Kay Thompson (5 page)

Another famous graduate of Soldan High was actress Agnes Moorehead. She was nine years older than Kitty and, by 1926, had left St. Louis. Nevertheless, they later became friends and shared stories about their Missouri upbringing. There was also Vincent Price, born in St. Louis two years after Kitty. But even though the two grew up just a couple of miles from each other, they were worlds apart in terms of social standing. Born into a wealthy family, Vincent was sent to private schools and attended Yale. Still, Kay and Vincent became friends as adults via showbiz circles and their shared passion for fine art.

Sans silver spoon in a class-conscious society, Kitty used her musical skills to parlay herself into a higher bracket. In the middle of her junior year at Soldan High in February 1926, Kitty was elected to serve as librarian of the Chaminade Glee Club, the fifty-member girls’ choral group, known for singing songs like “S’wanee River.” And that summer, for the third year in a row, she returned to Minne-Wonka Girls’ Summer Camp, this time leading all the campfire songs.

That fall, Kitty entered her senior year at Soldan High and involved herself in just about every extracurricular activity on campus: Song Committee, Orchestra, Chaminade Glee Club, the Athenaeum (a twenty-five-girl debate and speech club), Scrippage Committee (the school newspaper staff), Dancing Club, and the Girl’s Athletic Association, where she excelled in hockey, tennis,
and swimming. And, in addition to her regular gig as pianist for the St. Louis Symphony, she somehow found time to star in the school production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Iolanthe.

All this took its toll on her schoolwork; by the time she graduated in June, she mustered an average of only 67 (out of 100), ranking 209th in a class of 214 students. Diplomatically, the quote in her yearbook focused on her strengths: “A friendly maid and likewise gay is she; her touch upon the keys is heavenly.” But by then, she’d given up piano lessons—another thorn in her father’s side. On the verge of burnout, she insisted on recharging her batteries at Minne-Wonka Summer Camp.

In the fall of 1927, Kitty enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, which offered a broad range of academia. But the social whirlwind of sororities was what girls like Kitty and Ginny craved. “I became a Kappa Alpha Theta,” Ginny said. “Kitty became a Delta Gamma first—her sister Blanche’s sorority—and then broke that pledge and joined Kappa Kappa Gamma.” After a freshman year best described as one long party, Kitty and Ginny spent the summer of 1928 at Minne-Wonka again—their fifth annual retreat to Wisconsin—this time as camp counselors.

Once they returned to school for their sophomore year, however, Ginny didn’t hang out with Kitty as much. Differing sororities played a role. “We sort of grew apart,” Ginny lamented.

There were other gravitational pulls. Kitty was devoting more of her time to the music and theater departments. Surrounded by scores of extroverted actors and ambitious singers, Kitty had her hands full trying to elbow her way into these highly competitive cliques.

“While other girls posed in front of mirrors trying to look like Norma Talmadge and Vilma Banky,” Kay later mused, “I wore myself out working for personality.”

Don’t let her fool you. Kitty was equally concerned about her looks. She had matured early into her adult size: 121 pounds, five feet five-and-a-half inches tall. “I know that I give the impression of being tall,” she was later quoted, “so I avoid stripes especially. When I have my shoes on, with their higher heels, I am about five feet six-and-one-half or seven inches.” She may have had the body of a woman, but she still had the face of a kid with red hair, freckles, and an unfortunate nose. This mug worked fine for comedic performances, but if she was going to be taken seriously as a torch singer, she needed sophistication.

“Make me like Carole Lombard,” Kitty told flummoxed hairdressers and makeup artists at the Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney cosmetics counter, showing them magazine photos of her favorite actress. At that time, the young
Lombard was a teen idol who, after a disfiguring automobile accident, had just undergone her very own makeover with the aid of advanced plastic surgery, state-of-the-art makeup, and a tireless publicist. Lombard’s ordeal was great fodder for fan magazines and Kitty attentively followed her every move on the road back from tragedy. Details from Lombard’s life story—dropping out of school, her use of a stage name, her hair and makeup techniques, even her plastic surgery—all eventually became essential to the creation of Kay Thompson.

However, even after her accident and recovery, Lombard was still a knockout, so Kitty’s wish to look like her was a very tall order indeed. Without the aid of Hollywood magicians, Kitty had to rely on St. Louis hair and makeup folk to do the best they could.

When she turned eighteen, Kitty got the first of many nose jobs—a battle zone that would forever remain a work in progress.

“With my new appearance, my collection of fraternity pins jumped by leaps and bounds,” Kay later boasted. “I’ve got more than fifty tucked away at home.” It also helped her land a part-time singing job with a band, earning a whopping $125 per week. She ran home and reported the news to her stunned father.

“I won’t need my allowance anymore,” Kitty proudly announced.

“What?” Leo said, shocked by her good fortune. “They pay you for making those noises that drove us crazy? Something is wrong somewhere.” In spite of her father’s hurtful cynicism, Kitty had become a campus celebrity.

In June 1929, her sister Blanche graduated from Washington University with flying colors, but Kitty’s sophomore year made a crash landing. After she’d skipped three-quarters of her classes, there was no way Kitty could pass. When she sat down to take her Greek exam, the only thing she knew were her sorority letters. After several minutes of painful squirming, she decided to write the teacher a note, in plain English: “Dear Mr. Durfy, I am very sorry I will not be able to answer these questions today. Mother has been ill and I haven’t been able to concentrate. This is no reflection upon your teaching. Sincerely Yours, Catherine Fink.”

Concerned, Mr. Durfy contacted Kitty’s parents, and soon discovered that Mrs. Fink was in perfect health. Leo grounded his daughter, canceled her annual trip to Minne-Wonka, and ordered her to take Greek lessons all summer for a reexamination in September, which, by the skin of her teeth, she managed to pass. “My days as a Greek student, though, were over,” Kay later expressed with no regrets.

Unfortunately, Kitty had to repeat most of the other courses from her sophomore year. So, in the fall of 1929, she was back for a third year at Washington University as a half-baked sophomore while Ginny and her other contemporaries
were already juniors. Unfazed, Kitty kept her sights set on the stage, volunteering to produce the annual
Co-Ed Vodvil
show. Delegation was not her strongest suit; after appointing herself director, writer, composer, choreographer, chorus leader, pianist, and stage manager, she had no time to appear in her own show. That unintended deprivation would be rectified when she landed the female lead in
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room
, the melodramatic story of a self-destructive alcoholic.

“Oh, at seventeen,” Kay reminisced, “I decided I was going to be another Sarah Bernhardt.”

That ambition, however, was not embraced by her peers. The school yearbook, appropriately named
The Hatchet,
sliced and diced the production in its review and, even worse, ran an unflattering photograph of Kitty with a severe expression and a hideous black wig.

Undaunted, she appeared in another production that same school year,
Si, Si, Señorita,
the story of a Mexican ghost rider and his schemes to scare off gullible American tourists. She also served as assistant musical director and was the lead singer of the Trio, alongside Harriet Ingalls and Louise LaRue. The yearbook review stated, “From the overture to the final curtain the whole concoction was grade A sour goat milk. The chorus wasn’t bad in its dances but
ouch!
when they sing.”

O
n October 29, 1929,
eleven days before Kitty’s twentieth birthday, Wall Street hit rock bottom. It was Black Tuesday, the inauguration of the Great Depression.

As the Fink family’s income plummeted, Kitty figured out a way to twist the dilemma to her advantage. She was more than happy to drop out of school in the spring of 1930 in order to go to work. Even though Leo disapproved of career women, he did not have the financial luxury to stand on ceremony. Completely out of character, he casually suggested, “I thought it would be nice if one of you girls would sing on the
Capitol Family
program someday—ballads, you know.” Broadcast from New York,
Major Bowes’ Capitol Family
was a nationally heard amateur hour that provided early exposure for such rising stars as Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, and a seven-year-old Beverly Sills.

Overjoyed by her father’s seeming enlightenment, Kitty announced, “I’ll sing . . . but not ballads. Right now I’m going to get myself a radio job as a blues singer.”

Although the genre is today considered mainstream, back then blues was still ghettoized as “Negro music”—the very last thing Leo had in mind for his
daughter. But her mind was made up. “Blues singers have done for the radio what the self-starter did for the automobile,” she declared.

In the spring of 1930, Kitty began singing on KWK, but her insistence on blues numbers did not go over well with station management or listeners. Frustrated, she decided to resurrect her singing group, the Trio, with her sorority sisters Harriet Ingalls and Doris Shumate (replacing Louise LaRue). A few local gigs came their way, but once the money was split three ways, it hardly seemed worth the effort. Times were getting tougher by the day and Kitty needed to get a real job.

After sending a bunch of applications to every summer camp advertised in the classified section of her favorite magazine,
Harper’s Bazaar,
Kitty lined up a job as a counselor at Toyon Summer Camp, a ritzy girls’ enclave on Catalina Island within eyeshot of Los Angeles. In addition, she wangled the hiring of her singing partners, Harriet and Doris, so the Trio went west for the summer of 1930. Earning $175 for the season, Kitty proved to be a skilled swimming, diving, and sailing instructor, and she led the campfire songs.

“Finky was one of the favorite counselors,” recalled celebrity biographer Cynthia Lindsay at the age of eighty-eight in 2003, identifying Kitty by the nickname for which she was known at Toyon. “She was funny, friendly and darling. We all absolutely adored her.” In 1957, Cynthia wrote a profile of Kay Thompson for
McCall’s
magazine.

“Finky wanted things done
her
way,” Cynthia observed, “and they were done her way or else there was a lot of trouble. But she was the best disciplinarian I have ever known—never mean, never without humor. To reprimand campers, she would break into the voice of a little girl and say things like, ‘You better do what I say or you’ll have to answer to me, Eloise.”

The official story has always been that Eloise extemporaneously came into being in 1947 when Kay was late for a rehearsal with the Williams Brothers. Asked why she was tardy, Kay had supposedly improvised in the high-pitched voice of a little girl, “I am Eloise and I am six.” Debunking that mythology, however, Cynthia testified she’d heard the prehistoric voice of Eloise ages before the sanctioned chronology.

When the summer was over, Kitty found herself longing to be at school again, missing the social outlet campus life provided. Hardship or not, her father was thrilled to have Kitty resume her studies—as if that were her true intention.

“I did have one ambition unfulfilled,” Kay later explained. “I didn’t have a Phi Beta Kappa to my credit. I managed to get back into school again and set about getting one. In the process I developed my first real ‘crush’—on an
assistant instructor. He was terribly attractive and the Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain was like a piece of hamburger in front of a kennel. Our first date was a terrific success. He quoted Shelley and Swinburne and I thought I’d found romance for sure. We drove into the country, and under a full moon he stroked my cheek. He whispered, ‘Your skin is as smooth as velvet,’ which was hot stuff for St. Louis in those days!”

However, when Kitty discovered that he’d said the exact same thing to her sister Marian, she saw red.

“So the next day, when he called up,” Kay explained, “Marian got on the upstairs extension and I got on the downstairs phone. ‘Oh, darling, your skin is as smooth as velvet!’ we both shouted at the top of our lungs. He hung up—and that was the last we ever heard of him.”

Once she’d gotten her fill of fraternity pins, Kitty set her sights on another sort of prey. She got herself all dolled up and marched over to the Mayfair Hotel in downtown St. Louis, where, on the second floor, she found the headquarters of KMOX, the top radio station in the city. Without an appointment, Kitty demanded to see George Junkin, the managing director and announcer, adding haughtily, “and I haven’t much time to give him.”

The bluff got her ushered right into his office because everyone assumed Junkin already knew her—including Junkin himself.

“All you have to do is to keep ’em guessing and you’ve got ’em!” Kay later remarked. “That goes for men—and everything.” It was a mantra she lived by.

Once she was inside Junkin’s office, it became clear what was up. Intrigued, he gave her the once-over and said, “So you think you can sing.”

“I
know
I can sing,” Kitty replied.

“Go ahead.” Junkin waved his hand, granting her an impromptu audition. With a bluesy style, she sang Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair” a cappella. Moved, Junkin pondered, “You sound a little like Libby Holman.” Deciding the time was right for a St. Louis knockoff of “the first great white torch singer,” Junkin said, “All right, we’ll take you on at twenty-five dollars a week.”

“That’s not enough,” she said. “Look how much Libby gets and you said I sound just like her.”