Kay Thompson (58 page)

“If Doris didn’t like something about somebody,” recalled her personal assistant, Barbara Flicker, “she’d give this big sunny smile, then go to her dressing room, and tell [her husband] Marty, ‘Get rid of them.’ ”

Sensing another Fred Astaire situation might be brewing, Thompson was not the least bit interested in locking horns with Doris Day. And, after her run-in with Roger over credit for the JFK Inaugural Gala, she could no longer trust him to protect her best interests. So, when her solo number got nixed during prep, Kay bailed and Martha Raye replaced her.

C
onsidering the enormous impact
Thompson made in
Funny Face,
it was a scandal that it took five years for her to act in front of a camera again. The project that finally caught her fancy and follow-through was a made-for-television murder mystery entitled “Who Killed Julie Greer?” presented September 26, 1961, on the premiere installment of NBC’s new anthology series,
The Dick Powell Show,
produced by Four Star Television (founded by Dick Powell, David Niven, Charles Boyer, and Ida Lupino).

From an original script by Frank Gilroy (who later won a Tony and a Pulitzer for
The Subject Was Roses
), “Who Killed Julie Greer?” was a standard-issue
whodunit that executive producer Dick Powell wanted to goose up with a dozen well-known stars. To get things started, Powell cast himself as Amos Burke, an independently wealthy Los Angeles chief of detectives who solves crimes while being chauffeured around town in his Rolls-Royce. His associate investigator would be played by Dean Jones. The producer of the show, Aaron Spelling, got his wife, Carolyn Jones, to play Julie Greer, the murder victim who gets bumped off in the first few minutes—co-opting the gimmick of Janet Leigh’s early demise in
Psycho
. And then there was an impressive school of red herrings to be interrogated by the detectives, including Ronald Reagan, Mickey Rooney, Lloyd Bridges, Ralph Bellamy, Nick Adams, Jack Carson, and Edgar Bergen.

Powell’s wife, June Allyson, was going to play Mrs. Pierce, a blind landlady who has heard the murderer’s voice and is called upon to identify the culprit by listening to a lineup of suspects. However, Allyson was already signed for a subsequent installment of the same series, so the network decided it would be better not to overexpose her. Consequently, Powell began looking for a replacement among his friends.

“I saw Dick in New York,” Kay recalled, “and he asked if I ever wanted to act, and I said, ‘Sure,’ thinking he was kidding. He told me about the blind part and then went off to Europe. I thought no more about it until he called from Hollywood and asked if I was coming out. This man was serious, honey-darling, and I took the next plane. I didn’t ask about the money. I still don’t know if it’s three dollars or not. Either way, it’s O.K. with me.”

Next to the thrill of snatching a coveted role away from June Allyson, what most appealed to Thompson was “the chance to stretch.” Unlike Miss Prescott in
Funny Face
, Mrs. Pierce was quiet, unassuming, and unfashionably dressed, and had no musical numbers. Plus, as Powell very shrewdly pointed out, it would require “serious acting chops” to pull off the illusion of being blind. Thompson was a sucker for a challenge.

It also didn’t hurt that her entire commitment would be just two days: one for a table reading of the script and a group photo shoot for
Life
magazine; and the other for filming all three of her scenes. That was it.

Each star would work for the same “favored nations” rate of $1,000, plus, according to Aaron Spelling, “a beautiful gift from Dick Powell.” Billing would be alphabetical and each would be chauffeured in a Rolls-Royce limousine to and from the Four Star lot in Studio City where the show was filmed in June 1961.

“Kay was ‘Queen for a Day,’ ” recalled director Robert Ellis Miller, a veteran of
Perry Mason
and
Peter Gunn
. “She was a terrific pro. She knew how to
play blind because she had prepared herself. But I remember telling her, ‘Just touch the back of the chair, because then you’ll know exactly where you are in the room.’ Something as simple as that made all the difference and she smiled because she got it immediately. She nodded and she did it. She was a pleasure.”

Reviews were generally upbeat, and
The New York Times
noted that Thompson’s “little old blind lady” was a highlight among the “succession of intriguing small character portraits.”

Ratings were so impressive, Powell’s rich detective character, Amos Burke, was spun off into a series called
Burke’s Law,
but, tragically, before production began on the series in 1963, Dick died of cancer and had to be replaced by Gene Barry.

“Historically, ‘Who Killed Julie Greer?’ really started that thing of putting a famous actor in every part,” recalled Dominick Dunne, then a vice president at Four Star Television.

A whole subgenre of all-star murder mysteries was born. Movies like
Murder on the Orient Express
and television staples like
Murder, She Wrote
all trace back to Powell’s original high concept.

“And Aaron Spelling applied the idea to shows like
Love Boat,
” costume designer Nolan Miller added. “Because of ‘Who Killed Julie Greer?’ every aging actor and actress in this town got a chance. If they didn’t do
Love Boat,
they were dead.”

Nevertheless, it sure seemed like a colossal waste of Thompson’s real talents after five years of waiting for her follow-up to
Funny Face
. In the same way she allowed Eloise to hijack her life, Kay had fallen into a rut of creating opportunities for stars other than herself.

Pygmalion Redux

(1949–62)

Kay was Andy’s guru. It was a Svengali thing.

—Norman Jewison

W
hen Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers broke up the first time in the summer of 1949, many assumed that Kay’s love affair with Andy Williams had ended, too. Far from it. When she took three dancers out on the road that fall, Andy quietly traveled with her, and, during off-hours, they developed an entire act for his first solo flight at Manhattan’s Blue Angel in November 1949.

“Andy sang his ass off,” recalled Bill Harbach. “It was marvelous, but his act was just a boy singer, like Perry Como, singing at a microphone. No choreography.”

“I thought I was going to be Noël Coward,” Andy told writer Ben Alba. “So I spent about two years in supper clubs singing ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ and doing George Gershwin medleys and that kind of thing.”

His repertoire also included a catchy new love song Kay had written for him entitled “(The Birds Are Talkin’) ’Bout You ’n’ Me,” about a clandestine romance that had turned into hot gossip. When Thompson released her own version of the song on Decca Records—with Andy singing backup—it instigated another flurry of romance rumors.

The Thompson-Williams affair became such a pervasive topic of discussion,
it actually inspired a romantic musical entitled
Two Tickets to Broadway
(RKO, 1951). “The idea came from the success of Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers,” admitted the film’s director, James V. Kern. “Reversing it, writer Sammy Cahn thought it would be the basis of a good story if a man were teamed in an act with four girls.” The story would focus on the May-December romance that develops between the older headliner, Dan Carter (the Thompson-like star), and the youngest member of his backup quartet, Nancy Peterson (the Andy Williams counterpart).

Howard Hughes, then head of RKO, “liked the idea and bought it” as a vehicle for his latest obsession, Janet Leigh, in the role of Nancy Peterson.

“I had to share my good news with Kay Thompson,” Janet wrote in her autobiography.

Thompson offered to give Leigh voice and dance lessons—an idea enthusiastically rubber-stamped by Hughes. Unfortunately, Kay was only intermittently available, so during her absences, Harriet Lee was brought in as the vocal cord drill sergeant; and Marge and Gower Champion were borrowed from MGM for dance instruction.

While Leigh was kept busy rehearsing from January to September 1950, Ann Miller, Gloria DeHaven, and Barbara Lawrence were hired to flesh out the distaff version of the Williams Brothers quartet. And, after Danny Kaye, Bob Hope, Sid Caesar, and Bing Crosby turned down the Thompson role reversal, Hughes offered the part to Frank Sinatra.

“Sinatra would like to do a picture at RKO,” Hedda Hopper reported on May 29, 1950. “Said he’d play a male Kay Thompson in it. We both roared.” The setup was so ripe, punch lines weren’t even necessary. But just days after meeting with Hughes, Sinatra’s vocal cords hemorrhaged during a performance at the Copacabana in New York. His recovery was going to take months and Hughes was unwilling to wait.

Ultimately, Tony Martin was signed in July 1950 for ten weeks that grew into six months. “The reason it lasted so long,” Martin recalled in his memoir, “is because Hughes developed a crush on the girl star, Janet Leigh, and kept it going so he could be around her more.”

In November 1950, Kay breezed into town for some last-minute polishing of the musical number “Big Chief Hole-in-the-Ground.”

“[The set] was rigged on the largest stage at RKO and was about four stories high,” noted Theodore Taylor in
Jule: The Story of Composer Jule Styne,
“with a winding circular staircase. It was so mammoth that some of it projected outside the stage. Even Busby Berkeley would have been envious of this awesome Gog and Magog.”

Then word came down that Howard Hughes wanted to see the work in progress, but plagued by debilitating phobias and superstitions, Howard refused to set foot on his own RKO lot because he thought it would bring him bad luck. So he ordered a full-fledged dress rehearsal on the Samuel Goldwyn lot, including the completed set. In two days.

“The production department was stunned,” wrote Taylor. “Carpenters and grips sat down, weak from the thought of it. Did Mr. Hughes know what it meant to dismantle a four-story set, truck it three miles, and rebuild it in forty-eight hours?”

They had no choice but to make it happen. “Promptly at one o’clock, Mr. Hughes made his entry, along with a covey of assistants,” Taylor continued. “He observed the number and quickly reacted by firing Kay Thompson. A few minutes later the Champions were fired, without explanation. By 6:00 p.m., composer Jule Styne had quit, along with lyricist Leo Robin.”

The “Big Chief” set was hauled back and re-erected at RKO, and Busby Berkeley was hired to take over the choreography. Filming progressed slowly until the day Janet announced she was engaged to Tony Curtis. “Instead of more delays,” recalled Tony Martin, “now suddenly they told us we’d have to wrap the picture that midnight.”

The final film was forgettable, but like all her colleagues, Thompson made out like a bandit and never looked back.

M
eanwhile, Thompson and Williams
were still seeing each other as regularly as their schedules allowed, and they adopted a pair of “kids.”

“Kay got two boxers,” Andy explained. “One we named Barnaby and the other we named Cristóbal. They were siblings.”

Cristóbal went with Kay, but she didn’t keep him for very long because she was traveling so much. Barnaby, on the other hand, remained Andy’s side-kick until he passed away in 1960. “All my companies were named after him,” Andy explained. “Barnaby Publishing, Barnaby Records, and Barnaby Productions.”

In 1950, Andy took the dog with him on the road when he played solo gigs in cities such as Pittsburgh and Boston.

“I did some of the hotels where Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers had played,” said Andy, “but nobody knew who I was . . . and when I played, nobody listened.”

An appearance on
Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town
(CBS-TV, August 20, 1950)—his television debut—and a regular role as a singing undergrad on the
Chico Marx musical-variety series
The College Bowl
(ABC-TV, 1950) did little to reverse Andy’s anonymity.

By the winter of 1951, he was playing small dives in unglamorous cities, making so little money, he was practically down to his last dime. One night, in a dingy motel room, Andy ended up sharing a can of Alpo with Barnaby.

“If I needed a wake-up call,” Williams reflected, “a dose of dog food certainly supplied it.”

Neither Andy nor his brothers had found much success on their own, so the idea of a reunion of Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers sounded mighty fine. A tour was mounted and, for the next two years, they earned top dollar playing the A-list clubs—just like old times.

When the act was dissolved once and for all in 1953, many wondered if Kay and Andy’s relationship had finally run its course. Not in the slightest.

Marti Stevens, who lived directly under Thompson’s Los Angeles flat at 1364 Beverly Glen, remembers seeing Williams “scampering up the steps to Kay’s apartment, at all hours of the day and night. Very often. Now, I can’t tell you details. I wasn’t hiding under the piano. But Andy practically wore a path up those stairs. They were very close.”

In the summer of 1954, Williams did his very first solo sessions for RCA’s Label X in Hollywood. Of the seven songs recorded, two were composed by Thompson: “(There Is a Time) A-O-Lee-O,” an early example of rock ’n’ roll, with a Persian flavor; and “Ground Hog,” a fusion of jazz and rock ’n’ roll with a call-and-response children’s choir. Two singles with non-Thompson compositions were released but the records went nowhere, resulting in the rest of the songs being shelved. “(There Is a Time) A-O-Lee-O” finally surfaced in 1971 on the Camden Records album
Andy Williams
, and, in 2006, was faithfully covered by the British indie rock band Vatican Jet. Sadly, “Ground Hog” has never been released (though it still exists in RCA’s vault).

With his recording career a bust, Andy’s luck turned when NBC’s Pat Weaver ordered a brand-new late-night series called
The Tonight Show Starring Steve Allen,
produced by Kay’s former aide-de-camp, Bill Harbach.