Kay Thompson (31 page)

Bill Harbach aspired to find work behind the scenes in television. “Kay was a great friend of Pat Weaver, the president of NBC,” Harbach recalled. “She told me, ‘Go see Pat, say I sent you, and you gotta call him Weaver Feathers.’ ” Armed with those magic words, Harbach became a fixture at the network and later launched and produced a promising new program called
The Tonight Show
.

Next up, Thompson and company did a return engagement at the Blackstone in Chicago starting June 18, earning a whopping $12,000 per week, plus percentage. It was, according to the
Los Angeles Examiner
, “the biggest salary ever paid an entertainer.”

To break away from the 24/7 hubbub at the Blackstone, Kay checked herself into the nearby Edgewater Beach Hotel, where she met a ten-year-old resident named Marilou Hedlund, another of the many inspirations for Eloise.

“The Edgewater was a wonderful playground,” Baroness Marilou Hedlund von Ferstel remembered in 2007, “with lots of ballrooms, restaurants, and stores—all of which piqued the interest of a child. I was gregarious about meeting people. My standard opening line was always, ‘I am Marilou. My mother is 4'11” and wears a 3
¹
/
₂
shoe, and my father is 6'2” and weighs 200 pounds.’ It was my marketing slogan.”

On meeting Kay, Marilou recalled, “She thought I was amusing and she tried to give me singing lessons, but it was not a success, because still to this day, I cannot carry a tune in a bucket.”

Years later, Marilou bought a copy of
Eloise
to read to her daughter. “When I saw ‘My mother wears a 3
¹
/
₂
shoe,’ ” she explained, “that’s when I discovered that Kay must have based some of her lines on my patter.”

On the promotional front, Thompson appeared on several radio shows hosted by her former paramour Dave Garroway, now one of the top radio personalities on WMAQ, Chicago’s NBC affiliate. Like Kay, he was divorced and available. Circumstantial evidence suggests their romance may have been rekindled: not only were they spotted dining together on several occasions, Dave waged a personal crusade that summer to turn Kay’s swing recording with Johnny Green’s orchestra, “The Steam Is on the Beam,” into a local hit.

Another Chicago radio personality had his sights set on her, too: Mike Wallace, who later coanchored
60 Minutes
on CBS-TV for thirty-eight years.

“In 1948, I was hosting an afternoon interview show called
For the Luvva Mike,
” recalled Mike Wallace in 2007, “and I remember interviewing Kay Thompson when she was in Chicago with the Williams Brothers. In those days, I was fairly square. I was a little taken by, and enchanted by, and
puzzled
by show business people, especially someone as extraordinary as Kay Thompson. We became fast friends because she was an adorable individual and she was willing to help educate this young ‘Myron’ Wallace. What I remember most about Kay was her terrific performances with the Williams Brothers at the Blackstone, and at the time, she was already involved in that Eloise business. She’d speak to me often in the voice of Eloise.”

That summer, Kay was also stepping up her strategy to conquer Broadway.
Happily Ever After,
a stage adaptation of her unproduced screen treatment, was to be directed by Bob Alton—who was negotiating a leave of absence from his MGM contract. According to
The New York Times,
Thompson and Alton were devising ways to “introduce movie effects, like the ‘dissolve,’ with skits merging into musical numbers and vice versa,” an innovation that would “soft-pedal the blackout and curtain devices traditional to the form.”

Unfortunately, President Truman’s newly instituted military draft got in
the way. Three of the Williams Brothers—Andy, twenty, Dick, twenty-two, and Don, twenty-five—were eligible to be called up for duty. Because of the uncertainty,
Happily Ever After
was put on hold and Alton stayed at MGM to choreograph
The Barkleys of Broadway,
with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland. On July 15, 1948,
Daily Variety
reported that Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers would make an appearance in the movie, but four days later, Garland was suddenly dropped from the project due to “chronic illness,” and replaced by Ginger Rogers. Out of loyalty to Judy, Kay withdrew.

That very same month, Thompson got another movie offer to appear in Samuel Goldwyn’s
Billion Dollar Baby
with Betty Hutton. In the role that Mitzi Green had originated on Broadway, Kay was to play Georgia Motley, a fictionalized depiction of Texas Guinan, the colorful speakeasy hostess. Sadly, the film never got made.

F
rom the start of
their collaboration, Thompson appointed herself tutor to the Williams Brothers. “Kay taught us everything while we were on the road,” Andy recalled, “not only about show business, but about the arts.” She knew the trick was to make lessons entertaining. “When we were learning about Impressionist painters,” Andy elaborated, “she wrote a song that went like this . . . ‘Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Bonnard; Manet, Monet, and Degas; van Gogh, Goya, Gauguin; Sisley, Cézanne, Matisse; Mary Cassatt, et aussi; Georges Seurat, et aussi,’ and so on. She also wrote one called ‘The New York Public Library,’ rattling off names of famous authors. This was our education.”

“The Impressionists” had a simple singsong melody but much of “The New York Public Library” was spoken rhythmically—her second honest-to-God rap song, expanding on the innovation she and Roger Edens had started with “Madame Crematante” in 1944.

“She was the first rapper,” Liza Minnelli marveled to
New York
magazine in 2007.

“I call her L. L. Cool Kay,” added entertainer Jim Caruso.

While the Godmutha of Rap tried very hard not to show any outward favoritism among her Boyz, it was impossible not to notice that Andy got preferential treatment. For instance, when she wrote a number for their act spoofing Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward, it was Andy who got to play Noël opposite her Gertie.

Soon, rumors of a love affair were flying. In those days, May-December romances were still considered scandalous, especially when it was the woman on the winter end of the calendar. So, it was no wonder that the sight of a thirty-eight-year-old
woman and a twenty-year-old boy hanging out together raised eyebrows and made the papers. (The eighteen-year gap exceeded the fourteen years between her parents—plus Kay was now the father figure.)

“Sensational Kay Thompson’s big romance is Andy Williams,” insisted Dorothy Kilgallen in her April 12, 1948, gossip column, setting off a blaze of press reports. Both parties denied it (even to Andy’s own brothers).

But in his 2009 memoir,
Moon River and Me
, Andy Williams finally confessed: “I couldn’t help letting my feelings show. To my surprise and delight, [Kay] admitted that she felt the same. We made up for lost time over the next couple of years, but even though we were now lovers, it remained a completely private affair.”

It was not a well-kept secret. “They lived together for a while,” Bill Harbach confirmed. “As a matter of fact, they went to Nantucket for the summer [of 1948] on a little
vacances
—just the two of them—and they had a little bed-and-breakfast place they lived in. They were having a marvelous time. They’d say, ‘We’re staying there for the summer. Give us a call.’ They didn’t talk about it but they presented themselves as a couple. They were
always
together.”

After what some referred to as “their Nantucket honeymoon,” Kay and Andy reunited with Dick, Don, and Bob and resumed touring on August 2, 1948, for two weeks at the Piping Rock, an elegant spa and casino resort near the horse-race tracks of Saratoga Springs, New York, controlled by Thompson’s favorite mobster, Meyer Lansky. Earning $10,000 per week, plus a percentage, they broke the house record, grossing $25,000 per week.

What a difference a year had made. Since they debuted at the El Rancho Vegas on August 6, 1947,
Daily Variety
tallied that with just ten engagements in twelve months, their act had earned an eye-popping $436,000.

Then came the announcement, on September 15, 1948, that Thompson had just signed a “three-year $1,000,000 deal with the Kirkeby hotel chain.” Eleven years before Elizabeth Taylor broke the seven-digit threshold for an actor’s salary in a single movie (for
Cleopatra
), Thompson was the million-dollar baby of cabaret. Even more astonishing was the fact that the contract required only half of her time, “a total of 26 weeks annually for the Kirkeby chain.” Because of the tenuous nature of the Williams Brothers’ availability, the agreement was drawn up with Kay alone, allowing her the flexibility to reconfigure the backup singers if circumstances dictated it. Using the military draft as an excuse, Thompson had artfully wrested complete control over her act, with or without the Williams Brothers.

As part of her deal with Kirkeby, she negotiated three years’ free use of a suite at the Beverly-Wilshire—a perk to which she rapidly grew accustomed.

This was a defining moment for Thompson, whose potential had been dismissed by so many for so long. Now a self-made star, she was her own boss, calling the shots. After all the setbacks and humiliations, it was a triumph and vindication of everything she’d strived to achieve. Revenge was sweet but it wasn’t long before it went to her head. No longer flexible to negotiate or collaborate or compromise on future projects, she had to be in charge. If not, she didn’t give a damn—she’d rather not work at all.

Just as Le Directoire had been transformed especially for Kay, she demanded that the Florentine Room at the Beverly-Wilshire undergo a serious makeover. So, while a costly overhaul got under way, she and the boys accepted interim tour dates, starting with the Oval Room of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston.

Oddly, their reception in Boston was considerably cooler than it had been in other cities.
Daily Variety
reasoned that Thompson’s excessive “weekly stipend necessitated doubling the couvert—a matter resulting in the Cod City dwellers folding their pocketbooks and staying home.” The act’s four-week booking was quietly shortened to three.

This humbling experience was followed by a whole new challenge. The Roxy Theatre, at 153 W. Fiftieth Street (at Seventh Avenue) in New York, was a cavernous 5,920-seat vaudeville palace that presented live acts as a warm-up for motion picture presentations. Thompson and her boys had been booked for two weeks, starting October 15, at $15,000 per week plus a fifty-fifty split over a weekly gross of $120,000, “the highest fee ever paid on the vaudeville circuit.”

Four times daily, the quintet would be the lead-in to
Apartment for Peggy
, the heartwarming story of a young couple (Jeanne Crain and William Holden) who give their suicidal landlord (Edmund Gwenn) a new lease on life. The glitz of Kay’s act was a cockeyed mismatch, yet reviews were glowing.

“It is the first time in this writer’s knowledge that you have been able to see a top-flight musical comedy for the price of a movie ticket,” proclaimed the
New York Herald Tribune
.

Lines stretched for blocks and attendance records were broken. The two-week run was extended for ten days, the maximum availability before Kay and the boys were due back in Los Angeles to begin their gig at the Beverly-Wilshire.

One person who saw Kay’s act at the Roxy was twenty-two-year-old comic Mel Brooks, one year before landing his first job writing jokes for Sid Caesar. “I
loved
her,” Mel recalled in a 2006 interview. He would later write for Thompson and use her act as inspiration.

Another impressionable spectator at the Roxy was twenty-two-year-old
illustrator Hilary Knight—his very first exposure to Kay in the flesh, though only from afar. “The audience was not sophisticated,” Knight recalled, “and they didn’t quite know what to think of it.”

“It wasn’t fun,” Dick Williams reflected, “because we were a very intimate act and we needed a small room. It was the best money we ever made, but that was the only time we played a theater. None of us liked it, Kay included.”

While Thompson was anchored in the East, she was being lampooned in the West. On October 14, 1948, the Annual Hollywood Press Photographer’s Costume Ball was held at Ciro’s. It featured what
The Hollywood Reporter
called “probably the greatest bit of showmanship ever to hit a night club floor—Danny Kaye as Kay Thompson, with Jack Benny, Jack Carson, Van Johnson and George Burns as the Williams Brothers! There’s never been anything like it! Danny was done up with a K.T. hairdo, complete unto bun, nail polish and Kay’s working wardrobe. You couldn’t tell Kaye from Kay, it was so brilliantly handled. Whole stunt was Benny’s idea, but the major credit goes to Bob Alton, who rehearsed the lads for two weeks at Benny’s home.”

“[Danny’s] resemblance was so striking, his mimicry so uncanny, that some in the audience actually believed it
was
Kay Thompson,” wrote historian Martin Gottfried. “Since there already was a mannish quality about her, it was an esoteric moment in the history of sexual ambiguity.”

“Kay Thompson telephoned me from New York,” Florabel Muir reported in
Daily Variety
. “She said she wept at the high compliment . . . Kay sent huge bunches of flowers to Danny and the other guys and congratulatory telegrams . . . She said. ‘There is nothing that can happen from now on that will give me such a thrill.’ ”

The gag proved so popular, two repeat performances were given at Friar’s Club Frolics in L.A. and San Francisco. Then, at a party thrown by Betty Hutton, Danny did his “absolutely final farewell impersonation of Kay Thompson” for a crowd of cheering friends. The last song of his set was so strikingly realistic, Van Heflin sputtered, “Why that’s better than Kay herself!” Turned out, it
was
Kay who had prearranged the encore switcheroo as a prank. Consequently, when reporters spotted Danny and Kay dining together at The Stork Club in Manhattan, it became an irresistible photo op that made all the papers.