Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee

Too Good for Her Own Good

Peggy Lee was "too good for her own good," as the jazz critic George Hoefer discerned in 1959 (a remark quoted in this book, though it's misattributed to John Tynan). The range of her talents and the reach of her appeal obscured her extraordinary accomplishments and somewhat dented her prestige. Listeners won over by her gigantic pop hits were at a loss when she returned, as she always did, to her jazz roots. But some jazz purists shunned her because of such crossover recording successes as "It's a Good Day," "Golden Earrings," "Mañana," and the songs in Disney's Lady and the Tramp -- all of which she wrote.

Peggy Lee, of course, was one of the first great singer-songwriters (she amassed more than 200 composing credits). She was also among her era’s finest recording artists (with her 1956 Black Coffee, which epitomized world-weary sophistication for a generation, she pioneered the "concept album"). She was, moreover, the greatest chanteuse of her age (her minimalist and confessional style perfectly suited the intimacy of the nightclub, and her act at Ciro’s in the 1940s and, above all, her engagement at Basin Street East in the winter of 1961 remain legendary). She was, as Hoefer declared, simply "the greatest white female jazz singer since Mildred Bailey."

To some, this is like being declared the best Jewish player in the NBA. But in fact Lee interpreted the urbane lyrics of the American songbook with a knowingness, a resigned wit, a refined intelligence, a quizzical irony -- conspicuous already in her first recording triumph, "Why Don’t You Do Right?" with the Benny Goodman Band -- that Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday could not approach. On stage she didn’t emote; she arched an eyebrow. The introspective, slightly New Agey, domestically oriented Lee also led an unusual life for a female entertainer of her time. Many of her closest friends were men -- Bing Crosby, Johnny Mercer (her mentor as a lyricist), Jimmy Durante, Frank Sinatra (only with the last was she romantically linked). For a good part of her career, she was a single mother. Her unremarkable 1989 autobiography (which, alas, she insisted on authoring without the aid of a ghost writer) revealed little about the nature of those friendships or her experiences raising her daughter, although it was famously direct, if understandably opaque, regarding her traumatic childhood on the plains of North Dakota (Lee’s father was an amiable but ineffectual alcoholic; her stepmother beat her with sadistic regularity). This book, which perforce draws heavily on Lee’s, adds little to that picture.

Richmond, though, firmly grasps Lee’s musicianship, even if his sound judgments often lack specificity (he doesn’t, for instance, assess precisely the enduring influence of the Goodman Band, for which she was the canary from 1941 to 1943, on her phrasing and technique, although he rightly and astutely acknowledges her 1942 recording with the band of "Where or When" -- the loveliest rendition ever of that supremely lovely song—as a landmark of her "maturing style"). But he fails to put Lee -- in many ways as emblematic of mid-century America’s cultural and sexual style as was Sinatra -- in a broader context, in the way that Gary Giddins brilliantly did for Bing Crosby. Musicians, for the most part, leave scant documentary records. So a great biography, like Giddins’s, must be as much a cultural history as a life history. Five singers warrant that sort of treatment: Armstrong, Holiday, Crosby, Sinatra, and Lee. Only one has yet received it.

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