Kay Thompson (68 page)

Kay had absolutely no sense of humor about this sort of thing and was frustrated that she had no legal recourse to stop it. She really blew a gasket over Bob Morris’ “Delia at the Delano,” a humor piece in the February 18, 1996, edition of
The New York Times Magazine,
about “a trendy 8-year-old who lives at the Delano in Miami with a Prada ant farm and a French au pair.” Recognizing its Eloisian potential, the Delano’s owner, Ian Schrager (of Studio 54 fame), paid Morris to expand the spread into the book
Delia at the Delano
, published later that year. Hot off the presses, Schrager sent two hundred thousand free copies to movers and shakers “to create a groundswell, a buzz.”

There was a buzz, all right. Protesting that the book was more copycat than parody, Thompson got Simon & Schuster to send a cease-and-desist letter to Schrager that erupted into a farcical feud, with indignant press conferences and rebuttals, until
Delia at the Delano
had been indelibly “suppressed” right into the public consciousness. By the time the book became “unavailable,” it was a hot item on the collector market—although for those who bothered to check, it remained brazenly on sale at the Delano gift shop long after Schrager told
Time
that he had amicably agreed to yank it.

When Kay got wind of the breach, she phoned a fan in Florida to blow the whistle on Delia contraband—a priceless postscript to the saga of the cranky old lady who brought an almighty tycoon to his knees.

Perhaps the most biting of all Eloise parodies was the Roz Chast cartoon published in the May 1, 1995, edition of
The New Yorker
. Entitled “Eloise Revisited,” the panel shows a forty-six-year-old recluse in a frumpy housecoat, lying in her Plaza Hotel bed watching TV, surrounded by a mess of magazines,
half-eaten room service trays, and other assorted junk strewn about. No one dared show it to Kay because it struck too close to home.

Thompson
did
spend most of her time lying in bed, glued to the television or yapping on the phone. Once a week, she’d call her sister, Blanche, to argue about politics. Although Kay was a staunch Democrat, she never cottoned to Bill Clinton, so she cast an absentee ballot for independent candidate Ross Perot.

She was captivated by real-life mysteries like the Clifford Irving/Howard Hughes hoax, Travelgate, and the peculiar circumstances surrounding the death of her friend Doris Duke.

“During the Claus von Bülow trial that I covered in 1982,” revealed true crime journalist Dominick Dunne, “Kay would call me up every night at my hotel in Rhode Island. That was one of the first televised trials, ‘gavel to gavel,’ and she watched every minute of it. She
hated
Claus. So did I, so we were in absolute accord. She would call me and she would get
so worked up because it wasn’t going right
!”

“She was obsessed with the O.J. Simpson trial,” Jim Caruso said. “She absolutely thought he was innocent. He was an acquaintance and that was good enough for Kay.”

Thompson was an avid—and eclectic—reader. She devoured philosophy books like
Meditation in Action
by Chogyam Trungpa. “He’s a guru to a lama,” Kay explained to writer Hugh Fordin. “Listen, we need to go to Tibet. I wish it were on the ocean. It may be for all I know.”

At the other end of the spectrum, she loved juicy showbiz memoirs like
Haywire
by Brooke Hayward, daughter of producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan. “We were at a party,” recalled Geoffrey Johnson, “and Kay was very excited to talk to Brooke about the book, but she just wanted to change the subject.”

“There was a book about the Pope called
In God’s Name
[by David A. Yallop] that she was quite worked up about,” remembered Michael Feinstein. “Transgressions in the church and all the corruption. She said, ‘You
must
go out and
immediately
get a copy!’ ”

When Bette Midler did a sassy children’s book called
The Saga of Baby Divine,
reviewers often compared it to
Eloise.
“Kay liked it,” Hilary Knight recalled, “which surprised me because anything that even remotely seemed like Eloise, she usually hated. But Kay really liked Bette Midler, so it was okay.”

She had other pop culture favorites, including Bernadette Peters, John Travolta, and Whoopi Goldberg. And Liza marveled, “Kay was completely up to date on every piece of music that came out. Everything Annie Lennox did. She loved her. She loved Sting.”

When Sting was headed to Broadway in
3 Penny Opera,
Thompson told the show’s casting director, Geoffrey Johnson, “Well, I could take Sting in hand and tell him exactly what he’s doing wrong and what he can do to make the performance better.” Unfortunately, she was never given that tantalizing opportunity.

Jim Caruso remembered, “One day, Kay said, ‘I want a record of monks singing.’ Of course, nobody had such a thing. Finally, I called one of those scary places downtown like the bookstore in
Funny Face,
except it’s records. She would have
loved
this place. They absolutely had an old cassette tape of some crummy old monks in Parma chanting. So I got it for her. Well, she was
thrilled
. Beyond thrilled. She played it twenty-four hours a day. Six months go by and all of a sudden we’re reading
The New York Times
and there’s a two-page spread of this new CD called
Chant
. It ended up being the No. 1 worldwide selling record of all time, something crazy like that. I immediately called Kay and said, ‘What made you think of monks, for God’s sake? They’re so hot now.’ And she said, ‘It was just time for monks.’ ”

She was also wildly unpredictable. “One of my all-time favorite Kay Thompson arrangements is her version of ‘How Deep Is the Ocean,’ ” said Caruso. “One day we were sitting in the kitchen and I said, ‘Kay, someday I’d kill to have an arrangement that cool.’ Not ever thinking she was going to let me have it. But, all of a sudden, Kay gives me the arrangement. I think Liza’s hair almost fell out when she gave it to me—because normally Kay didn’t let anybody do anything.”

Was Thompson finally softening up in her old age?

“Kay talked about Andy Williams a lot,” recalled Roni Agress. “She said they’d had a falling-out at one point. I remember she got in touch with him when he started performing out of Branson because she wanted to send him a painting. I know they had a long conversation and she said to me, ‘Things are better now.’ She was very happy she had talked to him.”

Her relationship with her goddaughter improved, too. One day Liza confided to Kay, “Mama died when she was forty-seven. I always worried that by the time I got to that age, I’d be dead, too. But, now that I’m turning forty-eight, I think that I should celebrate that I’m still here.”

So, on March 12, 1994, to commemorate Liza’s “coming of age,” Kay decided to throw her a birthday party. But this was not going to be just an intimate, cake-and-candles affair.

“A Radio City musical extravaganza” was how Thompson underplayed it to
Variety
.

“The attraction was that Kay would be hosting the party for Liza at The Plaza Hotel,” Roni Agress remembered. “It was mythic. The whole history. It was a grand idea.”

Enthusiasm mounted, and suddenly the fête was going to be filmed as a Liza Minnelli television special and recorded for an album—with Kay joining Liza “on little bits of it here and there.” Donald Saddler, who had danced for Bob Alton and won a Tony for choreographing
No, No, Nanette,
was recruited to join the creative team.

“Kay thought I should stage it,” Saddler explained. “We would eat in the kitchen at Liza’s apartment and discuss what it would be like. It was very
en familia.
”

Fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert and Tiffany & Co.’s John Loring were brought on board as consultants.

“It was going to take place at The Plaza in the Terrace Room,” recalled Loring. “We’d go over there and work in that space. Kay was stage directing the whole thing from a wheelchair. We had recording people and computerized light towers. It was going to be rehearsed for several days but Kay kept repeating, ‘It’s got to be totally spontaneous, you understand.’ ”

“Kay was
reborn
,” recalled George Feltenstein, who oversees the MGM vault and archive. “They were going to do ‘Madame Crematante’ from
Ziegfeld Follies
and ‘Ladies’ Man’ from
Good News,
so Kay called and asked me to get the conductor scores, which I did and I sent them to her.”

“Leaving nothing to chance,” Loring added, “Kay took a big red magic felt marker and wrote out the invitation, which she insisted we reproduce exactly ‘as is,’ in red ink on white invitation cards, made by Tiffany & Co., suitable for framing.”

The distinctive scrawl read, “Kay Thompson is giving a Surprise Birthday Party for Liza . . . Liza AGREES it’s a Good IDEA . . . So Come to the Plaza. WE’LL
BE THERE
.”

Invitations were in the mail when sadly, Kay came down with pneumonia and the whole occasion had to be canceled. But, even though the final presentation never came to fruition, the experience had been a personal triumph. One last heavenly hurrah in the thick of it.

When she was on life support at Lenox Hill Hospital, everybody thought she was a goner—except for her former chorus member Beverly Freeland, who blithely insisted, “Oh, no. Kay’s not the type to die.”

She was right. Thompson cheated death again and lived four more pampered years at Chez Liza, chatting on the phone, feeding green lime Chuckles to Mr. Begelman, and conjuring up a thousand new projects that went no further than her mind’s eye.

“Whenever I’m tired,” Thompson told friends, “I just think about the
glorious colors of butterfly wings. It’s refreshing. I mean, butterflies never get tired—or if they do, we never hear about it.”

On May 14, 1998, Sinatra died—a blow that really knocked the wind out of Kay. Then, on June 19, she received an unexpected gift. It was a new CD with a letter that read, “Dear Kay, I like this album of Dave Grusin’s. I thought you would like it too. Love, Andy.” The music was nice, but it was the note from her long-lost love that made her shoulders tingle.

Shortly afterward, on July 2, at age eighty-eight, Kay joined the choir—where you can bet she’s jazzed up the arrangements with “a lot of joy and a whole lot of tra-la-la!”

In the aftermath of her passing, Rex Reed eulogized that she had “a trumpet in her heart” and was “ahead of her time for nine decades.”

China Machado reflected, “There is a Spanish song called ‘Dramática Mujer’—which means ‘dramatic woman’—and that’s what Kay was.”

For Liza, words were not enough: “It’s impossible to describe what a fascinating person Kay was. She’s the original ‘you had to have been there.’ ”

The last thing Kay ever said to me was, “I’ll see you in the movies.”

It still gives me chills.

—Jim Caruso

K
ay Thompson’s pervasive genius still reverberates in movies, music, dance, books, and fashion. But perhaps her most surprising gift was empowerment. Legions of working women have been inspired by her trail-blazing in a man’s world—in real life as well as on screen in
Funny Face
. And generations of children have been seminally influenced by the independent spirit of Eloise.

“She was my kind of girl,” recalled supermodel Lauren Hutton, who discovered Eloise while growing up in Charleston, South Carolina. “I didn’t realize it then, but she became my role model. You know, she escaped from her parents, got to live in The Plaza, and could go around causing trouble. It was a hell of a life. And I did get to grow up and live a lot of it.”

As a child in Texas during the 1950s,
Vanity Fair
writer-at-large Marie Brenner was taken with Eloise, too. “We were in the middle of a gray flannel society,” Brenner recalled. “Our mothers had station wagons. We were girl scouts. And here was this little girl who could sklonk kneecaps. She could put water in mail chutes. She could do things we didn’t
dream
of doing. We would
say to our mothers, ‘Why can’t we live like Eloise?’ And I think an entire generation of us tried to.”

Another member of that Eloise generation was
Batman Returns
producer Denise Di Novi, who fulfilled a lifelong dream when she instigated two Emmy Award–winning television movies,
Eloise at the Plaza
and
Eloise at Christmas-time,
both starring Julie Andrews as Nanny.

“When I was about seven years old,” Di Novi explained, “I received the
Eloise
book for Christmas. I’ve loved her ever since. She was part of the reason I wanted to live in New York and part of the reason I wanted to stay at The Plaza as soon as I had enough money.”

“I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of Eloise,” recalled Meredith Vieira of
The Today Show
. “I grew up in East Providence, Rhode Island. Small town, two parents, a picket fence, a perfect, idyllic suburban life. And I would sit there in my room and fantasize about a life at The Plaza. Forget the picket fence. I wanted to live in a big hotel. Here was this little kid who called the shots and it was a
girl
. And she had this attitude—and I wanted some of that attitude. I wanted to be her.”

Eloise
opened minds in other ways, too. “The vocabulary!” Marie Brenner marveled. “I mean ‘zimbering,’ ‘the zimbering reindeer.’ Remember that? And ‘I skibbled and skittered.’ Ah! For a young girl who was going to grow up to be a writer, these words were a liberation. It showed me the power of words, what you could do with an inventive sentence.”

But the impact ran even deeper. “Rereading all the Eloise books,” Brenner added, “I realized how powerful she was and how she inhabited our imagination. I really began thinking about her in the most broad cultural terms and I realized that not only had she given me permission to rebel, but that, in fact, she was the very symbol for our generation to usher in the 1960s. There have been other bad girls in children’s books but this one felt like the 1960s are coming. You could really feel the beginning of a new era. And then, of course, ten years later, we were all teenagers and we were right in the middle of the youthquake. Eloise’s importance as a cultural figure is that she was a liberating force coming in. She was our Holden Caulfield.”