Is That All There Is?

by James Gavin

  The Mary Costa trial was set for May 28, 1991. Rather than invite more bad publicity, Disney made an out-of-court settlement. The previous December, singer Ilene Woods had filed a twenty-million–dollar suit against Disney over the video of Cinderella, whose title character featured her voice. Woods’s contract lacked the wording that had spelled success for Peggy Lee. But the company paid her one hundred thousand dollars anyway. “If they didn’t want my wife for something, we wouldn’t have gotten any money,” said Wood’s husband, drummer Ed Shaughnessy, who had played on Black Coffee. “One way we got revenge was, if they wanted her to do an event, like an autograph show, we’d say we don’t go anywhere for less than ten grand. That’s what they had to pay.”

  It was a humbling time for the company, which according to the Los Angeles Times had suffered its “worst quarter in six years.” Even Roy Disney softened his stance, at least verbally: “As the company gets bigger, it’s easy for it to lose what we stand for.” The Times quoted a nameless Disney executive: “When it comes to the hardball issue, we are guilty and we know it. We also know that we better change it. It’s been win-win for us for a long time. But it’s time we introduced some compassion and sensitivity into the process.”

  Disney kept Lady and the Tramp off the home-video market for years. In 1997, the company negotiated a small per-unit royalty for Lee and the estate of Sonny Burke, who had died in 1980. It wasn’t retroactive; the deal began from the date of signing. As for the broader effects of Lee’s victory, the case had merely made Disney and other studios much more careful in their wording of contracts. From now on, they retained rights to disseminate their films—as Cheech Marin said—in every form “that can possibly be invented on this planet or in any universe.”

  Where Peggy Lee was concerned, Disney refused to give up. The company filed with the California Court of Appeals. In October of 1992, they lost. “Then they tried to get to the California Supreme Court,” recalled Blasband. The effort failed. Disney could plead the case no higher. Lee’s check, Blasband said, “came very promptly after that.” It contained approximately $1 million above the $2.3 million. Lee’s counsel had managed to recover attorney’s fees and interest, covering the time Disney had spent appealing. Out of Lee’s money came attorneys’ fees. Since a breach of contract award qualified as taxable income, the IRS would take out a sizable chunk.

  Disappointed as she remained, Lee sorely needed the funds. “That battle depleted her,” said Jane David, her new secretary. “She was mad that she had to work. She didn’t want to anymore, really. But she had a household staff to pay. She had a home, a mortgage.” Other expenses included the live-in cook who monitored Lee’s diet, and the private nurse who came twice a day to check the diabetic singer’s insulin level. No matter what, Lee still kept up appearances. David’s duties included buying peroxide to maintain the star’s platinum blondness. “But don’t tell anybody,” Lee cautioned her. “Everybody thinks it’s real.”

  Through it all, David proved herself invaluable. A vivacious blonde with glasses, she was the girlfriend of publicist and record promoter Dick LaPalm, Lee’s friend of forty years. David developed a genuine fondness for Lee. She persevered even when the star made her redo stacks of sealed letters because a few stamps weren’t perfectly straight; or pack seventeen bags for one out-of-town show. “She was abusive, but I took it. I used to say, ‘Miss Lee, because you sing so well, I’ll let that one slide.’ There were times when I’d say, ‘I’m going home,’ and I wouldn’t come back for months. Then she’d send me a little peace offering, a gift.”

  Lee needed David’s help, for work was coming in. It included shows in Melbourne, Florida; Palm Desert and San Carlos, California; and, first up, a concert with strings at the Pasadena Playhouse. This was her welcome-back, and the sellout audience cheered their conquering hero. The “depleted” singer sang with a vigor and lung power that she hadn’t shown since the 1960s. Lee never mentioned Disney by name; instead she sang “He’s a Tramp,” then added a remark that got the biggest laugh of the night: “I’m kinda glad I never was afraid of mice.”

  On the contrary, Lee could still “make a grown man cry,” according to David. “I’d be sitting in the office, and there’d be men that had come for meetings—agents, musicians, lawyers. I’d see them walking out sniveling.”

  Gone from her band was John Chiodini, her guitar-playing muse, with whom she had written over a dozen songs. Like Paul Horner, Chiodini had made an oral agreement with Lee to divide ownership of their collaborations equally. He saw her taking steps to edge him out, and he filed a lawsuit. The even split was restored, but not their friendship. He left Lee to join Natalie Cole, the singing daughter of Capitol Records’ onetime favored son, Nat King Cole.

  * * *

  NOTHING THAT LEE DID— not even her war with Disney—could dissuade the general public that she was above all else a tender, vulnerable creature. Softness remained her most powerful tool, a nightclub her most seductive setting. Lee would never find another Empire Room, but in 1992 she took the next best available option in Manhattan. Jerry Kravat, a New York manager of cabaret artists, was the latest in a long line of aspiring impresarios who wanted to revive a long-lost supper-club glamour. That summer Kravat took over a function room in the New York Hilton at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street. Club 53, as he planned to call his new boîte, was still unbuilt when he heeded a tip from David Rothenberg, Lee’s trusted Manhattan press agent, to present her.

  Everyone knew she was intimidatingly costly and demanding. But to have her there would make Club 53 a true happening. Kravat signed her for five weeks, from July 28 through August 29. The forty-dollar cover charge, plus a ten-dollar minimum, made this the priciest cabaret outing in town.

  But when Rothenberg’s office released word of the engagement, the reservations book filled up. Opening night sold out the quickest—and still the club continued to book tables. Old-school celebrities would occupy some of them: the 1940s MGM star Gloria DeHaven; Eartha Kitt; lyricist Sammy Cahn, who had scored his first Oscar nomination in 1942.

  On July 29, they and a well-heeled crowd of mature Peggy Lee fans were herded into a multilevel but nondescript club. Guests were squashed together elbow-to-elbow; waiters and waitresses forced their way through too many tables and tried to take orders. At 9:30—forty-five minutes after the show should have begun—dinners kept emerging from the kitchen, and “they were still stuffing tables onto the already-oversold floor,” wrote Bob Harrington in Back Stage. Patrons started banging silverware on plates and glasses to try and get Lee onstage.

  It worked. The room darkened and a quartet began the fanfare. A blinding flash of light hit a narrow entranceway to the left of the stage—and there she was, standing, though on the arm of Mike Renzi. She wore no glasses. Many of the fans present had seen her sail onstage with her mermaid figure at Basin Street East; now, as the band vamped and people cheered, Lee—a blizzard of shiny white from head to toe—labored her way to the swivel chair that awaited her, too many steps away, on a small corner platform. Would she make it? And if she did, what kind of sound would emerge from a face that was still puffy from prednisone?

  After a painfully long entrance, Lee settled gingerly into her chair. She began “I Love Being Here with You” in a voice that had almost the same shimmer of old. Relief spread through the room, replaced by wonderment. “It was like a resurrection for her,” said Rothenberg. The next day, a critic exclaimed: “When she sang, all those medical disasters evaporated and she was Miss Peggy Lee—cool, warm, sexy, in full command of one of the legendary instruments of American popular song. . . . She touched us with her will to live and with her singing, which is her reason for living.” Everyone laughed at her familiar introduction to “Fever.” Explained Lee: “I used to have a magic act, but I lost the rabbits. I decided that I would change it.” She held out a palm, blew on it as though extinguishing a candle, and the room went to dark, save for the pinspot on her snapping hand. Swelling caused by diabe
tes had made it hard for her to snap, but Renzi and her other musicians—bassist Steve LaSpina, drummer Peter Grant, guitarist Jay Berliner, and saxophonist Gerry Niewood—kept the rhythm moving.

  Reviving a swinging showtune she had recorded in the 1960s, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen’s “Walking Happy,” Lee got lost in its thicket of rhymes. She joked about it: “The smoke detector went off in my room and knocked all the lyrics out of my head.” Yelled Cahn from his table, “Even when you sing it bad it’s good!” The ever-eerie “Circle in the Sky” led into her heart-tugging finale, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Lee’s audience stood as one. Holding out her arms, Lee rose shakily to her feet. She lost her balance, and fell back into her armchair.

  In the New York Times, Stephen Holden took a less sentimental view of the show. Through a combination of “will power, musicality, and professionalism,” he wrote, Lee had managed “to project a fair degree of the old magic.” With so much mobility gone, her minimalism served her well: “Miss Lee hasn’t lost the knack of making small rhythmic gestures and subtle changes of intonation imply volumes of information.”

  For five weeks, New York treated Lee like a homecoming queen. Al Pacino came to the show and raved to her afterward, while eagerly posing for a picture with her. Lee had Jane David frame it for her. “She just couldn’t believe that Al Pacino was such a big fan,” David said.

  One night, Lee’s audience included the world’s biggest and most provocative pop star. At thirty-four, Madonna had pushed themes of sexual boldness and female empowerment to lengths undreamed of by the blond temptresses she had studied, including Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Nancy Sinatra, and Peggy Lee. A former Catholic girl from Bay City, Michigan, Madonna combated her inbred guilt and shame by wearing dominatrix drag onstage, miming masturbation, and mixing sexual and religious imagery to the point where she inflamed the Vatican. She seemed colder and tougher than Lee could ever be, but in many of her songs, such as “Rain,” she cried out for a human connection, a little peace: “Rain, wash away my sorrow, take away my pain.”

  Rob Hoerburger of the New York Times saw a resemblance between the two stars: “Like Madonna, Lee was a Middle Country misfit who loaded up a small voice with sex.” Both singers had lost their mothers at an early age; Madonna, likewise, deemed herself a “lonely girl who was searching for something.” Lee had blossomed in a time of traditional femininity; no matter how tough show business had forced her to be, she was still “a woman, w-o-m-a-n,” and yearned for a man’s love. Madonna did, too, but her playing field was a steely wilderness of electronic beats and nine- and ten-figure financial stakes. Her singing emerged as soulless and cold, while Lee’s was never less than sheer humanity.

  She couldn’t relate at all to Madonna’s art; the couple of videos she’d seen appalled her. Lee conveyed sex by implication, not bludgeoning explicitness. As coquettish as she was onstage, and as sexually aggressive in private, blunt sex talk or displays made her very uncomfortable. Lee sensed the same sort of disconnect in Madonna. “I can’t figure it out,” she said. “Is it just a role she’s playing, or what?”

  Madonna’s interest in Lee took wing in August 1992. The pop superstar was completing her dance album Erotica. Only one track, “Goodbye to Innocence,” remained unfinished. According to her producer, Shep Pettibone, it “just wasn’t working.” He whipped up a new bass line. Apparently it reminded Madonna of “that lounge-lizard-act staple, ‘Fever,’ ” said Pettibone, and Madonna sang snippets of Lee’s hit instead. “It sounded so good that we decided to take it one step further and actually cover the tune,” said the producer. “Too bad no one knew the words.” According to Pettibone, Madonna called Seymour Stein, the cofounder and president of her label, Sire Records, a Warner Bros. subsidiary. Stein rushed over copies of Lee’s and Little Willie John’s versions. “I explained to her, you know, Peggy Lee was a great songwriter in the days when—forget about women—male singers weren’t writing songs,” said Stein. Madonna, he recalled, “was intrigued.”

  Word reached Lee that the “Material Girl” would be attending her show—an unimaginable coup at an engagement whose boldface names were mostly of the Hedda Hopper vintage. Sure enough, one night during the second week, the star and a sizable entourage made a conspicuous entrance into Club 53 just as the lights were dimming. They assembled themselves at a corner banquette. The group included her boyfriend and bodyguard Jimmy Albright, her publicist Liz Rosenberg, Stein, and Epic Records executive Eliot Hubbard.

  They watched the show. Later, in an empty ballroom that Lee used as a greeting space, the blond vixens met and chatted. Madonna seemed “quite shy,” recalled Lee, as she mentioned that she was a longtime fan. Lee was surprised at how “well-mannered” the superstar was—“a perfect little lady. She dressed impeccably.” The next day, Lee called Phoebe Jacobs in delight. A bouquet of “beautiful cabbage roses” had arrived in her suite, courtesy of Madonna.

  On August 15, Madonna recorded “Fever.” Her techno dance treatment owed little to its forerunners. Whereas Lee’s version sounded cool yet sultry, no degree of fever could warm Madonna, whose vocal had the robotic numbness of a drugged-out night on a disco floor. The record hit number one on Billboard’s Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart. She performed it on Saturday Night Live with body language appropriated from Peggy Lee—the outstretched arm and the snapping hand.

  At 75 Rockefeller Plaza, the New York headquarters of Warner Bros. Records, Seymour Stein ran into writer David Munk, who worked in the building as an assistant to Gerald Levin, CEO of Time Warner. In an article on his blog, Stargayzing, Munk recalled Stein telling him proudly of having turned Madonna on to Peggy Lee. “Stein understood how cool Peggy Lee was,” he wrote, “and I could see what a thrill he got from this music-publishing equivalent of a home run.”

  Madonna and Lee crossed paths again. On August 26, Sire artist and Peggy Lee fan k.d. lang made her Radio City Music Hall debut. Lang was riding high on the success of her album Ingénue, whose hit single, “Constant Craving,” would earn the thirty-year-old singer-songwriter her third Grammy. Gerald Levin hosted a jam-packed afterparty for lang in the glass-roofed atrium of Remi, a midtown Manhattan restaurant. Munk stood among the VIPs, who were “corralled at the far end like penned-in animals.” He spied a “commotion” across the room. It was Peggy Lee, enthroned in a wheelchair that a male attendant was pushing. “She was still every inch the great star: cloaked in a voluminous satin dress with fur trim and matching satin shoes; her white blunt cut wig shimmering in the light; her make-up just perfect; and, most perplexingly, a small bejeweled crown perched atop her wig.”

  Lee’s helper struggled to roll her through a dense sea of partiers toward the velvet rope. “It was painful to watch, this terrific legend bumping into chair legs and roadblocks in her attempt to get to k.d. and Madonna. The whole time she smiled proudly; she handled what could easily have been considered an ignominious entrance with tremendous class.”

  Munk was standing next to the two young stars as they spotted Lee. He overheard Madonna’s words: “Oh shit, where the fuck is she gonna go?”

  “Moments later,” said Munk, “when she finally rolled up at the feet of Madonna, the younger singer proved to be a far better actress than she had ever demonstrated on film, as she gushed over Miss Lee.” Finally her attendant put Lee’s wheelchair in reverse, and they began their long, labored exit. Having been consecrated by Madonna, the elder singer received bursts of applause as she rolled by. Lee was aglow. These world-renowned, chart-topping women loved her. At seventy-two, she was in.

  * * *

  LEE AND PHOEBE JACOBS boasted that Madonna wanted to star in a Peggy Lee biopic—“based, I’m sure, on that wonderful book,” said Robert Richards. The film, of course, never happened. And while Madonna would eventually be named the greatest-selling female rock artist of the century, Peggy Lee made her final album on a tiny, Manhattan-based boutique label. Near the end of the Hilton run, Chesky Records invited her to turn the show’s song
s into a CD. Lee had never heard of Chesky; she only knew that it wasn’t Capitol or A&M. But no other company had asked. And Chesky had a fine reputation, even if Lee didn’t know it. The brothers who founded it, David and Norman Chesky, recorded quality jazz and classical music with state-of-the-art equipment, but they abhorred modern-day technical gimmickry. Chesky placed all singers and musicians together in one room and recorded complete takes, just as Lee had done in her Benny Goodman days.

  She called the album Moments Like This. Chesky’s audiophile miking captured an elderly voice, stripped of its beauty and most of its energy. But her weathered sound imparted interesting subtexts to songs she had introduced in her much younger days. On “Why Don’t You Do Right?,” the lass of twenty-two had become an old woman, her cry of defiance worn down to a vague mumble. In 1942, a whole big band had roared behind her; now just a drummer and a saxophonist remained. The man she was hounding to “get out of here and get me some money, too” might now have been an aged, doddering loser with a gin bottle. Given her vacant delivery, Lee could even have been singing to a dead man’s ghost.

  “Remind Me” had appeared on Lee’s 1960 make-out album, Pretty Eyes. In that song, by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, a starry-eyed woman plays hard-to-get, with a wink. Thirty-two years later, she sang each phrase haltingly, as though she truly needed reminding of how ardor felt. Mike Renzi, her sole accompanist, followed her gingerly, dropping a chord here and there to guide her way.

  The track enchanted Diana Krall, a budding jazz singer-pianist who still lived in her native Canada. Krall loved Peggy Lee, and she adopted Lee’s cool toughness, though not her vulnerability. Krall sought out Renzi and told him she loved his voicings; could she study accompaniment with him? They met several times, and Renzi gave Krall a push toward her career as the multiple-Grammy-winning, best-selling artist in jazz.