Kay Thompson (30 page)

A bidding war erupted among Decca and its competitors for exclusive rights to future Thompson recordings; Columbia Records emerged victorious. In December, before a strike by the American Federation of Musicians went into effect, Kay quickly recorded four sides, only two of which featured the Williams Brothers—that way, she could command considerably more than the fifty-fifty split she reluctantly shared with them for her nightclub act. Unfortunately, when the records were released the following spring, sales were tepid.

“Class material has never been given more gloss nor spirit than the Thompson turn evokes,” noted
Daily Variety,
“but the ceiling on pop-platter tastes has never been high. What rocks ’em in niteries just doesn’t seem to panic the platter public.”

Clearly, Thompson needed to expand her fan base to more cities. So, after eight record-breaking weeks at Ciro’s, she moved on to Miami’s Copacabana beginning Christmas Eve 1947 for $6,500 per week, plus 40 percent of the gross over $30,000. “They should walk out with at least $10,000 each week,” calculated
The Hollywood Reporter
.

But would Kaytee mania translate to a place like Miami, where she would have to rely on attendance by mere mortals? The answer came swiftly. “450 were squeezed into the ordinarily 300 seating space on opening night,” reported Walter Winchell, “and 1200 were turned away.” And when the pace didn’t let up, her two-week engagement was extended to three.

“One night in Miami, Milton Berle came into Kay’s dressing room,” Peggy Rea recalled, “and she had her Christian Science books on the table and he said, ‘Well, Kaysie, I see you’ve been over at Mary Baker & Eddie’s.’ I have treasured that joke all my life, because, you see, Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science, and Leon & Eddie’s was a famous comedy club in New York.”

When a reporter for the
New York World-Telegram
noticed an open Bible in her dressing room, Kay responded, “That’s the side of me nobody knows.
You see, I adore children. I’m making a special arrangement of the 23rd Psalm [“The Lord Is My Shepherd”] to be sung by a large group of children on records, without musical accompaniment. The record label will say ‘Just Children and a Young Man’s Voice.’ ”

The “young man” in question was intended to be Andy Williams, but nothing came of it—at least not right away.

When asked how religious Thompson really was, Peggy Rea said, “Kay got into Christian Science for about twenty minutes. Then she started healing people. When pianist Joe Marino’s little boy and little girl got sick, Kay started healing them. I mean, this was a woman who was a dynamo, but nutty, too.”

After Miami, Kay and the boys accepted an offer of $7,500 per week, plus percentage, to play Chicago at the Mayfair Room in the Blackstone Hotel (January 20–February 13, 1948). The Blackstone was owned by Arnold Kirkeby, the wealthy hotelier whose properties included the Beverly-Wilshire in Beverly Hills and the St. Regis in Manhattan. A Chicago native, Kirkeby had many business connections with Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano.

“ ‘Ho-la! Ho-la! It’s Jubilee time!’ chortles Kay Thompson in a telegram from Chicago, where she and the Williams Boys played to a total sockeroo on their opening night,” reported Florabel Muir in
Daily Variety
. “ ‘All records smashed.’ Well, there’s a tornado that won’t blow itself out soon.”

Chicago Daily Tribune
critic Will Davidson wrote that until Thompson’s act came along, show business had been suffering from a bad case of “pernicious anemia—lack of Vitamin Kay.”

Reservations were not easy to come by.
Daily Variety
reported that even Broadway’s beloved Mary Martin was refused at the door. Although she outwardly took the disappointment in stride, Martin harbored a lifelong belief that Thompson had purposefully blackballed her. Like she did with June “Peter Pan Collar” Allyson, Kay categorized Mary as “hopelessly square,” a dismissal that apparently Thompson wore on her sleeve, because two years later, Martin was still holding a grudge and would exact her revenge when the moment was right.

With all the orgasmic hosannas being heaped upon the altar of Thompson in major cities, it was easy to forget that she was barely known in Middle America—where zebra-print pants and Noël Coward parodies were not the norm. To regular Joes, Kay was a fringe showbiz kook. But that did not matter to her.

“I don’t think she craved recognition by the public,” observed Lorna Luft. “She craved recognition among her peers in show business.”

Though Kay resisted repeat engagements because of her “leave ’em wanting more” motto, she could not turn down $10,000 a week, plus 10 percent, to encore in Miami.

“We shared a house with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis,” Peggy recalled. “They had a duplex and we had a duplex.”

Martin and Lewis would soon be giving Thompson a run for her money. But in February 1948, the comedy duo was still an opening act for more established stars.

“Kay was a brilliant performer, an incredible choreographer, and a great singer, and she utilized the four boys brilliantly,” Jerry Lewis recalled. “A
great
act.”

Shattering her own attendance record, Thompson ended her Miami gig on March 15, 1948, and then disappeared for several days without letting anyone know where she was. Was it a publicity stunt? After a flurry of rumors concerning her whereabouts,
The Hollywood Reporter
scooped on March 23 that she had been located in Cuba, where she was “resting prior to her New York opening.”

The story got better. Kay was holed up at the notorious Hotel Nacional in Havana, where Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano were fixtures. In fact, Frank Sinatra was currently under investigation by the FBI for meeting with these gangsters at that hotel during the December 1946 “Havana Conference”; it was then that the hit on Bugsy Siegel allegedly had been ordered. Suspected of delivering a briefcase full of cash to Luciano, Sinatra was spending a lot of his own money defending himself against the charges—though many, including Jerry Lewis, had witnessed Frank’s shady dealings with the Mob on countless occasions.

It seems ludicrous to suggest that Kay was in cahoots with the Mob, but in an era marked by media suspicion and government-sanctioned witch hunts, did she really think she was immune to guilt by association? This was brazen, attention-grabbing mischief of Eloisian proportions.

M
eanwhile, Barron Polan closed
a deal for the act to play New York at Café Society Uptown, 128 East Fifty-eighth Street, which had recently been acquired by Herbert Jacoby and Max Gordon, owners of the Blue Angel.

“Kay called Jacoby ‘the Prince of Darkness,’ ” said Bill Harbach, composer Otto Harbach’s son, whom Thompson had just hired as her New York aidede-camp. “He scared the shit out of Kay. He had a thick European accent and he looked like Dracula.”

Jacoby and Gordon wanted to “set this town on its ear” by reopening Café Society Uptown under a new name, Le Directoire, with a new look by celebrated interior designer William Pahlmann, and “the greatest act in nightclub history.” To conduct, Kay insisted they hire her old pal Ted Straeter and his
orchestra, heralded by
The New Yorker
magazine as “the best dance band in these parts.”

Opening on April Fool’s Day, Thompson would earn an unprecedented $10,000 a week, plus 15 percent of the gross. Refusing to perform on a ground-level dance floor, Kay demanded a special hydraulic performance platform. At a cost of $4,000, “[Pahlmann] built a stage, eighteen inches high,” recalled Gordon, “and had it wired so that at the push of a button, it could move and come to rest on the dance floor.”

As one problem got solved, however, another blew up. “On the afternoon of the opening,” wrote historian James Gavin, “Jacoby and Gordon discovered that they had inadvertently reduced the seating capacity from 300 to 212.” This was a cataclysmic disaster since every night had been sold out weeks in advance.

Like the riot scene out of Nathanael West’s
The Day of the Locust,
the furor that erupted over denied reservations only added to the “must-see” mystique of it all. Those who managed to survive the stampede on opening night included Marlene Dietrich, Maurice Chevalier, and William Randolph Hearst.

When it was time to start the show, the band stopped playing, the dance floor was cleared, and the hydraulic stage was ready to make its dramatic descent. Peggy Rea howled as she described what transpired next: “The Prince of Darkness went to the wall and pushed the button but nothing happened. That damn stage didn’t budge one inch. They frantically put in a call to the engineer in Jersey and he had to drive through the tunnel, so it was going to be a while. Milton Berle got up and ad-libbed, treating it all as a horse race. ‘All right, now the engineer is at the corner of such-and-such.’ He got Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis up there, he got Ethel Merman, he got every star in the house to come up and do a turn. It was unbelievable. By the time the engineer finally got there and that damn floor came down and the boys came on with Kay, everybody went bananas.”

Radie Harris proclaimed in
Daily Variety,
“[The opening] goes down in the records as one of the greatest nights in the memory of supper club habitués. For Kay and the 4 Williams Brothers not only lived up to expectations—they surpassed it.”

“Ethel Merman came every night,” said Peggy Rea, “and knew every joke and every line and started to laugh beforehand. Kay would send me down to speak to her: ‘Excuse me, ma’am. You’re bothering the rest of us because we haven’t heard the joke yet.’ Couldn’t have cared less.”

There was stiff competition to be Thompson’s new best friend. Columnist Erskine Johnson reported that Marlene Dietrich was regularly “haunting Le
Directoire [and] convulsed everyone by telling Kay, ‘You’re the greatest thing since bubble gum.’ ” Then Joan Crawford started showing up every night.

When she wasn’t being wined and dined at the Stork Club by every star in the galaxy, Kay would slum it with her boys. Winchell noted, “Kay Thompson and the Williams IV taking out their final Broadway citizenship papers by dining at Hanson’s drug-store counter in the middle-of-the-night.”

The Williams brethren were privy to a side of Kay Thompson that was all but extinct—the less pretentious woman who had pounded the pavement of Tin Pan Alley during the 1930s and hung out on Swing Street with musicians like Alec Wilder. “[By the time] her extraordinary act with the Williams Brothers hit Hollywood and then New York,” observed Wilder, “she was a completely fabricated personality as far as I was concerned.”

Like it or not, the fast lane bred superficiality. There was no time for real emotions. Hell, there was hardly time to go to the loo.

Forgoing respites between shows, they made themselves available for nearby private parties such as the one they played honoring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for which they pocketed a cool $5,000. Edward and Mrs. Simpson loved the performance, and became instant friends of Kay’s. In the years to come, they would socialize often on both sides of the Atlantic. Of cultural significance was the Duke and Duchess’s passion for pug dogs that rubbed off on Kay—and, by extension, on Eloise, whose pet pug, Weenie, later caused a spike in pug adoptions across America.

Another memorable night at Le Directoire was the time Kay finally came face-to-face with Noël Coward. When Thompson heard he was in the audience, she turned to her lieutenant and said, “Billy, dah-ling, while I’m onstage, I want you to go get seven million candles for my dressing room.”

“There was a little joint called the Sazerac on Lexington Avenue around Fifty-sixth Street,” Bill Harbach recalled, “so I ran in there and asked, ‘Can I have all the candles in this building?’ And the owner said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Noël Coward is coming to see Kay Thompson and she wants to be impressive.’ And he said, ‘Well, sure, for Noël and for Kay, you got it.’ I got about ten cardboard boxes filled with these little candles in glass jars and I put them all over that fucking dressing room. It took me twenty minutes just to light them. It was
wild
.”

Coward was not only enchanted by the wonderland of twinkling flames, he was particularly taken by Thompson’s unusual bow after her last number.

“Kay would kneel on one knee, spread her arms out with a bow, and almost have her head on the floor,” Harbach remembered. “She’d give one of these bows at the end of the show, and then she would walk off. There would be
screaming and screaming and screaming, but she would never come out again. No second or third bow, no encores, that was it. Well, when I brought Noël Coward up to the dressing room, he said to her in that marvelous crisp accent, ‘Dear girl, you were absolutely magnificent. And when you did that beautiful bow and left the stage, I screamed for you to come out again and have a second bow, and if you had, I would have killed you.’ ”

To thank Walter Winchell for his relentless drumbeating, Kay decided to stage a benefit for the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund, established by Winchell in memory of his mentor, who had died of throat cancer in 1946. Radie Harris reported in
Daily Variety
: “Kay not only conceived the whole idea, but wrote all the new lyrics and arrangements, did all her own contacting and personally sent out every wired invite . . . To see Ethel Merman in a blonde wig and slacks, the exact duplicate of Kay’s, and hear her sing ‘Jubilee’ was worth the $50 admission price alone . . . Nancy Walker said, ‘Look Ma, I’m Dancin” in her famous ballet satire—Henry Fonda played Noël Coward to Kay’s Gertie Lawrence—and the Nicholas Bros. tore down the house with their ‘Harlem’ routine. All this, in addition to Kay and the Williams Bros.’ regular show.”

Kay and her boys headlined in other charity shows, too, including ones held at the Winter Garden Theatre with Martin and Lewis, Carnegie Hall with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with Ethel Merman.

“We were the No. 1 act in the world,” Andy Williams recalled, shaking his head in amazement.

On June 2, 1948, after nine weeks of taking Manhattan, Kay and her boys bid adieu to Le Directoire and to two members of their entourage. Peggy Rea had decided to pursue a career as a character actress and later became known for playing Lulu Hogg on TV’s
The Dukes of Hazzard
.