The Copa by Mickey Podell-Raber

and his wife. It was the early morning hours and the joint was officially closed. We were having drinks, food, a lot of laughs and birthday greetings, and a band was playing off in an anteroom. Nick, the Africanologist, was absolutely bagged, and when he heard the band, he wanted to go into the anteroom. Nick, a big guy, knew his way around. Suddenly he was a little assertive, there was a commotion, and he came stomping back. Out of the woodwork stormed Jules’s boys. This was a tough joint. It was like a George Raft movie, with all the boys in tuxedos. They encircled Nick. Nick was about to be undone when Peg spotted him. She got into that circle and identified him as a friend of hers, faster, more sober, and more serious than anyone had ever seen. Probably saved the guy from a bad beating. After all, they were protecting Peg, but she said to back off. For Nick, the protocol against letting yourself be shoved was tough to overcome. Peg had called Jules, and when he came into the center of the guys, she said, “The man doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s just drunk.” Peg was the one. I didn’t see anyone else pay much attention. When action needed to be taken, that dame is going to take it.

    Mary Ann Shedon, Peggy Lee, and me backstage at the club.
    According to Peggy Lee:
    Jules was very protective, if he liked you, and he also did good things in secret, which are not well known. One day he called me and asked, “Will you do me a favor, Peg?” “Of course, Julie, what is it?” “I want you to sing for some nuns.” Here was a man who only took one day off a year, Yom Kippur, and he spent the entire day in a temple. Now he was asking me about some young novitiates in a convent! He said, “I know the young nuns would like to hear you sing. ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ is one of my favorites.” “All right, Jules, what time?” “I will send a car for you at six o’clock. Then I can bring you back in time for the show.”
    I was curious, to say the least. The limo arrived, I was taken tothe convent, and the beautiful novitiates had nothing but good things to say about Jules Podell and how he supported the convent almost single-handedly. When I came back, he said in his gruff voice, “Anything you ever want me to do, Peg, anything, you just ask me.” You can never tell about tough guys.
    Here is a review of Peggy by Robert Salmaggi that appeared in the World Journal Tribune on October 30, 1966. The title of the piece was THIS GAL GOES BY THE BOOK :
    We’re gonna throw the book at Peggy Lee. When this gold-topped gal is being caressed with a baby-blue spot, and lofting the inimitable Lee sound, you find yourself admiring the letter perfect precision of her act. The lead-in cues, the accord between vocalist and band, the split-second timing of the soundman, and the click lighting liaison, are the constant envy of Peggy’s songbird contemporaries. It’s because Peggy goes strictly by the book. Literally. It’s a large, black-leather-bound loose-leaf affair; jammed with neatly typed-and-mimeo’d notes and data, all lovingly compiled and looked after by Peggy’s gal Friday, Phoebe Jacobs. If Peggy were to lose her “show-book” (and she did, for a few harrowing hours, just before a Copacabana stint last year), things wouldn’t be half so sweet on stage. Peggy knows it: “That book is half of me—the better half.” Even a cursory flip-through of the show-book bears Peggy out. Every show she’s done for the past two decades, right down to each song she sang and what she wore, is carefully recorded so she can refer to the notes for a multitude of reasons (“Sometimes I want to revive a song or medley I did that went over with the crowd”). For any upcoming shows (her current engagement at the Copacabana, for instance) Peggy’s book outlines, even to hand gestures, what is to