Kay Thompson (66 page)

“Not since Eisenhower liberated Paris have the Americans had such a triumph in France,” concluded high-society matriarch C. Z. Guest.

“It was the robbery of all time,” raved fashion critic Eugenia Sheppard in the
Los Angeles Times.
“Five American ready-to-wear designers completely stole a joint fashion show from five of the greatest names in world fashion.”

“Like a big show on Broadway,” assessed Marc Bohan of the House of Dior, “Kay Thompson knew what she was doing.”

“Up to that time,” Eleanor Lambert explained, “everybody in America went to Paris for inspiration, but this show turned the tables.”

“They agree to disagree about where the fashion world’s capital should be,” wrote William Safire in
The New York Times,
“though most concur that American director Kay Thompson taught them a lesson in sparkling presentation.”

Bill Cunningham of
The New York Times
later reflected that the show was “the Valhalla of American fashion—and everything was all downhill after that.”

Lambert concluded, “The show was groundbreaking on so many levels—not just introducing American designers—but changing the way fashion shows were presented. And Kay was a very big part of that.”

“We did Versailles in November and I didn’t come down until February,” Kay rhapsodized. “It was just the most exciting, just crazy, wonderful, beautiful stuff.”

For the rest of her life, Thompson talked about authoring
Getting It Together
, a coffee table book chronicling the milestone, but true to form, that
never happened. However, in 1993, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a twentieth-anniversary tribute to the Versailles smackdown as “the moment American fashion came of age.”

In the wake of her Versailles victory, Kay virtually became the fashion doyenne she had played in
Funny Face,
opening up a whole new career for herself at age sixty-four.

Soon she was staging a Rube Goldberg–inspired “Exhibition on Escalators” for the opening of Bergdorf Goodman in White Plains, New York, showcasing collections by Halston, Bill Blass, James Galanos, Norman Norell, Pauline Trigère, Donald Brooks, and Kenneth Jay Lane—with Hubert de Givenchy, Prince Egon von Fürstenberg, New York governor Malcolm Wilson, and Pat Kennedy Lawford on hand as guests of honor. The kick-off was underscored with Burt Bacharach’s exotic Bollywood ballet, “Sir James’ Trip to Find Mata,” from the soundtrack to
Casino Royale.

As
The New York Times
reported, “Twenty-five models, choreographed by Kay Thompson, glided, twirled, reclined and danced as they went up and down” a labyrinth of cascading escalators in a vast three-story atrium under a moonlit skylight.

“I wanted it to look like a waterfall of beautiful girls,” Kay explained in the
New York Post.

“Miss Thompson,”
The New York Times
added, “crouched at the bottom and using her hands as a baton to orchestrate the movements, was, to many, a sight equally as mesmerizing as the show.”

“Surrounding Kay was a team of Otis workmen,” wrote Eugenia Sheppard, “who were making the escalators do tricks.”

It was Barnum & Bailey meets Busby Berkeley with Thompson as Houdini. Or, as the
Times
concluded, simply a “smasheroo.”

When Anne Klein died of cancer in 1974, her assistant, Donna Karan, became head designer for the company and chose Thompson to direct the presentation of her first collection. When Kay decided to show the tropical resort wear in a grimy, industrial warehouse setting, some of the Klein establishment feared she’d lost all her marbles, but critics and buyers went positively nuts over the unusual juxtaposition. At the conclusion of the show, amid screams of approval, Thompson gave Karan a great big bear hug and said, “You just went out and came back a star.”

When Thompson’s name was mentioned to Donna Karan in 2008, her eyes lit up and she exclaimed, “Oh my God, Kay! She was so important in my life. She meant so much to me and I wouldn’t be here today without her. She was motherly, delicious, and made it all happen.”

L
iza’s next big movie
project was a family affair:
A Matter of Time
, directed by Vincente Minnelli, based on Maurice Druon’s 1954 French novel
La Volupté d’être
(source of the 1965 British play
La Contessa
, starring Vivien Leigh). Liza was set for the role of Nina, chambermaid to an aging Italian contessa, Lucrezia Sanziani, once the rage of Europe, now suffering from Norma Desmond–like dementia. As the old woman reminisces about the wild exploits of her heyday, Nina fantasizes that the flashbacks are her own.

“Actually, the thing was a love story between the chambermaid and the countess, if you want to look at it that way,” recalled the movie’s screenwriter, John Gay. “That’s really what it was all about.”

The contessa character was inspired by the Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881–1957), a scandalous heiress who wore “live snakes as jewelry,” paraded “cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes,” and employed “nude servants gilded in gold leaf.” According to Hilary Knight, Kay was “absolutely fascinated by Casati and campaigned hard to play this fictionalized version of her in
A Matter of Time
.”

Others considered for the part included Luise Rainer, who had won two Best Actress Academy Awards in the 1930s, and Valentina Cortese, who had recently been Oscar-nominated for François Truffaut’s
Day for Night
. But the producers insisted on pairing Liza with a bigger star. When Katharine Hepburn demanded too much money, the coveted role ended up going to Ingrid Bergman, hot on the heels of her Oscar-winning comeback in
Murder on the Orient Express
.

Nevertheless, Thompson did not walk away from the project. “Liza’s going to do the film in Italy,” Kay said during a radio interview. “And I’m going to be a consultant.”

“Kay had a certain cadence, a certain melody to the way she wanted me to speak in that picture,” Liza recalled, “and it was wonderful because it was exactly what Ingrid Bergman was doing, too. Kay said, ‘You have to paint the picture with the melody of the words.’ She instinctually understood what needed to be done and she was dead right.”

Kay’s disappointment over not being able to appear in the picture eventually turned to relief when the distributor cut the film to shreds, resulting in, as Rex Reed put it, “a brainless gumbo of incompetence.” It effectively killed the career of Vincente Minnelli; he never directed another movie.

Miraculously, Liza emerged unscathed and Kay continued to advise her through a rapid succession of major motion pictures, starting with
New York, New York
, directed by Martin Scorsese. “They first asked Kay to do the vocal
arrangements,” remembered Earl Brown, who had sung in Thompson’s chorus at MGM. “But she was not feeling well at the time and she didn’t want to travel to Los Angeles. So Kay told Liza, ‘If you can’t get me, get Earl Brown.’ ”

“We were at MGM shooting the picture,” Liza explained. “I was in my mother’s old dressing room and I called Kay and said, ‘Can you help me? This is all about singing in the forties.’ I care about the words so much but Kay said, ‘That’s not what it’s about.’ Back then, big-band singers were supposed to be up, no matter what the song was about. Kay said, ‘You’re thinking too much about the words. Pretend your head is a balloon and there’s a string through your ears. Now, just smile and sing.’ ”

Thompson also instructed Minnelli on phrasing. “I was trying to sing ‘You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me’ very fluidly,” Liza explained, “but Kay told me, ‘No. Sing it right on the beat.’ And I said, ‘Huh?’ Then she sang it, ‘If a NIGHTingale, COULD sing like you, THEY’D sing sweeter THAN they do . . . Cause YOU brought a NEW kind of LOVE to me.’ I said, ‘Uh, well, okay . . . ’ So I sang it that way and everybody thought it was just the hippest thing they’d ever heard and I said, ‘Yeah, I know.’ ”

“On
Arthur,
” Liza continued, “Kay put me in black high-tops, jeans, a little striped T-shirt that we’d gotten in Italy, a yellow slicker, a low belt like we always wore, a red cowboy hat, and a bandanna around my head. And from the moment my character came on the screen, you knew exactly who she was. Kay just nailed it.”

By then, Liza was the poster child for the hedonistic New York nightlife of the 1970s—and Kay was part of her entourage, a freakish fixture of Studio 54, where she got a kick out of the giant mechanical “Man in the Moon with a Cocaine Spoon.”

Lorna Luft observed that Thompson “was fascinated by the Sodom and Gomorrah type of atmosphere going on there.”

“Kay was always asking about sex in the balcony and all that,” Liza said, laughing. “And I’d say, ‘I don’t know about
that,
but if you push this button in the lighting booth, you can light to the beat of the music.’ ”

When Liza married Mark Gero on December 4, 1979, Archdeacon Peter Delaney, who had officiated the Judy Garland–Mickey Deans wedding, came from London to New York to preside. “I expect I didn’t come up to scratch in terms of the clothes I was going to wear,” Archdeacon Delaney recalled. “So, I had this extraordinary spree for two days with Kay Thompson in black limos, darting from various couturiers I’d never heard of, trying to get some suits that were more stylish. I suppose I was being ‘Vogued’ by Kay Thompson, for lack of any other expression. Can you imagine anything more splendid?”

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Thompson was still hot to trot, a habitué of Regine’s, an impromptu performer at Ted Hook’s Backstage Club, and a staple at every opening.

“I was at Elaine’s one New Year’s Eve,” remembered Randall Wallace, “and in swept Kay with an entourage of pretty boys, looking like something out of
Sheltering Sky
. Bizarre but arresting. She had this elongated black hooded cape thing, with black kohl under her eyes. Very Egyptian.”

“When Ethel Merman and Mary Martin appeared together on Broadway, Kay came with us,” recalled Geoffrey Johnson. “Everything she wore was black, except an aluminum foil vest. I said, ‘Kay, that’s stunning. Where did you get it?’ She said, ‘Oh, do you like it? I made it myself, just for this evening.’ ”

In 1981,
People
magazine described the always-cloaked-in-black Thompson as “a Bergmanesque dervish.” And though she gushed about the plethora of projects on her plate, as far as anyone could tell, she never committed to anything.

“I was working for Harry Warren in 1980 and ’81,” Michael Feinstein recalled. “Paramount was going to make another musical with John Travolta because of the success of
Grease
, and they were going to do this Harry Warren musical written and directed by Jim Bridges starring Travolta. I called Kay to ask if she would do the vocal arrangements on that film and she said, ‘Oh, I’m way past that, darling. I’m doing so many other things now. I’m writing and I’m producing and I’m just so busy, I couldn’t possibly go back to that. I love doing it, but it’s just so far in my past.’ ”

A
s time went on,
Kay saw less and less of her goddaughter. Busy with her own life, Liza had collected two more husbands (Jack Haley Jr., and Mark Gero), suffered two devastating miscarriages (if she’d had a girl, she’d planned to name her Kay), kept the tabloids in business with high-profile flings (Baryshnikov, Scorsese, etc.), and, like her mother, had fallen prey to substance abuse that, in 1984, landed her in the Betty Ford Center.

“Liza always thought Kay didn’t know what she was doing,” observed Christina Smith, “but Kay did know—because Kay would ask me. She would be very upset about it.”

Lorna Luft reflected, “When my sister’s behavior started to, you know,
whatever,
Kay said, ‘Uh-oh, here we go.’ Because she knew the parents.”

To calm Liza’s distress over all the negative press, Kay told her, “The legend is going to build. They’re going to build it, you’ve got nothing to do with it. So don’t go out and say, ‘But I’m not like that!’ because people don’t want to hear it.”

“Kay always told me I sold papers so not to worry about it,” Liza later admitted to columnist Cindy Adams in the
New York Post.
“Sometimes that helped a little.”

As the years ticked by, Thompson seemed to become more and more world-weary. Contemporaries were dropping like flies, and with each passing, it seemed that a little bit of Kay’s spirit died, too.

Then Vincente Minnelli passed away in 1986. “I immediately called Kay,” Liza remembered. “She said, ‘Yes, darling, what is it?’ And I said, ‘Daddy died.’ There was a long pause and then she said, ‘Well, that’s it.’ I always wondered why she said that. ‘Well, that’s it.’ I guess, meaning that that whole period of her life was gone.”

In many ways, it was. Not long after that, Kay’s sister, Blanche, now a widow with failing eyesight, moved into the home of her daughter, Julie Hurd Szende, in Woodland Hills, California, where she could be looked after for the rest of her life. Saddened, Kay feared that someday she might lose her own independence, too.

“One day, I ran into Kay on the street,” recalled Leonard Gershe. “People kept looking at her because she looked so ghastly. And she said to me, ‘Isn’t it incredible what an impact that picture had?’ Meaning
Funny Face
. It never occurred to her why they were
really
gawking.”

“I was next to her in the crowd at a Broadway opening,” recalled Geoffrey Johnson, “and somebody said, ‘Oh my God, look! There’s Isak Dinesen!’ Kay said nothing.”

Eventually, she got the message and stopped going out altogether. Like Garbo and Dietrich, Thompson assumed the role of the eccentric recluse. She stayed in touch with the world strictly by telephone—with calls screened by Belles Answering Service (the company that inspired Vincente Minnelli’s
Bells Are Ringing
). And she kept those operators very busy.

For weeks on end, Kay conversed as Eloise with Francis Ford Coppola, who wanted to adapt
Eloise
for the silver screen. He eventually realized that Thompson would never be satisfied, so he ended the fruitless discussions with a curt “Well, good-bye to both of you.” Undaunted, the director collaborated with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Sofia Coppola, on the short screenplay for “Life Without Zoë,” a highly derivative tale of an eleven-year-old heiress who lives with her butler and a dog at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, diagonally across the street from The Plaza. Sumptuously produced for Coppola’s section of the anthology film
New York Stories
(Touchstone, 1989), the forty-minute short was cast with an impressive array of actors, including Giancarlo Giannini, Talia
Shire, and Adrien Brody (in his movie debut). Incensed, Thompson consulted with her lawyers but ultimately could do nothing to stop it. The legerdemain only served to heighten her distrust and obstinacy.