Kay Thompson (59 page)

“Billy called one day,” Kay explained in a BBC Radio interview, “and he said, ‘Listen, we need a singer. What do you think about Andy? Do you think he can do it?’ And I said, ‘Bill. Of
course
he can do it!’ He said, ‘Well, he’s gonna have to audition for Steve.’ And I said, ‘He’ll be there. No doubt.’ So I called Andy and I said, ‘Come over here!’ I said, ‘I think maybe you ought to do a medley . . . I’ll put these two songs together . . . ‘All I Do Is Dream of You’ and ‘You’re My Everything.’ And by God, he went over there and got it, of course.”

The Tonight Show
premiered September 27, 1954, and became an instant hit—still going strong today—but there is an untold part of the success story.

“Kay helped me arrange songs to perform on that show, just as a friend,” Andy confessed. “She did quite a few of those—uncredited, unpaid, and without the knowledge of the show. Kay would teach me her arrangements and she got Peter Matz to do the orchestrations. Peter was going to a shrink and the shrink was charging him twenty-five dollars a session. So I paid him twenty-five dollars per orchestration. Then I’d come in to work on the show and everyone was so amazed that I had these amazing arrangements. I never told anybody that it was Kay. I wanted them to think that it was me. It was one of the reasons why they kept me going on that show for nearly two-and-a-half years.”

There was one instance when a Thompson arrangement proved to be a bit embarrassing. “Andy sheepishly remembered the night they did a tribute to Richard Rodgers,” wrote Ben Alba in
Late Night.
“He sang Rodger’s classic ‘Spring Is Here,’ a song he frequently performed in his nightclub act, but didn’t realize that the opening verse he had been doing was something extra that had been written especially for him by Kay Thompson and incorporated into his arrangement of the song. When he sang Thompson’s verse in front of Rodgers, ‘Richard Rodgers was looking at me like,
What the hell is this?
’ chuckled Andy. ‘And then he told me later,
I didn’t write that first part!
’ ”

W
ith a regular paycheck
coming in, Andy could afford to rent a $129 per month apartment at 5 East Sixty-third Street, right off Fifth Avenue—just four blocks north of Kay’s suite at The Plaza.

He decorated nearly every inch of his walls with framed artwork. “[Andy] is a budding art collector,” wrote columnist Dick Kleiner in 1958. “Although no painter, he likes to surround himself with nice paintings, generally modern impressionists. This started when he was with Kay Thompson.”

Buoyed by his ongoing
Tonight Show
exposure, Andy felt the time was right to get a record deal. “I told Kay that I really wanted to get a contract with Cadence Records because the label was churning out a lot of hit records for the Everly Brothers and others,” he explained. “Kay said, ‘Oh, well I know the owner, Archie Bleyer.’ And I said, ‘Listen, if you can get me a contract with Cadence, I will give you half.’ And she basically took me up on that offer.”

Having helped Bleyer launch his career in 1941, Thompson had every reason to believe he’d return the favor. “Kay and I went over there,” Andy recalled. “She played piano for me and I sang. A man of few words, Archie said, ‘Do you want to make some records?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Fine,’ and gave me a contract.”

As a result, Thompson demanded 50 percent of Williams’ royalties, an onerous deal that he would live to regret. Aside from the money, the provision magnified Kay’s sense of entitlement over Andy.

For instance, when Kay gave up her suite at The Plaza in 1956, she moved into an apartment at 9 East Sixty-second Street, just around the corner from Andy’s flat on Sixty-third. It was very convenient when they were working together, but when he needed a little space, it was a bit too close for comfort—especially when he began dating other women.

Andy’s breakthrough came when his third single at Cadence, “Canadian Sunset,” climbed to No. 7 in August 1956. But his follow-up, “Baby Doll,” stalled at No. 33. This disheartening development was followed by the news that Steve Allen was leaving
The Tonight Show
on January 25, 1957, which meant Andy was out of a job.

Andy’s mellow style, it seemed, was not in tune with the hottest trend in music: rock ’n’ roll. Williams recalled the day in January 1957 when Bleyer played Charlie Gracie’s latest rock ’n’ roll single, “Butterfly,” for him: “I listened to the record and I thought, ‘Boy, that doesn’t sound like me at all.’ He said, ‘Well, if you want a hit . . . ’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I do want a hit.’ And he said, ‘Well, then we oughta do this song.’ ”

“I got an Elvis Presley record, and I listened to it a lot, and I went and did the same thing,” Williams later told Larry King.

In the spring of 1957, Williams’ version of “Butterfly” soared all the way to No. 1 on both the U.S. and UK charts. There was nothing “Andy Williams” about it, but who could argue with success?

Thompson was not surprised. “I love Elvis Presley,” she proclaimed on CBS-TV’s
Person to Person
in November 1956, a declaration later reinforced when she sang one of Presley’s hits, “Stuck on You,” on
Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall.
Thompson was fascinated by Elvis’s androgyny, calling him “a sort of butch Lolita.”

Following “(There Is a Time) A-O-Lee-O” and “Ground Hog,” Kay had continued dabbling in rock ’n’ roll songwriting, her latest being “You Gotta Love Everybody,” with lyrics by Bill Norvas, which was recorded by such artists as Della Reese, the Sun Spots, and Ray Ellington. Even Danny Kaye gave it a whirl, but his label, Capitol Records, declined to release it.

Once Williams got on the bandwagon, Thompson wasted no time writing an Elvis sound-alike for him called “Stop Teasin’ Me,” which she submitted to Bleyer under the nom de plume Y. Des Louvettes—which looked French, but when phonetically pronounced with a heavy Southern drawl, it came out “Why, they love it.”

“Stop Teasin’ Me” became the B-side of Andy’s next Cadence rocker, “I Like Your Kind of Love,” which peaked at No. 8 in May 1957. After years of positioning himself as a crooner of show tunes, Andy hit pay dirt doing Elvis. Go figure.

Sticking with the trend, Andy’s seventh single featured two more guitar-laden rock ’n’ rollers: “Lips of Wine” and “Straight from My Heart,” the latter composed by an emboldened Kay Thompson, no longer hiding behind a pseudonym.

On September 9, 1957, Andy performed the new songs on Dick Clark’s
American Bandstand,
but apparently kids just weren’t buying it. It was one thing to
hear
Andy copy Elvis on the radio, but quite another to
see
him masquerading as a rock ’n’ roller on TV. No amount of vocal hiccups and pelvic thrusts could cover the fact that Andy was simply out of his element. Sales of the single stalled.

Sure, copying Elvis may have worked in the short term, but to build a career with longevity, Andy needed sincerity. So, fittingly, his next Cadence single was entitled “Are You Sincere?”—a passionate ballad that was squarely in his comfort zone. When the single shot to No. 3 in February 1958, it proved that there was, after all, a market for the
real
Andy Williams. There were sighs of relief all around, especially from Kay, whose bank account got a nice infusion of cash.

For his next single, Kay wrote a midtempo pop ballad, “Promise Me, Love,” that marked Williams’ first A-side of a Thompson composition. In September 1958, the song rose to No. 17, followed shortly thereafter by “Hawaiian Wedding Song,” which reached No. 11 and snagged a Grammy Award nomination for Best Male Vocal Performance.

W
ith his pop crooner
status on the rise, Andy hosted three consecutive summer replacement series in 1957, 1958, and 1959, with Kay working as a “creative consultant” most intensively on the last one.
The Andy Williams Show
was broadcast on CBS-TV, from July 7 to September 22, 1959, directed by Norman Jewison.

“Kay was Andy’s guru,” Jewison recalled. “It was a Svengali thing, and she had a lot of say on what we did.”

Her influence on the show stretched far beyond the music. “I want
Harper’s Bazaar,
” she demanded, “not Ed Sullivan!”

“Kay had worked quite a bit with Avedon,” recalled art director Gary Smith, “and she was very keen on
Vogue
-like imagery. She helped us set a whole new standard for a TV variety show. The ‘all-white’ look. No one had seen anything like it. It was revolutionary.”

“White on white,” Jewison concurred. “I suggested that we paint the floor
white going into gray and then blend it into the cyclorama at the back and then lighting it in such a way that they were endless in space.”

“I will never forget one particular number Kay had us do that just bowled everybody over,” Smith remembered. “Way in the back of the all-white stage, in the infinity, was Andy Williams wearing a Panama hat and something rolled up at his feet that was about five feet wide. It was a roll of gray paper and he kicked it and it rolled right down to camera. And then he just snapped his fingers, singing ‘Look down that lonesome road,’ walking down this path he made. It was so simple and yet the hair on the back of my neck stands up just thinking about it.”

On another installment, Thompson created an Asian arrangement for Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” featuring the Peter Gennaro Dancers dressed in Kabuki costumes.

“Gimmicks like that were Kay’s ideas,” Smith observed. “Pure Kay Thompson.”

Helped by his weekly television exposure, Andy’s next single zoomed all the way to No. 5: “Lonely Street,” backed with a new Thompson composition called “Summer Love.”

If there were any doubts that Kay was still hung up on Andy, the melancholy, lovesick lyrics of “Summer Love” put those to rest. Reinforcing that notion to millions of Americans was the Williams spread in the September 1, 1959, issue of
Look
magazine, with Andy sprawled out on the floor of Thompson’s apartment, rough-housing with Fenice as Kay observes the shenanigans from a nearby sofa. Domestic bliss practically leapt off the page.

If Kay wanted Andy all to herself, however, she was in for a lot of heart-ache.
TV Guide
wrote that the thirty-one-year-old bachelor was “quite content to play the field,” and gossip columnists would soon link Andy to a whole string of starlets, including Ann-Margret, Kathleen Nolan, Hope Lange, Pippa Scott, Carol Lawrence, and, most seriously, Claudine Longet, whom he began dating in August 1960, when she was a seventeen-year-old dancer for
Les Folies Bergere
in Las Vegas.

The ratings and reviews for
The Andy Williams Show
were so terrific, suddenly all three networks were bidding for Andy to headline his own series during the regular television season. However, the only time slots being offered were of the sacrificial lamb variety—in competition with such ratings stalwarts as
Gunsmoke
. Skittish, Thompson reminded him of what happened to Patti Page’s
The Big Record
when it went up against
Wagon Train.

Andy took the advice to heart, choosing to stay in the public eye by hosting network specials and by appearing in top nightclubs—which were not only risk-free but highly lucrative.

During a gig at New York’s Copacabana, Williams came down with a serious case of laryngitis. “I’d heard about the miraculous healing powers of Dr. Max Jacobson from Kay,” Andy recalled. “Archie Bleyer also went to him. So, I went to him to help me. He said, ‘Do you want to sing higher or lower?’ I said, ‘I don’t care. I just want to sing.’ He gave me a shot. I went outside and hailed a taxi. ‘Take me to 5 East 63rd Street.’ By the time I got halfway home, I was talking a mile a minute, so fast I couldn’t control myself, like Donald Duck. I told the cabbie, ‘Now-wait-a-minute-take-me-back-to-where-you-picked-me-up!’ And I was like, ‘Let-me-out-here-okay-thank-you-very-much!’ And I raced back in and said, ‘Wait-a-minute-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-me-what-did-you-give-me-I-can’t-stop-talking-so-fast!’ Then Jacobson poked a needle right in the middle of my stomach and my speech wound down like a battery was running out. It was scary, but, I have to say, I went back to the Copacabana and I didn’t have any laryngitis. I got through it fine.”

On the recording front, Andy took a chance releasing a religious song, “The Village of St. Bernadette,” which went all the way to No. 7 during Christmas week of 1959. Its surprise success motivated Bleyer to fast-track an entire album of inspirational songs. Andy asked Kay if he could include her special version of the Twenty-third Psalm, “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” which she had written in 1948 with Andy in mind but had never recorded.

“I don’t think so,” Thompson replied. “I want to save that for Leonard Bernstein and a full orchestra.”

Andy was crushed. “I couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t allow me to perform the song,” Williams recalled in his memoir. “I had been with her when she wrote it, and I had sung it for her many times in her apartment. I guess that was Kay; she was possessive about everything she worked on.”

Nevertheless, Andy hung on to that arrangement and, after Kay’s death, sang it at the 2003 funeral of his eldest brother, Bob.

As consolation, Kay composed “Sweet Morning” for the album
The Village of St. Bernadette,
and Andy magnanimously recorded it—though it must have been with a heavy heart.

Positive reaction to the album cheered him up, especially when he received a commendation from the Vatican.

Emboldened by this experimentation, Andy persuaded Archie to let him self-produce his next album,
Under Paris Skies,
a collection of French-flavored songs, including a new Thompson composition entitled “Au Revoir, Paris,” her wistful answer to “Bonjour, Paris!” from
Funny Face.

Partly for authenticity but also, more important, to remove himself from Bleyer’s cocoon, Williams recorded the album in France with an up-and-coming
conductor named Quincy Jones. The resulting album was nothing short of exquisite, showcasing Williams’ dazzling vocals and Jones’ lush orchestrations—with “Au Revoir, Paris,” representing the very best of Kay’s compositions for Andy.