Kay Thompson (33 page)

Angry that Thompson had allowed the group to break up for any reason other than the military draft, Arnold Kirkeby demanded renegotiation of Kay’s $1 million contract. She responded by moving out of her free suite at the Beverly-Wilshire and renting a second-floor apartment at 1364 Beverly Glen in Westwood (directly above Marti Stevens), where she stayed up to all hours of the night indulging in outlandish decorating flourishes.

“She papered her apartment on Beverly Glen with tiny clusters of flowers; the walls and ceiling were completely covered,” wrote Marie Brenner in
Vanity Fair.
And, even though the living room was modest in size, she installed an enormous, thousand-dollar chandelier.
Funny Face
screenwriter Leonard Gershe remarked, “The overall impression was like being inside a candy box.”

Now, Kay was free to do anything she pleased—though she was becoming harder to please by the minute.

First, she considered, then turned down the lead in the London production of Hugh Martin’s
Look Ma, I’m Dancin’
in the role made famous by Nancy Walker on Broadway.

Then she toyed with the idea of playing Madame Arcati, the eccentric clairvoyant, in Mel Ferrer’s summer stock revival of Noël Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
at the La Jolla Playhouse (south of Los Angeles), but ultimately decided against it. Six years later, Kay was asked again to play Madame Arcati in a television production of
Blithe Spirit
for
Ford Star Jubilee
(CBS-TV, January 14, 1956), with Noël Coward, Lauren Bacall, and Claudette Colbert, but, again, she turned it down. In
both
cases, Mildred Natwick, who had portrayed the character on Broadway, filled in.

On the movie front, Twentieth Century-Fox announced in July 1949 that Thompson would play “Mamie,” the sardonic housekeeper, in
Love That Brute,
a remake of the 1941 gangster comedy
Tall, Dark and Handsome
, in which Charlotte Greenwood had originated the character. However, by the time it went into production that November, Kay had decided it wasn’t right for her, so they rushed Joan Davis into service.

Then, according to Sheilah Graham, Thompson and Bing Crosby were “hatching a plot for Kay to appear in Bing’s next picture,
Mr. Music.
” But Paramount nixed Thompson in favor of Nancy Olson, a studio contract player who was getting a big push on the heels of her supporting part in
Sunset Blvd.
“Which was kind of crazy because Nancy was still at UCLA,” scoffed dancer Marge Champion, who costarred in
Mr. Music
with her husband, Gower. “Kay would have been so much better for it, not only because she was so brilliant, but also because Nancy made Bing look like an old man.”

Even if Paramount had offered Thompson the role, many wonder if she would have gone through with it. Some colleagues believe that the trauma of being fired from
Hooray for What!
shattered her confidence, rendering her forever gun-shy. But there is also much to suggest that, after her ego-inflating, self-made success on the nightclub circuit, coupled with delusions of grandeur routinely associated with methamphetamine use, Kay had morphed into a monstrous control freak, spurning anything of which she was not fully in charge. Whatever the explanation, the outcome was the same: deadlock.

Disturbingly, however, she made it worse than it needed to be. Kay thrived on feeling wanted, so when offers came her way, she would express initial interest, string everyone along with enthusiastic creative discussions, and instigate rewrites based on her suggestions. But, in the end, she’d invariably get cold feet. She’d start making unreasonable demands that could never be met until the parties reached an impasse. She turned playing hard-to-get into a sadistic exercise in futility.

This serial syndrome of botching opportunities and burning bridges was why Kay’s magnificent potential was so rarely realized.

As weeks of unemployment passed the six-month mark, people began to wonder if she had lost her marbles. “I am shocked,” Louella Parsons commented. “It seems to make no sense.” Was Thompson on the brink of a self-destruction?

Living out of a Suitcase

(1949–55)

Kay Thompson [is] the youngest 176-year-old Iroquois squaw in captivity, and the livest, wittiest, fireman-save-my-childest lady on earth.

—Kenneth Tynan

I
n the fall of 1949, Kay Thompson finally ended months of unemployment and bad press by forming a new trio to replace the departed Williams Brothers quartet. First, she chose George Martin and Buzz Miller (future companion of Jerome Robbins), whom she had admired as members of Jack Cole’s dance troupe. Lee Scott, who had just finished hoofing for Bob Alton in
Annie Get Your Gun
(MGM, 1950), would be the third member.

“When I started with the Williams Brothers, they were all singers and I had to teach them to dance,” Thompson observed. “This time the situation is reversed.”

So was the money. Instead of forking over 50 percent, Kay would pay each of her three new boys a flat $250 per week.

“We used to drive out to the Pacific Palisades to Bob Alton’s new house,” George Martin recalled. “For two solid months, we would rehearse at night
after he got home from the studio. Bob and Kay came up with the idea of having two black rectangular boxes as interactive set pieces. We sat on them, jumped on them, moved them around in all sorts of configurations. It was very chic and brought a whole new dimension to the act.”

On October 20, 1949, Kay got back into business with mobster Meyer Lansky when she and her trio made their public debut at his Beverly Club Casino located just outside the city limits of New Orleans—attended by Andy Williams, who stayed for several days. According to Walter Winchell, she had to accept “$5,000 per week for the new act unseen,” just to get things started.

Kay’s forty-minute routine was entirely new, including “Gotta Rejoice,” with Thompson as “a Holy Roller, arm-flailing revivalist”; “Get Away from Me, Boys, You Bother Me,” during which Kay tells her trio “to return to their paper routes”; and “The Lives and Loves of Madelaine d’Esprit,” described as “a murderous burlesque” of Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, and Katharine Hepburn, about a sadistic society dame “who tramples over three men.”

And, for fans who like their comedy pitch-black, there was “Rubyocco from Morocco,” “the horrible adventures of an Arabian miss adrift in the cosmopolitan world,” whose life comes to an abrupt end when she dives into a mirage that turns out to be an empty swimming pool.

What did the Louisiana crowd think? “Well, either you fell in love with Kay,” George Martin said, “or you thought she was maybe the strangest lady in the world.”

Winchell was among the amorous, declaring her show “better than the old act.” That endorsement was enough for Arnold Kirkeby to let bygones be bygones and book the foursome at the Blackstone in Chicago, where business was “socko” and reviews were sublime.

Dave Garroway was front and center on opening night. By then, he had parlayed his radio success into the new medium of television with WNBQ’s
Garroway at Large,
broadcast nationally by NBC-TV. Kay made her television debut on the program—chatting, not performing.

“When Dave was doing
Garroway at Large,
” recalled Mike Wallace, “I was doing the eleven o’clock news on the same station. Dave and his writer, Charlie Andrews, and Hugh Downs—we were all there together in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, on the eleventh floor. We had a big Webster’s dictionary on wheels and, for a buck a word, we’d spend our time testing the literacy of each other. When Kay came to see Dave, she would hang out with us and I remember that she loved playing that game, too. I would entertain her with words.”

For the last night of her Chicago engagement on December 8, Kay wanted to stage a charity spoof of Mary Martin’s new Broadway hit,
South Pacific.

“Kay and company, with able assistance from Julie Wilson of
Kiss Me, Kate,
Chester Morris of
Detective Story,
Myron [Mike] Wallace of the radio, and Dave Garroway of practically everything, will put on a
South Pacific
show,” reported the
Chicago Daily Tribune.
“Recordings of Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza’s voices will be used, with Kay and Wallace pantomiming the parts.”

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, December 4, however, the
Tribune
stopped the presses to include a late-breaking news flash: “Last minute complications over rights to the use of certain material has forced Kay Thompson to cancel her plans for a benefit performance Thursday night.”

The Scrooge who put the kibosh on the enterprise was none other than Mary Martin. For nearly two years, she had been lying in wait to exact her revenge for being refused at the door of Thompson’s act at the very same Chicago venue—and now was her day of reckoning. What started as a minor faux pas escalated into a world-class diva feud of Aaron Spelling proportions. Now the ball was in Thompson’s court—and, yes, in due time, there would be payback.

D
uring this period, Kay
had several chances to go to Broadway. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen reported that she was being wooed to star in Irving Berlin’s
Call Me Madam
as Sally Adams, a Perle Mesta–like society “hostess with the mostes.” True to form, however, Kay eventually turned her nose up and the role instead went to Ethel Merman—who went on to win a Tony.

Not long after that, Winchell reported that Thompson was the “top candidate for Cole Porter’s new musical comedy,
Out of This World.
” Kay would play the Greek goddess Juno, who dons earthly disguises to catch her husband cheating with a mortal. At first, Kay seemed genuinely interested, but by the time they ironed out her many libretto concerns, she had decided against it. Charlotte Greenwood took her place for a robust eighteen-month run.

Thompson’s career as a recording artist was only slightly more productive. Ankling Columbia Records, she signed with Decca and recorded four songs—including her own chirpy composition, “(The Birds Are Talkin’) ’Bout You ’n’ Me”—an obvious nod to the rumors floating around about her relationship with Andy Williams. When two singles were released in 1949 and 1950, sophisticates ate them up, but Thompson was still an acquired taste among the hoi polloi. Consequently, her contract with the label was allowed to quietly expire. In 1953, she would record “Old Fashioned Hammock” (Kay Thompson) and “On the Caribbean” (Kay Thompson–Bob Alton) for Allied Records, but again, sales figures were just so-so.

As a nightclub headliner, however, Thompson was hard to beat. After
Chicago, Kay and her trio opened at La Boheme in Broward County, eighteen miles up the Florida coast from Miami, owned by Meyer Lansky and his brother Jack.

There was a problem with Kay’s accompanist that needed correcting, however. “Joe Marino was an alcoholic and he slipped,” George Martin confirmed. “In fact, one night Joe was so bombed out that Buzz had to put him in the bathtub to try to sober him up.”

So Kay got another Joe, Joe Karnes, her former accompanist from MGM. They honed the act further in Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, before braving Manhattan for a run at Versailles, a swank supper club at 151 East Fiftieth Street, where Desi Arnaz had gotten his start as a bandleader. Taking diva demands to new heights, Kay insisted that “a sliding platform be built for her at a cost of $12,000.”

With a lot at stake, a major publicity stunt was staged at Grand Central Terminal on January 29, 1950, that turned Miss Thompson’s New York arrival into a cause célèbre. Dressed in a smart skirt suit with a mink coat draped around her shoulders, Kay perched herself atop a mountain of luggage on an enormous forklift that paraded her through the rotunda.

“Excuse me,” she blithely asked stunned passersby. “Could you tell me the directions to Versailles?”

Eloise could not have done it better.

Her opening turned heads, too, with critic Bill Smith declaring the act to be “better and sharper than ever.”

She was also a hit on the new medium of television. Although she had made a few appearances on chat shows, her
performing
debut was singing “Gotta Rejoice” on
Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town
(CBS-TV, April 30, 1950), which
Variety
testified was “dynamite.”

W
hen Thompson told her
trio that the tour would soon be headed to Paris, Lee Scott decided to drop out—ostensibly because he was “homesick.” In truth, his excessive drinking had caused one rift too many. To replace him, Kay hired Jimmy Thompson (no relation), a contract dancer at MGM, who came to Minneapolis to study the show before Scott departed.

On the way to Paris, Kay stopped off in New York to substitute-host for
The Walter Winchell Show
(ABC Radio), guest star on
Irving Mansfield’s This Is Show Business
(CBS-TV), and to pose for a Jergens Dryad deodorant print campaign. Then, Barron Polan threw her a bon voyage party with such well-wishers as the super-rich industrialist Bror Dahlberg and his wife, Gilda.
A former Ziegfeld showgirl from Pittsburgh, Gilda told Kay to look up her twenty-one-year-old nephew, Peter Matz, a virtuoso pianist who was studying music theory in the City of Lights. Kay would later give Peter his first break as an arranger and mentor his rise to the top.

“Kay Thompson and Company will make their Paris debut at Les Ambassadeurs June 12,” announced
The Hollywood Reporter,
“for a three-month engagement . . . Barron Polan set the deal with the new management, Pierre-Louis Guérin and Rene Fraday, who also manage the Lido and are considered the smartest commercial showmen in Paris today.” Winchell reported that Thompson would earn “the tallest wages ever paid an American in Paris.”

Ringsiders included Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan, with whom Thompson socialized often during her time abroad.