Kay Thompson (23 page)

“Oh God, what a night,” Kay gleefully recalled. “It was
so
exciting. We did the first birthday at my house with no furniture except the two pianos and a rented ‘Abbey Rents’ bed. We glutted [the house with] everything—hurricane lamps and the tables and the food—and I got a Mexican girl to come and sing and lean on the piano.”

Lena arrived fashionably late. “I figured by this time the broadcast would be forgotten,” Horne explained, “and no one would feel obliged to say ‘You were wonderful!’ just to be polite.”

But no one had forgotten. Cheers exploded and the party escalated further as Lena prompted the mob to sing “Happy Birthday” to Kay and Roger.

“And then,” Kay reminisced, “just when everybody was at the height of going mad, we just said, ‘Shut up,
we’ve
got a song! A birthday song for Roger.’ ”

Thompson and Ralph Blane had composed a song called “Roger de Coverley,” Kay’s nickname for Roger Edens. It was a reference to Sir Roger de Coverley, an eighteenth-century columnist for the British newspaper
The Spectator,
but historical significance was hardly the point. Kay just liked the way the name rolled off her tongue.

“Judy Garland and Peter Lawford secretly rented these outlandish getups from the studio costume department,” Kay remembered, “and we performed this number in my living room. And Roger just sat there listening, crying . . . And if we did it once, we did it a hundred thousand times. The crowd kept begging for more. ‘
Again!
’ So we just kept singing it over and over and over.”

The annual tradition was born, with Kay and Roger trying to one-up the other. “Kay would have no clue what Roger was doing, and Roger would have no clue what Kay was doing,”
Funny Face
screenwriter Leonard Gershe told
Vanity Fair
journalist Marie Brenner. “People would die to be invited!”

“We had the most elegant food,” Kay explained. “Mexican with tacos and tamale pies, and salad was a favorite, then always Wil Wright Ice Cream, several kinds like fresh mint pale green ice with chocolate burnt almond served together . . . We began to outdo each other. The best decorated table, something special in flowers shipped in from Honolulu. Steak from Paris. Candied apples from Alabama.”

“Every once in a while,” Peggy Rea recalled, “Kay would make corned beef hash and she did it right.” Thompson was such a connoisseur of the delicacy that, in 1951, she would become the spokeswoman for canned Broadway Corned Beef Hash, appearing in a newspaper ad campaign.

“
All
the parties were great,” Kay declared. “Arthur [Freed] gave some marvelous ones. Jerry Kern and Tallulah [Bankhead] and Irving [Berlin] and Harold Arlen. There was music from start to finish. When Roger got up from the piano, Lennie [Hayton] sat down, and when he got up, I sat down and all of us sang, including Arthur. We were moved by the moment, stirred by the affection of that moment and anybody who didn’t participate wasn’t there.”

Another event on the A-list calendar was July Fourth at Villa Tramonto, the Pacific Palisades home of Joseph Cotten and his wife, Lenore Kipp (a former associate fashion editor under Diana Vreeland at
Harper’s Bazaar
).

“We had the Rams football team band one year,” Cotten recalled, amazed by his own extravagance. “Then there was the time Ethel Merman sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and Kay Thompson once did ‘Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.’ Everybody had a good time and there were no bras in the bushes the next morning.”

“I would sing with Kay at all the parties,” Margaret Whiting recalled, “and we used to hang out with Judy sometimes up at the Café Gala, the bar we found in Hollywood. It was the first club where everybody sang all the songs from New York, Cole Porter songs, all the great Broadway show tunes. Lana Turner and all the people that were bright and fun used to go there every night.” (It later became Spago, home of Swifty Lazar’s Oscar parties.)

Cabaret singer-pianist Bobby Short recalled, “We would just close down the place and keep the bar kind of secretly going. And we’d have a good time. I mean when you’ve got Roger Edens, Conrad Salinger, and Kay Thompson and Lena Horne and God knows what else sitting out there, all drinking their heads off, and the place closes. And there are two grand pianos. A lot of wonderful things happened.”

Skitch Henderson said, “You know where I’d sometimes see Kay, too? There was a café society group that would go to Rocky Cooper’s house on Saturday nights. Rocky was Gary Cooper’s wife—a Connecticut Yankee type.
Kay was very close to Cole Porter and a couple of times they performed some special material they’d prepared.”

Another favorite watering hole was Frances Edwards’ Bar and Grill, nicknamed “the Hangout,” across the alley from the Metro lot. “Judy Garland, Donald O’Connor, Kay Thompson, Mickey Rooney, June Allyson, Jane Powell, and others, would gather around the piano for a singing session,” wrote columnist Bob Thomas. The establishment also had a tiny dance floor frequently used by Gene Kelly to rehearse routines.

Beneath all the merriment, however, Thompson envied the stars around her. Determined to boost her profile as an actress, she and her husband concocted a musical-mystery radio pilot entitled
Kay Thompson’s Club Midnight,
a hybrid of the Thompson
Forecast
pilot, “51 East 51,” and the Lena Horne episode of
Suspense,
“You Were Wonderful,” both set in nightclubs. The idea was for Kay to play a cabaret star who solves crimes on the side—with bigname guest stars dropping by each week. Spier’s golden imprimatur as director and producer made the project even more enticing. Nonetheless, no sponsors signed on, so the series never got on the air.

Thompson felt unappreciated and underutilized, and her mounting resentment was not always kept in check. In his unpublished memoir, jazz composer Alec Wilder observed that after Kay had been in Hollywood for a while, “a tougher, harsher, more cynical person” emerged. She had reason to be cynical. Bolstering the careers of others was a bittersweet endeavor for someone who craved the spotlight so intently. But, stuck in a dead-end job, Kay had no choice but to submerge those feelings and bide her time.

Somewhere Over at Metro

(1945–47)

Kay is my best critic and severest friend.

—Judy Garland

O
ne of the most triumphant sequences in screen-musical history” was how
The New Yorker
film critic Pauline Kael described Judy Garland’s “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” in the Freed Unit production of
The Harvey Girls
. It was just one of a multitude of kudos lavished on this classic sequence—but few recognized Kay Thompson’s contribution: she had entirely transformed a three-minute ditty into this nine-minute tour de force.

Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer had written the song for the film, but Kay had been assigned to embellish it with her vocal arrangement and choral direction. In her hands, “Atchison Topeka” became the showstopper to end all showstoppers. Kay told writer Stephen M. Silverman that the reaction to the number at the premiere was so euphoric, the crowd was “screaming.”

“It is absolutely wonderful,” declared Michael Feinstein. “I think probably ‘Atchison Topeka’ is Kay’s greatest film achievement.”

Neither composer agreed. Years later, Feinstein asked Harry Warren why he and Mercer had not embellished “Atchison Topeka” on their own. Warren’s
response: “Well, in those days at MGM, we’d write the song and they would take it. We’d turn it in and it was good-bye. We could have written that special material if they’d given us the chance, but then Kay Thompson reared her ugly head!”

Johnny Mercer was equally incensed. “They’re going to make me look like an idiot,” he fumed. “Everybody’s going to think I wrote that junk.” He lodged a formal complaint with Arthur Freed, but Freed dismissed it out of hand: “What are you talking about? It’s wonderful.”

Unassuaged, Mercer and Warren boycotted the Academy Award ceremony. When “Atchison Topeka” was named Best Song, presenter Van Johnson had to accept the Oscar on their behalf.

No matter. The song became a Top 10 hit, selling over a million records and a half million pieces of sheet music. Thompson proudly proclaimed, “That number was just a peach.”

It helped to have Garland at the mike. “On
Harvey Girls,
Judy was fun,” Kay remembered. “Her brain . . . was a little vacuum cleaner, which just picked up all this stuff . . . She was at ease. She was in love with Vincente [Minnelli] and everything was so calm.”

In fact, Judy was in such a blissful state, she married Vincente on June 15, 1945, with Kay and Bill among the well-wishers.

For
The Harvey Girls,
Kay assembled one of her largest choruses ever, forty strong, featuring two future singing stars, Andy Williams and Frankie Laine.

“I learned that MGM was holding auditions,” explained Laine, “so I went over to Culver City and tried out for a lady named Kay Thompson. I did a jazz tune for her and she liked what she heard.” Kay booked him for the chorus and also “to dub in the voice for a dancer—a great big guy—in ‘March of the Doagies.’ ”

Another new chorus recruit on
The Harvey Girls
was Kay’s younger sister, Marian Fink, who had changed her name to Marion (with an
o
) Doenges (pronounced “DAWN-jeez”). Marion had recently married a career Air Force pilot named Robert Doenges, and while he was serving in the war, Kay persuaded her to take a job at MGM as the secretary to George Schneider, “the librarian in the Music Department in charge of copyright clearances and accounting.” Once Marion was in close proximity to her sister, Kay couldn’t help but put her voice to good use. When it was decided that Cyd Charisse’s chirping wasn’t good enough for her songs in
The Harvey Girls,
Kay hired Marion for $100 per session to be Cyd’s voice double.

Angela Lansbury’s singing voice was also replaced in
The Harvey Girls.
“As far as I remember, I don’t think Kay or Roger [Edens] ever had me in to try me
out singing the songs,” Lansbury recalled. “They just assumed that my voice was pitched very high and that I didn’t have the chest tones to play that earthy lady of the night.”

For Lansbury’s vocal, Kay hired Virginia Rees, who had prior experience dubbing Marlene Dietrich and Eleanor Powell. “[There was no] publicity,” Rees recalled. “It was all rather hush-hush that a star had to have someone sing for them.”

Lansbury was also scheduled to perform “The Continental Polka” (Johnny Green–Ralph Blane) in the upcoming production
Easy to Wed,
so Thompson had Rees bank that vocal at the same time. However, when “The Continental Polka” went before the cameras, Lansbury had been replaced by Lucille Ball, resulting in a rather unusual twist of fate: Lucille Ball lip-synching to Virginia Rees channeling Angela Lansbury.

Lansbury recalled her earliest memories of Thompson: “When I first arrived at MGM in 1943, I remember seeing this extraordinary, marvelously glamorous woman who used to come into the commissary with her blond hair and usually in a very long mink coat that kind of dragged on the floor. She always had a coterie of males with her. She talked in this very strong voice and you couldn’t
not
notice Kay Thompson in those days.”

“Lunch was divine in the commissary,” Kay remembered. “At our table it was an event. Creative spirits breathing in the same air and helping to get it on film.”

But all was not equal. “It was very caste conscious,” Skitch Henderson observed. “Kay was a czar. She would eat with her own gang—with Roger [Edens] and Connie [Salinger] and those people.”

Kay admitted, “The clannishness of us drove people to remark that, ‘There goes that snob Freed Unit.’ Snobs we were, but
good
snobs . . . We bounced off of each other with violent enthusiasm.”

The clique also had a mascot named Eloise. “Kay used that voice quite a lot,” Angela Lansbury recalled. “I don’t think she had narrowed it down to the character living at The Plaza at that point. But yes, she would go into her Eloise voice. Quite often.”

While Kay was busy with prerecordings for
The Harvey Girls,
she convinced her husband to find a juicy role for Frank Sinatra on his
Suspense
radio series. And so, on January 18, 1945, Frank played opposite Agnes Moorehead in “To Find Help,” the story of a hired hand who turns out to be a psychopathic killer.

“Until Bill gave Sinatra his first dramatic role in a
Suspense
episode, no one thought he could act,” wrote Sheilah Graham. “Frank was excellent, and this led indirectly to
From Here to Eternity
. They might never have allowed him
to test for it if [Columbia Pictures’ chief] Harry Cohn had not heard him on
Suspense
.”

Other
Suspense
guest stars taking cues from Spier during 1945 included Humphrey Bogart, Lana Turner, Henry Fonda, Lucille Ball, Edward G. Robinson, Myrna Loy, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Ronald Colman, John Garfield, Joseph Cotten, and Clifton Webb.

As the premier radio director-producer in the business, Bill Spier decided the time was right to branch into movies. Supportively, Kay got him a movie agent, Barron Polan, and suggested that he pitch film versions of the best
Suspense
installments to her associates at Metro. As a result, it was announced that Spier had been hired by MGM to produce several film noir thrillers—including
The Beast Must Die
(to star Edward Arnold),
The Men Who Couldn’t Lose
(to star John Hodiak), and
Desire
(to star Robert Young)—but not one was ever made. Like Kay’s, Bill’s motion picture ambitions remained frustratingly stymied.

Meanwhile, Thompson’s first husband reappeared on the scene. Jack Jenney had been “honorably discharged” from the Navy due to health problems obviously related to his alcoholism. Having declared bankruptcy, he was desperate to find work, and so, with Kay’s blessing, Lennie Hayton hired him to play trombone on Garland’s Decca Record sessions for songs from
The Harvey Girls,
featuring Thompson’s chorus.