[Dixielandjazz] Peggy Lee Biography

[Steve barbone]

For all us old guys on the list who were beguiled by her beauty, her voice
and the way she used it in song.

"From (Mae) 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."

"Is That All There Is?"  Maybe so, ain't none of the latest crop singing as
well as the sexy and very musical Peggy Lee.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

 
'Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee,' by Peter Richmond

Review by STEPHEN HOLDEN - NY TIMES - April 30, 2006

To have experienced the sound and image of Peggy Lee in the 1950's and 60's
was to be bewitched by the pop-jazz equivalent of a film noir femme fatale.
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 Peter Richmond's entertaining but gushy biography, "Fever: The Life and
Music of Miss Peggy Lee," the writing often descends into the purple prose
of a besotted fan. In the prologue, he compares a 1961 performance of "The
Second Time Around" at Basin Street East in New York to a Shakespearean
soliloquy and declares, "So utterly given over to the song was she that to
disturb the spell would have been to risk a fissure in the universe."

But there is a happy side to this wince-making hyperbole: here is a fan who
has immersed himself in Lee's music deeply enough to understand it to the
core. Amid the effusion, he grasps every nuance of an artist who was all
about nuance and minute calculation.

In a more cleareyed mode, he 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.

Stephen Holden is a Times critic who reviews film and cabaret.