Kay Thompson (63 page)

An entire year slipped by with no progress whatsoever. “Oh, Hilary,
please!
” Nordstrom begged. “Just finish it!”

“Ursula, Kay has destroyed my
life,
” Knight responded. “I can’t deal with this . . .
thing.
”

“Get over it!” Nordstrom snapped back. “We’ve got a book to publish!”

So, in 1966, Hilary trudged back to Rome for another round of pulling teeth and, this time, managed to extract a completed manuscript that went as far as blueprint proofs before Kay once again got cold feet.

Hanging Nordstrom out to dry, Thompson telegrammed from Rome:
THIS BOOK CANNOT COME OUT
!

I
n 1966, Roland Flamini
got appointed
Time
magazine’s bureau chief in Vienna, so his wife, Janet, had to give up her position as Kay’s assistant. Thompson burned through a few other secretaries until she settled on a full-time houseboy named Juliano.

“Juliano was a hunky, sexy kid who could not have been more than eighteen or twenty at the very most,” remembered Mart Crowley. “He was like a street boy, you know,
tough.
He looked like a gay hustler. I thought anything was possible. I wondered at times if there was anything going on between him and Kay, but he was so young and she was not so young. But he was a
very
sexy-looking boy and he was
everything
to her.”

If Kay’s infatuation with Juliano suggested a midlife crisis, her acquisition of a Vespa scooter kind of cinched it. The sporty two-wheeler, manufactured by Italy’s Piaggio & Co., was given to her as a gift by the public relations executive who handled the Vespa account in Rome—Count Rodolfo “Rudi” Crespi, husband of
Vogue
’s Consuelo Crespi. It was Rudi’s job to get Vespas product-placed in movies and television, and since Kay traveled in showbiz circles, he used her for traction.

When asked by an American reporter what she did for kicks in Rome, Kay dutifully replied, “I plunk my guitar, race about on my Vespa, and hit the high spots and the low spots with some great Italian men.”

In 1968, however, the bloom was suddenly off the rose. When Fenice died of diabetes, Kay could only blame herself for recklessly feeding him a steady diet of lime green Chuckles. Racked with guilt and grief, she became homesick. She was also running out of cash—partly because whenever Judy Garland needed a handout, Kay always “helped with her expenses.” If Thompson was expecting something in return, it never came.

“Kay always talked about how she’d had a falling-out with Judy Garland, toward the end of her life, over the drugs and everything,” recalled Thompson’s physical therapist, Bi-Ko. “She said that Judy had become impossible and there was a lot of anger.”

No longer able to support herself, much less Judy, Kay sublet her maisonette to sex symbol Monique Van Vooren, gave her furniture to Juliano, put her other belongings in storage, and shouted from the roof of the Palazzo Torlonia, “Arrivederci, Roma!”

The Last Hurrah

(1968–98)

Walk like you have ice water in your brassiere.

—Kay Thompson

O
n November 1, 1968, Kay flew back to the United States to face the music. Immediately, she appeared on
The Joey Bishop Show
and
The Hollywood Palace
but, in both instances, was treated as a relic from the past singing her oldie “I Love a Violin.” She didn’t care; she took the money and ran.

Then, for a hefty ransom, she authorized Simon & Schuster to launch a large-scale reissue of
Eloise
on April 30, 1969, for which she appeared on all the major talk shows.

“I want to see about making an animated film of
Eloise
,” Kay crowed. “And I want to make an LP of the book, with songs and music of course. Maybe I can get Burt Bacharach to conduct.” Thompson talked up grand designs to re-launch a high-end Eloise doll with Louis Vuitton luggage and a wardrobe designed by Madame Karinska and manufactured by Broadway’s Barbara Matera.

None of it happened, of course, but Kay used the buzz to leverage free accommodations at The Plaza—which she refurbished in her own anomalous style. Using pins and Scotch tape, she covered chairs, tables, and lamp shades
with zebra-striped Porthault sheets. Then she manufactured a fake fireplace out of leftover cardboard boxes.

To further justify squatter’s rights, Thompson sanctioned a new Eloise Room (decorated by the editors of
House Beautiful
), and a new Eloise Ice Cream Corner in a nook of the lobby near the Fifty-eighth Street entrance.

While putting a happy face on selling out, Kay received word of the sudden death of Judy Garland on June 22, 1969. Fulfilling her duty as twenty-three-year-old Liza Minnelli’s godmother, Thompson jumped into action.

“Kay did what godmothers do,” Liza reflected. “Took charge. And organized it all.”

She escorted Liza to Campbell’s Funeral Home to choose the casket. “They asked for a white one,” wrote columnist Liz Smith. “The funeral people . . . said it was not possible. Miss Thompson spoke right up. ‘We’re from MGM. We want white. Do it!’ ”

“Judy had a bracelet given her by Kay Thompson when Liza was born,” reported Garland biographer Gerold Frank, “and Judy had given it to Liza and they’d given it back and forth. It was good luck. ‘If I go before you go, I want to be wearing this,’ Judy instructed Liza about the cherished bracelet. ‘I don’t care what dress you put me in, but I’d like to be wearing this.’ ”

Her wish was honored and the bracelet was placed on Judy’s wrist, forever linking her to Kay. Their bond would be as eternal as the public’s fascination with it.

“The day of the funeral was a
circus,
” Lorna Luft recalled. “Kay was the voice of reason. She was the one at the funeral who stood behind us, with her hands around us. And after the funeral, at Liza’s place, when all the news reports were on TV and someone said, ‘Oh we have to listen to this,’ Kay said, ‘No we don’t,’ and turned it off.”

Liza recalled, “After about ten minutes of sitting around feeling sad, Kay suddenly said, ‘All right, everyone to the piano.’ We went to the piano and we sang ‘Great Day’ with her. And she said, ‘Sing! Come on!’ And we all sang our brains out. The music grounded us. When the kids left, I looked at her and I just said, ‘Thank you.’ And she said, ‘My darling, that’s what I’m here for.’ ”

But now what? As days passed, Thompson could sense that Minnelli’s marriage to Australian singer Peter Allen was a sham. Perhaps Liza needed a little guidance from a godmother with better gaydar. And for her own part, Kay realized that Liza was just the sort of fresh project she needed to get back into the swing of things. Minnelli’s first starring vehicle,
The Sterile Cuckoo,
was set to open in October, and with any luck, she just might have a future. Like Andy Williams, Liza became Thompson’s next “client.”

“Kay was so great because when she came in, she brought a world with her,” Liza explained. “She brought this energy, this freedom, this intelligence.”

Liza had already begun rehearsals for her next movie,
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon,
the cheerful story of a girl whose face has been disfigured by acid during an attempted rape. Based on the bestselling novel by Marjorie Kellogg, the film was being directed by Otto Preminger. Kay offered to assist Liza throughout the production as her coach and rock.

Originally, there was going to be a brief bit with a grumpy landlady who rents a run-down house to Junie (Minnelli) and the two friends she met during her hospitalization—Arthur (Ken Howard), an epileptic, and Warren (Robert Moore), a crippled homosexual. Then, later in the story, the trio meets a spoiled young heiress, Gregory (named after Gregory Peck), who invites them to stay overnight in her castle. Gregory sadistically taunts Warren to get up from his wheelchair and walk, but it only leads to him falling on the floor, humiliated and in tears.

When Preminger saw Kay hanging out with Liza, he decided to merge the characters of the landlady and the heiress into one mysterious grande dame named Miss Gregory.

“Otto knew Kay,” Liza explained in 2008. “So one day he said to her, ‘There’s this woman in the picture. Would you do it?’ And Kay said, ‘All right. Why not?’ ”

On June 29, 1969, the morning after the Stonewall Riot, it was announced that Thompson had been signed for the movie. Could it really be true that, thirteen years after
Funny Face,
her long-awaited return to the silver screen would finally happen? Without a hitch?

Naturally, she insisted on being “creatively involved” in the development of her character’s look and persona. And for every inch Preminger indulged, Kay snatched a mile. Soon, Halston was designing her wardrobe and she was making arrangements to rent a 1925 Rolls-Royce Phantom convertible. “I want the back seat re-upholstered in zebra-striped Porthault sheets,” she ordered the art department. Yep, Kay Thompson was back in business.

In early July, Kay and Liza traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where shooting commenced in and around the historic Hammond Castle, which served as Miss Gregory’s estate.

“When I was twenty years old,” recalled comedy writer–performer Bruce Vilanch, “I was a journalist writing for the
Chicago Tribune
and I was sent on a press junket to the set of
Junie Moon
in Massachusetts. Liza was the star of the picture but
not
the center of attention. Between Otto Preminger and Kay Thompson, it was a draw as to who was the more imperial of the two. Crazy
Otto, we called him—and he was running around screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘Miss Thompson! Will you come to the set?!’ Kay was heavily scarved the day I met her, with sunglasses. I mean, she was as absolutely Hollywood, New York, as you could be—and I thought I’d met a god. She certainly was to me. I’d grown up idolizing Eloise, for Lord’s sake, and I told her so. She gave me the once-over and said, ‘How sweet.’ ”

For her first scene, Miss Gregory arrives in her chauffeur-driven Rolls tourer to meet her new tenants. Dressed in a black leatherette pantsuit with matching skullcap, big black shades, and an Isadora Duncan–length silk scarf monogrammed with the letter
G,
the spider woman rises from her zebra-striped throne, puffs on a cigar, and proffers, “Would you come to dinner tomorrow night? I’ll send a car at six.”

Honestly, it felt like Kay had dropped in from either
Sunset Blvd.
or
Zorro,
but so what? The dame knew how to make an entrance.

Kay not only stole her own scenes, she Thompsonized one of Liza’s, too. At a cocktail bar in Miss Gregory’s garden, Junie mixes up a pitcher of “Purple Kazazz” (an amalgam of “Kay” and “bazazz”), while strutting and wriggling a “razzamatazz” jingle: “A little VO, some Grand Marnier, and, oh, I almost forgot the Beefeater.” It was Liza channeling Kay à la Judy doing “Madame Crematante.”

“It was almost like she took direction from Kay,” Vilanch observed. “Unlike Marilyn Monroe, who would always look at her acting coach for approval, Liza didn’t make it so obvious. But you could tell that Kay was advising her discreetly.”

Thompson referred to Preminger as Eau de B’Otto and snarked, “His reputation precedes him, so we don’t need to tell you about that.”

Glass houses.

A
round that same time,
Thompson met Hilary Knight to discuss the possibility of giving
Eloise Takes a Bawth
one more whirl—with talk of
Eloise in Rome
and
Eloise’s Wit and Observations
to follow in rapid succession. As he pulled out a pencil and began to sketch an idea, however, Kay’s spiderlike talons crawled down and clutched the tops of his fingers.

“She guided my hand, pushing the pencil across the paper, trying to take control and make the drawing her own,” Knight said, shuddering from the memory. “That was it. I knew right then and there that it was never going to work. My ego had already been crushed to a pulp by her and I refused to put up with it any longer. I told her to find someone else.”

For a time, Thompson boasted that she was in discussions with David Hockney to replace Knight, but everyone knew that would never fly. Kay was a chorus of one in her dismissal of Hilary’s contribution to the universal appeal and longevity of the Eloise phenomenon.

Rather than be forced to refund eight years of advances, Kay fulfilled her obligation to Harper & Row with a new book.
Kay Thompson’s Miss Pooky Peck-inpaugh and Her Secret Private Boyfriends Complete with Telephone Numbers
was a teenager’s alphabetical catalog of the boys she has encountered, from “Arthur is awful” to “Zooz is zizzy.” The heroine’s name was derived from Pookie, Liza Minnelli’s sweet and quirky character in
The Sterile Cuckoo,
juxtaposed with the last name of director Sam Peckinpah, aka “Bloody Sam,” because of his notoriously violent movies like
The Wild Bunch.

Each profile had a minuscule drawing by Joe Eula, whose credit was buried on the inside flap of the dust jacket.

“I mean, you know, she was a cunt,” Eula exploded. “That’s the only word for it and don’t be afraid to use that in the book. I always used to say, ‘You’re not going to fuck me like you did Hilary.’ Well, she did on
Darling Baby Boy.
And then she said, ‘Well, now I’ve got this project. Would you do this book?’
Pecky Pickenpooh,
whatever the fuck it was. I said, ‘I’ll do it under one condition: You stay away from me.’ I did it all in three days. And when she said, ‘There’s a revision . . . ’ I said, ‘Do it yourself.’ So she reduced my drawings to the size of postage stamps.”

The exhaustive text to
Pooky Peckinpaugh
dominated the layout and became tedious after about page 2. Published in November 1970,
Pooky
was dead on arrival and Thompson’s beleaguered editor, Ursula Nordstrom, refused to work with her again.

“When I saw the book,” said Eula, “Kay and I had a very, very quick word and I just said, ‘You’re fuckin’ lousy.’ We didn’t talk for a while until she wanted me to do posters for Liza. Then we made up.”