Reviewed by Summer Block
9.19.07

“Armstrong, Crosby, Sinatra, Lee—these are the faces on the Mount Rushmore of American pop,” Peter Richmond gushes in his new biography of singer Peggy Lee. That those other three names are much more famous than his subject’s is an oversight the besotted Richmond intends to correct in this generous biography of the legendary Miss Peggy Lee, named after her sexy 1958 hit “Fever.”

Born Norma Deloris Egstrom in a small North Dakota town in 1920, Peggy Lee had a rough start in life. Her stepmother was a tyrant who beat and abused Peggy daily; her father was an undependable alcoholic who could neither defend Peggy nor support his family. Peggy grew up during the Depression listening to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong on the radio, and dreaming of a way to leverage her substantial music gifts into a way out.

The first half of Fever reads like a conventional rags-to-riches story, as Peggy surmounts obstacle after obstacle to achieve ever greater fame, from her start at a town hall recital to her big break in 1941 as the female vocalist in Benny Goodman’s band. It was with Goodman that she recorded three of her best-loved songs, “Let’s Do It,” “I Got It Bad,” and "Why Don’t You Do Right?"

For all but the most dedicated fans, this early section may drag, though the biography’s repeated formula (trepidation-audition-success) is enlivened by some excellent characters, including the formidable Goodman himself, as well as songwriter Johnny Mercer and British writer and playboy Patrick Skene Catling. The descriptions of life on the road with Goodman’s band are the highlight of the book, and may occasionally make you wish you were reading a biography of Benny instead.

Lee’s subsequent solo career was marked by hits like “Lover,” “Fever,” "Is That All There Is?" each performed best in small venues framed by a carefully choreographed stage routine. Lee’s signature style was intimate, confessional, and erotic, marked by a seductive blend of irony, humor, world-weariness, glamour, and grace. She combined elements of Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Holiday, Sarah Vaughn and Anita O’Day, but her voice and presence were uniquely her own.

Richmond can’t help but stray into some sordidness as he discusses his subject’s four failed marriages, her numerous romantic affairs, financial difficulties, lawsuits, and occasional lapses in taste (her daughter Nicki’s room in their palatial Beverly Hills home “had a white marble floor, mostly covered with white fur. Her bed was gold-leafed wrought iron surrounded by clouds of yellow chiffon. The canopy was caught back with gold-leaf antique carved wooden cherubs.”

But to his credit, Richmond’s narrative never wanders too far from Peggy’s astounding musical gifts. “She had the best sense of time, in the jazzman’s sense, of any singer,” André Previn said. Added to that was her extraordinary range, from breathy spoken word to full-throated roar, and everything in between. But perhaps most importantly, Lee had a gift for ringing every ounce of emotion out of even the lightest pop tunes, acting for the audience as much as singing.

Fever is at its best when it places Peggy in the context of her time, “the greatest generation of American music, singing at the height of an era when the American Songbook was the expression of the national heart and soul.” Richmond is nostalgic for this time when America boasted something like a single, unified public culture, and it was a fine one. “It was not a time, as now,” he explains, “when ‘popular’ and ‘disposable’ were interchangeable terms. It was a never-to-be-revisited era when popular novels were also literary and enduring, when popular movies where crafted and inspired and lasting. When music had meaning and resonance.”

Peggy Lee’s fame as a multi-dimensional jazz, blues, and pop singer (not to mention actress and songwriter) is the perfect example of an era “when art still shaped our popular media, from writing to film to music.” Nurtured by both Benny Goodman and Quincy Jones, Peggy Lee exemplified an integrated style that crossed not only genre lines but racial ones: many attested that on hearing Peggy’s voice on the radio, they didn’t know whether she was black or white.

In some ways, what killed Peggy’s career was the eventual splintering of that popular culture, along with the rise of rock and roll. Jazz became increasingly experimental and inaccessible, popular music increasingly confectionary and forgettable. What had once been the root of her appeal—her enormous range of styles and influences—made her impossible to categorize. Her pop fans were bored by her jazz albums, and her jazz fans mocked chart-topping hits like “It’s a Good Day” and “Mañana.”

But not all of Peggy’s critical jeers can be attributed to the changing musical scene. She also made a number of terrible career moves from bombing at a 1970 state dinner for Presidents Richard Nixon and Georges Pompidou to launching an unintentionally high-camp one-woman show entitled “Peg.” Ever the devoted fan, Richmond tries to tenderly smooth over these missteps, but his excuses aren’t always convincing.

Richmond’s biography is a nice break from the usual scandal-mongering celebrity bios, but his gentleness at times seems excessive. By all accounts—including her own—Lee was an extremely difficult person to work with, demanding, needy, and emotional. She drank excessively (though Richmond pointedly refuses to label her an alcoholic), ran threw a series of disastrous romantic affairs, and fell prey to a range of melodramatic, semi-imagined illnesses.

Richmond’s gushing praise can also lead to significant stylistic gaffes, as when he rhapsodizes, "So utterly given over to the song was she that to disturb the spell would have been to risk a fissure in the universe.” Moreover, his dominant theme (the battle between the artist’s two personas, the shy and insecure Norma Egstrom and the splendid but artificial Miss Peggy Lee) is a celebrity biography cliché, though no less true for being so.

Richmond may not be a prose stylist, but where he succeeds is in presenting a creative, versatile, universally pleasing, and criminally overlooked superstar to an American public of increasingly splintered affiliations and allegiances. Richmond should be congratulated by blasting Miss Lee back up on Rushmore, where she belongs.