Kay Thompson (32 page)

Then, Warner Brothers producer Jerry Wald arrived in New York to talk to Kay and the Williams Brothers about appearing in his next Joan Crawford movie,
The Broadway Story,
written by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, about “the attempts of an old-time actress to stage a comeback.” Unfortunately, the project was still “in development” in June 1950 when Wald parted ways with the studio, effectively nixing its future.

While Kay was breaking attendance records at the Roxy, several second-run movie houses began showing “KAY THOMPSON in
MANHATTAN MERRY-GO-ROUND
,” though her appearance in the 1937 oldie was only brief.

T
o celebrate her return
to Los Angeles and her upcoming opening at the Beverly-Wilshire—also her birthday (she turned thirty-nine on November 9)—Kay was the guest of honor at an opulent soirée thrown by Arnold Kirkeby on November 13, 1948, at his palatial Bel Air estate. Built by architect Lin Atkinson of Hoover Dam fame, the twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion was later used for establishing shots in
The Beverly Hillbillies
(CBS-TV, 1962–71).

“I asked Kay Thompson how you get from a Culver City soundstage to a palace in one short leap,” wrote Hedda Hopper. “She said, ‘You’ve got to have long legs, a face like mine, the Williams brothers and Bob Alton.’ ” Escorted by Jack Benny, Kay was toasted by three hundred of Hollywood’s brightest lights.

For Thompson’s run at the Beverly-Wilshire, the Florentine Room had not only been redecorated, it had been renamed the Mayfair Room. Kay and her boys christened the new venue on November 17 to an SRO crowd of nothing but glitterati. Louella Parsons joked, “When Kay got up to sing at her opening—we all thought it was Danny Kaye.”

Danny couldn’t make it, but all four of his faux Williams Brothers—Jack Benny, George Burns, Jack Carson, and Van Johnson—did. Thompson promptly cast them as the lovers in “Poor Suzette,” reprising the routine they had learned the month before, only now with the real lady in question.

From Clark Gable to Bette Davis, the assemblage of stars was so spectacular that
Silver Screen
published ten pages of pictures commemorating the event, which
The Hollywood Reporter
declared broke all records “with a Kay-O wallop.”

“What a story Kay’s sensational rise to fame is—much more thrilling than fiction,” marveled Louella Parsons. “Someday somebody’s going to write it—it would make a fascinating story.” Ya think?

During the run, Kay and the boys guest starred on
Louella Parsons’ Woodbury Journal
(ABC Radio, December 26, 1948), for which Thompson and Alton cowrote a hilarious new song, “Don’t Tell Louella,” satirizing the columnist’s inability to keep a secret. The group not only performed it on the radio program, they added it to their nightclub repertoire, too.

Meanwhile, interest was heating up again at MGM to bring Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers to the big screen in
three
Freed Unit musicals:
Annie Get Your Gun
with Judy Garland;
On the Town
with Gene Kelly and
Frank Sinatra; and an untitled starring vehicle of their own being scripted by Sidney Sheldon for Bob Alton to direct.

With all three projects in mind, the studio ordered a screen test. On January 26, 1949, Hedda Hopper reported, “Arthur Freed, Bob Alton and all of us are pulling for the Technicolor test Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers made at Metro.”

While the studio mulled things over, Kay and the boys headed east for their third gig in Miami, this time at the brand-new Copa City. Their warm-up act was Jack Cole and His Dancers—including future star Gwen Verdon and two young men who would later dance for Thompson: George Martin and Buzz Miller. There was one small problem, however. Cole’s troupe was getting as much applause as Thompson—and she was none too pleased.

“Miami is buzzing about the feud between Kay Thompson and Jack Cole,” dished
The Hollywood Reporter
. “[When] Kay found it tough to follow Cole’s dynamic act (the applause) she ordered the management to have him eliminate his jazz number because ‘it wasn’t part of his East Indian routine.’ ”

Noël Coward came to see her en route to his newly constructed Jamaica pied-à-terre, Blue Harbour. He insisted that Thompson join him there the moment her gig was over—and she did, becoming the first famous visitor to christen Noël’s new vacation hideaway. Though Kay pretended to enjoy the tropical setting, she later admitted to Rex Reed that “heat, Caribbean islands, suntans, flies, mosquitoes and wasps (living or dead)” were high on the list of things she “detests.” She much preferred frolicking with Noël behind screened doors.

“Noël adored her,” noted Paul Methuen, friend of Coward and future cabaret partner of Thompson. “Whenever she stayed with him in Jamaica, their great fun was to play two pianos together.”

A
ll was not well,
however. Kay had become rail thin, having dropped to barely a hundred pounds. “I only eat when I’m hungry,” Thompson said in defense of her stick figure. Optimists wanted to believe that she was simply born with ants in her pants and that the Olympian rigors of her nightclub act would make anyone lose weight.

“I don’t know what Kay took for energy,” remarked her former publicist Gary Stevens, “but
she
should have been given out as a vitamin herself. She was ever dancing, running, and humming against the wind. She arranged her songs that way and she disarranged her life that way, too.”

But Thompson’s legendary vigor did not always come naturally. Most people were thrown off the scent because she drank so little alcohol. Friends would
comment that Kay was “sober as a judge” and when others became inebriated around her, she was the first to raise an eyebrow. However, as it turns out, she was in no position to cast aspersions. Accompanist Joe Marino, conductor Ted Straeter, and orchestrator Ralph Burns independently told friends that Thompson was “the queen of cocaine.”

“I never,
ever
saw her do any coke,” Andy Williams insisted, “but she definitely got hooked on Dr. Max Jacobson’s injections.” Jacobson was famously known in showbiz and high society circles as the original “Dr. Feelgood.”

“Kay Thompson was a patient of my father and friend for many years,” related Jill Jacobson, the doctor’s daughter. “They went back a long time. My father was very friendly and obliging to her. But then he was that way with most of his patients.”

The obliging doctor was administering “vitamin cocktails” to Kay and a slew of other devoted clients—many of whom were Thompson’s associates.

“Dr. Max Jacobson was injecting all of the show business people in New York,” Hugh Martin explained. Initiated in 1950, Hugh was so enthralled by the revitalizing effects of Jacobson’s injections, he recommended the doctor to anyone who needed a pick-me-up, including a hoarse Eddie Fisher during a New York engagement at the Paramount in 1953.

“Max looked like a mad scientist,” wrote Eddie Fisher in his memoir. “What I did not know was that Max’s ‘vitamin cocktail’ was a mix of vitamins, calcium, and methamphetamine, mixed in whatever dose Max thought was appropriate. Speed.”

“Instant euphoria” was how Truman Capote described the injections he received from Jacobson. “You feel like Superman. You’re flying. Ideas come at the speed of light. You go 72 hours straight without so much as a coffee break . . . Then you crash . . . [Next] you’re running back to [his office at 155] East 72nd Street . . . looking for the German mosquito, the insect with the magic pinprick. He stings you, and all at once you’re soaring again.”

“In those days that stuff was not only legal, but nobody really knew what it was,” Fisher added.

“He told me they were liquid vitamins,” said Hugh Martin. “I never knew I was on heavy drugs for ten years, but I was. It nearly killed me. I fell apart in London in 1960, and ended up in a mental hospital. I’m lucky to be alive.”

Likewise,
Time
magazine reported that Tennessee Williams “spent three months in a mental hospital after Jacobson’s treatments.” It took Eddie Fisher thirty-seven years to kick the habit. Others never got over it and, allegedly, some may have died as a result.

“Amphetamine is not an addictive drug,” Jacobson swore defiantly in an interview with
The New York Times
in 1972. When observant patients noticed the label on Methedrine vials, he would insist, “It’s not for kicks. Only for people who have work to do.”

But most patients never asked any questions, taking it on blind faith that he was looking after their well-being. His golden rule was admonishing patients in a fatherly tone that they were “forbidden to drink liquor.” So, while Thompson played the part of the obedient teetotaler, she was getting hooked on something far more potent.

Surely, Jacobson’s patients must have suspected something wasn’t quite right. “There were broken hypodermic needles on the counter and on the floor,” observed Doris Shapiro, assistant to Alan Jay Lerner (
My Fair Lady
). “The wastebasket was overflowing with their wrappers” and it was common to see “blood on his polo shirt and sneakers.”

But the only thing stronger than the drug itself was the collective denial among Dr. Feelgood’s faithful flock.

“He did say they were vitamins, but you couldn’t ‘not know,’ ” recalled singer-actress Marti Stevens. “Everybody who went to Max Jacobson—and everybody did—knew better than that. Especially with Kay’s mind, for God’s sake. I went with a friend to Max Jacobson and tried him once—and
only
once. What a dirty, filthy surgery. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and the needles looked like they’d been used for 10 or 15 people. I wound up on the ceiling and I didn’t get down for three days. I have never been so frightened in my life. I never,
ever
went back. But everybody went there. Jack Kennedy, Jackie, Dietrich, the whole bunch. The ones I knew who went there used to go there at midnight, 1:00 in the morning, any time they liked, to get a bunch of shots so they could stay up. Marlene would go on Sundays or late at night at 1:00 in the morning because she didn’t want to be seen. He got everybody hooked.”

“He’d pull up our arms and stick us,” Hugh Martin recounted. “My arms looked like a battle-scarred veteran of the war because he stuck me so many times.”

In cases of public speakers and singers, Jacobson often aimed his needles directly toward their vocal cords. “Kay got methamphetamines shot right into her neck,” recalled one source who wished to remain anonymous. “She was injected when she sang.”

According to Jacobson’s widow, Ruth, every time Kay came to see Max, she presented him with a rose, so they nicknamed her “the Lady with the Rose.” And, although Thompson continued to preach that she never saw doctors
because of her Christian Science beliefs, she admitted to friends and colleagues that she routinely received “B-12 injections.”

“That’s what Jacobson told people they were getting,” Hugh Martin confirmed. “ ‘B-12 injections.’ But he was a big liar. They were amphetamines, believe me. He never gave a shot to anybody that wasn’t.”

In addition, to help his patients rest, Jacobson prescribed potent prescription tranquilizers, and to counteract a variety of other side effects, he gave them steroids and antibiotics.

How could Thompson have kept up a regimen of injections and pills on the road? According to the New York State Board of Regents, “Dr. Jacobson mailed out vials of his solution to addresses throughout the world each day.” Jacobson taught Eddie Fisher how to inject himself by sticking needles into a grapefruit.

Because meth is an appetite suppressant, it is no wonder that Kay became dangerously anorexic, dropping to barely 100 pounds—a far cry from the 121 pounds she boasted during her radio days of the 1930s.

Doris Shapiro called it “the spooky look of a Charles Addams lady,” and
Who’s Who in Hollywood
described Thompson as “cadaverous.”

“I’ve never known a woman as thin as Kay,
ever,
” arranger Buddy Bregman recalled. “I’ve never seen a human being as thin except in pictures of Dachau and other extermination camps. I just remember seeing bone with some skin.”

The media began to take notice. Kay’s coverage shifted dramatically from accolades about her dazzling performances to a morbid preoccupation with her weight and well-being.

W
hen Kay’s Jamaican holiday
was over, she rushed back to Los Angeles and announced she was going to whip up an entirely new act.

Bob Alton, who was spending long hours every day choreographing Judy Garland in
Annie Get Your Gun,
would race home from MGM to moonlight with Kay and the Williams Brothers until the wee hours of the morning. Unfortunately, Garland was in such bad shape, shooting was soon suspended and she entered Peter Brent Brigham Hospital in Boston “to cure her dependency on prescription medications.” Any notion of shoehorning Thompson and the Williams Brothers into the movie evaporated after that. But, because shooting would not resume until the fall (with Betty Hutton instead of Garland), Alton suddenly had a free schedule to devote to Kay—and she was bursting with ideas.

The Williams Brothers were not so gung-ho. Kay’s insistence on a completely new repertoire meant weeks of hard labor with no immediate compensation to motivate the troops. It did not help that they hadn’t had a paying gig
since February. When she signed a new contract with Decca Records in June as a “solo artist” and recorded two new songs without them, was it any wonder that the boys’ morale sank to an all-time low?

On July 22, 1949, Louella Parsons announced the inevitable: “Kay Thompson has definitely broken with the Williams Brothers.”

“The act glowed so hot it had to turn to ash,” concluded one reporter, “flaming out like a comet.”

Dick Williams said the four boys had been “joined at the hip” since they were kids. “We had no social skills because we mostly just sort of hung out with each other. So we just decided that we should get away from each other.”

Though the split was made out to be “amicable,” a later interview with Thompson in the
Los Angeles Examiner
revealed there had been a “feud,” and that “the breakup was caused by too many bosses and a lot of temperament and came suddenly.” There also may have been a rough patch in the secret relationship between Kay and Andy that factored into the dissolution.