her clothes and helping her choose songs. The Jade wound up dropping Norman and keeping Lee.
Phil Moore, the club’s hulking young black pianist, accompani
ed Lee. Over the next few years Moore, who looked like a smiling bulldog, would land an arranger’s job at MGM and serve as coach and conductor for Bing Crosby, Lena Horne, and Marilyn Monroe. He and Lee hit it off, and before or after work he took her to one of the few spots in town where a black man could accompany a white woman without risking violence. Moore drove her to Central-Alameda, a black neighborhood in South Los Angeles, to eat at Father Divine’s Peace Mission and Truth Center. The budget hotel-restaurant was part of a chain founded by the controversial minister, who preached a daring stance of total desegregation. His cult-guru charisma and slick way with words inspired a pop standard in 1944, when Johnny Mercer, Lee’s future boss at Capitol Records, attended one of Divine’s flamboyant sermons. The minister had declared, “You got to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative!” Mercer spun that line into one of the biggest hits of the World War II years, “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive.”
No harm befell Lee with Moore at her side, but one of the most bizarre episodes in her 1989 memoir concerned the Jade. One night after work, she claimed, an acquaintance of Potter’s offered her a ride home. He drove her not to her rooming house but to a dark, seedy club whose door had a peephole. Inside, they joined a group of shady drinkers. A stranger watched Lee with alarm; suddenly he told her to run for her life. The two of them made a hasty getaway in his car, at which time the kindly gentleman informed her that she had narrowly avoided getting sold into white slavery.
Lee had evidently heard tales of the U.S. white slave trade of 1912–1913, when women were kidnapped, held prisoner, and forced to work as prostitutes. By 1938, the FBI had long since stamped the problem out. But even Lee’s most preposterously delusional stories held glints of emotional truth. She had already gone far on sheer bravado; many who knew her during her ascent were surprised to hear her describe herself as “shy,” for to them she seemed anything but. But the fast-lane Jade chilled the blood of a seventeen-year-old who had grown up amid country streams and grain elevators. At any moment, someone, or something, might snatch her from that microphone and send her back to North Dakota to scrub more floors.