Kay Thompson (7 page)

On August 30, Kay joined the cast of
KFI’s Fun Factory,
a nighttime sketch comedy series that mined her comic abilities. The very next night, however, she committed something akin to treason by appearing on rival station KHJ, the local CBS affiliate. Though, contractually speaking, she was nonexclusive to KFI and free to moonlight elsewhere, Dolberg took it as a personal affront.

Nevertheless, Kay accepted an offer to be the featured singer and piano soloist for Tom Coakley and His Orchestra during their three-month gig in the Blossom Room overlooking the roof patio at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. On September 9, 1932, KHJ broadcast a live special from the Roosevelt featuring Coakley and company to coincide with one of the biggest social events of the year: the Gala World Premiere of
Rain
(United Artists, 1932) at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. All the stars and klieg lights in Hollywood were shining for the highly anticipated Joan Crawford vehicle, with much of that glitter and excitement spilling right across the street into the Roosevelt, where the after-party was taking place. This gave Thompson and Coakley a captive audience of A-list celebrities. After that enchanted evening, their stock rose dramatically. So, beginning Monday, September 26, the orchestra “featuring Kay Thompson” was broadcast over KHJ six nights a week through the end of Coakley’s engagement on October 25.

Kay could not help but notice Coakley’s handsome eighteen-year-old saxophone player and vocalist, an affable fellow by the name of Alvin Morris, who, in 1936, would change his name to Tony Martin and become a big-time singer and movie star. Kay alternately called him “Mr. Suede” (because he always wore it), or simply “Mr. M.,” nicknames she was still using on the air in 1939 when she and Tony co-headlined the series
Tune-Up Time
(CBS Radio).

Kay quickly became known for her startling vocal arrangements. She loved to take a song, do the first verse straight, then reinvent it, changing the tempo, adding lyrics, and improvising improbable flourishes that spiraled into the wild blue yonder. Her groundbreaking swing arrangements oozed Thompsonian gusto at every fast-and-furious turn. Not everyone appreciated her tampering, however. To the ears of übercolumnist Walter Winchell, she crossed the line by reinventing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” Appalled that Kay had “messed around with it on the air,” Winchell chastised her for being “sacrilegious.” Winchell did not forgive and forget, either. In 1937, he declared, “Kay Thompson simply spoils lovely hits by re-writing them.”

The Winchell-Thompson controversy fueled an onslaught of cover versions of “Stardust” from just about every band and vocalist on the map. In his autobiography, Carmichael credits Winchell for turning “Stardust” into the standard it is today, though it was Thompson’s “desecration” that got the fire started.

During the fall of 1932, three young male singers caught Thompson’s eyes and ears. They were eighteen-year-old Hal Hopper, a tenor from Oklahoma City (later the father of actor Jay North of
Dennis the Menace
fame), eighteen-year-old Woody Newbury, a tenor from Dallas, Texas, and seventeen-year-old Chuck Lowry, a baritone from Los Angeles. They called themselves the Three Rhythm Kings, inspired by Bing Crosby’s recently defunct trio, the Rhythm Boys. Kay took them under her wing and helped them create special arrangements to showcase their three-part harmonizing. Kay adopted the Three Rhythm Kings as her new backup singers, succeeding the Three Ambassadors.

Building on the group’s exposure with Coakley’s orchestra, Warner Brothers’ radio station, KFWB, launched a new series called
Kay Thompson and the Three Rhythm Kings
on Sunday night, October 2, 1932. Amazingly, with concurrent radio shows broadcasting over KFI, KHJ, and now KFWB, Kay had managed to become the belle of West Coast radio.

A
s Kay turned twenty-three
that November of 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president, to serve the first of four terms, a regime that would lead the nation out of the Great Depression and into the Second World War.

Kay had been so busy in California, she hadn’t made it back to St. Louis since April. The Finks were laying the pressure on thick for her to come home for Thanksgiving, but Kay replied that she was too busy to get away. Then, in mid-November, just minutes before one of her radio shows, Kay received a telegram from her mother:
FATHER TERRIBLY ILL COME HOME AT ONCE
.

“I stayed for the whole broadcast,” Kay recalled. “I couldn’t walk out on them.” As soon as it was over, she boarded the next train to St. Louis only to find that the seriousness of her father’s condition had been greatly exaggerated. Leo had been diagnosed with a heart condition known as angina pectoris, but he clearly was not on his deathbed. The panic had been a ruse—a rather sadistic one—to get Kay home for the holidays.

While Kay had been away, her St. Louis–based trio, the Debutantes, had morphed into Three Best Girls, featuring Blanche Fink, Louise LaRue, and Georgia Erwin, regularly featured on
KMOX County Fair
with pianist Ted Straeter. Marian Fink, who did not have as strong a passion for showbiz as
her sisters, had decided to leave the group but would occasionally fill in when needed. Kay was happy to see them and enjoyed getting caught up on all the local gossip.

Jimmie, the young man who had partied with Kay the day she got canned from KMOX, asked her out on a Saturday night date to the Beaux Arts Room, a fancy dinner/dance club at the Coronado Hotel in downtown St. Louis. After the first course, he proposed.

“I don’t want to get married,” Kay responded. “My place is at a microphone in front of an orchestra like that one. Now, be a good boy and wangle me an introduction to that bandleader.” The puppy dog obeyed and, a short time later, Jimmie formally introduced conductor Al Lyons to his non-fiancée, “Kitty Fink.”

Winking at Jimmie to keep his mouth shut, Kay took over the conversation: “I have a friend who was a sensation at the Cocoanut Grove and she’d love to sing with your band.” With devil horns practically growing out of her head, Kay added that her “friend” was a West Coast singer named Kay Thompson, in town for the holidays.

Mesmerized by two magic words—“Cocoanut Grove”—Lyons said, “Send her around to the Fox Theatre tomorrow for an audition.”

The next day, when Kay came sauntering down the aisle at the Fox, Al asked where the Cocoanut Grove vocalist, Kay Thompson, was.

“Here I am,” she said with a smirk, sashaying over to the piano. “I’m the girl.”

The hoax went over better than the audition itself. Suddenly, Kay was stricken with stage fright. Her voice cracked through the first eight bars of “Underneath the Harlem Moon.”

Thinking fast, she exaggerated the deterioration in her voice, whispering pathetically, “I’ve got laryngitis. But I’m really very good.”

“I’ll never forget it! It was horrible!” Kay later recalled. “But he said to return to work, to my astonishment.”

Pulling herself together, Kay performed with Lyons regularly at the Fox Theatre, the Coronado Hotel, and the Meadowbrook Country Club, plus two nights a week on KMOX.

Around Christmas, however, after she’d been back home only a month, fate dealt Kay a card that took her right back to Hollywood for her biggest break yet.

Thompson on the Air

(1933–37)

To us, she was the Statue of Liberty.

—Bea Wain, of Kay Thompson’s Rhythm Singers

“N
ext came a wire from Los Angeles,” Kay told a reporter, “asking me to sign up with Columbia.” Offered an eye-popping $200 per week, Kay was being recruited by Don Lee’s KHJ radio station, the Los Angeles affiliate of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). “A horseshoe must have appeared over my head!” Kay recalled. “My lucky day had come! So, away I swished myself.”

Kay settled back into her La Marquise apartment in Los Angeles—just three miles from her new place of employment in the eight-story Don Lee Building at 1076 West Seventh Street (at the corner of Bixel). A Cadillac dealership, also owned by Lee, took up the ground floor, with KHJ occupying several of the floors above.

Wasting no time, Lee placed her on a new program,
The Merrymakers Hour
, which premiered on January 1, 1933. It should come as no surprise that the sponsor was the Union Oil Company, arranged by marketing manager Don
Forker, whose undying loyalty to Kay was surely a factor in Lee’s decision to hire her in the first place.

The show’s ensemble of comic performers was led by Sterling Holloway, twenty-eight, a redheaded Georgian with a raspy falsetto who would later supply the voice of Walt Disney’s Winnie the Pooh. Though Sterling was a gay man, he and Kay had columnists thinking they were a couple. For instance, after the April 7 congressional vote to end Prohibition, the
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
reported that Kay and Sterling were the first to raise their mugs at the Cocoanut Grove on the night beer started flowing once again.

Thompson and Holloway were not the only diamonds in the rough at KHJ. “The first show on which I worked was
The Merrymakers,
” noted Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the future president of NBC-TV (and future father of actress Sigourney Weaver). Although officially hired as a comedy writer, Pat was a jack of all trades. “I was allowed to write, direct, announce, and sometimes even act in programs, many of which I conceived and developed.”

Because Pat reminded her of a bird, Kay affectionately nicknamed him “Weaver Feathers”—a moniker she used for decades to come.

A few weeks after
Merrymakers
got under way, Kay was added to
Laff Clinic
and
The Happy-Go-Lucky Hour,
the latter of which paired her with thirty-one-year-old vaudeville performer Frank Jenks. With his shock of wavy red hair slicked back tight on his head, Frank had an infectious Irish grin and a salty delivery that delighted audiences. From the moment Kay and Frank shared a microphone, hilarity ensued, and so, starting March 6, they were given their own song-and-comedy series,
Thompson and Jenks
.

Kay also joined
California Melodies,
the most popular of KHJ’s broadcasts because, each week, the show featured big-name Hollywood guest stars such as Jean Harlow, Boris Karloff, Claudette Colbert, Edward G. Robinson, Mae West, and Dick Powell, who became Kay’s lifelong friend. Unlike some of her starstruck colleagues, Thompson impressed celebrities with her blasé ease and charm. Throughout her life, Kay would be most comfortable mingling with the glitterati—even though she was often the least famous among them.

Thompson was accompanied on all five of these series by KHJ’s thirty-two-piece orchestra conducted by Raymond Paige, who encouraged her to create unique vocal arrangements that he would then orchestrate. “Paige was already well known,” recalled Pat Weaver, “though not as famous as he would become in New York as the Radio City Music Hall conductor. He fit perfectly into our jocular style at KHJ.”

T
outing its new starlet,
KHJ got the
Los Angeles Times
to run a headshot of Thompson on March 11, 1933—the first time her photograph appeared in a major publication. It caught the eye of Leonard Sillman, who asked her to join his first “New Faces” stage revue,
Low and Behold!
at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, scheduled for a one-week limited engagement starting May 16.

Bound by her exclusive contract with KHJ, Kay had to get special permission from Don Lee to do the show. In exchange for agreeing to work around her performance schedule, the station would collect 20 percent of her outside earnings. She was already giving up 10 percent of her income to an agent the station had forced on her, Thomas Lee, son of her boss. The conflict of interest was astounding.

But for Kay, doing
Low and Behold!
was not about the money. She hoped the exposure would lead to movies and/or Broadway.

The cast of
Low and Behold!
would include such unknowns as Eve Arden (then billed as Eunice Quedens), Teddy Hart (brother of lyricist Lorenz Hart), Charles Walters (who later became a top choreographer and director at MGM), Lois January (who later appeared in
The Wizard of Oz
), and, last but not least, Leonard Sillman’s hunky nineteen-year-old chauffeur, Tyrone Power.

On March 13, three days after the devastating Long Beach earthquake, rehearsals got off to a shaky start at a dance studio on Highland Avenue in Hollywood. “A lot of professional gnashing” was how Lois January described the rehearsals. “Fighting and feuding and ‘we don’t like this and that’—I was so unhappy with it. Kay, on the other hand, was a delight. She brought stability to the mishmash. She kept it together. She was always fun and games, you know? A very talented, very bright person. So, I just took to her right away. I listened to her more than anyone.”

While
King Kong
was premiering in Hollywood,
Low and Behold!
was Pasadena’s behemoth run amok. Ascribing to the “bigger is better” philosophy, the final dress rehearsal contained a staggering seventy-five numbers exhaustively performed in two hundred costumes from 8:30 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. By opening night, an hour and a half had been mercifully amputated, reducing its girth to merely mammoth proportions.

“There are enough clever ideas to furnish three revues,” wrote W. E. Oliver in the
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
. “What
Low and Behold
needs to give it a professional fillip is a doctor not afraid to use the scalpel.”

Thompson had some choice bits in the show. During scene changes, Kay, June Shafer, and Dorothy Dee, billed as the Low and Behold Trio, would roll out a cocktail cart in front of the curtains and mix highballs for themselves
while singing three-part harmonies. With each new appearance, however, they progressively became more and more sloshed until finally they could barely stand. “It was a very funny routine,” Sillman recalled, “but Miss Thompson had to sacrifice her artistry for a laugh. That she did, and bless her.”