Kay Thompson (15 page)

“Richard Himber gave a party for Kay Thompson, Lou Holtz, and the rest of his co-workers on his radio program,” wrote columnist Virginia Vale, “and ever since the CBS studios have looked like a meeting of the Society of Amateur Magicians. Himber did card tricks at his party. Not to be outdone, Lou Holtz learned to pick watches out of the air. Kay Thompson is specializing in those old scarf tricks where one small handkerchief torn into bits turns into yards and yards of vari-colored scarves.”

Though the musical aspects of the program were generally deemed magical,
The Monday Night Show
was one rabbit short of a hat trick. “Lou Holtz,” according to
Radio Guide,
“was a big disappointment to many.”

“The zing of Miss Thompson,” noted
Variety,
“simply finger-pointed the unprofessionalism of the humor department.”

New comedy writers were brought in to make improvements, but the cash-flow problem only worsened. After a month, the regular cast members were still collecting only a fraction of their contracted fees. Then, the paychecks started showing up late. Faced with uncertainty and stonewalling, Kay lost her patience and bailed after the sixth broadcast.

Upset that her manager, Mark Hanna, had not done more to protect her, she fired him and signed with the William Morris Agency, where her agent would be Marc Daniels (later a prolific television director on such series as
I Love Lucy
and
Star Trek
).

T
rolling around CBS for
job opportunities, Kay sought out her old friend Bill Spier, whom she’d gotten to know in 1934 on
Pontiac Surprise Party
. They’d already reconnected in 1936 when Kay sauntered by his
March of Time
studio at CBS, where he’d introduced her to his stable of actors, including Agnes Moore-head, Joseph Cotten, and the baby of the group, twenty-one-year-old Orson Welles (who’d made his radio debut on March 22, 1935, under Spier’s direction).

As Bill had gotten to know Kay over the years, he realized they had an awful lot in common. They were both highly skilled, classically trained pianists and they loved playing double pianos together, jamming on all kinds of music, especially swing. They were also dedicated social climbers and, like Thompson, Spier had spent much of his life covering up his father’s Jewish heritage in order to join high-society clubs where Jews were often not allowed. At parties and niteries, they both independently cultivated friendships with the rich and famous, always working the room with an eye toward upward mobility.

The palpable electricity between them, however, had been kept at arm’s length in deference to Thompson’s matrimony with Jenney and Spier’s marriage to BBDO ad agency colleague Mary Scanlan (with whom he had two small children). The restraint, however, was not going to last forever—especially as both of their marriages were showing signs of wear. So, when Kay came to Bill’s office in the summer of 1938, she was ostensibly looking for work, but her eyes betrayed the possibility of a whole lot more.

Still creating radio shows for clients of BBDO, Bill proposed a reunion of his all-time favorite musical conglomerate: André Kostelanetz and His Orchestra featuring Kay Thompson and Her Rhythm Singers. Kay and Kosty loved the idea and so, with vaudevillian Walter O’Keefe attached as host, Bill shopped the package to potential sponsors until Ethyl Gasoline agreed to underwrite the series.

Written, directed, and produced by Bill Spier, the program would be called
Tune-Up Time
and was set to premiere January 12, 1939, broadcast in front of a live audience of two thousand inside CBS Radio Theater 1, at 242 West Forty-fifth Street. Kay would earn $750 per week, her largest radio salary to date. With wage minimums now set by the newly organized American Federation of Radio Artists (AFRA), each of Kay’s chorus members (nine women, three men) would take home around $62 per week. All would be Thompson alumni, including her sister Marian, who was back in New York singing again. (Under the stage name Mary Thompson, Marian had briefly headlined at New York’s Hotel Commodore, where one review called her the “young and pretty sister of kilocyclin’ Kay.” Ultimately, however, Marian was too shy to make a career of it alone.)

Between musical numbers, comedy sketches were performed by O’Keefe and an ensemble including Agnes Moorehead, who gamely lampooned herself in a regular feature called “Waste of Time,” a burlesque of
The March of Time
.

A major “name” guest star would join the regulars each week, and, depending on the magnitude of the celebrity, the sponsor was willing to cough up as much as $3,500 a pop. Among those who appeared were Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Beatrice Lillie, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Gene Autry, Lily Pons, Edward Everett Horton, and composers George M. Cohan, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart.

The most significant guest, however, was sixteen-year-old Judy Garland, who appeared on the April 6, 1939, broadcast. Judy had just finished principal photography for
The Wizard of Oz
in mid-March and was on a five-week personal appearance tour under the watchful eye of her vocal coach and accompanist Roger Edens. Roger had written a new number for Judy called “Sweet
Sixteen” and he had prepared an arrangement of “F. D. R. Jones.” Kostelanetz shunned the use of outside arrangements, always insisting on original treatments by his own team. “Sweet Sixteen” was not changed much, but Kosty and Kay had already collaborated on a more elaborate arrangement for “F. D. R. Jones” that was used instead—performed by Judy with Kay’s Rhythm Singers.

It was a fateful occasion marking Kay’s introduction not only to Judy but also to Roger, who happened to share Thompson’s November 9 birthday. It was no secret that Roger was born in 1905, but he was still trying to pinpoint Kay’s birth year when he produced
Funny Face
with her in 1956.

Thompson got right down to business. Dressed in her trademark slacks, she breezed into the no-nonsense dress rehearsal in full makeup yet wearing a red bandanna over her damp, freshly washed hair (to be styled later for the night’s program). According to chorus member Elizabeth Newburger Rinker, Kay demonstrated the special arrangements to Judy and Roger, playing piano and singing for them. After that, Roger took over at the piano as Kay coached Judy and the chorus until her shoulders tingled.

“Judy and Roger loved Kay from the get-go,” Elizabeth recalled. “I remember they laughed at lot.”

While in town, Judy performed five live shows daily at the Loew’s State in Times Square, between screenings of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. According to Elizabeth, Kay and several of the Rhythm Singers went to see Judy during that engagement and caught her show again in August when she performed at the Capitol between showings of
The Wizard of Oz
.

During the latter engagement, Judy was being looked after by
Oz
producer Mervyn LeRoy’s young assistant, Barron Polan, who would later become Thompson’s agent. And, keeping it all in the family, the revue also featured Thompson’s protégés Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, who by then had formed a quartet known as the Martins, with sisters Jo-Jean and Phyllis Rogers.

“There were two pianos onstage,” recalled Phyllis Rogers Whitworth, “and I remember Roger Edens playing one while Hugh played the other when we weren’t singing. Kay was around all the time, helpin’ us.”

Of course, no one had a clue then just how significant all these connections would eventually become.

Tune-Up Time
was beloved by critics, but struggled in the ratings because of two dreaded words: Bing Crosby. Bing hosted
Kraft Music Hall
during the same time slot on NBC, and routinely decimated the competition.

Fighting a no-win situation, the sponsor axed guest stars from the budget after the May 25 broadcast. With only five shows left (out of the original commitment of twenty-six weeks), CBS finally moved
Tune-Up Time
to Monday
night, starting June 5, up against the less formidable
Eddy Duchin and His Orchestra
on NBC. But the change was easier said than done.

It turned out that CBS Radio Theater 1 was not available on Mondays, so
Tune-Up Time
moved to Theater 3 (now known as the Ed Sullivan Theater), where Kay and Kosty had done
The Chesterfield Radio Show.
The shift also meant cutting the show to a half hour. Spier slashed all the comedy routines and diminished O’Keefe’s presence to little more than announcer. The spotlight would now be squarely on the music of Kay, chorus, and Kosty—which is what Spier had wanted in the first place.

The changes were worth it. The series slaughtered NBC, motivating Ethyl Gasoline to renew its sponsorship in August after a six-week summer hiatus. On the last show before the break, the closing number was Kay and Her Rhythm Singers performing Noël Coward’s “I’ll See You Again.”

While all this was happening, Kay had decided to try to salvage what was left of her marriage to Jack, using songwriting as therapy. The result was the aptly titled “What More Can I Give You?” a blues number composed jointly by the couple, which was recorded by Jenney and his orchestra for Vocalion Records on April 11, 1939. A review in
Metronome
called it “a grand combination of a pretty tune played just as prettily on trombone by Jenney.”

With Jack’s drinking somewhat under control, Kay encouraged him to form a permanent orchestra and mount a tour.
Down Beat
wrote that MCA fronted Jack a loan of fifteen thousand dollars to get the band up and running. Jenney unwisely borrowed another fifteen grand from trumpet player Ruby Weinstein, who would collect an onerous percentage of Jenney’s gross “up to 1949 in return for the loan.”

The Jenneys had personal expenses to worry about, too, not the least of which was Jack’s obligation to pay his ex-wife a hundred dollars per month for child support—which, according to his son, was often late or did not arrive at all.

Kay loaned Jack quite a bit of her own money, too. In a moment of clarity, she admitted to a reporter, “I’m the dumb cluck who is always getting drunks out of scrapes and lending them money that I never get back.”

Singer Louise Tobin saw a pattern in Kay’s behavior: “When you think about how close she later became with Judy Garland, who shared Jack’s addiction problems, I think Kay had an affinity for the helpless—a mothering complex or something.”

A fixer by trade, Thompson thought she could tame people’s demons with the ease of rearranging a song, but all too often, their excesses would prove to be more than she could handle.

With initial gigs in Cincinnati, Boston, and Atlantic City that June, Jenney’s
touring orchestra got off on the right foot.
Down Beat
raved that Jack’s new outfit “sounds like a million, plays like a million, and will probably make a million.”

During a Boston radio interview, host Ruth Moss asked Jenney, “Does Kay ever sing with your band?”

“I wish she would,” Jack lamented, “but she can’t.”

Moss wondered aloud, “I don’t know if it would be good for two musicians in the same family to be working together, conflict of temperament and so on.”

“Well, no, there’s no temperament,” Jack responded, keeping his cool. “We’re very seldom together, you see, so it is all right.”

Publicly, the Jenneys kept up pretenses of harmony. “I [used to think] that marriage and a career can’t mix,” Kay told a reporter that same year. “Well, Jack Jenney, the orchestra leader, and I have been married for two and a half years, and I admit I was all wrong. Today, I feel that most business women make a mistake when they try to make their marriages conform to exactly the same pattern as the marriages of women who stay home. It’s not the actual details that decide whether or not a marriage is a success, but the spirit behind it.”

One of those unimportant “details” was a singer traveling with Jack’s band named Lucille Matthews, described by
Down Beat
as “a brunette Carole Lombard . . . who will knock you out.” If this didn’t raise Kay’s eyebrow, widespread reports of Jack’s falling off the wagon certainly did.

While fretting over her husband’s relapse, Kay received word on July 12, 1939, that her sixty-five-year-old father had died of a heart attack. She dropped everything and flew to St. Louis to attend the funeral. Thompson’s mother, Hattie, a homemaker all these years, was now faced with running Leo’s pawnshop to make ends meet. While the rest of the family remained paralyzed with grief, Kay sprang into action, organizing everything, helping out at the store, making sure that her father’s affairs were put in proper order. It was her way of dealing with loss—by refusing to let it get her down.

Compassionately, Jack rearranged his touring schedule and arrived in St. Louis to start a gig at the Chase Hotel—where Kay could keep closer tabs on his drinking.

Not long after the Jenneys returned to New York, Jack recorded his most celebrated record, “Stardust,” during which he hit a high E-flat that was earth-shattering.

“No trombone player had ever done that,” recalled his son, John Jenney. “That was a great,
great
moment.”

John was not alone in his opinion. In 1946,
Down Beat
magazine declared, “Jack Jenney’s solo on ‘Stardust’ (Vocalion label, his own band) is generally acclaimed as the greatest trombone record of all time.”

Meanwhile, Kay’s agent at William Morris, Marc Daniels, was packaging a new Broadway musical,
Ladies and Gents
, with libretto and lyrics by William Engvick and a score by the progressive jazz musician Alec Wilder. “It was a biography in the form of a revue about a man and a woman named Peter and Helen,” Engvick explained. “It began when they met as children, and then there are various scenes of their meetings throughout their lives. They get married, then get divorced—that sort of thing.”

Kay was attached to star in the show and there was talk of Bob Hope or Tony Martin for the male lead. In August, Audrey Wood and William Liebling, who represented Tennessee Williams, organized a backers’ audition. Accompanied by pianist Walter Gross, Kay blazed through such scorchers as “I Wanna Dance,” “Got On My White Pants,” and the irresistibly titled “The Vamp of the Auto Camp.”