37 BREAKS A NEW HEART EVERY DAY: PEGGY LEE
Somebody asked me recently if I always dress up, and I do, even for rehearsals. But when I plant roses, or paint, I wear karate clothes.
Peggy Lee
On Christmas Eve 1941 the Benny Goodman Sextet went into the studio to record Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Where or When’. The lyric was romantic, charged by its own confusion: ‘It seems that we have met before, and laughed before, and loved before. But who knows where or when?’ Given that America had entered World War II a fortnight earlier, the recording – so hushed and uncertain, its celeste suggesting a child’s music box, a quiet storm of pasts – was doubly poignant. The vocalist on ‘Where or When’ was twenty-one-year-old Peggy Lee.
Two years later, she appeared with Goodman in the movie Stage Door Canteen, walking onto the crowded bandstand for a couple of choruses of ‘Why Don’t You Do Right’.I Short of space, Lee’s arms hung by her side, and the only movement she allowed herself was a rhythmic twitch in her hip throughout the song. She was smiling, as was the custom for band vocalists in the early 1940s, but under piled-up platinum hair, her eyes were looking around the room, telling a different story, one that went with the hard-line lyric. She had the languid phrasing of Billie Holiday and she looked like mischief. DownBeat and Metronome had described her as ‘cold’ when she had first appeared in 1941; now they considered her Goodman’s finest canary. Though doing very little, she was clearly in charge. While Goodman’s other girl singer of the time, Martha Tilton, had a not dissimilar voice, it was far less authoritative; her face was a monochrome photo, snapped and trapped in the early 1940s. Martha Tilton was the girl waiting patiently at home. Peggy Lee wasn’t going to wait for anyone.
Originally, she was Norma Delores Egstrom, a North Dakota farm girl with Norwegian and Swedish blood. The full weight of Lee’s furs and jewels and compound-eye sunglasses could never entirely hide her roots. Even after moving to Greenwich Village in the 1940s, she didn’t feel at home unless she had a twenty-five-pound sack of potatoes in the kitchen. She would still make her own bread, leaving the dough to prove in a warm closet while she skipped town to see a boyfriend two hours away in Washington DC. Norma Delores Egstrom was a small-town girl, but she represented the height of metropolitan elegance.
‘Why Don’t You Do Right’ had peaked at number four on the Billboard chart in January 1943, and no matter how much Benny Goodman thought canaries were little more than a necessary evil, to be kept in their cage whenever possible, it was Lee who made the record a hit. While she was filming Stage Door Canteen, though, she discovered she was pregnant. Dave Barbour had been the guitarist in Goodman’s band; fraternising with the girl singers was strictly forbidden, but Peg ‘had to chase him for a year! He’s the type who wouldn’t admit he was attracted to me… but at night after the shows he was always there to drive me home.’ When Goodman found out about the pregnancy, he was furious. Pianist Mel Powell and arranger Eddie Sauter had just left him – now this? Barbour was sacked, and married Lee in a shotgun wedding. He carried on working; she stayed at home playing mother. ‘I’m retired,’ she told Dave Dexter of Capitol Records, America’s hottest new label. ‘I don’t sing any more.’
But what she did while she was changing nappies and washing dishes was write her own songs, with Barbour coming up with guitar accompaniment. Domesticity couldn’t hold her. By 1945 Peggy was a solo star: ‘Waitin’ for the Train to Come In’ (‘I’m waiting for my life to begin, waiting for the train to come in’) and the coy ‘I Don’t Know Enough About You’ were both self-penned and both reached the US Top 10, and by 1946 she had been voted top female singer by DownBeat. Biographer James Gavin said she had an ‘enticing sense of the forbidden’, which was part of Peg’s appeal, but so was the darkness that drew her towards material like Willard Robison’s ‘Don’t Smoke in Bed’ (‘Goodbye, old sleepy head, I’m packing you in like I said’) and the daffiness that led her to sing like Speedy Gonzales on ‘Mañana’ (a number-one hit for nine weeks) at the very same session in 1948.II
Peggy Lee’s voice was about minimalism. Her range wasn’t huge, but she knew exactly how to use it. Unlike the crooners of the 1920s and ’30s, she was sparing with vibrato and most effective when she seemed to have run out of breath, dipping at the end of a line and stopping dead. You could hear her wink, cock her head. She was funny, sensual, and one of the definitive jazz vocalists. She worked around a melody, picked out off-beats, audibly teased and put her hand on her hip, all the while keeping the rhythm ticking so you barely noticed. The door was always left slightly ajar so that you could enter her world and get lost in her mink jazz; or you could just as easily walk on by and never know what you’d missed. Lee was never going to try too hard to lure you in; she’d rather just lie there and wait. ‘We are Siamese if you please,’ she’d say. ‘We are Siamese if you don’t please.’
Throughout the 1950s and ’60s she remained pop’s Mona Lisa, unknowable, enigmatic and most desirable. Playing at Hollywood’s Ciro’s nightclub in 1951, she experimented with the lighting, employing sudden blackouts to crank up the mystique. On record she could disinter Little Willie John’s hot and heavy ‘Fever’ one minute, getting to the nub of its sensuous strength, then melt like a butter statue on ‘Mr Wonderful’ the next. She could swing hard too: 1959’s ‘Jump for Joy’ was packed with some of Nelson Riddle’s brassiest arrangements, and Peg sassed her way through the Boswell Sisters’ ‘When My Sugar Walks Down the Street’, Billie Holiday’s ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’ and Fred Astaire’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’. On darker ballads – her narcotic takes on Ray Davies’s ‘I Go to Sleep’ (1965) and Michel Legrand’s ‘I Was Born in Love with You’ (1971), or the unsettling ‘I Can Sing a Rainbow’ (from 1955’s Pete Kelly’s Blues) – she employed a numb patience, a scary sense of resignation. Whether upbeat or low, it was a hypnotic sound, a cocoon of all-enveloping breathiness; at all times she sounded as if she was reclining into a huge consignment of furs. ‘I have a lot more voice than I ever use,’ she would say. ‘I ration it, and it’s lasting very nicely.’
Miss Peggy Lee never sounded girlish, though there was a sense of artificial sweetness on some of her earliest recordings with Goodman. This had gone by the time of Black Coffee (1954) and Dream Street (1955), two intimate song cycles that revealed Lee as an ideal singer for the album age. The title track of Black Coffee features the definitive 1950s jazz vocal; Lee’s opening note is preceded by an intentionally audible breath, a subtlety that simply wouldn’t have been possible on a pre-war recording, let alone something from the acoustic era. How far things had moved along! And what was more 1950s, more stylish, than a pot of fresh black coffee, preferably French or Italian strength?
Though Black Coffee would become a touchstone LP over the years, cited as a favourite by Joni Mitchell, among others, Dream Street was even better. A lot of its mood could be put down to arranger Sy Oliver’s light touch, using harp and glockenspiel to add sweet perfume to Lee’s delicate vocals and cushioning many of the verses with nothing but solo piano. The opening to ‘Street of Dreams’ created an empty nocturnal cityscape; there was a heavy frost on the woodwind-and-plucked-guitar intro to ‘Too Late Now’, with the brushed drums a carpet of snow that Lee delicately tiptoed over; and her ‘What’s New’ was quietly devastating, her sad smile failing her – head bowed – on the climactic ‘I haven’t changed, I still love you so.’
More uncompromising yet – and eventually shelved by a nervous Decca – was the avant-garde folk of Sea Shells, recorded by Lee in 1956 and only released two years later, when she left the label. Throughout, Lee was accompanied by just harpist Stella Castellucci and harpsichord player Gene DiNovi. The lyrics referenced ‘ruined old forts’, ‘green habitation’ and ‘butterflies powdered with gold’. ‘The White Birch and the Sycamore’ opened with ‘One day, when I was feeling very low’, before incorporating a conversation between a field mouse and a wren. Four of the tracks were entirely instrumental; two more were translated Chinese poems. In places it sounded like muzak from forty years hence; at the very least, it left a marker for ‘new age’. It’s hard to think how odd it must have sounded to the A&R men (and they would have all been men) at Decca. It’s as singular as Mel Tormé’s California Suite, the Beach Boys’ Smile or Herbie Flowers’ Plant Life, and I’ll lay good money on Stevie Nicks owning a copy.
Having Sea Shells rejected by Decca wasn’t Lee’s only disappointment in 1956. A year earlier, Walt Disney’s Lady and the Tramp had afforded her a chance to write for a movie for the first time, and she sang ‘He’s a Tramp’ (‘What a dog!’) like the Mae West of old. It’s quite shocking that none of her contributions – ‘He’s a Tramp’, ‘Siamese Cat Song’, ‘Bella Notte’ – was even nominated for an Oscar (the 1956 winner was Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster’s gooey theme for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing). In sympathy, DownBeat wrote that ‘few contemporary figures possess her many applied talents and fewer still can match her consistent record’.
Still, the real treasure was in the down-tempo albums. No Peggy Lee album was more seductive than 1957’s The Man I Love, which celebrated her return to Capitol after Decca had rejected Sea Shells. It was produced and conducted by Frank Sinatra, at a time when both singers were at the top of their game. Here, however, Sinatra played host, getting the studio ready for Peg, dimming the lights just so, a gin and tonic ready for her as soon as she walked through the door. Her voice was so intimate, so hushed and breathy, that it felt like she was somehow inside you, right there, inside your thoughts. Nelson Riddle’s unobtrusive arrangements provided a warm cocoon – it was just you and Peg. She sang, ‘Someday we’ll build a home on a hilltop high, you and I,’ the opening line of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s ‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill’, and the message was one of impossible hope. Maybe it’s just me, but I hear the song from the perspective of a woman stuck in the city, with no obvious way out, nowhere to go other than her internal Dream Street. Maybe she’s in a new, post-war tower block, isolated in the sky, scared to meet the new neighbours, killing time. It has an unreal quality, and it gets me every time.
Twin totems of 1950s vocal jazz, Sinatra and Lee were peers, equals, and clearly admired the heck out of each other, but their approaches were opposite extremes. Sinatra laid his life out for you; that was what he did, and that’s why he was so relatable. Lee, on the other hand, was a deep and impenetrable mystery. She sang of life, but not her life; it was quite abstract. She was a farm girl from North Dakota, but one who wore space-cadet shades and beaded headdresses. Songwriter Mike Stoller called her ‘a nice bunch of gals’. When the rock wave threatened to engulf the post-war stars, Peg adapted with the twanging guitar and (slightly staid) doo-wop backing on 1957’s ‘Every Night’. It wasn’t a hit, but her sizzling, stripped-back take on ‘Fever’ went Top 10 in Britain and America the following year. Peg’s purr aside, there was nothing to it apart from finger clicks, stand-up bass and strategically placed bongos that got animated in all the right places. She even added a couple of new verses – one about Pocahontas and one about Romeo and Juliet – which gave it an added wink. As a bridge between vocal jazz and modern R&B, it couldn’t be bettered, and Elvis Presley would copy Peg’s version almost note for note on his 1960 album Elvis Is Back.
Atmosphere and mystery, smoke and mirrors – Lee didn’t want to open up about herself. She wanted the listener to absorb her experience and use it to delve into their own half-buried memories and complex emotions. 1961’s If You Go was arranged by jazz’s golden boy, Quincy Jones, a couple of years before his pop crossover with Lesley Gore’s ‘It’s My Party’, the hit single that would ultimately lead to him producing Off the Wall and Thriller. If You Go, though, with its almost apologetic, half-finished title, was as sensitive and controlled as ‘It’s My Party’ was brassy and blubby. In fact, it featured no brass at all, with just woodwind and string arrangements cosseting a downcast Peg as she sang ‘As Time Goes By’, ‘Chaplin’s Smile’, Cahn and Van Heusen’s ‘Here Comes That Rainy Day’ and Frank Loesser’s ‘I Wish I Didn’t Love You So’. She could break a new heart every day. Clearly, she had been places and seen more than any of us ever would, probably more than we would care to. There was never any emoting for the sake of it, though; Lee’s power was in her restraint, which, even on a feline novelty like Chip Taylor’s ‘Sneakin’ Up on You’, was absorbing. Her intensity was always intimate; the climactic note, bathed in echo, towards the end of ‘Don’t Smoke in Bed’ was as close as she would ever get to belting.
Lee also diverged from Sinatra in her taste and take on modern pop in the 1960s and ’70s. Sinatra audibly hated having to record Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’ in 1966, and sang it like someone’s creepy uncle. Peg would turn to Ray Charles (‘Hallelujah, I Love Him So’) and Leiber and Stoller (the delicious ‘I’m a Woman’) in the early 1960s; then to Tim Hardin, the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Kinks in the mid-’60s; Goffin and King (‘Natural Woman’) and Sly Stone (‘Everyday People)’ at the decade’s end; and back to Leiber and Stoller for her ultimate party piece, ‘Is That All There Is’, in 1969.
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had been slightly put out that Miss Peggy Lee never got back to thank them for ‘I’m a Woman’, a rollicking, blues-based, first-wave feminist anthem that came out in 1963, just as Merseybeat was breaking. Both thirteen years Lee’s junior, the pair had repositioned her career with the song’s quickfire, hard-line lyric: ‘I got a twenty-dollar gold piece says there ain’t nothing I can’t do. I can make a dress out of a feed bag and I can make a man out of you.’ She never bought Leiber and Stoller a bottle of Scotch, never took them out to a ball game, never even asked them for another song – ‘I’m a Woman’ had been Grammy-nominated, for Chrissakes! A few years later, immersed in the chaos of late-1960s America and looking for something deeper than the teenage pop that surrounded him, Leiber read a Thomas Mann piece called ‘Disillusionment’. He peered into the existential emptiness within and began to write – not a song, but a narration. Your house burns down. So what? You fall in love. So what? You die. Whatever! Stoller decided the perfect musical setting for this über-cynical spiel would be the 1930s cabaret feel of Brecht and Weil. First off, they offered it to Marlene Dietrich. ‘That is who I am,’ said the great singer, when Leiber sang it to her, ‘not what I do.’ Next, Barbra Streisand received a demo, but never responded. It was too bad that Peggy Lee wouldn’t be interested, they sighed – she’d be perfect. But they thought, ‘What the hell,’ and handed her a tape after a show at the Copacabana. A week went by. Then she called them up and said, ‘If you give this song to anyone but me, I will kill you. This is my song. This is the story of my life.’
‘Is That All There Is’ was arranged by another Jewish smart alec and master of the observational, Randy Newman, a kid who had been born the year ‘Why Don’t You Do Right’ made Peg a star. Between them Leiber, Stoller and Newman created something that was warm, funny and entirely death-haunted. It was released in 1969, a few months before Lee turned fifty, and a few months after Sinatra recorded his winter-of-my-years, ‘and now the end is near’ epic ‘My Way’. That was chewy and bombastic. Lee’s summation of life was very different – an eye-roll, a shrug – and the message of her song was not endless libertarian defiance, but ‘Let’s break out the booze… let’s keep dancing.’
In 1974, as Sinatra relived the good old days with shows at Caesar’s Palace, Lee would be given a tailor-made Paul McCartney song called ‘Let’s Love’ – written just after Wings’ Band on the Run album had been released – that ached in all the right places. With its minor-chord piano backing and weightless, seductive, dream-state lyric (‘Lover, let’s be in love and discover that night is the flight of the butterfly’), ‘Let’s Love’, as much as ‘Is That All There Is’, was Lee’s perfect late-career coda. The world’s greatest and most famous songwriters visiting her misty house on the hill, paying their respects, bearing her gifts – it was exactly what she deserved.III
- I. I always imagine Lee singing ‘Why Don’t You Do Right’ to actor Dan Duryea, the go-to Hollywood creep for roles like the slimy blackmailer in Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window and the lazy-ass pimp in the bleak noir Scarlet Street. He always came to a sticky end.
- II. Robison had been a bandleader in the 1920s, and at one point employed Bix Beiderbecke. But by 1948 he was drinking heavily and getting by on the royalties from his biggest hit, ‘A Cottage for Sale’. When he discovered Lee was going to record a song of his, he went to her home town of Jamestown, North Dakota. ‘I just sat on a curb and thought about you,’ he told her, ‘and then I went home.’
- III. McCartney was paying tribute to one of his favourite singers. He had sung ‘Till There Was You’ on With the Beatles in 1963, a song from The Music Man that Lee had made her own in 1961. In the same year as ‘Let’s Love’, puppet-maker Bonnie Erickson came up with a slightly less flattering tribute: she created a puppet called Miss Piggy Lee, in part as an homage to a famously strong and independent woman. ‘But as Piggy’s fame began to grow, nobody wanted to upset Peggy Lee, especially because we admired her work,’ recalled Erickson. ‘So, the Muppet’s name was shortened to Miss Piggy.’