Is That All There Is?

by James Gavin

In 1963, the state’s then governor, William L. Guy, had picked Lee—“North Dakota’s best-known and best-loved woman,” as he called her—to receive the Rough Rider Award, given to distinguished natives. Recipients included Lawrence Welk, newscaster Eric Sevareid, and novelist Louis L’Amour. Lee made excuses and declined.

  The current governor, Arthur A. Link, tried again. North Dakota State University in Fargo sweetened the invitation by awarding her an honorary doctorate of music. This time, Lee could not refuse.

  On Wednesday, May 21, 1975, she arrived at the small Fargo airport with an entourage of seven. They included John Pisano and his recently wedded wife, Kathy Mahana Levy. “Lou divorced her and I married her,” said Pisano. A car took them all to the hotel, and Lee gazed out for the first time in twenty-five years at the flat, monotonous landscape that had defined her childhood. Kathy asked the driver, “What do you guys do when you get out of school here?” He said, “We leave!”

  Fargo welcomed her back like a queen. At WDAY and elsewhere, signs were hung that proclaimed PEGGY LEE SANG HERE. For the next two days, the city kept her on grand display. She gave a press conference, then attended an alumni dinner. On a scorching Friday afternoon, Lee donned a black robe and joined the graduating class to receive her doctorate.

  That night at a campus sports arena, four thousand North Dakotans saw Lee and an orchestra perform an expanded version of her latest show. Many old friends, including Ken Kennedy, had come. The woman they saw was heavier and slower than the teenage dynamo they remembered, and the obvious melancholy in her voice made the reunion heartrending. After the last strains of her closer, “I’ll be Seeing You,” Guy and Link walked onstage to pay lavish tribute to the singer. Link thanked her for her “tremendous contribution to the enrichment of millions of lives all over this great land.” Then he gave her the Rough Rider plaque, along with a leather scroll emblazoned with the words, “Strength from the Soil,” which she certainly possessed.

  Lee seemed on the verge of tears. “I really am overcome,” she said. “I can’t tell you what beautiful memories I will take home with me, and I hope it won’t be so long until I’ll come back again.”

  She never did. And the afterglow from that idyllic homecoming didn’t last. Composer Alec Wilder, a father figure to Lee since her Goodman days, looked with dismay at the scared and desperate woman she had become—one who was all too quick to hurt others the way she had been hurt. Wilder detested change, and clung to his vision of a past where “taste” and “manners” had reigned. But he was also a shrewd judge of character, and in his 1975 book, Letters I Never Mailed, he told loved ones the things he hadn’t the nerve to say to their faces. His remarks to Lee held a sad resignation.

  Just where, can you tell me, has the belief and sweet sadness, the genuine love and the genuine touch gone? Into the bitterness or loneliness of age? . . . So you aren’t young? So a great deal has happened to make a person crouch in the shadows? So an age of innocence, of joy and wonderment is at an end? So we must survive and somehow come to grips with today’s goblin society?

  All granted. But must we allow the best of ourselves, still breathing and living a lonely life in the secure world of our memory, die because the face in the mirror has changed or because little brown spots begin to sprinkle the backs of our hands?

  If Lee read his words, she didn’t let on. She continued to sink into a twilight zone where she stayed numbed from the truth, or tried to. A chill was in the air, literally, at the supper clubs in which she sang, which had begun to feel like morgues. “She loved cold, cold air-conditioning,” explained Lou Levy, “and everybody would be freezing to death. The guys in the band could hardly play, the instruments were so cold.” All the while, audiences beheld an embalmed-looking figure whose slow-burning delivery had turned distant and numb.

  Let’s Love had not sold as hoped, and Atlantic had declined a follow-up. Once more, her recording career seemed finished. Then she remembered an offer made to her by Leiber and Stoller when “Is That All There Is?” was hot. The partners had longed to produce a whole Peggy Lee album of their more esoteric songs. “She kept putting us off,” said Leiber. “She was on the road, always on the road.”

  The duo had never approved of Lee’s attempts to be “current,” as Stoller put it, “by singing covers of the Beatles and Aretha Franklin that, to my mind, had nothing to do with her style. I mean, they’re great songs, but we thought we could make her into a real cabaret singer in the European sense.” According to Phil Wright, however, Leiber and Stoller had “wanted a lot of money” in return. “That’s why I ended up producing her,” he said.

  In the winter of 1975, Lee phoned Leiber to remind him of his offer. “Peggy,” he said, “we’ve lost a little momentum.” Nonetheless, he and Leiber jumped at the chance to fulfill their “long-languished dream”—an LP that would show the world how much depth they really had.

  Their currency in the pop world had faded. In 1972, Leiber and Stoller had produced the acclaimed debut album of Stealers Wheel, a Scottish folk-rock band; it had yielded a top-ten single, “Stuck in the Middle with You.” Otherwise, the hits had dried up, but money flooded in anyhow. Years earlier, the team had bought up lucrative publishing rights to such musicals as Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof, along with a wealth of standards, including “Body and Soul,” “The Very Thought of You,” and “Fever”—the song whose composer royalties Lee felt she should share. “Those purchases relieved the pressure of being forced to write hits to make a living,” said Stoller.

  Now he and Leiber could devote their time to a project as commercially dubious as an album of Peggy Lee singing their undiscovered songs. They gathered some and presented them to her on Tower Grove Drive. Stoller found her conversation more disjointed and confusing than ever, but when they convened at the piano she snapped to attention. The songs revealed the broad range of Leiber and Stoller’s gifts. “Saved” was a witty spoof of a revival meeting. Other titles delved into such topics as insanity and murder, with atonal and bitonal touches. “Ready to Begin Again,” from an unproduced musical version of Jean Giraudoux’s fantasy play The Madwoman of Chaillot, detailed a bald, toothless matron’s rise from the ashes. “A Little White Ship” came from another unrealized project, a musical version of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real. The song could have been a lullaby or a descent into drug-induced euphoria. “Tango” was an imagined peek into the scene of a crime: the 1968 murder of silent-film heartthrob Ramón Novarro in his Los Angeles home by two male prostitutes. Such songs were at least as daring for Lee as “Is That All There Is?” But bravery had always marked her choices, and she unhesitatingly opted to move forward.

  Leiber and Stoller took the project to A&M Records, a company known for taking risks. The label could afford to; it was earning untold millions from hits by the Carpenters, Cat Stevens, Joe Cocker, the Captain and Tennille, Peter Frampton, and other young sensations. A&M’s founders, trumpeter Herb Alpert (who had led the chart-topping Tijuana Brass) and Jerry Moss, were known for following their hearts as well as their bankbooks. In 1971, Alpert had produced Wings, an epic cantata by the French film composer Michel Colombier; the album employed 158 musicians and 29 singers, and barely sold. Other high-flown concept albums came out of A&M’s jazz division, Horizon. “They just wanted to do these things,” said illustrator David McMacken, who worked in the art department. “They didn’t care if they made money or not.”

  But Peggy Lee was known as difficult and demanding, and Moss scoffed at the idea of signing her. It took a heavy push by Gil Friesen, one of his trusted staff producers, to change his mind. Still, Moss insisted that Leiber and Stoller produce the album themselves—a job that would involve keeping Lee under control. They promised they would.

  Bygone as “Is That All There Is?” now seemed, the songwriters harbored a vague hope that lightning might strike again. Moss cooperated. He signed Lee for one album, with an option for another if he chose. Cost was no object. “To have an album from Peggy Lee was a
big deal for us,” he explained. “We wanted to do it right.” Once the contract was ready, Lee met him for the first time. She encountered a thirty-nine-year-old whose thick mustache, dark wavy hair, and sideburns reminded her of Burt Reynolds. Although she never let him know it, Lee was instantly smitten with Moss, who had a wife and children. He had given her his home numbers—a gesture he lived to regret. “She had lots of questions,” Moss said.

  But most of them concerned business. He had just reached his weekend home when the phone began to ring. It was Lee, reading him passages of her contract, which was full of legalese. “She said, ‘I have had contracts with Capitol for years, and I’ve never seen language like this.’ I said, ‘Peggy, please don’t worry about the language. I guarantee you it’s not a problem. We’ll settle all this on Monday.’ This wasn’t her lawyer calling me, it was her. She was a girl who didn’t want to be taken advantage of.”

  The first recording sessions rambled along with no seeming focus. In late May, at A&M’s high-tech Studio B in Hollywood, Lee and the songwriters felt their way in a series of demos. Not all the tunes were Leiber and Stoller’s. According to the composer’s son, recording engineer Peter Stoller, the partners feared that a too-arty album might scare off the top brass—so they cut some pop tracks “as a backup plan.” A torch song from 1929, “Love Me or Leave Me,” took on a generic disco feel. “Crazy Life” came from Gino Vannelli, a curly-haired, hairy-chested Canadian pop star on whom Lee had a crush. Singing over bland electric keyboards and Latin percussion, she sounded so sluggish that a sexy groove was impossible.

  But Leiber and Stoller’s witty “Don Juan,” the tale of a fallen Lothario, awakened her funky swing, while her languid sexiness shone through on “Some Cats Know,” the tune of theirs that Lee had rejected in 1968. Leiber had replaced the risqué bridge that had offended her, but the song remained a single-entendre reflection on those rare men who know “how to make the honey flow.”

  Recording with Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber. (COURTESY OF THE LEIBER & STOLLER ARCHIVES)

  Overall, though, the results of those initial dates were pale enough to incite worry that the partners had lost their golden touch. Then came the fourth session, and everything changed. A&M’s extraordinary largesse had enabled the duo to contract a symphony—eighty-six pieces. Stoller had enlisted one of Lee’s favorite arrangers, Johnny Mandel. The two orchestral pieces recorded that day were downright chilling. In “The Case of M.J.” a spookily dissonant, Kurt Weill–inspired waltz, a “good” little girl named Mary Jane drifts, verse by verse, toward madness. An eerie spoken refrain—“How old were you when your father went away?”—hints at patricide, as does the news that Mary Jane has “made a mess of her pretty white dress.” High, icy violins enhanced a horror-movie soundtrack. Lee maintained a sinister smile in a voice that had grown thin and girlish enough to resemble Mary Jane’s. Echoes of little Norma’s spiraling anger toward Min weren’t far away.

  “I Remember” began and ended with Lee humming; in between, her thoughts drifted in what could have been a Valium-induced haze: “I remember when you loved me . . . I lie in my bed, hand under my head . . .” A bed of strings rocked as woozily beneath her as a ship at sea; harp and bells added a dreamlike twinkle.

  Leiber and Stoller hadn’t written these songs for her. But as with “Is That All There Is?,” they had managed to capture, in words and in music, the psyche of Peggy Lee. Her lost-in-space sound of 1975 suited the material ideally.

  The songwriters met with Alpert, Moss, and Friesen to play the recordings. Most of them left Moss cold. But Friesen perked up when he heard “The Case of M.J.” and “I Remember.”

  “That’s really interesting and beautiful stuff,” he said. “You should do a whole album like that.”

  A theme was emerging—one of surreal story-songs that grimly reflected the truth. All the lighter tunes recorded thus far, other than “Some Cats Know,” were shelved. The strange meters and tonalities of the others kept her off-balance; the stories tore off her masks one by one. “She was completely involved emotionally,” said Kathy Levy, who attended the sessions. “She disclosed a lot.”

  Except for “Ready to Begin Again,” which Perry Botkin Jr. arranged, the album would be orchestrated and conducted by Mandel. For added comfort, Lee rested between songs in a chaise brought in at her command. She kept her trusty cognac nearby. But none of this could calm her down; on the contrary, she stirred up as much drama as she could to fuel herself for the challenges at hand. When she emerged from her state-of-the-art isolation booth, Moss proudly asked her what she thought of it. “I couldn’t breathe in there!” she gasped. “I was dying!” The old friction with Leiber flared up, and Lee banned him from the studio. “I won’t record if he comes to the session!” she told Stoller. Later, said the composer, “she got closer to Jerry and hated me, and told Jerry pretty much the same thing. I had a little ulcer problem. Jerry told her that and she said, ‘I hope he dies!’ ” When a slipup by his copyist made Mandel late, Lee stormed out of the studio to meditate. She returned a half hour later, even madder.

  Up next was the song about Ramón Novarro. It begins with a slithering, minor-key tango, played in 1920s style. The volume dropped, and Lee delivered a Brechtian spoken monologue that details a dance with death. One false move, it warns, and “the frail body breaks with a slap and a twist.” Then, over a spooky baroque harpsichord, Lee sang about the setting of Novarro’s murder, a fussily appointed home in the Hollywood Hills. There lay the former heartthrob “in his silk dressing gown . . . one arm flung out for the peacocks to peck.”

  Lee had initially loved “Tango.” Now, explained Robert Richards, “she suddenly got it into her head that she had been forced to sing this obscene homosexual song. Why it should have bothered her so profoundly was very strange for a woman whose house was buzzing with queens.” But it was Lee’s custom to manufacture anger as a defense in trying moments. Before the session, recalled Stoller, Lee had “some bitter argument with a hairdresser”—probably Bruce Richard. In response, Lee demanded that in a key line of “Tango”—“He was a collector of beautiful strangers”—the “he” be changed to “she.”

  Leiber refused. Enraged, she sang it her way—“and gave an absolutely beautiful performance,” said Stoller. Later, at the editing block, the writers snipped the “s” from “she”—which, of course, made Lee fume.

  At least she could smile her way through a sardonic ragtime tune, “I’ve Got Them Feelin’ Too Good Today Blues,” which tickled her sense of humor: “When I’m unhappy I’m tippy-toe-tappy in my shoes!” Other songs pushed her voice to its limit. “Professor Hauptmann’s Performing Dogs” required Lee to relive her carnival-barker roots by shouting, over a raucous circus band, the praises of a weird menagerie of dog acts: “One rides a pony and carries a purse / One is on roller skates dressed like a nurse.” Lee struggled just as hard with the floating polytonality of “A Little White Ship.” Here, at an etherized tempo, she beckoned the listener to “come aboard, come aboard / I guarantee you a pleasant journey”; its nature is sinister but vague. Stoller’s tune sails as aimlessly as a boat lost at sea; the harmonies—thick as those of Richard Strauss—provide the fog.

  Two remaining songs tore down her smokescreen of self-delusion. “Longings for a Simpler Time” looks back upon an age when “kids behaved and fathers shaved”; when “hearts were true, red white and blue, and skies were sunny.” Lee sang this listless waltz with the vacuity of a dementia patient. Beneath the meandering tune, an “unstable tonality gives the lie to the lyric’s nostalgia,” as composer William Bolcom observed. Finally the song admits it: “We’re longing for a simpler time that never was.”

  In the album’s crowning performance, Lee came face-to-face with the most crushing reality of all. “Say It” was another tune from Leiber and Stoller’s effort to musicalize The Madwoman of Chaillot. The song brought a fantasy ballroom to life, and cast Lee as an aging Cinderella. To the lush, swirling strains of musi
c that echoed Ravel and Fauré, she begged a “bright and shining youth” to tell her he loves her—“for I love a lovely lie.” This was one reality she couldn’t face; instead she chose to view the song through a rosy lens. “It brings back an era that’s very pleasant in my mind,” she noted. “I have a whole make-believe concept of what ‘Say It’ says . . . I feel, oh, almost like Jean Harlow, kind of, and dancing.”

  Ultimately, there was no telling if Lee grasped the deeper implications of anything on the album. To Johnny Mandel, “the recordings worked out beautifully. She seemed anxious and insecure, but I was used to that. She knew when she was getting it and when she wasn’t.” In the mixing, the songwriters and engineer Hank Cicalo went heavy on the reverb; it added an aural vapor that made Lee sound even more as though she were a ghost in her own dreams.

  But what to call the album? A line in “Say It”—“Waltz me far beyond these walls, and mirrors of the truth”—gave Lee the answer. In an interview with writer Freeman Gunter, she strained to describe her murky and conflicted feelings about the material: “Like a mirror, you look at it different ways at different times and each time you feel differently about what you see.”

  A&M treated Mirrors as an event. Like many of the company’s releases, this one would have a gatefold (fold-out) jacket. Photographer Hans Albers, who produced hazy glamour shots in an old Hollywood style, had taken a blurred cover portrait of Lee in a white gown. A&M art director Roland Young relegated it to the inside. He wanted something different, and asked David McMacken to create an illustration of Lee’s face.

  McMacken was young, and barely knew Lee’s work; to him she was “just a sultry singer” from the past. But as he listened over and over to the Mirrors tapes, another vision formed in his mind: “She was just so kind of . . . odd. I loved her.” McMacken had never met Lee; instead he perused recent publicity stills and album covers. With each year, the images had grown fuzzier. The cover of her 1970 album Bridge Over Troubled Water had literally been shot through her screen door. “She didn’t want to be old,” McMacken realized. “She had a plastic idea of how she should look.”