Kay Thompson (14 page)

But why was Thompson dumped in the first place? Hugh said, “The switch was made partly because Kay was not what the Shuberts considered sexy in the 1930s. Vivian was very much like a Joan Blondell type, blonde and plumpish, but in an attractive way. She was curvaceous and vivacious.”

Exactly. So, how could anyone imagine Vance in the role of the prickly spider woman? On the other hand, perhaps it was typecasting after all. Eve Harrington à la Ethel Mertz. Even though the Shuberts were legendary for capricious changes, it appears that the growing membership of Vance’s fan club—Yip Harburg, Russel Crouse, and Ed Wynn—had blood on their hands, too.

“When I asked Yip why they fired Kay,” recalled Hugh, “he said, ‘Because she was rotten.’ I really hated him for it because I thought she was marvelous, and I felt it was disloyal of both Yip and Harold not to stand up to the stupid Shuberts and say, ‘We want this woman. We found her. That’s who we want and we will not allow you to replace her.’ That’s what they should have done, in my opinion. But they didn’t.”

Minnelli had always been Kay’s strongest ally, but after his illness and his falling-out with Wynn, his power had eroded. When the additional credit “Book Staged by Howard Lindsay” suddenly appeared in the program, it was clear Vincente’s opinion no longer carried much weight—which automatically gave Vivian another leg up in her divide-and-conquer strategy.

Disingenuously, she went to Kay and offered to quit. “You must do the show,” Thompson replied. “It won’t help me if you refuse. They’ll just get someone else and you need the break. You’re a gifted person.”

Gracious speech, but Kay knew full well that Vivian had the upper hand—and there was nothing to be gained by getting into a catfight. Game over.

Nine years later, it was still hot gossip among Kay’s confidantes at MGM, as evidenced by some no-holds-barred lyrics in “The Passion According to St. Kate, Opus 19, #46,” the satirical cantata composed by Roger Edens in honor of Kay’s birthday. Performed at a private party by Judy Garland and two
Hooray for What!
alumni, Ralph Blane and orchestrator Conrad Salinger, the song attributed Kay’s dismissal to “the Shuberts’ fornicality and Vivian Vance’s sexuality.”

Though Kay had left the show, the Forrest Theatre program for the subsequent Philadelphia tryout credited “The Kay Thompson Singers” and noted: “Soloists Coached by Miss Kay Thompson.” Those “soloists,” however, were dropping like flies—including Hannah Williams and Roy Roberts, both fired in Philly.

By now, all the dirty laundry from
Hooray for What!
had been worked up into a lather of bad press. With the official Broadway opening now set for December 1, something had to be done to quell the negativity. So, Russel Crouse wrote an article entitled “So You Heard a Rumor?” and hoodwinked
The New York Times
into publishing it on the Sunday prior to opening.

According to Russel’s fabricated version of events, all the people who left
Hooray for What!
did so of their own volition. “It all started when Kay Thompson decided that she preferred her native radio to musical comedy,” Crouse alleged. “We hated to lose her but there was nothing we could do about it.” Apparently trying to be funny, he sarcastically listed potential replacements for Kay, including “Greta Garbo, Sophie Tucker, Eleanor Roosevelt, and, if
she were still alive, Sarah Bernhardt . . . This kept up until Vivian Vance went into the part—and very nice, too.” Anything but spin control, Crouse’s article merely drew attention to the show’s colossal fallout of talent.

Although reviews were mixed, critics generally agreed that Ed Wynn was a hoot, which, box office–wise, was all that really mattered. Even so, just imagine the satisfaction Kay must have felt when she read in
The New York Times
that Vivian’s singing was “nothing remarkable.” In several other reviews, Vance received the absolute worst indictment imaginable: no mention whatsoever.

Despite the turmoil,
Hooray for What!
became a modest hit, chalking up two hundred performances over the next six months. Throughout the run, Thompson continued to receive credit in the
Playbill
program for coaching the chorus, and took personal pride in the fact that her vocal arrangements were heard nightly on the Great White Way.

Although Wynn was the primary reason for the show’s longevity, the musical’s score and arrangements would be far more influential in the greater scheme of things. Upon seeing the show, MGM producer Arthur Freed signed Arlen and Harburg to compose the songs for
The Wizard of Oz,
and the connection did not end there. “I’m Hangin’ On to You,” one of Kay’s solos cut in Boston, was resuscitated for
Oz
with new lyrics and a new title: “If I Only Had a Brain.” Freed was well aware of Thompson’s contributions as a vocal arranger, too, and in the years to come he would draw upon that talent.

Just when Kay thought it was safe to forget about
Hooray for What!
she was in for a surprise. For his NBC show,
The Royal Gelatin Hour,
Rudy Vallee wanted to feature selections from
Hooray for What!
performed by the musical’s cast. However, the radio program went on the air at the same time the play was being performed at the Winter Garden. Someone proposed the unthinkable: Would Kay consider salting her wounds for one more night? If it meant that millions of people would hear her proudly sing her own arrangements of “Down with Love” and “Moanin’ in the Mornin’,” rather than Vivian Vance, then hell yeah.

The blissful exuberance of Kay’s “Down with Love” arrangement was the perfect complement to the irreverent lyrics, and for good measure, the backup trio tossed in her idiosyncratic “Simone Simon” riff. In contrast, for the blues ballad “Moanin’ in the Mornin’,” Kay reached deep down into her gut and delivered an aching performance, pleading in a way that, when heard today, brings to mind Judy Garland. Of course, this was a full year before another Arlen-Harburg ballad brought out the gut-wrench in Judy, in a land you may have heard of, once in a lullaby.

S
till not done
with
Hooray for What!
Kay pulled some strings with Chappell and Company, Arlen and Harburg’s music publisher, for Jack Jenney and His Orchestra to be granted “first recording rights” for two songs from the show—enabling her husband to land his debut recording contract with Vocalion Records, a subsidiary of Brunswick. And so, on January 14, 1938, two months after his wife had been fired from
Hooray for What!
Jenney found himself in the surreal position of recording “In the Shade of the New Apple Tree” and “I’ve Gone Romantic on You.”

Kay had hoped to be the guest vocalist on the tracks, but Eli Oberstein, her boss at Victor Records, would not agree to a loan-out. Instead, Jack hired Adelaide Moffett, the scandalous, twenty-one-year-old heiress to the Moffett Newspaper millions. Thompson was not amused.

It is not known if Adelaide was one of Jack’s extramarital conquests, but he had a reputation as a philanderer. Jealous and suspicious by nature, Kay apparently decided two could play that game.

It was around this time that she connected with Dave Garroway, who later became the founding host of NBC-TV’s
The Today Show
(from 1952 to 1961). Born in Schenectady, New York, Garroway moved to St. Louis in 1927 at the age of fourteen and attended Washington University beginning in 1931, overlapping Kay’s final year there. An avid music buff, he became a fan of Thompson when he heard her sing on KMOX and, since then, he had followed her career with keen interest. With a wife and baby daughter, Dave moved in 1937 to New York, where he “won an entry level position at NBC as a page” and “enrolled in the network’s training school for announcers.” Knocking around Radio Row, he made a point of meeting Kay, and their friendship progressed to an extramarital affair—which only simmered down when Dave moved away in 1939 for radio gigs in Pittsburgh and Chicago.

Sadly, infidelity was not the only marital woe brewing between the Jenneys. “Jack was a heavy drinker,” Bea Wain confirmed. “He was smashed a lot. Kay drank pretty good back then, too, but Jack was worse.”

Hughie McFarland, Jack’s band boy, regaled acquaintances with stories about the couple’s “legendary consumption of alcohol.” Ted Straeter told friends, “In her early days, Kay was a drunk.” And Paul Hemmer, director of the annual Jack Jenney Music Festival, recalled, “A woman from Jack’s hometown in Iowa told me that the locals weren’t impressed with Kay because ‘she smoked that weed and had Jack smoking it, too.’ ”

Hearsay should not be taken as gospel, of course, but Kay did later tell playwright Mart Crowley, “Wherever there are musicians, there are drugs.” Considering Kay and Jack’s reputation as boozers, it is not hard to imagine them indulging in marijuana or perhaps even harder recreational substances. But, by all accounts, it was Jack who really let it get out of hand—especially in 1938 when, during a gig at the Onyx Club on “Swing Street” (West Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues), he got fired for showing up “drunk as a skunk.”

Thompson’s career was on shaky ground, too. She’d been dropped from several major radio series; her bid for Broadway had been a bust; her movie debut had been only a blip; and she was being held captive by a record label that no longer wanted her. Unemployed and demoralized, Kay was running low on money and self-esteem. It seemed like only yesterday she’d been making headlines, but those newspapers had gone to the bottom of the birdcage. Welcome to showbiz.

At that time, the star of the family was Jack. Although he wanted to tour with an orchestra of his own, he was too much in demand on the freelance circuit, where his reputation as a top trombonist kept him booked full-time. “He was besieged with so many offers that he had to hire a secretary to remind him of his numerous engagements,” noted an article in
Song Hits
.

In early 1938, one of Jenney’s gigs was in the orchestra for
The Kate Smith Hour
on CBS. One day when Kay was visiting, Kate Smith asked if she would be interested in forming a chorus to perform as backup singers on the series. Thompson did not want to toil strictly as a choral director, so she suggested her old pal from St. Louis, Ted Straeter, for the job.

Kay and Ted had formed a very tight bond in New York, though strictly platonic; he was one of her many gay friends. In putting together his choir for Smith, Straeter relied heavily on Thompson’s former backup singers to fill the ranks, including Bea Wain.

“One night on
The Kate Smith Hour
I had a four-bar solo,” Bea recalled. “After we got off the air, I got a phone call from bandleader Larry Clinton, who wanted me to audition for him.” Bea had some doubts about her own abilities to be a solo vocalist, so she called Kay for advice.

“Meet me down at The Plaza,” Kay told her. “In the Persian Room.”

“It was during the day so nobody was there,” Bea remembered. “Kay sat down at the piano and said, ‘Okay, let me hear you sing ‘The Best Things in Life Are Free.’ Well, it’s a rangy song. It goes from way down here to way up there. I mean, she was feeling me out, you know? And I did it. And she said, ‘If you can do that,
okay
!’ ”

Who else but Kay would crash The Plaza and commandeer the Persian Room as her own private rehearsal studio? Of course, she thought nothing of it, striding through the hotel as if she owned the place. With her matter-of-fact bravado, some of the employees probably thought she did. Thompson had a piano in her apartment, but that just would not do. Singing in someone’s living room was nothing compared to a real, honest-to-God stage.

“Kay just put me out on the right road,” Bea marveled. “I really adore her.”

Clinton liked Bea so much, he asked her to become his regularly featured vocalist, and from there she became a singing star in her own right.

Kay was also mentoring Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin. In 1938, she helped Ralph land his own Monday afternoon radio show on NBC, for which she served as a creative consultant. At the same time, Thompson put in a good word for Hugh with composers Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart that helped him land his first job as an arranger, on their Broadway musical
The Boys from Syracuse
. When Martin and Blane teamed up professionally, Thompson was like a proud parent. As
Family Circle
reported, “Kay encouraged them in their first songwriting ventures by making suggestions and helping to work out arrangements.”

Many of her colleagues noted, however, that just below the surface of Kay’s generosity was a fragile ego ready to erupt with anger and jealousy whenever a minion’s success threatened to eclipse her own.

To reconfirm her standing as queen bee, Kay needed a job and, luckily, one was about to fall in her lap. In February 1938, bandleader Richard Himber, known for his theme song “Monday in Manhattan,” was hired to conduct a twenty-piece orchestra—including Jack Jenney on trombone—for a new CBS variety series,
The Monday Night Show,
to be emceed by veteran vaudevillian Lou Holtz, set to debut on March 7.

Holtz would be accompanied in comedy sketches by the versatile thespian Agnes Moorehead, a fixture on Bill Spier’s
The March of Time
.

Rounding out the regular cast on
The Monday Night Show
would be vocalist Connie Boswell—or so it was announced. Suffering from a start-up cashflow crunch, producer Freddie Mayer asked everyone to take a cut in pay “until the show got rolling.” All agreed except for Boswell, who quit. At Jenney’s suggestion, Thompson was hired as a last-minute replacement.

Mayer promised Kay she could have her large chorus of Rhythm Singers when money started rolling in, but for now, she’d have to sing solo. For the premiere broadcast, Kay performed “Exactly Like You,” one of the songs she had recorded for Victor. Never satisfied with leaving well enough alone, she tinkered with the arrangement, slowed down the middle section, and kicked
it into an even bigger climax—with Himber’s lush orchestration puffing it up even further.