by James Gavin
Liver disease took Marianne’s life in 1986. The family had a farewell gathering at the house. According to Virginia Bernard, who attended, Lee remarked, then and there, that the house was now hers.
* * *
TO HER, MANHATTAN WAS still the ultimate, its audiences the acid test of how good she was. “She had that old-school thing about New York—‘If I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere,’ ” said Emilio Palame.
The failure of Peg had left her burning for one more chance to prove herself in the Big Apple. But the deluxe supper clubs that had pampered her for years had packed away their linen tablecloths and dismantled their orchestra-size stages. What remained was a handful of cabarets. Some were fancy, like the Carlyle hotel’s ninety-five-seat Café Carlyle, which hosted a high-flown sophisticate, the pianist-singer Bobby Short. At the slightly larger Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, veteran saloon singers such as the sequin-clad Julie Wilson relived the long-lost heyday of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and their peers. Newcomers broke in their acts at Don’t Tell Mama, a raucous sing-along piano bar with a no-frills backroom cabaret. And at Michael’s Pub, a stucco-walled restaurant-cabaret with Irish-bar décor, pop-jazz luminaries of the Basin Street East brand—Mel Tormé, George Shearing, Sylvia Syms, Anita O’Day—performed with a cool authority born of decades on the road.
None of these places had the budget or the grandeur to accommodate Peggy Lee. If she wished to play New York, she would have to relax her expectations. In 1985, Irvin Arthur, a cabaret owner turned booking agent, pitched Lee to Greg Dawson, who owned The Ballroom, a black-box cabaret-theater. The Ballroom was bigger than the competition; it held two hundred at cramped tables spread throughout a long, rectangular, tiered space. At the far front was an elevated stage. It could comfortably hold the sextet that Arthur proposed, and had the wings that Lee required. The club took lighting and sound seriously. What’s more, Dawson, a Yale graduate and former press agent, was known for eclectic taste. His past bookings had included Jane Olivor, the hyperemotional Brooklyn chanteuse whom Columbia Records had signed as its new Streisand; Joseph Papp, the founder of New York’s Public Theater, in his short-lived caprice as a song-and-dance man; and cult jazzbird Blossom Dearie, whose childlike vocals and featherweight swing as a pianist had enchanted Miles Davis.
There were minuses, though. The Ballroom stood on Twenty-Eighth Street near Eighth Avenue—a dark, forbidding stretch at night, with little or no foot traffic. Would Lee’s aging audience want to venture there? The cabaret was plain gray and black, closer to Weimar Berlin than to East Side chic; the dressing room, wrote a reporter, was “more of an alcove with a door.” Alongside the showroom, in The Ballroom’s popular Spanish restaurant, salamis, peppers, and ears of corn hung over the bar—a far cry from the towering chandeliers of the Waldorf.
Arthur demanded twenty-five thousand a week. Dawson had never paid more than twelve. Other demands piled up, including an around-the-clock limo and driver and a pricey apartment rental. But Dawson was intrigued. He and his partner, Tim Johnson, decided that maybe they could make this work—but only if Lee did nine shows a week for a twenty-five to forty-five-dollar cover, the highest they had ever charged.
They signed the deal. For four weeks, starting on July 10, 1985, Peggy Lee would play her first New York club engagement since 1976. If all went well, her presence at The Ballroom would catapult it to a level Dawson had never dreamed possible.
He met Lee at the airport. When he caught his first glimpse of her, Dawson couldn’t hide his shock. There was Lee in a wheelchair, rolled his way by her blond, pretty granddaughter Holly, now a teenager. The singer sat immobile inside a big fur coat; she wore tinted, rhinestone-trimmed glasses that looked like twin headlights. “I thought she might very well be dead,” said Dawson. “She wasn’t, but all the way into the city I kept wondering, how the hell was she going to perform? And could she still sing? I was very depressed.”
Lee didn’t like the roomy East Side apartment he had rented for her, and insisted on moving into a hotel at more than twice the cost. “I had visions of going broke with this whole thing,” he said. “Except that, from the moment we announced her engagement, the phone started to ring and reservations kept piling in.”
That helped Dawson survive the bumpy road to opening night. The day after she had checked in to her hotel, a limo deposited Lee in front of the picture window and French door that formed The Ballroom’s exterior. Dawson ran outside to greet her. She startled him by stepping out of the limo unassisted. Lee sat back down in her wheelchair, and Holly pushed her inside The Ballroom and down a short corridor that led to the showroom. When Lee saw it, her eyes turned to stone. Clearly no one had told her how unlike the Empire Room the place was.
As Dawson showed her around, Lee was in a foul mood. She didn’t like anything. Soon the demands started. The stage made “sounds,” she said, and had to be carpeted. She wanted a ramp built from her dressing room to the stage a few yards away. She tested the sound, and hated it. As a favor to her, Phil Ramone, a Grammy-winning recording engineer, spent a day pushing levers and twisting knobs. Little needed changing—“but the fact that he was there made her feel better,” said Dawson. “Peggy claimed she had the ears of a bat and was even the subject of a special sound study at UCLA. Bad sound, she claimed, could cause her to vomit or faint—possibly in the middle of a show. That was how she initially dealt with me—the subtle, never-exactly-stated threat that she couldn’t perform or might have to cancel—unless such-and-such happened. Since we had so much resting on this show, the terror was always lurking, producing constant anxiety.” Then the rehearsals began. “I nearly died,” he said. “She sounded terrible! I thought, she’s lost it. This is going to be a disaster.”
The engagement began on a sweltering summer night. All seats was full, and dozens more had been jammed in for the most talked-about cabaret opening in years. Retirement-age Peggy Lee fans in suits and dresses comprised about half the crowd; the rest consisted of younger, nostalgia-loving gay men and straight couples who looked barely old enough to remember “Fever.” Amid them all sat an elderly man with tortoise-shell glasses and a vacant smile. It was Benny Goodman, back to scrutinize Lee as he first had in 1941. The air seemed to buzz.
At eight PM, an employee passed through the curtain to the left of the stage and knocked on the dressing-room door.
“Half-hour, Miss Lee.”
A cool response came from inside: “We’ll see.”
The lights dimmed at 8:47. Grady Tate launched into a drum roll. Dawson feared the worst as he spoke into the microphone in the sound and light booth: “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss PEGGY LEE!”
Out she sailed, unassisted. The cheer that met her was so loud and long that Lee reared back in satisfied delight. “Oh, hel-LO!” she caroled. The spotlight made her pink satin gown and beaded cape glitter; diamond earrings dangled from her ears. Behind a silver headband, Lee’s own hair—without a fall—was tied in a chignon; the dark glasses hid her drooping eye.
Sitting on a stool center stage, she began her familiar welcoming song, “I Love Being Here with You,” with such vitality that she sounded reborn. Dawson could scarcely believe his eyes and ears. “It all came together. She was magic. A kind of force that sucks in all the energy in the room instead of projecting it out, like most performers.”
Having heard so much about how depressing Peg was, Lee had promised an “upbeat show” at The Ballroom. “She was tired of feeling down,” said Emilio Palame, who divided the engagement with Mike Renzi. “She was tired of singing about unrequited love.” Lee clung to crowd-pleasing chestnuts (“As Time Goes By,” “I Want to Be Happy,” “Fly Me to the Moon”); much-requested tracks from her albums (“Heart,” “Love Me or Leave Me”); and her hits. The band followed “I’m a Woman” with striptease music, and Lee did a few strutting bumps and grinds. Rarely had she seemed so joyful. “Can you imagine I wait all day long, a grown woman, to come down here and make a fool of myself?” she as
ked. “I love it, I love it, I love it!” She flirted with her young vibraphonist, Mark Sherman (“Don’t get any more handsome! You’re looking better every night!”), and introduced Palame with the warmth of a proud mother: “I’ve come to love this gentleman very much, and you will see, more than you have already, what a fantastic talent he is.”
Lee was contracted to sing for an hour per show, but seldom did she do less than an hour and forty-five. The eleven-o’clock show couldn’t begin until one-thirty in the morning; fans lined up all the way down the block, just as they had at Basin Street East. “It got to be a mess,” said Dawson, “but no matter how much I begged, she wouldn’t cut the show. Think of it—here was this woman, seemingly at death’s door, performing for three and a half hours each night! And loving it. She seemed strong as an ox.”
New York Times writer Charlotte Curtis rejoiced at the return of Lee’s “hip cool” and her “elegant, self-deprecating wit. . . . Her timing is infallible. The power of her low, sultry voice invests the pieces with the grandeur and good fun of times past.” If her once-lush tone now seemed dry and nasal, no one seemed to notice. The sound suited an encore that Lee had done ever since Basin Street East, when the mood struck her. She strung together four Billie Holiday trademarks—“Good Morning Heartache,” “Some Other Spring,” “Don’t Explain,” and “God Bless the Child”—and shifted back and forth between her own voice and an imitation of Holiday’s. The effect was chilling; it sounded like an otherworldly dialogue between Lee and the ghost of her idol.
Dawson had to admire her. “She was a very smart, funny lady. Oh, she could be a bitch, all right. She could scare the crap out of anyone. But she was tough in a way I came to appreciate—the result, no doubt, of having to take a lot of shit from a lot of people on her way up stardom’s ladder. And tough in order to get things done, or effectuate conditions that ultimately made her more valuable, to everyone’s benefit.”
Lee’s run was the greatest success The Ballroom had ever had. To her relief, Manhattan still loved her.
* * *
MANY JOURNALISTS ASKED LEE how it felt to be a legend. The question thrilled her, and she showed no false modesty. She had triumphed in a hard, male-run business and won near-unanimous respect, while surviving close brushes with death, the loss of key people in her life, the embarrassing failure of Peg, and numerous other disasters.
But most of the time she didn’t feel too well. Just as her career was coming back together, her health fell apart again. On October 6, 1985, while singing at the Fairmont in New Orleans, her chest pains returned. Lee checked into the city’s Touro Infirmary. The angioplasties had failed: Lee needed double bypass surgery fast. Holly had come to New Orleans as her assistant, and she was by Lee’s side as nurses prepared her for the operation. One of them reached to remove her false eyelashes—which she had worn even in her hospital bed—and her nail polish. “She was having a fit!” said Holly. “They ended up only taking the nail polish off one hand. They did take her eyelashes off, but I put her big movie-star glasses on while they wheeled her in. She wanted to be a star even in open-heart surgery.”
The delicate procedure took five hours. After she came to, Lee mourned her canceled shows, most of all a performance at a White House state dinner—a chance to wipe away whatever bitter aftertaste remained from her 1970 debacle. During her recuperation, pneumonia and pleurisy set in. “She almost died,” said Holly. Word of Lee’s health hit the news, and Frank Sinatra called to check on her. Once she was strong enough, he had her flown home on a private jet. From there, she checked into St. John’s for a month. Sinatra “called all the time to see how things were,” said Lee later to the BBC’s Alan Dell. “And then he came out to St. John’s. And I’ll always remember that he walked in carrying a bunch of flowers in his hand, not in his arm but in his hand, lovely white flowers, and he brought them in as if he was a teenager.”
Bouquets filled her room and get-well messages flooded in from all over the world, one from President Reagan. Her doctor released a statement to the Associated Press: “Miss Lee’s spirits have remained indomitable throughout this lengthy and tedious hospital confinement.” Finally she returned to Bel Air. Lee hadn’t needed an oxygen tank in ten years; now a new one stood beside her bed.
With her health on the downslide, the time seemed right to honor her for lifetime achievement. On March 31, 1986, in Los Angeles, the Songwriters Guild of America gave Lee its Aggie Award, granted in the past to Johnny Mercer, Henry Mancini, and Sammy Cahn. The enfeebled singer watched from her chair as figures from her past paraded out in This Is Your Life fashion: Danny Thomas, Arthur Hamilton, Johnny Mandel, Leiber and Stoller, Benny Carter, Lou Levy, Billy May, Stella Castellucci, Dick Hazard, John Pisano, Joe Harnell. Rarely had Lee felt so grateful to be anywhere. “I came very close to checking out,” she told Don Heckman of the Los Angeles Times. “I think when you survive what I went through, you realize that you’re not finished yet for a reason. I’m not quite sure what God had in mind when he kept me around, but I know I’m still here for a purpose.”
In Peg, Lee had seen herself in angelic terms. Now she really seemed to believe she was an angel. Perhaps the illusion helped her to rise, emotionally, above the pains of a body that had become a burden. But for Lee, this was no joke; she began to tell friends that she thought she would live forever. “I’m in tune with the infinite,” she explained to her band. Lee read aloud to John Chiodini from a treasured five-volume set on her shelf, Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East. The author, Baird T. Spalding, explained that physical immortality was attainable by those with a divine mission and a dogged love of life. All illness could be surmounted, as it had by Jesus and Buddha, who, Spalding asserted, still walked among us.
For Peggy Lee, that mission seemed clear: to transform and enlighten through song. Downtrodden tunes like “Black Coffee” or “It Takes Too Long to Learn to Live Alone” had no place in her new philosophy; she sang “Is That All There Is?” only reluctantly, and played it for laughs. In return engagements at the Westwood Playhouse in April and at The Ballroom in June, focus stayed on the miracle of her survival. “For any of you who thought a thought, said a prayer, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, because I know that’s why I’m here,” announced Lee from her onstage chair.
Many fans were moved, even to tears, by her resilience. Others snickered at her conversion into an icon of saintliness. Ted Ono, a Japanese producer of jazz recordings, brought his artist Maxine Sullivan, Lee’s original inspiration, to see her at The Ballroom. “Maxine just laughed and said, ‘Oh, God, she takes herself so seriously now!’ ” Her audiences, said Vince Mauro, were “too filled with sycophants, I thought. If you belch and they start applauding, then it’s all over. When she was forty-two she said to me, ‘A lot of times I don’t believe people when they say how great I am.’ Well, by now she believed anybody who said that anything she did was great.”
But Lee was clearly having fun as she talked with the audience for minutes at a time and wandered through her safe selection of standards and hits. Fans who had come to hear her classics, like “Fever,” “I’m a Woman,” and “Johnny Guitar,” got the same thrills of old, and the six-week run sold out. “As freaky as she looked, she was bringing a long-lost glamour to the stage,” said Robert Richards. “And she still had that haunting quality. But it got a little pathetic at The Ballroom. She was a diminished talent. The shows were weak, and they were careless. And that was the last thing you wanted to see from her.”
A practical joke played on her by a friend made Lee feel like a laughingstock. Mario Buatta was a high-end interior designer known in New York and the Hamptons as “The Prince of Chintz.” Lee obsessed him, and he barely missed a night of a Ballroom engagement; there he sat at a prime table, often with a large party of friends in tow. His sense of humor was epitomized by a stunt that made the columns. Cheered on by Bernard Lafferty, the drunken but lovable Irish valet whom Lee had fired and rehired for years, Bua
tta brought a chimpanzee to the show. The animal sat next to Buatta wearing a vest that bore his name, Zip. Throughout part one of Lee’s two-act show, all eyes were on Zip, who prattled away in his chair.
Lee had been upstaged by Elizabeth Taylor, but never by a monkey. She voiced a few tart remarks. Everyone laughed, but the edge in her voice made it clear that she was not amused. She cut Act I short, then stormed into her dressing room. In Act II, the animal was gone. Later, on the phone, she raged to her friend Jean Bach about what Buatta had done.
His friendship with Lee survived. But at The Ballroom, the anger she hoped to dispel kept flaring up. One night when she lost her place during “Fever,” her vibraphonist, Mark Sherman, wound up taking the fall. “What was that rhythm you played?” she said midsong, shooting him a cold glare. Other cutting remarks followed.
Robert Richards was there. “There was a cord on the floor of the stage, and she said, ‘What, is the management now trying to kill me?’ ” Lee finished the performance and left the stage. Customers were paying their checks. “All of a sudden,” said Richards, “she burst out of the dressing room wearing turquoise pajamas and a black mink coat.” Having entered The Ballroom in a wheelchair, she now stood, clutching the handles of a walker. Face frozen in rage, Lee dragged her way along the still-full showroom as though it were on fire; then she fled through the front door.
* * *
INJURY AND ILLNESS AS much as music now defined Peggy Lee. In the 1980s and ’90s, Lee regaled nearly every interviewer with a litany of her physical woes, from her bypass surgery to her foot troubles, a byproduct of diabetes. When columnist Michael Musto of the Village Voice arrived at her hotel room with a photographer, Lee blurted out: “Please don’t shoot my feet. They got squeezed tapping my toes, which caused an ingrown toenail and an operation.” Moments later, she added: “Please don’t shoot this hand. It’s swollen because I’m writing my memoirs longhand. Suddenly my ring doesn’t fit.” To Patrick Pacheco of the New York Daily News, Lee’s suite looked “a little like a hospital,” complete with steaming humidifiers, a wheelchair, and boxes of bandages. In his article, “Like a Statue Rising Above the Ruins,” Lee explained that she couldn’t walk well, and her eyesight was failing. To another reporter, Sheryl Connolly, Lee mentioned the view from her deck in Bel Air. “I can see the boats out there with my field glasses. That is, I don’t see the boats terribly well, but I know they are there.”