Kay Thompson (64 page)

N
ot long after the
filming of
Junie Moon,
Kay got back into her old habit of coaching stars for Broadway shows—with decidedly mixed results. First, it was Gloria Swanson, who was preparing to replace Katharine Hepburn as Coco Chanel in the Broadway musical
Coco.
Kay had Gloria “walking 26 blocks daily to build up her stamina” until Swanson’s excessive contractual demands kiboshed the whole affair.

Next, director Hal Prince asked Thompson to coach Alexis Smith for the Stephen Sondheim musical
Follies.
As Mart Crowley recalled, “Kay had Alexis
go through some simple vocal exercises, then stopped, turned to her, and said, ‘You have no talent at all, and you shouldn’t be doing this show. I can’t help you.’ ” Smith ignored the opinion and went on to win a Tony.

When it was announced that Rita Hayworth would replace Lauren Bacall as Margo Channing in
Applause
—the musical adaptation of
All About Eve
—Hayworth moved into The Plaza to be near Thompson.

“My mother really depended on Kay,” recalled Princess Yasmin Khan (daughter of Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan). “And Kay was always there for her. They were very, very close. For
Applause,
Kay was coaching my mother, trying to help her with her confidence, but my mom was sick and she couldn’t remember anything. So, it was a real drama and turmoil and panic. Of course, none of us knew it was Alzheimer’s. Finally, my mother had to pull out.”

In 1973, Kay gave singing lessons to Carrie Fisher for her supporting role in
Irene,
starring her mother, Debbie Reynolds. She helped create nightclub acts for Baroness Nina Van Pallandt and Neile Adams (Steve McQueen’s ex-wife). She preached style and method acting to Peter Allen. She even taught Prince Albert of Monaco how to sing.

After a shaky audition, Kay told the prince to imagine himself on the balcony of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, overlooking the curve during the Grand Prix. “You’re wearing a white tuxedo and a scarf,” she said suggestively. “A silver Jag pulls up and out comes the most beautiful woman you have ever seen in a multicolored chiffon gown with a gardenia in her hair. Now sing it again.” He did—and his vocals improved.

Then Kay was offered, yet again, the role of Vera Charles, Auntie Mame’s best friend, in the movie version of the Broadway musical
Mame.
In 1968, there had been discussions of teaming Judy Garland with Kay in the movie (from a screenplay adaptation by Leonard Gershe), but, contractually, “no film could be released before 1971,” to avoid competition with the ongoing Broadway smash starring Angela Lansbury.

Flash forward to August 1972 when it was announced that Lucille Ball and Kay Thompson would star in the picture. Unfortunately, negotiations with Thompson hit the usual impasse, and the role went to Bea Arthur, who had won the 1966 Tony Award for portraying the character opposite Lansbury. Kay always felt that she had been sabotaged by the director, Gene Saks—who just so happened to be Bea Arthur’s husband.

Ignoring the flap, Ball called Thompson for advice on her own vocalizing for the picture. “Darling,” Kay replied, “do not try to sing the songs. Write the lyrics out on paper three times. Then vocalize, sing Da-DA-da-DA-DA!”

Ball told the
Los Angeles Times
that she tried to persuade Thompson to
coach her throughout the challenging production. “I mean, bombastic Kay
is
Mame,” Lucille enthused, “but Kay finally was not available. I can’t sing, no Kay to inspire me! So I’m trying to get out of the whole damn thing.”

Still miffed over the Bea Arthur nepotism, Kay refused to have anything to do with the movie. And she must have felt a twinge of schadenfreude when audiences stayed away in droves.

George Roy Hill asked Kay to play a Nurse Ratched type in
Listen to the Silence
but the film never got made. And Louis Malle wanted Thompson for the “really nutty” old hag in
Black Moon,
but she couldn’t bring herself to appear in such an unflattering role.

The one film that Kay did make during that period,
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon,
was not well received. In June 1970, Rex Reed wrote in the
Los Angeles Times:
“Although Liza Minnelli, Ken Howard, Robert Moore and Kay Thompson struggle bravely to make flesh-and-blood characters out of one-dimensional creatures, even good actors need a director.”

If nothing else, however, the movie provided an opportunity for Kay to introduce Liza to Halston.

“Stick with Halston,” Kay advised. “You’ll never go wrong.”

“And that’s exactly what happened,” China Machado observed. “It became Liza’s signature look. The Halston look. The hat. The scarf thrown over the shoulder.”

When Liza went off to Germany to shoot her next picture, Bob Fosse’s
Cabaret,
she was so unhappy with the wardrobe that she got Halston to design and/or retrofit nearly everything she wore in the movie—for which he went uncredited.

“I would talk to Kay all the time on the phone from Germany,” Liza recalled. “She had loved a picture called
The Damned
and that was what she felt I should use as inspiration. And it was a great influence on Fosse, too.”

Kay not only set the wheels in motion for Liza’s attire, she was also instrumental in the overall look that has come to define “Liza Minnelli” through the ages—the Louise Brooks bob, the starburst eyelashes, even the Joe Eula posters for shows like
Liza with a Z
and
The Act.
Minimalist, timeless, and instantly recognizable, it was this consistent branding that helped Liza emerge from the formidable shadow of her mother as an icon in her own right.

For “influential buildup,” Thompson introduced Minnelli to Diana Vreeland (by then, the fashion editor of
Vogue
) and China Machado (Vreeland’s successor at
Harper’s Bazaar
). One example of the campaign appeared in the May 1972 edition of
Harper’s Bazaar,
a spread entitled “A Day in the Life of Liza,” with five photos of Minnelli and Thompson having a glorious time
together at Liza’s Fifty-seventh Street apartment, at Halston’s showroom, and in The Plaza’s Palm Court. (They were a team on
The Mike Douglas Show,
too.)

“Kay knew how to take the essence of someone and bring it to the forefront,” observed China Machado. “And not just with singing or fashion. Whether they walked well or had bad posture, she could somehow make it work. She was extraordinary. She brought a confidence to women who didn’t have it. Like Judy—or Liza when she first started. I mean, Kay really took what they had and pushed it. She practically put herself into their bodies.”

Kay even influenced Liza’s interviewing style. For instance, when Rex Reed sat down with Kay for
Harper’s Bazaar
in 1972, she told him, “I don’t like looking back. Let’s keep it crisp as lettuce.” Accordingly, Liza abides by the “less is more” philosophy, with a dash of embellishment for maximum crunch.

M
eanwhile, The Sterile Cuckoo
earned Liza an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and she copped the gold for
Cabaret.
But while Liza was basking in glory, Kay’s world was unexpectedly torn apart. First, on December 4, 1972,
The New York Times
published an explosive exposé on Dr. Max Jacobson, revealing that his “B-12 vitamin cocktails” were, in fact, heavily laced with speed.

Panic spread among his high-profile patients because the
Times
and other news organizations were naming names. Big ones. JFK, Jackie Kennedy, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams, just for starters. It was a miracle that Kay managed to avoid being outed, because she had just blabbed in the November issue of
Harper’s Bazaar
that she relied on a “B-12 shot” whenever she “felt tired.”

Then, one week later, on her last nerve, Kay got into a heated altercation with John F. Craver, the manager du jour of The Plaza. With no Eloise books or promotions forthcoming, Craver insisted that Thompson start paying for her room.

“She was so angry, she threatened to move Eloise to another hotel,” Kitty D’Alessio recalled. “She told him she was going to paint Eloise’s little footprints on the sidewalk leading from The Plaza all the way over to the St. Regis.”

Craver could not have cared less. That night, an eviction notice was slid under Thompson’s door. According to columnist Jack O’Brian, “She was given 24 hours to move out.”

Homeless and with no visible means of support, Thompson fled New York and crashed at the Alexandria, Virginia, home of her sister, Blanche—the only surviving member of her immediate family. Perhaps she just needed to get
the hell out of town for a while, to lie low until the dust settled. Some friends wondered if she did a stint in rehab.

“I missed her so much, so I called her up,” Liza remembered. “You could not offer her anything. There was no such thing as charity with Kay Thompson. So I said, ‘Kay, I don’t know what to do with my apartment. It needs redecorating. Will you
please
help me.’ So she said, ‘All right.’ ”

With her pride still intact, Thompson accepted the “job” and moved into Minnelli’s one-bedroom flat on the eighteenth floor of 300 East Fifty-seventh Street (the last New York address of J. D. Salinger before he became a recluse).

“Liza paid the rent the whole time Kay lived there,” said Minnelli’s former manager, Deanna Wenble. This arrangement lasted from 1973 to 1990, no strings attached. When Liza was in town, she often stayed at her sister Lorna’s, or at a hotel, and, eventually, when she realized that Kay really had nowhere else to go, she got a second apartment on East Sixty-ninth Street that became Minnelli’s permanent home base.

In the meantime, Thompson took her assignment very seriously and soon the old apartment had been given a wild makeover. The kitchen was lacquered fire engine red. She covered the grand piano—first in brown butcher block paper, then later in red vinyl. The most whimsical addition, though, was a Richard Ohrbach loveseat “in the shape of a great big pair of pouting red suede lips” (a knockoff of Salvador Dalí’s Mae West Lips Sofa).

“Kay went to Lamston’s and bought tons of red bandannas,” recalled Kitty D’Alessio. “She wanted my dressmaker, Mrs. Glass, to sew them together to make bedsheets. Mrs. Glass glared at me and said, ‘Thank you very much.’ ”

Instead of traditional framed artwork on the walls, Kay mounted giant pop art blowups of a “gray and glum newspaper photo of Nixon” and “the Pope eating spaghetti.”

“There were two very small closets,” recalled Geoffrey Johnson, Noël Coward’s U.S. representative. “Inside them, squeezed in tight, were little café tables with ballroom chairs. Each table had a vase with a rose and a wine carafe.”

Behind the tables, on the rear closet walls, were scenic blowups of Paris and Rio de Janeiro—two of Minnelli’s favorite destinations. Kay told Liza, “Open the door to the third closet and you’ll see
my
favorite thing in the whole wide world.” When Liza opened the door, she saw a reflection of herself. The closet had been lined in mirrors.

For quite some time in the 1970s, Thompson and Minnelli were inseparable, traveling the world. “Oh, God,” Liza exclaimed, “the David Nivens, the Gregory Pecks, they all
loved
Kay! We spent so much time together in the south of France.”

Liza relished Thompson’s childlike imagination. If they saw a crescent moon in the evening sky, Kay always said, “Look! God’s paring his toenails.” Or, when the wind was blowing leaves off limbs, she’d say, “The trees are getting their hair done.”

“We had two imaginary characters,” Liza explained, “and Kay was always making up stories about them. Gabriella and Beatrix—nicknamed Ga and Trix. Kay was Ga and I was Trix—and that’s what she wrote in all of her notes to me. She’d sign ‘Ga.’ She’d just write these wacky stories about these women who traveled around one summer in Europe—in a sports car. You know, she
loved
sports cars!”

“You need to buy yourself a Jaguar XK120 and have a good time,” advised Thompson, Queen of Pep Talks. “Enthusiasm and imagination can carry you anywhere you want to go, without Vuitton luggage.” “Drink lots of orange juice, eat lots of lobster.” “Do it for Donnie and Marie.” Instead of saying goodbye, she’d throw both arms in the air and bellow, “Happy
everything
!”

Thompson lived vicariously through Minnelli’s whirlwind romances. When Noël Coward died in 1973, for instance, Thompson and Minnelli went to the memorial service in London, where Peter Sellers swept Liza off her feet (resulting in the annulment of her engagement to Desi Arnaz Jr.). Much to Peter’s chagrin, however, he soon realized that Liza and Kay were practically joined at the hip.

“Kay Thompson was with them constantly,” explained Sellers’ son Michael. “My father liked her, but he never got any peace and quiet or privacy . . . and Liza was determined not to give her up.”

“If I marry Liza, I’ll be marrying Kay, too,” Peter confided to friends. “And, if I’m not mistaken, there are laws in this country against polygamy.”

After a few weeks of bazazz run amok, Sellers disguised himself in a Nazi officer’s uniform and escaped to the home of Joan Collins. A brief reconciliation was botched when Liza yanked Peter’s toupee off his head in a crowded restaurant, a practical joke that went over like lead soufflé. The day after the split was final, Kay fumed to a reporter that Peter was “a rotten bastard for the way he treated my beautiful Liza.”

With the press in a tizzy, the girls vamoosed to Positano, Italy, where they met up with Tennessee Williams and took refuge at the home of director Franco Zeffirelli and his partner, Pippo Pisciotto.

“The first night we arrived,” recalled Minnelli’s makeup artist, Christina Smith, “Kay, Liza, and I got all dolled up for dinner but the men were all just looking at each other. They were all gay. So, after dinner, as Kay, Liza, and I were heading back up to our rooms, Kay said, ‘Well, that was a bust.’ ”