Kay Thompson (3 page)

The Fink kids were welcomed into the neighborhood, with frequent compliments on how cute Blanche, Bud, and Marian were. The comments about Kitty were not quite as enthusiastic—and it was painfully apparent why: she wasn’t blessed with beauty. Even as a toddler, Kitty could sense that her siblings got more notice than she did. She quickly learned that if she wanted to vie for attention, she would have to do something to earn it. So, she made faces. She grimaced. She stuck out her tongue, messed up her hair—whatever silliness came to mind. Hardly a coincidence, Kitty pulled the same sort of attention-grabbing stunts that later turned up in all those Eloise books—like putting toe shoes on her ears or wearing a cabbage leaf as a hat. And it worked. People began to notice her. They thought she was funny. In the midst of laughter, Kitty was no longer second fiddle. She was a self-made star.

She was also a daredevil, often climbing trees and roughhousing with the neighborhood boys. But she loved fantasizing with dolls and playing dress-up, too. This split personality—half tomboy, half girlie girl—would prove to be just one of her many dichotomies.

“I was different from my siblings,” Thompson later reflected. “I used to lie awake nights, trying to think up ways of keeping up with brilliant Blanche and good-looking Marian . . . whom everyone admired while they disregarded me.”

As feelings of insecurity and alienation intensified, Kitty often retreated into her own world, where, in her solitude, she developed an imaginary friend—the first signs of an alter ego that later evolved into Eloise. While others played games, Kitty played God. She created characters, not only fictional ones but flesh-and-blood personas like Kay Thompson—a calling she continued throughout her life, both for herself and for many others.

She was also obsessed with music. Before she could walk or talk, Kitty merrily banged away on the piano, composing her own discordant cantatas. To preserve the family’s sanity, her mother began giving Kitty piano lessons when she was three. To Hattie’s astonishment, the toddler took to classical music like a duck to water. Neighbors clamored to hear for themselves what this precocious youngster would master next—Bach? Beethoven? In no time flat, Kitty’s reputation switched from clown to prodigy and, with her tiny legs dangling off the piano stool, she got her first taste of applause, a genuine appreciation that she liked much more than mere attention.

The day after her fourth birthday, Kitty was enrolled in kindergarten at Dozier Elementary School, where she boasted that she was going to be an actress, “Not sometime, mind you, but right away!” And, frankly, they had no reason to doubt her.

When a larger house nearby went up for sale, Leo grabbed it and moved his family to 17 Parkland Place, the residence that became their permanent home.

Kitty’s childhood friend Virginia “Ginny” Farrar Ruane, ninety-three years old when interviewed for this book in July 2002, could still picture it vividly: “It was a very nice house, nicely furnished, on a lovely, gated cul-de-sac with a fountain.”

Despite the fact that World War I had broken out in Europe in the summer of 1914, the Finks were living out the Norman Rockwell ideal; everything on their horizon was looking bright.

Convinced that Kitty was a budding genius, Hattie and Leo enrolled her in first grade on September 21, 1914, when she was several weeks shy of five years old—even though school regulations required children to be six. A close look at her school records reveals how this rule was fudged.

Kitty’s entrance form lists her birth date as November 19, 1908—wrong day
and
wrong year—making her appear to be a year older than she really was. Given the precocious nature of the child in question, the administration either never bothered to check or turned a blind eye. It wasn’t until Kitty was entering college that the awful truth finally surfaced.

The transfer-of-records form from Soldan High School to Washington University owns up to Kitty’s correct birth date, November 9, 1909,
finally in agreement with her certified birth record and the City of St. Louis birth registry, making her a full year
younger
than her peers had been led to believe.

After that, Kitty kept everybody in the dark about her age and it became a running joke among friends. During her years at MGM in the 1940s, legendary joint birthday parties with her colleague Roger Edens featured endless ribbing on the subject, as evidenced by the lyrics to “The Passion According to St. Kate, Opus 19, #46,” a satiric birthday cantata Roger composed in Kay’s honor: “She drove an ambulance in the First World War,” sang MGM orchestrator Conrad Salinger. In a teasing reference to “The Trolley Song” in
Meet Me in St. Louis,
Judy Garland chimed in, “All I know is, she was on that goddamned trolley ride I took. That was 1903.”

The natural aging process, coupled with too much plastic surgery, did her no favors. In 1954, Cecil Beaton and Kenneth Tynan wrote that she was “skeletal” and “hatchet-faced,” and the 1976
Who’s Who in Hollywood
blithely described her as “cadaverous.”

Thompson’s lack of candor about her age backfired completely after her death. In her obituary,
The New York Times
had egg on its face when it cautiously guesstimated that she was “between 92 and 95.” The truth is that Thompson was born on November 9, 1909, and died on July 2, 1998—at the ripe
young
age of eighty-eight. Case closed.

I
n early 1915, five-year-old
Kitty Fink breezed through first grade so fast, she was promoted to the second grade in April, completing a quarter of the curriculum by the time school let out in June. But schoolwork was just a distraction from what she really loved—playing piano. It was decided that Kitty would benefit from more advanced training than her mother could provide, so she began taking outside piano lessons.

“I practiced four or five hours a day,” Kay remembered. “When I was six, I wrote a piece and called it ‘The Billy Goat in the Woods.’ It was just eight bars.”

As teachers and adults paid more and more attention to Kitty, resentment grew among her classmates. Suddenly, her red hair, her freckles, her oversized nose, even her last name became the butt of cruel jokes.

“I had an inferiority complex,” Kay later admitted. “I always felt, when I was little, that I was ugly. My sisters and my mother were so gorgeously beautiful. If people asked my mother what she thought the children would grow up to be, she used to say that [Blanche and Marian] would probably be a writer and an artist—they were so talented—that her son might be President. Then
she would add:
and Kitty has a lovely personality
. All this must have waked the determination in me to do something outstanding.”

At the age of seven, Kitty advanced to the fourth grade on April 6, 1917, the same day the United States entered the First World War by declaring war on Germany. This must have been an uncomfortable time for Leo and Hattie, both of whom had family ties in enemy territory.

Things were not peaceful in St. Louis, either. That summer, racial unrest erupted into devastating riots and fires that frightened an eleven-year-old Josephine Baker into dreaming of a life where the color of her skin did not matter. Josephine would eventually abandon St. Louis in favor of Paris, where she became the highest-paid entertainer in Europe—a hometown success story that later proved empowering and inspirational to the
other
St. Louis femme phenom.

But, during her youth, Kitty’s world was sheltered from the hell of war and race riots—even though she would suffer some minor injuries on her own turf. She got plenty of spankings because she was “as freckle-faced and mischievous a brat as ever caused a mother gray hair.”

“I always was theatrical, and lickings were a nuisance,” Kay admitted to a reporter. “So I tried a little trick.”

In the dead of night, Kitty woke everyone up, screaming uncontrollably, claiming that she was haunted by thoughts of being whipped. “It’s the idea, not the pain, that frightens me so much,” she sobbed, wiping away crocodile tears.

“I must have done a good job,” Kay recalled, “for that night I heard my Mother tell Dad she had never realized what a sensitive child I was, and that it was best not to strike me ever.”

Kitty may have saved her behind from further corporal punishment, but she continued to suffer from injuries of her own making. At the age of eight, she developed a crush on a neighborhood boy named Harry. Her heart sank, however, when she saw him flirt with her older sister, Blanche. When he finally looked in her direction, Kitty couldn’t help herself. She sneered and stuck out her tongue. Unfazed, Harry did the worst thing imaginable: he ignored her. Infuriated, Kitty suddenly ran halfway up the staircase and blurted out, “I can jump more than anyone!”

All the children turned as Kitty shrieked like a banshee and leapt from the sixth step, landing at the foot of the stairs. Unscathed, Kitty taunted Harry, “ ’Fraidy cat, ’fraidy cat!”

Then she scrambled up the stairs again, this time jumping from the seventh step, crashing with a thud that must have hurt, but she wasn’t about to admit it. When she threatened to go even higher, Harry finally took the bait,
proclaiming, “You can’t.
I
can. It’s a cinch for a boy.” Harry climbed to the eighth step, jumped to the floor, then gloated at Kitty.

“I can do nine,” she retorted.

What happened after that was not pretty. Kitty landed flat on her face, breaking her nose. If her snout was considered unsightly before the calamity, now it was a bona fide eyesore. But, as far as she was concerned, her death-defying leap was worth the pain and disfigurement because, a few days later, Harry offered to carry her books to school. That episode encouraged further flights of folly, resulting in a broken arm and a
second
broken nose.

“My method as a kid was wrong,” Kay later admitted, “but the idea was right. Because I was homely, I learned I’d have to bestir myself and try extra hard to make the grade.”

Doctors’ visits to fix her wounds were so painful, she developed a phobia that many of her friends believe was the underlying motivation for her later conversion to Christian Science, a faith that bans medical intervention. And yet, exemplifying her many contradictions, she eventually came to rely heavily on the medical profession for nips, tucks, and pick-me-ups.

Broken body parts and interest in boys did not mix well with schoolwork. When her academic momentum imploded during the fifth grade, Leo took away her vacation privileges. He enrolled her in summer sessions at Emerson, another St. Louis school, where she began the sixth grade on June 16, 1919, still only nine years old. This sobering turn of events did not bring Kitty closer to her father, and their relationship would forever remain strained.

On April 5, 1920, Kitty transferred to Ben Blewitt Intermediate Junior High School, entering the seventh grade at the age of ten. During her two years of junior high, Kitty’s grades were highly erratic except in music and athletics, where she routinely excelled. Interestingly, she found a unique way to combine her passions. “At twelve, I wrote ‘The Tuberculosis Ball Game Benefit,’ ” Kay recalled in 1936. “I thought [it] was just grand. I had a record made of the ‘Ball Game.’ When last I was home and heard it, I was amazed at my nerve!”

She had nerve to spare. Her friend Ginny Farrar Ruane recalled, “Each class during the semester would put on some kind of show for the entertainment of the rest of the school, and Kitty’s class did a high-stepping cakewalk, complete with blackface, and it brought down the house. In a cakewalk there is not much choreography—you just
strut your stuff
! Needless to say, Kitty was the highest stepper of all. Kitty’s costume, made by her mother, was entirely of red bandannas.” (Kay’s affinity for red bandannas would endure.)

Kitty was supposed to graduate from Blewitt Junior High in June 1922, but her grades were just not good enough. She was finally promoted to Soldan
High School on January 26, 1923, and it took the rest of that school year and all of the next to scrape through her freshman year. So much for accelerated learning.

Protesting the threat of summer school, Kitty begged Leo to let her go with Ginny to girls’ summer camp. With the help of her mother, she got her way and spent eight weeks during the summer of 1924 at Minne-Wonka Lodge in Three Lakes, Wisconsin, her first time away from home—a much needed cooling-off period between father and daughter.

“Every Saturday night we’d have skits and musical things,” Ginny enthused, “and of course Kitty was so fun, so full of pep, and the life of everything. We’d have canoe trips that took three to five days. We all did lifesaving together and things like that. It was just grand.”

With growing independence and maturity, Kitty was determined to make her life at home more enjoyable, too.

“We had a little pitiful high school sorority,” Ginny recalled. “Xi Delta Sigma. We’d all get together, sing, sit around, gab, and have dumb fun.”

Another favorite distraction from homework was attending movies, although it wasn’t exactly for the love of cinematic arts. “We went to ’em all, didn’t matter which ones,” Ginny chuckled, “because we just wanted to see who else was there.”

On Saturdays, Kitty and her friends would go shopping in downtown St. Louis. When Kitty needed to get her five-dollar weekly allowance from her father, however, she never let anyone come with her to his “office.” She was so ashamed of her father’s pawnshop, she’d make her friends wait several blocks away. Even Ginny, her closest confidante, did not discover this secret until years later.

“The malign exercise of snobbery in ‘middle American’ life”—as Tennessee Williams labeled it—was alive and well in St. Louis. Kitty worried that her social standing would be irreparably stigmatized if her father’s profession were known. Even later in life, she steadfastly characterized Leo as “a jeweler,” never once admitting the pawn brokerage side of his trade. It is telling that as far back as high school, Kitty was carefully crafting an idealized public image.