Speaker 1: And when it was all over, I said to myself.
Speaker 2: That all there is.
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy, Peggy Lee won a Grammy for Is
Speaker 3: That All There Is? A song many heard as an
Speaker 3: anthem of on we, but not Peggy.
Speaker 1: She saw it as absolutely life affirming and hopeful that
Speaker 1: bad things are going to happen and that you can
Speaker 1: rise above them.
Speaker 4: Greg got the boom, stand back.
Speaker 1: And have a ball, celebrate life in spite of all
Speaker 1: of this that's happening.
Speaker 3: And Peggy Lee had a lot to celebrate. At fifty,
Speaker 3: she was already a legend, an artist of astonishing versatility,
Speaker 3: a heartbreaker, anoles spring, a trailblazer, and a master of cool.
Speaker 5: When you put your arms around me, I get a fever.
Speaker 5: That's a hard began a fever.
Speaker 3: Musically, how many different Peggy Lees over there? God dozens?
Speaker 4: Watch that bringency?
Speaker 2: How it's blooded.
Speaker 6: When there's platin sugar, there's blues things I swinging, there's jazz,
Speaker 6: there's pop.
Speaker 3: Creatively, she seemed utterly unafraid.
Speaker 7: Oh, you want me to do the folks who live
Speaker 7: on the hill, so you'll weep. I can do that.
Speaker 7: You want me to do black coffee, so you think
Speaker 7: it's like, oh, I'm hanging out with junkies at a
Speaker 7: kitchen table.
Speaker 1: I can do that.
Speaker 3: Personally, she was more conflicted.
Speaker 4: I never wanted to be a star.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I wanted to sing around the house and the
Speaker 8: paint and write and raised babies and those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: She would say that all the time.
Speaker 3: Do you think that was what she wanted?
Speaker 1: I think it was on some level what she wanted, But.
Speaker 3: That compulsion to create, she.
Speaker 1: Couldn't tamp it down.
Speaker 9: There was nobody like her.
Speaker 7: Andre Previn, who was a jazz pianist and played with
Speaker 7: all of them, he told me that he thought she
Speaker 7: was the best of them all.
Speaker 3: Does she get the respect she deserves today?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 7: And when Sir Andre Previn says to me, she's better
Speaker 7: than Ella, because Ella could only do certain things at
Speaker 7: which she was the best, but Peggy could do everything.
Speaker 3: That was the curse From CBS Sunday Morning and iHeart
Speaker 3: I'm Morocca and this is Mobituaries This moment Peggy Lee,
Speaker 3: January twenty first, twenty oh two. The death of cool
Speaker 3: I came to Peggy Lee relatively late in life. You
Speaker 3: know how kids are drawn to big, bold colors, Well,
Speaker 3: growing up, I was drawn to big, bold voices like
Speaker 3: bat Banatar, running with the Side, or Broadways, Lori beach
Speaker 3: Me belting it out in Annie and Why, and of
Speaker 3: course Barbara always Barbara.
Speaker 2: Last Lee.
Speaker 3: But Peggy Lee she was more my father's generation of music.
Speaker 3: Wasn't she that woman who sang about the doggie in
Speaker 3: the window?
Speaker 4: How much is that dog in the window?
Speaker 3: Sorry? That was Patty Page? And no disrespect to Patty Page.
Speaker 3: Her Tennessee Waltz undos me every time. The first time
Speaker 3: I really paid any attention to Peggy Lee was well, naturally,
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety seven, when comedian Ellen DeGeneres came out
Speaker 3: to ABC's Diane Sawyer and forty million other people in
Speaker 3: a nationally televised interview.
Speaker 9: Did you have sexual relations with men?
Speaker 1: I slept with.
Speaker 3: Two men.
Speaker 10: Yes.
Speaker 1: Didn't like it. Didn't like it.
Speaker 4: That Peggy Lee song Is that all there is?
Speaker 8: That was going over and over my head the first time.
Speaker 4: Just kept singing, is that all there is? My dear?
Speaker 11: Then let's keep dancing, that's what's going I thought, Am
Speaker 11: I crazy?
Speaker 8: Because I shouldn't be hearing Peggy Lee right now?
Speaker 3: Of course, when I profiled Ellen in twenty eleven for
Speaker 3: CBS Sunday Morning. I had to ask about that. I've
Speaker 3: always wanted to know after the interview, when you came out,
Speaker 3: did Peggy Lee get in contact with you?
Speaker 5: No, No, she didn't.
Speaker 7: That's a good question, though, But I bet I'm not
Speaker 7: the only person who had sex and for the first
Speaker 7: time and had that Peggy Lee song.
Speaker 9: Is that all there is in their head? She did?
Speaker 9: Is that all there is?
Speaker 3: And you give me fever?
Speaker 9: So something must have changed. She must have switched partners, right,
Speaker 9: It's probably true.
Speaker 3: Good. It was then that I started to give Peggy
Speaker 3: Lee a real listen, and I came to appreciate the
Speaker 3: shades of gray in her voice. She could swing with
Speaker 3: the best of them, but she was more likely to
Speaker 3: hold back, like she was keeping a secret. Johnnia, who
Speaker 3: was this woman? Where did she come from? And that wind,
Speaker 3: it's like a rumbling.
Speaker 9: It's powerful, feels like I could blow this house down.
Speaker 3: I met Peggy Lee's granddaughter, Holly Foster Wells, on the
Speaker 3: second floor of an old train depot in the tiny
Speaker 3: town of Wimbledon, North Dakota. There's no other way to
Speaker 3: put it. This place is in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 3: Thirty miles from the big city of Jamestown, North Dakota,
Speaker 3: where Peggy was born in nineteen twenty. Today, this train
Speaker 3: depot is the Peggy Lee Museum. It's also where Peggy
Speaker 3: lived when she was a teenager or standing in her bedroom.
Speaker 1: The first time I came here, and I walked upstairs
Speaker 1: and I stood in front of this window, I burst
Speaker 1: into tears.
Speaker 3: By the way, Holly really looks like her grandmother, blonde hair, saying,
Speaker 3: big bright eyes.
Speaker 1: Even today when we've been talking here, it's like I
Speaker 1: feel I feel her here.
Speaker 3: Peggy was still Norma Dolores Eggstrom when she lived here.
Speaker 1: She wouldn't have been Peggy Lee without Norma. She wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been Peggy Lee without this heartache.
Speaker 3: And the heartache started early.
Speaker 9: Her mother passed away when she was four.
Speaker 1: It was a traumatic event that I think that was
Speaker 1: kind of the beginning of her search, her search for healing.
Speaker 3: Norma adored her father, who was the town's railroad depot manager,
Speaker 3: but he was an alcoholic.
Speaker 9: She helped run the depot when her dad wasn't in
Speaker 9: a good place.
Speaker 3: Even worse, the woman her father remarried was abusive. Peggy
Speaker 3: later claimed her stepmother once beat her over the head
Speaker 3: with a cast iron skillet.
Speaker 8: So I went through all that and I learned a
Speaker 8: great deal from that.
Speaker 3: That's Peggy talking to CBS much later in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 10: I learned how I run real that few other things
Speaker 10: like that.
Speaker 1: She said she would look out at the railroad tracks
Speaker 1: and just imagine where they led. And she said, one day,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna leave this place as soon as I know
Speaker 1: where those train tracks lead. And it was a it
Speaker 1: was a way out. And of course her other way
Speaker 1: out was music.
Speaker 3: Now, radio was still a relatively new technology around the
Speaker 3: time Norma entered high school in the early nineteen thirties.
Speaker 3: Tuning the dials of her Atwater Kent five tube radio receiver,
Speaker 3: she fell in love with the voices of Maxine Sullivan.
Speaker 5: Oh you take the high road, Now take the low road,
Speaker 5: alb and scottlanderfio.
Speaker 3: A young Louis Armstrong.
Speaker 6: I'm so happy, asking me when this wing that music from?
Speaker 3: And Billie Holiday. Yes, this white girl from the tundra,
Speaker 3: who had only ever sung hymns at her Lutheran church
Speaker 3: is listening mostly to black artists. But that's the music
Speaker 3: that spoke to her. At seventeen, Norma was invited to
Speaker 3: audition for the biggest radio station in North Dakota. This
Speaker 3: is Wday Fargo, W Day Fargo. That's when program director
Speaker 3: Ken Kennedy made a fateful decision. As she later recalled
Speaker 3: in a nineteen seventy five interview, the.
Speaker 9: Name Norma Egstrom didn't sound right.
Speaker 4: He said, let's see, you.
Speaker 2: Look like a you look like a Peggy Maggy?
Speaker 9: What Beggy?
Speaker 4: What you need?
Speaker 10: Tried a few names and came up with Lee and
Speaker 10: it was That was really how it started.
Speaker 3: She had the Peggy Lee name. The Peggy Lee sound
Speaker 3: came two years later, after she made her way to California.
Speaker 3: Still unknown, she was singing at the Dollhouse Restaurant in
Speaker 3: Palm Springs before a raucous crowd celebrating comedian Jack Benny's birthday.
Speaker 3: Biographer Peter Richmond, author of Fever, The Life and Music
Speaker 3: of Miss Peggy Lee, describes the scene.
Speaker 7: People are just laughing, and so she's getting pissed off.
Speaker 7: And she's only like nineteen, and she's singing in a
Speaker 7: good club in front of celebrities.
Speaker 3: She's pissed. And that's when Peggy decided if she couldn't
Speaker 3: sing over them, she'd sing under them.
Speaker 7: So she starts singing softer and softer, until people start
Speaker 7: getting quiet because they can't hear her singing. And now
Speaker 7: they're listening, and now they're captured. That's when she understood
Speaker 7: volume wasn't going to be the thing. Nuance was going
Speaker 7: to be the thing.
Speaker 2: Moms like this make me through, though, And.
Speaker 3: Though now there's no recording from that evening, but here
Speaker 3: she is decades later, casting a similar spell over the
Speaker 3: crowd at Manhattan's Basin Street East Club.
Speaker 7: She knew that the more she could get the room silent,
Speaker 7: the more she's got them.
Speaker 1: No, she said, the challenges to leave out all but
Speaker 1: the essentials.
Speaker 3: Peggy would cultivate a style that was as minimalist as
Speaker 3: the landscape she'd grown up in, cool but never cold.
Speaker 3: While singing in Chicago in nineteen forty one, Peggy was
Speaker 3: discovered by the king of swing, Benny Goodman, one of
Speaker 3: the era's biggest bandleaders. Now, Goodman didn't much respect his
Speaker 3: so called girl singers, and Peggy was intimidated by the
Speaker 3: famously perfectionist Goodman. But when he noticed the twenty one
Speaker 3: year old Peggy carrying around a prized possession a record
Speaker 3: of blues singer Lil Green's why Don't You Do Right?
Speaker 3: He was intrigued you.
Speaker 2: Had many money. In nineteen.
Speaker 3: Goodman decided to let Peggy record her own version, and
Speaker 3: it became her first hit.
Speaker 4: Lea the Wama make a who Love You? Why don't
Speaker 4: You Do Right?
Speaker 7: She doesn't even have to worry about finding the rhythm
Speaker 7: from the drummer or the bass player or Benny.
Speaker 3: They're following her rhythm.
Speaker 5: Get out of here and get me.
Speaker 4: The money too.
Speaker 3: It was while touring with Benny Goodman that Peggy, often
Speaker 3: the only woman on the bus, met guitarist Dave Barber
Speaker 3: and the two struck up a romance that didn't go
Speaker 3: over well with Goodman, though, and Barbara was fired from
Speaker 3: the band for quote unquote fraternizing with the girl singer.
Speaker 3: But Peggy liked Dave, I mean, she really liked him,
Speaker 3: and so she quit. She married Dave Barber and gave
Speaker 3: birth to their daughter, Nikki later that year.
Speaker 1: They had such chemistry together that was the love of
Speaker 1: her life.
Speaker 3: There's this duet they wrote and recorded together called I
Speaker 3: Don't Know Enough About You. They filmed the performance sort
Speaker 3: of an early music video.
Speaker 4: I know a little bit about a lot.
Speaker 5: Of things, but I don't know enough about.
Speaker 3: Peggy is playing a teacher, sitting at a desk, fiddling
Speaker 3: with a pair of glasses. She looks so healthy, happy
Speaker 3: and gorgeous. Dave Barber sits off to the side, strumming
Speaker 3: his guitar. These are two people so at ease with
Speaker 3: each other that the picture of contentment.
Speaker 5: You get me in a fish Oh.
Speaker 1: A new arman.
Speaker 3: I don't know, but Dave, like Peggy's father, had a
Speaker 3: drinking problem, and as Peggy's star rose, Dave's drinking only
Speaker 3: got worse and it.
Speaker 1: Broke her heart. But just as she always has done,
Speaker 1: it fueled her music.
Speaker 5: Gazza, don't enough of that.
Speaker 3: After eight years of marriage, Dave Barber and Peggy Lee
Speaker 3: filed for divorce. Coming up personally, Peggy takes on the
Speaker 3: nineteen fifties as a single mother. Artistically, she ends up
Speaker 3: owning the decade.
Speaker 7: Person two Persons with Charles Collingwood.
Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty, cameras from the CBS TV interview series
Speaker 3: Person to Person visited Peggy Lee at her sprawling Beverly
Speaker 3: Hills mansion, also known as the Peach Palace.
Speaker 12: Well, now you've achieved quite a few goals up and
Speaker 12: now what was your main goal as a youngster in Jamestown,
Speaker 12: North Dakota.
Speaker 9: Well, Charles, I had two goals really.
Speaker 10: One was to be a successful singer, and the other
Speaker 10: was to have a family. And I've been very happy
Speaker 10: about having some success, and I have a wonderful daughter.
Speaker 10: And of course as I have gone along, I picked
Speaker 10: up a few more goals. I think it's good to
Speaker 10: have a goal, don't you, Charles.
Speaker 3: I think it is now. When Peggy says she'd had
Speaker 3: some success, that's an understatement. In just the previous decade,
Speaker 3: she had achieved more than most artists could hope to
Speaker 3: in a lifetime. In this act, we're going to talk
Speaker 3: about what made Peggy Lee one of the most important
Speaker 3: musical artists of the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a good day far sanging a song, and
Speaker 5: it's a good.
Speaker 3: Day for one thing. She was a prolific singer songwriter,
Speaker 3: a rarity for women back then. She co wrote It's
Speaker 3: a Good Day with Dave Barber. Peggy was always writing
Speaker 3: back in North Dakota. She wrote poetry and ultimately she
Speaker 3: had credits on more than two hundred and fifty songs,
Speaker 3: sad songs.
Speaker 2: Was then and no no.
Speaker 3: Happy Songs.
Speaker 4: I Dance by Fred Astaire and Brando's Eyes.
Speaker 5: You're Runner's Hair, but I think to tell you is
Speaker 5: only there that I love it with you?
Speaker 3: And a certain Disney classic, What a Dog.
Speaker 9: As a kid?
Speaker 3: Was it really cool for you that your grandmother was
Speaker 3: part of Lady in the Tramp.
Speaker 9: So that's how my friend knew of her.
Speaker 3: That's Peggy's granddaughter, Holly foster Wells. Again, Peggy co wrote
Speaker 3: the score to Lady in the Tramp. But that's not
Speaker 3: all she did on the movie.
Speaker 1: She's the voice of the Siamese Cats. She's Darling the Mother,
Speaker 1: She's Peg in the Dog Pound.
Speaker 2: He's a child.
Speaker 1: I love him, Yes, he love have got it pretty bad.
Speaker 1: My grandmother had a film projector in her house and
Speaker 1: she would take out that film every year and we
Speaker 1: would watch it in the living room sidebar.
Speaker 3: That same year, nineteen fifty five, Peggy scored an OSCAR
Speaker 3: nomination playing an alcoholic saloon singer in the film Pete
Speaker 3: Kelly's Blues. This is a sidebar because well, we don't
Speaker 3: have time to get into all the things that Peggy
Speaker 3: did in the nineteen fifties, blame her for being so
Speaker 3: productive now. In addition to all the songs Peggy wrote,
Speaker 3: they are the ones she all but rewrote. Peggy covered
Speaker 3: a lot of popular songs, often breathing new life into them.
Speaker 3: She took the song Heart from the Broadway show Damn Yankees.
Speaker 2: You Gotta Have.
Speaker 3: All, and gave it a Latin beat, You Gotta. She
Speaker 3: took the song lover a Waltz from the Rogers and
Speaker 3: Heart musical Love Me Tonight, Speak My Name, and well
Speaker 3: listen to what she did to that. She takes that
Speaker 3: and turns it into something kind of wild.
Speaker 7: Her final notes have been likened to an orgasm.
Speaker 3: And in nineteen fifty eight, she took the song Fever,
Speaker 3: originally recorded by R and B singer Little Willie John.
Speaker 8: You never know how much love, never know how much
Speaker 8: I care.
Speaker 3: And gave it a new, stripped down arrangement, just bass
Speaker 3: drums and finger snaps.
Speaker 4: Never know how much I love you.
Speaker 7: She's keeping so much in If this is the only
Speaker 7: thing to signal what you're singing about, that's powerful.
Speaker 5: When you put your arms around me, I gave a fever.
Speaker 4: That's a hard thing you give.
Speaker 3: Me It became the biggest hit of her career. That
Speaker 3: sequence in the middle that sounds almost like beat poetry.
Speaker 4: Roam me O loved Julia.
Speaker 3: Peggy wrote that.
Speaker 5: When he rounder, he said, Julivy, you my fame.
Speaker 4: Now give us fever.
Speaker 3: Also listen to the way she delivers those lines. Peggy
Speaker 3: had been blurring the line between talking and singing as
Speaker 3: far back as her Benny Goodman days. Here she is
Speaker 3: on Coal Porters, Let's do It back in nineteen forty one.
Speaker 5: Up Leland, little lapts, do it well, Let's do it,
Speaker 5: Let's fall in.
Speaker 3: The way she just tosses off the words let's do it.
Speaker 3: Peggy came up with that. Now. Fever may have been
Speaker 3: Peggy's biggest commercial success, but her artistic apex came with
Speaker 3: the release of the album Black Coffee.
Speaker 7: You can really feel her coming into the kitchen after
Speaker 7: a long night and just looking at the coffee and saying, Wow,
Speaker 7: it was worth it last night, but I gotta have
Speaker 7: that now.
Speaker 3: Here She is on the album's title track.
Speaker 4: Black Coffee Loves a hand Mawnbreu.
Speaker 3: Black Coffee was one of the very first concept albums
Speaker 3: ever recorded. It's about a woman's lonesome experience being in
Speaker 3: love with a man she can't trust. The Milestone record
Speaker 3: is now considered one of the best vocal albums in
Speaker 3: jazz history.
Speaker 7: She becomes Cool in that album.
Speaker 3: Black Coffee also cemented Lee's status as the high priestess
Speaker 3: of pop jazz, acclaimed by critics and the masses alike.
Speaker 3: Could Peggy Lee have only happened at the time that
Speaker 3: she did.
Speaker 9: Yes.
Speaker 3: Biographer Peter Richmond says Peggy was peaking just as black
Speaker 3: and white musical traditions were intermingling in the mainstream.
Speaker 7: Peggy was able to incorporate so many different rhythms and emotions.
Speaker 7: And she was, and I really think I can say this,
Speaker 7: she was unique. There was nobody like her.
Speaker 3: Later in her career, Peggy told one writer quote, I'm
Speaker 3: not really a white singer. I sing black. I always have.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 3: When Peggy made that comment in nineteen seventy four, it
Speaker 3: had to have rankled many, just as it certainly would today.
Speaker 3: There's a terrific essay about Peggy Lee written by culture
Speaker 3: critic Gerald Early. He's a professor of English and African
Speaker 3: American studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. Early writes
Speaker 3: about the profoundly uneasy history of white performers emulating a
Speaker 3: black sound, from Louis Prima to Elvis to eminem. Peggy,
Speaker 3: he points out, didn't just emulate black singers. She literally
Speaker 3: and famously would imitate Billie Holliday.
Speaker 4: I love you first time. I love to them. You
Speaker 4: got a certain and acute way of friendly.
Speaker 8: So what was that about? Was she a big fan
Speaker 8: of Billie Holidays. She was a huge fan of Billy Holidays.
Speaker 8: She absolutely loved her music. And I heard that Billie Holiday. Well,
Speaker 8: wasn't so crazy about my grandmother because I heard that
Speaker 8: she felt like, not just my grandmother, but other people
Speaker 8: too copied her. But as my grandmother's voice matured in
Speaker 8: her career developed, you don't hear anybody but Peggy Lee.
Speaker 3: Gerald early in that essay seems to agree that Peggy
Speaker 3: was an original. He writes that she invented the hip
Speaker 3: white female vocalist. He describes Peggy's imitation of Billy Holliday
Speaker 3: as more than quote some sort of lame white girl
Speaker 3: imitation of the great black jazz singer. It was an
Speaker 3: expression of how accomplished Lee was as a jazz singer
Speaker 3: and how much she respected holiday end quote. Peggy Lee
Speaker 3: had deep bonds with black artists throughout her career. She
Speaker 3: was an early champion and friend of Ray Charles. When
Speaker 3: one of her childhood idols, Louis Armstrong, died in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy one, it was Peggy Lee who was invited to
Speaker 3: sing the Lord's Prayer at his funeral, for.
Speaker 2: That is the King and the Poe and the Blood.
Speaker 3: And when CBS aired a star studded tribute to Duke
Speaker 3: Ellington produced by Quincy Jones, Peggy Lee was the only
Speaker 3: white solo artist featured, alongside Sarah Vaughan, ROBERTA. Flack, and
Speaker 3: Aretha Franklin. If I'm the Duke Ellington once said, Peggy
Speaker 3: Lee is Queen. Peggy had earned that title in the
Speaker 3: nineteen fifties. She was no longer just a big band
Speaker 3: singer Benny Goodman's Canary. Critically and commercially, she was an
Speaker 3: artist of the highest order, on a par with Frank Sinatra.
Speaker 3: But for all the hit songs she'd recorded, the one
Speaker 3: that was closest to her heart wasn't one she'd written
Speaker 3: or radically reimagined.
Speaker 5: Someday We'll build a home on a hill top.
Speaker 11: You and I.
Speaker 9: Shine so the folks who live on the hill.
Speaker 1: That's her very favorite song, and I think it just
Speaker 1: paints this picture of an idyllic relationship and growing old
Speaker 1: together and always having that soulmate by her side.
Speaker 3: Peggy recorded it in nineteen fifty seven. The song was
Speaker 3: written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein twenty years earlier
Speaker 3: as a romantic reverie.
Speaker 4: We will Whiz because.
Speaker 3: But Peggy's version is different. She's singing about something that
Speaker 3: was never to be on that trumpet.
Speaker 7: It's just so plaintive, the mournfulness of wishing a house
Speaker 7: on the hill that will never be yours and really
Speaker 7: doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: And that's what she really wanted. So she hoped to
Speaker 1: have with my grandfather. And she married three more times
Speaker 1: after that, But it was not those were she called
Speaker 1: those costume parties. Actually, well, I think she didn't think
Speaker 1: they were real. They weren't real love affairs. She certainly
Speaker 1: fell in love with many people throughout the years. I
Speaker 1: just think maybe it was too much for these men
Speaker 1: to be mister Peggy Lee. And and I don't know
Speaker 1: that any man could have really given her the love
Speaker 1: that she wanted. The closest she got to getting that love,
Speaker 1: I think was from the audience.
Speaker 3: On the other side of the break. Miss Peggy Lee
Speaker 3: the icon.
Speaker 11: Well, I can scoop up a great, big difference full
Speaker 11: of lag from the dripping skin and look in the skill,
Speaker 11: go out and do my shopping and be back to forth.
Speaker 3: By the nineteen seventies, Peggy Lee had become Miss Peggy Lee,
Speaker 3: a bona fide icon, even inspired the Muppets character Miss Piggy,
Speaker 3: originally named Miss Piggy Lee, the.
Speaker 11: Baby greased the car and pot of my face all
Speaker 11: at the same time.
Speaker 1: She thought that was pretty fantastic. I mean that pig
Speaker 1: is glamorous.
Speaker 3: Miss Peggy is the is the paragon of glamour.
Speaker 9: Right, and she's a diva. And my grandma was a diva.
Speaker 3: So growing up in that era, Holly Foster Wells spent
Speaker 3: summers touring with her grandmother, beginning when she was just six,
Speaker 3: and frankly, I'm kind of jealous.
Speaker 9: So you would go on the road with her, Yeah,
Speaker 9: tell me about that. She would take me all over
Speaker 9: the world.
Speaker 1: I would dress up in her gowns and we would
Speaker 1: have breakfast in bed. We'd watch soap operas, and then
Speaker 1: it would be time to get ready for the show.
Speaker 1: Then we had to get serious because that was a
Speaker 1: process of becoming miss Peggy Lee.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it was. It was like a four hour process.
Speaker 9: And she starts first with a bubble bath, and then
Speaker 9: the makeup, and then the hair and the gowns.
Speaker 3: There's a great story about a fan meeting her grandmother
Speaker 3: in an elevator on the day of one of her shows.
Speaker 1: She had a scarf and she had curlers and sunglasses
Speaker 1: and someone looked at her and said, are you Peggy Lee?
Speaker 9: And she said not yet.
Speaker 3: Now, we've talked plenty about Peggy as a recording artist,
Speaker 3: but we haven't really touched on her as a live performer.
Speaker 9: I would just be in awe of what she could do.
Speaker 1: And I would see grown men crying, and I would
Speaker 1: see couples holding hands and people. You could hear a
Speaker 1: pin drop and this was really mesmerizing.
Speaker 2: See sid.
Speaker 3: See what there's a tape of her singing CC Rider.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it's a hypnotic.
Speaker 9: I know exactly what performance that is.
Speaker 1: And she early moves like she just moves a little
Speaker 1: shoulder and just her face and it's so sexy.
Speaker 3: That performance was at Bason Street East. We mentioned it earlier,
Speaker 3: a legendary Manhattan nightclub that no longer exists. Now, I
Speaker 3: can tell you that if I could get in a
Speaker 3: time machine and go back and near her live, I
Speaker 3: would choose to go back to Basin Street East, the
Speaker 3: club in New York City where she really triumphed.
Speaker 1: Right, absolutely, And if I could go back into time machine,
Speaker 1: that's when I would go back.
Speaker 3: Because you're my plus one or I'm your plus one exactly.
Speaker 3: We don't have a time machine. But luckily Peggy recorded
Speaker 3: everything on real to reel tapes from sessions with her musicians.
Speaker 4: Because one thing isn't very.
Speaker 3: Clear, to sessions with her psychic how many.
Speaker 1: Times have you been married?
Speaker 8: Well, married once and sort of married three times, so.
Speaker 3: It's four, right and lucky us. Holly has agreed to
Speaker 3: play some of those recordings, including a behind the scenes
Speaker 3: moment with Peggy and one of her favorite artists.
Speaker 1: Well, my grandmother loved the music of Ray Charles. He
Speaker 1: pitched to her a song he'd written called tell all
Speaker 1: the World about You.
Speaker 2: You're so fun and you're so sweet.
Speaker 5: How's going on?
Speaker 2: You're so sweet, You're so fun?
Speaker 5: Oh my goodness, I can't even remember my own thing
Speaker 5: I gotta do.
Speaker 1: And then she actually went in and recorded it. She
Speaker 1: put her own spin on it.
Speaker 5: You're so fun and you're so sweet, you can love Anuskin.
Speaker 4: Talk about.
Speaker 3: Peggy's home recordings also capture her goofing around with family.
Speaker 1: So my grandmother was rehearsing at home, and my dad
Speaker 1: and my mom and my brother were watching her rehearsal,
Speaker 1: and then in the middle of it, she just decides
Speaker 1: to bring out balloons and start sucking helium.
Speaker 12: Ya lasa One'm from a lasa, Run for maball, run
Speaker 12: for a little living and lung.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's Peggy Lee singing on helium.
Speaker 12: Ba bay every well, Yes, yeah, yese hey begs.
Speaker 3: By the early nineteen eighties, Peggy was thinking seriously about legacy.
Speaker 3: In nineteen eighty one, the great Lena Horn had had
Speaker 3: a smash hit with her own one woman Broadway show.
Speaker 3: Now it was Peggy's turn, as the sixty three year
Speaker 3: old discussed with NBC's Gene Shallett in nineteen eighty three, Peggy.
Speaker 10: You've got a new show coming on Broadway called Peg, Right,
Speaker 10: so I want to know about that. Well, it's called
Speaker 10: Peg because it's about my life, and.
Speaker 1: I wrote it, and.
Speaker 10: I started writing this for someone else to play. I mean,
Speaker 10: there was going to be a show about you, but
Speaker 10: someone else would play your life?
Speaker 3: Yes, that chance? I mean, who else was going to
Speaker 3: play Peggy Peg was a musical, of course, with original songs,
Speaker 3: mostly co written by Peggy. It opened on December fourteenth,
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty three. It closed three days later.
Speaker 1: It was one of I would say, her greatest failures
Speaker 1: actually in her career. She was really, really just devastated.
Speaker 1: It felt like a rejection of her life.
Speaker 3: Because the show was autobiographical, it was a better life.
Speaker 1: But and quite frankly, some people felt it was too depressing.
Speaker 3: There was one song about Peggy's stepmother beating her. It
Speaker 3: was an up tempo song.
Speaker 5: For eleven years, there was at least one beating a day,
Speaker 5: one leading a they.
Speaker 2: For eleven years.
Speaker 4: There was at least one beating a day, so.
Speaker 3: Many do you remember how the audience in the Broadway
Speaker 3: theater reacted to that?
Speaker 1: That was an awkward moment in the show because people
Speaker 1: didn't know if they should laugh or cry. It was confusing.
Speaker 3: In The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote, for those
Speaker 3: who respect Peggy Lee as a vocalist, but who don't
Speaker 3: worship her as a public personality. Peg may seem bizarre,
Speaker 3: and that was one of the nicer things written about it.
Speaker 3: And I can imagine that the reaction to that probably
Speaker 3: really shook her and made her think, have I just
Speaker 3: lost my touch?
Speaker 1: I remember her being defensive, like, this is my life,
Speaker 1: Like wait, I'm so sorry if this is sad for
Speaker 1: you or hard for you, but this is my life,
Speaker 1: Like I'm just telling you what I went through. And
Speaker 1: if it's hard for you to hear about, think about
Speaker 1: how it was to live it.
Speaker 3: And away from Broadway, Peggy Lee's live performances weren't hitting
Speaker 3: like they used.
Speaker 1: To, so she aged, but these songs didn't age with her,
Speaker 1: so she sometimes would approach them in a campy way.
Speaker 1: And I don't know that that how that resonated with audiences,
Speaker 1: if they liked it or not.
Speaker 3: With her oversized sunglasses and outlandish wigs and kaftans, Peggy
Speaker 3: was becoming a punchline.
Speaker 1: I would be backstage with her and during intermission she
Speaker 1: would want me to give her honest feedback about what
Speaker 1: people were thinking in the audience, and she'd go on stage.
Speaker 1: I'd run out watch the show, and I'd even go
Speaker 1: and listen in the ladies room what people were saying.
Speaker 1: And there came a time when I didn't want to
Speaker 1: tell her those comments anymore because people were really critical, like, oh,
Speaker 1: she sounds good, but she doesn't have the voice that
Speaker 1: she used to have, or while she's gained weight, or wow,
Speaker 1: or you know, people are really they come in with
Speaker 1: their own expectations.
Speaker 3: There were things that were hard for you to hear
Speaker 3: and write, and hard to report back.
Speaker 1: Right and things. So I didn't want to tell her,
Speaker 1: you know, it was hard.
Speaker 3: By this point, Peggy's health was failing, in part due
Speaker 3: to exhaustion.
Speaker 1: She really never took a vacation. She would write about
Speaker 1: places like Paris, but she wouldn't go there. She didn't
Speaker 1: go there and slow down.
Speaker 3: After a bad case of pneumonia, she became dependent on
Speaker 3: an oxygen tank. By the nineteen nineties, she was using
Speaker 3: a wheelchair and suffering complications due to her diabetes, and
Speaker 3: spending more and more time at home in bed. And
Speaker 3: how long would she be in bed?
Speaker 1: Sometimes she could just be in bed until the next
Speaker 1: time she went on the road, which could be months. Yes,
Speaker 1: and she's learned to do everything from her bed, from
Speaker 1: her bedroom, so it was like an office. She would
Speaker 1: write songs in her bed. There's one I want to
Speaker 1: play for you. That's so beautiful, haven to.
Speaker 2: Lonely more too long and too.
Speaker 3: So gorgeous, so much longing.
Speaker 1: That's why we're all drawn to her songs though. It's
Speaker 1: that longing that we all have, and then she just
Speaker 1: puts it into words and song for us.
Speaker 11: Cut up here.
Speaker 2: I guess I wouldn't know read for me because I
Speaker 2: haven't long too long.
Speaker 3: Were there times when you'd see her in bed and think, now,
Speaker 3: I wonder if she could get up and walk out
Speaker 3: of here?
Speaker 1: She absolutely could, and I know that because well she
Speaker 1: would have dinner parties where she would at least go
Speaker 1: from the bedroom to the dining room. But there was
Speaker 1: also a time when I got in a car accident.
Speaker 1: Someone t boned men intersection and really badly destroyed my car.
Speaker 1: I was okay, thank goodness, but I called her and
Speaker 1: she was there in like ten minutes, with her turbanon
Speaker 1: and her sunglasses, looking very glamorous. But she was there
Speaker 1: in ten minutes.
Speaker 3: In nineteen ninety five, a seventy five year old Peggy
Speaker 3: Lee performed from a wheelchair at the Hollywood Bowl. After
Speaker 3: the show that night, Holly told her grandmother that it
Speaker 3: was time.
Speaker 1: I just said, it just seems like it's getting harder
Speaker 1: for you. She didn't ever want to be thought of
Speaker 1: as a joke. She wanted to go out on a high,
Speaker 1: and that was the end. That was the last performance.
Speaker 3: Holly says, Peggy remained a romantic until the very end.
Speaker 1: One of the ways I know that is when I
Speaker 1: fell in love with my husband and told her, oh, Mama,
Speaker 1: I've met a boy, and she wanted to know everything.
Speaker 1: It was like she was reading a romance novel. She
Speaker 1: just ate it up. She at that point was beyond
Speaker 1: romance for herself. But she loved watching me have a romance.
Speaker 1: And I'm so grateful that she was able to be
Speaker 1: at our wedding. We got married in June of nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight, and she had her stroke in October.
Speaker 3: Peggy Lee died of a heart attack on January twenty first,
Speaker 3: twenty oh two, at the age of eighty one. There's
Speaker 3: a PBS documentary on Peggy that was made in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty nine, the year before she released Is that all There?
Speaker 3: Is Peggy is wry and sophisticated. Here an artist who
Speaker 3: knows what she wants.
Speaker 10: I choose a material that lets me tell a story.
Speaker 4: You know, it's a nice way.
Speaker 3: To make a living. I wants talk to a musician
Speaker 3: who said, your voice is one of the greatest musical
Speaker 3: instruments ever ever created.
Speaker 4: Whoever that was, I love it.
Speaker 3: And yet there's something about the way she's wearing her hair.
Speaker 3: Here you can see her artistry, but she's also she's
Speaker 3: wearing her hair and pigtails, so there's something also kind
Speaker 3: of girlish at the same time.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, there's I always said there was a little
Speaker 1: girl in her.
Speaker 9: Sometimes I would see that childlike.
Speaker 1: Quality, and I think it was she was always looking
Speaker 1: for our mom. She was a powerful woman with a
Speaker 1: powerful career, but there was that little girl there always.
Speaker 3: What do you think she was trying to do with
Speaker 3: her voice?
Speaker 7: She had to get out of the childhood physically as
Speaker 7: well as metaphorically.
Speaker 3: That's biographer Peter Richmond.
Speaker 7: Again, she had to leave behind the thing she was leaving,
Speaker 7: and she's doing it with one tool, the voice and
Speaker 7: the rhythm and the perfect pitch and the talent she
Speaker 7: had in writing lyrics that others couldn't. That was her
Speaker 7: way of feeling a psychic wound.
Speaker 1: She said she wanted to leave a legacy, and she
Speaker 1: really did.
Speaker 3: One final note today, Holly Foster Wells manages the Peggy
Speaker 3: Lee estate, which includes all those songs her grandmother wrote.
Speaker 3: Despite offers, Peggy never sold the rights to her written work.
Speaker 3: Just like Dolly Parton, Joni Mitchell, Taylor Swift, great singer
Speaker 3: songwriters who came after her. Peggy Lee understood the value
Speaker 3: of what she had created.
Speaker 4: And it's a good day. Ah, shine in your shoes and.
Speaker 2: It's a good day.
Speaker 3: I certainly hope you enjoyed this mobituary. May I ask
Speaker 3: you to please rate and review our podcast. You can
Speaker 3: also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can
Speaker 3: follow me on the social media platform formerly known as
Speaker 3: Twitter at morocca. Hear all new episodes of Mobituaries every
Speaker 3: Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts, and check out Mobituaries
Speaker 3: Great Lives Worth Reliving, the New York Times best selling book,
Speaker 3: now available in paperback and audiobook. It includes plenty of
Speaker 3: stories not in the podcast. This episode of Mobituaries was
Speaker 3: produced by Aaron Shrank Our team of producers also includes
Speaker 3: Hazel Brian and me Morocca, with engineering by Josh Han.
Speaker 3: Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Our archival
Speaker 3: producer is Jamie Benson. Mobituary's production company is Neon Hum Media.
Speaker 3: The original television version of this story was produced for
Speaker 3: CBS Sunday Morning by John Demilio and edited by Steven Tyler.
Speaker 3: Indispensable support from Alan Pang, Reggie Bazil and everyone at
Speaker 3: CBS News Radio Special thanks to Holly Foster Wells and
Speaker 3: the Estate of Peggy Lee, Steve Razies, Rand Morrison, Craig Swaggler,
Speaker 3: Mike Hernandez, Alberto Robina and Francisco Robina. Executive producers for
Speaker 3: Mobituaries include Megan Marcus, Jonathan Hirsch, and Mo Roca. The
Speaker 3: series is created by Yours Truly