By Emmanuel King
Peggy King, the singer and actress who became one of the first women America welcomed into its living rooms every week, died Sunday at the Saunders House assisted living facility in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, following a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 96. Her publicist, Alan Eicher, confirmed her death.
For anyone who studies how performers built careers in the early days of television, King’s rise is a master class. She was a regular on The George Gobel Show from 1954 to 1957, appearing as the resident vocalist on what was then NBC’s No. 1 series. Gobel introduced her musical numbers with a nickname that followed her for the rest of her life: “Pretty Perky Peggy King.” In 1955 she was nominated for an Emmy Award for best female singer, and three years later she returned to the Emmys not as a nominee but as the broadcast’s co-host, a measure of how completely television had embraced her.
She was born February 16, 1930, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, and raised in Ohio. She began singing on radio in Cleveland while still young, then paid the dues every singer of her generation paid, fronting the big bands of Charlie Spivak, Ray Anthony and Ralph Flanagan. The band years taught her the two skills television would demand: how to put a song over in a single take, and how to make a camera feel like a person.
In 1952 she signed a contract with MGM, which led to a singing cameo in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful, where she performed “Don’t Blame Me.” Mitch Miller then signed her to a long-term deal at Columbia Records, where she made two best-selling albums, Wish Upon a Star and Girl Meets Boy. DownBeat and Billboard both named her the best new singer of 1955-56. That same year she stood on the Academy Awards stage and performed “Count Your Blessings,” the Oscar-nominated song from White Christmas.
Her career also holds one of the great what-ifs in American song. Composer Arthur Hamilton wrote “Cry Me a River” for King, but Miller refused to let her record it. The song went on to become a standard in other voices. King, gracious about it for the rest of her life, simply kept performing it on stage, reclaiming in concert what the studio system had taken off her record.
On film she sang her way through Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy in 1955, and in 1957 she played stewardess Janet Turner in Zero Hour!, the earnest aviation thriller that a generation later would be affectionately spoofed, nearly shot for shot, as Airplane!. She starred opposite Tab Hunter in the television musical Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, and in a TV version of Jack and the Beanstalk alongside Joel Grey, Celeste Holm and Cyril Ritchard. Her face and voice were everywhere the era’s audiences looked: The Bob Hope Show, American Bandstand, The Steve Allen Show, The Kraft Music Hall, The Garry Moore Show, The Jack Benny Program, The Perry Como Show, What’s My Line? and The Tonight Show, with dramatic turns on Maverick and Dragnet. On February 8, 1960, she was among the very first entertainers honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
After her third marriage, to Samuel Rudofker, King made her home in the Philadelphia area and raised a family, stepping back from the national spotlight while continuing to record and perform. The Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia inducted her into their Hall of Fame in 2010. Then, in a late chapter most performers only dream about, she came back: in 2013 she returned to the stage with the All-Star Jazz Trio, winning strong notices at 54 Below and the Metropolitan Room in New York, and in 2016, at 86, she released Songs a la King, her first new album in 36 years.
Peggy King’s career spans the entire arc of modern entertainment, from big band radio to streaming-era rediscovery, and she met every era the same way: prepared, musical and incapable of giving a performance less than her whole heart. The nickname was “Pretty Perky,” but the career underneath it was something sturdier. It was the work of a singer who understood, long before it became a slogan, that the camera rewards the performers who show up ready.