Kay Thompson (28 page)

Things had come to a crossroads in her personal life, too. Garland’s emotional state was worse than ever, leaving Thompson wracked with guilt and frustration that she could not seem to help her. According to Garland chronologist Scott Schechter, “With Judy’s work finished on
The Pirate,
she made a quiet, unpublicized suicide attempt and was admitted to Las Campanas, a California sanitarium, followed by a few weeks stay at Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.”

As Garland hit rock bottom, so did Thompson’s marriage. Spier was dating other women. “I knew Bill quite well,” Angela Lansbury explained, “and after he left Kay, he used to take me out a lot.” Not coincidentally, Angela guest-starred on
Suspense
on May 29, 1947, in a tale aptly titled “A Thing of Beauty.”

Then along came Havoc. “I was kind of on a double date with my agent, Barron Polan, and Bill and Angela Lansbury,” June Havoc recalled. “And we went to a restaurant. The first thing I did was squirt grapefruit into Bill’s eyes. From then on, he was mine.”

Despite his still-legal marriage to Thompson and his involvement with Lansbury, Spier made no secret of his new romantic interest in Havoc, which got reported in all the papers. He hired Havoc to guest star in the June 12 installment of
Suspense
and then, with her voice disguised in a variety of character parts, she appeared under the pseudonym Armana Fargey in several installments of
The Adventures of Sam Spade
.

When asked her perspective on the breakup of Kay and Bill, June said, “Well, you know, it was just one of those drifting apart things. It was very romantic while it lasted but I think it was more of a love affair than a marriage. Bill eventually came and moved in with me. I lived in Malibu.”

“Kay got the house on Bellagio Road,” recalled Leonard Grainger. “Other than that, there was no division of anything.”

In the early 1970s, Kay told Rex Reed, “I love love and I believe in divorce. Two great things. I’ve lived with quite a few men and alone is better. That doesn’t mean I’m a loner; I just don’t like to ask permission.”

Impatient, Thompson insisted on a “quickie divorce” from Nevada but, in order to get one, she’d have to become a resident of the state for six straight weeks. So, in early August, she relocated to Las Vegas.

“To pass the time I put together this little act and tried it out,” Thompson explained. The “little act” turned out to be Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers. And show business would never be the same.

Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers

(1947–49)

The greatest thing since bubble gum.

—Marlene Dietrich

A
fter wiping her slate clean at home and at work, Kay was ready to take on the world. “Bob [Alton] and I had a talk,” Thompson recalled, “and he said, ‘Katie, what are you gonna do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, Bob. I can always sing in a saloon.’ ”

Imagining herself surrounded by dancers like Judy Garland in “Madame Crematante,” Thompson decided she needed reinforcements.

“Why don’t you use those Williams kids?” Alton suggested.

“I’m too tall and they’re too short,” Kay replied.

“Fine,” Alton countered. “It will be funny.”

Having reunited after World War II, the Williams Brothers (Andy, Dick, Don, and Bob) were finding it hard to jump-start their career at MGM.

“Let’s get out,” Kay suggested. “Let’s go form an act.”

“She loved how we sang,” noted Dick Williams, “but she didn’t know what we were going to do exactly.”

Standing idly around a microphone, Kay and the Williams Brothers sang
together publicly for the first time in May 1947 for some all-star volunteer shows at veterans hospitals. Then, they made their radio debut performing “Louisiana Purchase” on
Personal Album,
presented by the Armed Forces Radio Service. Recognizing their potential, agent Barron Polan (currently repping Bill Spier, June Havoc, Howard Duff, and Ethel Merman) took them on as clients.

“Roger Edens and Kay would hold these elaborate joint birthday parties and perform at them,” recalled Don Williams. “Kay wrote ‘Jubilee Time’ for that and one day she decided to teach it to us.”

“It sounded so great,” Kay recalled, “so I called Bob [Alton] and . . . he said, ‘Come on over to the house at about 8 o’clock.’ ”

“After Bob heard us sing ‘Jubilee Time,’ ” Don added, “he said, ‘Learn this step.’ ”

“We had never danced before,
ever,
” Dick Williams said, laughing. “We didn’t know our left foot from our right.”

“Oh my God, Kay,” Alton lamented. “They’re not dancers. What am I going to do?”

“Just get them to dance a little bit if you can, Bob,” Thompson replied. “They don’t need to be Fred Astaire.”

“And it just expanded from there,” Don said. “Kay would write the thing—and then we’d go to Bob at night and he would stage it. We’d rehearse until midnight or even later. He’d go to work the next day at MGM [choreographing
The Pirate
] and come home in the evening and work with us again.”

They needed a rehearsal pianist. Enter Joe Marino, thirty-one, who grew up in Chicago and, at the age of fourteen, had worked as a pianist for Al Capone at the Paddock Club in Cicero, Illinois. Now serving time as a pianist for MGM, Marino was appropriated by Thompson for her cause. She also stole Bill Spier’s girl Friday, Peggy Rea, to become her personal assistant.

“We rehearsed for at least six weeks without anyone asking what we were rehearsing for,” Kay stated.

And nobody was getting paid. “It was a labor of love for all of us,” said Don, “because we didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“When we began rehearsing,” Dick recalled, “we’d do the opening number and would be absolutely exhausted. We’d say, ‘We can’t do an act. We can’t
move
after just one number!’ Kay would say, ‘Oh, yes you can. Just try harder.’ Little by little, we built our stamina to thirty-five minutes.”

“We all looked exactly alike,” Don explained, “and when we did a hand move, we all did it exactly alike,
bam,
in perfect sync.”

“I am only five-feet, five-and-a-half,” Kay Thompson recalled, “but [next to the boys] I look like ten-feet tall with my arm up in the air.”

“It was like four penguins and a giraffe,” Peggy Rea chuckled.

“I remember one time we were trying to learn a new song,” Dick recalled, “and we just got all screwed up, lost our places, and Kay said, ‘Keep rowing, boys! Keep rowing!’ ”

Bursting with confidence, Thompson tried to hire Sinatra’s press agent, George Evans—the man who created Frankie’s screaming bobby-soxers—but because the act was still gestating, Evans “couldn’t see her for dust.” Instead, she ended up hiring Maury Foladare, “the most rotund press agent in the world,” who had represented such giants as Bing Crosby and
King Kong.
He convinced
Vogue
magazine to do a spread on his new client.

The session with
Vogue
photographer George Platt Lynes went longer than expected, and Kay was running late for rehearsal at Alton’s house in Bel Air.

“So I drove the car across the golf course,” Kay explained. “This wonderful, gorgeous, millions of yards of green grass. Just heaven.”

Alton greeted her by asking, “Who do you think you are, coming here five minutes late?”

Kay answered in a high-pitched voice, “I am Eloise, I am six.”

So there it was. The official anecdote told a thousand times—in a thousand variations—to describe the supposedly extemporaneous 1947 “birth” of Eloise, even though it was a bald-faced lie. Kay had been talking in the voice of Eloise for decades.

“The boys loved Eloise and they gave themselves names,” Thompson elaborated. “Andy, for instance, gave himself two names. He was Junior
and
he was Melvin. The good and the bad. One helped his mother; the other smoked marijuana.”

Alton became Nicholas Aubrey Carstairs; Barron Polan became Stinky; Polan’s sister, Connie Wald, became Sarah Jane; and her husband, Warner Brothers producer Jerry Wald, became Pee Wee.

Despite the distraction of Eloise chatter, “Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers” managed to evolve into an act. “I think you can go to Las Vegas,” Alton proclaimed. They were ready. Not only that, it was just the excuse Kay needed to establish six weeks of Nevada residency to get her “quickie divorce” from Bill Spier.

B
ack then, the Las Vegas
Strip was no great shakes—just a small oasis of three hotel-casinos—the Last Frontier, the El Rancho, and the brand-new Flamingo—the last two controlled by mobsters Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Their associate Bugsy Siegel had just been gunned down on June 20, 1947, for failing to control construction cost overruns at the Flamingo.

After Siegel’s death the operation of the Flamingo and the El Rancho was taken over by Sanford Adler, “a gambler with a long record of arrests” who was a front man for Meyer Lansky. Adler was convinced that the survival of Vegas hinged on luring big stars to its stages. Lansky’s friend Frank Sinatra would have been first in line, but at that time, he was keeping a low profile due to intense scrutiny by the press and the FBI regarding his ties to the Mob.

On July 25, 1947, large advertisements appeared in
Daily Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
announcing three daily chartered plane flights, free of charge, for anyone coming to Las Vegas from Los Angeles, “inaugurated by Sanford Adler, the owner of The Hotel El Rancho Vegas and the Flamingo Hotel.” To enhance the publicity stunt, Adler hired the object of Sinatra’s unbridled flirtations, Ava Gardner, to christen the first flight. In keeping with the hard-boiled cast of characters, Ava brought along her current beau, Howard “Sam Spade” Duff.

According to Jerry Lewis, “
every
important nightclub of the 1940s [was] owned by the Mob. I’ll maintain till the end of my days . . . that in the 1940s and ’50s, before the Mob lost its hold on nightclubs and Vegas, it was literally impossible for an entertainer, any entertainer, not to deal with them.”

Realizing this, Barron Polan organized a private preview of Thompson’s act for Meyer Lansky, Sanford Adler, and other shady characters from the nightclub underworld. The secret summit took place in Bob Alton’s living room.

Don Williams remembered, “It knocked them all out because it was something nobody’d ever seen before.”

It didn’t hurt that Thompson had Sinatra’s enthusiastic stamp of approval. As a result, Lansky and Adler booked the unproven act at the El Rancho for a two-week engagement starting August 6, 1947, at a rate of $2,000 per week.

Kay was now faced with the daunting task of making sure an audience would show up, twice nightly, for two solid weeks. On Sunday, August 3—just three nerve-racking days before their debut—Polan organized a press preview for Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and all the other major columnists. Florabel Muir of
Daily Variety
hailed it “the greatest nightclub act that I’ve ever seen or hope to see,” and the rest of her colleagues agreed.

“We had
enormous
support,” Kay later recalled, still astounded by the snowball effect of the preopening buzz.

Everything seemed to be falling into place just perfectly except that no contract had been drawn up between Kay and the boys. The Williams Brothers’ career had always been managed by their father, Jay Williams, so Kay and Barron would have to strike a deal with him. Fast.

“The Williams Brothers featuring Kay Thompson” was how Jay Williams wanted the act to be billed, but Kay scoffed at that notion. As far as she was concerned, the Williams Brothers were nothing more than her backup group. While Jay Williams tried to stand his ground, the boys—particularly Andy—seemed content to do whatever Kay wanted. In the end, they agreed to be billed as “Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers.”

“The split was fifty-fifty,” recalled Dick Williams. “Fifty percent to Kay and fifty percent that we had to split up among the four of us.”

Polan’s 10 percent agent commission would come off the top, but Kay was forced to assume all other costs out of her share, including salaries for the pianist, publicist, and secretary, plus wardrobe expenses, etc.

“You know, every obstacle was there,” she later remarked. “And I just kept saying, ‘We’re going forward.’ ”

Another unanticipated kink was how to amplify the voices of five whirling dervishes. Back then, hand microphones were tethered by long electrical cords that would have become hopelessly tangled amid five pairs of eggbeater legs. Inspired by overhead boom mikes on film sets, Thompson declared, “The microphones have to be hung from the ceiling.”

“We hung those mikes ourselves,” Andy recalled. “It was the first time that had ever been done.” And it has been copied and refined ever since—even Broadway theaters adapted the idea—but it all traces back to the mother of invention.

“There’d never been an act like it,” Andy concluded, “because it employed the movie technique of singing and acting and dancing and everything, but all live.”