Kay Thompson (61 page)

Instead, Kay got Fellini to cast Gilda Dahlberg, the colorful aunt of Peter Matz, now a fabulously wealthy widow residing in Rome. Gilda showed up on set wearing sequined and feathered “leftovers from her days as a Ziegfeld girl.”

On the social scene, Thompson reconnected with Marion Marshall, who, after divorcing
Funny Face
director Stanley Donen in 1959, had moved to Rome with their two children (Peter and Josh), and, like Kay, was in search of a fresh start.

“When I arrived in Rome,” Robert Wagner recalled, “I took over Lee Engel’s old apartment at 7 Via Adda—he’d just gotten a bigger place—and he introduced me to Marion.” (Mart Crowley crashed there, too, until he could find work).

“When I was going with Robert Wagner before we were married,” Marion Marshall Donen Wagner recalled in 2004, “he was shooting a movie at Tirrenia Studios in Livorno, which was on the beach, so I moved up there for the summer of 1962 with the kids, and Kay came up, too. We went to a dime store called Standa and, for five dollars every day, we would completely outfit ourselves in some wild shirts, hats, and beads, and then we would arrive on the beach, all decked out in our latest ensembles.”

“RJ [Robert Wagner] had a four-door Jaguar sedan,” Mart Crowley recalled, “and he drove Marion, Kay, and I around in it everywhere. He would pay for everything. Kay never offered to pay but, in return, she did buy RJ the most outrageous, expensive gift. It was a collapsible wooden ‘butterfly’ chair with real zebra skin. She bought it at Gucci.”

She could be generous in other ways, as well. In June 1962, for example, Kay attended a Frank Sinatra concert in Rome to benefit the Boys Towns of Italy orphanage. A choir of orphans performed during the show, and afterward, Frank introduced the boys to Kay. Moved, she volunteered to be a guest choir director from time to time. And Marion Marshall recalled a related charitable impulse. “Kay and Lee Engel found a less fortunate boys’ orphanage on the way to Naples. They took over and supplied blankets, clothes, shoes, and threw these lavish annual Christmas dinner parties with Kay performing for the kids.”

Although Thompson boycotted the United States, she frequently visited France, Switzerland, and England. In late July 1962, for instance, she flew to London to coach Judy Garland in
I Could Go On Singing
(and to emotionally prepare her to file for divorce from Sid Luft, which she did soon after the shooting of the movie was completed).

Then Kay got the itch to write a screenplay. It all started when she was seated on an airplane next to the great jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton (whom she’d known since 1937 when they performed on
The Saturday Night Swing Club
). He had just taken part in a cultural exchange arts festival in Lagos, Nigeria, where he discovered a local thirteen-year-old prodigy named Mike Falana “who could play trumpet like Miles Davis.”

According to Dorothy Kilgallen, “Kay made shorthand notes and was so enthralled . . . she wrote a screenplay based on them . . . titled
The Pebble.
” Unfortunately, in a quagmire of revisionitis, the manuscript stalled in her Olivetti.

I
n the fall of
1962, a cat burglar caper entitled
The Pink Panther
was gearing up for shooting at Cinecittà Studios on the outskirts of Rome. Hot on the heels
of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
Blake Edwards was set to direct the picture, with the hands-on producer being his former agent, Martin Jurow, who had coproduced
Tiffany’s.

Oscar winner Maurice Richlin (
Pillow Talk
) came up with the basic story line about “a detective who is trying to catch a jewel thief who is having an affair with his wife.” The main object of the thief’s desire is a rare, priceless diamond with a pink flaw shaped like a panther.

Though
The Pink Panther
is remembered for introducing the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, spawning an enduring movie franchise, in this first film outing Clouseau was only a supporting character among a large ensemble that, originally, was to include David Niven (the jewel thief known as “the Phantom”), Audrey Hepburn (Princess Dala, owner of the Pink Panther diamond); Peter Ustinov (Inspector Clouseau); Ava Gardner (Simone Clouseau, wife of the inspector); and Robert Wagner (the thief’s playboy nephew).

There was one more delicious role that beckoned for a casting coup: Angela Dunning, a social climber modeled after real-life “hostess with the mostes” Perle Mesta and society columnist Elsa Maxwell. Because the Phantom stages all the jewel robberies during Angela’s soirees, everyone on her guest list is under suspicion—including Angela herself.

Naturally, Thompson’s name came up because she was perfect for the role, pals with all five stars, and a cost-effective “local hire.” When the offer was made, however, she played hard to get by demanding a musical performance during her big party scene. Though Edwards was not terribly eager to “suddenly stop the plot to do a number,” he granted Thompson’s wish.

She offered to sing her own Italian-flavored composition, “Subito,” which Steve Rossi had recently recorded for Columbia Records. But Edwards was partial to hit-maker Henry Mancini, who had just won an Oscar for “Moon River” from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. He phoned Mancini in Hollywood and asked him to compose a “Latin jet-set” number. The result was “Meglio Stasera (It Had Better Be Tonight),” with lyrics cowritten by Franco Migliacci (“Volare”) and—with considerable irony—Johnny Mercer (“On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”).

To stage the number, Kay wanted Hermes Pan, who had come to Rome to choreograph
Cleopatra
and never left. Bowing to Thompson’s pressure—again—the producers complied.

Meanwhile, negotiations with Audrey Hepburn hit a snag and she was replaced by a far less costly Claudia Cardinale, fresh off the set of
Federico Fellini’s 8
¹
/
₂
. “When Kay was cast in the film,” recalled Roland Flamini, “she wanted to meet Claudia in advance of the movie, so she threw a dinner party for her—though
I’m sure she had no idea who Kay was.” Cardinale’s English was so bad, she came with a translator and ultimately had to be dubbed throughout the entire film.

Around that time, fashion wunderkind Yves Saint Laurent was hired to design chic ensembles to be worn in the film by Cardinale and Ava Gardner. Because Yves was a friend, Kay assumed her own wardrobe would be created by him as well. Not so. Edwards purposefully wanted Angela Dunning to be dressed in clownish designs by Annalisa Nasalli-Rocca, one of the resident wardrobe mistresses at Cinecittà.

Thompson would have none of it. “She demanded that Yves Saint Laurent do her clothes and insisted they fly her first-class to Paris for a fitting,” related Mart Crowley.

While Thompson waited for a response to her latest ultimatum, Ava Gardner got canned because her own perks had bloated the budget by $100,000. To replace Gardner, the producers went after Elizabeth Taylor, but since she’d been spoiled by
Cleopatra,
her demands were positively Elizabethan. As a cheaper alternative, Charles Feldman, the agent for both Edwards and Wagner, suggested another client from his stable, a thirty-four-year-old model-turned-actress named Capucine.

“They were an item at the time, she and Charlie,” Blake admitted.

“The replacement did not please Peter Ustinov,” wrote executive producer Walter Mirisch in his 2008 memoir, “who advised us that he did not want to act in the film with Capucine and chose to withdraw from the cast.”

The emergency substitute for Ustinov was Peter Sellers, who was flown in from London on Saturday, November 10—just two days before shooting was set to commence. During the ride from the airport to the hotel, he convinced Edwards that Inspector Clouseau should be played more broadly, as an accident-prone buffoon. So, on Monday, Sellers went before the cameras, slap-shtick and all, and summarily hijacked the picture.

With the budget awash in red ink, producer Martin Jurow was ready to snap if someone so much as requested a paper clip. So, on Friday, November 16, when Thompson started up again about her wardrobe, Jurow just lost it.

“Kay got a big ramrod up her ass,” was how Robert Wagner remembered Martin’s tirade. “I was in the makeup department when it all went down. Kay came in and was very upset. She was crushed.”

“I can’t be in show business anymore,” Kay fumed. “I don’t have the stomach for it.”

“But Kay wasn’t just upset about the wardrobe,” Wagner added. “It was also the script, which was always being altered.”

Originally, there was a major subplot involving Kay’s character and three important red herrings: a British novelist, a Greek shipping magnate, and a Chicago Mafia daughter-turned-Hollywood starlet. Once Sellers commandeered more screen time, however, these scenes were truncated or cut altogether. Alarmed that her role was being chipped away to nothing, Thompson confided to Wagner that she was on the verge of walking off the picture.

“What in the fucking hell is the matter with you?!” Wagner pleaded. “Don’t you realize this is a great shot?!”

But the die had been cast. According to Louella Parsons, Kay “flipped her wig and left the set.”

The party line over Thompson’s exit was diplomatic. “A spokesman for the Mirisch film production said the actress-author’s departure was by ‘mutual consent,’ ” noted a United Press International news bulletin. “Script changes were made when Sellers agreed to do the role [vacated by Ustinov]. According to a company spokesman, Kay Thompson’s role changed along with Sellers’ and it was decided that she no longer would be in the picture.”

As a result, Thompson’s part was split in two. Her musical number was reassigned to a twenty-five-year-old sex kitten named Fran Jeffries (soon-to-be ex-wife of Dick Haymes), who decoratively dropped in and out of the picture with no rhyme or reason. The nonsinging role of the party hostess—what was left of it—was given to Brenda de Banzie, a plump, British thespian whose interpretation was boorish and grating.

“It would have been great if Kay had been in it,” Wagner mused wistfully. “She was a
great
character actress and she’d have knocked ’em dead with a song-and-dance routine.”

Humiliated and depressed, Kay went into hiding and fell apart.

W
hen I saw Kay
in Rome,” recalled Marti Stevens, “she had gone from this immensely elegant, completely pulled together, dazzling creature, to someone who looked like a bag lady with unwashed hair and filthy, chipped red fingernails so long that they curled over like a witch’s. It was a terrible shock because I wondered what could possibly have happened to go to that extreme. There is no way to quite describe it. Was it the breakup with Andy? All the energy was still there and enough anger to fuel a train.”

It was Noël Coward who helped pull Thompson out of her funk. “Kay and I got invited to go to Noël’s for Christmas in 1962,” Stevens continued. “So we took the train from Rome to his place in Switzerland. She had a dreadful little dog called Fenice who shed all over everything, particularly Kay. She looked
so bad that when we got to Noël’s, he had to send her down to the village to clean her up for Christmas supper. She got her hair done, got those chipped nails manicured.”

That was all it took to restore some of the old Thompson spirit. “Then the thrill and the fun,” Marti added. “After dinner, there were double pianos. Kay and Noël started playing and it was heaven. Sitting in the corner, looking bored was Marlene [Dietrich]—and she eventually disappeared because nobody was paying any attention to her. Unfortunately, sometime later, she came back and in her hand she had some records. She interrupted the evening we were simply adoring to say, ‘Here, you must play this. These are my applauses.’ Records of applause! There was no music on them. Just the applause. And she was determined that we should hear it.”

“Wet blanket time” was how Kay later described the situation. “Marlene could be a most humorless human being.”

At the recommendation of Dr. Max Jacobson, Kay became a regular patient of Dr. Paul Niehans’ Clinique la Prairie in Vevey, Switzerland. Niehans specialized in live cell therapy injections containing placenta extracted from pregnant sheep—inspiring Kay, Noël, and Marlene to sing a chorus of “I’ve Got EWE Under My Skin.” Believed to be rejuvenating, the treatments had become a fad among such jet-set disciples as Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Cary Grant. Of course, this sort of medical experimentation flew in the face of Thompson’s Christian Science doctrine—yet wherever there was a syringe that promised some sort of “pick-me-up,” Kay seemed to be first in line.

“I remember Kay as a pill popper,” Roland Flamini stated. “There was medicine all over the place. In Rome, she saw Dr. Richard Pennington de Jongh at Salvator Mundi International Hospital. When Elizabeth Taylor was doing
Cleopatra,
he was a bit of a Dr. Feelgood, prescribing all sorts of drugs to alleviate her never-ending ailments, many of them imagined.”

“There was something like that going on with Kay,” Janet Flamini concurred, “but she was very secretive about it.”

“She often called Janet at three or four o’clock in the morning,” Roland added. “She never had anything pressing to tell her. She just needed to talk. I guess she was lonely but whatever she was taking made her lose all track of time and manners. It was especially rude because we had very small children and it woke them up.”

Though she had her low ebbs, Roland remembered that Kay was “usually well turned out, especially in the evenings when she’d wear one of her many Chanel suits.”

“At first, she was into beige and actually wore skirts or a cotton sundress,” Mart Crowley observed. “Flat sandals or Gucci boots. By the end of the 1960’s, though, she was in black, black, black. I think she slept in black.”

“With heavily made up eyes,” Roland added. “Raccoon eyes.”

Reliably outlandish, Kay became a favorite celebrity kook among local fashionistas, including Countess Consuelo Crespi, the Rome editor of
Vogue,
and Irene Brin, the Rome editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
.