Kay Thompson (8 page)

More daring was “Piano in the Parlor,” in which a somber Tyrone Power quietly stood next to Kay at an elegant grand piano, turning the pages of her sheet music as she played a concerto. Attracted to this strapping young man, Kay begins to flirt. At first, her advances are subtle, but when he shows no interest, she becomes increasingly more determined. Tyrone breaks his concentration only when he catches sight of a sexy chorus boy crossing the stage, at which point he becomes so flustered, he misses his cue to turn the page.

For 1933,
Low and Behold!
had a surprisingly progressive queer eye, unabashedly cultivated by its flamboyant creator, Leonard Sillman, who perhaps had never been asked if he was a homosexual simply because everyone already knew the answer. His in-your-face bravado was evident in the homocentric casting of Larry Armstrong, a three-hundred-pound drag queen, and the Rocky Twins, the notorious gay courtesans from Europe who were among the trailblazers of the Pansy Craze of the early 1930s—and, according to historians Samuel Marx and Jan Clayton, were “rumored to have been protégés of Adolf Hitler.”

Kay had been exposed to plenty of discreet gay men and women in the arts, but never before had she witnessed a group of people who were so open about it. Each night, after wholesome spaghetti dinners cooked for the cast and crew by Sillman’s mother, the more adventuresome members of the troupe would migrate to the Rocky Twins’ rented Beverly Hills mansion, where moderation and clothes were checked at the door.

As word spread among Hollywood’s bohemian elite,
Low and Behold!
suddenly became the hottest ticket in town. With the likes of Joan Crawford, Charlie Chaplin, and Barbara Stanwyck clamoring for seats, the revue had to be extended from one to three sold-out weeks, until a logjam of incoming shows forced its closure on June 3.

When Sillman made arrangements to remount the show in July at the Music Box in Hollywood, however, everybody wanted a raise.

“I had the unions to contend with in one corner of hell,” Sillman recalled, “the actors in another, and a select band of lunatics in the men’s lounge, the balcony and the boxoffice. We had come down from Pasadena in orderly fashion with our little flags flying, [but] as soon as we hit Hollywood our rehearsals looked like something Max Reinhardt might have done with
The Inferno
. Kay Thompson came to me one afternoon and announced that she was a properly
brought-up young lady and couldn’t stand all the obscene talk going on in the theatre.”

As an ultimatum, Thompson warned, “If people don’t stop saying ‘hell’ and ‘God damn,’ I’ll have to quit.”

So, when Sillman responded, “What the hell has gotten into you?” it was the last straw.

Kay wasn’t the only one fed up. “Very few people in that show stayed,” recalled Lois January, herself included. “I’d had too much of Leonard.” But Thompson must have wondered if she’d made the right decision when the show was moved successfully to Broadway as
New Faces of 1934,
where it launched the careers of Henry Fonda and Imogene Coca.

S
ettling back into her
routine at KHJ, Kay was awarded her own series,
The Kay Thompson Show,
and was assigned to join three others as well:
The Late Night Concert, Fun Frolic,
and
The 76 Gasoline All-Star Revue.
The last was sponsored by Union Oil—courtesy of Don Forker yet again.

According to Pat Weaver, Forker became Thompson’s “boyfriend.” But it was complicated. First of all, there was the age difference; Don was forty and Kay was only twenty-three—an even wider gap than the fourteen years that separated her parents. Then there was the minor detail that he was married—though that inconvenience quickly evaporated when his wife filed for divorce. The next thing Kay knew, Don asked her to marry him.

“That was the first time I ever was tempted to take the plunge into matrimony,” Kay confided to a reporter for
Radio Stars.
“He was quite a bit older than I and if he’d been—well, a little more impetuous, it would have happened. But he wanted me to give up my career—which really hadn’t started yet, anyhow. He was a brilliant man and I admired him immensely. But I was doing a lot of radio work on the coast, and I was sure I’d found my groove. I certainly didn’t want to quit.”

Kay had witnessed how her own father had stifled her mother’s musical aspirations, and she was not about to let the same thing happen to her. Despite their differences, Thompson’s relationship with Forker was far from over. But for now, the only serious love in Kay’s life was Mr. Chips, her new black thoroughbred Scottish terrier, who, she proudly boasted, had “won a prize at a dog show.” She absolutely adored the pooch and took him with her wherever canines were allowed—as well as many places they weren’t.

Beginning August 29, 1933, Kay and Frank Jenks headlined five daily stage shows, seven days a week, at the Paramount Theater in downtown Los Angeles,
produced by the leading vaudeville booking organization, Fanchon and Marco. The
Los Angeles Times
called it “an unusually good stage revue.” After each live show, the silver screen would be lowered and on it projected a newsreel short subject, a cartoon, coming attraction previews, a featurette of the Mills Brothers performing a song, the sixth chapter of the
Tarzan the Fearless
serial starring Buster Crabbe, and, finally, the feature presentation
One Sunday Afternoon,
starring Gary Cooper and Fay Wray—all for only twenty-five cents.

Incredibly, while the movie unspooled, Kay was required to race eight blocks to the KHJ studio and sing numbers on various radio shows. Then she had to dash back to the Paramount for her next scheduled live performance. If the nerve-racking schedule wasn’t enough to drive her batty, the repetition certainly was. By the end of the first week, Kay had performed the exact same revue thirty-five times. On the verge of coming unglued, she decided the vaudeville biz was for the birds. Accepting her resignation, Fanchon and Marco replaced Kay with her former colleagues Leonard Sillman and his sister, June, billed as “Stars of
Low and Behold!
”

In November, the Brunswick record label granted Kay an audition demo recording session for “My Galveston Gal,” a chipper ditty with backup barbershop harmonies by the Three Rhythm Kings. The label execs must have liked what they heard, because she was signed to an exclusive two-year deal. But, for reasons hard to fathom, the company chose not to make any records with her right away. At the same time, the pact restricted her from recording for other labels. Feeling like a caged animal, Kay would think twice before ever again signing long-term agreements.

Meanwhile, big things were afoot at KHJ. Bing Crosby, then the most popular voice on radio and the seventh biggest box-office movie star, was hired by Woodbury Soap to host a new CBS series beginning October 16, 1933. In order for Bing to continue his day job at movie studios in Hollywood, the network agreed to base the series at KHJ, where it would be written and directed by staffers Pat Weaver and Jack Van Nostrand.

Practically overnight,
The Bing Crosby–Woodbury Show
became one of the top programs in the country, and to Kay’s delight, Bing invited her and the Three Rhythm Kings to be his guests on the November 20 installment. When asked by the
Los Angeles Times
how things went, Thompson said she was most proud of the fact that “Bing tapped his foot” when she sang.

The foot tapping must have been sincere, because Kay and her boys were invited back the following two weeks, and then, “as a result of listeners’ response,” signed as regulars for a thirteen-week commitment through March 5, 1934—far and away Thompson’s most important national exposure to date.

And yet, she didn’t have much in the bank to show for it. While Crosby was raking in $1,750 per show (plus additional earnings for movies and records), Kay was limited to her all-inclusive salary of $200 as a KHJ staff artist.

As the popularity of the series grew, Bing rapidly gained an enormous amount of power and, for better or worse, took control of all creative aspects. He also demanded that the station pay him the entire $5,800 weekly budget, from which he would pay all salaries and expenses, then pocket the rest.

Although Crosby had been offered the use of conductor Raymond Paige and the KHJ orchestra, he insisted on hiring his own, cheaper accompanists. The first was Lennie Hayton and his sixteen-piece band. Musically, Lennie and Kay’s arranging styles melded perfectly and they became instant friends. Unfortunately, their collaboration was cut short in January 1934 when Lennie was offered more money by NBC in New York to conduct
Town Hall Tonight
starring Fred Allen. Kay was very sad to see him go, but her connection with Lennie was far from over. Not only would they find themselves working together on many future projects, Thompson would help pave the way for Hayton’s marriage to Lena Horne.

Lennie’s replacement was none other than Gus Arnheim, with whom Bing and Kay had worked (separately) at the Cocoanut Grove. However, the network was unhappy, not only with the change of orchestras but with Crosby’s mismanagement and ever-increasing demands. The behind-the-scenes drama got so bad, William S. Paley, chairman of CBS, finally intervened, sending in one of his big guns, Burt McMurtrie, to handle the situation.

Both natives of the state of Washington, Burt and Bing had worked together before Bing was a star. But now the dynamics of their relationship had changed and Crosby was not about to take any orders from his old friend. Unable to tame the lion, McMurtrie did manage to fall head-over-heels in love with Thompson—an unexpected distraction that may have kept him off point.

Redirecting his energies, Burt decided to capitalize on the revved-up national recognition of Kay Thompson and the Three Rhythm Kings by creating a new show for them.
Pontiac Surprise Party,
a CBS network series broadcast from KHJ on Saturday nights, was sponsored by General Motors to the weekly tune of $17,500—triple the budget of
Crosby-Woodbury
.

General Motors was represented by the Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn advertising agency (BBDO), where twenty-seven-year-old William “Bill” Spier was the golden boy of the radio department—revered for his development and direction of
The March of Time
for
Time
magazine (another BBDO client).

For
Pontiac Surprise Party,
Spier negotiated a special tie-in with Walt
Disney, securing exclusive “first radio rights” to original songs from his
Silly Symphonies
cartoon featurettes. On the February 10 premiere broadcast, “The World Owes Me a Living,” from the brand-new Disney short
The Grasshopper and the Ants,
was performed by Kay as the Queen Ant and Pinto Colvig as the Grasshopper. Colvig had provided the same voice in the film and went on to be the original voice of Goofy, Pluto, and two of the Seven Dwarfs (Sleepy and Grumpy).

After
Radio Guide
hailed the broadcast performance as “a brilliant novelty,” Victor Records cut a disc of the melody with Raymond Paige and his orchestra featuring Colvig and the Three Rhythm Kings—though sadly, because of her exclusive contract with Brunswick Records, Kay was not allowed to voice the Queen. Nevertheless, her vocal arrangement was utilized and, as always, she coached the Rhythm Kings’ harmonics.

On subsequent installments, other familiar cartoon voices dropped by to sing with Kay, including Walt Disney as Mickey Mouse and Clarence Nash as Donald Duck.

Although Spier was based in New York, he traveled to California to seal the deal with Disney. It was then that he came face-to-face with Thompson for the first time. From the moment he laid eyes on her, Bill was smitten, but because he had a wife back home in New York and Kay had Burt McMurtrie and Don Forker vying for her affections, the timing just wasn’t right. Not yet.

Despite its promise, the ratings for
Pontiac Surprise Party
did not live up to the high-octane expectations of General Motors. Expensive Hollywood guest stars such as W. C. Fields and George Raft were hired for added oomph but the results were negligible, so the series was canceled after the show on March 17.

Just two days later, when Kay and the Rhythm Kings asked for a raise to continue making appearances on
Crosby-Woodbury,
the request was denied and they were dropped from the series “to free up time for more Crosby solos.”

In a fit of rage, Kay and her trio went on strike, refusing to appear on any of their other scheduled KHJ shows. The conflict of interest between her agent, Thomas Lee, and his father’s radio station had never been more evident, and she went public with her grievances in local newspapers. Late in the day on Friday, March 23, Don Lee caved, demands were met, and the walkout ended.

“Everything is rosy now between KHJ, Kay Thompson and the Three Rhythm Kings,” reported the
Los Angeles Times
on March 24. Or at least that was the party line.

“I expected to love Hollywood—but it was awful,” Kay later reflected. “I thought it would be gay and interesting, but I found myself hating it.” Disillusioned, she was itching for a change of scenery.

In June, Kay received a telegram from Tom Coakley, begging her to come to San Francisco and perform with his orchestra for a two-week gig in the Rose Room at the Palace Hotel. Kay had loved working with Tom and his guys at the Roosevelt in Hollywood back in 1932, and the offer was just the excuse she needed for a getaway.

On June 16, 1934, the
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
announced, “Kay Thompson was booked by Thomas Lee to sing with Tom Coakley’s organization for two weeks beginning today.”

Although KHJ would collect a 20 percent commission on her outside earnings, Don Lee was not going to make life easy for her. “Kay Thompson will be heard nightly at the Palace, except Sunday,” explained a report in the
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
. “Over the weekends she’ll fly to Los Angeles [to be] on
The Merrymakers
broadcast.”