Is That All There Is?

by James Gavin

  The song made many of Charlie Brown’s child fans burst into sobs. But Peggy Lee seized upon “It Changes” from the moment she heard it, and added it to her show. Charlie Brown’s desolate spoken monologue from the song made its way onto her record, complete with its most piercing line: “I hate goodbyes.”

  Lee’s probably last album for Capitol ended, fittingly, with a song of farewell: “I’ll Be Seeing You,” a number-one hit in the depths of World War II. As she sang of “all the old familiar places” that now seemed bare—“that small café / The park across the way”—panic entered her voice.

  Butler finished the album even more captivated with Lee than when he began. “Whatever the craziness was, it manifested itself in the magnificence of her artistry. We all know people who have the craziness but not the artistry. With Peggy, they went hand in hand.”

  Catalano jarred Panella by announcing his intended title for this soul-baring album: Superbitch. Clearly the producer saw it as a last-ditch attention-getter, but Panella knew that Lee would never allow it. Catalano wouldn’t budge. Reluctantly, Panella shared the news with Lee. Her response was no surprise: “Has he lost his mind?”

  Panella went back to Catalano, who threatened not to release the album unless Superbitch remained. But finally he relented. Catalano devised an alternate title: Norma Deloris Egstrom from Jamestown, North Dakota. It was a curious name for an album that aimed to show the world a revitalized Peggy Lee. The back cover bore a map of Lee’s home state; it included Wimbledon and Valley City, the towns that had launched her professionally. Now here she was, at the end of the line.

  That summer Capitol released the album, minus the saddest track, “It Changes.” Lee stared out from a front-cover close-up that had been airbrushed almost beyond recognition. Only the title, not her name, appeared there—an overly confident artistic choice for a faded artist. But the album didn’t go unpromoted. On July 8, Capitol placed a full-page ad in Billboard; beneath the cover photo a caption read, “Norma Deloris Egstrom From Jamestown, North Dakota Has Recorded Her Greatest Album.” Once more, no other name was used.

  In the end, it may not have mattered. A new Peggy Lee album was hardly news. A critic from the Chicago Daily Herald described this one as “sort of after-dinner cocktail music”; Patrick Scott of the Toronto Star seemed to think that Lee had changed her name back to Norma Deloris Egstrom. One review that might have mattered—a page-long critique by her loyal cheerleader, Peter Reilly, in the influential Stereo Review—didn’t appear until a year later. And Reilly wasn’t enthusiastic. Despite “three or four stunning bands,” the LP fell short, he thought. What’s more, he added, no amount of top-forty covers by Lee would attract the youth market. “Who sees her in Vegas, New York, or Miami?” asked Reilly. “All the over-the-hill gang that still thinks Tony Bennett or Robert Goulet or Steve and Eydie is where it’s at, that’s who.”

  By this time, Capitol had truly wiped its hands of Peggy Lee. Woolworth’s and other discount chains that stocked “cut-outs”—out-of-print or overstock LPs—had begun selling bulk copies of Lee’s Capitol swan song, priced at $1.99.

  Panella vowed to somehow keep her afloat. For singers of Lee’s vintage, double bills with another vocalist or star comic had become a practical way of filling houses. Tony Bennett, for instance, had teamed with Lena Horne for a touring concert that went to Broadway. And in November of 1972, the neon billboard outside of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas advertised A Man and a Woman, starring Peggy Lee and comic Alan King, a TV star and Caesars favorite.

  Panella worked out the details. Lee would open for King—a touchy prospect for a woman used to headlining. Conscious of her pride, Panella arranged for King to lead off with a short routine, then to bring on Lee. After her set, King would come back to deliver his comically beleaguered rants about the woes of the common man: air travel, hospital food, insurance firms. Afterward, Lee would join him for a long medley of songs about life’s foibles.

  For three weeks, the pairing filled the hotel’s eight-hundred-seat Circus Maximus showroom. Lee adored King; he returned the sentiment, with reservations. Years later he told a young jazz singer, Spider Saloff: “Peggy was great, but she was cuckoo. Everything had to be blue, or everything had to be green. Dealing with her before and after the show—ooh, I avoided that.”

  Despite the format, Lee knew she was the supporting act. Illness had always helped her tilt the attention, and when Leonard Feather profiled her for the Los Angeles Times, Lee complained of a crushed vertebra and arthritis of the spine. “Last night I felt that an incision, from an operation I had a while back to remove a benign cyst, had come open. This was just before show time. I was in such excruciating pain, I thought Bruce [Richard] was going to faint.”

  On another night, she nearly did—but out of ire, not pain. At two AM, just before the late show ended, TV host Ralph Edwards walked out onto the huge stage of the Circus Maximus. He held what looked like a scrapbook. When Edwards uttered his famous phrase—“Peggy Lee, this is your life!”—Lee let out an audible groan. She was trapped.

  So were all the subjects of This Is Your Life, a long-running show in which Edwards and his cameramen interrupted stars on the job and took them on a tour down memory lane, replete with friends, family members, and long-lost figures from their past. Surreptitiously, Nicki had helped Edwards’s staff to plot the tribute. She had flown to Las Vegas with her three children, allegedly to see the show. As she maneuvered on Edwards’s behalf, the crew laid TV cables backstage, hiding them under carpeting.

  Now, as Lee stood, glowering, on the Circus Maximus stage, a table, sofa, and chair were dragged out to accommodate the parade of those who had known her when. Lee didn’t like losing control, and there were many in her past whom she did not wish to see again. But she softened when Edwards brought out Ken Kennedy. Snuggling her head to his chest, she declared: “He made me sing. I was very shy.” Out came her brother, Clair, and Rose Savage, an old friend from Nortonville. Chuck Barclay, who had booked her into the Jade in 1938, emerged next, followed by the guest she seemed happiest to greet, Duke Ellington. “You knew all about this,” she told him with an undisguised edge. Then came Nicki, whose long, straight brown hair and flowing multicolored dress evoked the similarly proportioned singer, “Mama” Cass Elliot. When Edwards mentioned the missing guest, Dave Barbour, Lee looked off wistfully. By the close of the show, she seemed genuinely touched.

  That look back certainly seemed sweeter than the look ahead, which held no record deal and fewer venues that could afford her lushly orchestrated glamour. At least the Waldorf still enabled her to live like Cinderella. Entering the hotel before her engagements, the singer passed through a lobby festooned with placards that announced Miss Peggy Lee’s return. Throwing open the door of suite 37F, she found her requisite crystal glassware at the ready. As opening night approached, dozens of extravagant bouquets arrived, accompanied by signed cards that made Lee’s guests swoon.

  She had planned it that way. Part of Betty Jungheim’s job was to phone Lee’s florist and order an array of floral arrangements. She would add ersatz messages from Lee’s celebrity friends. Doak Roberts helped. “Betty and I would sit at her desk and make up all these things like, ‘You’re mine forever, and who could forget those wonderful days—love, Cary Grant.’ ” By the time an engagement ended, said Roberts, “she thought that maybe Cary Grant had sent her flowers.”

  Grant didn’t drop by as much, but the privileged guests who did were summoned up to 37F for the nightly meet-and-greet. They accumulated in the living room, and were called into the bedroom in ones or twos. Her friend Robert Richards was a regular. Then around thirty, the Manhattan-based illustrator had become known for his meticulously detailed, glamorized images of figures from fashion, music, and gay porn. Richards was the kind of New York character Lee loved. He wore eccentrically flashy suits and a pair of round, oversize glasses; and while his taste in music leaned toward older pop-jazz singers like Lee and Sarah Vaughan, he was alwa
ys up on the latest gossip from Manhattan’s fast lane.

  Once admitted to the inner sanctum, he found the star in bed, “completely made up, with the hairdo from the show, and the big long nails. She was in very frilly and feathery stuff, with a blanket pulled up to her breasts. A little dessert plate rested somewhere between her chest and her stomach, with a chicken sandwich. She would gingerly nibble on it, and tell you that the crusts had been removed. And she drank tea, very properly. You’d have to be from a place like North Dakota to have this totally Hollywood vision of yourself.”

  Her entourage tended to her as though she were a dowager queen. Panella kept asking how she felt, and if she needed anything. Virginia Bernard carried glasses of water and whatever pill “Miss Lee” had requested. Bruce Richard massaged her feet. Everyone present was discouraged from leaving. One night Lee summoned Shaun Considine of After Dark magazine to her suite to apologize for having canceled an interview. She kept him there all night. Lee volunteered news of her recent mishap: “I slipped on the bathroom rug and fell into the tub, hitting my head.” This had caused a “bruised brain.” Further details followed. “But please,” she concluded, “let’s not talk anymore about my health.”

  Hearts raced at the occasional presence of Lee’s longtime fan and chum, Doris Duke. Dubbed “the richest girl in the world,” the heiress shared much in common with Lee, from their love of jazz to their striving for happiness via TM and plastic surgery. Both women used the same surgeon, who outfitted them with nearly identical protruding chins. Lee had introduced Duke to the two men who would trigger the greatest scandals of her life. Eddie Tirella—gardener, decorator, movie set designer, and gay confidant—had helped Lee to design her home on Kimridge Road. Duke, in turn, hired him to create decorative gardens for her estates in Newport, Rhode Island, and Hillsborough Township, New Jersey. She was used to getting what she wanted, but when she fell in love with Tirella, the results were bound to disappoint. In 1967, he announced he was leaving her employ. Within days he was dead—mangled under the wheels of Duke’s car as he opened her gate to let her drive out. A court ruled it an accident, but Tirella’s friends were sure she had done it on purpose. Lee took Duke’s side.

  Friends of the singer noted the bizarre irony that unfolded next when Duke hired Lee’s former butler Bernard Lafferty, a portly, gay Irishman with reddish-blond hair and a drinking problem. Bruce Vanderhoff and other friends of Lee’s had laughed for years at his sheepish doting, voiced in an Irish brogue: “Is everything OK, Miss Lee?”

  Both she and Nicki found him hilarious and lovable, but Lee fired him at least three times for drunken inefficiency. Why she had recommended him to a close friend—no less a woman as demanding and neurotic as Duke—is a mystery. But the heiress grew heavily dependent on Lafferty, and appointed him executor and cobeneficiary of her 5.3-billion-dollar estate. When she died of cardiac arrest in 1993, Lafferty was charged with foul play; some accused him of having coerced a drugged, mentally unstable old woman into letting him take control. Neither claim was proven, and Lee vehemently defended his innocence, as did Nicki.

  While the less-than-pretty Duke couldn’t help but attract gold-digging men, Lee still had her feminine wiles. But according to an unnamed friend quoted in a 1971 Cosmopolitan profile, the “sexy act” was just for show: “Actually, she’s pretty much a prude. She’s offended by the skin-flick movies that are so popular now, and she likes cussing held down.” Lee’s notions of romance remained as starry-eyed, and often as deluded, as a high school girl’s. One day she announced to a stunned Betty Jungheim that she and Bruce Vanderhoff were deeply in love and planning to marry. They had spent the evening together, explained Lee, and had cried tears of joy. Vanderhoff groaned loudly when he heard the story.

  But nothing could shake Lee of her self-image as a grand seducer of all. In late 1972 she lay in bed, poring over the story of a woman she considered her soulmate. French author Pierre La Mure had written the fanciful Clair de Lune: A Novel About Claude Debussy in 1962. It contained the fictional character of Alix Vasnier, a mature but glamorous singer for whom the composer played piano in his twenties. In La Mure’s telling, Debussy fell madly in love with her, and she with him; but Alix vanished from his life, just as David Prowitt had from Lee’s. Obsessed with the story, she decided to produce it as a film, starring herself as Alix. She bought the film rights from La Mure, then announced that she would write the screenplay and start filming in France the next spring. “It was going to be a very sweeping romantic epic,” recalled Robert Richards. “Madness. Without moonlight!” Lee knew even less about screenwriting than she did about producing, though, and she ended up mostly plagiarizing La Mure’s dialogue.

  No film ever resulted, but Lee’s fixation with the novel went on for at least a year. Another of La Mure’s characters, Gabrielle Dupont, leaves a life of riches and success to share a garret with the great composer. Eventually she dies in a poorhouse—one of Lee’s darkest fears for herself. Out of bed, Lee did a painting of herself as a gaunt-cheeked Gaby.

  Such dark forebodings sent her running for escape. One day in the living room of Lee’s suite in the Waldorf Towers, her actor friend Walter Willison spotted some little red pills on the floor. He had never seen Seconal, a popular alternative—or in Lee’s case, an addition—to Valium. Seconal calms the nerves, but can also induce nightmares, somnolence, impaired motor functions, irritability, and confusion, all of which Lee was experiencing. Willison asked her New York assistant, Gail Bixby, about the pills. “Gail said, ‘Oh my God, my pockets are full of them. She drops them all over the apartment, and before anyone comes over I have to run around picking them up.’ ” The young man had always thought Lee’s mellowness was “spiritual.”

  So had her audience, but they were learning otherwise. Lou Levy recalled a show in which Lee had worn her White House attire—an elegant black gown and a long string of fake pearls. During a song, the strand broke. Rather than making light of it and moving on, the glazed singer looked down at the floor for several long moments, then got down on her hands and knees and tried to pick the pearls up. Eerie silence fell over the room. Eventually Lee straightened up and ended the show. At the end, fans filed out slowly, looking as though they were leaving a funeral.

  Panella knew he had to “try to protect Peggy from herself.” The task encompassed making excuses to promoters for spectacles like the pearl incident; it also involved, on one occasion, sweet-talking a drunken Lee into handing over the carving knife she was recklessly using to slice up a sausage from room service. Panella’s duties extended to her outer family. The Fosters had finally acquired their own house in nearby Cheviot Hills. One day their Hispanic housekeeper phoned Lee in a panic. She struggled, in her broken English, to report an emergency; it involved little David and a gun. His parents were out. A terrified Lee begged Panella to jump in his car and race over. Minutes later he reached the house. The housekeeper pointed him to the backyard. There was David, scampering about with a double-barrel shotgun, perhaps loaded. He had already pushed the hammers back.

  Panella spoke to him calmly, from a distance. “Gee, David, I need to ask you a couple of questions. Can you come over here?” David approached him, shotgun in hand. “Wow,” said Panella, “that’s a beautiful gun. Do you mind if I hold it for a minute?” David handed it to him—“but I want it back! It’s mine!” Panella snapped the hammers into safety position. Then he opened the breech. It contained two shells. As David whined for “his” gun, Panella left the house with it. Back at Tower Grove, he had to tell Lee what had happened. She went “berserk,” and immediately phoned Nicki and Dick. “I became persona non grata with them,” said Panella. “Nicki believed I blew the whistle on her and could have covered it up. She didn’t realize that her mother already knew.”

  Increasingly, his fiercest opponent was Lee herself. When he tried to gently caution her about her misbehavior, to tell her that her demands were alienating promoters and pushing budgets over the edge, she exploded. On
ly later did he realize that anyone who posed a threat to Lee’s fantasy-fueled life would soon be expelled from it.

  Panella had helped maneuver a pairing of Lee with America’s hottest funnyman, Don Rickles, the king of insult comedy. Rickles jumped at the offer; he had adored Lee ever since his days as a sailor in World War II. The bill would guarantee sellout crowds at the chosen venue, Westbury Music Fair, a three-thousand-seat theater-in-the-round in Westbury, Long Island. Once more, Lee would open the show. But Rickles agreed to accept equal billing and to introduce Lee with a short opening routine. Her publicist, John Springer, convinced the local press to review the stars separately, so that Lee would seem like a headliner.

  All of this—as well as the handsome paycheck—should have appeased her. But Lee was hostile, and Panella wondered why. He didn’t know she was shopping for an excuse to fire him, and that Bruce Richard was egging her on, telling her how “beneath her” it was to play second fiddle to an insult comic.

  In February 1973, Lee and Panella arrived at Westbury for opening-day rehearsal. Rickles had filled her dressing room with flowers; Lee made a snide remark about his excess. Bruce Richard was there to do her hair. Each time Panella entered the dressing room, he found them whispering together and glaring at him as though he had intruded. Panella told the singer that Rickles wanted to drop in and thank her for agreeing to perform with him. “Why would I want to talk to that . . . second-rate comedian?” hissed Lee. “I will never forgive you, and I will not speak to that man, no matter what!”

  Showtime came. During the overture, Panella stood in the wings alongside a seething Peggy Lee. On her other side was Bruce Richard. Lee turned to the hairdresser and said imperiously, “Tell Mr. Panella that this is the worst night of my life!” Grinning, he obeyed. The overture ended, and Panella announced into Lee’s hand-held microphone: “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Peggy Lee!”