Kay Thompson (6 page)

“Keep still or I’ll make it twenty dollars,” Junkin countered, flabbergasted by her chutzpa.

“Go ahead,” Kitty shot back. “I’ll be making more than you will, someday.”

By all rights, he should have kicked her sassy ass right out the door, but cooler heads prevailed. After caving to his “insulting” offer, Kitty joined the ensemble of
The Anheuser-Busch Antics,
a hit variety show for CBS, the first national radio series broadcast from St. Louis, sponsored by the local
Anheuser-Busch brewery. (During this time of Prohibition, Anheuser-Busch had switched from beer to producing ginger ale, yeast, and sarsaparilla.)

On Kitty’s debut show, she began by singing “Rockin’ Chair.” Unfortunately, the height of her microphone had been adjusted for a much taller person and so, while teetering on tiptoe, she fumbled with the screws on the stand, trying to lower the darn thing to her level.

Suddenly, the delicate crystal microphone toppled off its perch and crashed to the floor, exploding into a million tiny particles. While conductor Ben Feld kept the band playing, Kitty charged over to host Tony Cabooch’s podium, commandeered his mike, and finished the song.

As soon as the show went off the air, Junkin bellowed, “That mike cost us three hundred dollars! How did you ever dare touch it? You’ll have to pay for it.”

“Pay you three hundred dollars?” Kitty scoffed. “You can’t draw blood from a turnip.” Nevertheless, her pay was docked for the next three months.

Other than her grumpy boss, Kitty was well liked by her colleagues, especially Ted Straeter, a pianist four years her junior. His first association with the Fink family came at the age of eight when he passed by the window of L. G. Fink, Inc., and a secondhand Victrola caught his eye. Like a dog in heat, he sold Christmas cards door-to-door until he had earned enough money to buy the record player. In his teens, he worked as a pianist and bandleader at KMOX, where he accompanied Kitty on countless occasions. (Years later, when they both had migrated to New York, Kay would help Ted land jobs as the choral director for
The Kate Smith Show
and as the house conductor for the Persian Room at The Plaza.)

In late 1930, not long after Kitty’s twenty-first birthday, KMOX added her to the cast of
The Phillips 66 Flyers
variety series, sponsored by Phillips Petroleum, and broadcast Monday through Saturday at 6:00 p.m. One hot Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1931, Kitty and one of her many fraternity escorts—this one named Jimmie—were at a big party at Creve Coeur Lake, northeast of St. Louis at the end of the electric trolley-car line. Caught up in the fun, Kitty lost all track of time until Jimmie happened to point out the beautiful sunset. Glancing at her watch, Kitty realized
The Phillips 66 Flyers
was due to go on the air in only
ten minutes
!

“We made forty miles in thirty minutes, doing 80 an hour,” Kay remembered vividly. “Sure we got there late, but the broadcast was still on.”

Realizing she had not rehearsed the song the band had prepared for her, she scribbled a note and passed it to the conductor, Mike Child: “Play ‘Some of These Days’ in G Minor.”

“He just glared at me,” Kay said, shuddering at the memory. Mike winged the number well enough, but her performance was dreadful. Not only was Junkin fit to be tied, so, too, was the president of Phillips, who shot off a telegram:
KEEP THE BAND BUT DISMISS VOCALIST
. On Sunday, Kitty got eighty-sixed.

“I was young and foolish,” Kay later admitted. As long as Mr. Junkin was the managing director at KMOX, Kitty would remain persona non grata. With bridges smoldering at the only St. Louis radio station that really mattered, she was left with no choice but to focus on other endeavors.

Kitty’s 1930–31 school year at Washington University was spent mainly in the drama department, where she performed in
Princess Nita,
a musical comedy about a young royal in ancient Egypt, with such intriguing song titles as “Sahara Sarah” and “Jazz Rhythm Strut.” She also served as assistant music director under Edmund L. Hartmann, the show’s librettist, lyricist, and composer, who later went to Hollywood, where he wrote and/or produced nearly fifty movies, including two Sherlock Holmes adventures starring Basil Rathbone, five Abbott and Costello vehicles, and seven Bob Hope comedies.

When the academic semester ended in June 1931, Kitty decided to quit school for good. Having accumulated barely enough credits to qualify her as a junior, she never came close to graduating.

Fed up with St. Louis and her stifling father, twenty-one-year-old Kitty announced her intention to head for Hollywood. Leo refused to finance her trip, but that would not stop her from going. Toyon, the girls’ camp on Catalina Island, wanted her back for the summer, offering to increase her pay to $250 for the season. Kitty could not have packed her bags faster.

U
pon arriving in California,
Kitty used every second of her free time to pound the pavement in Hollywood. In July 1931, she stormed the headquarters of KFI (part of the NBC Pacific Coast Network), one of the top radio stations in Los Angeles—owned by Earle C. Anthony, who also happened to be “the largest Packard automobile dealer in California.” She bamboozled a meeting with the station’s thirty-three-year-old programming director, Glenn Dolberg, and to her surprise and delight, he agreed to give her a shot on an amateur talent show. But he made it clear that to get a regular slot on the schedule, she would have to impress his mother, who always listened to the show at home. Kitty thought this was a peculiar stipulation, but who was she to argue? She sang her heart out on the program and apparently made a good impression on Mama Dolberg, because her son offered Kitty a job as a staff singer—to start in eight weeks, as soon as her summer camp commitment was done.

Finally, things were looking up, so she rented a $75 flat in La Marquise (later a residence of Errol Flynn), a brand-new apartment building on Gramercy Place, just northwest of the Wiltern—the highly anticipated Art Deco theater at the intersection of Western and Wilshire that would open in October.

With her luxury address all set, Kitty got another nose job, had her teeth capped, bought fancy cosmetics, and acquired a new wardrobe. Brimming with confidence, she reported to Dolberg’s office at KFI on the prearranged date in early September, only to find that things were not quite what they seemed.

The mama’s boy had come down with a serious case of bad memory, claiming he had never met Kitty and that he was unaware of any job promise. Dazed and confused, Kitty was politely ushered to the sidewalk. With wobbly legs, she made it back to the new apartment she could no longer afford, wondering if she had stepped into some sort of alternate universe.

Later reconnaissance revealed the raison d’être for Dolberg’s sudden amnesia. During a routine background check, Dolberg had called George Junkin, the KMOX station manager in St. Louis, and gotten an earful about the notorious Miss Kitty Fink. Consequently, she was blacklisted at KFI.

Realizing that her sullied reputation had followed her all the way to California, Kitty decided that now would be a very good time to assume a new name. And so, henceforth, she called herself Kay Thompson (although the stage name was not made legal until fourteen years later on September 25, 1945). “Kay” came from the pronunciation of the letter
K
, the first letter of Kitty. No one knows where she came up with “Thompson,” but it certainly suggested Waspier breeding. Together, “Kay Thompson” rolled off the tongue emphatically, with an authoritative, staccato beat. In addition to providing a clean break from her checkered past, the new identity would forever erase her Jewish surname. Tellingly, she never again mentioned it to the press. As far as she was concerned, Kitty Fink was dead and buried.

Even though Leo Fink had spent a lifetime rejecting his own heritage, he was deeply offended by his daughter’s repudiation of his family name. His reaction to the KFI debacle was summarily unsympathetic: an “I told you so” followed by a command that she return to St. Louis at once. Kay did not want to crawl back home with her tail between her legs, but she was down to her last dime.

Her confidence reached an all-time low. “I was a singer, [but] I wasn’t a good one of them,” Kay told her old Camp Toyon chum Cynthia Lindsay for her 1957 article in
McCall’s.
“It took a close friend, a black Irishman he was, to wise me up to what I did have—musicianship. ‘Kiddo,’ he said, ‘you have creative talent obviously, so if you’re not getting it across there’s something wrong.
There’s a reason.’ As soon as he spoke the whole thing unfolded and I knew the reason. I was doing the wrong thing.”

Up until then, Kay had been copying other singers. What she lacked was a style of her own. At the same time she was changing everything on the outside, it clicked in her brain that she had to reinvent herself from the inside, too.

Providence also intervened. “At a party, I met the daughter of the President of Union Gas Company,” Kay explained in
Radio Stars,
referring to oil baron L. P. St. Clair. Not letting on that she was all but destitute, Thompson “kidded around, and sang and played for the guests, as though she were on top of the world.”

One of those guests was Don Forker, a thirty-seven-year-old Iowan go-getter who created radio shows sponsored by the Union Oil Company of California (makers of Union Gas and 76 Gasoline), for which he served as manager of advertising and publicity. Forker was impressed with Kay and decided on the spot that she would be just the talent to revitalize their flagship radio program.

“I got the job,” Thompson recalled, “singing for the Union Gas Company on the air, at ninety dollars a week.”

With an orchestra conducted by Gus Arnheim, Kay would sing, play piano, and arrange songs on
The Kay Thompson–Union Gas Show,
broadcast from KTM, the local Santa Monica station. The miraculous timing saved her from financial ruin and her father’s wrath.

She obviously made a good impression on Arnheim, too, because he invited her to perform with his red-hot, fourteen-piece dance band, appearing nightly at the Cocoanut Grove, the mythic ballroom in the Ambassador Hotel—coincidentally within easy walking distance of her apartment.

Not only was Kay suddenly performing in front of the rich and famous, but Mondays through Fridays, from ten o’clock to midnight, her singing was broadcast live over the radio. The remote was heard throughout the West over the Warner Brothers station, KFWB, and the program had already gained considerable fame as the place to hear tomorrow’s stars, like the young Bing Crosby, member of the Rhythm Boys trio with Al Rinker and Harry Barris.

In November 1931, Arnheim left to go on tour, leaving his arranger, Jimmie Grier, to wave the baton. Without missing a beat, Kay continued having a grand ole time, delighting Cocoanut Grove patrons as well as KFWB radio listeners, until it was announced that the broadcasts of
Jimmie Grier’s Cocoanut Grove Orchestra
would switch to, of all the rotten luck, KFI. When Glenn Dolberg discovered that Kay Thompson was really just Kitty Fink in sheep’s clothing, he barred her from appearing on the show.

H
umiliated, Thompson decided to
skip town and spend the Christmas holidays with her family in Missouri. “When one door closes, another one always opens,” Kay told her California chums as she waved good-bye at the train station. And she was right. Upon arriving in St. Louis, she was greeted with the news that her hometown nemesis, George Junkin, had just quit KMOX. Not only that, but starting January 1, 1932, the station was moving to brand-new headquarters in the St. Louis Mart Building, featuring five state-of-the-art broadcasting studios.

With its increased capabilities, KMOX was looking to launch a number of new shows that its parent company, CBS, might pick up for national broadcast—reaching a sizable percentage of the nearly 17 million homes then equipped with radios. With her two sisters, Kay immediately formed a new vocal trio called the Debutantes. In no time flat, the girls were headlining their own radio show two nights a week. “The Debutantes, a regular feature of KMOX, are one of the most popular girl trios in the Middle West,” read a promotional brochure. “The trio features modern renditions of the latest popular tunes in a unique style of presentation.”

Just when things were settling in, however, Kay got word from Los Angeles that, “having established herself in the hearts of followers,” she was being sought to host
Brighten-Up with Kay Thompson,
a new morning show being mounted by, to her great surprise, KFI. Kay thought it was a cruel joke until it was explained that Glenn Dolberg had been persuaded to give her a second chance. She soon discovered, however, that his about-face had, in fact, been motivated by the almighty dollar. It turned out that the sponsor for the series would be Union Oil, thanks to that company’s marketing whiz Don Forker, Kay’s most ardent supporter. Forker’s vote of confidence—and the vast riches he brought to the table—trumped Dolberg’s concerns about Thompson’s murky past.

And so, when her thirteen-week commitment to
The Debutantes
series on KMOX in St. Louis ended on April 8, 1932, Kay replaced herself with Louise LaRue (formerly of the Trio) and raced back to California, where she signed a thirteen-week contract for
Brighten-Up
on KFI. From April 18 to July 15, the half-hour wake-up call was broadcast Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings from the Cocoanut Grove, featuring Kay’s singing and piano playing (sandwiched between histrionic news updates on the Lindbergh kidnapping). A press release, written by Don Forker and issued by the Union Oil Publicity Department, noted that Kay’s “blue” singing style was “devoid of the moan
affected by so many other blue singers.” Kay was accompanied by the backup vocals of seventeen-year-old Jack Smith (later host of ABC-TV’s
You Asked for It
), Martin Sperzel, and Johnny Smedburg, better known as the Three Ambassadors—the first of many male backup groups Thompson would utilize.