Biography Was this the Peggy Lee I knew? Only my sunny disposition and saintly tolerance enable me to accept Peter Richmond's portrayal of her, all the way from 1920 to 2002, as quite authentic. Was she really such a demanding perfectionist, such a relentless "control freak"?
Admittedly, I spent a mere three months in her company, in 1961. But that was her mid-life heyday, which should have been typically revealing. She certainly seemed strong and focused on her career, but she was not offensively self-centred and dictatorial.
Most of the time, we lived in a hedonistic fantasy, in London, Monte Carlo and Beverly Hills, in the Dorchester Hotel, the Hotel de Paris and finally in her hilltop house, a miniature palace. We behaved nothing like that idyllically sentimental couple of one of her hits, The Folks Who Live on the Hill, who probably did not drink much brandy. In Lotus Land, we idly lolled about, undisturbed by the obsessive drives that continuously galvanise the character in Richmond's biography.
As in other historical works of this kind, Richmond's principal sources are archival. He worked hard for a long time, gathering all available facts and opinions from newspapers, magazines, books and innumerable interviews with survivors who were willing to talk to him. By means of showbiz archaeology and gossip, he has succeeded in creating a simulacrum as colourfully realistic as a Forest Lawn loved one. For effort, he deserves A-plus. But what happened to the joy of music? The fun?
Richmond depicts, in baleful detail, the formative influences of Peggy Lee's childhood, which were ineradicable, no matter how strenuously she reacted against them. Her Swedish and Norwegian antecedents settled in North Dakota, the flattest, bleakest state in the Union. The summers are so hot that the prairie turns to dust. The winters are so cold that depressed Scandinavians turn to the bottle.
She was born in Jamestown and named Norma Deloris Egstrom. Her mother died when Norma was four. Her father, an amiable, ineffectual drunkard, married a brutal giantess who was not amiable at all. She beat Norma with a leather strap, pulled her around by her hair, gouged her with fingernails and told her her head was too small and her hands were too big. The railroad demoted Egstrom to an even smaller depot, in Nortonville, population 125. At the age of 14, Norma often had to do his job, when he was too drunk to do it.
In spite of her harsh family life, Norma found, by the age of 10, that she could charm people by singing. Having somehow managed to graduate from high school, she escaped to another small North Dakota town, Fargo, where she sang These Foolish Things for a local radio station. The manager renamed her Peggy Lee.
Richmond convincingly develops the thesis that Norma's childhood insecurity and shyness persisted throughout her life within the carapace of the artificial persona she presented to the world. "Miss Peggy Lee" (she always insisted on the honorific Miss) was a glamorous, cool chick who got rich and famous as a singer and lyricist, making love to microphones and a series of bewildered admirers. But inside she was always Norma, with what a Freudian would call an inferiority complex. Even when she was making half a million dollars a year, she worried about money every day. In Nortonville, the Egstroms had no electricity, no inside toilet, no well. How could chandeliers, white fur rugs, marble floors and plastic flowers enable her to forget?
Richmond tells the whole story of professional success and private failure, from her discovery by Benny Goodman, on to record-breaking record sales and triumphs in films, television and night-clubs, and her short-lasting personal relationships. Benny Goodman was notoriously mean. He paid her only $10 for singing one of his biggest hits, Why Don't You Do Right? When I asked her about that derisory payment, she said, with a gesture encompassing her entire home, "but, in a way, he gave me all this".
Dave Barbour, the guitarist, her favourite husband, perverted her from jazz to pop music, most notably with their collaborative composition Mañana. For the sake of commerce, she sang in a Californian Latin accent to make fun of Mexican lethargy, and the American public applauded. Dave drank a lot, even feeding bourbon to her goldfish, but they remained friends after the divorce.
When asked which singers most influenced her, she said: "You have to pick Maxine Sullivan for her simplicity, Billie Holiday for her emotional appeal, and Ella Fitzgerald for her great heart". Duke Ellington called Peggy Lee "the Queen", Louis Armstrong said she could swing, and Frank Sinatra was a close friend, but she was a perennial psychosomatic invalid whose truest summation of all her experiences was her most sombrely heartfelt hit, "Is That All There Is?"
Patrick Skene Catling's memoir, Better Than Working, is now available in paperback (Liberties Press)
Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee By Peter Richmond Aurum, 449pp. £20