Kay Thompson (22 page)

“So Roger came up to my office,” Thompson recalled, “and we got down to it. I don’t know who said what, [but we settled on] doing an interview with a star.”

Kay and Roger decided to spoof Garson’s image as a serious actress who frequently starred in melodramatic biographies, specifically her most recent MGM vehicle,
Madame Curie,
about the scientist who discovered radium. In their musical send-up, Garson would announce to the gentlemen of the press the subject of her next biographical characterization.

“So we began to improvise,” Kay continued. “I thought of the name ‘Madame Crematante.’ ”

The name was an amalgam of “crème de la crème” and “dilettante”—meaning übersuperficial—a biting indictment that would sail right over Garson’s head . . . or would it? They’d take their chances.

“And what did Madame Crematante invent?” Kay added. “The safety pin.” This absurdity became the basis for Kay and Roger’s satiric gem, “A Great Lady Has an Interview,” or, as it is more commonly referred to, “Madame Crematante.”

“When we finished it,” Kay explained, “I acted it out in the office. Roger played piano and Ralph [Blane] was a reporter.”

Obviously, it would require a certain amount of self-deprecation and a sturdy sense of humor on Garson’s part. But the timing could not have been worse. Greer had just received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in
Madame Curie.
Being up for an Oscar was—and still is—an emotionally charged period for any nominee, especially those prone to delusions of grandeur.

Just days before the March 2, 1944, Oscar ceremony, Roger arranged for a presentation of “Madame Crematante” at Arthur Freed’s house, attended by Garson, her mother, her husband, Richard Ney, Vincente Minnelli (under consideration to direct), and Charles Walters (under consideration to direct and/or choreograph). With Edens on piano and Blane as a reporter, Thompson demonstrated the number, hamming it up to the hilt.

“As Kay and Roger got deeper into the satiric piece,” Vincente Minnelli recalled, “and the music became more challenging, it became obvious that a singing performer would have to play ‘Madame Crematante.’ ”

When it was over, there was no reaction. “Absolute dead silence,” Kay remembered. “Vincente pursing his lips. And finally Richard Ney said, ‘Your house is beautifully appointed, Arthur.’ Nobody moved. Then, Greer said, ‘Well . . . I was thinking more of doing . . . a number about, oh, a red beard and a bicycle.’ Vincente didn’t say a word, not a goddamn word. Neither did
Arthur . . . The mother said, of course, nothing. And I got up and went over to Roger and said, ‘Don’t you think we have to go?’ And Ralph said, ‘Geez, we gotta go.’ Then the three of us just left.”

In retrospect, Kay still pondered the rejection with amazement and anger. “Isn’t Greer Garson an ass?!” she snarled. “I mean anybody who would not like this—aaarrrrgh! It was
great
.”

“Oh, it would have been fun, wouldn’t it?” Garson later reflected to
The Hollywood Reporter.
“But at the time I didn’t think it was appropriate to be making fun of the hand that was feeding me, so to speak.”

Thompson did not give up. If Garson didn’t want to do it, maybe Garland would. “Kay suggested Judy,” Minnelli recalled. “It was a singing tour de force preceded by devastating commentary, the sort of number Kay did herself with such great high style. Judy was capable of the biting lines, if her way with a story was any indication. Yes, I agreed, Judy would be perfect.”

“So the next day,” Thompson remembered, “we called Judy and said, ‘Come up to Kay’s office.’ ”

On a break from shooting
Meet Me in St. Louis
, Garland sat down and watched Thompson do the routine, from start to finish. “So I did it,” Kay recalled. “I flounced all over the thing. When it was over, Roger said, ‘Do it again.’ ”

This time, however, he made Judy stand beside Kay. “Do it exactly like she does it,” Edens instructed Garland. Judy began emulating Kay, as if they were synchronized images, side by side.

“I’m saying, ‘Now go over here,’ ” Kay explained, “and she got up on the desk and I’m saying, ‘Put your hand on your hip like that.’ ”

Suddenly, all that mattered in the entire world to Garland was this fascinating new kind of character she was being asked to play.

“Judy was just captivated,” Kay said. “Just electrified. She was just in her little girl period, you know, of innocence, whatever it was. But she hadn’t made her departure yet, and this was certainly it. You never saw such an infusion of vitality, but she got it in pretty good shape. And then we quickly went down to Rehearsal Hall C and had that
long
table built and Ralph put all the props there and went over it with her, just drumming it. And I’m doing it like wild, and placing her arms and her hands, you know, just really going to work on her. And then, Chuck [Walters] came in to see it, and he became one of the reporters, so we had Chuck and Ralph as the reporters.”

When they got it in presentable shape, Roger brought Arthur Freed over to see it. “Just before we started,” Kay recalled, “I was gonna give Les, the pianist, the downbeat and I lifted my hand and hit Arthur right in the crotch. He really jumped a few feet, and I turned—I just said right to his crotch, ‘Oh
Arthur!’ And Ralph turned and patted him on the leg. It was an awful way to impress anybody. And Roger said, ‘Come on, Katie, let’s
go
!’ So, we tried not to laugh too hard [as we] acted the whole thing out. We get to the end—and Judy really did do it great, you know, for having learned it in a half-hour—and we all are, ‘Hola, hola, hola,
holaaaaa
[singing the finale of the song]!’ ”

To the astonishment of all, Arthur said nothing about the performance and began making small talk, predicting winners for the upcoming Oscars. “We’d had this poor treatment from Greer a couple of nights before, so we didn’t give a shit by then,” Kay cursed, the memory still blistering.

Later in private, Arthur told Roger that the idea of casting Judy in such a sophisticated role was in direct conflict with the wholesome image that had been cultivated for the twenty-one-year-old star. Before proceeding, they would have to get the blessing of studio management. Since the number one chief, Louis B. Mayer, still viewed Judy as a child, Roger hoped that the number two boss, Sam Katz, might be more open-minded.

“So we went to Sam Katz’s office,” Kay recalled. “It was at 9 o’clock in the morning, and the upright piano faced the wall and Roger played and I did it right by the piano. Sam was dictating a letter or on the phone and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ when we finished. He didn’t say anything. I left and Roger carried on babbling. It was a matter of minutes and . . . Roger called me and said, ‘Let’s get started. It’s in.’ ”

Columnist Hedda Hopper visited the rehearsal hall and reported, “The corkscrew knots Judy ties herself into while getting her picture taken will have you rolling. Bet she gets a touch of Hepburn’s ‘Rally, rally, I do’ and Garbo’s ‘I tank I go home’ in her impersonations.”

Lennie Hayton conducted the prerecording sessions with Kay’s chorus of seventeen men, including Andy Williams, Don Williams, Ralph Blane, and a fifteen-year-old kid named Earl Brown.

“She loved tenors squealing out there,” Earl Brown recalled. “Sometimes she’d make the chord even higher than it had been written. One time, the tenors were really too much, and she said, ‘My God, darling, it sounds like a pit of hissing snakes.’ She was just great and so talented. I was really listening to every word she said. I had a feeling I might use it and I did.”

Earl went on to become a member of the Skylarks and later, he would become a top vocal arranger for television and movies (including
New York, New York
), frequently crossing paths with Kay along the way.

Though Judy’s performance was Kay’s creation from beginning to end, Charles Walters choreographed the gaggle of reporters. He wanted to direct the sequence as well, and spent weeks planning every aspect of the production.
To his dismay, however, the directing reins were handed over to Vincente Minnelli. Vincente must have been in sync with what Charles had so carefully prepared because, according to Walters’ biographer, Brent Phillips, “Chuck always insisted that every shot in ‘The Interview’ was his.” Nevertheless, Minnelli got the “Directed by” credit while Walters had to live with a “Dance Direction” attribution.

The person who
really
got gypped was Kay. Though Thompson received a cowriting credit with Edens, her contribution went far beyond ink on a sheet of paper. But Kay thought it was undignified to beg for credit. She opted for false modesty, later claiming, “I don’t think I ever gave Judy anything.”

With “Madame Crematante,” however, Thompson not only reinvented Judy, she pioneered a whole new genre of music: rap. “Kay introduced the first rap song, 40 years before Harlem did,” marveled critic Rex Reed in 1998.

“Shooting the number was great fun,” Minnelli wrote in his autobiography. “Judy came off extremely well. Her singing was as vibrant as ever, and she revealed a satirical style which owed a great deal to her terrific version of Kay’s performance.”

Newsweek
enthused that Garland “displays an unexpected flair for occupational satire,” and
The New York Times
raved that Judy possessed “a talent approaching Beatrice Lillie or Gertrude Lawrence.”

“But you see that’s the marvelous thing about invention,” Kay proudly declared, having just viewed the sequence on television in 1972. “As I saw it [again] last night, it’s right
now
. And you know, I liked it better on television than I’ve ever liked it before. That’s the wonderful thing that God gave me, if he ever gave me anything, which was a sense of no time . . . That’s what you call style. And that’s what this thing had.”

A
side from “Crematante,” Kay
worked on many other segments for
Ziegfeld Follies
as a vocal arranger, vocal coach, and choral director—including Lena Horne’s powerful rendition of “Love” (Hugh Martin–Ralph Blane), conducted by Lennie Hayton.

One day during rehearsal, Lena “protested she could not reach high C in a certain passage.”

“My voice isn’t that good,” Lena insisted. “Better put it down at least one key.”

On the next run-through, Horne hit the note pitch-perfect.

“You see?” Lena said. “B-flat is my limit.”

“I see.” Kay nodded knowingly. “For your information, I didn’t change the key, and you can hit high C right on the nose as long as you think it’s B-flat!’ ”

Horne’s appreciation ran deep. Years later, she always declared, “Kay was the best vocal coach in the world.”

Hugh Martin begged to differ. “Sometimes Kay overworked people,” he said. “I know that when Lena Horne recorded my song ‘Love’ for
Ziegfeld Follies,
she had a tired voice because Kay worked her too hard just before the recording. Kay had a real strong voice and she didn’t have to worry about getting tired, but she sometimes forgot that other people had more fragile voices.”

Martin actually preferred Thompson’s own rendition of “Love,” performed on
Philco Radio Hall of Fame
in January 1945, fifteen months before
Ziegfeld Follies
was released. “I was nervous about whether Kay could bring that last note off, but she did with flying colors.”

Few people knew that Kay’s singing voice made it into
Ziegfeld Follies
. During Fred Astaire’s “Limehouse Blues” sequence, she can be heard on a Victrola warbling “ ’E Pinched Me,” a bawdy British pub song, which she comically screeches in an unrecognizable, high-pitched Cockney accent.

Whenever Kay wasn’t needed on
Ziegfeld Follies
, other producers on the lot commandeered her services for various assignments on
Lost in a Harem, Thrill of a Romance, Music for Millions, Week-End at the Waldorf, Her Highness and the Bellboy, The Clock, Yolanda and the Thief,
and three
Tom & Jerry
cartoons.

While juggling all of this, Thompson had a crisis at home. On May 18, 1944, while eating Italian food at Preston Sturges’s Players Club (on Sunset Boulevard opposite the Garden of Allah), Bill Spier suffered a
second
heart attack. He had just finished directing Orson Welles in the first half of “Donovan’s Brain,” an ambitious two-part
Suspense
special that was being presented on May 18 and 25. Spier was laid up in the hospital for six weeks and was then ordered to convalesce at home for three months.

A professional nurse had been hired to keep Bill resting in bed, but not a moment was lost as he feverishly interrogated the poor girl on unusual medical means of homicide, collecting “insidious ideas for new stories.” The unsettling truth was that there may have been a darker purpose behind Bill’s curiosity.

“If I have one more night in this bed in this room,” Bill told Kay, “I’ll blow my brains out.”

Even when he wasn’t bedridden, Bill suffered from severe bouts of depression, with talk of suicide a common occurrence.

“Spier was always threatening to kill himself,” said Dick Williams of the Williams Brothers. “Of course, he would never do it. He was the sort of person who was crying out for help. So one day at the house, a package arrived from the sporting goods store. It was a gun. Kay took the gun back and for the money that he’d spent on the gun, she got a big box full of baseballs and had
it sent to the house. She included a note that said, ‘Bats to DiMaggio. Balls to you.’ ”

W
hen Bill was back
on his feet, he and Kay decided to give up their bungalow at the Garden of Allah and buy a sprawling, $39,000 Georgian farmhouse at 11580 Bellagio Road in the tony neighborhood of Bel Air. It had more privacy, more rooms, and most important, more space for entertaining. And it wasn’t long before corks were popped.

Less than two weeks after moving to Bel Air, Kay inaugurated the First Annual Kay Thompson–Roger Edens Birthday Bash on November 9, 1944 (her thirty-fifth, his thirty-ninth), which would also serve as a listening party for Lena Horne’s star turn on
Suspense,
broadcast live that same evening.