Kay Thompson (35 page)

They reunited at Ciro’s on July 27, 1951, with an audience of all-stars, including a twenty-one-year-old actor named Robert Wagner, who became pals with the entire quintet.

“Triumphant,” wrote critic David Hanna in
The Hollywood Reporter.
“The zany, irrepressible five, played the performance of their careers.”

“One of the funniest numbers was ‘Mad about the Ballet,’ ” recalled record store owner Randall Wallace. “The lyrics went something like, ‘Spencer Tracy wanted her. Cary Grant wanted her. Even Clifton Webb wanted her.’ And the Williams boys shouted back, ‘Clifton Webb?!’ Insiders knew that Clifton was gay, so everyone
howled.
The innuendos were absolutely outrageous.”

The media made a few innuendos of their own, fixating on regular female clientele such as Dietrich, Crawford, Moorehead, and Stanwyck, describing their devotion with suggestive phraseology.

“Barbara Stanwyck and Kay Thompson have formed a mutual admiration society,” winked
The Hollywood Reporter.
“Barbara’s on the front line at Ciro’s most every nite.”

These teasing column items needed little decoding, though there was absolutely zilch to back up any Sapphic insinuations. And yet the perception persisted.

Next, Thompson and the Williams Brothers headed for New York, where they were booked as guest stars for the debut broadcast of NBC-TV’s
The Kate Smith Evening Hour
on September 19, 1951. They performed “Jubilee Time,” and if the surviving twenty-five-second clip of the climax is any indication, it was a razor-sharp
wow.
At one point, Kay is lifted off the ground into a rigid horizontal position above the boys’ heads, then tossed to a perfect, featherweight landing of Olympian grace. Smith adored them so much, she invited them back for three more shows before the year was out.

While in Manhattan, the quintet opened a four-week engagement in the Persian Room at The Plaza. “The charade here is show business with its best foot forward,” declared
The New Yorker.

While Kay was setting off fireworks at The Plaza,
I Love Lucy
(CBSTV) made its smash debut on October 15, 1951. With a growing number of “must-see” TV shows every week, café society was turning into a bunch of couch potatoes.
Look
magazine concluded that Thompson was among “only a handful of well-known stars left in night clubs who are guaranteed money-makers.”

The night after Lucy ignited, Judy Garland opened at the Palace Theatre in New York. Once again, Kay coached her during rehearsals—along with her old pals Roger Edens (who wrote the act), Charles Walters (who staged and choreographed), and Hugh Martin (who provided piano accompaniment).

Kay and Hugh were still receiving regular “vitamin cocktail” injections from Dr. Max Jacobson, and at some point, Judy tried his “magic elixir,” too. But not for long. “Jacobson stopped treating Judy,” noted historian Rick Lertzman, “because she was doing everything else in the world and the interaction was too dangerous.”

Nevertheless, Garland needed every ounce of energy to keep up with the Thompsonesque choreography. Like a double dose of Williams Brothers, Garland was backed by “Judy’s Eight Boyfriends,” a gaggle of chorus boys reminiscent of the ones who performed with her in “Madame Crematante” for
Ziegfeld Follies.
In fact, “Crematante” was to be part of the show, but for reasons unknown, it was dropped during rehearsals.

“The demand for tickets was so great,” wrote Garland chronologist Scott Schechter, “that the scheduled four-week run would ultimately be extended to a record nineteen weeks.” And then it won a special Tony Award.

While Garland was doing the Palace, Thompson got to spend some quality time with her goddaughter. “I remember once we were walking around in New York,” Liza Minnelli told
New York
magazine in 2008. “I was about 4, and she had a big wolf coat, gray, just heavenly looking—she was so tall and thin. She stopped by the Stork Club. This very nice black gentleman opened the door, and she asked for Mr. So-and-So [owner Sherman Billingsley], and the man wasn’t in. And she said, ‘Yeah, well, just tell him that Miss Thompson and Miss Minnelli stopped by.’ And my world changed! I was Miss Minnelli.”

Meanwhile, the usual suspects horded Persian Room tables throughout Kay’s run—along with Audrey Hepburn, who was in rehearsals for her Broadway debut in
Gigi.

The tour next took them to Dallas at the Hotel Adolphus, where Kay rekindled her friendship with Billie Cantrell, the high school sorority sister who had married Stanley Marcus of Neiman-Marcus.

“I was about fifteen or sixteen years old—still at a very impressionable age—when I first met Kay Thompson,” recalled Jerrie Marcus Smith, Billie and Stanley’s daughter. “I remember the time that Kay came over to our house for dinner and following her in the door were four handsome boys—the Williams Brothers. Kay played the piano and they sang. I was sitting on the couch, openmouthed. It is a vivid memory and I was mightily impressed.”

Then the regiment conquered Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., and Miami before setting their sights on London for an engagement at Café de Paris beginning February 11, 1952—marking the Williams boys’ very first trip abroad. However, on February 6, the day they were set to cross the pond, the world awoke to the news that King George VI had died.

Kay and company boarded that plane anyway, figuring the show must go on. But when they arrived in England, they found an entire country in bereavement. “It was a no-no to be seen out on the town during the mourning period,” recalled Dick Williams, “so we had to postpone. Instead, we went to Paris and stayed there a few days, with Kay as our guide.”

“At Le Louvre,” Andy recalled, “I watched this little girl with just one roller skate. Years later, after I married Claudine [Longet], I was telling her about it and she said, ‘That was me! I used to go over there every day and I only had one skate!’ ”

They also took a side trip to Rome, where Kay visited
another
Williams chap who had taken up residence there, Tennessee Williams, who took her on joy rides in his shiny new Jaguar XK120 Roadster. With Mr. Toad eyes spinning with envy, Kay had to have a sports car like his, and sure enough, by
September of the following year, she did—a new and improved 1953 Jaguar XK125 Convertible, silver with red leather upholstery. Never one to miss an opportunity, she appeared in ads for her dealer, International Motors of Hollywood, in exchange for a deep discount on the sticker price.

When they finally opened in London on February 18, critic Kenneth Tynan wrote to Cecil Beaton, “Kay Thompson came back to the Café de Paris, the youngest 176-year-old Iroquois squaw in captivity, and the livest, wittiest, fireman-save-my-childest lady on earth: do you love her, too, as I do?”

“We would go to Kay’s apartment after the show and play charades,” Don Williams reminisced. “One night, Bob had had too many beers when it was his turn. She held up four fingers: ‘Four syllables!’ She set something down, and Bob said, ‘Set!’ Next she held up ten fingers and he said, ‘Ten!’ Then she acted all cold and Bob said, ‘Brrrr!’ And finally she pointed to some music and Bob said, ‘Song!’ He got all the syllables right, ‘Set-ten-brrrr-song!’ But he was so loaded, he couldn’t get that it was ‘September Song.’ He just kept saying ‘Set-ten-brrrr-song!’ and everybody was just dying laughing!”

T
he next stops on
Tour Thompson were Chicago (at Conrad Hilton’s Palmer House) and Philadelphia (at the Latin Casino). But the
big
Thompson buzz that month had nothing to do with her act.

“[Kay] thinks quite highly of Frenchman Georges Champigny,” reported Hedda Hopper. “Says Kay: ‘He’s really divine, and answers my particular requirements. Since my divorce in ’47, I’ve met an awful lot of dull guys. Now instead of listening to suspense stories on dark and rainy nights, I’m listening to French love songs.’ ”

The melody did not linger on. Thompson later alluded to the affair in an interview with columnist Sheilah Graham: “I only know a few attractive Frenchmen. They are rather mysterious for my American taste. You don’t know if they like you only because they think you have money.” Were these the words of a woman scorned by a Gallic gold digger?

Though short-lived, the Champigny fling apparently put a crimp in the status quo with Andy and his siblings. Within a month Hopper announced, “Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers again have broken up their act.”

With her nightclub tour grounded, Thompson entertained stage offers to play the part of Charlotte Diensen in Noël Coward’s
Quadrille,
costar-ring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and the juicy role of Laura Carew, the no-nonsense editor of
Everywhere
magazine, in Jule Styne’s
Hazel Flagg.
After protracted deliberations, however, Kay declined both.

In Los Angeles, Kay attended the July 19, 1952, party thrown by Judy Garland to celebrate her recent marriage to Sid Luft and her just-announced pregnancy (Lorna would make her debut on November 21).

And then, as if nothing had ever happened, Kay and the Williams Brothers were back on track. After a Dallas warm-up, they headed to New York for six weeks at The Plaza’s Persian Room, beginning September 18, 1952.

The return engagement was promoted in that month’s
Harper’s Bazaar
with a Diana Vreeland–assigned spread featuring photos by Richard Avedon. This proved to be quite prophetic; in
Funny Face,
Kay would impersonate Vreeland opposite Fred Astaire’s impression of Avedon.

One of the most unusual ringsiders on opening night was an eccentric Plaza resident named Clara Belle Walsh. Even though she “had more money than God,” Clara insisted on getting her hair done economically in the men-only barbershop located off the lobby, a ritual Kay later used in
Eloise.
Clara also amused high society with stunts like painting fake eyes on her eyelids—another quirk Thompson would co-opt.

Hilary Knight recalled that when Kay met fashion designer Norman Norell, she adorned her eyelids with two red dots, producing a “subliminal flash-of-red effect.”

During this Persian Room gig, Kay received word that her forty-one-year-old brother, Bud, had suffered a fatal heart attack on October 6, 1952. Bud had been helping their mother, Hattie, run the family pawnshop, L. G. Fink, Inc. Now, with his passing, she would be left to handle the business on her own. By then, Kay’s sister Blanche Hurd was busy raising two kids, Julie and John, in Alexandria, Virginia, while moonlighting as Blanche Alexander, a diva with the Washington Opera Guild. Kay’s other sister, Marion Doenges, had given up dubbing singing voices at MGM and had moved to Alexandria, too, not far from Blanche, because both of their husbands were career military men, based in the D.C. area. As soon as Kay finished gigs in Cleveland and Boston, she went to St. Louis to spend the Christmas holidays with her mother.

K
ay rang in 1953
by visiting Denver, Colorado—Ethel Merman’s new stomping ground. Ethel had fallen hard for the charm and vast fortune of Denver’s Bob Six, CEO of Continental Airlines, and had moved into his baronial mansion in the highfalutin suburb known as Cherry Hills.

“About the only things I miss in Denver are the entertainment they have back East,” lamented Merman. “But we do have the Emerald Room in the
Brown Palace Hotel where they have outstanding big-time entertainment, particularly Kay Thompson.” Kay and the Williams boys played there January 1–10, with Ethel ringsiding every single night.

Then it was on to San Francisco for a two-week gig in the Venetian Room at the Fairmont, where her most ardent local fan was Lynne Carter, a white man known for impersonating black women.

“There was a dive in the gay district called the Beige Room,” recalled Randall Wallace, retired owner of San Francisco’s Gramophone record stores. “Lynne Carter was the headliner, famous for doing Pearl Bailey and Josephine Baker—both of whom had donated dresses from their own wardrobe.”

One week after Lynne attended Kay’s opening,
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Dean Jennings remarked that “Beige Room mimic” Lynne Carter was a look-alike of “Venetian Room bonanza” Kay Thompson, “especially if you squint a bit.” Tossing his Pearl Bailey and Josephine Baker frocks to the wind, Lynne slipped into a pair of slacks, grabbed a long scarf, hired four hunky dancers, and, by February, had debuted Lynne Carter and the Four Cartiers, an uncanny re-creation of the Thompson–Williams Brothers act.

When Kay heard about it, she was not amused. But when she learned that her own compositions were being performed without authorization or compensation, she flipped her lid.

Chinkie Naditz and Al Burgess, owners of the Beige Room, immediately launched an ad campaign in the
San Francisco Chronicle
and
The San Francisco Examiner
touting the “Spectacular Satirical Impression of Kay Thompson & the Williams Bros.”

On the very same page in the
Examiner,
columnist Ivan Paul wrote, “Kay Thompson is
maaad
at the Beige Room’s Lynne Carter for imitating her act. Maybe he does it too well?” The one-two punch resulted in lines around the block.

“You’ve seen pictures of Danny Kaye doing Kay?” Randall Wallace asked. “Well, Lynne looked even
more
like her. Kay felt Lynne was infringing on her copyright and he really didn’t have a leg to stand on because he was lifting her material exactly.”

But Thompson also objected to Carter’s mimicry on the basis that it was defamatory—a legal challenge that was far more difficult to prove.

On April 27, 1953,
Daily Variety
reported, “Frank L. Ippolito, attorney for Miss Thompson, has demanded that Carter stop performing in ‘slacks, costume, facial makeup and other device that imitates Miss Thompson.’ ”

The irony of demanding that a female impersonator stop wearing pants was apparently lost on both Thompson and her attorney.

“Carter had his own lawyer [Jake Ehrlich] counter-propose that both he and Thompson do their acts before a court,” reported
Gay News,
“who could then decide whether he was defaming her. Not wanting to give her ‘rival’ any more publicity, Thompson declined, but it was too late to stop the noise. The brouhaha had already made Carter a ‘hot commodity.’ ”