Kay Thompson (65 page)

Zeffirelli had decided to star Minnelli in a remake of
Camille
from a new screenplay by Hugh Wheeler (Tony winner for
A Little Night Music
and, later,
Sweeney Todd
).

“Franco loved Kay’s influence, her point of view, and her sense of style—as did everybody,” Liza explained. “So, I was just thrilled she was there because I knew she wouldn’t let me
ever
do anything that was wrong.”

Franco and Kay marinated ideas for days, and then a screen test was filmed with Liza and Tim Woodward (son of actor Edward Woodward).

“Kay set up how it should look,” Smith added. “For Liza’s period costume, Kay had her in a big push-up bra. Liza put her head down and was laughing. ‘Oh my God, I’m gonna bounce off my boobs!’ ”

Despite “violent enthusiasm,” the financing never materialized. “If the movie had been made,” Smith reflected, “Kay would have been involved in some way, either on the screen, behind it, or both.”

The next putative project was an authorized biography of Liza, written by Kay, to be published in the spring of 1974. Preview “fragments” of Thompson’s text, amounting to fifteen hundred words, were excerpted in the September 1, 1973, edition of
British Vogue
(featuring cover and interior photographs of Liza taken by, of all people, Peter Sellers).

“The biggest influence I believe was her mother,” Kay freely associated, “always together . . . sharing the fun . . . and whatever old man trouble was dishing out at the time. Liza sets her own pace . . . strong in a crisis . . . constantly looking through rose-coloured glasses . . . if there’s a shadow looks the other way . . . common sense to the core . . . run for your life . . . survival at all costs . . . and as a result Liza has made all the right mistakes.”

Thompson’s style was quirky and carbonated, and it would have been a fun read, but, living up to her reputation, she got bored and the book idea fizzled.

A
historic alliance between Kay
and Liza did come to pass in the fall of 1973. It all started one October night in New York. The girls were having dinner at Orsini’s with Halston, Joe Eula, Anthony Perkins, and his new wife, Berry Berenson.

“We’re giving a fashion show in France at the Palace of Versailles,” Halston told Kay. “Liza will be our star and we want you to direct it and produce it.”

“
Funny Face
lit up like a big balloon in my head,” Thompson recalled, “and suddenly I was singing, ‘I want to step out on the Champs-Élysées . . . ’ and then Liza began singing . . . and Tony Perkins, because he was on the set the day we were shooting it . . . and away we were and the whole Orsini’s was going
to Paree! It was just darling. We finished it and stood up and, my God, the applause was filled with people and waiters. And I said, ‘Well . . . we’re going to Versailles.’ ”

The job offer did not come completely out of the blue. Since her return from Rome, Kay had worked the runway as a celebrity model for Halston, Giorgio di Sant’ Angelo, and Robert Mackintosh, and at two annual Coty American Fashion Critics Awards ceremonies. In each case, she had ended up advising behind the scenes and making herself indispensable. To his credit, Halston was the one who really recognized her undervalued potential.

The Versailles exhibition was not going to be just any old fashion show. To raise money for the restoration of the palace, publicist Eleanor Lambert had come up with the novel idea of staging a fashion event in Marie Antoinette’s Théâtre Royal du Château de Versailles.

“I called up Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild in Paris,” Lambert recalled, “and said, ‘If I can get five American designers, can you get five French designers?’ So, she organized the French half of the show. She had Pierre Cardin, Marc Bohan for Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, and Emanuel Ungaro. And to sing, they had Josephine Baker. For the American half, I got Anne Klein, Stephen Burrows, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, and Halston—with Liza opening and closing. And Kay agreed to direct and produce our half of the show.”

Flush with funds from his recent $16 million acquisition by Norton Simon, Inc., Halston was the ringleader and covered many of the expenses. Thus, ground control emanated from Halston’s Manhattan headquarters at Sixty-eighth and Madison.

“So in comes Kay to figure out what the hell we’re going to do,” recalled actor Dennis Christopher, who, along with Bill Dugan and Stephen Sprouse, made up the trio of assistants known as the Halstonettes. “In anticipation, I had gone out to this fabulous little grocer on Madison Avenue and bought kiwi and lady apples—those little tiny apples with a stem and little tiny leaves on them. They’re adorable, very expensive, and I bought them for her. So, Kay comes in and looks at me.”

“Who is this charming little boy?!” Thompson beseeched, hands thrown high.

“He’s my assistant,” Halston replied.

“Hiring twelve-year-olds now, are we?” she sneered.

“I was young, but not
that
young,” Dennis said, continuing the story. “Trembling, I handed her this bag of fruit that I had gotten her. Halston’s eyebrow flew up like ‘What are you doing?!’ She opened it and gasped. Lady
apples were her favorite thing and kiwis were her favorite thing and she refused to eat any of the food that had been prepared by Halston’s cook for the lunch meeting that day. All she ate were the kiwis and the lady apples and she insisted that I sit next to her.”

Surrendering, Halston said, “Why don’t you just take him.” Then he shifted his eyes to Dennis and ordered, “You go with her.”

So, for the next six weeks, Dennis became Kay’s boy Friday–cum–stage manager—six years before his breakthrough movie,
Breaking Away,
earned him a Golden Globe nomination and a British Academy Award. “Not only did I assist her with the show,” he recalled, “but I also did other stuff like getting her food, calling her to confirm, ‘We’re meeting in half an hour. Shall I pick you up in a taxi?’ One time, I picked her up at Dr. Feelgood’s office, where she had had her B-12 shot—which seemed to be something that she looked forward to and needed.”

Thompson would need all the energy she could muster to pull off this fashion Olympics. “I got on the phone,” Kay recalled, “and from then on, I never got off the phone.”

“She never ate,” Dennis observed. “I always tried to force-feed her a yogurt or fruit. She might have a couple of cashews but I never saw her eating a real meal. She lived on cigarettes and Coke—and by that I mean the soft drink.”

“She drank Coca-Cola because she loved the red can,” noted Jim Caruso. “It was all about the red.”

“As odd as it sounds, there were times when Kay looked like a kid,” Dennis added. “When an idea came to her, it lit up her face, turning this old crone into a sprite.”

Her first decision was to prerecord the entire soundtrack for the show in New York, and to ensure absolute perfection and audio control, Liza would lipsynch. For the opening, Thompson borrowed Paramount’s original multitrack recording of “Bonjour, Paris!” from
Funny Face
and replaced the vocals with Liza and a female chorus that included Kay. For the finale, Liza would sing “Cabaret,” followed by “Au Revoir, Paris,” a cover version of the song Thompson had composed for Andy Williams’ 1960 album,
Under Paris Skies
—with Kay on keyboard and Max Hamlisch (father of Marvin) playing the accordion.

To accompany the designers’ individual presentations, Thompson selected a startling array of instrumental tracks. For Halston, it was Maurice Jarre’s brooding score to
Luchino Visconti’s The Damned
(with riffs of Mahler’s waltz); for Burrows, it was Curtis Mayfield funk from
Superfly;
and for Blass, it was a medley of Cole Porter songs. For de la Renta, the swirling strings of “Love’s Theme” by Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra were pumped into the
mix—three months
before
the song became a No. 1 smash on the nation’s dance floors.

“The music was bold, loud, and
very
eclectic,” Eleanor Lambert remembered. “It was seismic. It absolutely changed the way music was used in fashion shows ever since.”

“What was really essential,” added Oscar de la Renta, “was that we had models who walked to the music. That was the very first time it was done—girls just swinging out to the pace of the music.”

“Walk like praying mantises!” Kay ordered them. Forty models would be shared by the designers, plus they would all appear with Liza for the opening and the closing of the show.

“For ‘Bonjour, Paris!’ ” Kay said, “we can do all the day and sportswear and rain wear.”

“It allowed for the models to do a lot of movement,” Dennis Christopher recalled, “like opening the coats or the umbrellas would go up at a certain point. I had to get a place called Uncle Sam’s to manufacture umbrellas in matching fabrics from all the different designers. Kay wanted to start with beiges and progress to more explosive colors toward the end of the number.”

For the “Cabaret”/“Au Revoir, Paris” finale, the attire was formal evening wear. “ ‘Cabaret’ started playing,” said Dennis, “and Liza came out in front of a scrim as you saw this marvelous tableau behind her—with very dramatic lighting. Everybody was frozen at these café tables—including me and Billy Dugan in tuxedos, because there was a shortage of male models. Then the scrim goes up, and as Liza sang and danced, each person she went by suddenly came to life, so that by the time the song came to an end, the cabaret was in full swing. Kay thought of the whole thing, from concept to choreography. It was unbelievable.”

Of the forty models, Kay insisted that ten should be trained dancers. “The dancers didn’t know how to model,” Dennis remembered, “and the models didn’t know how to dance. So there was a lot of hands-on, a lot of molding them. She would say things like ‘Elocution with your arms.’ ‘Vocabulary with your fingers.’ ‘There’s a bird trapped in your hair.’ ‘Walk like you have ice water in your brassiere.’ These far-out haiku statements. She wanted an army of women who were replicants of her.”

To upstage the other designers, Halston paid several famous women to appear in his segment, including Marisa Berenson (costar of
Cabaret
), Baby Jane Holzer (Andy Warhol’s very first “superstar”), Elsa Peretti (the jewelry designer), and China Machado.

When the traveling satyricon arrived for rehearsal at Versailles, all hell broke loose. Because he’d mistaken metric measurements for inches, Joe Eula’s painted backdrops came up short. “Get rid of it,” Eula winced. “It looks like Chinese laundry, like everything shrunk in the wash.”

Kay insisted that he do a giant rendering of the Eiffel Tower. “So, I just got a huge piece of no-seam paper,” Joe explained, “rolled it out on the floor of the halls of the palace, and I got black stovepipe material and a broom and I did the Eiffel Tower in three sweeps, and up it went.”

On the night before the show, the French contingent’s rehearsal stretched until ten o’clock as the Americans impatiently awaited their turn. When things finally got under way, bad blood began to boil.

“Kay directed Anne Klein a lot,” Eleanor Lambert explained. “Anne had cancer then, though none of us knew it at the time. She was ill and nervous that her casual designs would pale beside these elaborate evening dresses of the others. So she kept asking Kay how to make her segment shine. The others were annoyed that this was eating into their precious rehearsal time.”

“I was backstage amid all the chaos,” China Machado recalled. “Halston was so awful with Kay.
So
awful. And she was very upset by it. And Bill Blass insulted her or something—there was a rather nasty scene. The French were being impossible, too. It was madness.”

“Fed up with the viciousness, Kay Thompson walked out,” recalled Bill Blass. “Fortunately, she did not go far. Without Kay, in my opinion, we would have certainly perished in flames of amateurishness.”

No sooner had Kay been coaxed back into action than Halston took a hike. “He walked out and sat in a car by the sidewalk,” Eleanor Lambert remembered. “He wanted the models to retire with him but Liza said, ‘Listen, girls. Don’t you dare go out. This is show business. We’re committed to it.’ And so they all turned around and came back.”

“Kay was just so glad that everybody was furious,” Joe Eula said with a chuckle, “because that’s the way she likes things. She said to me, ‘It always makes a good performance, my dear. Raw edge.’ ”

Charged with plenty of it, Le Grand Divertissement à Versailles raised its curtain on the evening of November 28, 1973. Seven hundred and fifty of the world’s aristocracy paid $235 per ticket, plus $50 for the lavish blue-and-gold programs designed by Jean-François Daigre.

“The first segment was the French,” explained Bill Dugan, “and they had a lot of celebrities in the show like Louis Jourdan, Capucine, Zizi Jeanmaire, Rudolf Nureyev, Jane Birkin, and Josephine Baker. It was all very staged with
classical music, a lot of sets, and yet, ultimately, it was kind of staid and not very exciting. It was politely received, followed by an intermission. Then the American segment came on. There were no sets. It was all about lighting, with just Joe Eula’s huge brush painting of the Eiffel Tower as the background.”

“Kay had the models going
fast,
” recalled Christina Smith, “just boom boom boom boom boom! Clean and precise.”

“The French portion had dragged on for days,” remembered Eula, “and here we storm on and off in exactly thirty-five minutes. It was breathtaking. We
killed
’em. And when it was over, the audience threw fifty-dollar programs in the air like they were confetti.”

“There was a frenzy,” Dennis Christopher agreed, “which was especially surprising from such a refined audience. These were not kids at a rock concert. These were the wealthiest kings, queens, and royalty of Europe. Princess Grace showed up with her fucking crown on.”

“I’ll never forget Yves St. Laurent, so long and gangly, coming backstage, picking up Kay and swinging her around,” Liza observed. “He said to her, ‘The Americans have triumphed again.’ ”