Kay Thompson (19 page)

At the very same moment, however, MGM offered Kay an exclusive, long-term contract to be their in-house vocal doyenne. To the surprise of many, she accepted.

Kay would now be a member of the MGM boys’ club—no small feat in
that era. The press noted that Thompson was the “first and only woman arranger in American music.”

On March 16, 1943, Kay scrawled her John Hancock on an agreement with MGM that would commence on Monday, April 5, with options up to seven years (someone’s wishful thinking). A contract memo was officially drawn up between Loew’s Incorporated (the parent company of MGM) and “Mrs. Catherine F. Spier, professionally known as Kay Thompson (Arranger).” At a starting salary of $500 per week (to be raised by $100 each year), her job was described as follows: “Exclusively for us as a vocal arranger, vocal coach and other duties in the Music Department as we require and she capable of performing (other than composing complete songs).”

When arranging vocals, Kay never wrote anything down, so accommodations were made for her unusual way of working: “She [is] not required to do actual ‘physical scoring’ of her arrangements, and we [are] to furnish musical steno or assistant as required by her to transcribe arrangements into manuscript form.”

The MGM publicity department would control Kay’s public image, so she was expressly forbidden to hire her own publicist.

The agreement allowed her to “render services for herself or others” on one radio broadcast per week during off-hours. Regarding possible “loan-out” offers for Kay’s services from competing studios, Metro would consider these on a case-by-case basis.

Kay was given two weeks to close up shop in New York and make the permanent move to Los Angeles. Bill went east with her and did a couple of
Suspense
shows from New York while they packed and vacated their Manhattan apartment.

“Kay tried to get me to go to California and assist her,” Phyllis Rogers Whitworth of the Four Teens recalled, “but somethin’ had happened to me by then. I was finished with showbiz. I just had to get out of it. I said good-bye to her and our group disbanded not long after that.”

In an interview with writer Hugh Fordin, Kay recalled the date when she and Bill returned to Los Angeles: “It was April the 1st, if you believe in omen.”

W
asting no time getting
into the swing of the glamorous life, the Spiers attended a private preview of
Cabin in the Sky,
a new MGM musical starring Lena Horne. “We had just come from New York,” Kay recalled, “and the two of us fell sound asleep during it.”

The following Monday, her first official day on the job at MGM, Kay ran into her
Hooray for What!
director, Vincente Minnelli.

“Oh hi, honey,” Vincente said. “Did you see the picture? Did you see
Cabin
?”

“I didn’t see much of it because I fell asleep,” Thompson replied, not realizing that Minnelli had directed it.

Despite that embarrassment, Vincente immediately requested her vocal arranging services for his latest picture,
I Dood It
. The movie was all but completed, save one isolated number for Lena Horne that, when necessary, could be cut out of prints exhibited in racist Southern theaters.

“I did ‘Jericho,’ and Vincente directed it,” Kay later recalled. “Down I go to the [rehearsal studio], hiring the sixty singers, and I have them for five days, and then Lena came in.”

The coming together of Horne and Thompson was auspicious for both of them. “[Kay] taught me how to open up and let the music out,” Horne was quoted as saying in the
Philadelphia Daily News
. “I had a little voice and couldn’t carry a tune. I was afraid to sing.”

“Even though my mother had worked a number of nightclub gigs without a microphone, she had never, ever learned about singing
out
before,” recalled Horne’s daughter, Gail Jones Lumet Buckley. “Kay got her to just open her mouth and let it rip. Belting, I guess you’d call it.”

Thompson took an immediate liking to Horne. “As naturally friendly as a puppy,” Kay recalled, “[Lena] sends out a liking for others and is eager to be liked in return. All in all, she is one of the few completely
real
people in Hollywood.”

Similarly, Horne was impressed with Thompson right off the bat. “The most important thing [Kay] taught me was breath control,” she later elaborated. “We were working on her arrangement of ‘Jericho’ and it really extended me and I was hitting the notes I didn’t know I could.”

Something special was combusting in that rehearsal hall and the buzz reached the producer, Jack Cummings (nephew of studio head Louis B. Mayer).

“Jack came down,” Kay remembered, “and we knocked him over with great joy. It was after that I was called by him to say, ‘Make something for Hazel.’ ”

Hazel Scott was another African-American performer being groomed by the studio—a darker, earthier singer and piano player. She was to prelude “Jericho” with a jazzy keyboard solo of “Taking a Chance on Love” and reappear in the middle of “Jericho” for an improvised piano break.

Movieland
magazine reported that Lena and Hazel came face-to-face for the very first time “in the office of Kay Thompson.”

According to Gail Lumet Buckley, “Lena turned up, California style, in pigtails, slacks and loafers. Hazel, fresh from New York, was dripping in silver fox.”

“Hazel was always known for her fabulous clothes and jewels and furs,” Lena wrote in her memoir. “[The next] day I was determined to outshine her
and I came to work in my best dress and wearing my mink and my few little pieces of jewelry. Of course, that was the day Hazel decided to go California. She came to work in slacks and a blouse.”

Hazel took one look at Lena and cracked up laughing.

“It was a laugh all around,” Lena recalled, “with Kay Thompson leading the chorus.”

The Dreamers, an African-American quartet, was a key ingredient in Kay Thompson’s large, racially mixed choir, which brought together a number of preexisting singing groups, including the Music Maids, the Three Cheers, and Six Hits and a Miss.

“Kay was color-blind compared to a lot of folks in those days,” recalled Dreamers member Leonard Bluett (whose mother was a cook for Humphrey Bogart for thirty years). “She’d mix us right in with white singers, which just wasn’t done in Hollywood back then. Our experience had mostly been singing Negro spirituals in Jester Hairston’s all-black choirs on movies like
Gone With the Wind
. So all of us black kids thought Kay was on ‘our side,’ you know. She was very open-minded and she was very tight with Lena.”

Bluett described what it was like to work in Kay’s chorus: “When we got on the lot, the music would be handed to us. We would go over it with Kay and learn our parts, like an actor would learn his lines. The singers were on risers, like at a basketball game. We would first be in a rehearsal hall and then we’d go to the recording studio when we were ready. Kay was definitely a perfectionist. She would really tell you exactly what she wanted and it had to be just right. After breaks, she’d say, ‘Everybody up! Let’s go! Function! Function! Function!’ Firm but very upbeat, like Lauren Bacall. Everybody liked her.”

Conrad “Connie” Salinger was assigned to create the orchestration to match Thompson’s complicated vocal arrangement. “Connie always used to say that he couldn’t do jazz,” Kay recalled, “but on ‘Jericho,’ he did it. He was so adorable when we started that patter. I said I wanted a ‘badoobadeep, badoobadeep, badoobadeep’ underneath it going all the way through. He said, ‘Well, would you like it in the celli?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I think it’d be great in the celli! Let’s put it there.’
God,
the patience he had!”

Everyone needed patience when it came time to record the thing. Conductor Georgie Stoll was faced with one of the more difficult arrangements of his career. Lena recalled, “During the course of the long, wearing evening, conducted by a gentleman that I never did enjoy working with—too Prussian in attitude, with everybody—Kay and I began to gripe. ‘What a drag,’ Kay said. ‘If Lennie were doing this we’d have been finished eight hours ago.’ ”

Kay was referring to her beloved
Bing Crosby–Woodbury Show
and
Lucky
Strike Hit Parade
maestro Lennie Hayton, but Lena liked him even less than Georgie.

Not long before, Vincente Minnelli had taken Lena to a private party where Hayton was among the guests. One of Hayton’s cronies, comedian “Rags” Ragland, was telling racist jokes that Lena overheard. By association, Horne assumed Hayton was a racist, too.

The more Lena grumbled how much she disliked the guy, the more steadfastly Kay defended him. Lena recalled, “Toward the end of the evening Kay said, very firmly, as if making up her mind about everything: ‘He’s very much the kind of man I think you’d like.’ You know how your girl friend can plant something in your mind? I admitted I’d never really had a chance to know what Lennie was really like and Kay had managed to pique my interest.”

Thanks to Matchmaker Kay, a romance did indeed develop between Lennie and Lena, which wasn’t easy in those days.

“Very few restaurants would serve Lena,” recalled Peggy Rea, who was then working as a secretary for Arthur Freed. “There was one place on Sunset just east of Gardner—I forget the name of it—but I was there many times with Lena and Lennie, Kay and Bill, just the five of us.”

At that time, the laws of California prohibited marriage between races, but even if it had been legal, MGM would never have allowed it. So, Lena and Lennie kept things discreet.

From her previous marriage to Louis Jones, Lena had two young children, Teddy, three, and Gail, who, like Eloise, was six years old when she met Kay.

“Many of my best childhood friends were grown-ups,” wrote Gail in
The Hornes: An American Family
. “Roger Edens, Kay Thompson, Conrad Salinger of the Freed Unit.” Having traveled with her mother on tours, Gail always had
rawther
sophisticated stories to tell her bemused older pals. “I took to hotel life like a duck to water,” Gail recalled. “All kids do. Hotels represent luxury, magic, and freedom—all those corridors, elevators, and opportunities for solo missions. My life was excitingly similar to that of Eloise . . . ‘This is me, charge it please!’ ”

When the time finally came to shoot the “Jericho” number, director Vincente Minnelli summoned Kay for help.

“Vincente Minnelli was always busy fixing Lena’s gown,” Leonard Bluett chuckled, “so he had Kay there to make sure the sound was going right and that we were mouthing the words right.”

Some of the on-screen singers were new and didn’t know the words to the prerecorded track, so Thompson stopped the shooting and ordered a quick
rehearsal. “I said, ‘Come to the piano!’ with all the authority of Queen Mary,” Kay recalled. “And I go ‘tada tada
ta da
’ on the piano, but it is one of those dummy pianos and not a sound came out of it. And this whole group fell out—just
roared
with laughter. And I fell out and said, ‘Just go back to where you were.’ ”

Next on her docket was
Meet the People
, starring Lucille Ball, Dick Powell, and June Allyson. It would be lyricist Yip Harburg’s debut as a producer, a career move loaded with more drama than the film itself. Harburg’s entrée into producing only happened because of Arthur Freed’s endorsement and yet, on every level, Harburg blew the opportunity, requiring Freed to cover for his mistakes and clean up the mess.

Kay had loathed Yip ever since
Hooray for What!
when his affair with Vivian Vance had led to the one of the more serious crimes of the century. Somehow, for the good of
Meet the People,
she managed to bury the hatchet, but it was a shallow grave on the edge of a slippery slope.

Later, in 1950, Harburg would be among many entertainment figures named as “suspected Communists” in
Red Channels,
the newsletter that prompted blacklisting during the heinous McCarthy era. Consequently, whenever Yip’s name came up in conversation, Kay always venomously snapped, “That pinko!” The cold war between them never thawed.

The person who made the production of
Meet the People
tolerable for Kay was Lennie Hayton, the Freed Unit’s preferred music director. It was this picture that professionally reunited them for the first time since founding
Hit Parade
in 1935. And, unlike prior movies for which her contributions were limited,
Meet the People
afforded Kay her first complete menu of songs from which to cook—and her first full-fledged Freed Unit assignment.

Thompson created yet another superchoir for the production and would soon be adding new groups to the mix like Mel Tormé and the Mel-Tones (aka the Skylarks), whose members included Ginny O’Connor (later Mrs. Henry Mancini). But the ones she loved the most were four bumpkins from Iowa, the Williams Brothers—Bob, Don, Dick, and sixteen-year-old Andy. The boys were signed by MGM to appear in
Anchors Aweigh
and
Ziegfeld Follies
but had to bow out of both when Bob was drafted into the Army. In the meantime, Kay kept Don, Dick, and Andy steadily employed in her chorus.

Thompson’s choral work was most outstanding on “I Like to Recognize the Tune” (based on a Hugh Martin arrangement originally intended for RKO’s
Too Many Girls
, but never used). Historian Will Friedwald pointed out that the song was “embellished and updated by MGM’s resident wit Kay Thompson, who borrowed liberally from Gershwin’s ‘By Strauss,’ threw in a reference to
Rodgers & Hart themselves, and switched the line, ‘A guy named Krupa plays the drums like thunder’ to ‘When Tommy Dorsey tears a tune asunder.’ ”

“I was just handed a song for yet another cameo role and told to learn it and be ready to sing it,” June Allyson recalled in her autobiography. “It was called ‘I’d Like to Recognize This Tune,’ [
sic
] and I remember telling Lucille Ball, ‘I’d like to recognize where I’m going. I think it’s
nowhere
. That’s where.’ ”