Kay Thompson (29 page)

The learning curve was fast and furious—both for the performers and their audience. “We didn’t know the facts of nightclub life,” Andy explained in
The Saturday Evening Post
. “On our second night at El Rancho, my brother Dick jumped off-stage and belted a guy who kept talking while we were on. The truth is people didn’t know what hit them on our opening night . . . [but] they stood up and cheered when we were through.”

In Kay’s humble opinion, they were simply “the greatest group that ever hit humanity.”

On August 15,
Daily Variety
reported, “Kay Thompson and the four Williams Brothers have proved such a click at the El Rancho Vegas that they’ve been booked to play the Flamingo Sept. 11, with other offers swamping them from niteries all over the country.”

With a two-week break before opening at the Flamingo, they took a booking in the Tahoe Village Casino at Lake Tahoe.

“Two thugs named Russian Louie Strauss and Sir Abe Chapman ran the place,” Andy recalled. “One time, Kay invited these guys for tea. It was a hot August day, and they asked if they could take off their jackets; Kay said yes, so they did, and they each had two guns strapped over their shoulders! Right after our two-week booking, Russian Louie and Sir Abe drove Kay to the airport, then went back and shot their other partner dead right there in the lobby. I think Russian Louie Strauss is buried somewhere out in the desert. It was a rough group.”

Afraid to look back, Kay and her boys hightailed it to Vegas for their gig at the Flamingo—with Sinatra, Peter Lawford, and many others flown in to cheer them on.

The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
reported, “Kay and the Williams Brothers were an instantaneous hit with everyone except the dealers in the gambling casino . . . Kay knicked them for $18,000 winnings by the end of her engagement.”

The money was a godsend because the heavy start-up expenses had consumed her entire six-week earnings for the act in Nevada. Three days after her divorce was decreed on September 22, 1947, she sold her Bel Air mansion for $50,000, which eased the financial stress.

K
ay and the boys
next played San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel, collecting $2,000 per week for a fortnight beginning October 26. It was reported in
Daily Variety
that the act was the “town’s newest rave.” However, after a splashy opening the act did not sustain big crowds. As word spread, interest from other clubs suddenly dried up.

“We have no bookings,” Kay lamented to columnist Florabel Muir.

“Let me talk to Herman Hover,” Muir suggested. “He could sure use this act at Ciro’s.”

Located at 8433 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood (now the Comedy Store), Ciro’s was, according to Jerry Lewis, “the ritziest nightclub on Sunset Strip and Herman was quite a power in the Hollywood of the late forties. Short, gruff, always impeccably tailored, he was the same height and build as Edward G. Robinson.”

“Whoever heard of these people?” was Hover’s initial response to Muir’s recommendation.

“Right now, nobody, but give ’em time,” Florabel urged.

Begrudgingly, Hover decided to give them a shot for two weeks starting October 14, 1947, at $3,000 a week.

To cut expenses, Kay persuaded MGM producer Jack Cummings to let her reside rent-free in the pool house behind his Beverly Hills mansion at 603 N. Canon Drive (later bought by Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood).

Then, with a complete lack of modesty, she sent letters to everybody she’d ever met: “We have found a sound which is greater than Thomas Edison ever dreamed of . . . The act is the greatest that has ever hit show business . . . This is your chance to see the one and only Kay Thompson—singer, actress, dancer, arranger, and comedienne. See you at Ciro’s.”

It worked. Big-league reservations began pouring in and soon there wasn’t a seat to be had. “Their opening . . . will, no doubt, break every existing record,” predicted
The Hollywood Reporter
.

“You should have been here opening night,” Kay marveled. “Everybody else was.”

The pantheon of stars that showed up rivaled Oscar night: Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, Angela Lansbury, Orson Welles, Dinah Shore, Jackie Cooper, Ava Gardner and Howard Duff, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman, and scores of other famous folk.

“It was like a bombshell,” recalled Connie Wald, “the most exciting night I’ve ever witnessed in my entire life.”

“It was unbelievable,” Angela Lansbury rhapsodized. “I’ll never forget Kay coming out in those shoes and that outfit, those pants and everything. I’m telling you, it was some event. It really was.”

“It wasn’t an act,” recalled another eyewitness. “It was a scrimmage. Tumbles, pratfalls, leapfrogs, and zany songs filled the air with flying figures and frantic music. It was the most frenetic act in nightclub history.”

Kay later parsed the recipe for lightning in a bottle: “My
enormous
sophistication, my thinness, my angular
thing,
and the lovely innocence, purity, and simplicity of the Williams Brothers and their dear little eager eight eyes.”

Thompson’s shoulder-tingling was off the chart. But, several nights into the engagement, the sensation stopped cold when she spotted Walter Winchell in the audience—the columnist who had crucified her in the 1930s for spoiling “lovely hits by re-writing them.” However, by the end of the first number, Walter was cheering along with the rest of the crowd. After the show, he proclaimed himself Kay’s “top fan,” religiously devoted to her “atomic art.” He nicknamed her “Kay Thompsonsational.”

“He couldn’t stop writing about us,” marveled Andy Williams.

Winchell explained his about-face to
Variety
by admitting, “I didn’t appreciate [her style in the 1930s]. What she was doing then with her arrangements is what I’m so nuts about now.”

“I have always been twenty years ahead of myself,” Kay reflected philosophically.

Money couldn’t buy notices like the ones they got—and if an unfavorable review exists, it has yet to be found.

On subsequent nights, tables continued to be jammed by the likes of Sinatra, Bogie and Bacall, Dietrich, Gable, Crosby, Astaire—to name just a smattering. No one had ever seen audiences so starry.

Each forty-minute show would consist of about eight numbers. They always opened with “Hello, Hello,” which playfully introduced Kay and the boys by name to the audience. This segued into rip-roaring workouts like “Jubilee Time,” “I Love a Violin,” and “On the Caribbean.” Between high-energy songs, they would do comedic odes such as “Myrtle (of Sheepshead Bay),” with Thompson as a Brooklynese floozy, and satiric sophistication like “Broadway (Street of Dreams),” which
Life
described as “a typical Noël Coward–Gertrude Lawrence tête-à-tête.”

But, hands down, the audience favorite was “Poor Suzette (with Her Restoration Bosom and Four Lovers),” aka “L’Histoire de la Pauvre Suzette,” because every night, Kay cleverly inserted four names of real celebrities as Suzette’s lovers, and tailored bawdy new lyrics to each. Thompson did not dare to ambush her “Suzette” victims without warning, so she wrote witty telegrams like this one to Orson Welles:
DEAR DARLING ADORABLE ORSON: I’M TAKING THE LIBERTY OF USING YOUR NAME IN A NUMBER CALLED SUZETTE UNLESS I HEAR FROM YOU TO THE CONTRARY. NEEDLESS TO SAY, IT IS USED WITH CHARM AND AFFECTION AND IF YOU ARE NOT HERE BY 11:30 I WILL REFUSE TO GO ON YOUR LOVER. KAY THOMPSON.

Though celebrities’ names were assigned to Suzette’s suitors, it was the Williams Brothers who actually portrayed them: “The Man She Loved,” “The Man She Didn’t Love,” “The Man She Loved Too Much,” and “The Man She Loved Too Often.” The routine was loaded with slapstick, mugging, and acrobatics.

“Andy was the one that she loved too much,” Kay recalled, “and [he] fell dead on the floor.”

“Bob Alton taught him this fall and taught him how to break it with his hands before he fell,” Don explained, “but . . . one night, he missed and he didn’t catch himself, hit himself in the head and knocked himself out cold.”

Another night, he miscalculated and slid under a ringside table. “The man at the table said, ‘Get away from my wife’s ankles,’ ” Andy recalled, “and kicked me right in the ear.”

“By the time our shows were over,” said Dick, “you could hear the sweat sloshing in our feet. Our suits were dripping wet.” Peggy Rea noted that
Bob Williams perspired so profusely, “they had to cut his necktie off every night.”

Subtlety was out. “We ram it down their throats,” Thompson put it bluntly. “I always wanted to be a big fat ham.”

But she knew when enough was enough. “Kay refused to do encores,” Dick remembered. “She’d say, ‘Leave ’em wanting. Never give ’em too much.’ ”

“We never mingled with the crowd,” Don added. “It was Kay’s philosophy: ‘Don’t become commonplace.’ And she was right. We’d go to Kay’s dressing room, have champagne, whiskey, or whatever, and wait to see who’d come.”

“She was always extremely charming to anyone visiting in the dressing room,” Dick Williams confirmed, “but often when a person would leave, she would turn around and say, ‘Oh, what an asshole.’ It made me wonder what she would say about me when I left the room.” Many others echoed the same fear.

W
ith Thompson suddenly the
talk of the town,
Daily Variety
posed the question on everyone’s mind: “How could MGM hide her all this time?”

“They’re knocking their heads against the walls out there [now],” Thompson gloated to a reporter. “Serves ’em right. I beat my brains out for them long enough.”

And—no surprise—suddenly the studio wanted her back. On October 15, 1947, the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “Kay Thompson . . . recently contributed a musical comedy scenario, along with her partners, the Williams Brothers, which Metro is reportedly considering for production along
The Harvey Girls
line.” The project would be entitled
Happily Ever After,
with Bob Alton attached to choreograph and direct.

Not only was MGM feeling remorse, Thompson’s ex-husband became a groupie. When confronted by the press, Bill Spier described his attendance as a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation: “If I stay away from Ciro’s I’m jealous. And if I go in and look sad—I’m taunting her.” One night, he brazenly brought June Havoc, whom he would soon marry on January 25, 1948.

In the wake of Thompson’s popularity, other clubs in town found themselves virtually empty. The Mocambo, Ciro’s top competitor, took out seriocomic ads in
The Hollywood Reporter
and erected a billboard on Sunset Strip begging Kay to mercifully “get the heck outta town.”

But her holdovers just kept multiplying. The act’s weekly guarantee doubled to $6,000, and they demanded and got a percentage of the gross. At first, “The Incomparable Hildegarde” graciously agreed to postpone her scheduled
Ciro’s opening, but after the third postponement, she pitched a fit and canceled altogether.

Another unanticipated phenomenon was the unusually high number of repeat customers. “Kay Thompson’s ‘I’ve Seen Her 12 Times’ club growing apace,” wrote Florabel Muir in
Daily Variety.
Judy Garland, Peter Lawford, and Margaret Whiting were among the most obsessed.

“Nobody yells and screams louder than Judy Garland for Kaytee at Ciro’s,” reported Muir. “She was doing it again Monday night.”

“I would always say to Peter Lawford, ‘What are you gonna wear tomorrow night?’ ” Margaret Whiting recalled, “because we’d been there twenty-nine nights in a row.”

Ads in the trades included testimonials from dozens of major stars, including Garland (“Kay Thompson is a brilliant performer!”) and Orson Welles (“Greatest act I’ve ever seen!”).

One of Kay’s biggest fans was Bing Crosby, who booked the act on his current series,
Philco Radio Time
(ABC, November 12, 1947), during which she performed in a comedy sketch with Peter Lorre. After appearing on other shows with the likes of Danny Kaye and Perry Como, Thompson was suddenly hot again on the airwaves. The Milton Biow advertising agency, which represented
Suspense,
offered to provide a sponsor for a proposed
Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers
radio series “wherever, however and whenever they would like.” Pass. The last thing Kay wanted to do was regress back to radio on a regular basis.

Broadway offers were raining like confetti: Irving Berlin’s
Miss Liberty,
a revival of George M. Cohan’s
45 Minutes from Broadway,
Arthur Schwartz’s
Inside U.S.A.,
and an untitled revue from producer Leland Hayward. But Kay turned them all down.

Next, a blitz of magazine spreads in
Life, Look, Time,
and
Vogue
elevated her national profile.

On the cover of its December 17, 1947, issue,
Daily Variety
headlined: “
KAY THOMPSON, INC
.,” with a report that the “nitery star” had formed a company “to handle radio, motion pictures, recordings, night clubs, theatres and the manufacturing of Kaytee Slacks.”

And then she signed a book deal with Little, Brown and Company to write
Beds I Have Slept In,
a collection of amusing ruminations “about people who live in hotels. The pulpwood people.”

When asked how much of it got written, Peggy Rea laughed, “Not word one. I was assigned to hang around and take notes, but I was too busy getting shoes sewn and scarves fixed.” Of course, Kay did retain one germ of the idea by making Eloise a hotel dweller.

D
ecca Records decided to
cash in on Thompson’s heat by unearthing long-forgotten recordings she had made in 1944 as a guest vocalist for Johnny Green’s orchestra, including “The Steam Is on the Beam,” “You’re Mine, You,” and “Coquette.” This “fresh” Johnny Green album was promoted in the press for featuring “new nightclub sensation Kay Thompson,” and Green took out a congratulatory ad in
The Hollywood Reporter
stating, “Your new act is just a big NEON LIGHT shining in a wilderness of doldrums.”