The rise & fall of PEGGY LEE
Legendary singer would have turned 100 this year
Peggy Lee was one of Truman Capote’s favourite singers, but the novelist got more than he bargained for when he dined with her in Los Angeles in 1979. Lee recalled for him all the times she had been reincarnated, as a princess, an Abyssinian queen and, most startlingly, she said: “I remember being a prostitute in Jerusalem when Jesus was alive.”
“Oh really,” Capote replied. “How do you remember?”
“I’ll never forget picking up The Jerusalem Times and seeing the headline ‘Jesus Christ Crucified,’” Lee answered, with a straight face.
When the singer stepped out to use the lavatory, Capote turned to their fellow diner, Dotson Rader, and hissed: “She’s totally bonkers.”
Lee’s circus of a life began in a strange, sad way. Born Norma Deloris Egstrom 100 years ago in small-town North Dakota, she was just four when her mother died. After her alcoholic father remarried, Lee found herself with a cruel, fairy tale-like stepmother called Min, who told her she was fat, and that her hands were too big.
Lee confided to Capote that Min had stabbed her in the stomach with a kitchen knife. In TV interviews, Lee compared her childhood to “boot camp,” adding that “brutal beatings became a way of life.”
Lee’s biographer James Gavin casts doubt on these stories of violence.
“Peggy painted Min as a Dickensian ogre who had beaten and tortured her,” Gavin told Jazztimes in 2014. “Peggy had her head in the clouds. She whipped up a Cinderella-like fantasy world in which she hid from reality.”
Whatever the truth, Lee’s miserable upbringing ignited a determination to escape North Dakota. At age 14, she began singing for WDAY Radio in Fargo, earning a dollar per program, and took the stage name Peggy Lee.
In 1937, she left for L.A., where she found work as a “carnival barker,” luring punters to a “hit the wino with the baseball” stall. Eventually, she landed some singing jobs in clubs around North America, which led to her big break.
In 1941, bandleader Benny Goodman heard Lee singing in the cocktail lounge of the Ambassador West Hotel in Chicago and asked her to join his band. A string of hits followed.
Goodman was notoriously stingy — he paid Lee only $10 for singing Why Don’t You Do Right? — but she always credited him for her success, often telling visitors to her chandelier-filled, marble-floored mansion: “In a way, Benny gave me all this.”
Even as a multimillionaire, she fretted every day about money, and stewed over lost revenue she believed to be rightfully hers. Lee had a point. She made so much money for Capitol Records in the 1950s that their lavish circular headquarters in L.A. was jokingly known as “the house that Peggy built.” In 1989, she was still angry over missing out on royalties for her 1958 hit Fever.
“I advise all young songwriters, copyright your song,” she said.
In 1991, Lee sued Disney for unpaid royalties when she got nothing from the video release of The Lady and the Tramp, for which, three decades earlier, she had been paid a mere $3,500 for its hit songs and for voicing several characters: Darling, the Siamese cats Si and Am, and a stray Pekingese called Peg. In court, she cited a clause in her contract about transcription royalties for radio productions.
“I’ve almost got a law degree out of reading all the legal papers,” she joked. Lee won $2.3 million.
Her reputation as fearsome litigant played a part in the history of The Muppets. Throughout her career, Lee insisted on the full title Miss Peggy Lee at concerts, and once upbraided a British jazz musician for introducing her as plain Peggy Lee. When designer Bonnie Erickson built Miss Piggy in 1974 for an early Muppets TV special, she called her Miss Piggy Lee — “as both a joke and an homage.” Erickson has confirmed the rumours that Lee threatened to sue.
Miss Piggy, as she was renamed, is a controlling prima donna, and Lee’s detractors said the same of her. Jerry Leiber, who co-wrote Is That All There Is? — which sparked Lee’s comeback in 1970 — loved her voice but described her as “a pain in the ass.” Her biographer’s verdict was that she was “an utter narcissist.”
Problems with excessive drinking and pill-popping — especially Valium — took their toll in the 1970s. She became a devotee of a quasi-new Age organization called the Divine Science church. On television, she extolled the theory that “we are a collective one ... I think there is only one intelligence and we are part of it and we use that mind.”
Viewers could sense that Lee was damaged, something Goodman spotted, back in the 1940s, when, according to Lee, he “gave orders that none of the musicians were to come near me.” That didn’t deter the amorous attentions of Goodman’s guitarist Dave Barbour, who was 30 when he married the 22-year-old Lee in 1943. Eight months later, they had a daughter, Nicki.
Lee described Barbour as “the greatest love of my life.” He was, however, an alcoholic, who would sit in their home feeding bourbon to her goldfish. They divorced in 1951, and Lee went on to divorce three more times, after brief marriages to actors Brad Dexter and Dewey Martin, and Jack Del Rio, a bongo player from Las Vegas.
Lee also had flings with Frank Sinatra, Punch’s jazz columnist Patrick Skene Catling, actor Robert Preston and her musical director Quincy Jones.
By 1991, she was spending most of her time on her king-sized bed in California, spaced out on tranquillizers. She ventured out only for lucrative lounge bar gigs in New York and Las Vegas. In 1998, she suffered a stroke, and was never able to speak again.
In her prime, her voice had been admired by Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Iggy Pop and Paul Mccartney.
When Lee died, at age 81, in January 2002, she left behind more than 50 albums, and some of the most bewitching singing of the 20th century.
Peggy had her head in the clouds. She whipped up a Cinderella-like fantasy world in which she hid from reality.