Legendary singer Peggy King plots her comeback at 84

On Friday nights, on the second floor of Chestnut Street's Square on Square, some traditions are observed and some are ignored.

Personal tragedy chased hit-making torch singer Peggy King from the spotlight 13 years ago. Now with Philly’s All-Star Jazz Trio behind her, she’s back to belting it out.
Maria Pouchnikova

On Friday nights, on the second floor of Chestnut Street’s Square on Square, some traditions are observed and some are ignored.

During its ongoing residence there, Philadelphia’s All-Star Jazz Trio — pianist Andy Kahn, bassist Bruce Kaminsky and drummer Bruce Klauber — tend to the classic union of Chinese food and live jazz.

These Philly cats tuck into jazz standards like champs, with verve, innovation and ease. They’re diamond cutters, but they don’t take themselves too seriously. Each Square gig starts with the sounding of a gong. “Hey, it’s a Chinese restaurant,” says Kahn smiling.

After an instrumental intro, the pianist introduces a “surprise guest,” though her presence has become a regular thing on these nights.

Long-retired vocal legend Peggy King, 84, enters and sits before the trio. Handsomely dressed in black, with an expensive red silk scarf around her neck and a well-coiffed mop of strawberry blond hair framing her face, she sings “While We’re Young” in the same sweet, soft alto that made her famous as “pretty, perky Peggy King” — the toast of 1950s television, stage and album sides.

“Only now,” she’ll say later, “I sound like a woman, not so much that little girl.”

Unlike the old days, when talented players were often swapped in and out of the shadows of the singing stars, this band is not a backing unit. All-Star Jazz Trio is very much King’s full-time collaborative equal. “We are a foursome,” she says of her partners, after they’ve played an inventively subtle and brisk rhumba below her dulcet tones.

That’s where tradition goes out the window. It’s a gently improvisational dance when King sings with the All-Star Trio. “Nice way of putting it,” Klauber says after the set. “Though we take a backseat to Peggy when we’re accompanying her, as any professionals would, we do not lose our identity musically or personally throughout our program.”

During their playful set — when the boys aren’t mugging and she isn’t telling stories about being one of the last contract players at MGM film studios and dissing Columbia Records’ onetime boss Mitch Miller — King and the trio perform an angularly vampy “Born to Be Blue” and a noir-jazzy “Cry Me a River” with supple strength and youthful vigor. “Though all of us ham it up, individually and collectively, we still make some damn good music,” says Klauber.

Like Tony Bennett, she’s one of the last of the Great American Songbook standard-bearers — a saloon singer without the booze, a torch song traditionalist with a high flame underneath. In her day, King was a hit-making A-list performer and a household name.

“I didn’t think I’d ever do this again with any regularity,” says King. Right now her professional dance card is booked: She’s working on her first album since 1985, gearing up for a show at the Sellersville Theater (her biggest gig since meeting up with the All-Star Trio in 2013) and hyping a recently released compilation of past hits called Make Yourself Comfortable (Jasmine).

You can call it a comeback. King gave singing a rest after a pair of heavy heartaches: the 1994 death of her beloved husband, Samuel Rudofker (the philanthropist/chairman of Philadelphia formal wear clothier After Six), and the 2000 suicide of her firstborn, Jonathan. “I’m not a woman to burden others with my problems, but these things took a long time to move past. That pain will never leave. But, now that I’m here with these guys in the trio, I’ll never stop singing.”

* * *

Peggy King has always thought of herself as lucky, even if life hasn’t been as easy as one would imagine for someone so pretty and perky. “No matter what, I’m the luckiest girl In the world. I had a very, very, very lovely life, in opposition to a very difficult early life.”

King grew up poor in Greensburg in western Pennsylvania — “abject poverty, hungry, cold” — in a broom-closet apartment without a bathroom. “I didn’t have one until I sang professionally and hit the road,” she says. “My big dream was to buy my parents a house with a bathroom.”

She brings up a subject she’s rarely discussed: Not only did her mother and aunts grow up in an orphanage, but King was herself adopted within her family. “My mother Margaret’s baby sister, my Aunt Gladys, got pregnant as soon as she got out of the orphanage. No one told her how not to. Girls used to think that they were bleeding to death when they had their periods. They knew nothing about sex.” Rather than put the baby up for adoption, young marrieds Margaret and Floyd King adopted Peggy. “I did come to realize — and early, as I started singing at age 4 — that I had my birth mother Aunt Gladys’ voice, a sweet and powerful one at that.”

King tells a humorous story about when her dad was a volunteer fireman and the department held a benefit. “I wandered out from the kitchen and started singing ‘Oh Johnny’ with the little orchestra. My mom told me that I was singing ‘with gestures,’” she laughs. “I was swinging my hips. The audience was excited. I connected with that.”

The three Kings moved to the Cleveland, Ohio area when Peggy was 10, and the pre-teen took advantage of her musical self-awareness. She acted in every theater musical in high school and by age 17 was singing on the radio by day and at the Cleveland Hotel nightclub by night. In 1950, she was discovered by renowned big band boss Charlie Spivak (she later also sang with Ralph Flanagan and his band), who hired King away from her first steady jobs.

“The money part was scary, losing that revenue, and my parents were terrified that their little girl was touring with 20 men in a bus.” Things became a little more stable when King auditioned for, and won, a spot singing for jazz great Mel Tormé, who was starting his own television show on CBS, one of the first live and in-color programs. The Red Norvo Trio and comedienne Kaye Ballard were among its stars. “I think I got it because I was petite and Mel was just 5’4”,” she says giggling.

The Mel Tormé Show only lasted nine months — it was a ratings disaster, as the CBS color system was not viewable on standard black-and-white sets — but King’s profile was nonetheless boosted, and she began a relationship with top-notch New York City nightclubs such as the Blue Angel. That’s where she met legendary MGM musical producer (Singin’ in the Rain, Gigi) Arthur Freed. “He was a big weird man, but he offered me a film contract and said I could be another Judy Garland, so …”

So, off she went to Hollywood in 1952. Things didn’t quite work out with Freed (“I was expected to come to his office every day at 5 p.m. and refused. I wasn’t going to sleep with him.”) but, under contract at the end of the studio system, King still wound up in MGM’s The Bad and the Beautiful. She befriended Debbie Reynolds and Bing Crosby. Crosby helped her land another major television gig, on The George Gobel Show, in 1955.

“I’m certain it was Bing who put me in front of Gobel,” she says. “Bing and Lou Costello [of the Abbott & Costello comedy team, who put King in one of their movies] watched over me.” During her time on The George Gobel Show, she made the cover of TV Guide and was nominated for an Emmy.

Right before the Gobel hit though, there was Mitch Miller — the head of Columbia Records — who, after hearing King do a series of radio jingles, including a then-famous Hunt’s Tomato Sauce ad, signed her to a contract. For the uninitiated, Miller is known for doing as much bad as good for music, promoting white bread singers like Frankie Laine and belittling stars like Frank Sinatra by making them do novelty songs and hokey stuff, like sing with barking dogs. King agrees that “Mitch brought a lot of junk to the biz.”

King recounts her own Mitch Miller horror story on stage at Square on Square: Songwriter Arthur Hamilton tapped King to sing his smoky standard “Cry Me a River,” but Miller said no, and all over one word. “Mitch told me that the word ‘plebeian’ would never be on any Columbia label product and refused to let me record it.” Since then, Julie London, Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand and Joe Cocker have each recorded memorable versions of “Cry Me a River.”

Luckily, King had best-selling albums for the label, such as 1955’s Girl Meets Boy and 1956’s Wish Upon a Star, and was named “Best New Singer” of 1955-56 by both Billboard and DownBeat.

“The way she interprets a song, telling a story, personalizing each song. Those albums are classic,” says Mary Ellen Desmond, Philadelphia jazz chanteuse and University of the Arts School of Music professor who’ll host a workshop with King and the All-Star Trio in February. “I love her phrasing and delivery.”

In the late 1950s, life was good for King the songbird. Yet, as a woman plugging away since her teens, bouncing between gigs and coasts, she found that stardom was losing its luster. “I was starting to realize I didn’t have a life. I thought maybe I should get one. Then I met Sam.”

“Sam” was Sam Rudofker, the Philadelphia men’s formal wear magnate of After Six, who happened to be at Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago during King’s jazz dates there in 1960.

By then, King’s contract with Columbia had ended and she was able to swing as she did in the past, and do the subtly sultrier material she couldn’t under Miller’s control. (She wasn’t averse to jazzier, saucier stuff; check out 1959’s Lazy Afternoon and 2009’s The Navy Swings, a collection of tracks she recorded in the late ’50s with then-paramour André Previn.)

 “I did something when I met Sam I never did before — asked him if there was anything special that he wanted to hear.” It was love at first sight. After their first date, King knew she was going to quit the business and marry him. She did so in 1961, moved to Philly, and became the toast of local social circles with her charitable singing gigs for the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Philadelphia Boys Choir, Settlement Music School and such. The couple had two children — a son, Jonathan, a daughter, Suzy — and all-but-adopted the Boys Choir’s Justin Hopkins, an African-American youth whose vocal largesse and winning ways wowed King. She produced industrial films and commercials for her husband’s company.

* * *

“I’d known of Peggy as far back as the 1960s, as a distant cousin of mine married into her husband Sam’s family,” says Klauber. He and Kahn — who’ve known each other since they were 9 (“We were brazen little fellows,” says Kahn) — co-founded the All-Star Jazz Trio in 1972.

Klauber remembers that King did several benefits for the now-shuttered Philly-based Combs College, where he was secretary of the board of trustees, “right around the time she had that comeback in the ’80s.”

King returned to performing (including a guest appearance with Peter Nero’s Philadelphia Pops in 1983) and recording with two albums produced by her husband, 1984’s Oh, What a Memory We Made and 1985’s Peggy King Sings Jerome Kern. “Such a lovely life, you know,” she says quietly.

Still, she nearly lost her daughter to a serious car accident. Her husband died in 1994. And her son committed suicide in 2000, after a long, difficult battle with drugs and depression. That’s pretty much when the singing stopped.

“[Jonathan] was my first, you know, so I was gone for two years after that. I just ate, slept and tried to stay my daughter’s mother. I was in a stupor. It was the only time in my life that I couldn’t sing. I had no voice.”

Her solace and comfort, she recalls, came from her protégé, opera star Hopkins. “Peggy selected him from over 50 boys in the choir when he was 8, and mentored him personally,” says Kahn. “Peggy claims she would never have been able to continue had Justin not moved in with her during the initial mourning period.”

Still, for 13 years, King didn’t sing in public.

* * *

It wasn’t until King met her next “adopted sons” in the trio, that she found her voice again. The All-Star Jazz Trio was staging its own “comeback,” says Klauber, when they produced a fundraiser for the nonprofit Musicopia at the Ethical Society in June 2013. “I’d been friends with area PR guy Anthony DiFlorio III — Peggy’s archivist — for years and asked if he could bring Peggy to our show.”

When Klauber introduced King in the Ethical Society audience, the place went nuts, and she spent a full hour after the show posing for pictures and signing autographs. “This could have been out of some Grade-B movie,” notes Klauber.

Kahn recalls King then directed her attention to him, saying she hadn’t heard anyone play the piano that well since she was engaged to André Previn, adding that “she ‘dodged THAT bullet!’” laughs Kahn.

“Then she asked us if we’d consider bringing her out of retirement to do a show together.” Kahn brought her into his Rittenhouse Square home studio and came to the conclusion that even after a decade-plus away from music, “she could sing her ass off.”

* * *

That was the beginning of what King terms “a four-way love affair.” Something just clicked, that night for her, and kept clicking as she performed a quartet show with the trio at the Ethical Society that December, a small Chris’ Jazz Café gig in 2014 and as she guests at the Trio’s semiweekly Square on Square residency. And now, there’s the Sellersville show and a new album on the way.

Kahn recalls that first phone call, when King asked him, “How do you know I can still sing?”

He replied that she had a resonant purity and a distinct clarity in her speaking voice. “It’s gentle, sweet, not hoarse or guttural in any way, something which could easily have occurred naturally to a woman of her age, especially since she hadn’t been rehearsing or singing round the house — both of which she insisted she said she hadn’t done in years,” Kahn says.

When it comes to the music, there’s no hand-holding involved. “It took time to build up complete musical trust in terms of knowing that we’ll always be there for her harmonically and rhythmically,” says Klauber, “but she got jazzier as time went on, and the musical chances she takes — because of this trust — are just astounding.”

King laughs about having come to the boys in the band with over 40 songs they never played: jazz, pop and showtune classics that “we own as soon as we perform.” WRTI’s J. Michael Harrison has their salty, post-bop take on “Let’s Fall in Love” in regular rotation. “That’s sweet, since that used to be my big audition song,” she says.

“You have to take advantage of every opportunity as soon as you get it, especially now as there’s less time than more. I’ve been ready for this since I could walk and talk.”

Peggy King and the All-Star Jazz Trio perform, Sun., Feb. 1, 2 p.m., $25-$39.50, Sellersville Theater 1894, 24 W. Temple Ave., Sellersville, Pa., 215-257-5808, st94.com.