Kay Thompson (43 page)

As for Kay, her words on the
Playhouse 90
experience have been few. When
The New York Times
dared to broach the subject in November 1957, Thompson pleaded the Fifth: “Listen, have a heart. Let’s forget it. I’m trying to.”

What really mattered to Kay was her treasured book which by year’s end had sold 130,000 copies, ranking it the fifth-highest-selling fiction book of 1956. Amplified by her Top 40 hit record and the massive surge in business at The Plaza, no one could deny that Eloise was the biggest debutante to hit New York since the Statue of Liberty.

From “Fancy Pants” to
Funny Face

(1930–65)

The heterogenesis of
Funny Face
is quite a saga in itself, full of hair-raising suspense, and completely Horatio Alger.

—Roger Edens

I
’ve always loved fashion,” Kay Thompson told
Women’s Wear Daily
in 1974, “and had friends in fashion like Diana Vreeland and [
Life
magazine fashion editor] Sally Kirkland.”

In fact, a fashion magazine was responsible for Thompson’s emancipation from St. Louis in 1930, when she was still known as Kitty Fink.

“I got a copy of
Harper’s Bazaar
and picked out all the ritzy western girl’s camps as my prey,” she explained. She wrote them all, landing a counselor job at Camp Toyon on Catalina Island, within spitting distance of Hollywood. From there, she springboarded herself to stardom as Kay Thompson. Had she not been so involved as a musician, entertainer, and Empress of the Eloise Empire, Kay would have pursued a full-time career in fashion.

From the get-go, Kay was a clotheshorse. In the 1930s, she insisted that her radio Rhythm Singers dress as snazzy as they sounded—even though they would be seen only by the studio audience. To shop for a dozen new dresses
every week, she recruited the world’s foremost fashion critic, Lois Long, to do the job. Long moderated her own CBS Radio talk show on fashion, heard by millions coast to coast. She also wrote an influential column called “On and Off the Avenue: Feminine Fashions” for
The New Yorker
(where her husband, Peter Arno, was a contributing cartoonist).

Though Lois was the expert, Kay was not shy about voicing her own dos and don’ts. “The clothes I like best of all are simple, with good lines and in plain, solid colors,” she said in 1937. “The black and white combination is my favorite . . . Pinks and oranges and lavenders are simply color poison to me.”

When Kay’s radio chorines did not live up to her brand of chic, she took matters into her own hands. “One day at rehearsal,” Elizabeth Rinker recalled, “Eula Jernigan wore a funny little hat made out of oilcloth and Loulie Jean Norman had a flat white piqué hat that matched her piqué coat. When everybody went to lunch, Kay and I were there alone in the room and she just picked up both of those offending hats and threw them out the window. To this day, I can just see them sailing across Madison Avenue.”

All this attention to glamour soon paid off. In 1937,
Radio Guide
declared, “Kay’s girls are the best known, and the best looking of all radio choirs.”

And, long before it was acceptable for women to wear pants, Thompson was bucking tradition. On August 1, 1936,
Radio Guide
featured a photo of Kay in androgynous white gabardine jodhpurs and black leather boots.

“I was the first to wear pants and simple shirts,” Thompson later told Rex Reed, “because they were easier to move in.”

Adding to her tomboy mystique, Kay was very athletic. While most women sported skirts when playing tennis, Thompson wore regular shorts. On the golf course, she was always in slacks. And, according to a 1936 article in
The Washington Post,
one of Kay’s favorite pastimes was horseback riding in Central Park, wearing jodhpurs.

“Side-saddling in skirts is strictly for the birds,” Kay proclaimed.

At a 1939 premiere, fashion journalist Mary Jacobs observed that Thompson stood out in a room full of major stars. “You didn’t notice any of them,” Jacobs wrote. “Immediately the tall, lanky figure of Kay Thompson, in an ultra-smart, ultra-simple navy blue tweed suit, with an all-over ticked white blouse, stood forth. There’s something startling, dramatic about Kay and her lean, intense face with its network of freckles, its amazingly frank blue eyes and generous mouth. From beneath a smart navy beret her softly waved red hair peeped.”

While working behind the scenes at MGM during the 1940s, Thompson turned heads on the lot with her striking ensembles.

“Kay had all her clothes custom-made by a seamstress named Ozel,” recalled
Angela Lansbury. “She made these incredible thin silk garments for Kay. They just clung to her body. Kay was very thin. She had just incredible legs. Everything was long. Her nails were out to here. And high heels?
Ah!
”

When Kay became a nightclub star in 1947, she pumped up the volume. To make sure repeat customers never saw her in the same thing twice, she commissioned Don Loper to churn out twenty-five different stage ensembles, based on her dictates, described by
Time
magazine as “sleek slack-suits.”

Equally trailblazing was Kay’s promotion of “three-quarter-length” pants. According to the fashion history books, Prussian designer Sonja de Lennart introduced the style in her 1948 “Capri Collection,” named after the Italian isle; others credit Emilio Pucci, who in 1949 opened a boutique on Capri and coined the name “Capri pants.”

While debate has raged over who came first, the fact is that Kay beat them
both
by introducing “three-quarter-length” pants into her nightclub ensemble in 1947, with Ozel manufacturing custom knockoffs for Thompson’s celebrity pals.

“I started designing them,” Kay declared defiantly, “and now you see them everywhere but they are called Capri pants.”

The rest of America was a bit slow on the uptake. Capris would finally take off in the early 1960s, largely mainstreamed by Mary Tyler Moore, who caused a sensation sporting the style every week on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
(CBS-TV, 1961–66).

Back in the 1940s, however, a woman wearing pants of
any
length was still considered shocking. On August 2, 1947, Katharine Hepburn made headlines for “creating quite a to-do in London, dining at Claridge’s in slacks,” defying the restaurant’s strict dress code for women. But Hepburn wielded enough power to do as she pleased. Thompson, on the other hand, was out there in the trenches bucking the system—not always victoriously. Columnist Mel Heimer reported, “Kay was going to the Venice Ballroom in Long Beach, California, to hear Benny Goodman’s band, and she had on a chic pair of gabardine pants, along with a long evening coat and an armful of diamonds and pearls. ‘You can’t come in here with those on,’ the doorman said. Miss Thompson looked around, stunned, at the big and glittering and noisy dance hall which wasn’t quite El Morocco. ‘Here?’ she asked in disbelief. The doorman nodded, with tight lips, so she went over to the rollercoaster instead.”

Thompson’s pants caused problems during daylight hours, too. In July 1948, she sported “a black faille pair of pants, along with a ducky white sweater and lined coat” for a day at the races at Chicago’s Arlington Park Racecourse. When she and the Williams Brothers tried to enter the plush Turf-and-Field Club, the maître d’ said, “I can’t admit a woman wearing slacks.” In a “devil-may-care
mood,” Kay marched out on the clubhouse lawn, placed a $10 “win only” bet on the least likely horse to win, and collected a $300 jackpot.

“
Both
underdogs got the last laugh,” she gloated.

Even when Thompson appeared in the January 1948 edition of
Vogue,
her fashion-forward thinking was speed-bumped. Editor in chief Edna Woolman Chase assigned photographer George Platt Lynes to capture Thompson’s essence, yet the point was missed entirely when her fancy pants were nixed in favor of a traditional silk evening gown by Hollywood designer Howard Greer that sucked the wind right out of her strut.

Columnists such as Dorothy Kilgallen criticized Thompson for wearing pants: “She traipses about the stage in an outfit that is a combination of Hepburn-ish slacks and grandpop’s old long underwear, and on her it looks like
Harper’s Bazaar
because she is built like a swizzle-stick.”

In
The Washington Post,
Jack Gaver complained, “Miss Thompson has made herself look like the most freakish woman . . . with a clinging all-white ensemble featuring slacks . . . that gives her the appearance of having just been plucked.”

With a bit more diplomacy,
The New Republic
noted that Kay resembled “a blade-like instrument” in “a pair of ultra-chic black slacks . . . The effect of this costume is not masculine; it suggests the feminine with a deftly epicene touch. ‘Sliced Steel’ would be a fitting title.”

A few, like columnist Danton Walker, dared to cheer her on: “La Thompson, who suggests a cross between a polo player and a Chinese Chippendale goddess, wears slacks with more chic than any other woman living.”

Slowly but surely, Thompson was making headway. “[Kay] told me her trip to Boston was very amusing,” Hedda Hopper wrote in 1949. “The good ladies there were appalled at her slacks, and a week later, the same ladies were asking for the pattern.”

By 1950, Kay’s pants were such a trademark that any variation warranted national coverage.
Time
reported that at Manhattan’s Versailles nightclub, “some of her admirers demanded that she wear a dress. Her compromise solution: a new outfit she described as ‘pedal pushers surrounded by a split skirt.’ ”

Responding to Thompson’s new look,
Boston Daily Record
critic George W. Clarke observed, “Pretty? Far from it. Ugly? No-o-o, but certainly smart, sharp, suave, subtle, sophisticated and very, very soigné.”

Kay also introduced catsuits into her stage ensemble, custom-made for her by an aspiring young designer named Nolan Miller.

“I wasn’t even in the fashion business back then,” recalled Miller. “I was working for Stanley Medeiros, a florist in Beverly Hills, and we did flowers for Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and everybody at MGM like Don Loper
and Roger Edens. Roger is the one who introduced me to Kay. She wanted somebody to make catsuits for her long before other people started wearing skintight catsuits. She explained in great detail exactly what she wanted, I did some little sketches, found the fabric—black wool jersey—and I made catsuits for her. She came for two, maybe three fittings at Ozel’s, and that was it. She didn’t fool around.”

Though the job seemed inconsequential at the time, Nolan would not forget it. In 1962, Aaron Spelling asked him to come up with wardrobe ideas for a new character he was developing for Anne Francis named Honey West, who was introduced on a 1963 episode of
Burke’s Law
, then spun off into her own series,
Honey West
(ABC-TV, 1965–66).

“Anne Francis was very feline,” Nolan recalled, “and I could just see her in those black catsuits I had made for Kay. So I made some sketches with that in mind and Aaron sold the show to the network using my sketches. A couple of years later, that’s all Diana Rigg wore on
The Avengers.
I was way ahead of my time.” Which would place Thompson somewhere in the light-years-ahead category.

When Kay played Paris in the summer of 1950, French critic Henri Larrive thought she looked like “a Salvation Army nurse,” but he begrudgingly admitted her innovation of wearing catsuits underneath a split skirt was “
croquignolet.
” Translation: “cute.”

One important designer sat up and took notice. Pierre Balmain was so inspired by Thompson’s innovative use of pants, he created a custom ensemble that she modeled in the November 1950 issue of
British Vogue,
photographed by Cecil Beaton, with a caption that explained she was wearing “a Balmain pantaloon-line dress in nut-coloured taffeta; the irregular skirt, swathed below the knee into trousers.”

Back in America, though, Kay was still fighting an uphill battle. Columnist Earl Wilson quipped, “Seeing her in slacks, many men will say, ‘She ain’t my cup of she.’ ”

And when Thompson appeared on
The Frank Sinatra Show
(CBS-TV, October 28, 1950), her predilection was the butt of jokes.

“Who’s your tailor?” Frank asked sarcastically. “I
must
have a pair of those pants.”

“Some people might disagree,” Kay responded, “but I believe if the occasion calls for it, a woman has a perfect right to wear trousers. Or, for that matter a man should wear skirts!”

“Not without a set of bagpipes he shouldn’t,” Sinatra scoffed.

A
s it happened, a
Broadway musical was in the works that would combine Thompson’s talents as entertainer
and
fashionista.
Wedding Day
, by Leonard Gershe, was a
Pygmalion
-like story set in the world of high fashion, loosely inspired by the courtship between photographer Richard Avedon and his first wife, model Doe Avedon. Having served with Avedon in the Merchant Marine during World War II, Gershe had followed his career with keen interest.

Through Avedon, Gershe had become friends with Dorinda “D. D.” Prest Dixon (later known as D. D. Ryan), a twenty-two-year-old junior fashion editor at
Harper’s Bazaar
under fashion editor Diana Vreeland.

“D. D. would feed me expressions and things that Vreeland said,” Gershe recalled, “like . . . ‘Pink is the navy blue of India.’ ” Vreeland also created her own jargon, like the word “pizazz,” which she coined in her March 1937 “Why Don’t You . . . ?” column in
Harper’s Bazaar,
meaning “the quality of being exciting or attractive.”

For his libretto, Gershe named his editor Dana Prescott. “Dana” was a shortened version of “Diana,” Vreeland’s first name, while “Prescott” was a lengthened version of “Prest,” D. D.’s middle name. He also decided her favorite byword would be “bazazz,” a clever amalgam of “
Bazaar
” and “pizazz.”