Is That All There Is?

by James Gavin

  Later that month, Riley awarded Lee $325,000—a handsome settlement for the time, awarded to a sympathetic and famous plaintiff. Yet it was a fraction of the fifteen million Lee had wanted. “Peggy deserved nothing,” insisted Bruce Vanderhoff, “because her story was totally fabricated.” But Lee was miserable. She had talked of her “fall” so many times that she truly seemed to believe it had happened. More dismayingly, legal bills would erase much of the award.

  At least she still had Peg. To almost everyone concerned, most of all Peggy Lee, the show had the makings of a hit. She shared her vision with reporter Kathy Larkin: “I’ve been around for a while, and I figured it would be War and Peace and Gone with the Wind and Forever Amber—all combined.”

  Early announcements mentioned a cast of twenty-two. The right actor had to play Dave Barbour. Lee wanted Dustin Hoffman, with his “quiet intensity”; the suitably Italian but age-inappropriate Tony Bennett has offered his services. Lee decided that either Maureen Stapleton or Colleen Dewhurst, two Tony-winning Broadway veterans, should portray hatchet-faced Min. Plans were announced for a nationwide talent search to cast three women as the younger Peggy Lees. If she had ever seriously intended to stay out of her own show, the notion was shot down by the Cowans, Bufman, and by her own ego. Perhaps, as in Side by Side by Sondheim, Lee could serve as onstage narrator, she thought. A chaise on the side of the stage would be perfect.

  Every choice hinged upon the advice of her psychic, Don Torres. At one of their sessions, he sat by Lee’s bed and predicted wondrous things. “You have some tremendous public acclaim coming as a legend, as a truly great individual . . . Physically things are beginning to improve . . . I have never seen your aura as clear . . . There’s a healing going on here.” He urged her to tend to her health and rid her body of toxins; she would need to shore up her strength.

  Lee took him at his word. She replaced her fattening meals with yogurt, granola, and vitamin drinks. Soon she decided she wanted to dance onstage, something she had never done in her life. The costumes, she vowed, would show off a streamlined Peggy Lee—svelte as the one in Pete Kelly’s Blues.

  One thing was certain: Lee knew nothing about writing a script; all she had was a bunch of songs and anecdotes. William Luce stepped in to try and save the day. Luce specialized in biographical portraits of stellar artistic women; his 1976 Broadway hit, The Belle of Amherst, had starred the venerated Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson. Who better than Luce, reasoned Bufman, to write Peg? “He was gentle; he was sensitive; he was not a fighter,” said the producer. “He was just a sweet person with uncanny instincts as to how to write about women.”

  The playwright’s agent had urged him to decline. “He reeled off tales of her explosive outbursts of temper and sudden paranoid distrust of friends and colleagues,” said Luce. But Bufman won him over. “She’s really very sweet,” he argued. And the money was tempting. Luce agreed to meet her.

  He arrived at her home. Lee saw his curly hair, beard, and soulful eyes, and felt his warm and shy demeanor. She turned on her charm full force, and he melted. “It was like an old friend had walked into my life,” he said.

  Eager to stoke their rapport, Bufman paid for Luce to accompany her to New Jersey in September for a weekend of reunion shows in honor of Capitol Records’ fortieth anniversary. Called “Forties in the Eighties,” the concerts would take place in Hackensack at the run-down Orrie de Nooyer Auditorium. For old-record fans, the series was a feast: On one stage they would see a parade of the label’s old stars, reprising songs they had sung on heavy shellac 78s and long out-of-print LPs. Besides Lee, the cast included emcee Margaret Whiting, Betty Hutton, Keely Smith, Ella Mae Morse, Johnny Johnston, Gordon MacRae, the Pied Pipers, Andy Russell, Nelson Riddle, the Four Freshmen, and Nancy Wilson.

  Before the plane they were taking from L.A. had even left the ground, Lee turned into a fire-spitting diva. As soon as the passengers were told to fasten their seat belts, she called down the aisle, demanding a plate of fresh fruit. A flight attendant promised to bring it as soon as the jet was in the air. “I’m diabetic and I need it now!” sputtered Lee. Passengers turned in alarm. Lee yanked at Luce’s arm. “Get that girl’s name!” she ordered. “I tried to calm her down,” recalled the playwright. “When she finally stopped fuming, she said with sarcasm, ‘So this is what Zev calls first-class?’ ”

  The first performance of “Forties in the Eighties” ran a stultifying seven hours; singers who were starved for applause far exceeded their allotted handful of songs. By one-thirty AM, when the biggest star of the group was called from her trailer to go onstage, more than half the twelve hundred seats were empty. Lee began what Stephen Holden, by then a New York Times critic, called an “eerie, somnambulistic set,” heavy on ballads. “Despite a tiny, faltering voice,” wrote Holden, Lee wove a “dreamy spell.”

  Luce was spellbound, especially by her traditional closer, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” As so often happened with Lee, her singing salved the sting of her ill behavior. “I felt that I had met another Peggy Lee,” he said. “She conveyed allure and intimacy, a place deep inside where romance still existed as a young girl’s most vulnerable emotion. She took her listeners there. This is when I came to believe that Peggy’s show might really be a winner.”

  She certainly felt that way about Luce—so much so that she asked him to leave the hotel Bufman had put him in and move in with her, which would place him on twenty-four-hour call. Luce declined, but he put in long, daily hours at the house in an effort to drag a script out of Lee. A ritual of frustration and minimal productivity ensued. Luce arrived at noon. He waited in the living room for up to an hour while Lee worked on her makeup and outfit. The living-room phone would ring, and ring. It was Peggy Lee calling, from her bedroom, with dictation for Luce.

  Finally she called him into the inner sanctum. Lee lay in bed, propped up with pillows. She was fully made up, with a turban, diamonds, and feathers. Luce sat at a wobbly card table near the bed.

  He tried to elicit reflections from her to formulate a rough script. Each day she handed him written lines, many of them rhymed. “Sometimes it was a litany of woes,” he said, “but other times it was a bit amusing. At her best, Peggy had a droll sense of humor.” But for all her insight as a singer, Lee, he found, “didn’t seem disposed to mentally work out her own problems, or to analyze her possible responsibility for causing them.” For years she had leaned on Ernest Holmes, then Adela Rogers St. Johns, to hold her hand through every crisis, real or imagined. Now, said Luce, “she depended on astrologers, metaphysical practitioners, and clairvoyants to talk her out of emotional upsets and depression. I made sure not to be drawn into this ongoing dependence she demanded of others, so I used my work on the Peg script as an excuse to move to another room when Peg got on the phone for up to an hour or more.”

  A videotape of Pete Kelly’s Blues ran over and over in the background. She played with her Lhasa Apso dog, Genghis—her second canine gift from the Dalai Lama, she informed Luce, to replace the departed Sungyi-La. José Prado brought lunch into the bedroom, then dinner. Mealtimes took hours. As evening neared, with little achieved, Lee tried to make Luce stay and watch TV with her. When interviewers came, she enjoyed showing him off as the playwright of her forthcoming Broadway show. One writer asked her opinion of the female singers of the day. “Peg paused as if deep in thought,” remembered Luce. “ ‘Let me see,’ she said, as if unable to come up with a name.” The journalist mentioned Barbra Streisand, who was then in the process of coproducing, cowriting, directing, and starring in the movie Yentl. “Peg said thoughtfully, ‘Yes . . . she’s coming along nicely.’ ”

  Lee had never forgiven Bufman for (as she saw it) sabotaging her dinner party/backer’s audition by bringing Elizabeth Taylor. She ordered Luce to keep count of every sheet of paper he used at the upstairs copy machine; all possible costs, she stressed, would be charged to Zev. Try as the playwright did to resist, Lee kept him in her web of melodrama. One day, with him
at her bedside, Lee flew into a rage over some matter concerning the producer. She yanked the phone from its cradle and announced that she was calling Vilma, Bufman’s wife, to inform her that her husband was having an affair with Taylor. Luce pleaded with her not to: “How could you do such a mean thing?”

  “Because he lied to me!” snapped Lee. Exactly how was unclear, but Luce couldn’t stop her from dialing Vilma. “I don’t even want to hear this,” said Luce. He left the room. Knowing of Lee’s old affair with the married Robert Preston, he couldn’t help but think her a hypocrite.

  And a needy one. To tear himself away from the lonely and needy star was a nightly challenge. Then, often as not, the phone in his hotel room would ring after midnight. “If you dared to say, ‘I’m getting sleepy, I’ve got to sign off,’ she would slam down the receiver. She wanted to be the one to terminate.” Lee would call back in tears, begging forgiveness. “So much pressure,” she sniffled, “and everyone is against me.”

  Lee compensated by pulling rank—even over her daughter, who visited occasionally; and Marianne, who was living there as her sister’s employee. “She was like a little ghost moving through the house every now and then,” said Luce of Marianne. Lee treated both Nicki and Marianne “like servants,” he observed, and didn’t hesitate to fling withering sarcasm at them in front of others. Having heard Lee vent so much about Min’s slave driving, Marianne watched with dismay as her sister morphed into the woman she hated.

  But Lee was at her most gracious when Martin Charnin, the Tony-winning director and lyricist of Broadway’s Annie, came over at Bufman’s request to explore the possibility of directing Peg. Lee arranged a fancy catered lunch. Then she directed José to create one of her favorite housekeeping effects, which entailed vacuuming the living-room carpet in rows, one up and one down, giving it a vaguely Art Deco look. “Five minutes before Martin arrived,” remembered Luce, “Marianne walked across the center of the carpet in her bedroom slippers, from the kitchen to Peg’s bedroom. She walked back in another direction. When Peg saw the footprints, which had totally damaged the House Beautiful feature, her reaction to poor Marianne was scathing. And there was no time to correct the silly little detail.”

  The doorbell rang, and in walked Charnin. “Martin was affable and pleased to meet Peg,” said Luce. But after a few pleasantries, he got down to business. Lee mentioned lunch. “No thanks,” he said. “I just ate breakfast.” The disgruntled star joined Luce on the living-room sofa, where he read a scene for Charnin. The director thanked them and left. He declined Bufman’s offer. “Peg said it was because I read too fast,” said Luce.

  Lee didn’t like it when a man turned her down. More than ever, she leaned on her imagination to keep her feeling desirable. That included casting Luce as her would-be swain. Late at night in his hotel room, the playwright answered his phone. He heard Peggy Lee breathily cooing a hit from Show Boat: “I love him because he’s wonderful / Because he’s just my Bill.”

  “Do you like me singing to you, darling?” cooed Lee.

  He paused. She had made such remarks before. “Peggy,” said Luce, “you know I’m gay, don’t you?”

  Silence. “I guess I never thought about it. I guess I’m too feminine to care.”

  “But you know I’ve had a partner for years. You’ve talked with him on the phone.”

  “And I like Ray very much, and I’m glad you have him in your life—and he has you in his.”

  The flirting ended. But still she clung to her fantasies, as Luce saw when she proudly handed him her new headshot. The photographer, Hans Albers, had reduced Lee to a ghostly blur of an old-time glamour queen, with everything but her platinum-swirled head and part of a hand shrouded in a white fur coat. As Luce stared at the murky image, Lee exclaimed: “They didn’t have to do any retouching!”

  No one quite knew what she saw when she looked in the mirror. But a photo taken later in the Peg dressing room by Marianne Barcellona for People magazine gave a clue. It showed Lee gazing at herself in the mirror while Vincent Roppatte, her hairdresser and makeup artist on Peg, fussed with what little hair the singer had left, and Paul Horner smiled broadly in the background. Lee’s hairline had receded almost to the top of her head; a silver headband covered it. Roppatte fingered the wisps of hair that hung from the back. Lee’s face looked as stonelike and featureless as that of an Egyptian sphinx. Through eyes hooded by giant false lashes, Lee beheld her reflection with a cool smile and a look of complete satisfaction. Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren could have been staring back at her.

  One day at the house, she allowed Luce to witness her daily transformation into Peggy Lee. As he waited to be summoned to her bedroom, Lee startled him by padding into the living room in her robe. Sans makeup, with her hair an unruly mess, she was almost unrecognizable as the Lee he knew. “I got a late start,” she said with a smile.

  Once in the bedroom, she began her transformation. As they chatted, Lee brushed back her hair and pinned on her artificial chignon. Luce noticed the facelift scars on the back of her neck and behind her ears. “Over a reddish, mottled face she applied a makeup base with a sponge. Then powder with a small brush, and blush. Lashes were attached, eyebrows penciled perfectly, and finally glossy lipstick. ‘Voilà,’ she said, looking at me in the mirror and laughing.” She awaited his reaction.

  “Wow,” he said. “Here you are.”

  Luce was impressed. “It was the most honest moment we’d had,” he recalled. “I felt there was a new bond.” Lee, he decided, had wanted him to see how masterfully she controlled the world’s vision of her.

  Now, with Peg, she could welcome everyone into her carefully crafted view of the truth. It began with the autobiographical lyrics that Paul Horner was setting. Lee couldn’t make music with a man without stirring in some romantic spice; not surprisingly, she harbored a crush on Horner. It went nowhere, for he too was gay. But he “dearly loved her,” and didn’t discourage her illusions. Lee knew what pains he took to get to Bellagio Road; lacking a car, he had to ride three buses and take a steep uphill walk through streets where pedestrians were liable to be questioned by police. All exertion was forgotten as they dined together in her bedroom, laughing and trading stories. Their intimacy unleashed some of Lee’s most inspired lyric writing. “Daddy Was a Railroad Man” looked back at her rural North Dakota life. The words swung—“Boxcar connected to the old caboose / Take ’em to the yard and then he’d turn ’em loose”—and Horner set them to trainlike rhythms. “Angels on Your Pillow” was a tender lullaby in memory of baby Nicki; it harked back to that brief time when her daughter’s future meant more to Lee than her own: “I wish for you the dearest things . . . A happy heart that always sings . . .”

  Domestic bliss, of course, had never been Lee’s for long, and Horner saw the latest threat to it as he stood amid the soft peach environs of her living room. While Lee readied herself in the bedroom, he noticed a letter on the piano. He couldn’t resist glancing at it. A bank had denied her application for a loan. Horner later learned that Lee had been in danger of losing the house. It helped explain her desperation for a hit show.

  At the start of 1983, prospects looked bright. Lee was back in London, reveling in a welcome as loving as ever. This was a quite different Peggy Lee, of course, than the one they had encountered at Pigalle in 1961 or at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970. At sixty-two, the star was a stout figure, camouflaged by white feathers. Lately she had tried foregoing wigs; her thin hair was parted and pulled back tightly, accentuating her high forehead and the mascara-lined slits that were her eyes. In a rehearsal studio, Lee met Boy George, the flamboyantly androgynous star of the white glam-soul group, Culture Club. He wore long braids tied with ribbon, lipstick, and wing-tipped eye shadow. To Lee, who still considered Cary Grant the pinnacle of manhood, George was a strange sight indeed. He loved her look, but not for the reasons men always had. “You look outrageous!” he said, adding, “You win the biscuit of the day.”

  If her appearance had
edged into the bizarre, Lee’s newfound health regimen had taken years off her voice, which sounded rounder and less nasal. She showed it off on London Night Out, a TV variety show. For Billie Holiday’s swinging trademark “Them There Eyes,” Lee teamed with the French-born Stéphane Grappelli, who at seventy-five was widely acclaimed as the world’s foremost jazz violinist. Masterful though he was, Grappelli let her take the lead; when they traded phrases he played off of her just as saxophonist Lester Young had done in his 1930s recordings with Billie Holiday.

  Then the singer announced “something wonderful” that had just come her way. “My producers, Zev Bufman and Irving Cowan, are taking me to Broadway in my own play. And I’m so thrilled I can’t stand it!” She leaned into the curve of the piano and, with clouds of violins swirling around her, sang “Angels on Your Pillow.” Her British fans roared their approval.

  No one doubted that Peg would be a musical feast. Instead of hiring one arranger, as most Broadway shows did, Lee reached out to many of the greats she had known: Gordon Jenkins, Bill Holman, Johnny Mandel, Artie Butler, Don Sebesky, Billy May, Torrie Zito, Benny Carter. Her choices ensured that Peg would sound like a Peggy Lee show, not like a Broadway musical. Just as important to her, though, was the freedom to tell her story her way—especially with regard to Min and her Paradise Lost tragedy with Dave Barbour. “We’re going to treat this all with a light hand,” she promised a reporter. “But it’s really about survival.”

  Ostensibly it was also about healing, and dismissing lifelong demons. “I know the value of forgiveness,” explained Lee of Min, “and I’ve long since forgiven her.” But with each new interview the “compassion” wore thinner. “If hers had been my lot in life, to feel that way and to inflict physical and mental violence on someone, I wouldn’t want to be alive. I feel sorry for her, really sorry.” Kathy Larkin of the New York Daily News caught Lee on a particularly livid day. “Look,” said the star, pointing to her cheek. “My stepmother hit me here, in the face, with a metal-edged razor strap. And here”—Lee touched her head—“that’s where she hit me with a heavy cast-iron skillet.” She told Paul Horner that she identified with the slaves, because of having had to rise before dawn and do chores. “I took it with a pinch of salt,” he said. “I’m sure her stepmother was a formidable woman, but I don’t think that being a stepmother is an easy task. And being the stepmother of Peggy Lee—well, Peggy was a very willful child when she was sixty. But Peggy’s truth, in her mind, was the truth.”