Is That All There Is?
It now seems just all too perfect that as a 15-year-old boy, I would be obsessed with a song filled with existentialist angst, a half spoken-half sung opus to disillusionment with life even when the events are exceptional. The singer playing on my parental unit’s hi-fi suggested:
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball… if that’s all …there is.
I decided to take the sage singer’s advice.
The enigmatic, existentially bleak Is That All There Is? was written by the great Brill Building songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The first recording was by Leslie Uggams in 1968. Then came the hit Peggy Lee (1920 – 2002) version in 1969.
The song was inspired by a 1896 story, Disillusionment (Enttäuschung), by queerish writer Thomas Mann. Leiber’s wife grew up in the Netherlands, and she just barely escaped ahead of the Nazis. She introduced Leiber to the works of Mann. Most of the words used in the song’s chorus are taken verbatim from the narrator’s words in Mann’s story. In Lee’s version, the music recalls the style of the great German composer, Kurt Weill.
Lee’s version reached Number 11 on the Pop Singles chart and Number One on the Adult Contemporary chart, becoming her first Top 40 hit since Fever eleven years earlier. Lee won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and then later the recording was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame.
The orchestral arrangement on the song was composed by Randy Newman, who also conducted the orchestra.
For me, it’s about how everything ultimately is anticlimactic in life. There is a line of that song that devastates me:
“And then one day he went away, and I thought I’d die, but I didn’t.“
I loved it as a young teenager, but it really is a perfect song for an old person questioning the meaning of life and wondering if a lot of it had been for naught. Lee’s recording magnifies the question. Lee was one crazy truth-teller.
Lee’s Diva behavior behind that cool jazz exterior places her as one of the true great Gay Icons, in the same league as Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli. Lee was one of the greatest interpreters of American popular music; a singer, a songwriter, an actor and an innovator. She could sing it all: Jazz, Blues, Swing, Latin, and Rock. She recorded over 650 songs and released 60 albums.
Lee was one of the few of the traditional pop singers to successfully embrace the songs that the kids like, recording songs by The Beatles, Newman, Carole King, and James Taylor. From 1957 until her last recording in 1993, Lee routinely released two albums a year including standards, her own compositions, and material from new artists.
Lee was nominated for 12 Grammys. In 1995 she was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She even dipped into acting; Lee was even nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as an alcoholic jazz singer in Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955).
Lee’s singing voice gives us a natural conversational grace, with a smart nod to hipness, wit, nuanced sensuality, and she sings it all extraordinarily expressive minimalism. She uses vibrato and volume sparingly. Lee was not known to be spontaneous. Lee:
“I knew I couldn’t sing over them, so I decided to sing under them. The more noise they made the more softly I sang. When they discovered they couldn’t hear me, they began to look at me. Then they began to listen. As I sang, I kept thinking: ‘softly with feeling’. The noise dropped to a hum; the hum gave way to silence. I had learned how to reach and hold my audience- softly, with feeling.“
She liked to rehearse, and every gesture, lip curl and lifted eyebrow was planned. She kept detailed notes of lighting, costume, cosmetics, and choreography.
There is detached coolness to Lee’s recordings, and a bit of mystery too. Even with all of those wigs, over-the-top costumes and drag makeup, there is still something so cool about her. She extravagantly mythologized herself and she padded her life story, but I can’t think of an example of a record where she ever sang without truthfulness. A lonely woman with too much man trouble, she lived her love life on stage, singing to strangers. I find that very touching.
Lee carried a great deal of pain, and her anger was a major creative reservoir for her. Rejection and abandonment are major themes. Lee had a rough childhood, four miserable marriages, diabetes, and a drinking problem. Her life was troubled, but Lee never comes across as a tragic figure to me. But, she does seem nutty. She once insisted to Truman Capote that in a past life she had been a prostitute in Jerusalem and that she remembered the crucifixion:
I’ll never forget picking up the Jerusalem Times and seeing the headline ‘Jesus Christ Crucified’.
Lee had a date with producer Quincy Jones, but as he kept her waiting she drank so much that when he arrived she was passed out… and she was wearing black face!
Once, when her limousine broke down in route to an awards ceremony, she rolled her way down Wilshire Boulevard in a wheelchair in full Peggy Lee drag: Cleopatra wig, huge dark sunglasses and a white gown trimmed with lots of white fur.
But, she was not too nutty; she famously sued Disney Studios for royalties from her contributions to Lady And The Tramp (1955) and won $2.3 million. The score for the film was composed and conducted by Oliver Wallace, but Lee wrote the songs with Sonny Burke and assisted with the score as well. In the film, she sings La La Lu, The Siamese Cat Song, and the terrific He’s a Tramp. She helped promote the film on the Disney television series, explaining her work with the score and singing a few of the film’s numbers.
Disney did another of their unnecessary live-action remakes of Lady And The Tramp in 2019. The Siamese Cat Song is now cut because of its present-day perceived racist connotations. I suppose that is the way it has to be, but as a kid, the song brought me more interest in Asian culture.
Lee continued to perform into the 1990s, sometimes from her wheelchair. She left this world in January 2002, taken by diabetes at 81 years old. She was cremated, and her ashes are buried at The Garden Of Serenity in Westwood Memorial Cemetery in Los Angeles. Her marker reads:
Music is my life’s breath.
Is That All There Is? has been covered by Chaka Khan, Sandra Bernhard, PJ Harvey, The Bobs, Bette Midler and Tony Bennett, among others. Leiber and Stoller did shop around their curiously desolate ballad, offering first it to Streisand, whose manager turned it down. So did Marlene Dietrich, who would have done it properly. Lee’s manager played her a demo of the song, and she said that it was a big bummer. She changed her tune when Leiber personally brought it to Lee at her hotel, and she waved around the demo in his face and said: “If you give this to anybody else, it’s your life. This is mine. This is the story of my life.”
Here’s the lyrics so you can practice your version:
I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire
I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face as he gathered me up in his arms and raced through the burning building out to the pavement
I stood there shivering in my pajamas and watched the whole world go up in flames
And when it was all over I said to myself: is that all there is to a fire?
Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is
And when I was twelve years old, my father took me to a circus, the greatest show on earth
There were clowns and elephants and dancing bears
And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads
And so I sat there watching the marvelous spectacle
I had the feeling that something was missing
I don’t know what, but when it was over
I said to myself, ‘is that all there is to a circus?’
Is that all there is, is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is
Then I fell in love, head over heels in love, with the most wonderful boy in the world
We would take long walks by the river or just sit for hours gazing into each other’s eyes
We were so very much in love
Then one day he went away and I thought I’d die, but I didn’t
And when I didn’t I said to myself, is that all there is to love?
Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
I know what you must be saying to yourselves
If that’s the way she feels about it why doesn’t she just end it all?
Oh, no, not me I’m in no hurry for that final disappointment
For I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you
When that final moment comes and I’m breathing my first breath, I’ll be saying to myself
Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is…
