423 Musical Moment

Peggy Lee with The Dave Barbour Quartet in 1950. What an era – smoky nightclub, hot date, mixed drinks, all dressed up.

Her soft, stealthy voice, always lingering behind the beat, hinted at secrets that could never be revealed. Art, artifice and a heady sensuality combined to evoke a pastel dream world ruled by a platinum blond queen of the night.

In the his Lee biography, Peter Richmond  writes:

“She gave the crowds little but a smile and the sidelong glance she was starting to perfect — a look that spoke a thousand words, accompanied by a little sideways drift of the jaw, with the gaze dropping off to the side and her eyelids falling to half-mast. It was nothing but shyness, of course. She was afraid to look someone in the eye.”

At Lee’s peak, that shyness translated into a highly stylized persona that suggested a refined soft-focus hybrid of Billie Holiday and Mae West. If her jazz phrasing closely followed Holiday’s (Lee credited not Holiday but Maxine Sullivan as her major formative influence), the sound of Lee’s purr was purer and warmer; it blurred Holiday’s growled feline edges and bandaged her open wounds. Instead of raw pain, Lee projected a faraway yearning, tinged with regret. She spun one of her signature songs, the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein standard “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” into a wistful personal daydream of the domestic bliss she knew only briefly — at the beginning of her first marriage, to the guitarist Dave Barbour.

From West, Lee took the blatant, self-mocking sexual come-on, and refined it to a subtle set of erotic signals expressed in discreetly rolled eyes, the flicker of a half-smile, the twitch of a shoulder.

Lee was born in Jamestown, N.D., in 1920, the daughter of a hard-drinking railroad worker. Norma Deloris Egstrom, as she was originally named, endured regular physical abuse from a scary stepmother that left lasting psychic scars. Her pursuit of a singing career while in her teens was partly a way to escape that unhappy home. But it was also a response to an inner calling to perform and write songs, stimulated by the swing music she heard on the radio.

Once she went on the road with a dance band, her rise was swift. Her big break came in the summer of 1941, when Benny Goodman hired her to replace Helen Forrest as his lead singer. Some of the richest parts of “Fever” describe Lee’s musical development while working for Goodman, a notoriously chilly taskmaster who viewed his female singers as unfortunately necessary commercial baggage. But mentored by Mel Powell, Goodman’s brilliant pianist at the time, Lee quickly blossomed.

The book comes alive in its descriptions of the grueling two years she spent on the road with Goodman, which ended shortly after she had her first big hit with Lil Green’s sultry swing-blues song “Why Don’t You Do Right?”

Lee found happiness briefly in her marriage to Barbour, the love of her life and the man with whom she wrote her hits “Mañana,” “It’s a Good Day” and “I Don’t Know Enough About You.” The couple had a daughter, Nicki, but the marriage collapsed under Barbour’s worsening alcoholism.

From here on, Lee was on her own, despite three more short-lived marriages and a passionate affair with Robert Preston that went nowhere because he was already married. Her career landmarks — the stampeding mambo recording of “Lover” in 1952, the making of the Sinatra-conducted album “The Man I Love” in 1957, the hits “Fever” in 1958 and “Is That All There Is?” in 1969 (the song was originally offered to Marlene Dietrich) — are described in loving detail here. Her Oscar-nominated supporting performance in “Pete Kelly’s Blues” didn’t lead to a movie career, Richmond maintains, because of rumors that the alcoholic singer she played in the film was a version of herself.

The author, a longtime writer for GQ, recognizes the degree to which Lee’s minimalism was a vocal innovation — she never sang loud or drew out a note for very long. Her genius lay in her rhythm and timing, combined with her blend of singing and acting, which sometimes blurred the distinction between speech and song. Her stylistic fusion of African-American blues and mainstream pop was groundbreaking, too; if you heard Lee without seeing her, you couldn’t determine her race.

Richmond also understands how Lee’s sorcery at conjuring glamour carried a curse. For what is glamour other than the aura surrounding a carefully manufactured illusion? The more powerful its spell, the more it isolates the conjurer inside a bubble in which the chances of losing one’s bearings increase over time. And as Richmond tells us, gently, almost apologetically, Lee began losing hers starting in the late 1960’s, when rock, whose bluntness was ill suited to her subtlety, eclipsed traditional pop. Like her longtime friend and sometime lover Frank Sinatra, Lee nevertheless felt obliged to keep up with the times, usually with shaky results.

The author presents the continuing drama in Lee’s life as an internal struggle between her ferocious drive and musical perfectionism and the residual shyness and uncertainty carried over from her miserable childhood. She drove herself professionally until she collapsed. Then she would take to her bed with assorted ailments, real and imaginary, and find doctors to diagnose and treat them.

At one point Lee came to believe that lying down as much as possible was more healthful than exercising. At various times she relied on alcohol and tranquilizers to keep her pacified. One of the biography’s saddest episodes describes her bizarre meltdown while entertaining at the Nixon White House.

In the patchy final chapters, the author bends over backward to give the smallest triumphs in the years of Lee’s decline more weight than they merit. (She died in 2002.) Even her disastrous autobiographical Broadway show, “Peg,” by which time she suggested an eerie ghost of her former self, is picked over for whatever tasty crumbs he can scavenge. And her late, wispy efforts at songwriting are garlanded in mostly undeserved praise.

Despite the hyperbole and numerous writer’s tics — like Richmond’s lapses into a period jive talk, in which female singers are called canaries — a real person still emerges in this book. That woman (the forerunner of contemporary singers as different as Diana Krall, K. D. Lang and Sade) is a wounded, maddening, magnetic artistic force, who, four years after her death, still remains undervalued.

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Ron rockit

3 years ago

I think she was married to the guitar player………Great Song

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AZ gal

3 years ago

Love this performance! Learned about Peggy Lee too.

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