Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (17 page)

Peggy Lee sends a car for the two men. They are taken through to what Rader describes as ‘the biggest living room I ever saw in my life and the longest sofa ... It’s an enormous, dramatic theatrical Hollywood kind of place.’ The house has beige carpeting throughout, so deep that you can see your footprints in it. The living room is very sparse, and gives the impression that no one has been there for a very long time. The house has two storeys, but Peggy tells friends that she hasn’t been upstairs in a decade. ‘There’s no reason to,’ she explains.

At the end of the room is Peggy Lee, clad in a thin white chiffon gown. She moves very slowly, as she has an oxygen tent attached to her. She is
prone to illness, and to offbeat diagnoses and cures: she once spent the afternoon hanging head-down on a slanted board, explaining to concerned onlookers that she was experiencing extreme pain in her stomach because her liver had turned upside down; by going topsy-turvy, she sought to realign it.

Capote introduces himself by taking her hand and kissing it. ‘Oh, my God,’ he says, ‘I’m in the presence of an angel.’

‘Can I get you something to drink?’ asks Peggy, buzzing for her butler. Her two visitors ask for vodka, but the butler informs them that they don’t have any alcohol in the house, so they reluctantly settle for Perrier water. As a result, Capote grows irritable.

‘Well, Truman, can I show you the gardens?’ asks Peggy.

‘All right. Show me the gardens, but then we’ve got to go,’ he snaps.

Peggy tries to open the sliding doors into the garden, but cannot budge them. Truman tries to help. Together, they tug and pull, but the doors remain firmly closed. After a while, Peggy abandons the idea of going into the garden.

Instead, they set off for dinner at Le Restaurant. At last Truman and Dotson can have their vodkas. Peggy settles for a bottle of Evian water, which arrives in a silver ice-bucket, and is charged at $50 a bottle. The restaurant has a tin roof, and it is raining hard. They have to shout in order to be heard. ‘You felt like you were on the Western Front in World War I and the Germans are machine-gunning your lines,’ recalls Dotson.

Suddenly, Peggy asks Truman, ‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’

‘I don’t know. Do you?’

‘Oh, yes. I’ve been reincarnated many times. In my other lives I’ve been a prostitute, a princess, an Abyssinian queen ...’

Truman asks her how she knows.

‘I can prove it!’ she shouts. ‘I remember being a prostitute in Jerusalem when Jesus was alive.’

‘Oh, really? What else do you remember?’

‘I remember the crucifixion very well.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, I’ll never forget picking up the
Jerusalem Times
and seeing the headline “Jesus Christ Crucified.”’

Peggy Lee departs for the lavatory. The two men look at each other. ‘She’s totally bonkers,’ hisses Truman.
⁶³

(Some might say he has hit the nail on the head: she once got in contact with Albert Einstein, seeking his imprimatur for an invention of hers which involved singing in front of a chemically-treated screen so that the sound waves would conjure up different colours, and somehow heal the sick. As it happens, Einstein never accepted her invitation to dinner, though he did post her a book inscribed, ‘To my favourite girl singer’.)

When Peggy returns from the lavatory, Truman changes the subject. He asks about her childhood, and how she started singing. She tells him her mother died when she was four. Six months later, the family home burned down. Her father, an alcoholic, had married a very large, aggressive woman, who used to beat her. ‘Florid face, bulging thyroid eyes, long black hair to her waist pulled back in a bun, heavy breathing. Obese and strong as a horse, she beat everyone into a fright,’ is the way Peggy Lee describes her stepmother in her autobiography. She accompanied her beating with verbal abuse, telling the five-year-old Peggy that she was too fat, and her hands were too big.

Peggy Lee confesses to remaining self-conscious about her hands for many years. ‘I would hold them behind me ... fold them up, never present them flat to view but edge-wise only. I was one of the quickest handshakers you ever saw.’ Today, she tells Truman that her stepmother once stabbed her in the stomach with a butcher’s knife; she still has the scar.

Truman Capote is touched. He has always possessed an uncanny instinct for the vulnerability of others. People open up to him. ‘He would meet someone, make fun of them, although they weren’t aware of it, and then they would say something that would reveal a vulnerability, some heartache or pain, and suddenly Truman’s attitude would change,’ says Rader. ‘... Unless he knew a vulnerability of yours, he never felt safe around you.’

The mood has changed. Truman asks Peggy if she will sing a song. She sings ‘Bye-Bye Blackbird’ and ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’, and Truman joins in. For the next forty minutes they sing old standards together, heedless of the other diners in Le Restaurant.

‘All the way back in the car, they talked about music and every once in a while the two of them would start singing,’ says Rader. ‘It was a lovely evening.’

PLANTS A SMACKER ON

The East Room, the White House, Washington DC

February 24th 1970

‘Our artist tonight, Miss Peggy Lee, comes from the heartland of America ...’ begins President Richard Nixon. ‘From the farm in North Dakota she went to Hollywood, and then to New York, and then finally to the pinnacle of success in the musical world.’

The President has been enjoying his social life as never before, and never again. In the space of a single week, he has toasted the artist Andrew Wyeth with 1962 Dom Perignon at the unveiling of a collection of his paintings in the East Room, he has hosted his daughter Tricia’s twenty-fourth birthday party at Camp David and he has attended a special performance of the Broadway production of
1776
at the White House.

Now, for the state visit of the President of France, Georges Pompidou, he is really pushing the boat out. Bands on the South Lawn are followed by a dinner of
Contre-Filet de Boeuf aux Cèpes
served with Château Ausone 1962. After dinner, the President takes to the stage to introduce the evening’s star performer.

But behind the scenes, there have been problems. Other performers have dropped out in protest at Pompidou’s decision to sell 110 Mirage fighter jets to Libya while refusing to sell fifty to Israel. Peggy Lee is asked to step in only at the last minute.
⁶⁴

She takes to the stage and launches into the up-tempo ‘Almost Like Being in Love’. She follows it with ‘Watch What Happens’ and a medley of
‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ and ‘The Most Beautiful Man in the World’. But the applause is muted: by her usual standards, this audience is very stuffy. After the first few songs, she nips offstage and downs a stiff drink, all in one. ‘You can’t believe how much cognac she just had!’ whispers her make-up lady to her press agent.

Peggy Lee returns. In defiance of White House protocol, she starts speaking directly to the President and his guests. ‘I want to thank you so very much for making me feel so very welcome here. Do you realise I’ve tried to be here a number of times? And, uh ... it’s a very kind of wonderfully warm feeling, and Mr President and Mrs Nixon ... you have a lovely house.’

She doesn’t stop there. She puts on a Mae West accent. ‘I’m very fond of poetry ...
among other things
,’ she says, saucily. She pauses for laughter, but it fails to arrive, so she tries to make a joke about it.

‘One of my favourite humorous verses is by Samuel Hoffenstein from his book
Pencil in the Air
and it’s very short. And it goes like this:

Everywhere I go

I go, too.

And spoil ever-thang.’

The audience shifts uneasily in their seats. President Nixon, a little sweaty, adopts a fixed smile. Peggy Lee remains undeterred, quoting a poem by the fourteen-year-old Grace Kelly in the high-pitched, lisping voice of a little girl:

I hate to see the sun go down

And squeeze itself into the ground

’Cos some warm night it might get stuck

And in the morning not get up.

‘Isn’t that divine? Do you like her poem? I love it. I really wish she’d kept on writing, but I know she’s happier now.’

There is silence in the room while Peggy Lee giggles.

‘You know, more serious poetry isn’t that well accepted. In fact, to quote one writer, “To publish a book of verse is like dropping a rose petal down
the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” And I know. I wrote a book of verse and dropped it into the Grand Canyon.’

The audience tries to laugh, but it sounds effortful. There is widespread relief as she signals to the orchestra to start the next song – her current hit ‘Is That All There Is?’, a bleak ramble through the various disappointments in her life. It begins, as usual, with a spoken reminiscence from her childhood in North Dakota: ‘I remember when I was a little girl, our house caught on fire.’ But she adds, ‘And it did, Mr Nixon.’ She manages to finish the song, but her mind is clearly elsewhere.

The applause is muted. ‘Well, I don’t want to sing goodnight right now, if you don’t mind. Do you? You’ve all been to Disneyland, I presume. No? Well, you must go. I am going to be Tinker Bell someday. I don’t think
any
of you have been to Disneyland. Don’t you know what Tinker Bell does? She hits that peanut-butter jar and flies over the Matterhorn. I think she’s about seventy-five. So that’s my next job.’

Her next song is her signature ‘Fever’. But she swaps her usual cool, laid-back delivery for something more crazed, and, halfway through, slips into a stream of consciousness, free-associating the words:

‘Fee-verr! Fee-vah! I boin. I boin? I burn? I bin. Oh, look out for the Indians ... Fee-verr! What a lovely way to learn. You know what you learn? You learn not to kiss chickens! You know why? Ask me why?’

Someone in the audience yells, ‘Why?’

‘Because they have such funny lips.’ She puts on a funny face and performs a noisy, slurpy imitation of kissing a chicken.

At the end of her act, she zigzags up to a fearful President Nixon and, without warning, plants her lips smack on his.
⁶⁵
The next day, the
Chicago Daily News
carries the headline ‘PEGGY “BOMBS” AT WHITE HOUSE FETE’.
⁶⁶

Two months later, a report in the
New York Times
suggests that ‘the only way you can make Peggy angry these days is to mention “the White House dinner” ... “I don’t really wish to discuss it,” she says, her moist pink lips drawing together tightly. “Those reports were totally inaccurate, and therefore deserve no comment. If I’m sexy, I can’t help it ... Mrs Nixon gave me a warm embrace and I returned it. I would never kiss the President. I just leaned forward as he spoke to me, and it may have looked like it, but I didn’t kiss him.”’

AWARDS A BUREAU OF NARCOTICS AND DANGEROUS DRUGS SPECIAL AGENT BADGE TO

The White House, Washington DC

December 20th 1970

As 1970 nears its end, Elvis Presley is riddled with worries about assassinations, anti-war protests, a lack of respect for authority, and the prevalence of drugs. His paranoia about the abuse of drugs by young people is exacerbated by the quantity of drugs he himself consumes.

Shopping proves a reasonably effective method of allaying his fears about everything else. He particularly enjoys buying guns, cars and jewellery, not just for himself, but for friends and employees, and sometimes total strangers. Over the course of three nights he spends $20,000 on guns at Kerr’s Sporting Goods in Memphis; the following week, he buys two Mercedes, one for himself and another for a girlfriend; the week after, he buys a third Mercedes for an aide, plus a new Cadillac as a wedding present for a Palm Springs patrolman with whom he has struck up a friendship.

When his father first warned him that he was spending too much, Elvis tried to calm him down by buying him a Mercedes. But on December 19th, his father and his wife Priscilla confront him: his spending is getting out of hand.

Presley takes it badly; it is his money, he says, and he can do with it what he likes. ‘I’m getting out of here,’ he shouts. Without telling anyone where he is going, he flies from Memphis to Washington, from Washington to Dallas, then on to Los Angeles, where he has arranged to be met by his new driver, an Englishman called Gerald Peters.
⁶⁷

He then takes the next flight back to Washington. In flight, he writes the following letter:

Dear Mr President
,

First, I would like to introduce myself. I am Elvis Presley and admire you and Have Great Respect for your office. I talked to Vice President Agnew in Palm Springs three weeks ago and expressed my concern for our country. The Drug Culture, the Hippie Elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc. do not consider me as their enemy or as they call it The Establishment. I call it America and I love it. Sir I can and will be of any service that I can to help the country out ...

He asks to be made a Federal Agent at Large. ‘First and foremost I am an entertainer but all I need is the Federal credentials.’ He has, he adds, pursued ‘an in depth study of Drug Abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques ... I would love to meet you just to say hello if you’re not too busy.’ On another piece of paper, marked ‘Private and Confidential’, he lists his various phone numbers.

At 6.30 a.m., Presley drops off his letter at the White House. Later that morning, he receives a phone call at his Washington hotel. It is Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh, deputy counsel to the President, wondering if he would drop by in forty-five minutes.
⁶⁸

The senior staff at the White House, including the President’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, feel that, in view of Nixon’s poor standing among the young, it would be ‘extremely beneficial for the President to build some rapport with Presley’.