Kay Thompson (9 page)

Not only would she have to fly back-and-forth to KHJ in L.A., but Kay was also assigned two series on KFRC, Don Lee’s San Francisco station:
The Kay Thompson Show
and
The Blue Monday Jamboree,
both featuring Meredith Willson and his orchestra, and overseen by Pat Weaver (who had just been sent to San Francisco as reinforcement).

What she had hoped would be a San Francisco getaway had turned into a whirlwind of commitments. Of her opening night at the Palace Hotel with Coakley’s band, Kay recalled, “I was terrible.
Really
bad.” Despite her external exuberance, Thompson had recurring bouts of stage fright. The pattern is easy to trace—her teenage memory loss at her debut with the St. Louis Symphony, her sudden laryngitis attack at the audition with Al Lyons, and so on. Frequently nauseous before performances, she utilized many backstage tricks to calm her anxiety—such as a shot of whiskey or improvising comic conversations as Eloise. Unfortunately, none of those worked when she went onstage with Coakley. The hotel manager was so upset, he told the bandleader to get rid of her.

“You can imagine how I felt,” Kay said, shuddering from the memory.

Compassionately, Coakley insisted on giving her another chance, and the second night went well enough to convince the manager to let her stay. Now Kay had something to prove: “It was do or die.” Miraculously, she regained her footing and the breezy, self-confident Thompson was back in action.

One night she blithely announced to the audience, “I cannot sing unless I wear a scarf.” This was the sort of nonsensical bon mot Kay had perfected over the years as a way to drum up attention—humorous, eccentric, and self-glamorizing, conveyed with an economy of words. When an interviewer later nailed her to explain the predilection, Kay couldn’t “tell you why to save her life.” But it got plenty of ink.

Less savvy was her decision to sleep with the enemy. Coakley’s band was being nationally broadcast daily by NBC via their local affiliate, KECA, the initials of owner Earle C. Anthony, who also owned KFI in Los Angeles and twenty Packard dealerships throughout California. In both radio and automotive sales, Anthony was Don Lee’s archrival.

So, it was beyond brazen for Kay to think she could get away with belting her pipes out on NBC, and yet that’s exactly what she did. When Lee lodged an objection, he assumed that would be the end of it, but Thompson, stubborn as a mule, kept right on singing, figuring she would solve the problem by using a pseudonym. Her voice had become so recognizable, however, few were fooled.

“Kay Thompson is singing with Tom Coakley’s Orchestra under the name Judie Richards,” scooped the
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
on June 22. The following day, the
San Francisco Chronicle
insisted that her alias was not Judie Richards at all, but rather “Judy Rich.”

Whether her name was Judy Rich, Judie Richards, or Kay Thompson, Kitty Fink’s goose was cooked. Don Lee not only fired her, he canned the Three Rhythm Kings as well. Predictably, their agent, Thomas Lee, dropped them as clients.

Finally free to do as she pleased, Kay decided to stay with Coakley’s band at the Palace and appear as Kay Thompson on their nightly NBC broadcasts. “There is no thrill that compares with it,” Thompson later reminisced. “There’s something about having a swell orchestral background designed especially for your own torching which few songbirds can resist.”

Her notices were good, too. “When she sings a number,” columnist Carroll Nye wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
, “the dancers gather around the band stand to give her a cheer—especially when she’s singing ‘Here Come the British.’ ”

“I was jealous of Kay when she did ‘Here Come the British,’ ” said Virginia Haig, another of Coakley’s vocalists, “because I thought I should have had that song. Thank God she didn’t go with us on tour! She was extremely talented and that’s why I was losing it. I was jealous. I could sing, but not like Kay. She was a real star.”

All of Coakley’s singers and musicians were given free accommodations at the Palace, which naturally led to some late-night shenanigans.

“Kay and one of the guys in the band made goo-goo eyes at each other and fell in love,” Haig recalled. “His name was George Kinney. He was from Oakland and he played clarinet and saxophone. Sometimes he sang, too. This affair he had goin’ with Kay developed into a pretty hot thing. It was the talk of the band, you know. Everybody was teasing them but Kay and George just laughed it off. They were very sharp with the double entendre. Of course, there
was the sex angle, but I think they had a wonderful rapport as far as humor was concerned. They laughed a lot.”

“In love?” Kay pondered, responding to gossip about her many romances. “I’m in love all the time! It’s fun! It’s the salt and pepper of life—and I adore salt and pepper! I want my whole life to be highly seasoned. Oh, I’ve been in love, all right—but so far, I haven’t got beyond the stage of being in love with love.”

Victor Records invited Kay to be the featured vocalist on several of Coakley’s sessions for the label, but Brunswick would only grant a “loan-out” for Kay to do one side. Recorded on September 25, 1934, “Take a Number from One to Ten” (Victor 24744-A) became Thompson’s first record. When it was released the following month,
Variety
called it “a brace of brisk foxtrotology.”

W
hile Kay was hanging
out with Coakley in 1934, New York–based radio star Jane Froman dropped her manager, Danny Winkler, leaving a vacancy at the Morrison-Winkler Agency for a female singer on the rise. Danny had been keeping close tabs on Kay’s career ever since she had shared the KHJ airwaves with his client Lennie Hayton. Now that Kay was no longer represented by Thomas Lee, Danny began actively courting her to sign with Morrison-Winkler and advised her that, if she was really serious about a career in radio, she’d have to move to New York, where the major networks were based. Kay told him she’d consider it if he got her a New York radio gig first.

It just so happened that Danny was friendly with Burt McMurtrie and was well aware of the romantic fireworks that had ignited between them in Los Angeles. No longer with CBS, Burt was now head of programming for WMCA, the New York hub of an upstart rival network, Associated Broadcasting System (ABS), where he was creating a whole new slate of programming. When Danny informed him that Kay was available, Burt promptly signed her up to headline a show.

Just hours after recording her Victor record with Coakley, Thompson grabbed her dog, blew a kiss to George Kinney, and flew to New York, where, starting September 30,
The Kay Thompson Show
would air three nights a week from the WMCA studio in the Hammerstein Building at Fifty-third and Broadway.

Unsure if her relocation would be permanent, Kay—and Mr. Chips—moved in with her younger sister, Marian, who as luck would have it was studying painting in Manhattan. When Blanche, the eldest Fink sibling, got wind that Kay had joined Marian in the Big Apple, she took a break from St. Louis and boarded a train for a little sightseeing/family reunion.

The exposure on ABS was nothing to sneeze at, but the network trailed far behind CBS and NBC in the ratings. Wary of becoming an indentured servant again, Kay refused to sign a long-term contract for
The Kay Thompson Show
, opting for a single thirteen-week season commitment.

That hard bargain prompted McMurtrie to affectionately call Thompson “a bitch,” a term of endearment that stuck. In fact, nineteen years later, in a wistful love letter to Burt (by then, a top radio personality in Tacoma, Washington), Kay nostalgically wrote, “I have never forgotten you. Years come and days go merrily dancing into the blue beyond, but I still think of you when I hear the word bitch (which of course is very often now that I’m all grown up and all). I am more than delighted that you are Mr. Tacoma. I am not in the least surprised. You have always been twice as bright as anybody else in the world. And you know it.”

But in 1934, McMurtrie was essentially a lovesick puppy caving to Thompson’s demands. Leaving her options open suited Kay’s manager, too, because in the grand scheme of things, working for WMCA was not a step up—it was merely a stepping stone that got Thompson to New York.

Sure enough, in less than a month, Winkler orchestrated a major coup for her: “What if I told you I could get you a meeting with Fred Waring?”

At that time, Fred Waring was the No. 1 bandleader on the airwaves, host of CBS’s phenomenally successful program
The Fred Waring–Ford Dealers Radio Show,
broadcast weekly from Manhattan. Today, Waring is a household name mainly because of a bartender gadget he invented and patented that earned him his greatest fortune: The Waring Blender.

“Fred Waring’s program was one of the best, and nothing but the best for Thompson was my slogan,” Kay boasted to a reporter. “He’d heard me on the air in California and wanted me to come to New York for a talk.”

Three thousand miles for a tête-à-tête? Hardly. In truth, Kay was just an elevator ride away from Waring’s office in the Hammerstein Building—the same location where her WMCA show originated. On the day of the fateful appointment in late October, Waring was about to leave town on a six-week tour.

Fred explained that he wanted to incorporate more female vocalizing into his arrangements. “If you can find sixteen girls and train them in six weeks,” he proposed, “you’re hired.”

Directing a choir of sixteen would be a cinch for Kay; the daunting part of the task would be
finding
them. “I didn’t know a soul in New York,” she recalled.

To make matters more difficult, Fred had a litany of provisos. Each girl had to be young, pretty, refined—no drinkers or smokers, no loose morals—and
above all, they had to be
untrained
. He hated “longhaired” voices. His progressive pop style was the inverse of everything taught in formal singing lessons, and he was fed up with trying to undo the damage. Upon returning from his tour, he would audition them. If they passed the test, each girl would make $25 a week, with Kay earning a robust $350.

The job seemed impossible, the Mt. Everest of tall orders, but Kay was ready for the challenge. “I said, ‘Yes,’ ” she recalled, “just because I wanted to go with him.” Taking a gulp, Kay told Fred, “When you come back, we’ll be ready for you.”

Kay rushed to Marian and Blanche: “You two kids are caught in the draft. Art can wait, and so can Grant’s Tomb. Right now you’re going to sing.” Thus, the Debutantes were reunited, with additions soon to follow.

Kay marched to the Capitol Theatre, the site of her father’s favorite radio amateur hour,
Major Bowes’ Capitol Family
. There, she found two dancers in ghastly stage makeup who seemed interested—she gambled that they looked human beneath the greasepaint.

Next, she accosted girls in hotel lounges, department stores, and theaters, leaving no clone unturned. Blanche and Marian scouted candidates, too, among passersby on streets and in stores—anyone who was eye-catching and eager.

At Macy’s, Kay hijacked a salesgirl who looked the part. Although the young woman had never sung a note outside her own bathroom, Thompson made her chirp right there in the store in front of astounded customers. “You’re hired,” Kay declared, to a round of applause. Moving on to a fashionable store on Fifth Avenue, Kay kidnapped a model who fit the bill.

Three Texas girls were found singing at the New York Roosevelt Hotel, a trio named Dot, Kay, and Em who had been featured regularly on
The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour
starring Rudy Vallee.

Another girl named Janet Ayres popped up in the lobby of a song publishing company, where she had been hanging out with hopes of being discovered. She recommended Elizabeth Newburger, who would later marry Al Rinker (Bing Crosby’s boyhood friend and a founding member of the Rhythm Boys).

“I was the only one who was classically trained,” Elizabeth explained, “but I learned to fit in with something different. She hired me right away.”

Eventually, Kay had her sweet sixteen. It would’ve been too crowded to hold rehearsals in Marian’s modest flat, so Kay rented a larger apartment on Park Avenue in the mid-Fifties, complete with piano, and enough bedrooms to house all three Fink sisters plus Mr. Chips.

“The most nightmarish weeks of my young life,” was how Thompson dramatically
characterized the ordeal to reporters. But, by the time Waring returned in December, Kay had a rock-solid group.

For the audition, Thompson and her girls first sang “Wistful and Blue,” with Kay on piano and lead vocal. Poker-faced, Fred made a few suggestions and they performed it again, incorporating his adjustments. Enigmatically, he asked for the next number, “I Got Rhythm.” They not only nailed it but at the very end, they broke into a little synchronized tap dance routine Kay had taught them.

A smile curled up on Fred’s face and he said, “Swell”—the highest praise imaginable for this perfectionist of few kind words and even fewer happy emotions.

But the hard part wasn’t over. Waring informed Thompson that she would have to get the final thumbs-up from someone more powerful than he: Henry Ford, founder and chairman of the Ford Motor Company—the show’s sponsor.

Wrapping the seventy-one-year-old tycoon around her elongated index finger, Kay showed off her surprising knowledge of cars and made it a point to mention her teenage romance with Dunc Dorris, the son of Ford’s former competitor in St. Louis. Ford was charmed and the deal was done.

To celebrate, Kay let her girls have Christmas off, but then it was throats back to the grindstone in preparation for their debut broadcast on Thursday, December 27, 1934. They were an instant hit, measured by a large influx of fan mail.

Kay insisted that Blanche and Marian use “Thompson” as their stage name, further suppressing “Fink” out of existence. Henry Ford’s highly vocal anti-Semitism may have been a motivating factor. In any case, this must have been hard on their father, especially when his local newspaper, the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat,
did a proud story on the hometown girls who had hit the big time in New York without a single mention of Leo and Hattie Fink. For Kay and certain species of sharks, it was all about forward motion.