Kay Thompson (24 page)

Trumpet player Uan Rasey, who sat next to Jenney in Hayton’s orchestra, recalled, “Jack got along just fine with Kay. They had fun working together. You could tell they still liked each other. But Jack was still drinking very heavily and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him. He was probably into drugs, too, because there was plenty of that going around. I remember Lennie Hayton experimenting with an LSD-like drug he’d gotten from France.”

By early December, Jack was hospitalized with kidney failure—then appendicitis. On December 16, 1945, he died in Hollywood Hospital of “peritonitis after complications resulting from an appendectomy.” He was only thirty-five.

W
hile working
on
The Harvey Girls
in the spring of 1945, Thompson was also juggling duties on
Easy to Wed, Twice Blessed,
and
Abbott and Costello in Hollywood,
which featured her delirious choral arrangement for “Fun on the Wonderful Midway” during the frenzied climax. But in May, her slate of projects suddenly dried up, allowing her to officially consider outside productions.

“Get me Kay Spier!” ordered independent producer Samuel Goldwyn.

“Because Goldwyn kind of slurred his words,” Don Williams recalled, “they brought him a case of beer.”

Despite the mix-up, a deal was struck on May 11, 1945, for Kay to be loaned out to Goldwyn for
The Kid from Brooklyn
(RKO, 1946), a Jule Styne– Sammy Cahn musical directed by Norman Z. McLeod, starring Danny Kaye as a milkman-turned-prizefighter. Her $700 weekly salary from MGM would cease while Goldwyn was paying her $1,050 per week.

Also appearing in the picture would be the Goldwyn Girls, a bevy of eighteen “glamazons,” cast as a wholesome group of milkmaids who tend the cows for the Sunflower Dairy, which provides the milk Danny Kaye delivers.

Defying all logic, the same girls would also appear in a “fashion parade” prelude to the song “Josie” (Styne-Cahn, with additional music and lyrics by Thompson), performed in a music hall. Because they were just models with little acting or singing training, it was Kay’s job to find eighteen distinctive voices to match each face. To accomplish this economically, she called in a versatile performer, Peg La Centra, who in the 1930s had provided dozens of voices for Bill Spier on
The March of Time
and, with Kay’s coaching, would go on to dub the singing voices of such stars as Susan Hayward and Ida Lupino.

Peg later told the
Los Angeles Times
that of all her jobs, the task of replacing the voices of the Goldwyn Girls in
The Kid from Brooklyn
was her “prize stint.”

“Each of them recited a little verse of music,” Peg explained. “Kay Thompson, who was staging the number, sent for me and asked me to speak for them all. I suddenly found myself before an orchestra parroting—in rapid succession—a Southern girl, a Stork Club type, a sweet, nice girl, a prissy one, a sexy one and so on.”

There was one exception. In the movie, Kay’s own voice is heard coming out of the lips of the fourth Goldwyn Girl, saying, “You all may be her beaus, but I taught Josie all she knows.”

Styne and Cahn also wrote “The Sunflower Song” for the young ladies to chirp in a promotional film-within-the-film. Kay expanded the introduction to the number, adding a brief appearance by a new character she called the Matron of the Sunflower Milkmaids, a disciplinarian who keeps the girls in line—much like Marjorie Main’s den mother in
The Harvey Girls
. When Thompson demonstrated the bit part, Goldwyn asked, “Do you want to be the Matron?”

“I thought this man is so sweet to have just asked me,” Kay recalled, “so I just said, ‘Yes.’ ” Feigned innocence aside, this was the outcome Thompson had been passive-aggressively plotting since her arrival in Hollywood in 1943. It
was about time someone took the bait. (MGM screen tested Kay for the music teacher in
Bathing Beauty
but jazz organist Ethel Smith got the part.)

The segment was filmed on September 7, 1945. The script supervisor’s notes read, “BOOM SHOT—on doors. MATRON enters. DRAWS back to Full Shot, PANNING with Matron as she inspects GIRLS.”

“Good morning, girls,” says the Matron in a no-nonsense tone of voice. “At ease.”

Like an Army drill sergeant, she walks the lineup, scrutinizing each maiden for any imperfections. When she stumbles upon a stray camisole, her eyes narrow and she picks it up, dangling the offending evidence from her index finger.

“Whose underthings are these?” she bellows, as a guilty milkmaid lowers her head in shame. “For that you inherit the usual demerit.”

Next, one of the girls is caught chewing gum and the Matron orders her to swallow it. When the inspection is finally over, she proclaims, “For some very special duties, we have chosen all you beauties . . . Heigh Ya Ta Ho, Heigh Ya Ta Ho . . . it’s off to work you go.”

And that was it. Eight takes to get it perfect. Kay was released by one o’clock in the afternoon, her big break over in the blink of an eye. Shortly afterward, press releases and photographs were sent to the media touting her cameo appearance in the movie.

In the meantime, however, test screenings of the two-and-a-half-hour film were not going well. As a result, editors made mincemeat of it right up to its premiere in New York on March 21, 1946.

Butchered to 113 minutes, Kay’s entire role got cut (along with all but one of Danny Kaye’s musical numbers). Adding insult to injury, her elimination was so last-minute, they didn’t bother to remove her name from the on-screen cast list, perpetuating false expectations that continue today. Her long-awaited, highly publicized movie acting debut ended up an embarrassing no-show. “The whole thing was weird,” Thompson concluded.

There is one footnote of interest before closing the file on
The Kid from Brooklyn
: one of those eighteen Goldwyn Girls happened to be Donna Hamilton, who, in the summer of 1946, was brought to Twentieth Century-Fox by talent scout Ben Lyon, along with her friend, model Norma Jeane Dougherty. The two were signed exclusively to the studio for $125 per week. Donna was allowed to keep her name, but Norma Jeane was rechristened Marilyn Monroe.

“Both girls were groomed for stardom,” noted columnist Maxine Cheshire in
The Washington Post,
“with dancing lessons by Leonide Massine and singing lessons by Kay Thompson and acting lessons by Elia Kazan.” However, in August 1947, after a year of intensive training, the know-it-alls at Twentieth
Century-Fox decided that Hamilton showed the most promise. As Cheshire drily observed, “She’s the one they kept on salary the day they let a girl named Marilyn Monroe go because they couldn’t afford them both.”

By 1950, however, the tables had turned for Thompson’s alumni; Monroe was well on her way to superstardom while Hamilton had quit the business.

I
n July 1945, Thompson
got a call from Metro executive Sam Katz, who said, “I want to send over one of our loveliest girls.”

From experience, Thompson knew exactly what this meant. “Mr. Katz was always having affairs with actresses,” Kay explained, “which was no big surprise since MGM was the biggest whorehouse in the world.”

Katz told Thompson that Ilona Massey, the “Budapest bombshell,” had been put on contract with the studio and that she needed coaching to sing “You, So It’s You” in
Holiday in Mexico
.

A man of few words, Katz said to Kay, “I want you to give her sex.” End of discussion. Massey was sent to Thompson’s office.

“She came with her Hungarian song teacher and her red hair—Lucille Ball colored hair,” Kay recalled, “and she was absolutely outraged.”

“Why am I here?!” Ilona fumed. “What am I doing here?!
What?!
”

“Well frankly,” Kay replied, “Mr. Katz asked me to give you sex.”

“We just stared at each other,” Kay later recalled. “She wondered what in heaven I knew about sex that she didn’t know—and I wondered the same.”

After a long, incredulous silence, the girl turned to her Hungarian song teacher and signaled the meeting was over. “So with that,” Kay continued, “the two of them left.”

Thompson exacted her revenge. Although Massey was billed as “the singing Garbo,” Kay replaced her warbling with Rece Saxon.

Around that same period, Kay was also assigned to coach Pat Kirkwood, a British musical star making her Hollywood debut in
No Leave, No Love
with Van Johnson and Keenan Wynn.

From the moment Kirkwood landed on American soil, she was stalked for sexual favors by the producer, Joe Pasternak, and the director, Charles Martin, while studio doctors loaded her up with pills for every occasion. Her only happy memories at MGM were her sessions with Thompson.

“Kay Thompson was certainly the best thing to happen to me,” she recalled in her memoir. “She was a tall, gangling blonde with an intelligent and witty personality. After I sang a couple of songs while she played the piano accompaniment,
she sat back, gave me a grin and said, ‘Gee, honey, you don’t need to come to me for lessons, so forget it—just come and talk to me when you feel like it . . . ’ She was a great girl and we had some laughs together, which made everything seem easier. I had found a friend.”

For
No Leave, No Love,
Thompson did the vocal arrangements for fourteen songs, four of which she wrote or cowrote. The most outstanding was a snappy, upbeat ditty called “Love on a Greyhound Bus” (Kay Thompson–Ralph Blane–Georgie Stoll), sung by Kirkwood with Guy Lombardo and His Orchestra and a male quartet that included the voices of Ralph Blane and Andy Williams. Covered by a slew of artists, the song ranked No. 1 on the Top Jukebox Request chart and it was used as a jingle for Greyhound Bus commercials—one of Kay’s most successful songwriting ventures ever.

The movie itself, however, was nearly overshadowed by two public relations nightmares. Disillusioned, Pat Kirkwood refused to attend the premiere, abandoned Hollywood for her native England, and “suffered a nervous breakdown, spending eight months in a sanatorium.”

But the studio was far more concerned with covering up the fact that the two male stars of the film, Van Johnson and Keenan Wynn, were having an affair—resulting in Wynn’s wife, Evie, being pressured into a highly unusual arrangement.

“[Louis B.] Mayer decided that unless I married Van Johnson, he wouldn’t renew Keenan’s contract,” Evie Wynn Johnson recalled. “I was young and stupid enough to let Mayer manipulate me. I divorced Keenan, married Van Johnson, and thus became another of L.B.’s little victims. They needed their ‘Big Star’ to be married to quell rumors about his sexual preferences, and unfortunately I was ‘It!’—the only woman he would marry.”

Thompson would soon learn that her own private affairs were the studio’s business, too.

Meanwhile, she contributed vocal arrangements and choral direction for a few numbers in
Two Sisters from Boston
and
A Letter for Evie
—the latter most notable for Kay’s new swing arrangement of “The Trolley Song” heard playing on a radio—sung by the Mel-Tones with Kay’s rehearsal pianist, Joe Karnes, replacing Mel Tormé, who was serving in the military.

To mark the end of the war in August 1945, Kay staged and starred in a one-hour variety show honoring returning fliers at an Air Force base in Santa Ana, California. She sang “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” and, with actors Keenan Wynn and Peter Lawford, performed comedy skits.

She also attended a celebration at the home of conductor Johnny Green
and his wife, Bunny Waters, honoring Navy hero John F. Kennedy, twenty-seven, who had been awarded the Purple Heart. None of the partygoers could have imagined that Kennedy would one day be the President of the United States and that Thompson would direct his Inaugural Gala.

During this same busy period, Kay was secretly moonlighting as a vocal coach to Rita Hayworth for
Gilda
(Columbia, 1946). “I wanted to study singing,” Hayworth told biographer John Kobal, “but Harry Cohn kept saying, ‘Who needs it?’ and the studio wouldn’t pay for it.” So, Rita took matters into her own hands and took private voice lessons from Kay.

“I once made and intercut eighty-four takes of a song with Rita singing,” recalled music arranger Fred Karger, referring to “Amado Mio,” a number performed in
Gilda.
“The effort was certainly made and Rita worked hard. She was going to Kay Thompson at the time.”

“Kay told me that she went with Rita into the music studio at Columbia,” Hilary Knight recalled, “and while she was there, Harry Cohn came by, saw them working, and just broke it up. He lashed out at Kay, ‘You are
not
getting involved with this. Rita is going to be dubbed!’ ”

“Although Anita Ellis dubbed most of Hayworth’s singing in the film,” noted the
AFI Catalog of Feature Films,
“Hayworth actually sang the acoustic guitar version of ‘Put the Blame on Mame.’ ” So, Kay’s vocal training was not entirely for naught.

On September 9, 1945, Kay threw a surprise fifty-first birthday party for Arthur Freed. “All of us, the clique, the Freed Unit, chipped in I think $50,” Kay recalled, “and it was decided by somebody that the party would be at my house. And it cost a
fortune
.”

Hell-bent on making an impression, Thompson hired World’s Fair designer George Hyam to create a spectacular “vertical garden and waterfall,” dressed up the badminton court with several twenty-eight-foot rococo statues that had been sculpted by Tony Duquette for
Ziegfeld Follies,
and recruited one of MGM’s top lighting designers to bathe the outdoor wonderland in a dramatic glow.

Her extravagance did not sit well with her husband. “I was running around and Bill would not help,” Kay recalled, so she threw him out of the house. The friction was not an isolated occurrence.

“Everything had been so fun, so
soigné,
so terribly grand,” recalled Peggy Rea, who had given up her job with Arthur Freed to become Spier’s assistant. “And then it got old. You could see there was a vacuum, that their marriage was disintegrating.”