I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Nineteen

In early 1954, I got a late night phone call in Brooklyn from Peggy Lee in Los Angeles. For about a year, after I left Tony Bennett, I had been back with Peggy, and often my phone rang at all hours with her on the other end. Usually the reason for the calls was something along the lines of her asking me to put a star at a certain place in a certain arrangement; she knew that a beautiful chord change came up at the starred place, something that could open the skies for her vocally speaking, and she wanted the place marked to remind everybody about the possibilities. But the 1954 call was different. This time, she said she needed me to fly out to her house in Los Angeles.

    Peggy did some funny stuff when I was her accompanist. She was very possessive, and one thing she liked to possess was people. In this case, it was me. She wanted me to come to her house, stay in a guest room, and be available for a certain length of time. I knew all about this possession kick of hers. I didn't always go along with it, but this time, in 1954, I flew out to the coast.

This was my first visit to Los Angeles. Peggy lived in a house on Kimridge Drive at the top of Coldwater Canyon. If I was to be Peggy's guest or maybe prisoner-I stayed at Kimbridge for five weeks-I was hardly alone in the house. Nicki was there, Peggy's little daughter with Dave Barbour. Dave dropped into Kimridge a lot. There was Lillie Mae Hendricks, a small black woman who didn't put up with any nonsense from anyone. She was the cook and housekeeper, a loyal and determined type of person, and though she didn't live at the house, she was there for many hours of the day and night. So was her boyfriend, a nice guy who drove Lillie and himself around in a Model A Ford. Musicians from Peggy's band were always coming by Kimridge to rehearse and hang out. A number of doctors called on Peggy because she was intermittently laid low by some ailment that nobody seemed able to diagnose. It might have been arthritis. No matter what it was that Peggy suffered from, she had all the doctors wrapped around her little finger. It was more a case of her telling them what to prescribe than the other way around.

(Billy Exiner, Jimmy Marino, and Gene DiNovi in Las Vegas)

One other person in regular residence, the star prisoner in effect, was an incredible guy named Jimmy Marino. Jimmy had quirky looks, a little man with big rimmed glasses and a left arm that had been withered by childhood polio. Though he was restricted physically, in mental terms Jimmy functioned at the genius level. He had studied physics at Princeton, he palled around with Albert Einstein, and he had worked on the Manhattan Project with J. Robert Oppenheimer. At the time I met him at Peggy's house, he was busy at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena doing hydrogen bomb research. 

    Peggy first ran into Jimmy when she was performing at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Jimmy had come to town with a convention of scientists, and when he introduced himself to Peggy, she insisted he come and visit at Kimridge. Like everybody else, he couldn't turn Peggy down. He stayed at the house for many weeks, spending hour after hour talking about scientific concepts with Peggy. She had theories involving colour and sound waves. She thought she could sing While We're Young in a way that the sound of her voice would strike a chemically treated screen thereby creating patterns of colour. These were connected to the colours she had seen in her head one time when she was hit in an accident. Somehow, Peggy thought, the combination of colour and sound waves could function as a healing device. Peggy wanted Jimmy to take the idea to his pal Einstein. I never knew whether Jimmy completed the mission or not, but he brought Peggy a book autographed from Einstein to her.

    Unfortunately for Jimmy, when I last heard about him, he seemed to have come to a grim end. He was working on a machine he invented at Caltech to refine uranium ore, and he was somehow on the receiving end of an accident that took away the use of his right arm. The right had been his only fully functioning arm. Peggy insisted that he move back into her house during his recuperation period. He did as Peggy wanted, but one day, he vanished, leaving behind his stacks of books in Peggy's house. As far as I know, she never heard from Jimmy again.

Probably the most pleasure I got out of my five weeks at Peggy's place came in our songwriting sessions. She wrote the lyrics, I wrote the music with me sometimes chipping in with alternate lyrics and with her making musical suggestions. We sat at the piano in her house. I'd throw her a line, and she'd throw one back at me. Gradually a few songs evolved. The one I was proudest of was But Only For You. For that one, I rewrote Peggy's last lyric line. She'd phrased it so that it was exclusively a woman's song. But I changed it in a way that meant either a man and a woman could sing it. It's just too bad that nobody of either sex recorded it. (Ever since Diana Krall came along, I've been thinking it's a perfect song for her.)

    A couple of the other tunes were of a very decent caliber, one we called It's a Funny Old World and the other, Big Pink Cloud. Neither of them attracted much attention either, though Ruth Price, a pretty fair singer, recorded both songs.

What I loved about Los Angeles as a city was its easy access to nature. The whole area had an amazingly rural feel to it in the 1950s. I could drive a short way into Cold Water Canyon and I'd immediately smell jasmine in the air. I could sense the ocean just over the horizon. For a kid from Brooklyn, this was blissful stuff. And when I at last flew home, Patsy liked my description of L.A. as a place for us to live. Since the prospects were pretty good that I'd be working with Peggy for a while, we decided the west coast had at least short-term advantages over the east coast.

    For the trip back to California, we planned a drive across the continent in my car. As far as cars in general went, I had been a little late getting into them. Partly, I suppose, that was because my father never owned or drove a car. As a kid, I didn't grow up with cars. But my brother-in-law Louie taught me to drive, and I passed the test for a licence when I was twenty-two.

    Then, as in so many things in my life, it was my brother Victor who taught me to be adventurous and look for quality in cars. He first owned an Auburn, then he got a Cord, the make that had concealed headlights. At the same time, I noticed that my fellow jazz musicians were hot on British cars. They liked Morris Minors and MGs. After much thought, I decided to go for a Hillman Minx. Victor thought that was a crazy idea. He said, if I was going to buy a foreign car, I should choose one that looked sharp, which is how I ended up with a 1952 Jaguar XK120.

    Victor went with me on the day in 1953 when I bought the car. He was standing right there in the dealership as I almost killed the deal the first time I sat behind the Jag's steering wheel. I didn't notice it was parked in reverse, and I came within a couple of inches of shooting my new car backwards through a plate glass window. In the end I left the showroom in one piece driving my very own Jag, The only drawback was that I had mysterious problems with the front end alignment. I went through several mechanics at fancy emporiums who failed to solve the problems before a guy whose name I've never forgotten, Alex Tarpinian, fixed it for good. Alex charged four dollars. I've never forgotten the price either, just four bucks after the people at the fancy places charged me hundreds for their failures. 

Pat and I-"Patsy" had been mainly my wife's show biz name during her dancing years, but now she was "Pat" for the rest of her life-we packed as much of our belongings as we could fit into the Jag and took our time driving across North America. In Los Angeles, we stayed in a string of inexpensive motel rooms until we rented a small one-story house on Highland Avenue in Hollywood. It had a living room, kitchen and one bedroom, just the three rooms but all were large and airy. We moved in and felt very Hollywood. Every morning, we saw James Dean turning a corner down the street on his way to the movie studio. He was driving the Porsche that he later died in. Speaking of cars, as I did a lot, in the first year in LA, I traded my Jag for a '56 Thunderbird.

    With the house and the Thunderbird and the lovely surroundings, Pat and I were living well, feeling good, and I was ready for the next adventures with Peggy. As it turned out, there was no shortage of them.