Kay Thompson (36 page)

Slumming at the Beige was suddenly the shabby chic thing to do, with an A-list stampede that included George Burns, Sammy Davis Jr., and Audrey Hepburn (appearing locally in the road company of
Gigi
).

In short order, Lynne Carter and the Four Cartiers were getting offers from top-tier venues across the country. Incredibly, Kay was a star-maker even when she tried not to be.

Having learned that the wrath of Thompson could be profitable, Carter used every trick in the book to bait another hissy-fit. When he arrived in Los Angeles for an engagement at Charlie Foy’s Supper Club, it was announced that the owner was “building a special stage for Lynne Carter and his troupe.” This stunt smacked of parody because Kay had famously demanded the construction of custom stages at Le Directoire, Versailles, and elsewhere.

Next thing she knew, Carter and the Cartiers were entertaining disabled veterans at Southern California hospitals, a charitable tradition that Kay and the Williams boys had forged in 1948.

Then, columnist Army Archerd claimed that Carter had become a patient of Kay’s dentist. Creepy stalker behavior? Hardly. Lynne was pulling everyone’s leg over the fact that Kay was a practicing Christian Scientist and did not see dentists as a matter of faith.

“Kay
never
went to the dentist,” Mart Crowley chuckled. “She’d put chewing gum into a cavity.”

Carter knew how to get Kay’s goat. And, even though her objections had considerable merit, she inevitably came off as the Wicked Witch of the West.

M
eanwhile, the authentic quintet
discarded
all
clothing for the erection of a billboard to promote their opening at the Mocambo on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. The depiction of Thompson and the Williams boys in their birthday suits gave new meaning to “doing the Strip.” Predictably, crowds were huge, but
The Hollywood Reporter
observed that Kay’s “double-barreled glitter” was “all surface sheen” with “no heart.” The criticism didn’t faze Thompson. If anything, she continued to move farther left of center—which seemed to suit her loyal followers just fine.

The next stop on the Thompson-Williams tour was the Ramona Room at the Last Frontier in Las Vegas beginning March 2, 1953. Though Kay had rehired Joe Marino as her pianist, his drinking was just as bad as before. Consequently, twenty-four-year-old Peter Matz, nephew of Kay’s friend Gilda Dahlberg, was drafted into service.

“I was probably thirty-fifth on the list,” Matz joked, “but they called me and I went to Vegas. Joe Marino said, ‘There’ll be no problem. There are two pianos. I’ll be there playing with you.’ ”

“Peter was just starting then,” confirmed choral arranger Ray Charles (not to be confused with the African-American blues singer). “He was very nervous but he got through the first show and it was fine. And he comes back for the second show and he looks over and there was nobody at the other piano. He looked out into the audience and there was Joe Marino giving a thumbs-up. From that point on, Peter played it by himself and conducted it.”

“Peter always credited Kay for giving him his first break,” recalled his widow, singer Marilynn Lovell. “He was just staggered by her musical ability. It stuck with him for the rest of his career.” And quite a career it became, conducting for Barbra Streisand and nearly every other big name in show business.

“Kay was the only performer I ever worked with who sent me notes after every show,” Peter told friends. “She was a genius in her musical talent and her sense of humor.”

After Vegas, they played the Latin Casino in Philadelphia, then bounced back west for a two-week stint in the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe. When the engagement ended on July 23, 1953, no one realized that this would be the final public performance of Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers.

After a planned hiatus, they were supposed to kick off a whole new touring season beginning September 17 in the Persian Room at The Plaza. However, Bob Williams was having second thoughts about continuing. As hemming and hawing mounted, it was clear that the act had gone from fun to drudgery. On September 4, Dorothy Kilgallen revealed, “Kay Thompson has cancelled all her bookings. She just decided, once again, that it simply isn’t worth the effort.”

Was that really the end? On November 10, 1953, word leaked that Thompson and the Williams Brothers were together again, secretly developing a new act, using the Mocambo during the day for rehearsal space. But on December 9, the unthinkable happened.

“Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers completed a rehearsal at the Mocambo minutes before the sign went up announcing Lynne Carter and His
Four Cartiers opening Tuesday [December 15],” reported Army Archerd in
Daily Variety.
“Wonder if Kay’ll attend?”

Thompson was apoplectic. She called for a boycott of the Mocambo, and her attorney threatened to file an injunction if Carter warbled a single note of a Thompson composition, or if her name appeared in any advertisements.

When Lynne opened four days later, his repertoire consisted of original songs hastily composed by his accompanist, David Morton, and all references to Kay Thompson had vanished. Nevertheless, everyone knew exactly who the act was lampooning and throngs of people came to see it.

In one last petulant act of defiance, Kay decided to cancel her reunion with the Williams Brothers altogether. If her lawyers couldn’t suck the wind out of Lynne Carter’s sails, perhaps the death of her act would. Besides, by going solo, she could finally collect all the glory and the spoils.

O
n January 7, 1954,
Kay opened
toute seule
in the Persian Room at The Plaza. There were only three tunes woven into the forty-minute routine—“I Love a Violin,” “Madelaine d’Esprit,” and “Rubyocco from Morocco.” A satirical monologue was the main event—a one-act, one-woman playlet entitled
Cocktail Party
, cowritten by Thompson and Bob Alton.

“As soon as she stepped onstage,” explained
Time
magazine, “she peopled it with imaginary cocktail guests. She became an outrageously blasé hostess greeting newcomers with explosive ‘Dahlings!’ and whipping out quips behind their backs.”

The opening night audience included Ethel Merman, Carol Channing, and Gloria Swanson, who, according to columnist Earl Wilson, “was suh-WOONING over Kay Thompson’s single act . . . ‘And you know, I’ve seen
everything,
’ Gloria reminded us.”

But, despite mostly glowing notices, Kay fixated on the review in
The New Yorker,
which stated, “One keeps wishing that she’d asked her old sidekicks, the Williams Brothers, around for a drink.”

By February, gossip columns were rife with talk of yet
another
Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers reunion tour, with dates in Chicago and San Francisco booked and announced. It did not take long, however, before negotiations broke down. “The Williams Brothers are making so much moo in real estate,” noted
The Hollywood Reporter,
“they don’t care if they never see Kay Thompson again.” Ouch.

With something to prove, Kay got herself on TV and showed America that she could shine on her own. On February 23, she sang “I Love a Violin”
on
The Buick-Berle Show
(NBC-TV), surrounded by an anonymous army of sixteen dancers choreographed by Herbert Ross—and it was a doozy. Nearly a half century later, it served as inspiration for Mel Brooks’ Broadway smash
The Producers.

“There’s a big number in the second act called ‘Springtime for Hitler’ that stops the show,” recalled Mel Brooks. “There is a break in the middle of the song that is ‘a Kay Thompson moment’ with forties bongos and things. It’s very Kay.”

“I had a set of DVDs of old Milton Berle shows and Kay was the guest on one of them,” confirmed
The Producers
music arranger Glen Kelly. “She sang ‘I Love a Violin’ and she’s being carried around by these guys and, you know, being bounced around
a lot.
Anyway, I just thought, ‘It would be so funny if this was Hitler doing the number instead of Kay.’ I showed it to Mel and he thought it was very funny so we worked together on that section, ‘The Führer Is Causing a Furor.’ It was Hitler doing Kay Thompson doing ‘I Love a Violin’ on Berle.”

Within days of the Berle broadcast, Kay bagged her biggest recording deal ever, this time with MGM Records for her first LP, the relatively new twelve-inch vinyl format, to feature a dozen tracks—a remarkable improvement over her scattershot output of only twenty-eight songs in twenty years.

“Kay knew exactly what she wanted,” recalled Joe Lipman, the album’s arranger-conductor. “Very precise. I would make notes and then I’d go and complete the orchestration.”

The album featured Thompson’s interpretations of such standards as “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “It’s All Right with Me,” and “Basin Street Blues.” There were several of her own compositions, too, including “I Love a Violin,” “Poor Suzette,” and “Myrtle (of Sheepshead Bay).” For those three tracks, a quartet of backup singers was assembled: Andy Williams, Lyn Duddy, Steve Steck, and Ray Charles, who, since 1950, had been conducting the Ray Charles Singers for both
Your Hit Parade
and
The Perry Como Show.

Titled
Kay Thompson Sings,
the album was released on November 19, 1954, featuring a cover caricature drawn by the renowned Broadway poster artist Don Freeman. And it was well-received.
The New York Times
noted, “Kay Thompson, whose usual métier is the supper club, proves herself a potent performer on discs, too.”

To promote the release, Kay returned to
The Buick-Berle Show
on December 28 to perform two cuts. Yet, with everything stacked in its favor, record sales were just moderate.

“Really, it was only for people who knew Kay Thompson,” Ray Charles reflected, “and she wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea. She was too smart. There’s a certain sophistication that eludes the great unwashed.”

Though Kay may not have fit the mold of a 1950s American idol, her composition of “I Love a Violin” developed an extraordinary cult following. Through the years, it has been covered by Petula Clark, Teresa Brewer, Dinah Shore, Dorothy Collins, Michael Feinstein, and Liza Minnelli.

S
tarting March 11, 1954,
Kay began a four-week solo gig in Chicago at the Palmer House but, much to her chagrin, reviews were bleak. And when she brought the show to Ciro’s in Los Angeles the following month,
Daily Variety
called it “a dud” with too much “interminable yakkity-yak.”

Then she took her yakfest to San Francisco to play the Fairmont Hotel, beginning May 18. Taking advantage of Kay’s return to the Golden Gate city, her archenemy, Lynne Carter, was simultaneously booked to appear at Ann’s 440 Club, setting the stage for a showdown. Though he carefully abided by her cease-and-desist order, his ad campaign featured a photograph of Lynne Carter and the Four Cartiers that duplicated a famous Thompson–Williams Brothers publicity shot pose. And, determined to press
all
of Kay’s buttons, Lynne brazenly showed up for one of her performances in full Thompson drag with his Cartiers in tow.

Having learned her lesson, Kay took the high road. As a result, the expected catfight never materialized, rendering an anticlimax to a matter that was already so last year. By summer, Lynne stopped doing Thompson altogether and, instead, took on Mary Martin as Peter Pan. With the Thompson-Martin feud still brewing, Kay must have relished the news. Some wondered if she had instigated it.

Then, Kay went to London for a monthlong gig at the Café de Paris starting September 20, 1954. After seeing the show several times, Noël Coward introduced her to a British gentleman named Paul Methuen, a Louis Jourdan doppelgänger who gardened for Cecil Beaton and decorated for Beatrice Lillie.

“I think it was all planned,” Methuen reflected. “We went to her dressing room
first,
which I thought was really strange. We chatted a bit and then she turned to me and said, ‘Would you like to come and do a show with me in New York?’ I mean, she didn’t even know if I was on the stage, which I wasn’t. But anyway, she said, ‘Go and see the show and when you come back, tell me if you’d like to come.’ I saw her show and she was the best cabaret performer I’d ever seen. So, I came back afterwards and said, ‘Yes, I would.’ ”

Noël convinced Kay that Paul should portray a beleaguered British butler as a “straight man” to her incessant chatter. Hence, in a burst of creative collaboration,
Noël and Kay turned the one-woman script for
Cocktail Party
into a two-character commedia dell’arte.

“We rehearsed the new material in Kay’s dreadful little flat on Chesham Place,” Methuen recalled. “There were holes in the carpet, which made us laugh because she always wore six-inch pin heels and they never stopped getting caught in the carpet.”

Paul was particularly struck by Kay’s diet: “She hardly ate anything. ‘I don’t eat like other people,’ she said. ‘You must try Fig Newtons.’ In fact, I can’t recall her ever eating anything else
but
Fig Newtons! And I said, ‘Well, Kay, I think they’re delicious, but you can’t live on Fig Newtons. What else do you do?’ Her response was, ‘Oh, well I have B-12 injections at least twice a week.’ ”

It seemed so innocent at the time.

After her solo engagement was over, she extended her stay in London to tinker with the new act—and her appearance. As a forty-fifth birthday gift to herself, Kay got her
fourth
rhinoplasty, along with a complete face-lift. No matter how she reconciled her Christian Science beliefs, she treated her mug like all her creative endeavors—as a work in progress. And critics had a field day reviewing nips and tucks beyond “the severance of the Williams Brothers.”

In a mood for change, she also canned her agent at William Morris and went back to Barron Polan. He began by booking the debut of her two-person act at The Plaza’s Persian Room starting November 18, 1954—for which she would earn $6,000 a week, plus a percentage of the gross. Out of that, Kay would pay Methuen a flat $200 weekly salary and require him to provide his own wardrobe.