by James Gavin
With that in mind, he went to work. Young had gone so far as to obtain samples of Lee’s makeup for him. McMacken created an image of a frozen doll with a touch of madness in the eyes. He caught Lee’s eerily waxen skin; the painted-on peach lips; the Barbie-like lashes. It was the perfect image for Mirrors. Lee saw no subtext in his work; to her it was just a pretty drawing. It appeared on the cover in a shiny silver border.
Tour dates in support of the album were slated quickly. The first one would take Lee to an unlikely place for a Mirrors show: the Flamingo Hilton in Las Vegas. Lee had hired a new young pianist, Byron Olson, the former accompanist of her old Capitol colleague, June Christy. Anxiety had already set in. Olson had conducting experience, but in a move designed to create tension, Lee decided that her tried-and-true guitarist, John Pisano—who had never conducted—should do the job instead, while doubling on guitar. She had Olson coach him.
During a rehearsal, said Pisano, “Peggy made some derogatory remark, the way she would always needle her conductors. I kept working. But as soon as we were in the dressing room, I said, ‘Peggy, I don’t need to do this. I didn’t want to do it, and I don’t appreciate—’ She looked at me and she actually started crying.”
Lee had programmed an awkward mix of Mirrors songs, contemporary pop-soul, and her old hits—not what the Flamingo was expecting. The real surprise came just before the opening. The Flamingo shared the same management as the Las Vegas Hilton, formerly the International. While Lee rehearsed, word came that the Hilton’s cash cow, Elvis Presley, was sick and couldn’t perform. Lee was asked to move Mirrors for that night to the same huge space that Barbra Streisand had packed for a month in 1969. It was a risky prospect, but she agreed.
Kathy Levy watched the early show from the wings. After a few songs, the walkouts began. “I saw she was in huge trouble,” said Levy. So did the manager. “We have to get her out of here,” he said. “She’ll never sell the second show.”
Soon after Lee had left the stage and returned to her dressing room, the manager knocked on her door. Moments later came a cry: “KATHY!” Levy hurried inside. “She looked at me. And she looked at him. And she said, ‘Dick doesn’t feel we can fill this room. What do you think?’ I said, ‘Here’s your purse.’ I gave her my arm. I walked her down the stairs and to the limo, and we went back to the other hotel.”
Lee spoke not a word about the incident. But she was crushed; never before had she been asked to leave a venue. The Flamingo engagement went on, but Mirrors wasn’t a hit there, either. She began lopping out the Leiber-Stoller songs and replacing them with crowd-pleasers.
The singer moved on to one of her regular stops, Chicago’s Palmer House Hotel, which had its own Empire Room. To Ron Powers of the Chicago Sun-Times, the nightspot was “frozen in time a half-century ago, a pocket of aristocratic make-believe with its plumes and mirrors and soft-peach lights flung on the vaulted ceiling.” Such a setting might have lent an ironic backdrop to the Mirrors material, but Lee’s audience wasn’t there for irony. For years she had brought them playful current songs they could accept—“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Sing,” “Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?,” “My Sweet Lord,” “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.” Now, as she sang the opening lines of “Ready to Begin Again”—“When my teeth are at rest in a glass by my bed, and my hair lies somewhere in a drawer”—the crowd tensed up visibly. The Chicago Tribune’s Will Leonard, who had been raving about Lee since her Buttery days, wasn’t charmed by Mirrors; he called “Ready to Begin Again” “corny comedy.” Later in the show, the audience jarred her by giggling during her recitation in “Tango.”
Doubts about the project seized her. Already, she looked for people to blame. A week before the October 17 release of Mirrors, Lee joined guest host Joey Bishop on the Tonight show. She sang the album’s two “little lightening procedures,” as she called them, “I’ve Got Them Feelin’ Too Good Today Blues” and “Some Cats Know.” When Bishop asked about her “controversial” new release, Lee brought up “Tango,” with its homosexualizing pronoun. “There’s a verse in there that I don’t approve of. I thought it was out, and I heard the final mix and it was in . . . Well, I tried reciting the poem, it is a poem at the beginning, and I got laughs when I wasn’t supposed to—you know what that feels like?” She delivered the whole monologue. “That’s funny, eh?” said Lee testily. Bishop changed the subject: “So why do you bite your nails?”
A&M forged ahead in its efforts to make Mirrors a success. Posters with the McMacken drawing were glued all over New York. To advertise Lee’s upcoming run at the Waldorf, the label ran ads with a Robert Richards sketch—a glamorous but ghostly black-and-white image of the singer glancing over her shoulder in a backless dress.
Just before the opening, the label threw her a sumptuous party at the Waldorf’s Starlight Roof. Four hundred guests were invited, along with a battery of press. Waiters circulated, bearing trays of champagne and oysters. The Waldorf was treating the show like a theater piece, selling advance tickets and printing a program. All this attention made Lee even more nervous, and with good reason. Opening night came—and almost from the first minute of the show, she smelled trouble. Her deceptively jaunty welcoming song, “I’ve Got Them Feelin’ Too Good Today Blues,” earned only strained applause. The macabre humor of “Professor Hauptmann’s Performing Dogs” caused palpable discomfort; the audience seemed to feel it had missed the joke. “Say It” and “A Little White Ship” unsettled them further. Lee alternated the Mirrors selections with a half dozen of her hits. But they couldn’t lessen the sting of songs about a toothless old lady and a gay murder.
In her suite after the performance, dismayed friends asked her why she was doing this. More resistance came from the New York Times, where John S. Wilson called the show “disappointingly superficial.” The songs, he wrote, “suggest an emotional depth that is not conveyed by her bland delivery. . . . Nothing cracks the perfection of her carefully arranged image. Nothing is ever out of place. Nothing shows.”
The record reviews followed. Seldom in A&M’s history—and never in Lee’s—had a release been panned so savagely as Mirrors. Because it was a Leiber and Stoller project, the album made it into Rolling Stone, one of whose critics, Stephen Holden, dismissed most of it as “dreck.” The duo’s songs, he wrote, were “tuneless and wordy, implying less in twenty-five couplets than one verse from any of their countless hits for the Coasters or Elvis Presley.”
His opinions broke Stoller’s heart. The composer read a subtext in them: “These guys know rock and roll and rhythm and blues, what are they trying to do? What is this pretentious shit?” In Down Beat, America’s top jazz magazine, twenty-five-year-old Mikal Gilmore was hardly kinder. He deemed the record a “failure,” and blamed Leiber and Stoller: “Mirrors, a cabaret album without any noticeable urgency, provides Peggy with about as much support as clouds would a faltering airplane.” He compared the album to “a joke that everyone laughs and titters at, but where nobody really catches the punch line.” To the usually sympathetic Peter Reilly of Stereo Review, Mirrors was “at times pretentious, gimmicky, and rather overdecorated even for her.”
Even Jerry Leiber joined the naysayers. “I was embarrassed by the criticisms,” he said in 1999, “and I think that some of it was supportable. I thought some of the stuff was pretentious.” He held Lee partly accountable, pronouncing her past her peak and not up to the music’s demands.
If Mirrors had come to her at an ideal moment emotionally, its commercial timing couldn’t have been worse. This was the peak of the disco era, one of the most frivolous, escapist times in pop history. No wonder so many critics found Mirrors leaden. Morgan Ames, who had helped contract the orchestra, was shocked by the responses. Mirrors, she said, was “more than disliked; it was actually resented. It was so different from anything going on at the time, and nobody understood it. It was a brutal punishment for Peggy, because she had had such a huge hit with ‘Is That All There Is?,’ which was a
rt music too.”
The castigation cut deeper than that, for Lee had never exposed herself so nakedly on an album. Her Mirrors show “didn’t last too long,” said Byron Olson. Lee began dropping the Leiber-Stoller songs and replacing them with more of “the old warhorses” her fans wanted.
Typically, she accused others of sabotage. The songwriters had forced her into doing the album, she claimed, then into darkening her interpretations, which spoiled their humor. None of that was true, but Lee had blown the “Tango” incident into the realm of fantasy. She placed a series of angry, accusatory calls to Jerry Moss, thus ensuring that A&M would never record her again.
Once the smoke had cleared, rage gave way to hurt. “I’m not going to get that sad again,” she vowed to Max Jones of the British magazine Melody Maker. “I didn’t really think it was right to depress people that much.” She cited “Longings for a Simpler Time,” one of the tracks that had fallen most heavily on fans’ ears. “People believed the song in a basic, sentimental way, and then at the end they felt I had tricked them.” The cover drawing that she had initially loved now embodied the death of one more dream. “It looks like a corpse,” she told a friend.
A few people saw Mirrors differently. “It’s all of a piece, it’s a work of art,” said Robert Richards. “It’s still deeper than anyone has gone in the pop field.” Johnny Mandel was disgusted by “these new rock-and-roll writers who took it apart, as if they knew. Most of them were idiots. It’s a wonderful work. I think it’s classic and it’s timeless.”
Many years passed before Mirrors developed a cult of fans who hailed it as a masterpiece. In 1988, William Bolcom, the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, compared it to a “fine wine” that had been opened too soon.
Once more Lee felt stranded, unwanted. She was also nearly broke. At a vulnerable moment she confided in Richards: “I’ve never had a day when I didn’t have to worry about money.” A lot of that problem, of course, was of her own making, but Lee preferred to blame fate. Having released one of the most rarefied albums of the year, Lee agreed to record a set of radio spots for McDonald’s. She saw poverty ahead, and her paranoia over finances increased. Lee had refused to give Betty Jungheim her final paycheck or to reimburse her for expenses owed; she had also badmouthed her former secretary widely and sent defamatory letters about her. Bruce Vanderhoff was so disgusted by Lee’s behavior that he encouraged Jungheim to sue. He introduced her to a pair of lawyer friends, who took the case.
According to Variety, Jungheim filed a $300,000 suit against Lee and her lawyer, Ludwig H. Gerber, on July 23. It charged libel, slander, and nonpayment. Lee’s response was volcanic. On August 27, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lee was countersuing Jungheim for “slander, fraud, embezzlement, and mishandling of business affairs.” The initial amount was six million dollars; it pole-vaulted to fifteen, then twenty-two. Jungheim learned why. Recently a court had awarded Doris Day a twenty-three-million-dollar settlement against the business partners of her late husband and manager, Marty Melcher, for mishandling her funds and nearly wiping her out. Lee had decided that if Day could win twenty-three, she would try for twenty-two. She had also consulted her psychic, who informed her that Jungheim had hidden the allegedly embezzled funds in her garage. “I want to put her behind bars!” railed Lee to Virginia Bernard.
Lee’s friends were appalled. “It’s the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life!” said Dona Harsh. Brian Panella agreed: “If there were anyone I ever met who I thought was honest to a fault, it was Betty.” Lee’s favorite ex-hair stylist never forgave her. “If Betty Jungheim embezzled one dollar, I’m not Bruce Vanderhoff!” he said. “I was so upset about Betty getting fired for Peggy’s lies. Peggy was in financial ruin due to her spending. She would have had to declare bankruptcy. Peggy was infamous for taking too many of her own musicians on the road, which ate up all the profits. For paying hairdressers too much money. Because she was the star. The sky’s the limit. Betty took the fall. It was all for show.”
Her legal actions were costing Lee money she didn’t have, but she wasn’t through. Citing “gross negligence,” she managed to block Jungheim’s unemployment payments. “That’s when I sat down and cried,” Jungheim said. Lee continued her smear campaign. Newspapers printed her charges against Jungheim, which nearly destroyed the younger woman’s chances of finding another job in the industry. Meanwhile, her legal expenses were mounting. Vanderhoff came to her rescue by putting her to work in the office of Le Restaurant. When Lee heard about it, she called him and insisted he ban Jungheim from the premises. He refused. She slammed down the phone.
Jungheim, who had two teenage sons, wound up nearly penniless. It took her years of hard work to recover financially. All the while, she recalled some advice she’d received from a sympathetic member of the district attorney’s office, where Jungheim had gone for her deposition. Putting his hand on her shoulder, he told her: “Don’t ever go to work for a friend.”
“The magic was gone,” said Mel Tormé of the Waldorf’s fading Empire Room. In her last days there, Lee kept company with Mike Russo, her hulking protector.
Chapter Fifteen
ON TOWER GROVE Drive, new secretaries came and went rapidly. Lee had always hired short-term help for the Waldorf, and for her next engagement, her confidante and personal shopper Helen Glickstein recommended Magda Katz, a friend of her daughter Wendy. A budding show-business writer, Katz jumped at the opportunity. At one PM on a frigid day, she stood at the door of 37F and rang the buzzer. A housekeeper let her in. “Miss Lee is in the bedroom,” she said, pointing to a partly open door.
Katz saw that the room inside was dark. “Come right in,” murmured a weak voice. The curtains were drawn and the air-conditioning turned on. From either side of the room, humidifiers sprayed plumes of mist that surrounded the bed with a ghostly vapor. Lee lay under a blanket, a scarf around her neck. “Sit down,” she whispered, nodding toward a chair by the bed. Katz kept her coat on. “Do you know how to take dictation?” the singer asked. Katz said yes, although she didn’t. Lee wanted to send a letter to Johnny Mercer, who had an inoperable brain tumor. “Dear Johnny . . .” said Lee, followed by some unintelligible mumbling.
“I thought, oh my God, I don’t understand what she’s saying,” recalled Katz. “How was I gonna do this? Meanwhile my coat’s getting sopped because of all these sprays, and I’m freezing. I could barely see.” She asked Lee what she was trying to say. “He’s very sick,” came the response. Katz managed to extract a few more details, then moved to a typewriter in the living room. Though it took her several tries on Lee’s pricey stationery, she created a convincing note of sympathy. Lee liked it, but a bigger concern snapped her out of her fog: “Be very careful with my stationery. It’s very expensive!”
Katz got the job, and kept it for the balance of Lee’s Waldorf engagements. On the surface, the runs went well, and loyal fans continued to crowd the shows. But Lee’s expenses had shrunk the profit margin. The Waldorf paid her twenty thousand dollars a week, more than she earned elsewhere. Accommodations for her musicians, said her guitarist John Whitfield, were “always first-class.” After Lee had written checks to them and to her employees and covered the costs of travel, gowns, publicity, and incidentals, only a fraction remained. After Katz gave birth to a daughter, she asked Lee for a thirty-dollar raise to pay the babysitter. “She went crazy on me,” said Katz. The singer lunged out of bed, reached inside a cabinet, and pulled out a wad of bills. She threw them on the floor in Katz’s direction. “Here! Take it! You’re just like everybody else. Everybody wants money!” The young woman calmly picked thirty dollars off the floor and handed Lee the rest.
Soon she met the dazzled admirers who made up her employer’s inner circle—notably Phoebe Jacobs, Robert Richards, and Lee’s longtime fan and pal Frank Ralston, who despite having a prosthetic leg ran any errand she asked of him. But Katz looked at the star’s New York retinue and saw mostly “a lot of hangers-on.” Two hairdresser friends w
aited until Lee was sleeping or busy, then raided the cupboard of 37F for groceries and took them home. Another regular on the scene was Mike Russo, a hulking, fussily groomed pursuer of Lee’s. No one knew for sure what he did for a living, but her friends had their theories. Russo, who claimed a friendship with Frank Sinatra, began monitoring Lee’s incoming calls and otherwise assuming a take-charge attitude, throwing muscle around on her behalf as though he were her manager. He wooed Lee with expensive gifts, which she accepted, while apparently never repaying him in the way he wanted. “He gave me the creeps,” said Katz.
Another regular was Freeman Gunter, a bearded young writer who covered cabaret for gay publications. In a profile of Lee for Mandate, a magazine of male nudes and erotic fiction, Gunter proclaimed the singer “a living legend and a woman who lives her legend twenty-four hours a day.” But beyond the Empire Room and her suite, Lee was hardly seen. Katz and others tried, in vain, to pry her out of her suite for lunch or coffee. “She seemed to have no curiosity, no interest in the outside world,” said Wendy Glickstein.
Friends had to come to her. One of the singer’s favorites was Walter Willison, a boyish young singer-actor whose costarring role in the Richard Rodgers–Martin Charnin Broadway musical, Two by Two, had earned him a Tony nomination. Willison was a mad fan, and his golly-gee enthusiasm so charmed her that she let him hang out in her suite after shows. One night he showed up with his friend Lee Horwin, a young cabaret singer who would eventually make it to the Tonight show. She idolized Peggy Lee, and after she and Willison had seen Lee at the Empire Room, the star thrilled Horwin by receiving them upstairs. Lee even rose from bed and greeted them in the living room. She motioned for Horwin to sit next to her on the couch. “She was in a muumuu, munching on a bologna sandwich, and she started picking my brain about different aspects of her show,” Horwin recalled. “I thought, this can’t be happening. I was just starting out, really.” Youthful opinions about her work mattered to Peggy Lee; but Horwin sensed that the singer was also “giving me time, giving me my moment. She was very generous.”