Kay Thompson (10 page)

Aside from her vocalizing on the show, Waring allowed Thompson to show off her skills as a pianist and arranger. One night, she presented a stunning, semiclassical arrangement of “My Heart Stood Still,” with no lead vocal, spotlighting Kay on piano, accompanied by the male and female choral groups. The number went over so well, it was repeated the following week.

A struggling vocal coach named Jule Styne, thirty, was so impressed with Kay’s unique arranging style that he went to the broadcast one night, introduced himself, and struck up an enduring friendship. Later, after hitting it big as a songwriter and theatrical producer, Jule sought Thompson’s services and/or advice on practically everything he did.

On a talk show in 1957, Styne declared, “Kay Thompson, in my estimation, is one of the most talented people I’ve ever met in my life.”

A
s pleasant as things
may have appeared to Waring’s listeners, behind-the-scenes politics were cutthroat. Fred devoted more airtime to other female acts, like Stella and the Fellas and the Lane Sisters (Rosemary and Priscilla). Not satisfied with one measly number per broadcast, Kay began campaigning for more.

With Thompson’s thirteen-week contract coming to an end in March, Waring should have realized he’d have a problem if he did not do something to appease her.

Meanwhile, back in September 1934, Don Forker quit his job as manager of advertising for the Union Oil Company of California and, as if following Kay’s lead, migrated to New York the very same month she did.

“A few weeks ago, he came east,” Kay confessed to a reporter. “We had dinner together—and we both agreed that maybe it was best, after all, that we hadn’t married. Maybe we’d both have been unhappy.”

The romance between Kay and Don may have cooled, but their professional relationship was about to heat up like never before.

In Manhattan, Don had taken a high-powered position at the Lord and Thomas advertising agency, where his mandate was to create radio shows for clients—particularly the American Tobacco Company, makers of Lucky Strike cigarettes. The tobacco giant was controlled with tight-fisted impunity by George Washington Hill, an infamously brusque tyrant who would stop at nothing to promote his product. When Frederic Wakeman spoofed the advertising business in his bestselling novel
The Hucksters,
it was no secret that the irascible tycoon Evan Llewellyn Evans was a caricature of Hill—and actor Sydney Greenstreet had a field day skewering him in MGM’s 1947 movie adaptation.

In March 1935, with American Tobacco on board as the sponsor, Forker instigated
The Lucky Strike Hit Parade,
a new Saturday night program for NBC. Each week, the broadcast would present performances of the fifteen most popular songs in the country, rankings based on sales of sheet music, phonograph records, and airplay requests. Nowadays, countdowns of the top hits of the week are a staple of radio and television, but back then, the concept was new, at least on a national level.

Forker essentially stole the idea from
The Big Ten,
a local San Francisco radio program he’d heard while working on the West Coast. Conductor Meredith
Willson had come up with the idea in the fall of 1933, after his boss complained he was playing too many oldies. “Just to quiet him down,” Willson explained, “I took the ten most-played songs of the week out of
Variety
’s list and made them into a show.” Willson later became famous for writing the Broadway hit
The Music Man,
but in 1935, he was still a fringe commodity.

Although
The Big Ten
was produced by NBC’s San Francisco affiliate, KECA, and therefore could have been picked up by the network for national broadcast, Forker advised NBC that it was not slick enough and needed a complete overhaul with better singers and musicians.

Naturally, Forker wanted to hire Thompson and he proposed a package that included more money, more airtime, more creative input, and star billing.

Kay asked, “Who is going to conduct the orchestra?”

Don replied, “Who would you recommend?”

“Lennie Hayton.”

“Done.”

And so, along with singers Johnny Hauser, Gogo DeLys, and Charles Carlisle, Kay would be a regularly featured vocalist on the one-hour series, guaranteed a minimum of four out of the fifteen songs per show. For her backup singers, Kay got NBC to import the Three Rhythm Kings from California and she would also continue using her choir, renamed Kay Thompson’s Melody Girls, all of whom would jump ship—no apologies to Waring.

Fred went ballistic. After he threatened legal action, a compromise was struck to keep Kay and her choir with Waring, nonexclusive, for an additional thirteen-week season on CBS. In return, the network agreed to allow Kay and her Melody Girls to simultaneously appear on NBC’s
Lucky Strike Hit Parade
.

The big winner in all this, of course, was Kay. Starring in two major primetime shows on competing networks was unheard of. As her income and notoriety skyrocketed, so did Waring’s resentment. Tolerance deteriorated into pettiness and he made life hell for Kay and her girls.

“He would say scathing things to us,” Elizabeth Newburger Rinker recalled. “I know Kay couldn’t stand him. Who could?”

When renewal time came up again in June, Waring let them go—a relief for all concerned.

Kay focused on
Lucky Strike Hit Parade,
where she and Lennie Hayton had a field day experimenting with offbeat arrangements. One of the more notable novelties was inviting Fred Astaire to tap-dance selections from his brand-new movie,
Top Hat,
including its No. 1 hit, “Cheek to Cheek.”

Describing Astaire’s historic appearance, Kay told writer Stephen M. Silverman, “He was dancing on the radio, if you can imagine it. Well, why not?”

No exaggeration. They built a little wooden stage and set up “table microphones” at his feet to capture the rhythm of his tap shoes. Kay later dubbed the platform their “Astaire-way to Heaven.” The stunt went over so well, Fred was brought back for three more consecutive weekly appearances before the month was out. Then he was off to Hollywood to begin rehearsals for
Follow the Fleet,
so that was that. When the September 7 broadcast aired without Astaire, however, there was a flood of complaints. Surrendering to the public outcry, George Washington Hill decided that if Fred could not come to
Hit Parade,
then
Hit Parade
would just have to go to Fred.

To contain costs, several of the show’s soloists were dropped, leaving only Kay and Charles Carlisle to divvy up songs with Fred. Kay’s Melody Girls were left behind, with only her Three Rhythm Kings on board as backup singers. Forced to use mostly L.A. musicians, Hayton did manage to persuade the powers that be that he needed to bring a few of his key sidemen—including his star trombonist, Jack Jenney. That was just fine with Kay because, by then, she and Jack were an item.

Five feet eleven inches tall, with brown eyes, dark, slicked-back hair, and a thin William Powell moustache, Jack Jenney was a handsome twenty-five-year-old from Mason City, Iowa, who dressed snazzy and played jazzy. His father, John Jenney, was a horn salesman who, according to family legend, was the basis for Harold Hill in
The Music Man,
the Broadway musical written by fellow Mason City native and family friend Meredith Willson. That’s why, in later years, Kay often referred to Jack as “the son of the Music Man.”

By the mid-1930s, Jack had become a top trombonist, highly sought-after for radio, recording, and club gigs. “Jenney could match anyone in the business,” wrote swing historian Campbell Burnap, “including Tommy Dorsey.” In fact, in the aftermath of the infamous breakup of the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra in May 1935, Jack was called in to replace Tommy.

Immediately upon meeting Jack, Kay was besotted—and the feeling was mutual. Hughie McFarland, Jack’s band boy, later told friends that Jack and Kay had a “highly charged sexual relationship.” But Jack had his issues. He was a devil-may-care “bad boy,” who drank hard, smoked reefer, womanized, and neglected the wife and child he’d all but abandoned back home in Iowa. Either Kay was in a dreamy state of denial or she was hell-bent on living dangerously, because any fool could see this was headed for disaster.

Kay, Mr. Chips, and the other
Hit Parade
transplants arrived in Los Angeles by express train on September 15. Jack did not show up until two days later in a car that had acquired extra baggage along the way.

“In 1935, my father picked me up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, driving a Packard
convertible,” recalled John Jenney, Jack’s son. “He also picked up his mother—in other words, my Grandma Ada—and he took us both to Hollywood. We stayed at the Ambassador Hotel. Kay Thompson was out there already, staying in the same hotel. They were busy doing a radio show but she really wanted to be in movies and she wanted to see if my father could get into them, too. He was a good-looking man, but he was not an actor.”

The presence of Jack’s mother and six-year-old son put a damper on romance, but Kay made the best of it by making a good impression on her potential mother-in-law and, more important, on little John.

“I remember she used a lot of makeup,” John recalled. But regardless of how exotic a creature Kay must have appeared to a wide-eyed country bumpkin, John warmed up to her immediately. “She was a very nice person,” he admitted.

Although Kay loved kids, she definitely preferred them in manageable doses—perfect aunt material. And she made no bones about it, admitting to a reporter, “I’m not the maternal type.” True to form, Kay would never have any children of her own, unless you count Eloise.

“I’ve always wondered,” John speculated, “if Kay might have based a little bit of Eloise on me from my experience living in the Ambassador Hotel when I was out there with her in California. I was six years old and I raised hell in that place, let me tell you.”

While Little John was pouring water down mail chutes and ordering room service, Papa Jack and Auntie Kay were busy jammin’ with Fred Astaire. But, after just four weeks of shows, without advance warning, Astaire announced on the air that the program would be his last. Citing exhaustion and overexposure, he simply up and quit.

“I vowed I would never try it again,” Fred declared, “regardless of the monetary attraction.”

Infuriated, George Washington Hill ordered that the show be hauled right back to New York and demanded that it get back to basics. Outraged that Astaire had so easily hijacked the franchise, he banned future guest stars.
Radio Mirror
reported that the sponsor did not want
any
performer “to become too closely identified with the show.”

Hill wanted a program in which the
concept
was the star: straight-ahead performances of the top hit songs. He changed the name of the show to
Your Hit Parade
and instituted strict new creative guidelines, aimed directly at Kay and Lennie, insisting that the songs be performed “without variations or new ideas.”

“I don’t want attention diverted by French horn gymnastics,” Hill railed. “Let’s give the public what the public wants and not try to educate them. We should not be concerned about introducing new numbers and novelties.”

Don Forker and NBC executives tried to defuse the situation but there was no changing Hill’s petulant mind-set—and, since he controlled the purse strings, he called the shots. When the broadcast on November 2 failed to adhere strictly to the new rules, everyone was fired including Kay. It was a startling turn of events for an extraordinarily popular program, a decision that bewildered the industry, press, and listeners.

Nevertheless, Hill stuck to his guns, and if longevity is the barometer of success, history is on his side. Remarkably,
Your Hit Parade
lasted twenty-four years and spawned a smash television series. As a founding member of the phenomenon, however, Kay only got to enjoy the first twenty-nine weeks of it. But she never would have been happy stifling her own creativity in favor of a purely pedestrian formula.

“That’s
impossible
for Kay to do,” chuckled Norman Jewison, who started his career directing
Your Hit Parade
(CBS-TV, 1958–59) and later worked with Thompson on projects with Andy Williams and Judy Garland. “Kay will change
every
note if given the opportunity. She’d get all excited and say, ‘Let’s do this in the bridge!’ And then she would fly off on a riff and create a whole new song. But some of the stuff was just terrific. She was a really,
really
creative person.”

T
he same week she
got the boot from
Hit Parade,
Kay got word that Brunswick Records had decided it had better get her into a recording studio before her contract expired at the end of the year. It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, but given that she was unemployed, at least it was something. She was assigned to record four songs from new movies: “You Let Me Down” (from
Stars over Broadway
), “You Hit the Spot” (from
Collegiate
), plus “Don’t Mention Love to Me” and “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” (both from
In Person
). For the sessions, Kay asked Jack Jenney to blow his trombone and conduct a band that they assembled from the ranks of New York’s top sidemen, including ace trumpeter Manny Klein and drummer Johnny Williams (father of movie maestro John Williams). Recorded on November 11, the numbers were released on two 78 rpm discs in time for the Christmas buying season—the first records Thompson could truly call her own.

To promote the records, Kay made a series of guest appearances on
The Harry Richman Dodge Show,
where she performed the numbers with Louis Katzman and his orchestra. To her delight, the sponsor offered her a free car in exchange for appearing as the Dodge spokeswoman for ads in magazines such as
Better Homes and Gardens.
Nice work if you can get it, but as a career move,
it was spinning wheels. Making matters worse, none of her records broke out as hits, so Brunswick let her renewal option expire.