Kay Thompson (67 page)

Over the years, Kay entertained a barrage of proposals from Disney and Universal Pictures (for animated Eloise movies); from Robert Wagner (for an Eloise cartoon series); from Mike Nichols, Franco Zeffirelli, Robert Evans, Steve Tisch, Tracey Ullman, and George Hamilton (for live-action Eloise movies); from Jerome Robbins and Geraldine Chaplin (for Eloise ballets); from Knopf (for a Kay Thompson memoir); from Charles Evans (for a Thompson biopic); and from Donald and Ivana Trump (for Eloise promotions at their newly acquired Plaza Hotel). But, like a cat toying with mice before dinner, Kay strung everyone along before “cutting them off at the ankles.”

No one was immune to her possessiveness. Not even the person who paid her rent. “You know Kay threatened to sue Liza if she ever sang her songs,” Michael Feinstein related. “When Liza and I sang ‘I Love a Violin’ in Houston in 1985, we had to do it secretly because if Kay found out she would get her lawyer on the case.”

Fed up with her behavior, Richard Avedon advised friends to stay away. “She’s crazy,” he warned. “She’ll call you in the middle of the night and drive you absolutely nuts.”

One of the few people who actually saw Kay in the flesh was Bi-Ko, a Chinese physical therapist who came to the apartment once a week to administer a combination of Japanese shiatsu massage and acupuncture. One of her other devoted clients was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“Kay’s apartment was always very clean,” Bi-Ko observed. “She had a maid come in once a week. She never wore makeup. She dressed casually but always elegant. Her main problem was that she didn’t want to see doctors. Her teeth were really bad. She refused to go out and never let anyone come see her—including Liza. They talked on the phone but their relationship seemed strained. Kay was very stubborn. Everything was done on the phone, sent in and delivered.”

Although Minnelli continued taking care of the rent, utilities, and other expenditures, Thompson was covering some of her own day-to-day living expenses with money she received from Social Security. Occasionally, she ran out of cash. Kay’s former business manager, Leonard Grainger, explained, “Once she called and said, ‘Listen, I have a friend of mine who needs a thousand dollars and I just don’t happen to have the thousand dollars right now. Would you mind loaning it to him?’ And I’d say, ‘No, not at all.’ So I’d send a check for a thousand dollars, and of course it was for her.”

“One time, Kay wanted some money from me,” recalled Andy Williams.
“So I gave her $10,000 in exchange for the publishing rights to ‘Kay Thompson’s Jingle Bells’ and ‘Holiday Season,’ which I published through my own Barnaby Publishing Company.”

But what about the royalty checks she was receiving from Simon & Schuster for the never-ending reissues of the first
Eloise
book? According to Hilary Knight, he periodically received payments that were “substantial,” so hers would have been twice as much. Apparently, Thompson never kept any of her royalty income liquid. “She had her money invested in stocks,” recalled Grainger. “It was strange because when she needed cash, she could have sold some stocks. But she was afraid to sell, I suppose.”

When asked if she thought Thompson was under the influence of speed, Bi-Ko replied, “I had a sense about that because she wanted me to come at
very
strange hours. I’d rarely go to see her any earlier than ten or eleven o’clock at night. I’d do her for an hour and then we’d chat and talk and blah-blah-blah until all hours of the morning. She’d pick up the phone in the middle of the night and dial somebody and when they didn’t answer, she’d get mad and say, ‘Why don’t people answer the phone?!’ I’d say, ‘Kay, who are you calling?’ And she’d say, ‘Hammacka Schlammacka’—her nickname for Hammacher Schlemmer. She had no idea of time.”

Thompson never ceased to amaze with her eccentricities. “One day I came for a session,” Bi-Ko explained, “and Kay showed me her leg. ‘These are the places that hurt me.’ She had put red Magic Marker dots all over her leg but the ink started running. So the next time, she put little pieces of masking tape on all the places.”

“Another day,” Bi-Ko continued, “she said, ‘Would you like a chestnut?’ I thought, ‘
A
chestnut?!’ ‘Sure,’ I said. So I watched her as she picked up a single chestnut with tongs and roasted it over a gas flame. Then she presented me with one roasted chestnut on this beautiful china plate, on a silver tray, with a crystal glass of water, a fine linen napkin, and a fresh rose in a vase.”

Then, in August 1990, the fairy tale turned Grimm. Shell-shocked by the recent deaths of Garbo, Sammy Davis Jr., and Halston, the 80-year-old Thompson fell and injured her brittle, osteoporotic bones.

“Kay called me in desperation,” Bi-Ko remembered. “I rushed there and she said, ‘I think I’ve broken something. I need you to help me get up onto the bed.’ She couldn’t walk. I said, ‘Let me call the hospital.’ She said, ‘No, no, no! I’ll be fine.’ She was afraid that she’d go into a hospital and never get out, or be put in a nursing home. I said, ‘Kay, let me call Liza.’ And she said, ‘
Don’t you dare!
She’s filming a movie in Toronto and I don’t want her to know!’ She made me promise that I wouldn’t tell her.”

After Bi-Ko left, Kay refused to let another living soul enter the apartment. On the phone, she acted as though everything was perfectly fine, when in fact she was incapacitated with a broken foot and fractured hip. She could barely drag herself to get food and water, much less caffeine, cigarettes, or “B-12” fixes. It was cold-turkey central. Days turned into weeks. Time blurred. She completely lost her grip on reality. It was like Miss Havisham.

“There were vermin everywhere,” related a friend who wished to remain anonymous. “Discarded soup cans, tins, old newspapers. Horrible beyond belief. When she needed to go to the bathroom or whatever, she’d crawl on the floor, beating off roaches with a back scratcher. Then the place flooded. The water destroyed all her manuscripts and things.”

Eventually the building’s management called Liza’s accountant, who paid the rent, and said, “There’s a problem. The smell is so bad coming from her apartment that you’ve got to do something or we’re going to evict her.”

The complaint caught Minnelli completely off guard. “Liza called me in a panic and asked me about it,” Bi-Ko explained. “I said, ‘Liza, she should be in the hospital.’ Liza said, ‘I’m going to take care of it.’ Later, Kay called and was so annoyed with me. She accused me of telling Liza. I hadn’t. But Kay wouldn’t speak to me ever again.”

When Liza arrived at the apartment, she was stunned by the nightmarish squalor. And it quickly became clear that Kay was not going to budge without a fight. Shrewdly, Liza invented, “Kay, reporters and paparazzi are on their way over here.”

That’s all it took. Thompson replied, “Let’s go.”

Rescued from this
Grey Gardens
hell, Kay was rushed to a hospital, where she was treated for malnutrition and dehydration. Her bones had not mended properly, so, like the cripple she had taunted in
Junie Moon,
she would now be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. If there was a silver lining, it was that she’d finally receive the necessary dental work she’d avoided for eons.

“What day is it?” the doctor asked her, trying to determine her competence.

“You fool, it’s Thursday!” Kay barked back defiantly.

She knew what day it was and knew what was going on, but like Howard Hughes, was selectively delusional. When she was well enough to leave the hospital, she was moved to Minnelli’s apartment on Sixty-ninth Street, where she was installed in the guest room and provided with a nurse to look after her. The muscle needed to lift Kay to and from her wheelchair was provided by M’hammed Soumayah, a handsome bodyguard-chauffeur formerly employed by the King of Morocco and Halston. And for companionship, Liza gave Kay a new pug dog to spoil, sardonically named Mr. Begelman,
after the notorious manager David Begelman, who bilked Judy Garland out of her fortune.

“Liza was marvelous,” Joe Eula recalled. “She took care of Kay. I used to go up there and visit her all the time. She was a frail, withered thing in a wheelchair but as tough as ever—all wrapped in a pea jacket and a bright red Halston scarf and a bandanna on her head with three hairs. That dame was a survivor.”

“God bless Liza,” praised Roni Agress, who was working as Minnelli’s assistant throughout the transition. “The circumstances that brought Kay to Liza’s apartment were not pleasant, but, I’ll tell ya, the end result was a resurrection.”

“She was treated like royalty in that home,” said Jim Caruso. “Like a queen, living out her last years in absolute luxury. Rigaud-scented luxury. Liza’s house-boy, M’hammed, would fix Kay’s lunch plate and it was a work of art. A little delicate plate with little flowers painted on it, with ten champagne grapes—those little tiny grapes—with two beautiful crackers with a wedge of something. Little, beautifully put together things. That’s what she liked. And a Coke can. Always a can of Coke. It was like a fashion accessory.”

“Kay was the ruler of the free world, you know,” said Michael Feinstein, “so Liza was indulgent of that. Sometimes Kay would assert herself. Liza was always very deferential yet I know that it was, at times, hard for her.”

“It got to be tough,” Roni Agress observed. “It’s your house, it’s nobody’s business how you live your life, but there is an extra person in there who will know if you’re coming and going, late or early, or this or that.”

“There was a wall built,” Lorna Luft explained, “so my sister would not have to go by Kay’s door and see Kay’s eyebrow rise up.”

“But Liza adored Kay above all else,” Feinstein added, “and she just made sure that she was taken care of. Kay was her last family member, in some ways, of the old guard.”

“Liza not only loved Kay as a person,” observed George Feltenstein, “she would go absolutely bananas anytime Michael or I would find a rare piece of Kay’s music. ‘Oh my, just listen to what she did there! The
brilliance
of it!’ ”

In January 1991, the
New York Daily News
declared, “With Garbo gone, the last recluse in New York is Kay Thompson.” But, by the fall of that year, things had normalized to the point where Thompson was ready to brave the public again.

Julie Wilson recalled, “At the premiere of Liza’s movie
Stepping Out,
Kay was there in her wheelchair. When she saw me, she threw up her arms and said, ‘Julie! How are you?!’ I give Liza a lot of credit for getting Kay out of her hiding, to make her a part of everything.”

Rekindled, Kay was suddenly up to her old tricks—including the all-too-familiar nihilistic ones. In 1992, for instance, she agreed to let Simon & Schuster reissue
Eloise in Paris
, but after promotional posters had already gone up in bookstores, she pulled the plug.

Meanwhile, Kay was discussing various ideas with John Loring, director of design for Tiffany & Co. “Naturally, the most promising of the bunch was a book to be called
Eloise at Tiffany’s
,” Loring recalled. “It’s not hard to imagine all the possibilities: Eloise breaking things, disturbing nice ladies who were trying to shop, driving the sales people mad. It would have been delicious. From the book would have evolved a whole Eloise Collection at Tiffany & Co.—children’s jewelry, piggybanks, dishes, silverware with Eloise and the dog and the turtle as the handles. There would have been no end to it. Unfortunately, she and Hilary Knight just could not see eye to eye and it all fell apart.”

But Thompson wasn’t done. She said to Loring, “You remember Walter Hoving’s book
Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers
? Well, I think grownups need a few table manners. Why don’t I write
Tiffany’s Table Manners for Grownups
?”

“She started coming up with the zaniest things to tell grownups
not
to do,” Loring remembered. “Joe Eula had illustrated Hoving’s book, so Kay was talking to him about doing her
Grownup
version. But, obviously, that never worked out either. Then she wanted to do a Tiffany fragrance to be called ‘Think Pink.’ ”

None of it came to pass. “Kay had the mind of a grasshopper,” Loring reminisced. “Scattered but very determined. Whenever she’d get exasperated with me, she’d go into her Eloise voice and say, ‘Well, good-bye. I’m going to play in traffic.’ Click! She had a habit of hanging up the phone as an exclamation point at the end of sentences.”

W
hile Thompson made a
career out of sabotaging Eloise, others had a field day satirizing the character. In 1967, Yves Saint Laurent wrote and illustrated
La vilaine Lulu
, a book about the ghastly adventures of ten-year-old Nasty Lulu who splattered fashionistas with black ink, took hallucinogens, and set homes on fire. Although
The New York Times
wrote that she “does things Eloise would never have dreamed of,” she did have a governess and a schoolgirl’s uniform that seemed awfully familiar. Then in 1971,
National Lampoon
magazine published “Michael O’Donoghue’s Eloise,” four years before Michael became the founding head writer for
Saturday Night Live.
The spread explained that due to an economic downturn, Eloise had been forced to move from The Plaza to
the grungy Dixee Hotel. “My mother . . . cawn’t cawn’t cawn’t afford Nanny anymore,” Eloise said. “My new nurse’s name is Carmelita Sanchez. She hooks on the side.”

In 1976, O’Donoghue’s girlfriend, Anne Beatts, in cahoots with humorist Deanne Stillman, instigated a parody entitled “Eloise Returns,” with art direction by John Belushi’s future wife, Judith Jacklin. Published in the feminist magazine
New Dawn,
as well as in the book
Titters: The First Collection of Humor By Women,
the spread showed Eloise living at The Plaza, only now, like Pooky Peckinpaugh, she’s seventeen years old and getting into the kind of precocious mischief that might get her arrested or pregnant. Provocative graffiti on a wall read “Mr. Salomone was a child molester!”—a punch line that did not sit well with the real-life Alphonse Salomone. In fact, he sued for libel but ultimately could not prove to the New York Supreme Court that his reputation had been damaged by an obvious joke. Remarkably, that landmark decision is still cited today in cases involving parody.