Kay Thompson (62 page)

Turning heads, she showed up with Noël Coward and Merle Oberon at the June 1965 wedding of Princess Olimpia Torlonia and Paul Annik Weiller wearing “a pink Chanel suit and matching pillbox hat that was an exact replica of the outfit that Jackie Kennedy was wearing when JFK was assassinated.”

Roland Flamini could not reconcile why Thompson would do such a tasteless thing because she “was just devastated by the assassination of JFK and such a close friend of the entire Kennedy family.”

Her notorious style made her a hot commodity among the paparazzi and, consequently, she was invited to appear as a runway model for the House of Micia wearing “hand-loomed knits with peeping-Tom cut-outs.” For Ken Scott’s groundbreaking 1968 “Burn the Bra and Bury the Girdle” collection, Kay opened the show in a “slinky black and white print with a long, black ostrich boa,” then swooped over to a white grand piano and performed “30s songs while the models paraded.”

In 1966, fashion god Eleanor Lambert wrote, “At collection time in Rome, [Kay] and her gigantic, snuffly pug dog hold daily reunions with pals in the fashion press. In between she wrote us all lengthy letters about how much she’d like to be in fashion.” When asked in 2002 why that never happened, Lambert replied, “She was just too flighty and unpredictable to pin down for more than five minutes at a time.”

“I want to open a shop that has a glorious gate and a bell in a cave in Portugal,” Thompson told
Women’s Wear Daily.
“I’d sell pretty things, go to lunch at noon on a bicycle with some cheese and a guitar player, come back around five and stay open until midnight.” What sort of “pretty things” would be in the store’s inventory? “Vegetables and ribbon.”

The closest she got to that fantasy was becoming the self-appointed marketing maven for La Mendola, a luxury ladies boutique at the top of the Spanish Steps. The store was opened in 1961 by an American gay couple, Michael La Mendola and Jack Savage. To help the boys get noticed, Thompson led all of her famous friends to their doorstep—from Ethel Merman to Ethel Kennedy.

“One day Kay Thompson popped in with Judy Garland,” wrote fashion columnist Marian Cristy. “Kay, a thorough extrovert like the fictional Eloise, grabbed a bolt of fabric and did an impromptu song-and-dance routine while simultaneously winding the fabric around her body. Customers broke into applause.”

Kay’s favors were rewarded with freebies off the racks, but as usual, her interest was ephemeral.

The same was true when it came to acting. Though she had already rejected the role of Madame Arcati in
Blithe Spirit
on two previous occasions, a masochistic Noël Coward tried to convince Kay to finally take on the nutty clairvoyant in a new musical adaptation entitled
High Spirits,
with a score by Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray. After the usual hemming and hawing, she refused—prompting Coward to conclude in his diary that she was “sweet as ever and barmy as ever.”

Kay was replaced by Beatrice Lillie, who ended up with
another
juicy role Thompson foolishly blew off—the villainous dragon lady, Mrs. Meers, in George Roy Hill’s
Thoroughly Modern Millie,
starring Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore, and Carol Channing.

In 1965, Kay turned down the role of Madame Dubonnet, a wealthy socialite in Terence Young’s all-star thriller,
The Poppy Is Also a Flower
, based on a story by Ian Fleming. The cast included Yul Brynner, Marcello Mastroianni, Omar Sharif, Rita Hayworth, and numerous other big names (including Princess Grace of Monaco, coaxed out of retirement for a “special introduction”). Instead of joining the impressive lineup, Thompson recommended her dependable
8
¹
/
₂
replacement, Gilda Dahlberg, who wore another one of her glitzy Ziegfeld getups. But her involvement did not end there. When Rita Hayworth was having trouble remembering her dialogue, Kay volunteered to discreetly help her on the sidelines.

Similarly, when Janet Leigh came to Rome in November 1966 for the diamond heist thriller
Grand Slam,
the star asked Thompson to coach her. “Kay advised me on wardrobe choices,” Leigh recalled in 2002, “and, on the set, she whispered comments in my ear, sometimes about my performance, but most often a funny remark about someone else. She knew how to put my mind at ease.”

Back in America, Kay may have been out of sight, but she wasn’t entirely out of mind. For example, when
The Andy Williams Christmas Album
became a No. 1 smash in 1963, it contained his interpretations of “Kay Thompson’s Jingle Bells” and her composition of “Holiday Season.” This lucrative
olive branch from Williams went a long way toward clearing the air with Thompson.

In 1964, Broadway got an injection of that old Kay magic when Angela Lansbury paid homage to her in Stephen Sondheim’s
Anyone Can Whistle.
Lansbury’s evil character, Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper, sang a number with four boys called “I’ve Got You to Lean On” that was, according to
New York Times
critic Frank Rich, “a jazzy, finger-snapping, Kay Thompson kind of number.”

“Stephen wanted me to
be
Kay Thompson,” Angela Lansbury said with a chuckle. “It was real kind of whoop-tee-doo stuff. Totally Kay and the Williams Brothers.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, Roger Edens hired Kay to write the Rome segment for Irving Berlin’s
Say It With Music,
an episodic MGM musical being developed by the Freed Unit and director Vincente Minnelli. It was to star Frank Sinatra as a man who romances Julie Andrews in London, Ann-Margret in Hollywood, Brigitte Bardot in Paris, and Sophia Loren in Rome.

“Kay gave a huge dinner party for Sophia Loren,” Roland Flamini recalled. “She was bringing Sophia together with the American producers, which, in Kay’s mind, was going to rival the Last Supper.”

Thompson also coached Loren’s recorded audition, to make sure she could sing well enough.

“Kay loved Sophia and said that she had a good voice,” Hilary Knight recalled.

But after a revolving door of writers, directors, and cast replacements, the project was abandoned.

W
ith her cash flow
running dry, Thompson reluctantly accepted an advance from Harper & Row for
Eloise Takes a Bawth,
the fifth book in the series, instigated in the fall of 1962 by legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom.

“It’s pretty much what the title tells you,” Mart Crowley explained. “Eloise is ordered by Nanny into the bathroom to fill up the tub. The tub overflows and it floods the entire hotel, turning the whole place into, shall we say, a Titanic disaster.”

Feeling uninspired, Kay convinced Nordstrom to first allow her to do a non-Eloise book called
Kay Thompson’s The Fox and the Fig: A Bedtime Story.
It was a Dr. Seuss–like imaginarium in rhyming verse—with lines like “The beastly fox has a great fox tail that flies with the wind like a full fox sail” juxtaposed
with “The modest fig, with fastidious care, has a fig leaf to cover whatever is bare.”

To illustrate the book, Kay first approached Hilary Knight. “I want you to do this in a Chinese ink brush technique,” she insisted. Knight had no desire to work in that medium so he said, “Why don’t you get Tomi Ungerer.” Remembered today for having designed the poster to Stanley Kubrick’s
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
, Jean-Thomas Ungerer was a celebrated illustrator who was not the least bit interested in taking direction from Kay. And she was not about to give up one iota of creative control. So, that was that. The next artist under consideration was Andy Warhol.

“Andy asked me what I thought about the idea of working with Kay,” Joe Eula remembered. “I said, ‘You are out of your fucking mind. All she wants is a weak-bellied sister she can push around.’ ”

Nevertheless, Warhol submitted sketches that were rejected outright for being “too decorative.”

Thompson ended up drafting Mart Crowley into service even though he had little experience or ambition to be an artist. Apparently, that was the point, since Kay felt at liberty to dictate every stroke of his brush.

“Sometimes Kay would actually guide my hand with the brush in it,” Mart exclaimed with exasperation. “If not that, she would pull the drawing out from under me and, with a pair of scissors, start cutting off a leg or an ear or an eye or God only knows what, and paste it on some other drawing and say, ‘This is how it ought to look.’ Then one day, I rang on her doorbell at the Palazzo Torlonia and her maid answered that Kay wasn’t in. Next day, same thing. After this happened several times, I realized I’d been ‘cut off at the ankles.’ Then later, once things started to happen for me as a writer, suddenly Kay was back. ‘Oh congratulations, Mart. Isn’t it just
wonderful
?’ That’s how she was.”

Kay didn’t only treat people that way. She was just as capricious about her endeavors—
The Fox and the Fig
being just the latest example. After having toiled madly away on a dozen drafts—none of which were ever completed or made the slightest bit of sense—she suddenly decided to ditch the whole shebang.

“Then she came up with the idea for
Darling Baby Boy,
” Joe Eula explained, “a book about that awful, ugly, farting pug, Fenice! Well now, that dog had a life that was extraordinary. Spoiled is not the word. She practically had sex with him.”

No joke. “We were sitting outside Piazza Navona one night,” Marion Marshall recounted, “and Kay was worried that Fenice was too hot. So she had the waiter bring her a cup full of ice. She turned the dog on his back and rubbed his balls with ice cubes!”

On another occasion, Kay ordered a startled dinner guest to observe the contrast between the dog’s “beige fur and his pink erection.”

“Kay once asked Marcello Mastroianni’s tailor, Vittorio Zenobi, to make a jacket for Fenice,” remembered Roland Flamini. “He was highly offended and said, ‘
We don’t dress dogs!
’ But, in the end, he did it—because Kay could talk anybody into doing anything.”

“
Darling Baby Boy
was all set in Rome,” said Eula, “with that little dog having chicken livers and goose up his ass at Passetto’s . . . his whole life at the Palazzo Torlonia . . . lifting his leg to take a leak on the crutch of a woman hobbling down the street. It was great, honey. You know me, I went crazy. But then Kay never stopped cutting and pasting these mock-ups. It drove me nuts. By the time Easter came, I realized that I was still sitting there doing hundreds of drawings that were never going to be used. I finally said, ‘I have to meet somebody in Africa,’ and I took off.”

M
eanwhile, in New York
during the Christmas holidays of 1963, Princess Grace of Monaco brought her two children, six-year-old Princess Caroline and five-year-old Prince Albert II, to The Plaza to show them the giant portrait of Eloise, only to discover it had been stolen.

“I am so disappointed,” Princess Grace lamented to the management. “I do hope you’ll have the picture back again.”

Alphonse Salomone, who had just resumed his old post as general manager of The Plaza, wrote to Kay in Rome, asking, “What’ll we do?”

“If you want to have another drawing,” Thompson responded, “call Hilary and tell him I said to give you another drawing.”

“By telephone and sketches sent to Kay in Rome,” Knight recalled, “I did a rough drawing for what would then become an oil painting.”

Reminiscent of the Lansdowne portrait of President George Washington, Eloise is depicted in a neoclassical pose, standing by a drawn-back curtain and marble pillar, with Skipperdee and Weenie at her feet.

In connection with the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, the new Eloise portrait was given a ceremonial unveiling in the lobby of The Plaza on April 17. Several high society youngsters made the scene, including seven-year-old Amanda Plummer (daughter of Tammy Grimes and Christopher Plummer), six-year-old Heidi Hagman (daughter of Larry Hagman and granddaughter of Mary Martin), and nine-year-old Carla Javits (daughter of Senator Jacob Javits). Invited but unable to attend, the Beatles wired a congratulatory telegram that was read by Mr. Salomone at the event:
DEAR ELOISE, WE WISH WE
COULD HOLD YOUR HAND, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH. THE BEATLES.
(A fan, Kay finally met the Beatles face to face when they performed in Rome the following year.)

Postcard reproductions of the portrait were made available at the front desk; Eloise “Do Not Disturb” signs were dangled from every doorknob; and full-page ads were taken out in
The New Yorker
and
The New York Times Magazine
, headlined “For Lord’s sake . . . could it be Eloise?”

In the wake of all this publicity, Ursula Nordstrom was more determined than ever to pry
Eloise Takes a Bawth
out of Kay. Having run out of tangents and excuses, Thompson summoned Knight to Rome.

“We must treat this as a movie,” Kay told Hilary, envisioning the storyboard system she’d learned at MGM.

“As I finished each drawing,” Knight explained, “I’d hang it up on string like a clothesline.” But each night, after he had gone back to his hotel, Thompson would stay up until dawn fiddling, rearranging, cutting and pasting. “The next day, I’d return to find that she had changed it all,” said Hilary. “Here was this enormously talented woman who excelled at everything and yet the one thing she couldn’t do was draw and it simply drove her crazy.”

Isolated in New York, Nordstrom optimistically bought the entire front cover of
Publishers’ Weekly
on July 13, 1964, to announce that
Eloise Takes a Bawth
was set for publication on October 21.

“When my sketches for the layout were all finished,” Knight recalled, “I sent everything to Rome for Kay’s approval. She took one look at it and said, ‘No. I don’t like it.’ ”

The deadline came and went. Ursula fired off missives to Thompson. In return? Deafening silence. On November 4, 1964, Nordstrom wrote to Thompson once more: “I wonder if I’m dead and don’t realize it, and that’s why you can’t get in touch with me.”