Kay Thompson (37 page)

“On opening night,” recalled business manager Leonard Grainger, “Andy Williams and I were standing with Paul in the wings, waiting for his cue to go on, which was about ten minutes into the show. He was dumbfounded, consumed with stage fright. When it came time for him to go on, Andy and I literally had to shove him out onto the stage. Fortunately, he came to life.”

“Look what I found in London!” Kay exclaimed to the audience. “A real dragoon, if I ever saw one.”

“With these words,” noted
The New Yorker,
“out steps the dragoon himself, wearing an inconspicuous brown suit and a black bowler, and carrying an umbrella and a bunch of posies . . . He remains a bit aloof but admiring as she leads him through a cozy specialty number about a music lesson. It’s an engaging routine, and Paul makes an excellent foil for the mercurial Miss Thompson . . . [in] the best show of her long career.”

“Paul gave an impeccable performance and was just charming,” said Leonard Grainger. “As a matter of fact, from Kay’s point of view, too charming.”

It did not help when
Variety
called her a “blonde widow-spider” whose “malice needs sharpening,” while raving that Methuen was “an astonishingly competent stooge.”

Buttressed by the buzz and his good looks, Paul became the darling du jour among wealthy admirers of both sexes.

“Kay was very jealous of him,” observed Grainger, “because he was being wined and dined and taken on boats for weekends and all that kind of stuff.”

“I had a lot of very social friends in New York,” Methuen explained, “particularly at The Plaza. And Kay didn’t really approve of them. She said, ‘They’re all a waste of time. If you want to be in the theater, give all that lot up.’ ”

Clearly, Methuen rubbed her the wrong way, but there were other disturbing matters weighing on her mind. Unbeknownst to most of her friends, Kay’s sixty-six-year-old mother, Hattie “Flavia” Fink, had suddenly become seriously ill.

“Kay cared very deeply for her mother and she called her regularly in St. Louis,” recalled Leonard Grainger. “But around that time, Kay started noticing that her mother was acting very strange, not herself, like she was losing her mind. Then all of a sudden, she could barely walk. Kay was busy in New York performing, so she arranged for her sister, Marion, and I to go to St. Louis to get her. Marion and I literally carried her mother onto a plane. I had a private ambulance waiting for her in New York at the airport and a lawyer arranged for her to go into a hospital in New Jersey. And then we found out she had a tumor of the brain. There was nothing they could do.”

Rather than let their mother die in a New Jersey hospital, the sisters decided to move her to Marion’s home outside Washington, D.C.

“As soon as Kay finished her engagement at The Plaza [on December 22, 1954],” Grainger explained, “she went to see her mother in Washington, loaded with all these Christmas gifts from Saks Fifth Avenue—lingerie and stuff to wear in bed.”

The day after Christmas, Hattie passed away.

“Kay came back to New York with all the lingerie because her mother never got to wear it,” Grainger added. “I took the stuff back to Saks Fifth Avenue because Kay just couldn’t face it.”

I
n early January 1955,
the Thompson-Methuen act opened at the Balmoral Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. As if she had planned it, Andy Williams and Dave Garroway happened to be there at the same time because NBC had sent both its
Today
and
Tonight
shows on location for the week of January 10–14, 1955.

Kay’s protégé Peter Matz was also there accompanying Mae West at a local gig. “It was terrifying,” Methuen exclaimed. “Mae West looked like a thing from outer space. I said to Kay, ‘Thank you for taking me because now I can say I’ve seen Mae West.’ Kay said, ‘Well, it’s not worth talking about, dahling, now is it? One has got to go
on.
’ ”

Methuen tested Thompson’s patience when he pulled his back out while taking surfboard lessons. Not long afterward, when they played Montreal, he came down with a terrible cold and nearly lost his voice. Apparently, the last straw was when he dropped her during a performance.

“Our next engagement was to have been Las Vegas,” Paul noted, “but first we were going back to New York for an interval where I was supposed to go and have some more singing and dancing lessons.”

“That’s when Kay had me get rid of Paul,” Grainger recalled. “I gave him some story that there was a problem with his immigration and he would have to go back to England. Kay locked herself up in The Plaza Hotel while I took him to the airport and when I came back, she said, ‘Are you sure he’s gone?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ But then she called the airline to be sure the plane left.”

“I felt very lucky to appear with such a remarkably talented lady,” Methuen reflected. “But I was just very distressed at the end that she didn’t have the manners to say good-bye. It was beastly.”

“Everything about Paul got on Kay’s nerves,” Grainger said, “but mainly it just drove her crazy that he was so well received.”

On January 19, 1955, Mocambo owner Charlie Morrison suffered a heart attack, and while he was recuperating, his business nearly went bankrupt. To help out, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz filmed an episode of
I Love Lucy
at the club. Then showbiz friends including Danny Kaye, Dinah Shore, and Jack Benny organized a dozen star-studded benefits to save the beloved nitery.

Everyone assumed that Kay, who still held the boîte’s all-time record, would take a night, but she was not on speaking terms with Charlie because of the Lynne Carter incident. The pressure got laid on thick: Don Loper volunteered to design her wardrobe; then Bob Hope offered to be her warm-up act; and, finally, Frank Sinatra called and said, “Come on, Kaysie. Bury the hatchet.” Reluctantly, Thompson agreed to headline two shows on March 8, but swore they would be her last—not just at the Mocambo, but
anywhere
.

Kay’s announced retirement sent shock waves through the industry, causing a near-riot for seats. Ringsiders included Sinatra, a very pregnant Garland (who would give birth to Joe Luft on March 29), and Howard Hughes.

During that same busy spring of 1955, Kay became a founding member of the Rat Pack. It all began during late-night social gatherings at the home
of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall at 232 S. Mapleton Drive, a stone’s throw from Judy Garland’s house in the exclusive neighborhood known as Holmby Hills. As Bacall later wrote in her memoir: “If the light over the front door was on, we were home and awake and a chosen very few could ring the bell.”

The “chosen few” included Kay, Garland and Luft, Sinatra, David Niven, restaurateur Mike Romanoff, literary agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar, songwriters Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, Noël Coward, and a bunch of semi-regulars.

During the summer of 1955, the group became known as the Holmby Hills Rat Pack (with several conflicting legends as to how the moniker was coined). “Bogie ran with the idea,” noted writer Scott Duhamel in
The Boston Phoenix,
“inventing a coat of arms (a rat gnawing on a human hand), calling together a tongue-in-cheek press conference, and conferring official titles to [key members].”

As Kay remembered it: “We were all terribly young and terribly witty and terribly rich and old Humpty Bogus was the head of it.” And if an official mascot had ever been designated, Eloise surely would have been it, because Thompson often kept the group in stitches by conversing in the voice of her alter ego.

D
espite her announced retirement,
Kay soon realized that she truly missed the spotlight—and the money that went along with it—so she quietly accepted an offer to bring her solo act to the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, Texas, for a week in late June 1955.

Fired up for another fresh start, Kay gave Barron Polan the boot (again) and enlisted agent Wynn Rocamora, whose client roster included Gloria Swanson and Dorothy Lamour. Thompson knew in her gut that if she really wanted to hit the trail with guns blazing, her act would have to resemble the one that she was most known for: Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers. Inconveniently, Andy had landed a regular gig on
The Tonight Show;
Dick was a member of the Cheerleaders; and Bob was just flat-out disinterested. But Don Williams was available, so Kay grabbed him. One Williams Brother was better than none.

Then she added three Williams clones: Gordon Thorin of the Whippoorwills, Bill Norvas of the Upstarts, and Jack Mattis, who had danced for Bob Alton in
I Love Melvin
(MGM, 1953).

Because Alton was busy in New York choreographing
The Vamp
with Carol Channing, Mattis ended up choreographing most of the new routines.

“Kay said I’d get equal billing with her,” Jack Mattis recalled, “and that I would get paid a thousand dollars per week, double what the other three boys would get.”

Thompson staged a preview of the new act to drum up word of mouth and bookings. “All the people from MGM came,” noted Mattis, “and we just wowed them.”

But all was not rosy. “The next day, I got a call from Kay’s agent,” Mattis continued. “He told me that Kay did not want me to have
any
billing at all and that I would not be paid double what the other boys would get. I explained that promises had been made, but none of that seemed to matter. I
loved
working with her but, in light of the situation, I was left no choice but to sue—and I won the case.”

As a result, Kay had to scrap the choreography and hire a new dancer, Paul Burton, to replace Mattis in the lineup.

“Strangely enough, I worked with her a week after that on
The Milton Berle Show,
” Mattis marveled, “and we were friendly again. You know, things happen in this business. I have nothing but love and admiration for her.”

On that same
Milton Berle Show
(NBC-TV, November 8, 1955), Kay launched the next salvo in her ongoing feud with Mary Martin by suggesting that she and Milton do “a wicked takeoff” of the Noël Coward–Mary Martin
Ford Star Jubilee
special, “Together with Music,” which had just aired on October 22.

Berle jumped at the idea and assigned the sketch to an up-and-coming staff writer named Gore Vidal. It was titled “The Amorous Percolations of Passionate Penelope.”

On the broadcast, Kay wondered aloud, “Do you think the audience will understand it?”

“Who cares?” Berle replied. “We will.”

Dressed in a leopard-print smoking jacket, Berle warbled with an operatic vibrato that was more Cowardly Lion than Coward—and Kay interjected with high-pitched, incongruous verses of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “It’s De-lovely,” and “Barney Google”—with his “goo-goo-googly eyes.”

When sought for reactions, Noël thought it was “highly amusing,” but Mary Martin was nowhere to be found.

Back to the business of putting together her new act, Kay got a booking at Ciro’s beginning November 17, 1955. “Kay Thompson was so impressed with Bob Wells’ lyrics in the current Ciro’s show,”
Daily Variety
noted, “she’s asked him to write material for her Thursday opener.” Ten years earlier, Wells had collaborated with Mel Tormé on the enduring classic “The Christmas Song
(Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” but Kay also knew him socially as the husband of
Kiss Me, Kate
sensation Lisa Kirk.

With Wells’ help, Thompson chose a Southern minstrel theme for the act, utilizing several old standards such as “I Wish I Was In Dixie” and “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.”
Daily Variety,
however, felt the choice of material fell flat, complaining that “an act of this kind needs satire, not straight stuff.”

Rattled by the criticism, Kay restored “Hello, Hello,” “Jubilee Time,” and other sure-fire favorites from her heyday.

She also collaborated with Wells on a novelty song called “Eloise,” to help promote her new book of the same name, which had just been published. Notes and lyric sheets from Wells’ estate, acquired by Joan Denise Hill, reveal that, originally, the “Eloise” song took the form of a satirical saga along the lines of “Madame Crematante,” “Poor Suzette,” and “Myrtle (of Sheepshead Bay).” Thompson was the narrator and enacted the main characters of Eloise and Nanny while her four backups portrayed naughty neighborhood kids named Junior, Stinky, Melvin, and Fenwick. At the climax, there was a rap that went like this: “That’s how it was with Eloise. No birds and bees. For Eloise. So young, so bright, and so shy, and so shy, and so delightful, so frightful, she really had a house that was a home. The Persian Room, diversion room, perversion room. So on your knees for Eloise. The beautiful queen called Eloise.”

“Toward the end of her run at Ciro’s,” recalled Bob Baker, of the Bob Baker Marionettes, “Kay performed the ‘Eloise’ song, which was brand-new at the time. After the show, Kay told me, ‘You know, I’m going to do an Eloise record. As soon as they’re hot off the press, you’ve got one.’ ”

Herman Hover tried to get Kay to extend her engagement through Christmas and New Year’s, but she had a book to publicize, so she declined and let the act close on December 1, 1955. Neither she nor anyone else realized that it would be the last time Kay would ever perform on a nightclub stage.