Kay Thompson (44 page)

After Gershe completed his libretto, he recruited composer Vernon Duke and lyricist Ogden Nash to write the songs for the musical. Then, in the fall of 1950, Clinton Wilder, producer of the Broadway hit
Regina,
optioned
Wedding Day
with hopes of opening it the following year. It was Wilder’s idea to offer the job of direction and choreography to Bob Alton, a choice Gershe heartily seconded. Alton liked the project but would commit only if Kay Thompson agreed to play the fashion editor.

In the show, Kay would get to sing no fewer than six big production numbers, including “I Hitched My Wagon to
Harper’s Bazaar
” and “I’m Glad I’m Not a Man.” However, Thompson’s response to the libretto was only lukewarm and she liked the songs even less. So she turned it down.

With Broadway plans going nowhere, Gershe’s agent, Sam Jaffe, submitted
Wedding Day
to MGM on July 13, 1951, as a potential movie musical.

Serendipitously, in August 1951, Diana Vreeland assigned Richard Avedon to do a photo session with Thompson in Los Angeles, introducing Kay to the real-life counterparts of the characters in
Wedding Day.
And then, as if to emphasize the point, the following year, Vreeland got Avedon to shoot Kay
again,
this time with the Williams Brothers for the September 1952 issue of
Harper’s Bazaar.

These premonitory confluences began to ruminate and, before long, Thompson
had charmed Vreeland via her alter ego. Kay later told writer Stephen M. Silverman that Diana would frequently call and say, “I wanna speak with Eloise.” And the conversations proliferated from there, with Vreeland wrapped around Eloise’s pinky.

I
n the meantime, Thompson
was moving ahead with plans to market her own “Fancy Pants.”

“Selling Bibles to the Hell’s Angels would have been an easier sell,” recalled Robert Evans, the future head of production for Paramount Pictures, then a salesman for Evan-Picone, Inc., the clothing manufacturer.

But Kay was a snake charmer. “You know how women catch on to a look,” observed Robert’s brother, Charles Evans, cofounder of Evan-Picone. “Well, a
lot
of women wanted to wear ‘Kay Thompson’ pants. Kay was a great talent, tall, slim, and full of rhythm. Certainly you would not describe her as a pretty woman, but by singing and dancing with the Williams Brothers, she carved quite a niche for herself. People started paying attention to her style and everyone loved the pants Kay wore—no crease, great simplicity. That was a distinctive part of her act. Adam Gimbel, chairman of the board of Saks Fifth Avenue, knew Kay Thompson socially. She said to him, ‘So many people want to buy my pants, why shouldn’t we sell them?’ ”

As a result, Gimbel negotiated an exclusive deal for Saks to carry “Taper Pants designed by Kay Thompson,” nicknamed “Kay Thompson’s Fancy Pants.”

“Being the good merchant that he was, Adam told Kay, ‘We’ll get the best pants manufacturer and it’ll be great,’ ” Charles Evans continued. “So, that’s how my life coincided with Kay Thompson because Evan-Picone was the best manufacturer of men’s pants.”

Located in Manhattan at 1407 Broadway (between Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth streets), Evan-Picone, Inc., had been founded in 1949 by Joseph Picone and Charles Evans. They needed help selling their wares and so, after dabbling in acting and modeling, Charles’ twenty-one-year-old brother, Robert Evans, joined the company as a salesman in 1951. The following year, along came Thompson and suddenly Evan-Picone was manufacturing women’s slacks.

“I’m in ladies pants,” Robert Evans salaciously quipped to friends.

At first, the whole idea was treated as a bit of a joke, just a passing fad. Pi-cone expressed concern that the respected Evan-Picone name might, in some way, be tarnished by Kay’s outlandish garments, so he formed a shell company named Diva Manufacturing, Inc.

Starting October 17, 1952, an expensive, yearlong advertising blitz was launched in a dozen major markets where Saks stores were based, including big display ads in
The New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
.

“We manufactured thousands of them,” said Charles Evans. “Our factory in Union City, New Jersey, could barely keep up with the orders. We had a good reputation and we became the best supplier of slacks for women at Saks Fifth Avenue—all because of Kay.”

In November 1952, syndicated fashion critic Phyllis Battelle opined, “The slickest lounging pants of the season are the creations of chanteuse Kay Thompson, who wouldn’t be caught either singing or snoozing in a skirt. She has designed gabardine and velvet ‘tapered trousers’ which are slightly ballooned out over the sitting portion of a lady’s figure, and tapered to fit snug at the ankles. Because of their bell top, they fit almost any woman from the waist measurement alone—and they’re flattering because the shape is subtly deceitful.”

Tastemaker Arlene G. La Rue noted, “Follow through with your shopping and likely as not you will end up with Kay Thompson pants, Greta Garbo hats, Marilyn Monroe nighties and slave girl jewelry.”

In October 1952, Kay brazenly showed up at New York’s Stork Club wearing a pair—and cunningly brought along Ethel Merman for support. At the time, Merman was the mistress of owner Sherman Billingsley, so an observant doorman waved the ladies right inside without a fight. It was a momentous breakthrough. Flabbergasted, Ethel proclaimed, “Boy, you’re the first dame who ever got into this joint in a rig like that.” And, of course, Kay made sure the victory was reported in all the papers.

Unjustly, Yves Saint Laurent is often given credit for introducing high-fashion slacks for women. “If it were not for Saint Laurent,” wrote
Los Angeles Times
fashion critic Booth Moore in 2008, “who sent pants down the runway in 1962 and again in 1966 . . . Giorgio Armani might not have an empire and Hillary Rodham Clinton might not have a uniform.”

The truth of the matter is that Thompson beat Yves Saint Laurent by a decade or two. In October 1952, columnist Mel Heimer declared, “Kay has done more for pants in the last 10 years than Fleming did for bread mold.” And there could be no greater judge to set the record straight than “the Empress of Seventh Avenue,” Eleanor Lambert, who established the Best Dressed List in 1940; created the biannual New York Fashion Week in 1943; and founded the Council of American Fashion Designers in 1962.

“Kay was most influential, I think, with her nightclub act,” Lambert declared in 2002. “Every star in the universe came to see her shows and she always wore her own pants and casual clothes—which gave everybody something
to think about. Back then, restaurants wouldn’t let women come in with pants on and Kay was one of the main reasons that eventually changed. Unfortunately, she didn’t want to license the production of her pants in a bigger way that might have made her clothes more available to the general public. Saks Fifth Avenue only had a few stores back then, so the impact was more among the movie stars and high society who adopted her style, and Kay never really got the credit she deserved.”

It is true that Thompson’s designs were available only at Saks, but she promoted them to millions of women on
The Buick-Berle Show
(NBC-TV, February 23, 1954)—at that time, the most popular television program in America. When Kay sauntered out in zebra-print trousers, Milton Berle grimaced. “Where’d you get them? At
Slacks
Fifth Avenue?”

Milton soon discovered that Kay’s maid and butler were sporting the exact same trousers, and before the comedy sketch was done, Berle had slipped into a pair, too.

Debate raged in the media.
Hollywood Reporter
critic David Newman declared that Kay’s slacks were “ridiculous,” while
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Marjorie Trumbull argued that they “looked marvelous.”

The association between Thompson and slacks had entered the national consciousness, but after all her accomplishments in music and entertainment, was she happy when
The New Yorker
described her in 1954 as “the girl who made lounging pajamas famous”? Would this be her epitaph?

W
hile all this was
going on,
Wedding Day
finally began to percolate at MGM because of an office romance between Roger Edens and Leonard Gershe. In 1953, while collaborating on “Born in a Trunk” for Judy Garland in
A Star Is Born
(Warner Brothers, 1954), Roger and Leonard had become, as Kay liked to call them, “sweethearts.” So, for insiders, there seemed to be intentional innuendo behind
The Hollywood Reporter
’s announcement on March 29, 1955, that “Leonard Gershe has checked into MGM to start scripting his original
Wedding Day
for producer Roger Edens.”

Edens agreed with Thompson that the Vernon Duke–Ogden Nash score was inferior, so the first thing he did was replace it with several standards by George and Ira Gershwin—including “Funny Face,” “ ’S Wonderful,” “He Loves and She Loves,” and “Let’s Kiss and Make Up” from the 1927 Broadway musical
Funny Face,
starring Fred Astaire (though the story line had nothing in common with
Wedding Day
). To fill gaps where none of the Gershwin catalog felt apropos, Roger and Leonard would come up with their own songs.

For the beginning of the movie, for instance, they decided to build a song around Miss Prescott’s latest
couleur du jour
for
Quality
magazine.

In the script, Miss Prescott sweeps into her office “like a gust of wind” and declares, “Yellow is to be the theme of the entire issue. Contact Revlon and find out if they can bring out a yellow nail polish. Tell them no matter what they hear from
Harper’s Bazaar
or
Vogue, Quality
says yellow is the color this summer.”

Hence, Roger and Leonard began writing a song called “Hello Yellow”—then decided that the color was all wrong. Instead, they went for the jugular and spoofed an actual campaign that
Harper’s Bazaar
had promoted around the color pink.

“I think the ‘Sunset Pink’ promotion is what cost me my editorial mainstay,” blushed
Harper’s Bazaar
editor in chief Carmel Snow in her autobiography. “The Budd Company, one of our important advertisers, built for the Southern Pacific Railroad a new train called the ‘Sunset Limited’ [christened August 20, 1950] that we were persuaded to promote by pushing ‘Sunset Pink’ fashions. Bags, gloves, coats, fabrics—everything but the train—were dyed Sunset Pink, and pages of
Bazaar
had to be devoted to them.”

Snow concluded that the entire endeavor had been “the height of absurdity.” And now, thanks to Edens and Gershe, that ignominy would come back to haunt her. In mid-May 1955, the men came up with a wicked opening anthem called “Think Pink!”

Was it just a fluke that during the very same period Thompson settled on pink as the primary color for her new
Eloise
book?

“It’s a great coincidence,” Hilary Knight said. “I’m not entirely sure how that came about or whose idea it was. Maybe Kay said, ‘Let’s do it pink.’ ”

Cross-pollination was certainly possible. While Roger and Leonard were composing “Think Pink!” they were also collaborating on three new songs for Judy Garland’s 1955 summer concert tour. And guess who was in the middle of it all, tweaking vocal arrangements, making suggestions on the choreography, and standing in the wings for support on opening night? Our First Lady of Fancy Pants.

It was this summer of teamwork that afforded Kay the opportunity to finally bond with Leonard Gershe—and decide that she wanted to play Miss Prescott after all.

“Don’t tell anybody, Katie,” Edens warned. It wasn’t going to be easy to make their casting wish fly at MGM because Roger rarely saw eye to eye with the new studio chief, Dore Schary.

Kay agreed. “When L. B. [Mayer] left, it was a different studio,” she lamented, calling Schary “an idiot.”

On September 14, 1955, it was announced that Stanley Donen, co-director of
Singin’ in the Rain
, had been signed to direct
Wedding Day
. He agreed wholeheartedly with Edens that Thompson was the ideal choice for the role of Miss Prescott. “I never considered anyone else for the part,” Donen told
Vanity Fair
.

Dore Schary was another matter. Schary did not agree on
any
of the creative choices. For instance, Edens wanted Richard Avedon to serve as a visual consultant, but Schary refused to okay the expense. And when Edens initiated discussions with Hubert de Givenchy to design the haute couture for the film, Schary insisted the costumes be made economically, in-house.

For the lead role of Jo Stockton, the Doe Avedon–like model in training, Schary wanted Cyd Charisse. Somehow Edens convinced him to cast Carol Haney, Gene Kelly’s former assistant choreographer, who had just won the 1955 Best Featured Actress Tony Award for
Pajama Game
.

For the role of the photographer, Gene Kelly’s name had been bandied about during early stages of development, but despite their marvelous collaboration on
Singin’ in the Rain
, he and Donen had since fallen out. Then Frank Sinatra was approached, but ever since he’d won the Oscar for
From Here to Eternity
in 1954, his schedule had been logjammed with projects and his asking price had gone through the roof. Schary was not willing to wait in line nor to meet his demands. He decided, instead, to hire Dan Dailey on loan-out from Twentieth Century-Fox. Edens was not happy because he was counting on a bigger box-office star to offset the fact that Carol Haney was a newcomer.

Naturally, when Edens brought up Thompson for the role of Miss Prescott, Schary was churlishly resistant. After some serious arm twisting from both Edens and Donen, however, Schary finally agreed to screen-test her on September 28, 1955.

In the sequence, Kay tells her staff, “Banish the black, burn the blue and bury the beige. From now on, girls, think pink!” This segues into the song “Think Pink!” with a unique arrangement that cleverly blended several bars of “ ’S Wonderful.”