Peggy Lee, the husky-voiced jazz singer who oozed sex appeal and artistry in equal measure, has died aged 81.

Lee, who had a stroke three years ago, suffered a heart attack at her home in Bel Air, California, Nicki Lee Foster, her daughter, said yesterday.

Best known for such hits as Fever and Is That All There Is?, Lee recorded more than 50 albums. She had a brief flirtation with a screen career, receiving an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for her role in Pete Kelly’s Blues.

Although she filled large concert halls, Lee was thought by many to be at her best in the intimate, nightclub settings. Some critics thought she was closer to pop than other jazz singers, but many still put Lee on a par with Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald.

“I would certainly class what she did as jazz,” Pete King, the owner of Ronnie Scott’s club in London’s West End said yesterday. “She was a great performer with a wonderful knowledge.

“She both wrote her own material and was very good at picking up other people’s and developing it.”

Married four times, Lee, a striking blonde, became an icon for many younger artists.

Kate Dimbleby, the star of Fever, the making of Peggy Lee, said the late singer had a “pretty special” voice, which she applied to styles from Big Band to pop.

“She had a sultry voice with attitude. It had a real softness with a sense of self behind it. Audiences felt as if she was whispering into their ear.”

Like many other hopefuls, Lee began by working in Hollywood as a waitress, occasionally picking up nightclub work. Her big break came when Benny Goodman heard her singing at a Chicago hotel and invited her to join his band.

She married Dave Barbour, Goodman’s guitarist but they divorced because of his alcoholism. She later married two actors, Brad Dexter and Dewey Martin, and the percussionist Jack Del Rio.

“They weren’t really weddings, just long costume parties,” she confessed.

A diabetic dogged by weight and health problems, throughout much of her life, she nearly succumbed to double pneumonia in 1971. In 1985 she underwent major heart surgery, but still carried on performing.

Johnny Dankworth, the jazz conductor, writer and musician, said the news of her death was “a nasty surprise”.

“She was a jazz great who bridged the gap with pop, but she was a true jazz singer who didn’t pander to the lowest common denominator, which on occasion Sinatra did.”

Dankworth’s wife, the singer Cleo Laine, said: “It is a great loss. What set her apart was her wonderful laid-back rhythm, but few people realise she was also a very good lyricist.”

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Singer-composer known for hits, film scores, B’way

by Richard Natale
Variety, January 23, 2002

Peggy Lee, the singer-composer whose husky, seductive voice brought a distinctive touch to such pop hits as “Why Don’t You Do Right,” “Fever” and “Is That All There Is?,” died Monday at her Bel Air home. She was 81.

Lee rose to prominence as a big-band singer in the 1940s, and continued her reign through the 1980s as she cut more than 60 albums, wrote several pop standards and performed on concert stages throughout the world. In addition, she contributed to film scores, copped an Oscar nomination as supporting actress in “Pete Kelly’s Blues” (1955) and appeared on Broadway in an autobiographical concert revue in 1983.

With her unique phrasing, Lee managed to inject a great deal of emotion and humor into her songs — a surprising feat, considering her low-key, almost breathy singing style. She began developing her “cool” technique at the Doll House in Palm Springs, Calif., in the early 1940s. According to Lee, her vocal method was born of necessity: Unable to shout above the din of the audience, she tried to capture their attention by lowering her voice. The softer she sang, the quieter the audience became.

Critic George Hoefer in Downbeat magazine described her as “the greatest white female jazz singer since Mildred Bailey,” but English jazz critic Peter Clayton went further, dubbing her “quite simply the finest singer in the history of popular music.”

She was also active in several philanthropic organizations throughout her life; though plagued by ill health and having to use a wheelchair for over a decade, she served on the boards of several charities.

Born Norma Doloris Engstrom on May 26, 1920, in the farm town of Jamestown, N.D., Lee was the seventh of eight children. She hailed from Norwegian and Swedish ancestry, and her father, Marvin, was a station agent for Midland Continent Rail Road. Her mother died when Lee was 4.

After graduating from high school, Lee moved to Hollywood with singing aspirations. She was briefly employed at the Jade Room supper club, but otherwise made her living as a waitress. Dispirited, she returned to North Dakota, securing singing work on radio station WDAY, where the station manager renamed her Peggy Lee.

After moving to Minneapolis, she began singing in supper clubs and on the Standard Oil radio show. She joined Sev Olsen’s band and then, briefly, was a vocalist with Will Osborne’s group.

Lee returned to California, landing a job at the Doll House in Palm Springs. While there, she was discovered by Frank Bering, the owner of Chicago’s Ambassador West Hotel and was invited to sing in its Buttery Room, where Benny Goodman heard her. He was looking for a replacement for Helen Forrest and brought Lee on in July 1941. For the next two years, Lee toured the country with his band.

“I learned more about music from the men I worked with in bands than I’ve learned anywhere else,” she once told an interviewer. “They taught me discipline and the value of rehearsing and even how to train.”

In 1942, Lee recorded “Why Don’t You Do Right?,” which sold over 1 million copies and established her as a recording star.

With husband Dave Barbour, a guitarist with Goodman, Lee also began to write and compose music. She left the Goodman band, had her only child, Nikki, and began to record for Capitol Records. Among her biggest hits were “Golden Earrings” (which also sold more than 1 million copies); “It’s a Good Day”; “I Don’t Know Enough About You”; and “Manana,” which sold more than 2 million singles.

Lee made her film debut in 1950 opposite Bing Crosby in “Mr. Music,” and then appeared in Danny Thomas’ 1953 version of “The Jazz Singer.” It was during this period that she wrote poems that would be collected in a book, “Softly, With Feeling.”

In 1955, her performance as a down-and-out blues singer in “Pete Kelly’s Blues” brought her an Oscar nom.

Lee also made prominent offscreen contributions, writing the theme music to the films “Johnny Guitar,” “About Mrs. Leslie” and the George Pal fantasy “Tom Thumb.” For “Anatomy of a Murder,” she collaborated with Duke Ellington on the song “I’m Gonna Go Fishing.”

In the ’50s, she had a monster hit with “Fever,” a deadpan ode to carnal frenzy that took full advantage of her playful vocal sexuality and became one of her signature tunes. Lee’s cool, jazzy style transcended all categories and she remained a popular singer long after the advent of rock ‘n’ roll. Her 1969 version of Leiber & Stoller’s “Is That All There Is?” became another of her trademark tunes and one of her most durable songs. The smart tune, a sung-spoken chronicle of a world-weary woman, earned her a Grammy for pop vocalist.

In 1960, she was a regular on CBS’ “Revlon Revues” and a frequent guest on musical variety and even some dramatic television shows.

In 1982, she was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors. The next year, she opened on Broadway in “Peg,” in which she performed 26 songs, including her biggest hits. In his Variety review, Richard Hummler said, “Musically, the show is flawless,” but lamented the “awkwardly written, mawkish autobiographical material” in which Lee told her life story with a combo of narration and recorded voiceover dialogue.

Throughout the ’80s, Lee suffered from a number of debilitating illnesses including pelvic fractures; open-heart surgery; and a chronic goiter, which threatened her singing voice.

Lee’s last great triumph was in the halls of justice in the late 1980s, when she successfully sued the Walt Disney Co. for breach of contract and unlawful enrichment over her work in the animated “Lady and the Tramp.” After a protracted battle, Lee was awarded $2.3 million, based on Disney’s $90 million in profits from the “Lady” videocassette sales.

In 1955, Lee had written the lyrics and provided several voices for the Disney toon. She was paid $3,500 and received an additional $1,000 for the use of six songs she and Sonny Burke wrote for the film. She retained recording rights and transcriptions, but like most contracts at the time, there was no provision for ancillary rights such as video.

When Disney released “Lady” on video in 1987, and reportedly reaped profits of $90 million, Lee sued Disney for $50 million, claiming it violated her transcription rights. The original $3.8 million judgment in her favor was modified to $2.3 million, but was considered a landmark win by a performer against a major studio.

After divorcing Barbour, Lee would remarry, to actors Brad Dexter and Dewey Martin; those marriages also ended in divorce.

She is survived by her daughter, Nicki Lee Foster; her grandchildren, David Foster, Holly Foster-Wells and Michael Foster; and three great-grandchildren.

(Timothy M. Gray contributed to this report.)

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As a devotee of the big-band era, I was saddened to read about the death of Peggy Lee (“Peggy Lee’s smoky voice falls silent, but endures,” Life, Wednesday).

After leaving North Dakota at age 17, Lee had her first big break in 1941, when Benny Goodman heard her perform at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago and hired her on the spot.

However, the gorgeous blond really didn’t blossom as a singer and songwriter until she met her husband, guitarist Dave Barbour.

I never really appreciated this sentimental and warm human being until the day I walked into my 90-year-old grandmother’s home and found her listening to the radio. She told me to “sit down and be quiet. Peggy Lee is singing.”

One of Lee’s biggest hits was Is That All There Is?

Lee surely will find out — Mañana.

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Dubbed ‘the Queen’ by Duke Ellington, the indomitable Miss Peggy Lee and her smoky voice set the standard in swing

by Gayle MacDonald (with files from the Associated Press)
Toronto Globe & Mail, January 23, 2002

Peggy Lee’s voice was small, encompassing little more than an octave and a half. But her sultry, purringly seductive interpretation of the tunes she sang — the raw emotion she poured into hits such as Fever or Is That All There Is? — left indelible imprints on anyone who loved swing, the big-band sound or jazz.

Miss Lee died late Monday night of a heart attack at her pink palace (so named for its nude colour) in Bel Air, high in the Hollywood hills where she reigned as a pop legend the past 40 years.

The woman — once dubbed “The Queen” by jazz great Duke Ellington — was 81.

“She made audiences feel glad to be alive,” said Toronto impresario Gino Empry, who has known Peggy Lee for almost 25 years, from the days he booked her into the city’s glitzier venues like The Imperial Ballroom in the Royal York Hotel.

“She realized everyone had some problems . . . of loneliness, unhappiness, broken romances. And she communicated that to the audience. But, most of all, she told people you can beat it off. You can overcome all that. You can survive.

“One day we were talking on the phone,” Mr. Empry remembers. “And she complained to me: ‘I wish they’d stop calling me a legend.’ But I said: ‘Darling, you are a living legend.’ To which she replied: ‘Legends are dead and don’t get jobs.'”

During her half-a-century-long career, Miss Peggy Lee, the ash-blond with the cool, breathy voice, recorded more than 631 songs and 60 albums, including such classics as Big Spender, Manana and the ruminative Is That All There Is?, the latter winning her a Grammy Award in 1969.

She performed with some of the biggest names in show biz, like Mr. Ellington, Benny Goodman, Benny Carter, Frank Sinatra, to name a few. She was considered in the same league as Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzgerald. Besides being a singer, she was also a gifted lyricist, composer and musical innovator, says long-time friend Gene DiNovi, a veteran piano man who worked for Miss Lee in the 1960s.

“She was someone who never sang a note out of tune, or a note out of time,” says Mr. DiNovi, 73, who lives in Toronto. “She was one of the few performers who was a complete musician who became popular, which is a rarity.

“In other words, most people who are big stars are not necessarily musicians. She was. Her greatest skill — like all truly great singers — was her ability to communicate, to generations of listeners.”

George Hoefer of Down Beat magazine called her “the greatest white female jazz singer since Mildred Bailey,” and Leonard Feather in The Encyclopedia of Jazz (1960) described her as “one of the most sensitive and jazz-oriented singers in the pop field.”

Born Norma Deloris Engstrom in Jamestown, a farm town on the Great Plains in North Dakota, Miss Lee was only 4 when her mother died and her father, a railroad station agent, left home. Through sheer grit, she rose from an abusive Depression-era childhood (her stepmother physically abused her), and decided to become a singer at age 14, when she would earn 50 cents a night at gigs for local PTAs.

A few years later she travelled to Fargo, N.D., where she sang on a local radio station. The program director suggested a name change, and she became Peggy Lee.

Her legend has it that Miss Lee eventually arrived in Hollywood with $18 in her pocketbook, supporting herself as a waitress in between nightclub jobs.

Benny Goodman, then the King of Swing, hired her to sing with his band after hearing her while she was performing at a Chicago hotel.

A string of hits, notably Why Don’t You Do Right? — her challenge to an unreliable man — made her a star. Then she fell in love with Mr. Goodman’s guitarist, Dave Barbour, and withdrew from the music world to be his wife and raise their daughter, Nicki. But she returned to singing when the marriage fell apart eight years later.

“I kept blaming myself for his alcoholism and the failure of our marriage,” she said once in an interview. “And I finally understood what Sophie Tucker used to say: ‘You have to have your heart broken at least once to sing a love song.'”

Three husbands followed after Mr. Barbour — actors Brad Dexter and Dewey Martin and bongo player Jack Del Rio — but all of the marriages were short-lived. Miss Lee once said of her last three trips to the altar: “They weren’t really weddings, just long costume parties.” (Miss Lee and Mr. Barbour were about to get back together in 1965, Mr. Barbour having been sober for 13 years, but before it could happen he died of a heart attack.)

Through her tumultuous personal life, Miss Lee’s smoky voice kept her a favourite in radio, on records and later in television. She collaborated with Sonny Burke on the songs for Disney’s 1955 animated classic The Lady and the Tramp and was the voice who sang He’s a Tramp (But I Love Him).

Her work on that film led to a landmark legal judgment 36 years later when a California court awarded her $2.3-million (U.S.) after she sued for a portion of the profits from the videocassette sales of the movie.

She also did Broadway, co-writing 22 songs for the autobiographical musical Peg, in which she made her debut in 1983 at the age of 62. And Miss Lee made her mark in Hollywood as an actress, winning an Academy Award nomination for her role as the hard-drinking singer in the 1955 jazz saga, Pete Kelly’s Blues.

“Like Ellington, Lee was really beyond category,” says Mr. DiNovi. “She was better than a jazz musician. She could reach a wider audience than that, which is a kind of genius. Peggy didn’t have to be labelled, she just communicated with everyone. I didn’t know of anyone who didn’t like Peggy Lee.

“She always had the best musicians around her. That was her first priority . . . for everything to be artistically right.”

As a person, Mr. DiNovi remembers her as having a mystical, spiritual side. “There were always great people around her. It was always a learning experience to be with Peggy. The conversation after the gig was as good as the gig,” says the musician, who remembers sitting around, chatting with Jimmy Marino, an atomic-bomb scientist and colleague of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer. (Mr. Marino spent a year recuperating at Miss Lee’s California home after losing an arm when he fell into a uranium-refining machine).

“Peggy was very warm, very appreciative of what musicians did,” adds Mr. DiNovi. “And she proved you didn’t have to be loud to sing, or to reach an audience.”

In the sixties and seventies, Miss Lee was a frequent performer on musical variety shows. But it was as a nightclub singer and recording artist that she achieved her most enduring fame, headlining in such landmarks as Ciro’s in Hollywood, the Copacabana in New York, and the Flamingo in Las Vegas. In 1961, she brought her tour abroad and performed for Princess Grace of Monaco in a Red Cross benefit. Miss Lee was also invited to sing at President John F. Kennedy’s legendary birthday party in Madison Square Garden in May, 1962 (a contribution that was eclipsed by Marilyn Monroe’s breathy solo).

A diabetic, Miss Lee had a litany of medical problems, including a heart condition and Ménière’s disease, which left her near-sightless and with a paralyzed face. In 1976 she had a near-fatal fall in a New York hotel. She was again seriously injured after a topple in Las Vegas in 1987. In early 1985 she underwent four angioplasties — balloon surgery to open clogged arteries — but resumed her singing tour. In 1998, she suffered a stroke which impaired her speech.

Mr. Empry says the woman’s indomitable will made her a success, and a survivor: “She understood life. God knows she had enough problems,” he says, referring to her ailments. “She was declared dead at least four times by various doctors over the years. But she kept conquering her illnesses. She kept fighting back. They called her the cat of nine lives.”

Indeed, at the time of her death, Miss Lee was leading a potentially groundbreaking class-action lawsuit against Universal Music, a unit of Vivendi Universal. Just last week, the music giant agreed to pay $4.75-million (U.S.) in back royalties to as many as 300 performers to settle the suit.

Besides her daughter, Peggy Lee leaves her grandchildren David Foster, Holly Foster-Wells and Michael Foster, and three great-grandchildren.

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Peggy Lee is gone now, dead at 81, and I am thinking of how hauntingly exquisite her singing was, how achingly personal. She had a midnight intimacy when she sang and she created an unfathomable mystery that would cut deep into the human experience.

My thoughts return to the Jack Webb movie “Pete Kelly’s Blues,” and how she turned the melancholy “He Needs Me” into a memorable ode to a life gone around a wrong corner. What a performance this was as she portrayed a singer who is bedeviled by the bottle, and it won Peggy Lee an Academy Award nomination.

It is good to remember Peggy singing “Where or When,” the Rodgers-and-Hart classic, with the Benny Goodman band. A wistful wedding of music and words, it is a song of regret and irony, and in her interpretation she would evoke late nights in candle-lit places where the bartender remembers what should be poured when you say, “The usual, please.”

Others may sing this tune, for it has a special appeal to singers, but it will always belong to her. Peggy Lee owned it. This was the first Peggy Lee recording I ever heard, long ago, and it remains pristine in the memory. “Where or When” is, coincidentally, the favorite song of Joseph A. Wambaugh, a hard-boiled sentimentalist who has experienced life’s raw edges. Wambaugh is, of course, the former Los Angeles cop and the author of books that are best sellers that also win plaudits from the critics, which is the best of parlays. From out of the golden ’30s it came, this song, and Joe hears it when it is sung by Peggy Lee and he finds himself inevitably touched. The song is autumn set to music.

Joe delights in telling about an incident that involved the singer. “When I went into the Marines in 1954,” Joe says, “we were all put up at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Los Angeles before being shipped down to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. A poster in the lobby said that Peggy Lee was appearing somewhere in town. They were having an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at the hotel, and I see this older guy staring at the picture of Peggy Lee. He says to me, ‘Don’t you love her?’ I nodded. Then this man, this A.A. member, committed to never drinking another drop, said to me, ‘I love her more than booze.’ How do you ever forget a line like that?”

‘Close to perfection’

When Ted Williams was going for his noted .406 batting average in 1941, someone was heard to say, “Ted is hitting over his head.” Whereupon a Boston sportswriter said by way of rebuttal, “Yeah, and over everybody else’s, too.” It was like that, I have always believed, with Peggy Lee. Any list of great popular singers would be woefully incomplete without the former Norma Delores Egstrom who came out of Jamestown in a farming community in North Dakota. She sang at a radio station in Fargo whose manager renamed her Peggy Lee.

Her skill must have been apparent from the outset. She was keenly aware of articulation. Her phrasing was immaculate. She had warmth and sophistication and she epitomized a true jazz feeling. She was an artist. And her singing was always a crackling lesson for the neophytes.

The songs that brought her commercial success were many and varied, such as “Fever” and “Is That All There Is?” But you must hear Peggy, backed by the Benny Goodman band, sing such standards as “My Old Flame” and “That’s the Way It Goes” and her lightly rhythmic (with a delightful Mel Powell piano solo) version of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” Leonard Feather, a most astute critic, once summed up the artistry of Peggy Lee with these words: “About as close to perfection as any singer who ever lovingly fashioned a performance for an audience.”

Skitch Henderson, now conducting the New York Pops orchestra, was born in England but spent some of his growing-up in North Dakota. He remembers Peggy from the days when they would talk about the future at the coffee shop of the Powers Hotel in Fargo. “Norma Egstrom was a fine singer,” Skitch says, “but she got even better when she became known as Peggy Lee.”

I met her just once, in an interview. Over the years I have interviewed a number of celebrities. But this was Peggy Lee. I’ll tell you the truth in three words: I was awed.

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Peggy Lee, the enduring and influential singer and composer who exuded a subtle, smoldering sexuality and whose hits “Fever” and “Is That All There Is” became standards, has died. She was 81.

According to her daughter, Nicki Lee Foster, Lee died of a heart attack at her Los Angeles home on Monday night. A diabetic with a history of heart trouble, she underwent four angioplasty operations and double-bypass surgery in 1985. In 1998, she suffered a stroke that impaired her speech.

The platinum blonde of Swedish and Norwegian descent perfected a seductive, bluesy sophistication that bore the influence of Billie Holiday. She sang jazz and pop in a cool, translucent tone and carried herself with a self-assurance that has held sway over such empowered girl singers as Madonna, who had a hit with “Fever” in 1992, and PJ Harvey, who recorded “Is That All There Is” in 1996. “Her regal presence is pure elegance and charm,” Frank Sinatra once said.

She was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, N.D., in 1920. Her father was a handyman and railroad worker, and her mother died when she was 4. She was raised by an abusive stepmother whom she memorialized in the song “One Beating a Day.” While working as a hired hand on a farm, she learned to swing by listening to Count Basie’s band on the radio.

At 14, she sang on a Fargo, N.D., radio station whose program director advised her to change her name to Peggy Lee. While Lee was singing at a Chicago hotel after two unsuccessful attempts to make it in Hollywood, Benny Goodman heard her and hired her on the spot. Her first hit with Goodman’s band was “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” in 1941, followed by “Blues in the Night” in 1942 and “Why Don’t You Do Right (Get Me Some Money Too)” the next year.

She married Goodman’s guitarist, Dave Barbour, and planned to retire, but returned to show business when the marriage fell apart. “I kept blaming myself for his alcoholism and the failure of our marriage,” she once said. “And I finally understood what Sophie Tucker used to say: You have to have your heart broken at least once to sing a love song.”

Lee was married and divorced three more times, to actors Brad Dexter and Dewey Martin and percussionist Jackie Del Rio.

In her brief film career, she costarred with Danny Thomas in The Jazz Singer in 1953 and earned an Oscar nomination for her role as a blues singer in Pete Kelly’s Blues in 1955.

As a recording artist, Lee worked with an orchestra conducted by Sinatra on 1957’s The Man I Love, the George Shearing Quintet for 1959’s live set Beauty and the Beat, and Quincy Jones on 1961’s If You Go.

“Fever” was first a hit for rhythm-and-blues great Little Willie John, but Lee’s 1958 version – featuring only bass, percussion and finger-snapping – brought the sultry song to a wide audience. She won a Grammy for her 1969 version of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Is That All There Is,” recorded with an orchestra conducted by Randy Newman.

A successful songwriter as well as torch singer, she penned “It’s a Good Day” and “Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)” with Barbour. She also wrote the songs for the 1955 Disney animated film hit Lady and the Tramp with Sonny Burke, and did the voices of several characters, including the dog who sings “He’s a Tramp (But I Love Him).” In 1991, she won $2.3 million from Disney in a landmark suit for her share of the film’s profits from videocassette sales.

In 1984, her autobiographical Broadway show, Peg, was panned by critics and closed after 18 performances. Her last album, Moments Like This, was recorded in 1992, and she won a lifetime-achievement Grammy in 1995.

Lee went on fighting until the end. At her death, she was the lead plaintiff for 300 aging musicians who accused Universal Music, a division of Vivendi Universal, of cheating artists out of royalties for decades. Last week, a Los Angeles judge gave preliminary approval to a $4.75 million settlement of the case.

Lee is survived by her daughter, three grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.

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She was “Fever” hot and “Is That All There Is?” cool.

She came out of North Dakota in the 1930s, claimed a world stage and held it for decades, swinging with Benny Goodman when Goodman was king. Born to the Jazz Age, she tested its boundaries yet remains an essential part of the definition of jazz.

Peggy Lee, born Norma Egstrom in Jamestown, N.D., died Monday from a heart attack at her home in Bel Air, Calif. She was 81.

It was a life riddled with health problems and personal disappointments, including four broken marriages, adding poignancy to a signature song: “Is That All There Is?”

In her last Twin Cities performance, in 1987, she sat for the whole show, singer and music historian Arne Fogel said. “But she sang beautifully.”

Connie Evingson, another Twin Cities vocalist, has been performing “Fever: A Tribute to Peggy Lee” since 1997 and will perform it next weekend at the Illusion Theater in Minneapolis.

“I love her understated style, an approach to music that is not conscious or calculated but comes from who we are,” Evingson said.

She also came to admire Lee as “a prolific songwriter at a time when that wasn’t very common,” an artist who was “endlessly creative, well-rounded and persistent” and who triumphed over considerable adversity.

“She struggled with poor health for many years,” Evingson said. “It’s amazing she made it to 81.”

People over 50 seem to enjoy Evingson’s “Fever” tribute show most “because it’s the music of their childhood or young adulthood,” she said. “But I find younger people really like it, too, because it’s good music: lovely melodies, swinging rhythm, clever lyrics. How can you not like it?”

Breathy, sultry

In a show-business career of more than 60 years, Lee won a Grammy (for “Is That All There Is?”) and was nominated for an Oscar (for “Pete Kelly’s Blues”). She recorded more than 600 songs, helped write more than 200, performed at President Dwight Eisenhower’s inaugural ball and enchanted countless children with her contributions to Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp.”

With Sonny Burke, she composed songs for the 1955 film and voiced the sultry hair-in-the-eyes pekingese Peg, who sang “He’s a Tramp (But I Love Him).”

In 1981, a court awarded Lee $2.3 million after she sued for part of the profits from videocassette sales. The landmark case hinged on a clause in her contract — drawn up before the video era — barring the sale of “transcriptions” of the movie without her approval.

Lee was flexible in her singing, ranging through pop ballads, soulful heartbreakers and big-band anthems.

“There may be some people who were better at some things, but she was the best all-rounder,” Fogel said. “She had the best sense of swing, the best sense of jazz and rhythm, the best sense of drama and the theatrical.

“The only people on a par with her were Sinatra and Holiday — that ability to really cut to the bone of a song and feel the vulnerability.”

Fogel spent three hours recording an interview with Lee in 1987. “She was an absolute peach, unpretentious and a lot of fun,” he said. “She was wry, cool, with a lot brewing under the surface, so open, so sweet — and already so frail.”

Star Tribune critic Michael Anthony saw the 1987 show.

“Even in a chair, Peggy Lee is better than most singers who have full use of all their limbs,” Anthony wrote in his review. “At 67, her voice is as true and as silken in tone as ever.”

Rough beginnings

Lee was 4 when her mother died. She was abused by a stepmother who, she said later, hit her over the head with an iron skillet. Her father drank, and his railroad job required frequent moves.

“There’s truth to the cliche that the great interpretive artists had cruddy childhoods,” Fogel said. “They took from it something to reflect on.”

Still, Lee embraced her North Dakota roots. “I learned independence,” she said later. She was embraced in turn by North Dakotans as “one of us who made good,” like Lawrence Welk. And like the bandleader from Strasburg, Lee has her portrait in the North Dakota Hall of Fame in the Capitol in Bismarck.

In 1950, she went home to sing at the North Dakota Winter Show in Valley City, and Gov. Fred Aandahl was there to welcome her. At the winter show’s livestock exhibition, young Douglas Richman admired Lee’s mink coat and beret while she inspected his prize-winning Hereford calf. She visited her ailing father in a nearby town; a blizzard forced her to make the trip in a farm truck.

“I sang before I could talk,” she wrote in her 1989 autobiography, “Miss Peggy Lee.” At 14, she earned 50 cents for singing at PTA meetings. In 1937, she “debuted” on 250-watt KOVC Radio in Valley City, sponsored by a cafe.

Norma Egstrom made the jump to Fargo, where WDAY Radio program director Ken Kennedy recognized her potential and paid her $1.50 to sing. He also suggested a name change.

To the Radisson

Jeanne Arland Peterson, 80, who sang live on WCCO from the late 1930s to the late ’50s, was dating her future husband — pianist Willie Peterson — when Peggy Lee came to Minneapolis in about 1940.

“She came from North Dakota . . . to Sev Olson, who had the orchestra at the old Radisson Hotel,” Peterson said.

“I was singing at the Athletic Club. Sometimes I’d go over to listen [to Lee], and when Willie saw me he’d ask Peggy to sing ‘I Dream of Jeannie.’

“She sang so well, I was jealous of her. She was quiet, reserved — didn’t blow her own horn at all — but so able to do her craft. She was a good-looking lady, too.”

Peterson recalls that Lee lived on a shoestring.

“She had a show on KSTP just before she was going to leave town, and they asked me to replace her,” she said. “I went over to watch her. She told me she needed earrings. I went to downtown St. Paul and bought her a 10-cent pair of earrings. Then my husband loaned her the money to leave town” — for an audition in Chicago with Goodman.

The King of Swing heard Lee sing at a Chicago hotel in 1941, and he hired her to sing with his band. They recorded a string of hits, including “Why Don’t You Do Right?”

But in 1943, Lee married guitarist Dave Barbour and left music to raise their daughter, Nicki. She resumed singing when the marriage ended because of his alcoholism. She was married three more times, but Barbour was her first love. He had been sober for years when Lee agreed to remarry him in 1965, but days later he died.

“When she appeared at the Radisson 26 years ago, she invited me and my children to dinner,” Peterson said. “We went upstairs to her suite. She was not well then, but she was as friendly and nice as could be.”

The friends saw each other again a few years ago. Peterson, whose husband died in 1970, said her daughter, Patty, also was there.

“Peggy would stroke her arm and hair and say such nice things about what a good man her dad was,” she said.

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There were roses on every flat surface. Swinging tunes from a five-piece jazz band filled the place. White-coated waiters passed hors d’oeuvres to guests who wore diamonds and furs. This was Peggy Lee’s last party.

On a 70-degree Saturday morning at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, about 300 of the jazz singer’s fans, family and oldest friends gathered to say goodbye at a special memorial service. Lee, known for hits such as “Fever” and “Is That All There Is?”, died of a heart attack on Jan. 21 at her home in Bel-Air, three years after a debilitating stroke.

Phoebe Jacobs and jazz singer Cy Coleman flew in from New York, and their memories of Lee reveal a woman who favored tight satin gowns, feather boas and 3-inch heels, a mercurial woman who was charming with a wicked sense of humor. When Quincy Jones once complained of exhaustion, she told him: “Quincy, even a mink has to lay down sometime.”

“When she was good, she was very good, but when she was bad …. ” Jacobs told the crowd.

Jacobs met Lee in 1954 while working as a secretary at Lee’s label, Decca Records, in New York. “She was the star, and I was the office girl,” said Jacobs, 83. The two women became close friends years later after Jacobs’ uncle opened a Manhattan jazz club, a place on 48th and Lexington called Basin Street East, named after a Louie Armstrong song.

As she spoke of her old friend, Jacobs pulled from her handbag a pair of sunglasses that once belonged to Lee. They were round, tinted frames surrounded by rhinestones. Jacob handled them delicately as she told the story. “I had an allergy,” she said, that caused her eyes to swell. When Lee saw her friend’s puffy eyes, she handed over the Elton John-style glasses.

She put the glasses away and announced that it was time to sample the food. Jacobs led a new acquaintance by the hand to a table of chocolate-covered strawberries, tangerine tarts, mini pecan pies and marshmallow-filled cookies and stopped. “This,” she said, “is where Peggy Lee would have started.”

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Jazz Diva, Dead At 81, Left Indelible Memories With Her Sultry Sound

by Owen McNally
Hartford (Connecticut) Courant, January 23, 2002

You had only to hear Peggy Lee one time for her sultry sound, fluid phrasing and silken way with lyrics to become an indelible part of your musical memory bank.

Whatever Lee sang — including such hallmarks as “Fever,” “Is That All There Is?,” “Lover” or “Manana” — bore her deeply personal imprint. The singer, who died Monday, had a style that could sizzle, swing, seduce or lament in a profoundly moving way.

The pop and jazz legend, who had been in failing health for years, died from a heart attack at her home in Bel Air, Calif., said her daughter, Nicki Lee Foster. She was 81.

To have seen Lee in performance — especially when she was a young, beautiful and charismatic rising star — is an experience still treasured by devoted fans of her career as a singer, composer and actress, a career that spanned six decades.

As jazz critic Leonard Feather once famously noted, “If you don’t feel a thrill when Peggy Lee sings, you’re dead, Jack.”

Eugene Solon and Harry Lichtenbaum, two Hartford natives who got hooked on jazz by hanging out at the old State Theater as boys in the 1940s, are prime examples of the once-smitten, forever loyal Lee fan.

The State was a long-thriving downtown show-biz emporium that brought to Hartford the best of the big bands, singers, comics and entertainers. And Lee, both during her breakthrough stint with the Benny Goodman Orchestra from 1941 to 1943 and later into the 1940s, performed there often

“It must have been 1941, but I still have this vivid memory of this incredibly beautiful, blond singer wearing an off-the-shoulder, floor-length, lipstick-red gown,” Solon said from his home in Tucson, Ariz.

“I can still remember the spotlight illuminating her as she took the stage at the State. It was incredibly sexy, especially from the perspective of a teenage boy still in high school.”

“Her singing was so great, and naturally augmented her stage presence. It was absolutely mesmerizing. She was with the Goodman Orchestra then, and one of the songs she sang was ‘How Deep Is the Ocean?’

“The State was the grammar school, the college and the graduate school for my jazz education back then,” Solon said. “And that was the first and only time I ever saw Peggy Lee live. And it has stayed with me.”

In part because of the State and boyhood epiphanies like seeing Lee in her prime, Solon went on to become one of the formative, behind-the-scenes shakers-and-doers in the Hartford jazz community from the 1960s to his retirement and departure to Tucson in 1998.

Lichtenbaum, who also fell in love with Lee at the State, followed her wide-ranging career, which even took her to Hollywood. In 1956, the singer-turned-actress played a booze-sodden singer in “Pete Kelly’s Blues.” It won her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. She also appeared with Danny Thomas in “The Jazz Singer,” a limp update of the Al Jolsen film. Her movie career fizzled, however.

An accomplished songsmith, she collaborated with Sonny Burke on the songs for Disney’s “The Lady and the Tramp” and supplied the voice for the dog who sang “He’s the Tramp (But I Love Him).”

Her work in that 1955 film, the Associated Press says, led to a landmark legal judgment 36 years later, when she was awarded $2.3 million after she sued for a slice of the profits from the videocassette sale of the movie.

Lichtenbaum, who honed his jazz education at the State into the ’50s, became not only an authority on and collector of all things Sinatra but also a connoisseur of pop and jazz vocal styles rooted in the Great American Songbook.

“As a kid, I started collecting all of Lee’s 78 recordings on Capitol Records. I have her stuff on vinyl and CDs, of course, but I still have those Capitol 78s in my collection in my home. I’d catch her every time she came to town,” Lichtenbaum says from his Wethersfield home, a mini-museum of jazz and pop history.

“I remember seeing Peggy Lee with her husband, the guitarist Dave Barbour. (The storybook marriage soured as Barbour slipped into the depths of alcoholism. It marked one of four broken marriages for Lee in a troubled life that came with a wicked stepmother who beat her brutally and often as a child.)

“She sang with sensuality,” Lichtenbaum says, “but also with great humor. ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?’ is just filled with humor the way she sang it. She was also a composer, and her song ‘Manana’ even added a phrase to the American lexicon. Instead of saying ‘tomorrow,’ people would say ‘manana,’ or echoing the lyric, ‘manana is good enough for me.’ She swings and she interprets the lyrics so that she is a genuine jazz singer, one of the leaders,” Lichtenbaum says.

Bobbi Rogers of Durham, one of Connecticut’s finest jazz divas and big-band singers, never met or even saw Lee in a live performance. Nonetheless, she feels a special bond with Lee that goes back to her childhood.

“l’ve always loved Peggy Lee since I was a kid and my grandfather would give me a quarter for my allowance, and I would go buy one of her 78s in a record store in New London. As kid in grammar school in our music class, we’d have to sing a song. I’d get up and sing a Peggy Lee song. Her melodic way of doing ballads and her phrasing were so great. It seemed unusual at that time to hear someone do something so lyrical,” Rogers says.

Art Fine of Bloomfield, a founding member of the Hartford Jazz Society, is another lifetime Lee fan, even though he never saw her perform live.

“She was someone I worshiped years ago. She was probably one of the greatest women singers that ever lived, in my estimation. I really think that she was that great.

“She had a presence about her that no one else seemed to have since [Billie Holiday]. She had a special, calm beauty when she sang. It used to knock me out. She was something wonderful, a great performer,” Fine says.

Besides her daughter, Lee leaves three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

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A sad item in the news brought back high school days, staying up later than I probably should have listening to Dave Garroway playing classic jazz records on late-night radio. The show always closed around midnight with Peggy Lee seductively intoning Alec Wilder’s lyrics in celebration of youth: ”Songs are made to sing, while we’re young. Every day is spring, while we’re young.” It was time to turn out the light.

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