Quick Review: Is That All There Is? The Strange Life of Peggy Lee

Is That All There Is? The Strange Life of Peggy Lee, by James Gavin


Mabel Mercer sat down.  Being by then a lady of a certain age and no longer comfortable on her feet, America's Queen of the Cabaret caused cushions to be piled beneath her and sang from a dais; a jazz maharani draped in silks, performing Cole Porter medleys that ran like a rāga into the wee hours of many a Manhattan mornings.

Still, it's no easy thing to grow old.

Rosemary Clooney clung to the piano like a survivor in a lifeboat. Her stories got longer and funnier as her breathing grew laboured and her phrasing shorter.  She could swing right to end, but she relied on the ballads to see her through.  In her last recorded concert, in front of the Honolulu Symphony Pops, her voice is wistful and warm, and almost girlishly slight.  In a strange, rather rueful way, Rosie sounds young again, very young.  It's magical and frankly sad.

As with most things in America, it's easier for the guys.  Sinatra as an old man was nonetheless the Chairman of the Board to the end and was consequently forgiven everything; from the bad toupees and the misread lyrics off a teleprompter to the hints or irascibility with the band, then led by his long-suffering Jr.  Bing was almost born middle-aged.  Satchmo, the founding father, survived caricature and opprobrium to see himself declared statesman, thank God.  And when his baritone broke here and there as he grew old, Joe Williams let it happen.  It sounds like a choice, and a deeper interpretation, like the Spirit caught him and the emotion was too much.  Jazz forgives old men, loves 'em, accommodates them, records them and gives them awards.

Still true today.  So long as he has those big notes to land on, the last bang in the last bar to hit square, Tony Bennett can drift gracefully along through the songbook, as sure as a skiff on a lazy river. 

It's harder, I imagine, as with most things to be a woman, and a singer and to grow old gracefully.  Opera singers retire, mostly.  Pop stars tend to caricature, the sexy ones anyway. (And when was the last time a pop star wasn't meant to be sexy?  Kate Smith?)  For women in jazz, generally the clubs get ever more "intimate", and, I imagine, the money tighter.  Maybe it's changing.  Jazz tends to a tight circle now anyway. Once upon a time, the stars were brighter for being more remote.

Peggy Lee became a ghost long before she died.  Her latest and best biographer, James Gavin has an unenviable task: how to write about a woman, a great star from the zenith of jazz's popularity, who lived to see, -- hell, to stage -- her own funeral? (See "Peg: The Musical.")  It's all a bit gruesome in the end. And yet...

I saw Miss Peggy Lee, as she was invariably billed by then, live, just the once.  The lights went down, the band played on, and on, ... and on.  Eventually she emerged from a tight spot: dark glasses, white wig, white feathers, white everything, with roughly six inches or so of actual, visible Peggy Lee under the shades and above the marabou collar.  Was her hand actually bandaged?  Was there a glove?  Anyway, her mic seemed to float in and out of one marabou cuff.  An apostate at our table whispered, "jazz mummy," and was summarily hushed.  And yet, it was easily one of the most magical performances I ever witnessed.

Gavin understands this and explains it, that magical intimacy with her audience, better than anything I've ever read about the lady.  In part he is able to do this, and to give the great artist her due, because he is the first biographer not of her cult.  There are facts to be faced, at last.  In her long and storied career, Peggy Lee recorded some crap records.  She gave some memorably awful concerts, including an epic, drunken disaster of a command performance at the Nixon White House.  She wrote some embarrassingly childish poetry, and faithfully followed the infantile "wishing will make it so" practise of Ernest Holmes' "New Thought." She made, as they say, bad choices.  Worse in a way, here at last we encounter a star who wasn't always very nice, or sober, kind, or smart.  This is a damaged woman from an unhappy home, if not quite the Dickensian nightmare she embroidered in her memoirs.  Her intimate life was a bit frantic, her domestic life was fraught and shrouded in fantasy.  As a mother, she was a mess.

Finding and recording such witnesses as there still are, sorting through all of the bullshit: the publicity, true and false, the self-mythologizing, the lies, and writing honestly about such a confused life must be an unhappy business for any biographer intent on preserving the memory of an admired artist.  Gavin's impatience is palpable throughout.  Strangely enough, it is exactly this that gives new weight to his appreciation of the singer.  For her previous biographers and ghosts, Peggy Lee was first the heroine from one of her own songs, then an untouchable icon, and finally the Blue Fairy.  For Gavin, she is a deeply flawed human being who also happens to have been a great musician, a pop star, the hippest white woman of her time, and one of the greatest jazz singers of all time.  It is to the artist he is loyal, even rapturously devoted.  (Gavin gives, for example a spirited and well reasoned analysis of some of the later recordings, including the, to me, unlistenable late album Mirrors.)  If then he is startlingly blunt about her short-comings as a person and a performer -- and that's as gently as that can be put -- it would seem to come not from any lack of respect or affection.  Clearly, despite it all, he still digs Peggy Lee.

As do I, come to that.

Anyone with an interest in jazz will by now have grown used to a certain candor in the biography of the men who made it.  No other way to talk about the hard living, the heroin, the harsh on the buzz, the blues, behind so much of our best American music.  But there is something ungentlemanly about writing this way about a lady, I suppose.  Old fashioned notion, but true.  Nobody now bats an eye at what Pops was smoking backstage, how many gigs Charlie Parker missed, how many hearts Chet Baker broke.  I should think if anything, for the men at least, it all adds to their mystique.  But for the Daughters of Billie, for the great women of jazz, their failures and flops, their bad marriages and habits, everything in short that makes them only too human and flawed must be recast as tragedy to be tolerated, even now. 

Peggy Lee understood this herself, thus perhaps not only her Horatio Alger autobiographies down the years, but also so much of the self-generated drama of her latter life; the mysterious illnesses and injuries, the lawsuits, the loneliness and isolation.  As Gavin's biography shows, her life was less a tragedy than a train-wreck; a weird, sometimes wonderful trip, uphill and down until she finally, slowly, steadily slipped the rails.  Quite a ride, though.

I've never been one of those who love a ruin.  Not for me those last, mournful recording of the broken Lady Day.  I like my Billie still out in front of the beat, the band and the devil.  Likewise, though I own all those late Peggy Lee records too, I seldom listen to them.  In a phrase I learned from Gavin's book, the Lee I love is the singer once described by a fellow musician Grady Tate as "Lady with another Lady on top of it."  Not to my taste the eerie wraith of those last recordings, this despite how enchanted I was, all those years ago by the "jazz mummy" in marabour and blazing pink spotlight.

Here, from the book, Gavin defining the indefinable: "Lee's inscrutable smile, her simmering sexuality, her skewed sense of humor, the whiff of anger -- all of it added up to that hard-to-define but compelling sense of less-is-more known as cool."

Seems it took a lot, not all of it nice, to make that cool.

Since I read James Gavin's biography I've been listening to a lot of Peggy Lee.  A lot.  I've lost myself in her masterpieces like Black Coffee, and Dream Street, triumphs like Basin Street East Proudly Presents Miss Peggy Lee, I'm a Woman, and Beauty and the Beat! I've tapped my toes to all those glorious sides when she was out in front of her beloved Dave Barbour and the boys, or when she sang better than anybody for Benny Goodman.  I've been listening over and over again to Is That All There Is?

It's no use regretting who the woman was or what the singer became.  One can wish she'd been better at being happy, that she'd taken better care, that her end had somehow justified the means, and the meanness.  Whatever.  Peggy Lee made the most of not very impressive voice, a sterling ear and the best rhythm of her generation.  She created a body of work and a recording catalogue likely to last as long as we listen to great singing.  She was a songwriter and lyricist, a band-singer and soloist, a pop star, an actress and a jazz musician, and yes, a bit of a she-devil.  I love her, still.

Reading James Gavin's excellent new book only showed me how much.

RIP, Peg.