Review
"Peter Richmond gives the great singer-composer her due. . . . A vivid montage of American pop at its peak."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Here is a fan who has immersed himself in Lee's music deeply enough to understand it to the core. . . . He grasps every nuance of an artist who was all about nuance and minute calculation."--The New York Times Book Review
"Richmond tells a fascinating tale of the singer's rise to stardom."--Baltimore Sun
"This is the rare bio of a golden-age entertainer that doesn't skimp on scandal but is quadruply concerned with conveying musical brilliance."--Entertainment Weekly "Richmond writes smoothly and researches diligently. . . . A gorgeous, eye-opening corrective."--The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) "Loaded with worthwhile detail . . . Richmond writes perceptively about Lee's various albums, never afraid to comment frankly on what worked and what did not."--The Washington Post
About the Author
Peter Richmond has been an award-winning reporter and feature-writer for GQ magazine for two decades. He has covered everything from Rosemary Clooney to sports, and his work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone. He has appeared many times on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He lives in Dutchess County, New York.
From The Washington Post
In the early 1970s, Capitol Records released an album titled "Norma Deloris Egstrom from Jamestown, North Dakota." These were the roots of the singer who, broadcasting over WDAY in Fargo in 1937, borrowed the first name of neighbor Peggy Grant and the middle name of one of Grant's young sons to rename herself Peggy Lee. She and Norma pose an interesting pair, and the duel between the two is a major theme of Peter Richmond's biography of the celebrated singer.Richmond perches Lee on a Mount Rushmore of popular jazz singers, along with Armstrong, Crosby and Sinatra. Richmond's assertion seems a slight stretch and baits a distracting and unhelpful debate. Lee placed her brand on certain songs, as did Armstrong; she was certainly as instinctual a jazz singer as Crosby, and she made you suspect, as did Sinatra, that a darker side lurked. But she could not be rated as influential and penetrating as the other three. Armstrong brought jazz out of its swaddling clothes. Though not the first, Crosby was certainly the quintessential crooner, eclipsing his predecessors and raising the bar for all who followed. Among them was Sinatra, who followed Crosby but established his own brand, a singer whose rendering of lyrics came out of the full experience of life, both bitter and sweet. Lee was more a stylist than a style maker, original to be sure, but not groundbreaking. But there's no debating that she should be included among the great interpreters of American popular song, or that an evening at home listening to Peggy Lee records is an exquisite pleasure.
During the 1940s, Lee carved out a singing style that many would describe as minimalist; she performed without the broad gestures and outstretched arms that were most singers' stock in trade. This compelled listeners, Andre Previn once observed, to focus on the song itself. Previn echoed the opinion of other musicians, that Lee had "the best sense of time" and was, he said, "right in the pocket." Music historians and critics often struggle to classify someone as either a pop or a jazz singer. In Lee's case, her affinity for the blues as well as pop and jazz made versatility her pigeonhole.
Benny Goodman, whose band Lee joined in 1941, brought her to nationwide recognition and did himself no harm in the process. Lee was drawn to black singer Lil Green's recording of "Why Don't You Do Right?" Goodman had it arranged for Lee, and the record enjoyed tremendous sales.
When Goodman brought guitarist Dave Barbour into the band, Lee fell in love with his musicianship and, rapidly, with Barbour himself. The two married in 1943 and left the band in Los Angeles. Lee resisted entreaties to return to music, adamantly choosing to make a home, especially after the birth of her daughter, Nicki. In 1951, Barbour, an alcoholic, asked for a divorce to protect his daughter from seeing him at his worst. Although Lee granted it, she seems to have loved Barbour all her life.
In the early years of their marriage, Lee was often at the kitchen table writing songs. The very fact that she fell in love with a musician all but ensured that she would return to music, and Barbour was unreservedly insistent that she do so. She was soon recording for Capitol, often accompanied by Barbour, and the couple wrote a series of bankable hits, including bluesy tunes such as "I Don't Know Enough About You" and "You Was Right, Baby," as well as the unabashedly upbeat "It's A Good Day." Years later, Lee teamed with lyricist Sonny Burke to write the "Siamese Cat Song" and the others in Disney's "Lady and the Tramp," and Lee voiced the sultry dog named (what else?) Peg.
She was an unremitting perfectionist, carefully ordering the songs in her sets for pace and presentation of a range of moods. Though she earned phenomenal sums for her live appearances, she spent much of the take on the musicians, musical arrangements and clothes that enhanced the singer and her show.
Richmond's book, the first substantial Lee biography, is loaded with worthwhile detail. Wisely, Richmond cites Lee's own autobiography selectively, for her point of view and not as a source of gospel fact. However, easily avoidable errors crop up -- several details of a 1933 recording date led by Benny Goodman are amiss, Joe McCoy was no trumpeter but a guitarist, and the 1943 motion picture "The Powers Girl," while perhaps not in circulation, is hardly "lost." In the first portion of the book, Richmond seems overly taken with the idea of a young girl's destiny and is given occasionally to fanciful metaphors, but as he moves into the better documented years of Lee's life, the account settles down to one of exceptional interest, owing to the extent of Richmond's interviews with her associates and friends.
One thing he makes clear is that Lee was never afraid to be adventurous, and that it usually worked to her advantage. Her visions for the staging of her hit recordings of "Lover" and "Fever" were counterintuitive. "Fever" invited bombast, but Peggy and arranger Jack Marshall lent it a hip coffeehouse sound with the sparest of accompaniment from string bass, drums and finger snapping. For Rodgers and Hart's waltz, Peggy hired eight percussionists and treated "Lover" as if it were "Bolero," intensifying with every chorus. Lee's faith in the darkly comic Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller song "Is That All There Is?" had little support from her label and the tastemakers in the record industry. Capitol gave the record negligible promotion but found itself with a hit anyway.
But Lee sometimes missed the mark. Richmond writes perceptively about Lee's various albums, never afraid to comment frankly on what worked and what did not, and notes the periods when Lee, anxious to remain relevant to the music scene, instead lost her way. His account of her return to her roots on her last albums in the early 1990s is especially poignant.
Lee gave people any number of reasons to shorten their professional and personal associations with her. Her behavior could lose its moorings, even be a little bizarre, such as the occasion when she went into a near-hallucinatory ramble before French President Georges Pompidou at a White House state dinner in 1970. She was demanding of her musicians on the job and wanted them to party with her after hours. A club manager branded her a "high maintenance" attraction. As the years passed, she was plagued by a spate of maladies and accidents -- pneumonia, faints and falls. There was a succession of relationships with men, some strictly spiritual or intellectual, carried out in long distance calls that often came in the middle of the night. An accompanist and conductor who rejected a romantic advance from her recalled that "she would devour people like me." But many others stuck with her. Was it for the gratification of being in the inner circle of celebrity, or for the entertainment value of her unpredictability? No, they remained for the music, and because they recognized Lee's extraordinary if unconventional intellect and empathized with her desperate quest for some sort of inner peace. Performers, she once remarked, "dream of -- and seek -- reality."
Her associates frequently remark on the distinction Lee drew between the stage persona ("I don't want to talk about her") and Norma Egstrom. Richmond seems to accept and embrace this notion as a window into Lee's psyche. Dualities of this sort are frequently a little glib, especially in Lee's case, where there is such chaos that it's difficult to really know at any particular moment which one of her was in charge. However, neither of them failed the music, nor did the music fail her.
Reviewed by Rob Bamberger
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
FEVER
PART IDreamland on the TrainONEIn DakotaON THE BARE stage of a small town hall in the middle of an isolated farm village in a large, empty state, a blond girl sat at a piano with her back to the audience, playing the music she loved more than anything else in life. She was ten years old. The year was 1930. The town was Nortonville, North Dakota.Friends and neighbors had gathered on folding chairs on the floor below. Like most of the people in those times, they had little to spare. The Depression was as unrelenting as the summer winds that scoured their parched topsoil and buffeted the town hall's six narrow windows that day. But the people of Nortonville were happy enough to listen to the girl play, and not only out of a sense of obligation--everyone knew she had troubles at home--but because the fifth-grader with the remarkably upbeat disposition was an obviously talented child.Norma Egstrom had never performed in a venue as grand as the Nortonville town hall. The biggest room she'd ever played before was the practice space behind the sanctuary over at the modest Methodist church, where she sat at the Washburn upright piano. The town hall was the big time, the social anchor of a community boasting one bank, one hotel, threegrocers, a restaurant, a bowling alley, a blacksmith, a livery, a hardware store, and a railroad depot. A long, thin clapboard structure, free of architectural adornment, the hall had been raised from the dirt a dozen years before, in all of three weeks, by townspeople eager to see their crossroads claim some sort of recognition in the beleaguered grassy outback of the southeastern part of their state.It was here that Nortonville gathered to watch the motion pictures, as kids chewed the sunflower seeds that grew in the endless ocean of fields surrounding their homes. It was here that citizens came to hear the lectures that brought news about the world beyond the plains horizon. It was in the hall that they skated, played basketball, and danced. And it was in the town hall that Norma Deloris Egstrom made her public debut in a recital on that summer afternoon in 1930.Finishing her song, she rose from the piano stool and heard the applause: the unequivocal and tangible affection that only an audience can provide, a feeling that can be especially gratifying when acceptance is hard to come by in the usual places. She had always been a shy girl; she would later say that she'd sung before she talked. Now she'd spoken, and she'd been heard.
People in Nortonville who recall that day won't go so far as to say that the girl was the best child pianist they'd ever heard, but they still marvel at her dedication. They speak of her with pride, though some concede that even before she played a note, the members of the audience were already disposed to like her. Norma Egstrom's dad, a father of seven, the station manager for the humble Midland Continental Railroad depot just down the street, was a gentle, kind, whimsical man. But he was also a drinker. He wasn't morose, or somber, or violent, but neither was he responsible or accomplished. Marvin Egstrom was a "rail"--an itinerant depot manager and agent--at a time when depots and railroads dotted the landscape of America.Before his sixth child's birth, Marvin's curriculum vitae had been a checkered one. He'd been a superintendent with the South Central Dakota line down in Sioux Falls until his drinking prompted the railroad to demote him to station agent. After that, he'd hooked up with the Midland Continental, up north in Jamestown, North Dakota, where, according to documents from the archives of the railroad's owner at the time, Egstrom had been associated with a scandal involving fraud and larceny.The railroad had exiled him to Nortonville, with a significant cut in salary, when Norma was eight.Most people who knew him would say that Marvin Egstrom and the everyday did not, in general, make a good fit, especially in a part of the nation where a man was defined by the acreage he owned. The railroad people had no real place there. They worked for a machine that signified transience in a state that was still enough of a frontier to pride itself on roots, literal and figurative. The Midland, not one of the more impressive lines, comprised only seventy-seven miles of track running north and south from Wimbledon to Edgeley with just a dozen stops in between.Marvin Egstrom was a pleasant, ineffectual man who, like nearly all of his family's members, had music in his soul. It manifested itself in unconventional ways, like the performance of an impromptu jig in the post office in the middle of the day, or a solo sung to the rails at two in the morning. "A couple of drinks," recalled one of Norma's classmates, "and her father could do the best soft-shoe dance you ever saw."Marvin's wife, Min--Norma's stepmother--cut a very different figure. She was stout, dour, congenitally cross, and surrounded by rumors. One concerned the freak accident in South Dakota--involving a torch and a frozen valve on a drum of gasoline--that had blown her first husband's head off. Speculation would persist that the man had killed himself. His widow's stern and humorless demeanor did little to lessen the credence of the tale.Other stories came closer to home, and were far more credible: Min Egstrom, it was whispered, beat her stepdaughter.The people of Nortonville (population 125) knew little about Norma's early childhood up the road in Jamestown, the county seat. Jamestown could boast the college and the mighty Northern Pacific's terminal, as well as the headquarters station of the humble Midland. It was also the home of the "bughouse"--the state mental institution, south of town.Norma's real mother, Selma Anderson Egstrom, had died in Jamestown at the age of thirty-nine, when Norma was four. In April 1924, she had given birth to her last child, a daughter named Jean, and was confined to her bed after that. On August 6, Selma passed away, leaving seven children: Norma, her five older brothers and sisters, and her infant sister. Marvin and Selma Egstrom had been married for twenty-one years.With the Reverend Joseph Johnson of the Scandinavian Lutheran church presiding, the memorial service was held in the Egstrom home. Toosmall to peek over the coffin's side, Norma was lifted up to peer into her mother's casket. She would recall seeing a frail woman at rest. Selma Egstrom's remains were sent to her family's hometown of Volga, South Dakota, where she was buried. Norma's infant sister, Jean, went to live with Selma Egstrom's sister until the girl's death, at age fourteen, of "a heart ailment of long standing."Norma was now the youngest in the household: a four-year-old with no mother, an alcoholic father, and her music. It was upon the occasion of her mother's death that Norma wrote her first song. "I remember writing a lyric to the song 'Melody of Love' when my mother died, when I was four," Peggy Lee would recall, many years later when her imagination and sense of her own myth had been heightened. "It wasn't a brilliant lyric, but I think it was interesting that a child would write one. I would walk around the house singing, 'Mama's gone to dreamland on the train.'"Norma's memories of her mother's home were vivid. In later years she would recall Selma's crystal and fresh linen, the scents of her baking, and the melodies her mother sang and played on the keys of her prize possession: a Circassian walnut piano. As in so many households of the time, entertainment in the Egstrom house was left to the creativity of the family, and music had always been part of the Egstroms' lives. Years later, a classmate would remember that both Della and Marianne Egstrom, Norma's two older sisters, had exceptional voices. "But they did not," recalled the classmate, "have the oomph to do anything about it."
Six months after Selma's death, the Egstrom home burned to the ground. Until the family relocated to another place in Jamestown, Norma lived with the former in-laws, and then the parents, of Min Schaumberg, who had been working as the nurse for Norma's married sister Della's first child.Norma enjoyed her time with the elder Schaumbergs as best she could. The old man's meerschaum pipe, his German-language newspaper, his old-world ways--these intrigued and comforted her. Best of all, they had a player piano. During the afternoons, the Schaumbergs would try to coax the girl into taking a nap in the parlor, but she spent more time on her knees pumping the pedals with her hands than she did sleeping.More often, Norma would be in the yard outside, peering out through the black iron picket fence as she waited for her father to visit and take her away, if only for a meal. One day Marvin Egstrom arrived with news: MinSchaumberg would be Norma's new mother. Min's son, Edwin, would be her stepbrother. One year to the week after her mother's death, Marvin Egstrom officially took a new wife. The unusual figure they cut--the thin, pleasant Marvin and the fat, frowning Min--would prompt many remarks."I didn't want to imagine him loving her after mama," Norma would later write in her memoir, Miss Peggy Lee. "I often wondered why Daddy and Min got married. Was it because of what Marianne and I heard ... about Daddy being asked by [his supervisor] to 'fix the books a little for the good of the railroad'? It was something about the per diem reports. Was it because Daddy was drinking and Min knew and might tell on him?"Far likelier was that Marvin Egstrom, a widower with several children, wanted a woman who could run his household while he tried to hold down his own job and his children did their share around the home and in the community. Like all the kids in Jamestown, Norma and her siblings who still lived at home--Marianne and brother Clair--would be sent out to help o...
