by James Gavin
One night she showed her tougher side to a delighted Willison. As he sat near her bedside, she answered a call. “Yes,” said Lee into the receiver. “Mm-hmm . . . mm-hmm . . . mm-hmm.” Finally she said in a steely tone: “Eliminate him!” She hung up.
“I guess she had fired somebody,” recalled Willison. “I thought, ooh, that’s so mafia!”
Having regained her lost pounds, Lee reverted to her strange techniques for weight control. Katz’s daily tasks included drawing a scalding-hot bath for Lee and pouring in rosewater and alum, a double-sulfate salt used as an astringent and blood coagulant. Lee shed her robe, whereupon Katz draped her in Saran Wrap and helped lower her into the tub for twenty minutes. “It shrinks you before you go onstage,” Lee explained. One day Katz waited a little too long; she ran inside the bathroom and found her boss in the water, reddened and dazed. She panicked. “All I could think of was the New York Post headline: ‘Magda Katz Kills Peggy Lee.’ ” She struggled to hoist Lee out of the tub, and the singer kept going limp. The doorbell rang, and it was Helen Glickstein. Katz blurted out the problem, and the two women somehow managed to hoist Lee up and onto her feet.
As always, nothing made her snap to attention like anger. Lee could find cause for it in the most innocent of statements and gestures. When Katz relayed a message from Frank Sinatra’s right-hand man, Jilly Rizzo, that Sinatra had invited her to a party he was throwing at the Waldorf, Lee turned as red as she had in the bathtub. “I’m not going!” she growled. “I can’t stand the man!” Katz could only assume that Lee had resented him for not calling her personally.
One night she was unusually late for her show, and the nervous Empire Room manager kept phoning upstairs. Lee was still in her bathrobe, raging to Katz about the brutalities of Min. “You don’t know the trauma!” she insisted. Yes, said Katz, she did; her parents were holocaust survivors. The remark made Lee even angrier. “Those people didn’t go through half of what I went through!” The singer yanked open her robe. She was stark naked underneath. “Look what my stepmother did to me!” she sputtered. Katz saw some light marks that may have been scars, but she didn’t believe Lee’s story; like others who were close to Lee she doubted that the beatings had happened at all. Finally Katz calmed her down enough to get her dressed and into the elevator.
The singer’s spirits rose when an offer came to tour Japan, where she had sung only once before. On this return trip, Lee would play four lucrative concerts and serve as the guest of honor at two post-Bicentennial galas: a fireworks festival to be attended by forty thousand, and a dinner to be thrown in her honor by the U.S. ambassador. Shigeru Okada, president of Japan’s Mitsukoshi department-store chain, was sponsoring the trip. He had chosen Lee, he explained, “because her great warmth and lovely personality are representative of the American people.” But once she had reached the Far East, no amount of enthusiastic applause or tributes from officials could break through her New York malaise. Lee showed no interest in sightseeing, beyond what appeared outside the windows of limousines; she did what was required of her, then retired to her room.
One last glamorous TV showcase awaited her. In the summer of 1976, the singer taped an appearance on America Salutes Richard Rodgers: The Sound of His Music, a two-hour CBS homage to the seriously ill composer. The semidramatized special starred Gene Kelly as Rodgers and Henry Winkler (Fonzie on the smash sitcom Happy Days) as Lorenz Hart. Diahann Carroll, Sammy Davis, Jr., Sandy Duncan, Cloris Leachman, and John Wayne saluted Rodgers in imaginatively conceived set-pieces. They were staged and directed by Dwight Hemion, whose masterful presentation of music on TV had helped earn him eighteen Emmys. Broadway composer Larry Grossman, music arranger for TV’s newly launched The Muppet Show, did the same for the Rodgers tribute.
Its centerpiece, an intricate medley of twenty-four songs, gave a Tiffany setting to three pop aristocrats. Legendary beauty Lena Horne was a haughty tigress who had broken historic ground as a black entertainer. Vic Damone crooned with an agelessly creamy, unprobing delivery. Peggy Lee was the ethereal minimalist, smaller than ever of voice but still strong of mystique. All of them, in 1976, were stars of high prestige but waning box office. The special was a big deal for them, and they seemed thrilled to be invited.
Rodgers, however, was not too pleased at the inclusion of Lee. Through an artificial voice box—the result of throat cancer—he expressed his hope that she would not sing her version of “Lover.” “He hated it,” said Grossman. It went in anyway.
The arranger went to her home to discuss songs and keys. “It was surreal,” he said. “She came wafting in wearing this white diaphanous gown, fully made up, with candles going.” Of the songs on his list, Lee refused to sing only one, “This Can’t Be Love.” She had heard Benny Goodman play it countless times, she explained, and she did not wish to be reminded of the King of Swing. Otherwise, said Grossman, Lee seemed “pretty warm, but shaky,” as though she were “slipping away a little bit.”
That didn’t apply to her professionalism. The singers came to the first rehearsal with Grossman’s wealth of tricky cues and counterpoint almost fully memorized. The two women maintained a cordial distance; drama came only at the start of the shooting, an all-day affair on a multilevel soundstage in Los Angeles. In Horne’s presence, all other females tended to vanish, and Lee found a way to grab the attention. “Peggy was wearing a big diamond ring,” said Grossman, “and it suddenly disappeared. There was this whole psychodrama—someone had stolen her ring, she said, because they didn’t want her to do well.”
Batteries thus charged, Lee rose to her current peak, as did Damone and Horne. The medley was the most talked-about segment of America Salutes Richard Rodgers; it helped the show win eight Emmy nominations and five awards. Primetime network audiences got to see Lee at her most elegant, with a tasteful, streamlined hairdo and a plain white gown with pearls.
But after fifteen years of tawdrier getups, many viewers, especially young ones, had come to think of her as camp. In a new low-budget Canadian film comedy Outrageous! and in nightclubs across the country, female impersonator Craig Russell gave a drag-queen’s impression of Lee—blond curls spilling out of a headband, a mask of makeup on a ghoulishly smiling face, arms that waved around as though she were a mad spider. The Muppet Show also had a go at Peggy Lee. Muppet designer Bonnie Erickson, whose mother had lived in the North Dakota of Lee’s day, had invented the program’s leading lady: Miss Piggy Lee, a blowsy, self-obsessed, zaftig blond singer with a supreme confidence in her own allure. Frank Oz, who provided her voice, gave the New York Times a bio of the character. It sounded like a thinly disguised précis on Peggy Lee: “She grew up in a small town in Iowa; her father died when she was young, and her mother wasn’t that nice to her. . . . She has a lot of vulnerability which she has to hide, because of her need to be a superstar.”
Miss Piggy Lee was an instant hit, and plans arose to give her a manager, Irving Bizarre, named after Irving Lazar, the hard-nosed Hollywood agent. But Peggy Lee was not amused. She threatened to sue, and Miss Piggy Lee became Miss Piggy. That didn’t stop the show from having one more chuckle at Lee’s expense when Piggy teamed with a Muppet based on screen sexpot Raquel Welch to sing “I’m a Woman.”
Lee’s complaint might have seemed sour. But for some time she had feared professional doom, and she did not wish to go down in history as the inspiration for Miss Piggy Lee. “I often wonder whether my work will live on,” she told a reporter. “Movies seem to live on, and movie stars. They seem to remain so . . . alive. They walk, they talk, they’re almost human. I’m not sure the same thing happens to records or to singers.” Lee began voicing a plea to friends: “Please don’t let people forget me.”
Her original songs brought her a modest income; otherwise she relied on the road. All around her, however, the supper-club circuit was dying. Disco fever still held sway over the country; young people wanted to be part of the fun, not to watch it at a safe remove. Dallas, New Orleans, and San Francisco’s Fairmont
hotels all had their Venetian Room cabarets, which showcased such nostalgic legends as Patti Page, Carol Channing, and Ginger Rogers, but similar venues had grown few. The decades-old Maisonette of New York’s St. Regis Hotel had recently closed; the Plaza Hotel’s Persian Room had become a boutique. The Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria survived, a hermetically sealed time capsule of bygone Manhattan. But to Mel Tormé, who played it in May 1976, “the magic was gone.”
Even in its prime, the atmosphere could be off-putting. “It was an expensive room,” said Robert Richards, “and run in a very old-fashioned style. You’d have to grease the maître-d’s palm, and then they would say, well, what about the captain, what-about-the, what-about-the. You were embarrassed at every turn. And people weren’t buying that anymore.” Columnist Jack O’Brian certainly wasn’t. “The cost of attending Peggy Lee’s opening night at the Waldorf Empire Room: $64.80 a couple—if that couple neither drinks nor eats; after that the nightly dinner zap is $65 per couple including tax, tip, dinner, and one cocktail!”
Most of Lee’s finest peers, notably Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Frank Sinatra, had graduated to concert halls, which they filled with the grand scope of their deliveries and charisma. But Lee was a true nightclub singer, known for intimacy. She had clung to the supper-club stage, and now, it seemed, she was sinking with the ship.
Still, there was the Empire Room. It felt like home to her, and the rehearsal tapes for her two-week, October 1976 engagement caught her at her jolliest. John S. Wilson had written skeptically of Lee for years, and even he was seduced; he called the new show “one of her very best . . . Everything—sound, orchestrations, programming, her voice—are under control and in balance.” She wore the minimalist fashions of her new find, Zoran, a Croatian-born designer with a select, upscale clientele. Lee favored his solid-colored tunics with roomy slacks, made from expensive materials like cashmere and as comfortable as pajamas. They disguised everything, while giving women her size the illusion of a figure. Lee had seldom looked so chic.
Her repertoire was just as elegant. The show opened with the heavenly sound of wind chimes over strings; then Lee drifted onstage, singing Vernon Duke’s “Autumn in New York” so slowly that it lured people into her floating realm of altered time. In her favored new greeting, Lee drawled breathlessly: “Are you enjoyyyying yourselves? That’s the whoooooole idea!” Then she jolted them with a discofied version of Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale.” For the rest of the show, that roller-coaster pacing kept fans on the edge of their seats. A twelve-minute Rodgers and Hart medley traced a relationship from first meeting (“Who Are You?”) to instant heartbreak (“Glad to Be Unhappy”) to disillusion (“It Never Entered My Mind”) to rebirth (“Bewitched”). For the first three of those tunes, Lee sounded as winded as though she were singing with her last breaths. Then in “Bewitched,” the tired, spent delivery vanished; Lee let out the song’s victory cry—“I’m wild again!”—with the force of an ocean wave, and the crowd burst into applause. She repeated that feat throughout the show. Lee struggled to keep up with Édith Piaf’s raucous “Milord,” then pulled out a grand, rollicking ending.
That constant alternation between weakness and strength ensured unending sympathy, but it also drove the Waldorf management to distraction, for they never knew in what state of chemically induced unravelment they would find her. Guitarist John Whitfield recalled one of her most memorable entrances. Lee had just begun her first song. When he looked up from his bass: “No Peggy.” She had slid under the piano.
But alcohol was no longer the culprit. Now she relied solely on prescription downers, which Lee knew she could not combine with liquor. During her midshow false exits, her Irish wardrobe assistant waited offstage with two Valiums, crushed between spoons. As the orchestra vamped, Lee quickly downed the powder with a cup of hot water. Then she scooped out the contents of a tiny jar of Dior lip gloss and stuck it in her mouth. The Vaseline-like paste alleviated the dry mouth that Valium caused. After two or three songs, the drug would hit her noticeably.
From there, disturbing things could happen. At one out-of-town appearance, a light bulb exploded above her head, raining down shards of glass. Lee didn’t react at all; she simply kept singing. The audience wondered if she had even noticed. Robert Richards witnessed a private fiasco in 37F. Just before she was due downstairs for the late show, a reminder call came from the Empire Room, as it always did. A heavily drugged Lee wandered into a shower stall that she never used. Fully dressed and made up, she turned on the water. It poured through her hair and down her face, soaking her gown. “She was just standing there, completely baffled at what she had done,” said Richards. “Of course this required a big repair.”
During the second week of the run, a member of the management gave Lee some sad but inevitable news: this would be her final engagement. The Empire Room was closing that December; soon New York’s last grand hotel supper club would be stripped down and turned into a conference and event room.
For Lee, the latter part of the announcement didn’t register. The remnants of her fairy-tale life as a nocturnal New York goddess had been snatched away. So had a substantial chunk of her earnings. Within days she received another crushing blow. The William Morris Agency notified her that they were letting her go after the Waldorf run. Lee’s temper and demands had made her impossible to work with.
This dismissal, like that of the Waldorf, struck her as a thunderbolt from out of the blue. She fired off a witheringly sarcastic telegram, addressed to company president Nat Lefkowitz and all the agents with whom she had worked. She was “delighted,” she wrote, that Morris planned to cut her loose after all the money she’d made for them. “After twenty-some years you might feel some gratitude,” she wrote. “I would like to find some gratitude for you but I can’t quite find a reason.”
The rest of the run found her at her most agitated, and her most drugged. Valium can affect one’s sense of balance, and that might have contributed to another mishap that occurred one night between shows. With Robert Richards at her side, Lee rode downstairs to perform her late show. Walking ahead of them was Freeman Gunter, Lee’s frequent guest. The singer wore a multilayered, floor-length gown. As she stepped off the elevator, her heel got caught in the hem. Lee stumbled and fell into Richards—“but she didn’t hit the ground,” he said. “I, of course, fell on my fucking head. She weighed about 398 pounds!” Lee was concerned about her makeup and hair. They went upstairs. “In two minutes everything was fine,” said Richards. The late show proceeded perfectly.
Soon came October 23, 1976—Lee’s last night at the Waldorf-Astoria after seven and a half years. Her New York followers had packed the Empire Room, as they always had for her closings; few of them knew that this was the end. “Let’s break out the booze and have a ball” became the theme of the late show, as Lee let fly with a mixture of anger-fueled excitement, touching affection for the fans who had stuck by her, and score-settling. Recently she had begun singing “Is That All There Is?” for laughs. She turned the payoff line of each chorus into comedy: “I said to myself: “Where’s the fire department?” . . . “Where are the peanuts?” . . . “And then one day he died on me.” While singing the refrain, she interjected the obvious: “I’m getting tired of this song. And that goes for Leiber and Stoller, too. I said that?”
Near the end, she gave a poignant farewell speech in a quavering voice. “Well, it’s time. And . . . I don’t know quite how to thank you. I thought I knew how . . . And then . . . I found I didn’t know just that you mean a lot to me. And I’m very grateful for everything you’ve done. And of course I’m awfully glad you came here tonight, because I don’t plan to come back here.” Cheers of sympathy drowned her out. “Some of us will find you!” yelled a fan. She responded with a chilling announcement: “Look for me in St. John’s Hospital. ’Cause that’s where I’m playing next week.”
Before checking out of 37F for the last time, Lee had ordered Magda Katz to take some dictation. She ree
led off a list of ailments suffered in her “fall” in the lobby. “Especially painful: Upper left arm and shoulder to the elbow. Bottom of the rib cage going to the back. The pain from these is relayed down to the center between the breasts. I hit the hip joint which created a pain in the inner pelvic bone and made it very sore. Also, bruised inside hand and large toe. Grazed left side of my head . . . Two other people fell in the same spot.” Katz was alarmed. “She walked around perfectly fine. There was nothing wrong with her.”
The true casualties of her Waldorf years were the relationships she’d severed—with Lou Levy, Brian Panella, Betty Jungheim, Bob Mardesich, Doak Roberts. Now Bruce Richard, on whom Lee had harbored a crush, had gone, too. Resentment had built on both sides. “He got so he hated Peggy,” said Doak Roberts. “At the Waldorf, every time Peggy would get a basket of flowers or something, she would say, ‘Bruce, give that to Virginia and have her pack it away and I’ll take it home.’ Bruce would go into Virginia’s bedroom and throw it out the thirty-seventh-floor window.” According to Mardesich, the end came when Richard asked Lee for a raise. She refused. He never returned.
Richard’s years with Lee had formed the peak of his professional life. Soon he sank more deeply into drugs. In the mid-1980s he died of AIDS.
* * *
LEE’S BOOKINGS KEPT THINNING, as did the crowds. She was relieved to find a new venue, the Drury Lane, a midsize theater in the Chicago suburb of Oakbrook Terrace. Rick Kogan reviewed her for the Chicago Daily News. “What she has left,” wrote Kogan, “she gave sparingly Tuesday night in front of a half-empty house.” Her “Autumn in New York” opener left some listeners giggling; had Lee gotten off at the wrong stop? Her greeting to the audience—“Let’s fill the theater with love!”—sounded more like camouflaged fury. “Peggy Lee,” Kogan concluded, “is no longer an object for sexual fantasy.”