by James Gavin
She kept returning to the Drury Lane, but Kogan’s critique devastated Lee, who until lately had earned almost consistent raves. Lee began considering other creative avenues that might provide a payoff. Maybe she could design a line of children’s clothes, or publish an illustrated children’s book about Little Joe, a character she had created. Neither idea panned out.
But once home in Beverly Hills, she launched a more promising endeavor. Lee had acquired a bedazzled fan in Shigeru Okada, the Tokyo-based department-store magnate who had sponsored her Japanese tour. Okada employed Robert Richards for illustration work, and during her last Waldorf engagement, Richards had helped Lee to craft a proposal for a line of beddings and towels that would bear her flower drawings. Okada loved the idea, and expressed interest in licensing it as an exclusive for his Mitsukoshi Limited Department Stores. In a letter to Lee, he raved: “They are, indeed, the most delicate and elegant arrangements, which, as you have explained in your note, will create an atmosphere to make a person happy and be contented.”
According to their agreement, Richards would complete the artwork based on her ideas, and they would split the proceeds. Lee saw riches ahead, and suggested adding a line of greeting cards.
Nearly overnight, her mood changed from flat-out despair to childlike excitement. She loved collaborating with “Ro-bair,” as she called him, and he was just as enthralled to be around her. Aside from revering her music, he found her a poignant figure. “I guess to me she represented what she did to a lot of people—kind of the last of the blondes.” At the same time, he decided, “she was Norma Desmond without Max”—the butler-protector to an aging, forgotten star in Sunset Boulevard. “There wasn’t that faithful retainer, that person who believed in her, who gave her that strength. And I think she suffered from that.”
Richards flew from New York to Beverly Hills to spend a couple of days at Lee’s home and talk business. Near the start of his visit came an omen of dark times to come. One night they returned to the house after an outing. It was pitch-black inside, and the main door wouldn’t open. Lee was frightened. They went in through another entrance. Checking the blocked door, they saw that a chest had been pushed in front of the door. On top was a typewriter with a letter in the roller:
Dear Miss Lee,
Fuck you.
The staff.
In the kitchen, a turkey turned slowly on a rotisserie.
“She was very upset by this,” said Richards. “The employment agencies weren’t too enthused about sending more people up. By not too enthused, I mean adamant.” Lee asked him to extend his stay. She didn’t have to plead.
But emptiness still hung in the air. “The party was over by the time I got there,” he said. The living room, once a bustling center of traffic and festivities, had turned into “a big frozen space, like a picture.” Lee’s lifestyle struck him as bizarre, starting with her proclivity for keeping the house ice-cold: “There you were in sunny California freezing your nuts off.” The chill didn’t encourage Lee to leave her bedroom. “I think I saw her out of bed three times,” he said. “It made the house very haunted.” Lee sat up in bed all night, doodling on sheets of white paper. On one of them, Lee sketched her own face; alongside it she wrote two long columns of the word “happy”—a seeming attempt at creative visualization.
She and Richards had a presentation to finish for Okada, and the illustrator tried to move it along. “I began to see that it was only possible to work one day out of every three or four. The mornings would be fine—the morning being from one in the afternoon until around three o’clock. Then this monster would appear and take over. The bed was full of shoeboxes and things with pills—very mad. The day was lost. We would have a two-hour discussion over something for dinner. She kept saying to me, ‘Don’t you think California is as intellectual as New York?’ I would just remain silent. We were doing nothing, we were talking about Fettuccine Alfredo!”
Other obsessions consumed her. Lee had heard that Clare Boothe Luce, the famed American writer and Republican Congresswoman, had suffered asbestos poisoning in her Roman villa. As ever, Lee hadn’t been feeling well, and she decided she had the same ailment. Without having the house tested, she called a contractor and made arrangements for the ceilings to be lowered.
For now, the atmosphere was still kooky enough to tickle Richards. One day he boasted of his new living arrangements to Bruce Vilanch, the comedy writer for Bette Midler and a future regular on TV’s The Hollywood Squares. “Oh my God, I’d love to meet her, she’s so nuts!” said Vilanch. Richards asked Lee if he could invite Vilanch and his friend Henry Post, a journalist from New York, to the house for lunch. Fine, said Lee—but she didn’t care to join them. Richards couldn’t persuade her.
“They came,” said Richards, “and they were like, ‘Where’s Peg?’ ” He broke the news that she wouldn’t be joining them. The guests were disappointed, but soon they were installed with Richards in the Yellow Room, eating and roaring with laughter. At a certain point, all of them became aware of someone standing outside the door, listening. They sat in frozen silence. Finally the illustrator said, “Peggy? Come in!” The silence continued. Then the door cracked open—and they watched the familiar hand of Peggy Lee reach inside, a big diamond ring on it. Lee started snapping out the rhythm to “Fever.” Then she left. Vilanch, said Richards, “lived off this story for months.”
More and more, Lee was inclined to wallow in self-imposed isolation rather than join the party. So it was when another of Richards’s friends, singer-songwriter Peter Allen, came to town. The flamboyant Australian showman was on an upswing that would take him from cabarets to small concert venues to Radio City Music Hall. In 1977 he played the Roxy, a Sunset Strip hotspot. Richards was invited, and he asked Lee to join him. The singer had long performed Allen’s “I Honestly Love You,” a number-one hit for Olivia Newton-John; other early songs of his, such as “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” had made her bond with him emotionally. “He has a quality in his singing that, although he is not crying at all, I hear a sadness, a little sorrow inside of his voice,” she said. “I feel that somehow he’s been hurt.”
Lee stunned Richards by flat-out refusing his offer. He asked her why she didn’t want to go. “I just don’t, that’s all. Why would I go?”
“Because it’ll be fun. All Hollywood is gonna be there.”
Still she refused. This time he wouldn’t give up. Finally Lee said wistfully, “You know, it might be fun, wouldn’t it.”
“What do you mean, it might be fun?” said Richards. “It would be fun.”
“She said, ‘But there’ll be a commotion if I go.’ Commotion, what commotion was there going to be? Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Raquel Welch were going. Anyway, the hairdresser was at the house at nine in the morning. We went through thirty pairs of lashes.”
They were among the first to arrive. Lee wore a red Zoran outfit and “looked fabulous,” said Richards. Still fearful of a stampede of attention, she insisted on entering through the back. They took their place at a prime table. Larry, Allen’s assistant, stopped by to welcome them, and asked Lee if Allen could introduce her during the show.
She froze. “Introduce me? I didn’t come here to be used!” Larry was aghast. He apologized profusely and hurried off. Lee stood up. “We’re going!” she announced to Richards, adding loudly, “I can’t believe that he would invite me here and then try to use me like this!”
Suddenly, there stood Peter Allen at the table. “Peggy, I apologize to you a thousand times,” he said. Allen explained that he would be announcing the VIP guests, and wanted to pay her the courtesy of asking her permission. “I absolutely don’t want you to,” insisted Lee. Allen locked eyes with Richards, then left. “Don’t forget,” said Richards later, “he’d been married to Liza Minnelli, so he knew a few things about crazy women.”
Once onstage, Allen shook maracas, did Rockette kicks, and sang at the piano of big-city life, love, and heartbreak. The show was a riotous success.
Near the end, he acknowledged his stellar attendees. Then he introduced his song “Quiet Please, There’s a Lady on Stage,” a defense of a struggling older chanteuse: “She may not be the latest rage / But she’s singing, and she means it / Doesn’t that deserve a little silence?” Allen had written it for one of his favorite cabaret singers, Julie Wilson. But most people assumed that his former mother-in-law had inspired it, and Allen didn’t argue.
“I’m gonna sing a song that people associate with Judy Garland,” he said. “But I don’t want to sing it for Judy, I want to sing it for somebody else. And I love her very, very much.” Allen began the song, and Lee soon realized she was that someone. “She was trembling so hard that the table started to shake,” said Richards. “People were looking. I could see that she was completely confused.” Suddenly Lee stood up. Allen saw her and nodded in her direction. A spotlight sought her out, and the entire audience rose and burst into applause.
Well-wishers crowded her afterward. “She was devastated,” said Richards. “She was like a child. All the way home she kept saying, ‘Robert, I have to go out more. It’s so much fun to go out!’ And I was just staring at her like, ‘You work in nightclubs, you’re staring at five hundred people, what do you think they’re there for, as punishment?’ The next day the phone rang all day long with people saying how thrilled they were to see her, how beautiful she looked. She was in seventh heaven. But three days later she was back in her depression, Valiuming herself into a coma.”
* * *
A TRIP TO LONDON always boosted her spirits, and in March of 1977 Lee embarked on a whirlwind two-week visit. It would include two concerts at the London Palladium, a live album drawn from them, and an additional studio recording. Soon her schedule burgeoned to include a TV special and a performance in Amsterdam.
Lee owed most of this to Ken Barnes, a British record producer who adored her. Barnes cherished the Great American Songbook, and had masterminded albums with a series of legends—Fred Astaire, Johnny Mercer, Bing Crosby—whose recording careers had dwindled. He had proposed a new LP to Lee a couple of years before, but at the time she still hoped for a future with A&M. When that and other prospects dried up, she remembered Barnes’s interest. She called him. Excitedly he contacted Polydor, the British label for whom he worked. Barnes persuaded the executives to let him produce two Peggy Lee albums—one at the Palladium show, the other in the studio.
“People had said to me, don’t work with her because she drinks; she’s an alcoholic,” recalled Barnes. But he and his conductor of choice, Pete Moore, flew to Los Angeles to meet her, and found Lee on her best behavior. “I liked her right away,” he said. “I never had any real clashes with Peggy. She was wonderful to converse with. You could talk with her about almost anything. She had a belly laugh that was infectious. I found that she was innately friendly. But she was a taskmaster when it came to working.”
He also knew that Lee could be “a demon to negotiate with,” and he urged Polydor to let him finesse her contractual needs. They insisted on handling the matter themselves. Polydor wound up covering first-class roundtrip airfare for Lee and two assistants, along with an extended stay at her preferred Oliver Messel Suite at the Dorchester—perhaps the priciest lodging in London. Before Lee had recorded a note, the project was costing a fortune.
Her schedule in London was intense, but Barnes saw not a hint of disability. “Nothing was too much trouble for her,” he said. “She was certainly okay on her feet.” Shortly after her arrival, she was in an isolation booth at CBS Studios for the first of three morning sessions. Her studio album, Peggy, aimed to present a vintage singer—then nearly fifty-seven—who knew how to “keep up with trends and not bury herself in the past,” as Barnes put it. Amid the gossamer clouds of Pete Moore’s orchestrations, Lee floated all over the musical map. Peggy included Peter Allen’s Carnival party song, “I Go to Rio”; “I’m Not in Love,” a number-one hit for the British electronic art-rock band 10cc; “Every Little Movement,” a coy showtune from 1910; the 1950s make-out classic “Misty”; and a disco-tinged reworking of “Lover.”
Her valiance remained, but Peggy found Lee in sluggish voice, clearly past her peak. When she sang of loss and regret, however, she still delivered. In “The Hungry Years,” Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, the 1960s jukebox hit makers, explored one of their mature themes—a sinking feeling that success hadn’t spelled happiness. Lee sounded appropriately heavy of heart as she sang: “How could I be so blind not to see the door / Closing on the world I now hunger for?”
Her rawest autobiography came in “Courage, Madame,” a Lee lyric that Pete Moore had set. It was a stoic vow to forget the “scars and tears” and “walk with quiet dignity, and time will heal.” She pronounced the title in French, adding a hint of a brave smile.
At least a record company cared enough about her at this late date to pamper her. Polydor threw a party for Lee at the Dorchester, and voiced plans to release “Lover” as a single. “I’m very, very happy about the record,” she exclaimed to Max Jones of Melody Maker.
Peggy turned out to be her last studio LP with a full orchestra. But thanks to Barnes, she had the chance to make her first authentically live album. On March 13, 1977, Polydor’s technicians recorded her early and late shows at the Palladium. Live in London reprised her final Waldorf act, with a few alterations. The Brits had requested “Sing a Rainbow” and a song from Sea Shells, “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard,” which had somehow caught on in the U.K. These two children’s songs grew more moving as Lee sang them in a frail but plaintive voice.
Barnes heard no reticence when he asked her to sing “Is That All There Is?” Declared the star: “That’s out of my act.” When he argued that she couldn’t possibly omit it, Lee explained that she was “mad at Leiber and Stoller,” and wouldn’t be singing any of their songs. Finally she relented.
Her recent vow not to “depress people” was likewise discarded in London. Four years earlier, Bruce Richard had urged her to sing “Touch Me in the Morning,” Diana Ross’s number-one hit. The song had mesmerized her ever since, and she sang it at the Palladium. Written by Ronald Miller and Michael Masser, it tells a harrowing story of desertion: a woman lies in bed in the middle of the night, knowing that the man by her side will vanish after dawn, never to return. Ross had sung it with her customary AM-radio lightness. “I’ve revived it by doing it dramatically,” said Lee. “I get all torn up in that song.” At the Waldorf, her version had reduced the veteran Broadway star Mary Martin to tears. “I’ve never seen her before,” said Martin afterward, “and now I don’t want her to ever leave that stage.”
“Touch Me in the Morning” is one of Lee’s most masterful and exposed performances—the plea of a spent woman, too tired to fight but not to feel. In a tearful, parched murmur, Lee asks for one last crumb of affection before love flees her life forever. “Must’ve been hard to tell me/That you’ve given all you had to give,” she sings, anger turning her voice to steel. It softens again with her sad plea: “Leave me as you found me/Empty like before.” Words like “empty,” “yesterday,” “gone,” and “dies” were lightning rods for Lee; she often sang them with a gasp or a slight moan.
The London Palladium audience responded. According to Ray Coleman of Melody Maker, “the impersonal Palladium was transformed into a hall of nightclub intimacy as the singer caressed her songs of lost love and forlorn hopes, unique and brilliantly sung.”
Lee quickly plunged into the taping of a special for Thames TV. Her guest was Charles Aznavour, the worldly French-Armenian chansonnier. A protégé of Piaf, Aznavour was the suavest of showmen, and the most calculating. Alongside him, Lee, for all her premeditation, seemed even more heartfelt. The two singers shared a duet of “Yesterday, When I Was Young,” Aznavour’s lament for a frivolously squandered youth. Fear showed on her face as she sang of time slipped away and the “pain and emptiness beyond.”
The release of Peggy and Live in London offered her hope for the future
. “The albums were quite well received,” recalled Barnes, “and they didn’t perform too badly at all.” Even so, he said, Polydor “closed the book on Peggy, because everything had cost so much. She was not expensive to record but she was expensive to accommodate.” Decades later, though, he remained immensely pleased with their collaboration. “I think I got the last of the best of her,” said Barnes. Certainly he had caught the vulnerabilities of a woman whom “you always wanted to protect—that you never wanted anything bad to happen to.”
But as Brian Panella had seen, Lee needed safekeeping not from the world, but from herself. Back in Los Angeles, she complained to Robert Richards that she had lost money in England. Once more her finances had her in mortal fear, and wounded pride made it worse. Months after Richards had moved in with her, they finished their design presentation for Shigeru Okada. Richards mailed it to Tokyo. Not a week had passed when Lee began complaining angrily: “Why hasn’t he called?” Richards explained that such decisions took time, and perhaps the package hadn’t even arrived. Lee wouldn’t listen. She threatened to cancel the whole deal. A couple of nights later she snapped, “I have had enough of this waiting!” She placed a harsh call to Okada, demanding the return of her presentation. “And indeed, he did ship it back,” said Richards. “This entire six months of work was negated completely. We had nowhere else to put this.”
After a heated confrontation, Richards moved out. The friendship never recovered. Some months later came an odd postscript. Lee had hired a young gay secretary. When the singer went on tour, he phoned Richards and invited him to a party at her house. All his friends were coming, he explained, and they were planning to dress up in her gowns and wigs.