Kay Thompson (26 page)

Kay chimed in, “Maybe Liza plans to grow up to be a music critic!”

Judy laughed. “Touché, my friend. Touché!”

Garland adored Thompson’s sarcastic sense of humor, which was honestly depicted in the Emmy Award–winning television movie
Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows
(ABC-TV, 2001). During one dressing room scene before a concert, Garland (played by Judy Davis) frets, “They’re all waiting for me to fall on my ass.”

“I know I am,” Thompson (played by Sonja Smits) remarks sardonically, putting a smile on Judy’s face.

“Only Kay could get away with saying something like that to my mother,” Lorna Luft confirmed. “If anyone else had said that, their ass would be out of there. But Kay could say that and get her to laugh.”

“Judy and Vincente and Kay and Bill saw each other several times a week,” wrote Gerold Frank in
Judy
. “There was a panache, a swash—sophistication is too limited, too worn a word.” In fact, vocabulary was a group obsession. “Their games, many of them intricate word games, were talked about everywhere,” Frank added. “Fractured French was to stem from these later. Bill Spier invented idiomatic French witticisms:
Honoré de Balzac: no hitting below the belt. La meme chose: your fly’s open.
”

“They had these little languages between them,” Peggy Rea confirmed, “like ‘I’m Gloria be-Holden to you,’ using the names of movie stars.”

Following the studio’s edict, Judy, Vincente, Kay, and Bill seemed happy as clams to the outside world. But, as with most fairy tales, it was too good to be true.

“It was a miracle to me that Kay and Bill were married,” Angela Lansbury confessed. “Their temperaments were so different. She was a woman who was consumed with energy and he was the opposite. He was terribly laid back.”

“They certainly had their differences,” recalled Peggy Rea. “Kay had a bunk bed in one of the spare rooms. She just loved to tuck back in that and get away from Bill.”

S
eparate bedrooms didn’t stop
Thompson from butting her nose into her husband’s work. As the self-proclaimed “First Lady” behind
Suspense,
she voraciously read every script, offering her opinions whether “President Bill” wanted them or not. One that she rescued from the trash heap was “Dead Ernest,” about a cataleptic man who the authorities mistakenly believe is dead. When the episode won the 1946 Peabody Award for Best Drama of the Year, Thompson gloated for weeks.

Around the same time, Kay helped launch the career of the celebrated science-fiction author Ray Bradbury. “I was in
love
with the
Suspense
program,” Bradbury recalled. “I was publishing stories in
Weird Tales
and various other pulp magazines, which gave me the courage to make up a package of short stories and mail them to Bill Spier.” In April 1946, Bradbury got a call to come for a meeting at the Spiers’ home in Bel Air.

“When I rang the doorbell,” Bradbury explained, “the person who answered the door was an explosion named Kay Thompson. She welcomed me like an old friend because she had read my short stories, too, and she thought they were terrific. I was in love
instantly
. She dragged me into the living room, sat me down, and brought me a glass of wine, so we were off to a great start.”

Before Bill arrived, Kay and Ray had time for a little chitchat. “I knew that she was occasionally doing choreography for Judy Garland [in
Ziegfeld Follies,
which had just opened that month]. We discussed that just a little bit but she mainly wanted to know about me, which was very nice. She made me feel like I’d been established for a lifetime. That was part of her character. She was always outsized—the grand gesture, the overstatement—but sincere. It was not fake. Her enthusiasm was so wonderful and it certainly didn’t hurt because when Bill finally joined us, he ended up buying one story at that first meeting.”

The acquisition was Kay’s favorite, “And So Died Riabouchinska,” a chilling murder mystery about a vaudeville ventriloquist and his dummy, and it proved to be the lucky break that launched Bradbury’s prolific career in movies, television, and books.

Flush with popular and critical success, Spier was the most sought-after radio director-producer in the business. “Larry White, who had been Dashiell Hammett’s agent for a great many years, had always wanted me to do
Sam Spade,
” Bill recalled, “[and] after I was well launched into
Suspense
for many years . . . I said, ‘Sure, let’s do it.’ ”

Not only was Bill a huge Hammett fan, but he and Kay had been friends of Humphrey Bogart—who, of course, played Spade in
The Maltese Falcon
(Warner Brothers, 1941)—ever since they lived across the pool from one another at the Garden of Allah. While everyone else called him Bogie, Kay came up with her very own nickname—Humpty Bogus—which she never failed to use in his presence.

“The original plan [was to] use Humphrey Bogart,” Bill explained, “[but] he would have cost us, at that time, $20,000 a week. I said, ‘No. It would be better for us to find an unknown . . . than be saddled to a star, great as he is, who’s going to be going into movies . . . who’s going to want to leave for Africa when you need him for next week’s show.’ ”

And so, in late April 1946, Lloyd Nolan, Elliott Lewis, and several other solid radio actors were invited to sit around a conference table and take turns reading scenes as Sam Spade.

“[Kay Thompson] was and is a woman of infallible taste,” recalled
Sam Spade
writer Robert Tallman, “with an unerring ear for the sound of success. Howard Duff, a young and unknown actor, was one of those auditioning. To everyone’s astonishment, Kay said that Howard Duff was
it
and no one else would do.”

According to Tallman, Kay was simply “mad for Howard’s voice” and made an impassioned pitch in his favor. “She said he sounded real ballsy.”

The others in the room were not so convinced. “Bill took exception and I had my doubts about Duff,” Tallman admitted, “but not about Kay, who had never, to my knowledge, taken a strong stand that was a wrong one. [Cowriter] Jo Eisinger absented himself from the whole conflict and Kay prevailed.”

Thompson was not only responsible for the casting of Howard Duff, she set the tongue-in-cheek tone of the series. “Our first script was influenced by the Bogart performance,” Tallman explained. “Somehow we had overlooked the first Hammett short story about Spade, in which he was described as ‘a blond Satan’ with a diabolical sense of humor. Kay pointed, or
screamed
this out, and that is how
Adventures of Sam Spade
became the first of all send-ups of the fictional private eye.”

Premiering July 12, 1946, the series became a smash hit, running until 1950, when, to the great disappointment of fans, it was canceled due to the
blacklisting of Duff and Hammett by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the rabid anti-communist fervor of the McCarthy era.

Back in the innocent days of 1946, however, Kay would come home from her MGM day job to participate in brainstorming sessions with
Suspense
and
Sam Spade
writers into all hours of the night. One of the most beloved
Spade
adventures was “The Kandy Tooth Caper,” a direct sequel to
The Maltese Falcon
, presented in two parts on November 24 and December 1, 1946. The term “gunsel” became a topic of bemused discussion. In
The Maltese Falcon,
Hammett used the obscure word to describe Wilmer (played by Elisha Cook Jr., in the movie), the unimposing and rather inept “bodyguard” of Casper “the Fat Man” Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet in the movie). It turned out that “gunsel,” derived from the Yiddish word
gendzl,
was a dictionary-coy euphemism for a homosexual.

In keeping with that sly tradition, a new “gunsel” was introduced in “The Kandy Tooth Caper” named Lawrence Laverne, an effeminate dentist who has hidden the sacred tooth of Buddha in the bridgework of one of his patients. Before the Fat Man can get his hands on the priceless fang, however, Laverne is found dead in Sam Spade’s apartment, resulting in Spade being arrested for murder.

Unexpectedly, Laverne was portrayed on the broadcast by none other than MGM’s beloved orchestrator, Conrad Salinger.
Sam Spade
’s composer-conductor, Alexander Courage, told historian Leonard Maltin, “They hired Connie for his one and only radio role as a queer dentist . . . And he cries, he does everything.” To the great amusement of his peers, Salinger’s “nervous Nellie” turn at the mike stole the show—even if it wasn’t much of a stretch.

“Kay was the one who cajoled Connie into doing it,” Peggy Rea said with a chuckle. “They were extremely close friends and it was just the sort of inside joke she lived for.”

Thompson’s fingerprints were also detectable in the matchmaking department. When Ava Gardner was having an affair with Orson Welles—while he was still married to Rita Hayworth—Kay was determined to re-orchestrate her friends into happier duets. So, she introduced Ava to Howard Duff and that took care of that.

M
eanwhile, at MGM, Thompson
was assigned to do the vocal arrangements for the Freed Unit’s
Summer Holiday
until composer Harry Warren threw a hissy fit, insisting on hiring someone who would be more faithful to his original compositions. Caught in the middle, lyricist Ralph Blane tried to put a positive spin on the betrayal: “Kay is very flamboyant, showy and original. I
knew a fabulously talented fan, Bobby Tucker, working at CBS in New York. His style of vocal arranging was quite different from Kay’s. Tucker sticks right with the original material.”

Though Thompson wanted Warren to take his score and shove it, Blane prevailed upon her to direct the choir for such numbers as “The Stanley Steamer,” a copycat ode to locomotion “from the transportation fellas who gave you ‘The Trolley Song,’ ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo,’ and ‘On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.’ ”

Despite Warren’s tenacious campaign to protect his score, the picture tested poorly and was drastically truncated. “When [Harry and I] met in 1979,” Michael Feinstein recalled, “it was all fresh in his memory, and he still resented the MGM ‘brass’ for cutting his score to shreds.”

Warren’s grudge toward Thompson never abated either, as evidenced by the crude anecdotes he told about her. “Harry said that Kay always used to wear this big round watch,” Feinstein related, “on a long chain around her neck, hanging way down below her waist, and he said that when she’d walk, it would bounce against her ‘cous.’ He said, ‘She got big thrills from that.’ ”

Next, Thompson was recruited to work with Sinatra again for Jack Cummings’ production of
It Happened in Brooklyn.
With Ted Duncan, she created the vocal arrangement for Mozart’s “Là ci darem la mano” from
Don Giovanni,
performed by Sinatra and Kathryn Grayson, and conducted by Johnny Green (featuring a piano solo by seventeen-year-old André Previn). She also created vocal arrangements for several new pop songs composed by her old pals Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, the most Thompsonian being the delightful “It’s the Same Old Dream,” sung by Sinatra with the Starlighters (including Andy Williams).

In August, Cummings lassoed Kay to coach Van Johnson for six songs in
The Romance of Rosy Ridge.
The film’s ingenue, Janet Leigh, had no numbers, but long before her iconic shower scene in
Psycho,
she had an unexpected lavatory encounter with Thompson at MGM.

“I seem to have a lot of incidents that happen in bathrooms, don’t I?” Janet joked in 2002. “One day I was in this bathroom on the lot, just singing away. All of a sudden, the door busts open, and this woman said, ‘That sounds lovely! You have to do a musical!’ And then she went out again without saying anything else. I was like, ‘What happened?’
Bombastic
is the word. I later learned who she was.”

Thompson provided several vocal arrangements for Joe Pasternak’s
This Time for Keeps,
with Esther Williams, and when the fall of 1946 rolled around, conductor Johnny Green got her to do some choral work on
Cynthia,
starring a fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor.

Then came
Living in a Big Way,
starring Gene Kelly in his comeback role after eighteen months in the Navy. For his opening dance sequence, Thompson created the vocal arrangement for “It Had to Be You,” sung by the Starlighters (again featuring Andy Williams), with Lennie Hayton conducting the orchestra. She also coached Gene and the Maury Rubens’ Children’s Choir for “Children’s Dance,” a nine-minute medley of nursery rhymes.

After that, Thompson did quite a bit of work on Pasternak’s
Three Daring Daughters,
starring Jeanette MacDonald as a fashion magazine editor (pre–
Funny Face
inspiration?) raising three young girls played by Jane Powell, seventeen, Ann E. Todd, fifteen, and Elinor Donahue (who later became famous as Robert Young’s daughter on TV’s
Father Knows Best
), nine. A divorcée, MacDonald is being courted in the picture by pianist-conductor José Iturbi (as himself).

Kay soloed as pianist on the prerecordings of “Happy Birthday,” Mozart’s “Turkish March,” and three versions of “The Dickey-Bird Song” (Sammy Fain–Howard Dietz), which rose to No. 2 on
Your Hit Parade.

José Iturbi actually finger-synched to Thompson’s piano playing for “The Dickey-Bird Song”—a surprising cheat for a pianist of his stature. In 2008, Elinor Donahue remembered that “Kay Thompson played the piano with her fingers straight out, but Mr. Iturbi played with his fingers bent in the proper way.” Because Thompson maintained long, manicured red fingernails, she always played the ivories with her talons outstretched, to prevent breakage.

To dub for Elinor Donahue, Thompson plucked an eleven-year-old girl from Maury Rubens’ Children’s Choir, Beverly Jean Garbo. Against normal policy, Kay invited Elinor to the prerecordings as an observer.