Kay Thompson (25 page)

But on this occasion, Kay reveled in the revelry. “Oscar Levant was playing
at the piano,” recalled Tony Duquette. “Judy said, ‘Oh, Kay, let’s just sing real loud!’ And it became one of our ‘family’ statements when we really wanted to have a good time, we’d say, ‘Oh, let’s sing real loud!’ ”

“I sing loud, and Judy sings loud,” Kay told a reporter. “Once Judy, Ethel Merman and myself sang together at a Hollywood party and you could hear us in Hawaii.”

O
n September 22, 1945,
Kay began work on the Freed Unit’s
Till the Clouds Roll By,
a colorful tribute to the music of Jerome Kern, featuring performances by Garland, Sinatra, Horne, and many others. Thompson created the vocal arrangements for all twenty-two numbers in the picture and, in October, she sang them in a rehearsal hall for a delighted Jerome Kern.

Highlights of the film include Sinatra’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River” (from
Show Boat
); “The Last Time I Saw Paris” sung by Dinah Shore; “All the Things You Are” sung by Tony Martin; and “Leave It to Jane / Cleopatterer” sung by June Allyson (with Andy, Dick, and Don Williams in the off-screen chorus).

During the “Show Boat Medley,” Lena Horne sang “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and Kay can be heard on the soundtrack calling “Magnooooolia!” with an exaggerated Southern drawl.

Angela Lansbury was assigned “How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” and was finally allowed to use her own singing voice. “Kay and Roger seemed to take it for granted I could pull that one off,” Lansbury recalled, “but, in all honesty, I didn’t have the expertise that I learned in my later professional life to really sell that song. I was too demure.”

Another first was Van Johnson singing “I Won’t Dance” with Lucille Bremer (dubbed by Music Maid Trudy Erwin). Van was panic-stricken, so he summoned Kay to calm his nerves. “She came in wearing a lynx coat and just sat there and smiled, and I sang to her,” Johnson recalled. “That was it. I got over my fright.”

Garland’s participation in
Till the Clouds Roll By
had to be rushed through as a top priority because she was pregnant. She prerecorded and filmed her songs in October and early November with Thompson by her side. Judy’s baby bump was concealed behind stacks of dirty dishes in a kitchen as she sang “Look for the Silver Lining.” While filming the number “Who?” Judy joked to Kay, “What a song to sing in my present condition.”

They completed Garland’s numbers on November 7, 1945, and two days later celebrated the Second Annual Kay Thompson–Roger Edens Birthday Bash, this year held at Edens’ residence. Still suffering from hangovers on
November 11, the partygoers received the sobering news that Jerome Kern had suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage, adding poignancy and purpose to the entire production of
Till the Clouds Roll By
as a heartfelt, posthumous tribute.

As 1945 drew to a close, Kay organized a charity Christmas concert for kids at the Hollywood Bowl on December 22. Sharing the bill with Santa Claus, Roy Rogers, and Trigger, Kay performed her hot new arrangement of “Kay Thompson’s Jingle Bells” that stopped the show. It was a revisionist’s delight, with rip-roaring harmonics dashing all the way.

The next evening, she wowed the nation by performing it on
Request Performance
(CBS-Radio). “Kay’s own arrangement of ‘Jingle Bells’ as they’ve never been jingled before” was how the announcer introduced the number, and it hasn’t stopped jinglin’ since. Subsequently recorded by many artists, the most popular version of “Kay Thompson’s Jingle Bells” appeared on the classic No. 1
Andy Williams Christmas Album
in 1963. Before Liza Minnelli sang it in concert in 2002, she warned the audience, “Hang on to your hair!”

T
he holiday spirit at
MGM in 1945, however, was dampened by salacious rumors of a lesbian romance between Thompson and Garland.

“I think Kay and my mom were closest friends,” said Lorna Luft, the second of Garland’s three children. “I won’t say that there wasn’t a relationship of having Kay put her arms around my mom, and hold her when she was crying or whatever. I would definitely say there was a closeness like that. But as far as a sexual relationship? No. Not between my mom and Kay.”

Nevertheless, by 1946, the gossip had taken on a life of its own and was starting to get out of hand.

“I remember Kay was married to Bill Spier,” recalled Leonard Bluett of the Dreamers. “But she was never with him. She was
always
with Judy, so we always thought she was a lesbian. We all talked about it.”

“Everyone back then believed the rumor,” recalled
West Side Story
writer-director Arthur Laurents. “But what’s that worth?”

Indeed, the rumor does not prove that Thompson was lesbian or bisexual, but it does establish that the
supposition
was very much alive among her colleagues in the 1940s. Several Garland biographies have recklessly reported the Kay-Judy affair as if it were a proven fact, and yet in the more than seventy years since Thompson first met Garland, nothing but flimsy circumstantial conjecture has ever surfaced. After a decade of delving into the substantiated sexual habits of both women and gathering testimony on the matter from
more than one hundred insiders, the only reasonable conclusion this author can reach is that both women were, first and foremost, attracted to men.

It is, however, easy to understand how the rumor got started—and it had very little to do with Garland. Clearly, stereotypical assumptions were made about Thompson because she did not fit the mold of traditional femininity.

“I remember her always in pants,” Sylvia Sheekman Thompson recalled. “Her style indicates in a way she might have been lesbian, too. I mean she was so mannish.” Or, as the defense-attorney-turned-mystery-writer Carolyn Wheat once put it, “the elegantly butch Kay Thompson.”

“She wasn’t going to wear flowing dresses like Loretta Young,” Lorna Luft reasoned, “because she’d have looked ridiculous and she knew it. I guess you can say she was a bit masculine, but that doesn’t make you gay.”

“I know there was a lot of speculation about her being a lesbian and I could certainly understand why,” stated actor Robert Wagner. “But I never had any evidence of that. I never saw her with a female companion or a partner or anything like that.”

Thompson’s masculine aura was more than just skin deep. “Kay was the kind of girl that all the other girls in camp would have crushes on,” surmised Elizabeth Newburger Rinker, Kay’s chorus member throughout the 1930s. “She had that kind of strength. Mannish strength.”

“I think if Kay had leaned that way,” Marion Marshall Donen Wagner responded, “she would have made a pass at me because we were very close friends. But she never, not even sideways, did that.”

“Strident and masculine as Kay would seem, she was not a lesbian,” insisted Peggy Rea. “Employees are privy to private matters more than the closest of friends. I witnessed plenty of discord between Kay and Bill that no one else knew about, but I never saw any evidence of hanky panky between Kay and Judy or any other woman. Kay had her eye firmly planted on men like Howard Duff and Andy Williams. She couldn’t stop talking about how sexy they were.”

“I knew Kay
very
well,” stated Andy Williams, “and I never,
ever
knew of any gay relationship that she had with anybody.”

“It would be my very, very firm opinion that she did not swing both ways,” declared Leonard Grainger, Thompson’s business manager, “because she so much needed a man’s love. And wanted it. From 1946, I was very close to Kay in all senses and her desire to have a male lover was always there.”

“Kay’s interest in men was
serious,
” observed Hilary Knight. “You could tell from her comments about men. She liked them
a lot
. And her husbands were very sexy guys. I just don’t believe she swung both ways because I was around her too much. I would have sensed something if it was there.”

On the other hand, Thompson occasionally made comments that implied her tastes were varied. At one point, she confessed to Rex Reed, “I’m stimulated by whoever is around—queens, dukes, dishwashers. If the tailor is attractive, it’s him for a week.”

“A fan named Bobby Cook used to speak to Kay on the phone on a regular basis,” recalled Michael Feinstein. “He believed that she was a lesbian. Bobby said at one point he asked her about being gay and she said, ‘Well, darling, we are what we are.’ ”

But remarks such as these should not be taken too seriously, since Thompson was notorious for making provocative statements, just to keep people guessing.

One thing is for certain: she was remarkably inquisitive about the subject. “Through the years, I had many,
many
discussions with Kay about homosexuality,” noted Leonard Grainger, “and she always,
always
treated it with the greatest respect and gentility.”

“Kay was
very
curious about homosexuality,” recalled Richard Grossman, Kay’s
Eloise
editor at Simon & Schuster. “Almost morbidly curious—or she would affect to be very curious about it. She would ask me how guys hit on guys and stuff like that. Isn’t that funny? And yet that must have been a put-on because this was a sophisticated dame who’d been around the corner, right? She must have known.”

“Around the time she was making
Funny Face,
” recalled Hilary Knight, “Kay told me in a hushed tone that [producer] Roger Edens and [screenwriter] Lennie Gershe were ‘sweethearts.’ It was such a corny way of putting it. But her comments and thinking on the subject were always so corny. That’s one of the main reasons why I just don’t believe Kay was a lesbian.”

Nonetheless, anything is possible. Aside from the Garland speculation, wildly unsubstantiated rumors have circulated for years that Thompson also had affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Lena Horne, and Ethel Merman—none of which seems likely. But if Kay really did harbor an attraction to women, it was a closely guarded secret—as conscientiously suppressed as her Jewish heritage.

T
o the powers that
be at MGM, the validity of the gossip was not what really mattered. Perception was the threat. After the Van Johnson–Keenan Wynn cover-up, there was a renewed determination to protect the studio’s most valued assets from damaging hearsay.

“Somebody kept spying on Judy,” Kay later recalled. “[The studio] had real ways and means of the FBI on another level.”

Howard Strickling, the studio’s resident spin doctor, aka “the Fixer,” routinely quelled unsavory notions about its stars. And so, as 1946 got under way, it appears to have been no accident that newspapers and fan magazines were suddenly rife with stories of marital bliss about the Spiers and the Minnellis.

“The William Spiers . . . are rated Hollywood’s happiest wedded couple,” gushed Walter Winchell in his January 17, 1946, column. “They go for picnics by themselves every Sabbath.”

“Oh, brother,” Peggy Rea laughed when the item was read to her. “That’s a load of you-know-what.”

At the same time, Garland’s pregnancy was played up as the ultimate consummation of a happy marriage.

When confronted with questions about the unusual closeness she shared with Kay, Judy told a reporter, “You teeter along the edge of all sorts of moods and complexes when you are expecting, and that’s how the camaraderie began to spring up between Kay and me. She’s so full of interests, that I never had time while waiting for Liza May’s arrival to get blue or giddy or listless.”

Though it was downplayed in the press, Garland suffered from terrible mood swings during the pregnancy. Kay told a friend that when Judy was expecting, she had sworn to stop taking pills. When she caught Garland red-handed breaking that vow, Thompson confiscated them.

“Kay, I swear on the eyes of my unborn child that I will never take pills again,” Judy pleaded.

Kay’s eyebrow rose in disbelief. That did it. Judy grabbed the bottle out of her hands and defiantly swallowed a handful of pills.

“Kay was one of the people who wouldn’t take any of the nonsense of my mom,” Lorna Luft observed. “She knew my mom was sick but she didn’t know what to do about it. Nobody did. If my mother did something—even if it was something
awful
—Kay wasn’t mean. Kay was a duchess. She could act like a bitch—but she wasn’t mean, and there’s a big difference. Kay was her only real friend that
knew
my mother. Kay would raise her eyebrow and my mother didn’t like that at all. That’s when my mother would yell at her. Kay wouldn’t stand for it.”

Whenever things got ugly, Thompson had the ultimate exit line: “The drapes are on fire!”

“Kay would always say that and leave,” Lorna concurred. “People would go, ‘What?’ But by then, she’d already be gone.”

“I was frustrated in not knowing where [Judy] was getting [pills],” Vincente Minnelli admitted in his autobiography. “Yet, with the unspoken terror engulfing us, Judy and I continued outwardly functioning as happily married husband and wife.”

And as new parents. On March 12, 1946, Judy gave birth to Liza May Minnelli. Just prior to the baby’s arrival, Judy and Vincente had selected godparents for their new bundle of joy: “They would be Kay Thompson, who’d been my friend for ten years, and who was now also very close to Judy,” wrote Vincente in his autobiography, “and her husband, Bill Spear [
sic
].”

“That clinched the friendship [between Garland and Thompson],”
Modern Screen
reported.

Liza was christened in June. “I knew she’d be sprinkled with a few drops of water,” Garland recalled, “but she looked like a baby duck taking her first bath.”

“The photographers took her picture,” Kay added, “and from the word goo, Miss Liza May Minnelli knew where she was going.”

“Liza is always cheerful and seldom cries except for a real reason,” Judy told a reporter eight months after the birth. “Just let me sing Brahms’ ‘Lullaby’ or ‘Over the Rainbow,’ though, and she yells a mile. Then Kay walks in, um-de-ums something simple and Liza brightens up like a marquee after dark.”