"I
was
in New York again, singing
at Basin Street East and living at the
Waldorf. One day the phone rang, and that
voice said, 'Hello Peggy? Cary Grant.'
"
" 'Oh, hello!' My
hands were shaking. I managed to pull
myself together..."
That was Miss Peggy Lee
talking in her autobiography of the same
name, about her thing with Cary Grant.
She gets him a table at
Basin Street East, he plays the piano for
her, she writes songs for him to record,
they feed the pigeons in the park ... and
years later, she tells him she can't
bring herself to call him by name.
"When you walk
into the room, everything stops for
me," she confides to him.
"After all these years, I don't
address you by name – never call you
Cary."
Well,
that one was all quite platonic, Cary
being married to someone else, but then
there was "Roger," not his real
name. Writes Peggy:
"I was in Las
Vegas when I met him, and when I first
saw that face, I knew it meant trouble,
but I also knew there was no other
choice. "
The veil is swiftly
drawn on "Roger," and soon
there is another face amid the pages,
that of her late husband, guitarist Dave
Barbour.
"It's a fact that
I used to spend as much time looking at
David as I did looking at the new house.
What a magnificent face! I used to think
he was a cross between Cary Grant,
Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus. Our songs
were Duke Ellington's 'Perdido' and 'Warm
Valley.' "
Harder to face was
Benny Goodman, a momentary admirer with
whose band she became a star back in the
1940s, when she was in her 20s. It wasn't
hard getting hired.
"All he said was,
'Come to work and wear someting pretty.'
" But then Benny cooled off on her
when she tried to sing
"Skylark" while inadvertently
taken drunk.
Lee writes of Bing
Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum,
Ronald Reagan, Danny Thomas, Robert
Preston, Rudolf Nureyev, Mel Powell,
Count Basie, Gordon Jenkins, Johnny
Mandel – only a few of the famous faces
(by no means all of them male) that fell
under her strangely poised gaze, among
the millions who sucumbed to the
strangely poised voice.
But
she kept the most special place for
Charlie, who came to he side as the
honors and the years gathered about her
head.
"Charlie was an
IPPV machine," she said.
"That's an intermittent positive
pressure breathing mahine. I had to
breathe with it to keep expanding my lung
and aerating it," Lee recalled.
"I took it on the road. I had two of
them.
"I used to have to
take five treatments a day." This
was during the 1970s, after a bout of
double pneumonia. She gave up the
machines toward the end of that decade,
but another collapse revealed a heart
condition, diabetes and Meniere's
disease, a condition of the inner ear.
Temporary blindness ensued.
But Miss Peggy Lee
refused to retire and kept right on
touring. In 1985, she suffered a heart
attack while appearing in New Orleans,
underwent a double heart bypass, and
developed a staph infection.
It
was her lifelong good friend Sinatra
who sent a plane to bring her
back to L.A. so she could recuperate in
her splendid house atop a hill in
Bel-Air.
There, in the company
of her staff and her cat, Baby, she got
herself back together. Since she couldn't
entertain at the little dinners she likes
to give, the cat, a silver chinchilla,
was happy to take over.
"One night I was a
little late getting dressed and I came
out and she had the entire group in a
circle while she did her little
tricks," Lee said with admiration.
"She stands on her
hind legs and walks, and she leaps into
the air and does a little twirl, and she
can walk around in Baccarat crystal
without disturbing anything."
