Kay Thompson (51 page)

Jumping into action, applications were submitted in January 1959 to send Thompson and Knight to Russia for four weeks to soak up atmosphere for their new book. The Soviet propaganda machine discouraged negative portrayals of its country and so, instead of promoting the satirical sociopolitical implications of Eloise blowing the Iron Curtain wide open, Thompson tactfully claimed on her visa application that she would be visiting Russia as “a tourist,” curious “to learn how entertainers work and live in that country.” Permission granted.

“Kay decided she should wear nothing but fezzes, so she went to Mr. John, the famous hatter, and he made ten fezzes for her,” Hilary recalled. Then she bought this big, red fur coat. It looked like fox but it was vicuña.”

On February 16, 1959, at a dramatic press conference held in the Eloise Room at The Plaza, Kay made a grand entrance modeling this Bolshevik winter coat, “clutching its big woolly collar tightly up over her ears.” And the following day, the diva made an even grander exit—with a bon voyage party that included her sister Blanche (who’d come up from Virginia just for the occasion).

“I hired what was then the only Rolls-Royce limousine service in New York,” remembered Richard Grossman, “run by a black man named Roosevelt Zander. I thought this was the offbeat way Kay and Hilary should be taken to the airport and she loved it.”

Traveling with Kay and Hilary was Howard Haines, thirty-three, a high-powered press agent for Arthur Jacobs Public Relations, whose clients included Garland, Dietrich, Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Princess Grace.

After changing planes in Paris, the threesome arrived in Moscow during a snowstorm. “We walked into the terminal
loaded
[with luggage],” Kay said. “There were no porters, so between the two Italian bags I had, the tape recorder, the typewriter, my purse which was heavier than my head, bongos . . . ”

Bongos?!

“Yes, bongos,” Thompson reiterated. “I thought I might run into some cats.”

“We were taken to the Hotel Ukraina,” Hilary said, “which was a charmless marble mausoleum in a town painted shades of ochre and mustard.”

The following morning, they were introduced to Aida, a short and stout battle-axe who spoke broken English in a heavy Slavic accent. Ostensibly assigned to be their “guide,” Aida worked for Intourist, a division of the KGB that monitored “foreigners’ access to, and travel within, the Soviet Union.” Aida did not look the part of a Russian femme fatale out of an Ian Fleming novel, but she was a spy nonetheless.

“Every place we went had to be cleared with Aida ahead of time,” Knight explained. “She would tell us what IS POSSIBLE and what IS NOT POSSIBLE.” And this is exactly how Aida would be depicted in
Eloise in Moscow
—though her name would be changed to Zhenka to save them from POSSIBLE EXTERMINATION.

“YOU WILL SEE EVERYTHING,” Aida barked.

“ ‘DA!’ we chorused, and we did,” Hilary noted.

Aida took them on a tour of the Kremlin and other government buildings—which were all very nice but not the sort of entertainment Thompson was craving.

Then, on February 25, Kay got wind that there was going to be a gala command performance of
Romeo and Juliet
by the Bolshoi Ballet for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and the visiting Prime Minister of Great Britain, Harold Macmillan. By happenstance, Macmillan was accompanied by Baron Selwyn-Lloyd, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, who, just four months earlier, had personally welcomed Thompson to London.

Refusing to accept “IS NOT POSSIBLE,” Kay explained that she was a friend of Selwyn-Lloyd. Then, as if by magic, three of the best seats in the house were suddenly “POSSIBLE.”

“We were on the fourth row,” Thompson marveled, “surrounded by all kinds of press—America, British.”

“Khrushchev slept through most of the ballet,” said Howard Haines, “but he’d be awake during the intermission for all the cameras and photographers.”

Mingling with the press, Hilary discovered that one of his childhood chums was residing in Moscow. “Nancy Jones was a neighbor and classmate
of mine in the 1940s,” he recalled. “Nancy had married Irving R. Levine, the famous NBC news broadcaster who always wore a bow tie. At the time, he was the Russian correspondent for NBC so he and Nancy were living at the National Hotel. We looked them up and Kay and I had tea with them.”

Through Levine, Thompson swiftly befriended other members of the U.S. press corps—all of whom used the National Hotel as a hub of operations. By contrast, Thompson was squirreled away in the Ukraina, not the favored meeting ground for free thinkers.

“We’ve
got
to be at the National,” Kay declared.

“IS NOT POSSIBLE,” was Aida’s blunt response. “TO MOVE HOTELS YOU MUST LEAVE MOSCOW AND RETURN.”

So be it. Off they went on a five-day side trip to Leningrad, where they visited the Hermitage Museum, a one-ring circus, the subway, and
another
gala for Britain’s Prime Minister Macmillan and Foreign Secretary Selwyn-Lloyd—a ballet,
The Stone Flower
, starring Maya Plisetskaya (later a girlfriend of Warren Beatty).

Late Sunday night, March 1, they boarded an overnight train back to Moscow. “On the train,” Hilary recalled, “Kay was assigned a cabin with this man none of us knew—and she
panicked.
She said to Howard, ‘You’ve got to let me stay with Hilary. You have to sleep with this man.’ She was petrified.”

The incident inspired the sinister drawing in
Eloise in Moscow,
on page 57, of the nosy man leaning over the top berth to leer at Eloise.

As promised, they were now allowed to check into the National, described by Knight as “a hotel with nothing but old-world charm and mystery.” Located in Red Square across from the Kremlin, the landmark is revered for its facade of ornate stonework depicting everything from nymphs to train engines. And the lobby is a breathtaking display of marble and larger-than-life statuary. This was more in keeping with the storied splendor Thompson had in mind.

With renewed determination, they hit palaces, mosques, cemeteries, museums, zoos, parks, and the tombs of Lenin and Stalin. “Their corpses were on display,” Knight recalled, “stretched out for the world to see. They were so spooky-looking—and Kay was really upset by it.”

Then Thompson explored GUM (Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin), a massive shopping mall with hundreds of merchants. “I went to one beauty shop and I might just as well have stayed out,” Kay said, “because the soap isn’t good and your hair is less divine for having gone in.”

There was, however, one pleasant surprise. “I’d been looking all over for jazz,” Kay explained, “and the best of the lot was at GUM Department Store that played for the fashion show . . . this little quintet played the overture, like
‘Mack the Knife.’ Real fast—you can’t
believe
how fast. Then . . . like Dior models from a long time ago, they came in rapid fire order . . . and the band played George Shearing’s stuff.”

They attended the Obraztsov State Central Puppet Theatre; circuses; magic acts; ballets, including
Carmen
at the Bolshoi Theatre; operas, including
Anna Karenina
at the Moscow Art Theatre; and the troika races at the hippodrome.

On March 6, they visited Mosfilm, the largest and oldest film studio in all of Europe, where they witnessed scenes being shot for
Belye nochi
(
White Nights
), adapted from the short story by Dostoyevsky. The film was being directed by Ivan Pyryev, “the high priest of Stalinist cinema,” and the winner of six Stalin Prizes (the Russian equivalent of the Oscars). Less winning were his social graces.

“He was very sassy and a smart aleck,” Knight recalled. “He asked Kay, ‘What did you think of
The Defiant Ones
?’—the movie with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped convicts chained together. He was trying to find out if Kay liked ‘the black actor’ or ‘the white one’—and who did she think was better—trying to see if she had Communist leanings, embracing black people. It was very deliberate and Kay didn’t like his attitude.”

Thompson was next introduced to director Mikhail Kalatozov, who had seen
Funny Face
at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, where his own film,
Letyat zhuravli
(
The Cranes Are Flying
), had been presented out of competition. Refreshingly, he was gracious and complimentary.

Though she had no local celebrity status in Moscow, Thompson managed to make quite a fashion statement. According to
Vanity Fair,
she “deliberately wore a dress ‘inside out’ to a wedding.” In Hilary’s words, “The town was totally freaked out by Kay. She appeared in this great fuzzy fur coat and a fez and she looked stylish and never took it off. She had a black knitted dress and black knitted gloves that were covered with dog hairs from her pug, Fenice—even though he’d been left behind in New York.”

Between public excursions, Hilary would be summoned for creative meetings in Kay’s suite at the hotel, where he found her brimming with ideas and energy. “We wrote, sketched, pasted, and laughed a great deal,” he recalled.

There was something unsettling, however, that hung over them like a dark cloud. “At the Puppet Theatre,” Knight remembered, “we met this very attractive Polish man who first said he was a builder and then, later, he changed his story and said he was a gymnast. He was asking all kinds of questions, which Kay didn’t like, and she got very nervous. She thought he was a spy sent to spy on us. She thought
everybody
was a spy.”

“Kay always thought her room was tapped,” Howard Haines confirmed.

“I looked everywhere,” Thompson explained. “I looked in the chandelier—only dead moths up there. I looked under the carpets. I looked every place I could look in cupboards. And I saw none.
But
 . . . I heard from some of the British press that there were microphones.”

“And the phone would ring at 3 a.m.,” Howard added, “just to see if you were there. Someone would say something in Russian, then hang up.”

“You were told not to lock your door,” Kay said. “I didn’t trust
les girls
at the desk. You have a definite feeling you are being watched.”

“Kay was really spooked by it,” Richard Grossman said. “She had a conspiratorial view of the world anyway, so naturally, Moscow really got her paranoia going. She visualized herself being spied on, and she may very well have been. Who knows?”

Although the side effects of Dr. Feelgood’s “vitamin cocktails” often induced paranoia, Thompson was not imagining things. Intourist operatives routinely kept close watch over foreigners, tracking their every move, listening in on phone calls, reading outgoing and incoming mail, maintaining voluminous dossiers. Knowledge was control—and the Soviets armed themselves by gathering information. It was 1984 in 1959.

Nevertheless, the ever-resourceful Thompson transformed the unnerving situation into a game of hide-and-seek for
Eloise in Moscow.
As a running visual gag, a mysterious man in a trench coat would be lurking somewhere in every illustration—and it was up to the reader to spot the spy on each page.

The device was not entirely original, though. In Vincente Minnelli’s
Hooray for What!
—the show from which Thompson had been fired—Le Grande Hôtel de l’Espionage was filled with statuary and paintings that camouflaged eavesdropping spies. Similar tricks had popped up in countless movies—most often real eyes peering out of holes in canvas portraits. And there were precedents in print as well—such as Al Hirschfeld’s tradition of embedding his daughter’s name, Nina, in all of his drawings, or the editors of
Playboy
hiding the bunny logo on the magazine’s covers. But Kay certainly synthesized and reinvented these visual teasers for
Eloise in Moscow
and, in doing so, ushered in a whole new subgenre of kids’ books—including Hilary Knight’s
Where’s Wallace?
(Harper & Row, 1964), with a hidden ape on every page, and Martin Handford’s
Where’s Waldo?
(Little, Brown and Company, 1987), with a hidden man on every page.

“Kay wanted everything in
Eloise in Moscow
to be gloomy,” Knight explained, “and so, when a sudden burst of spring weather began to melt the snow, she was ready to go.”

On March 15, the evening before their departure, Kay was given a bon voyage party by the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Llewellyn E. Thompson. The
fête was held at the historic Spaso House, an opulent manor that served as the official residence of all U.S. ambassadors.

The highlight of the evening was a showing of
Funny Face
in the mansion’s private screening room, where, during the “On How to Be Lovely” number, Kay got up and performed the song along with her image on the screen (the routine she’d perfected at Lucille Ball’s house).

“When we were packing to leave our hotel,” Hilary said, “Kay gave everything to the maids. She just emptied her suitcases. So these little Russian ladies are probably very, very rich women in Russia today.”

What Kay now valued was all the research they had accumulated—which she feared might be confiscated by customs agents if they were not vigilant. “We came out of Russia with our notes stuffed in pockets, shoes, pinned to underclothes, anywhere,” Howard explained, “afraid that Russian authorities might not let critical writing pass.”

As a gift to herself, Thompson had acquired a six-string balalaika, a triangular Russian guitar with a mandolin-like sound.

According to Walter Winchell, she also smuggled out several cartons of Ruskie cigarettes, which she awarded to certain deserving newsmen. “They have the longest filter,” Kay said, “but terribly strong tobacco—I could only go a couple of them.”

Thompson had planned to bring back cans of Russian caviar as homecoming gifts, but every sample she tried nearly made her retch. On the way home, they stopped in Paris, Hilary recalled. “She said, ‘Let’s go straight to the caviar bar [at the Petrossian Boutique & Café]!’ And when she tasted it there, she said, ‘Um! Much better!’ ”