Kay Thompson (52 page)

Kay checked into the Hôtel Queen Elizabeth with creative juices on overflow. “I’d planned to go to Lisbon to meet up with a friend of mine,” Hilary explained, “but Kay said, ‘No, we have to work.’ She hired a secretary named Annie Yip to take dictation and type up drafts of the text.”

They started work in the afternoon, took a break for dinner, then resumed working until around 1:30 a.m. “I would be so tired, I’d go to bed,” Hilary said. “But then she would stay up
much
beyond that.”

One night, Kay and Hilary dined at a Chinese restaurant called L’Empire Céleste, where they ran into
Pickpocket
star Martín La Salle and his fiancée, China Machado.

“China was a big model for Avedon,” Hilary recalled, “half Chinese, and very good-looking. And Kay was absolutely
fascinated
with her.”

The highest-paid runway model in Europe, Shanghai-born China Machado had actually worked on
Funny Face.
“I did not appear in the movie,”
China explained in 2008, “but I’ll tell you something that very few people know. I’d just started working as a model for Givenchy and, by sheer coincidence, I had the exact same body as Audrey Hepburn, and so all of her clothes for
Funny Face
were made on me. I was the fitting model. We went to the opening in France but I never got to meet Dick Avedon or Kay Thompson until a couple of years later when I came to New York for three months in the fall of 1958. I was hired by Dick Avedon and he really launched my career as a model for photo shoots. And it was Dick who introduced me to Kay. She took an immediate liking to me and was really fantastic. She invited me to do things all the time and introduced me to everybody. I remember she took me to 21 with Lena Horne—and, you know, this was beyond my wildest dreams. But then I went back to Europe and, I assumed, that was that.”

Four months later, Thompson and Machado found themselves dining at the very same restaurant in Paris—as if drawn together by fate.

“I could tell Kay was absolutely
fascinated
by China,” Knight continued. “And it was the
only
time I would ever say that I saw anything that would even suggest a kind of attraction to another woman—which, of course, could really mean nothing.”

“You know what I think?” China offered. “Kay was so enthusiastic about people that she fell in love with them—kind of had a crush when she met them. Dick Avedon was the same way. When he met someone he liked, he could fall in love with them without being physically involved with them. It was always a big, intense crush. He wanted to see them all the time and get everything from them. I think that’s what Kay was like.”

E
ventually, Kay and Hilary
made it back to New York and reported in to headquarters—Simon & Schuster—where the publicity department hailed their Russian deployment as a rousing success.

“Eloise went to Moscow . . . played in the snow . . . and created an incident or two,” Thompson teased in a radio interview.

While Hilary worked on the final illustrations, Kay shifted focus.

“Kay’s planning to record a musical score on the book in Moscow,” reported Hedda Hopper in the
Los Angeles Times
on June 5, 1959, “and former partner Andy Williams was asked to do the voice of an American boy. Kay plays Eloise, natch.”

That elusive Eloise album was, once again, on the front burner. Andy had already involved himself by singing backup vocals on “Eloise” and “It’s Absolutely Christmastime,” but Kay now wanted him to develop his own alter ego
to go along with Eloise—based on characters he’d been doing just for kicks for years.

“When Kay would talk in the voice of Eloise,” Andy said, “I played two characters: Melvin, a good kid, and Junior, who was a very naughty boy. And we used to just play this to the hilt. We’d go on and on in these voices and crack each other up, and it was so much fun.”

Kay saw this as a launching pad for two spin-off characters with their own line of books and merchandise—a companion industry for boys to complement the success that Eloise was having with girls.

But Kay was not about to abandon her core audience—precocious grownups. To that end, Thompson decided to record an extemporaneous Q & A on her experiences in the Soviet Union—the first of a series of spoken-word “Kay Thompson Party” albums she had in mind.

“It was kind of a ridiculous concept just to listen to Kay Thompson talk about her trip to Russia but I was the one who suggested it,” admitted Thompson’s latest manager, Mace Neufeld (the future mega movie producer). “I said to Bob Thiele, ‘You know, Kay is such a great conversationalist and raconteur. She’s just come back from Russia, so why don’t we put together a party and we’ll record it?’ Bob said, ‘Great!’ ”

Having already put out an album of beatnik Jack Kerouac reading his poetry, Bob Thiele and Steve Allen signed Thompson to their offbeat, fledgling label, Hanover-Signature, in the summer of 1959. It is hard to imagine that they really thought there was money to be made on a gabfest about Russia. The future prospect of an Eloise album was the carrot that clinched the deal.

“It was a nice party at her apartment,” recalled Neufeld. “It was just a fun thing. We produced the album, and they put it out.”

The twelve-inch vinyl LP was entitled
Kay Thompson Party, Volume 1: Let’s Talk About Russia.
On the cover was a misleading photo of Kay holding her balalaika—even though there would not be a note of music. The photo would have been much more appropriate for the two Russian-themed novelty songs Kay decided to compose, record, and release as a single. To help her write the lyrics, she recruited Simon & Schuster’s Nina Bourne.

“She thought I was a good rhymer,” Nina recalled, “so I spent several evenings collaborating with her in her teeny-tiny apartment. I’ve never been so at sea working with anybody in my life. It felt as if I were swimming through honey or glue. So, eventually, the meetings just stopped.”

Kay then gave her editor, Richard Grossman, a shot. “She’d always said to me that I’d make a good lyric writer because I could put things into short phrases,” he remembered. “I was a ‘word merchant’ as she called it. And so,
over the course of the summer of 1959, I used to go up to her apartment on Sixty-second Street off Fifth Avenue and we’d sit around—she had a Russian guitar—and we wrote a couple songs: ‘Dasvidanya (Until We Meet Again)’ and ‘Moscow Cha Cha Cha.’ I did write the lyrics largely but we would bat them back and forth, and then she would sing it one way and then another way and ask me which I liked best, like an eye doctor saying is it better with this lens or that.”

Once Kay was happy with the compositions, she developed the arrangements and set a session date at A&R Recording Studio (112 West Forty-Eighth Street) around August 1959.

“It was an all-night recording session,” Grossman remembered. “Kay, of course, with her tremendous network of music people, got the studio, got the musicians, got her old friend Ralph Blane to sing backup on the record. The conductor was Sid Ramin, who did
The Milton Berle Show
for years. He said, ‘Jesus, I can’t let my name be on this because I’m not following the union stuff. I’ve gotta use a pseudonym.’ I said, ‘Fine, I’ll make one up for you.’ And I made up the name Nicholas Zarr—a play on the word for a Russian czar. We were up all night and Kay was a masterful producer. She’d make those guys play it fifty times and love it.”

When both the album and the single tanked, Thompson lost all faith in the label’s ability to handle an Eloise album—so it went no further. Regrettably, it marked an inauspicious end to Kay’s otherwise remarkable career as a recording artist—her voice would never again be commercially released on vinyl.

W
hile Kay was spinning
wheels, Hilary dutifully completed his illustrations for
Eloise in Moscow
so the book could be published on October 30, 1959.

As if Thompson had planned it, Khrushchev came to the United States that September for a highly publicized cross-country tour that included Twentieth Century-Fox studios in Los Angeles, where Kay, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and a hundred other stars held a VIP luncheon in his honor (boycotted by Ronald Reagan). Afterward, Khrushchev visited the set of
Can-Can,
where Shirley MacLaine and Juliet Prowse demonstrated their bawdy dance routines. The Soviet premier was so offended, he stormed out and, for the gathered members of the press, denounced his hosts in a rambling, vodka-fueled forty-five-minute tirade. His indignant mood was not helped by the fact that his last-minute request to visit Disneyland had been denied for security reasons.

To Thompson’s glee, the internationally publicized contretemps put a much brighter spotlight on the imminent publication of
Eloise in Moscow
. Not only
was it the exact antithesis of Khrushchev in Hollywood, it was equally farcical. Seizing the opportunity, Simon & Schuster took out an ad in
The New York Times
declaring
Eloise in Moscow
to be “the most daring of all Russo-American cultural exchanges.”

“Never before have those Red squares been exposed to anyone as hip as Eloise,” reported
Time
magazine—an unmistakable jab at Khrushchev. “She is, of course, an irrepressible capitalist (‘The Rolls is the only sports car I will drive in a Russian blizzard’), shows dangerous bourgeois-individualistic tendencies by riding her tricycle on the frozen Baltic, and utters subversive observations (‘Everybody watches everybody in Moscow’). But she makes up for it by getting right into the thick of cultural exchange, playing chopsticks in F at Tchaikovsky Hall, and doing a ‘rawther unusual’ ballet with three elderly snow sweepers, which cries out for choreographer Jerome Robbins.”

Good Housekeeping
splashed
Eloise in Moscow
on the cover of its November 1959 issue. Inside, a multipage excerpt whetted appetites for more.

Beaming with confidence, Simon & Schuster upped the first printing order to 75,000 copies and bought a spate of ads in
The New York Times
and
The New Yorker
with copy that read, “Russian to your bookstore for Eloise’s magnificent mission to Moscow. It’s caviar. It’s
kultúrny.
”

Thompson hit the promotional trail, unveiling the book at the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas, Texas, at a special luncheon sponsored by the Dallas Fall Festival of Music, Art, and Drama, attended by one thousand dignitaries, including opera diva Maria Callas, the Duke of Bedford, playwright Moss Hart and his wife, actress Kitty Carlisle, and, of course, Billie and Stanley Marcus.

On the topic of
Eloise in Moscow
versus Khrushchev in Hollywood, Kay was grilled on a slew of radio and television talk shows, including
The Today Show
(NBC-TV, October 30, 1959)—by Dave Garroway, of course—and
The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar
(NBC-TV, September 24, 1959). The latter was happily repeated on November 9, 1959, the date of Kay’s fiftieth birthday (though not even the KGB knew her age for sure).

There had been plans in the works for a line of Russian-flavored “Eloise Fashions for Winter by Mr. John,” but with coats and fezzes to be made of real fur, the costs were prohibitive, so it never happened.

Without any new Eloise merchandise, stores were being asked to cross-promote the
Eloise in Moscow
book with the same Eloise doll they’d been stocking for two years. The timing could not have been worse, because as of March 9, 1959, there was a new girl in town who knocked the Eloise doll on her ass: Barbie. In the wake of an unparalleled Barbie doll invasion and the phenomenal success of Dr. Seuss, Eloise no longer warranted the prime display
space she had once dominated. There was also the very basic problem that anything having to do with Russia was a serious turnoff to most Americans. Consequently,
Eloise in Moscow
went over like a lead Sputnik.

“Eloise amid the Soviets isn’t the sprightly brat you either wanted to kill or take home,” read the all-important critique in
The New York Times.
“She has become just a dull little girl in a travelogue that is pretentiously presented. Fie on Kay Thompson.”

Adding insult to injury, the
New York Herald Tribune
observed that “Eloise’s escapades in the Soviet Union are somewhat slim . . . Only Hilary Knight manages to extract the fullest delight from the onion-domed city, and his furhatted and coated heroine.”

Once again, Hilary had emerged smelling like a rose—and thus, Kay’s resentment continued to fester.

Sales numbers for
Eloise in Moscow
were nowhere near what the previous books had achieved, with many remainders collecting dust on store shelves.

On March 19, 1960, a keen observation concerning the dismal state of Eloise appeared in John Falter’s cover artwork for
The Saturday Evening Post.
Barely visible amid the hubbub of Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street was a tiny “forlorn figure of Eloise, gazing down from her perch at The Plaza.”

The Plaza was in a sorry state, too. By the time Conrad Hilton’s management contract expired on March 31, 1960, all his valued executives—including Alphonse Salomone and Gene Voit—had been systematically transferred to other Hilton hotels, leaving The Plaza in the lurch and in serious decline.

“We were desperately concerned over whether we could bring the hotel back,” recalled Paul Sonnabend of Hotel International Corporation, owner of the property. “The place was going to seed.”

Hence, the new general manager, Neal Lang (former husband of Martha Raye), conducted a ruthless housecleaning to revitalize and spruce up the aging hotel, physically and administratively. The “Lang purge” resulted in the unceremonious cancellation of free office space for Eloise Limited and the immediate closure of the Eloise Room—to the great displeasure of our Miss Thompson.

The coup de grâce, however, occurred five months later. On the night of November 23, 1960, the Eloise portrait mysteriously disappeared from the lobby of the Plaza—all but erasing her from existence.