Kay Thompson (20 page)

Kay did not warm up to June, nor vice versa. “Never trust a woman who wears a Peter Pan collar,” was Kay’s curt indictment. Playwright Mart Crowley recalled that even in later life, Thompson was still mocking Allyson by imitating her “in that high, whiny voice.”

Lucille Ball’s tonality was just the opposite—low and scratchy. Kay was responsible for replacing it in the prerecordings with the more mellifluous singing voice of Gloria Grafton. Thompson worked closely with Ball on the set, making sure that her lip-synching was credible.

“Lucy was on one side of the camera and I was on the other side,” Kay explained during a joint appearance with Ball on
The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar
in 1960. “That’s when we first became acquainted and became very good friends.”

Lucille dreamed of one day warbling her own songs in a musical—a goal Kay would later help her achieve. Ball admired Thompson tremendously and Kay not only loved Lucy, she also liked her husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz. Soon, the Spiers and the Arnazes were frequently spotted together at hot spots all over town.

While the Freed Unit kept Kay occupied on
Meet the People
from May through August, producer Jack Cummings arranged for her to work on
Broadway Rhythm,
with an overlapping recording schedule of June through September. Although producers were highly possessive of their own pools of talent, it was financially beneficial to share because, on overlapping weeks, for instance, Kay’s salary of $500 was split between the two movies’ budgets.

In some ways,
Broadway Rhythm
was an extension of the work Kay had been doing on
I Dood It;
it was for the same producer and it again featured numbers by Lena Horne and Hazel Scott. But the most Thompsonian song in the film was “Milkman Keep Those Bottles Quiet” sung by the diminutive and feisty Nancy Walker, backed by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra (dressed as milkmen on-screen). Calling it a “rhythm novelty classic” and a “wartime favorite,” historian Will Friedwald declared, “Walker and Tommy Dorsey walk off with top musical honors.”

The ingenue in the film was played by Gloria DeHaven. “I never had a singing lesson in my life,” recalled DeHaven, “but I can sing and it’s because of
Kay Thompson. Kay Thompson was a vocal
coach.
There’s a big difference . . . [Kay] gave you style, how to sell a song, how to move your body, how to stand. ‘Not on every word,’ she would say, ‘do you use a gesture.’ She was phenomenal, just phenomenal.”

A
lthough Kay mingled with
a multitude of celebrities at work, there were plenty more when she went home to the Garden of Allah. Once the home of silent screen star Alla Nazimova, the Spanish-style house had been converted to accommodate a reception area, administrative offices, eight guest rooms, a restaurant, and a bar. Twenty-five villas, each subdivided into multiple bungalows, had been added throughout the three-and-a-half-acre estate, surrounded by tropical trees, fountains, and goldfish ponds. In the center of the property was a large swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea.

But nobody came for the amenities. The attraction was all about star wattage. When the Spiers arrived, residents included actors Humphrey Bogart (soon to be joined by Lauren Bacall), Errol Flynn, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, Edward G. Robinson, Fredric March, John Garfield, John Carradine, and Nazimova (reclusively peering from behind drawn curtains); writers Robert Benchley, Elliott Nugent, and Clifford Odets; musicians Paul Whiteman, Xavier Cugat, José Iturbi, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Woody Herman; and singer Perry Como.

Kids were an endangered species. Walter O’Keefe had two bratty sons whom Kay called Leopold and Loeb, inspired by convicted murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. And six-year-old David Carradine ran around in a cowboy hat shooting at everybody with his toy pistol.

One of the rare little girls on the premises was Sylvia Sheekman, daughter of screenwriter Arthur Sheekman and actress Gloria Stuart of
Titanic
fame, known back then for starring in the James Whale classics
The Old Dark House
and
The Invisible Man.

“Kay was my best friend,” confirmed Sylvia Sheekman Thompson (no relation) in 2002. “I was eight and I was a lot like Eloise. I wasn’t living at The Plaza, but I was a little girl at the Garden of Allah surrounded by adults. I was inquisitive and I loved everybody. I’d see Kay all the time at the pool and I would visit her place. I remember the upright piano, Kay and I, sitting side by side on the stool playing ‘Chopsticks.’ ”

Thompson enjoyed the girl’s visits and spoiled her with treats and gifts. “When I had my tonsils out,” Sylvia remembered, “Kay actually made a record, a song she wrote for me called ‘Sylvia Having Her Tonsils Out.’ It was so
incredible . . . a 78 disc, one-sided. The fact that anyone would do this during the war for a little girl having her tonsils out was amazing. All I remember is it started with distant calling, ‘Sylvia . . . ? Sylvia . . . ?’ as if I were coming out of the anesthetic. Can you imagine doing that for a child?”

Kay’s generosity did not stop there. “She also gave me two orange kittens,” Sylvia added. “I remember coming home from school and they were there in a box. My mother said Miss Thompson had left them for me. Kay had named them Roger and Wilco, like they say in the Air Force over the radio.”

It was no accident that Kay and Bill had chosen a bungalow in the inner circle, a prime location on the ground floor of a villa located diagonally across the pool from Bogart and Errol Flynn.

Both were on a mission. Kay longed to be a movie star, and the Garden enabled her to mingle among them and live like one. Bill was on the prowl for big-name actors to bolster his radio series, so the Garden was a natural casting depot—with Kay as his willing accomplice. In a matter of weeks, they had rounded up such neighbors as Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester to appear on
Suspense
, spiking the ratings further upward, thus setting the stage for Bill’s most monumental accomplishment in radio—and a scream heard coast to coast.

On the May 25, 1943, installment of
Suspense,
Agnes Moorehead starred in “Sorry, Wrong Number,” the story of an invalid woman who, in the process of trying to place a phone call, gets a wrong connection and overhears a man plotting a murder. The climax culminates in the horrifying discovery that the murderer is making the calls from inside the woman’s home and that she herself is the targeted victim.

In the original script, written by Lucille Fletcher (wife of
Suspense
composer Bernard Herrmann), the assassin enters the bedroom to kill the woman, but the police break in just in time to save her life. When Thompson read it, she felt the happy ending was a yawn and jokingly suggested a more grisly denouement. Spier didn’t think the idea was funny at all but rather a stroke of genius. He immediately rewrote the climax so that the murderer would finish the deed, concluding the episode with nothing but the bloodcurdling scream of the helpless victim. Little did Kay or Bill know that this sadistic shock ending would knock the wind out of millions of listeners coast to coast, resulting in one of the most talked-about radio milestones of all time—second only to the hysteria caused by Orson Welles’
The War of the Worlds.
In fact, Welles himself called “Sorry, Wrong Number” “the greatest single radio script ever written.” The phenomenon exploded further when Decca licensed the broadcast for commercial release, with sales so brisk it ended up as the third-highest-selling record of the year. Then
Life
published a pictorial of Bill coaching Agnes.

Right in the midst of this career high, however, Bill suffered a massive heart attack in mid-July. For a workaholic like Spier, being laid up in the hospital, then confined to his bungalow at the Garden for convalescence, was downright depressing. And for someone as hyper as Kay, being a nursemaid was sheer torture.

During the sabbatical, she tried shaving her husband every morning. “But it was too much for me,” Bill said, “Kay coming at me with a razor.” So a beard took root and became his trademark for life. Sheilah Graham dubbed him “the first hippie of Hollywood”; June Havoc described him as “tall, dark and woolly”; and Robert Montgomery called him “King George.” Judy Garland remarked to
Modern Screen,
“Those high Hooper ratings Bill Spier always gets on his radio shows are not because Bill looks like a genius. Whiskers won’t register on the air, but talent does.”

Kay liked the beard as well as the rest of the package. “To look less like an invalid,” she explained, “Bill decided that he would not wear pajamas. He was an exciting man in the nude.”

Kay wasn’t the only one who got to see Bill in his birthday suit. One night, the Spiers woke up to the heart-pounding discovery that an intruder was standing at the foot of their bed.

“Bill quite forgetting his heart attack got up and chased him to the patio,” Kay said. “He was about to call for help when he realized he was stark naked . . . Bill, to make it more interesting, told [the police], ‘They took my gold cuff links.’ I don’t believe they did, but he always had a sense of the dramatic.” As if she didn’t.

When Bill was back on his feet in September 1943, he not only resumed his position as producer and story editor on
Suspense,
he took over directing chores as well. And to help him get back into the swing of things, Orson Welles agreed to star in not one, but four consecutive installments of the series.

Welles had just married Rita Hayworth, whom Kay had befriended in 1939 on the set of
Music in My Heart.
So it was only natural that the Welles and the Spiers socialized. Between Bill’s star-studded radio triumphs and Kay’s splash at MGM, they sashayed onto Tinseltown’s high-society A-list. And, just as young Kitty Fink had made herself the life of every party, Kay breezed into every gathering, made a beeline to the piano, and got everyone singing till dawn.

Seemingly inexhaustible, Kay often volunteered for the war effort, too. “Every week,” she recalled, “I went to a hospital or a ward at some veterans’ hospital to sing and play the piano. Some of the wards were depressing and it was emotional to go there. One got caught up in the horror of the damage to
the young guys who . . . didn’t know who they were, walking around in those bathrobes, hanging around the piano and listening with eyes somewhere else. It was always difficult to go back to the studio after one of those.”

A year earlier, President Roosevelt had ordered the Special Services Division of the War Department to provide entertainment for soldiers via radio; and thus, the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) was formed. Uplifting variety shows were produced and transcribed on records, then shipped to hundreds of portable front-line transmitters to help boost morale among the troops.

Headed by Colonel Tom Lewis, a former radio producer, AFRS was run by a unit of privates that included the aspiring actor Howard Duff (who served as announcer), Kay’s old pal Pat Weaver (who wrote and/or directed), and Barron Polan (who headed the “talent-procurement department”). Thompson had met Barron in New York in 1939 when he was shepherding Judy Garland on her promotional tour for
The Wizard of Oz.
Since then, he had dated Judy and become her agent.

Through his tight associations with Garland and MGM, Barron had become friendly with Kay and was eager to book her on AFRS programs. Thompson was only too happy to oblige. In May, she appeared on
Personal Album
(accompanied by Hugh Martin); in September, she did an installment of
Mail Call,
hosted by Ingrid Bergman, for which she sang her jazzed-up arrangement of Irving Berlin’s “Louisiana Purchase” (with Ralph Blane in the chorus); and in November, she did another
Mail Call,
hosted by Lucille Ball, for which she performed a brassy version of Cole Porter’s “I’m in Love with a Soldier Boy.”

At a birthday party for Judy in June 1943, Kay ran into Broadway star Danny Kaye, who had just arrived in Hollywood to begin shooting his first motion picture,
Up in Arms,
produced by Samuel Goldwyn for RKO. Danny was a big fan of Kay’s work and he convinced her to do the choral arrangements, a moonlighting job that would have to be done under the radar because of her exclusivity to MGM.

Getting away with one outside job encouraged Thompson to test the boundaries of her contract further. Over the next several years, she worked clandestinely with Danny again on
Wonder Man
(Samuel Goldwyn/RKO, 1945); with her Garden of Allah neighbor Perry Como for his debut in Irving Starr’s
Something for the Boys
(Twentieth Century-Fox, 1944); with the Williams Brothers on
Something in the Wind
(Universal, 1947); and with the Music Maids on several films.

H
er most daring extracurricular
activity occurred at the behest of a certain blue-eyed crooner she’d befriended earlier that year in New York. When RKO brought Frank Sinatra to Hollywood on August 12, 1943, to star in his first movie,
Higher and Higher,
it was no accident that he took up residence at the Garden of Allah in a bungalow right next door to the Spiers. Frank wanted Kay to be his coach and advisor and she threw caution to the wind when he came calling.

“Frankie led a quiet life at the Garden,” wrote Sheilah Graham, “preferring to stay home in the evenings rather than test Hollywood night life.”

Many of those evenings were spent singing in the Spiers’ living room, with Kay accompanying him on piano. These neighborly jams served as coaching sessions, and there is no doubt that Sinatra came away with adjustments to his repertoire based on their melodic canoodling. Thompson’s services were rewarded with “big bowls of Italian spaghetti” delivered to her door every night by Sinatra’s cook.

Kay helped Frank rehearse his Hollywood Bowl engagement on August 14 and, that same month, helped him prepare his five numbers in
Higher and Higher,
including “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night,” which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Song.