Kay Thompson (60 page)

W
ith Williams’ reputation building
as a recording artist and television star, it wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling. In August 1960, Hedda Hopper announced that Andy had been cast to star in the movie version of
Bye Bye Birdie
at Columbia Pictures. The role had been originated on Broadway by Dick Van Dyke (Andy’s sidekick in his 1958 summer replacement series), but at that time Williams was considered more of a household name. Contractually, however, shooting could not start until the Broadway musical had run its course.

In the meantime, Kay felt Andy could use some experience doing a stage musical—quietly, off the beaten path, beyond the glare of New York critics. As a result, he signed up to star with Julie Wilson in a summer-stock tour of
Pal Joey
for the Kenley Players theater circuit in Columbus, Dayton, and Warren, Ohio, throughout July 1961—with Thompson on board as his coach.

“Kay traveled with Andy,” recalled theater owner John Kenley in 2005. “By the time they arrived, we had the musical all laid out and we had to get it on in five days, including the dress rehearsal. It was boom, boom, boom.”

Nevertheless, Thompson insisted on adding a number from
Gypsy
, “All I Need Is the Girl” (Jule Styne–Stephen Sondheim), for Andy to sing “as the first-act curtain number.”

“Kay was absolutely brilliant,” Kenley remembered. “She brought out the best in Andy and was highly respected by all.”

Williams came away with more confidence to handle the
Bye Bye Birdie
movie challenge. Unfortunately, two months later,
The Dick Van Dyke Show
premiered on CBS-TV and became an instant smash. By the time
Bye Bye Birdie
went into production, Columbia Pictures dumped Andy for Dick.

At the same time, Andy’s relationship with Kay was coming to a predictable climax right out of
Pygmalion.
The inevitable declaration of independence occurred in October 1961, when Andy signed with Columbia Records, thereby eradicating Kay’s fat commission.

“Fifty percent was a pretty harsh deal,” Andy reflected in 2002. “It represented hundreds of thousands of dollars. I really, in the back of my mind, sort of expected Kay to give back that money at some later date. But lo and behold, that never came to pass. She kept it. And that was that.”

Two months later, Andy effectively severed any lingering romantic ties between them when he married Claudine Longet.

“I have compassion for Kay,” remarked Marti Stevens, “because, at a certain age, young lovers inevitably strike off on their own and it’s a killer. Her feeling would have been that she was dumped . . . and used and betrayed.”

“Looking back on our affair with the benefit of hindsight,” Williams reflected in his memoir, “I wonder whether it was not only Kay who attracted me but also the glamour and aura that surrounded her, the artistic and literary circles she moved in, and the famous people she knew. Whatever it was, I loved everything about her.”

O
n the rebound, Kay
got back together with Dave Garroway, but by then he was a broken man. The April 1961 suicide of his second wife triggered a downward spiral that resulted in Garroway being fired from
The Today Show
on June 16, 1961. Soon afterward, Dave reconnected with Kay, but his mood swings and his long-term addiction to codeine short-circuited the affair before the year was out. (Garroway’s mental state never fully recovered; he died in 1982 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.)

While on this emotional roller coaster, Kay was also mourning the sudden death of her beloved younger sister, Marion, who had succumbed to cervical cancer on April 1, 1960. With Marion gone, the only remaining blood relative from her immediate family was her older sister, Blanche, but they had grown apart over the years. The heartbreak left Kay feeling more alone and vulnerable than ever before.

In the summer of 1961, Thompson got another kick in the stomach. “While Kay was away from New York,” China Machado recalled, “her maid, Sarah, and her boyfriend went to live in Kay’s apartment and drank all the liquor that was in the house, got drunk, and totally trashed the place. She wore all of Kay’s clothes and ruined them. Kay came back unexpectedly and this is what she found. Kay just let the woman go and said to me, ‘Oh God, I’m so disappointed.’ It soured her feelings about the entire apartment and she no longer wanted to live there.”

It was the last straw. She dumped her New York flat and sprinkled her oddball possessions among friends “on permanent loan.”

“I didn’t want anything,” Kay remarked. “Let it all go, I said. Travel light. I just grabbed my pug dog and headed for Rome.”

Eloise on the Tiber

(1962–68)

Dear Eloise, We wish we could hold your hand, yeah, yeah, yeah.

—The Beatles

I
n April 1962, Kay Thompson arrived in Rome, hell-bent on embracing
la dolce vita.
The self-appointed welcome wagon for visiting showbiz royalty was an American businessman named Lee Engel, vice president of International Latex (makers of Playtex bras), who had recently been transferred to Rome. Having served in the Merchant Marine with Richard Avedon and Leonard Gershe, Engel shared many of their friends, including Thompson. Though gossip columns reported flings with Janis Paige and Doe Avedon, intimates knew Lee was gay. That did not stop our heroine from falling head-over-heels for him.

“Kay Thompson found her Great Love in Rome,” claimed Walter Winchell. “An American exec.”

What Kay and Lee shared was a passion for exploration, sightseeing, and treasure hunting in curio shops. They even collaborated on business ideas.

“Kay actually designed a Playtex bra or wrote an ad campaign for them,” recalled journalist Roland Flamini, at the time a correspondent for Reuters. “There was a lot of talk about bras.”

With Engel’s help, Thompson leased a three-level maisonette atop the Palazzo Torlonia (at the bottom of the Spanish Steps), the royal palace of Prince Alessandro Torlonia (great-uncle of actress Brooke Shields) and his wife, Beatriz, Infanta of Spain and aunt of Juan Carlos I, the future King of Spain.

“Juan Carlos—who was then in his twenties—would come over and visit Kay from time to time,” remembered Flamini. “They were very friendly.”

The first time Thompson saw her spectacular view of a scarlet sunset over Rome, she wept. “It is a wonderful place to sit and think about all the things you’ve done right and wrong in life,” Kay waxed philosophical for a minute or two.

But, then there was work to be done. To clean the apartment twice a week, she hired Engel’s housekeeper, Concetta. Because she always raised her arms, dramatically shrieking “Señora, señora!” Kay called her Edith Piaf or Anna Magnani, depending on the level of hysteria.

Thompson’s decorating flourishes were equally over-the-top. For the rooftop garden, she used an old porcelain toilet as a flower pot—and stored her sheet music in the rear tank.

“Kay discovered minimalism,” marveled Mart Crowley, Natalie Wood’s former secretary, who had just arrived in Rome hoping to find work as an art director on movies. “This was pre-Beatles, so nobody was sitting on harem cushions on the floor at the time, but that’s what Kay wanted.”

The ceilings were magnificently high with windowed French doors that opened onto a green-tiled terrace. She had the rooms painted aquamarine blue and hung flowing blue curtains that billowed in the breeze. Mirrors and bold artwork went up on the walls. Crowley recalled that her office was lined with “kitsch paintings of priests, dressed in birettas and cassocks, doing unlikely things like walking a tightrope or swinging on swings in a playground.” For the living room, Kay splurged on an original oil,
Rouge et Noir
, by Antoni Clavé, the renowned abstract expressionist and Oscar-nominated art director and costume designer.

“She had a three-fold screen,” noted choral director Ray Charles, “like the Oriental ones, except hers was just a bare wood frame with chicken wire on it.”

“Well, you know what it needs now?” Kay said to Crowley. “The
zebes.
”

“That’s what she called her treasured zebra skins that she used as rugs,” Crowley translated. They were later used as set dressing for
The Boys in the
Band,
William Friedkin’s movie adaptation of Crowley’s groundbreaking off-Broadway play.

Then she bought ten unfinished wooden Chinese side tables, twelve inches high, that she decided to paint red.

“Kay
loved
the color red,” recalled Kitty D’Alessio, then an advertising executive, before her ascendency to president of Chanel. “One time, very late at night, Kay made me sneak with her to the Elizabeth Arden salon that was down on Piazza di Spagna, and—with me as her lookout—she scraped a little paint off the Red Door into an envelope and said, ‘This will be my
campione
’—her ‘sample.’ ”

Crowley picked up the story: “Kay and I went to a drugstore and she found this exact shade of red in a Revlon fingernail polish and bought out their entire stock. Then the two of us start painting the tables with these tiny nail polish brushes that are attached to the inside of the little screw-top lids. Well, the wood hadn’t been primed, so it just soaked up all the paint and it took forever.”

“I helped her,” recalled Robert Wagner, who, having just filed for divorce from Natalie Wood, was in Italy to lick his wounds and to film Vittorio De Sica’s
The Condemned of Altona
with Sophia Loren. “But we kept running out of nail polish, so then we’d have to go out and find more of it.”

“Then she got a grand piano,” said fashion illustrator Joe Eula. “But they couldn’t get it up the spiral staircase, so they sawed off the legs and lowered it through the skylight.”

“Put it on the floor,” Kay ordered. “That’s how I want it.”

“She’d sit cross-legged like a Japanese Genkō,” Eula continued, “and play the piano to serenade that damn dog of hers, Fenice.”

“Kay was a world-class eccentric and everyone gravitated to her,” Roland Flamini mused. “She’d have dinner with Pat Kennedy, Gregory Peck, Elizabeth Taylor. She was a port of call for Americans of a certain type in Rome.”

“Rita Hayworth was always flying her places because she had Karim Khan’s plane,” added Mart Crowley.

Noël Coward often visited Kay, too. “We dined peacefully,” Coward wrote in his diary, “and sat afterwards on the Via Veneto and had ice creams while we watched the gay throng of hustlers, pimps, queens, faggots, priests and tourists ambling past.”

And when her old friend Perry Como arrived in 1966 to record his latest album,
Perry Como in Italy,
Kay wined and dined him and his entourage.

“Kay got us to improvise a parody of ‘I Believe,’ ” recalled the album’s choral arranger, Ray Charles. “It went, ‘I believe in homo-sex-u-ality, for man and beast. I believe that it deserves le-gal-ity to say the least.’ ”

“One of her favorite places to go was the Blue Bar at the Osteria dell’Orso,” said Kitty D’Alessio. “One night, we were there with Lee Engel, Bobby Mackintosh, and Lennie Gershe. Kay sat down at the piano and began to play ‘My Funny Valentine.’ Then she became the vocal director and made this group sing this, and that group sing that, and then she put us all together. It was just magical.”

Roland Flamini related, “My former wife, Janet, answered a classified ad in the
Rome Daily American
to be the assistant to somebody who turned out to be Kay Thompson. At the time, Janet was very young, very calm, very proper, and, above all, very British. All of that appealed to Kay so she hired her.”

“For her breakfast at noon,” Janet Flamini remembered, “I always was required to bring a papillon biscuit—in the shape of a butterfly. She had a nickname for everybody. Mine was Janetini.”

“Kay’s nickname for Lee Engel was Fellini,” added Kitty D’Alessio, “because he was always photographing everybody with his Polaroid camera.”

It wasn’t long before the
real
Fellini came into Kay’s life. She claimed that the director once made a pass at her—a tale that seems mighty tall—but he did, in fact, offer her the bit part of a pushy fashion magazine reporter in his latest movie,
Federico Fellini’s 8
¹
/
₂
. (Kate Hudson played a younger, sexier version of the character in the 2009 musical adaptation,
Nine
.)

“Fellini had seen Kay around Rome and was fascinated by her,” said Hilary Knight. “She told me that he summoned her to his office to discuss playing this particular part. He sat her in a chair in the center of a room and walked continually around her, talking to her all the time while staring at her and observing her. She was flattered and totally intrigued by the idea of someone like Fellini being interested in her. She also knew that what he had in mind was to turn her into one of his grotesques—another freak in the freak show. She was smart enough to see that and declined. But she enjoyed having this important director wooing her and she played along with it for a while before turning him down.”