CHAPTER 24
KAY THOMPSON
Incorrigible
UNLESS YOU’RE A total musical comedy nerd, chances are you know Kay Thompson only (only!) as the creator of Eloise, the six-year-old heroine of children’s literature who lived at the Plaza with her pug, Weenie, her turtle, Skipperdee, and no adult supervision, save the boozy Nanny. If that’s the case, please go straight to YouTube and watch “Think Pink!” Kay’s show stealer from Funny Face, one of the great (by which I mean totally campy) films of Hollywood’s golden era. She costars as eccentric magazine editor/despot Maggie Prescott, who calls in her army of assistants to proclaim, in song, that pink is the new black. (“Red is dead / blue is through / Green’s obscene / brown’s taboo.”)
That’s Kay Thompson.
Brazen, cheeky, and flamboyant, Kay is arguably the most gifted song-and-dance woman of the 20th century. Genius lyricist, gifted choreographer, agile pianist, superb voice coach, sparkling actress and comedienne, Kay was the mad scientist responsible for the DNA of the classic Hollywood musical. All those performance conventions we don’t even think about—the saucy gestures made by the diva as she struts around the stage, the stars belting it out and dancing at the same time, the chorus singing nonsense syllables that make them sound like musical instruments—they all came from the fantastically creative musical mind of the complete nut job Kay Thompson.
BORN CATHERINE LOUISE “KITTY” FINK in St. Louis, Missouri, on—well, no one is quite sure when she was born, because she lied strenuously about her age for the majority of her life.*1 We’ll go with November 9, 1909, because that’s the official date on IMDb. Her father, Leo, ran a pawnshop but called himself a jeweler; her mother, Harriet, was vivacious and musical and poured all her talent into raising her four children.
Oh, it was the usual thing. Kitty Fink had three attractive siblings—a brother and two sisters—but she was the one with “personality.” That personality was rowdy, distinctly unfeminine, and prone to hijacking attention by acting out, pulling pranks, and behaving in a bratty manner that would, decades later, be celebrated as Eloise-esque. Her avid mother, eager to find something in which Kitty might excel, started her on the piano at age three. Even then, she had a gift for music, and by 16 she was playing Liszt with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. But she had no interest in classical music, she liked to say, because it would have required her to cut her fingernails.
Kitty Fink was a mediocre student at best. She graduated in the bottom third of her high school class and quit college to pursue a singing career on the radio. During the Depression and early 1930s, the radio was it, home entertainment–wise; the top shows were as beloved as whatever we’re currently obsessing about on HBO or Netflix.
In the late 1920s, CBS affiliate KMOX was the number one radio station in St. Louis. Kitty showed up at manager George Junkin’s office claiming she had a nonexistent appointment, also informing his secretary that she was in a tremendous hurry and was squeezing him into her schedule. Both the secretary and Junkin fell for her act; Junkin thought he must have met her at a party somewhere and asked her to come in.*2 She sang for him, emulating the blues singers she loved. He offered her $25 week; she demanded the amount he paid his other torch singers. He lowered his offer to $20. He was impressed with her voice—it was deep, smoky, even soulful—but not her brash attitude. Kitty was unconcerned. Even then, she knew that management came and went, but no one had a voice like hers.
She got the job, but then didn’t bother to take it seriously. One hot spring afternoon in 1931, she was at a lake party, enjoying the sunset with some beau, when she remembered that she was supposed to work that night. She had also apparently forgotten to rehearse, so when she and her date roared up after the broadcast started, she had to wing it—and was fired. Oops!
In July of the same year, she found her way to L.A. (where it was all happening anyway) and immediately landed a job singing on KFI. She was 22, and fell into the trap that a lot of young people encounter by overspending their first paycheck before they’ve even started the job. A few years earlier she’d had a nose job; there was apparently more work than a plastic surgeon could manage in one go, so now she sprang for another one.*3 She also had her teeth capped. Why not! And rented a ritzy apartment not far from the swanky new art deco Wiltern Theater on Wilshire Boulevard. She was ready for her career to take off!
At this stage, Glenn Dolberg, the KFI programming director who’d hired her, conducted a routine background check. Who knew that everyone knew everyone in radio? Dolberg called George Junkin, who advised him to steer clear of the gifted but unreliable Kitty Fink, and so she was fired. Again. Her solution was not to become less cagey but to change her name to Kay Thompson. Really, the woman was incorrigible. She viewed rules as suggestions, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t see her as an inspiration to do the same. Cut loose, cut corners, have some bazazz (a word Kay coined to explain one of her many admirable qualities).
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Kay was working her way up the ladder from staff singer to featured singer to headliner, performers pretty much sang a song as it was arranged for the orchestra that accompanied them. Kay wasn’t having any of that. She was drawn to jazz, swing, and scat singing when it was still considered the provenance of stoned beatniks and blues singers in dingy clubs in the bad part of town. She could never resist her impulse to bust a song out of time-signature jail and make a run for it. She became a singer’s singer, a vocal arranger’s arranger. The musical titans of the time—George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter—worshipped at the altar of her crazy innovation. My interpretation of a classic Kay Thompson arrangement of “Pop Goes the Weasel” might go like this:
All around, yes ALL around!, the mulberry bush
The monkey, the monkey, that silly old monkey, cha-cha-chased the we-a-zel
The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, his soca-soca-sock quelle belle sock!
Pop, pop-poppity pop goes that crazy ol’ weasel.
DESPITE THE nose jobs—before she threw in the towel, she had had five—Kay looked like a man. I don’t mean sort of winsome and androgynous like David Bowie or the latest Slavic supermodel; more like a leading man along the lines of Gary Cooper. But even Gary Cooper (those eyelashes!) was daintier than Kay. She had a long face, large eyes that shone with an anarchistic gleam, and a chiseled jaw. She was five feet five and a half inches and rail thin. She favored six-inch spike heels and, when on stage, employed a lot of theatrical gestures that incorporated shooting straight up into the air her very long arms, at the end of which were very long hands, at the end of which were very long nails painted murder red. Despite the heels and the nail polish and the long mink coat she wore everywhere, her energy was decidedly male—whip-smart, authoritative, and in your face. Bazazz!
Kay was queen of playing both sides against the middle. She also subscribed to the adage that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. In 1934, she was contracted to appear on two music shows in San Francisco, on the radio station KFRC. Always eager to have 47 irons in the fire, she also accepted a gig at the Palace Hotel with Tom Coakley, a popular local bandleader. As it happened, Coakley had his own radio show, on KFRC’s rival station NBC. Forgetting the fine print on her contract (if she ever read it at all), she started singing on Coakley’s show. Her boss at KFRC ordered her to cease and desist. Her solution? Change nothing but her name. Even though her voice was as recognizable to listeners as that of Mick Jagger during his heyday, she became Judy Rich. Once again she was promptly canned.
But her scheming eventually paid off. At one point in 1935, through more of her usual slightly shady finagling, she had eponymous music shows on both CBS and NBC. She had assembled an all-girl chorus to back her up on CBS’s Fred Waring–Ford Dealers Radio Show—but an old flame named Don Forker launched the Lucky Strike Hit Parade over on NBC, and promised her the moon. She shanghaied her all-girl choir without telling Fred Waring; he threatened to sue her but settled for sharing her. Everybody wins! Especially Kay.
She continued to experiment. She lived in fear of boredom and routine. She and her orchestra leader, Lennie Hayton, coaxed Fred Astaire, on the road promoting his new movie Top Hat, to come on the show and tap-dance on a wooden platform with table microphones at his feet. Listeners found her to be intriguing but were challenged by her music, which was more progressive than crowd-pleasing.
At the pinnacle of her radio career, Kay Thompson ruled on the top-rated Chesterfield Radio Show. By that time, 1936, and at the age of 27, she was a master of swing, jazz, and pop. She could play it, sing it, and arrange it for choirs large and small. She also liked to amuse herself by sprinkling in the occasional silly song that relied on sound effects and nutty fake foreign accents. Her one concession to the powers that be at Chesterfield was to hide the Camels she chain-smoked in Chesterfield packages.
IN JANUARY 1937, Kay eloped with jazz trombonist Jack Jenney. They were devoted to: (1) their careers, (2) boozing, and (3) each other. Pretty much in that order. Jack had alimony payments and a wandering eye. Kay dealt with his infidelities, both rumored and genuine, by launching an affair of her own with Dave Garroway, a page at NBC who was a diehard fan, and who would go on to make his mark in television with the Today show. For two years, Jack and Kay tried to make a go of it, but neither seemed particularly interested in sacrificing anything for the other. Then there was the business of Jack hocking Kay’s jewelry to keep himself in cocktails. “I’m the dumb cluck who is always getting drunks out of scrapes and lending them money that I never get back,” she remarked.
Still, Kay was the kind of woman who stayed friends with her exes. Down the road she would pull strings to get Jack a gig playing trombone on a big Judy Garland record. Not long afterward, he died, at age 35, of complications during a routine appendectomy.
MOST OF THE HOLLYWOOD STORIES we know well are variations on the rise-to-fame narrative. The big star-to-be lands the role of a lifetime—or if not of a lifetime, big enough to draw attention to her screen presence and charisma. She steals the show, and is set on her road to greatness. The more common showbiz story is the one Kay suffered for the first part of her career. Though she was already a well-known radio and music star, she had the usual acting aspirations—and offers that didn’t pan out. But then one day in 1937, she was cast as herself in Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, a comedy about a New York mobster who busts his way into the music business, pressuring top recording artists—like Kay Thompson!—to join his label. She was happy to play herself but refused to make life easier for the producers and director by accompanying Joe DiMaggio on the piano. She was determined to be seen as a star, not an accompanist to a baseball player who couldn’t even get through his few lines.
Later that year, director Vincente Minnelli tapped Kay to star in his new Broadway antiwar musical Hooray for What! She would do the vocal arrangements for the entire production but also play one of the leads: a femme fatale whose mission was to seduce a top-secret formula out of a hapless nerdy scientist. The part of Stephanie Stephanovich would be her big break! But actress Vivian Vance employed some strategic seducing of her own and wrested the role away from her; Kay was replaced without warning in previews. The press was told she resigned because she was having trouble with her throat—a complete lie that may have been belied by the fact that people heard her shrieking and wailing in her dressing room after she got the news. If her throat wasn’t troubling her before, it surely was after all that carrying-on. Still, the play did well. A producer at MGM, the granddaddy of the movie musical, took note and hired her to be the head of the studio’s vocal department.
AROUND 1942, Kay and her boyfriend (and eventually, second husband) Bill Spier moved from New York to L.A. Their new home was the Garden of Allah, the happening residency hotel at the east end of the Sunset Strip. It was also ground zero for Hollywood hipsters. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Benchley lived there during their Hollywood screenwriting days. Humphrey Bogart (Kay called him Humpy Bogus) lived across the swimming pool, and Frank Sinatra lived next door. He used to come over to Kay and Bill’s at night and they’d sing around the piano, in exchange for homemade spaghetti. You know that distinctly Sinatra-esque phrasing where he sings just a little behind the beat? He learned that from Kay. Because she was under contract at MGM, helping Sinatra was a conflict of interest—but you know how she felt about contracts. Hedda Hopper got wind of Kay’s informal coaching and reported it in the LA Times. Yeah, so?
Name any MGM musical from the 1940s and rest assured that Kay Thompson had a hand in it. Most actors couldn’t sing or dance—and they really couldn’t sing and dance. They couldn’t sell the lyrics. Kay worked people until they wept. She had a huge set of pipes, and she assumed everyone else did too.
In 1945, at the age of 36, Kay fell in love with Judy Garland. Not in love love (although there were plenty of rumors). Assumptions were made because Kay did not fit the traditional female mold. There were the pants, the confidence, the big gestures, the wisecracking wit—and the overall sizzle that was not sexual, but something else. If there is one great lesson we can learn from Kay Thompson, it’s that going for it in the manner she went for it carries its own madcap appeal.
Judy had been under contract at MGM since 1939, when she starred in The Wizard of Oz at age 16. Kay took Judy under her wing six years later, when Judy was in her failing first marriage and already struggling with the uppers, downers, and diet pills prescribed by studio doctors as a condition of work. Judy needed someone like Kay, and Kay needed to be needed. She needed to be the expert, the one who could control and fix everything. She achieved this by arranging Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren’s “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe,” expressly for Judy. It became one of Garland’s signature songs, won the Oscar for Best Original Song that year, and sold millions in records and sheet music.
Producers now stood in line to employ Kay to arrange their songs and train their stars. She even worked with the voice doubles who stood in for stars incapable of even talk-singing, Kay’s solution for people who couldn’t hold a tune. But they were still reluctant to cast her. It drove her mad with resentment. “MGM was the biggest whorehouse in the world,” she once said. A month didn’t go by without some big director or producer “discovering” a starlet they’d been sleeping with and sending them to Kay for coaching, which devolved into teaching them how to lip-synch. Every so often, the muckety-mucks would throw Kay a bone—you can be the sassy old-maid orchestra leader who sings a comic ditty with the male star!—but it was insulting, truly. She passed. She would always pass. She couldn’t possibly disrespect herself that much. She would always say no when her gut told her something was beneath her (and so should we).
In the mid-1940s, while Kay was still carrying the weight of the entire MGM musical juggernaut on her razor-sharp shoulders, her health began to fail. She began suffering from migraines and chronic intestinal misery. She was reduced to eating baby food (an improvement on the Fig Newtons and booze she had previously subsisted on). She was skeletal; her collarbone looked like a weapon. Friends urged her to seek medical help, but she had perhaps a little too conveniently become a Christian Scientist, fully embracing the faith’s disinclination to seek any medical aid aside from “healing.” (This didn’t extend to plastic surgery; in 1947 she had her third nose job.)
By then Judy Garland’s drug problem was large and in charge. During the filming of The Pirate with Gene Kelly (songs by Cole Porter), Garland missed 99 out of 130 shooting days due to “illness” (sleeping it off). Kay worried about her friend, and was one of the few people who confronted Garland and confiscated her pills when she found them. There was nothing for it. Judy continued to be “ill,” and The Pirate, released in 1948, came and went—the only Garland MGM musical that tanked.
Meanwhile, Kay’s five-year marriage to Bill Spier was unraveling. Spier was a gifted pianist, and a producer of Suspense, arguably the greatest drama on the air during the golden age of radio. It ran for 20 years, featuring every great star of the era playing against type, and would serve as a prototype for the great television anthology shows, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. In other words, Bill Spier was kind of a big deal in his own right. Kay and Bill drank and they argued. They argued and they drank. One day, during a particularly vicious spat, he said, “After all, who are you but a vocal coach for Judy Garland?”
“Exhaust pipe!” That was what Kay Thompson said when she was fed up and done.
In those days, to get a quickie divorce, you had to move to Nevada and take up residency for six weeks. Kay parked herself in Las Vegas. She was distraught the marriage hadn’t worked out, but she also knew she didn’t have it in her to be the sort of accommodating wife someone with an ego the size of her own would require. Whether she also grieved the lost opportunity to become a mother is unknown.
We must pause here for a life lesson. Kay was approaching 40. Trust me when I tell you that in 1947, that age was not the new 30. Kay was alone. She had worked herself to the bone helping to make less talented, would-be entertainers famous. Was she depressed at this juncture? Perhaps. But she was like a shark, and could only swim forward. She could only keep working and creating.
Back in L.A., Kay did just this. She was one of those people who could labor into the wee hours of the night, arise at the crack of dawn, and without so much as a piece of dry toast, log another 20 hours of singing, dancing, coaching, choreographing, lyric writing, and score arranging, all while tossing off one-liners. When she wasn’t working, she threw lavish, star-studded parties in which there were usually two pianos but no food. At one point, she weighed 100 pounds.
The amphetamines helped. Kay was a patient of Dr. Max Jacobson, an Upper East Side purveyor of miracle vitamin “cocktails” to the rich and famous. The list of stars who regularly partook of Dr. Feelgood’s zippy meth-based “B12” concoction is long and varied. Marlene Dietrich, Lauren Bacall, and JFK. Truman Capote, Marilyn Monroe, and Mickey Mantle. In the same way that Kay’s embrace of Christian Science didn’t apply to plastic surgery, it also did nothing to discourage her from seeking frequent and regular injections—some shot directly into her vocal cords.
While she served her time in Vegas waiting for her divorce to come through, Kay entertained herself by pulling together a new nightclub act. She knew the four Williams brothers—Dick, Don, Bob, and Andy—from her days at MGM, and conned them into rehearsing together without any clear idea of what the future held. She taught them how to sing and move. This was, again, revolutionary. In those days, singers were tethered to a standing mic. The most action you could hope for was some swaying and finger snapping. Kay pressed her sound engineers into figuring out how to suspend microphones from the ceiling, thus giving her and the brothers room to dance.
She believed that part of their appeal was that she was so tall and they were so short. In fact, they were all about the same height, but she appeared to loom above them, a human skyscraper in high heels and shimmering white pants. The brothers looked like cleaned-up quadruplet bear cubs in their matching dark suits and ties. When it came time to open the act, Kay drove a hard bargain. She was never afraid to overestimate her worth—something for which you’ve got to admire her. Someone suggested a name for their act: The Williams Brothers, featuring Kay Thompson. Ha ha. No way. They made their debut as Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers. Kay insisted on a 50/50 profit share, leaving each of the brothers a meager 12.5 percent.
They opened in Vegas at El Rancho, moved to the Flamingo, and then on to Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip. It was the place for Hollywood A-listers, many of whom had been schooled by Kay. At first, audiences came because it was Ciro’s, and anyone who was anyone went to Ciro’s. But they came back because no one had seen anything like Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers. They became the hottest nightclub ticket in town, then the nation. In September 1948, they landed a three-year, million-dollar deal with the Kirkeby hotel chain. It was the country’s biggest nightclub contract to date. Getting a ticket to see them was on a par with current efforts to get a ticket for Hamilton without having to take out a home equity loan. Stars who thought they could just sashay in and take a table near the stage were turned away.
Kay was delirious with self-satisfaction. At the end of every performance she gave a deep, heartfelt bow, then refused an encore. She would never mix with the audience, believing it was always best to maintain an aura of mystery. Now, the offers came rolling in. Every radio station wanted to give her a show. Broadway producers who’d never given her the time of day were appearing with hats in hand. Perhaps the most personally satisfying development was that after Daily Variety chided MGM for failing to give her a vehicle in which she could display her many superb talents, the studio came sniffing around, seeing whether she would come back to work for them.
Ha. Ha. Ha. (She did return for a screen test, however.)
Meanwhile, the icing on the cake: Kay and Andy Williams, the youngest brother, fell in love. She was 38; he was 20. Did either of them care? They certainly did not. They tried to keep it a secret, sort of. They lived together off and on, vacationed on Nantucket. The romance lasted much longer than anyone would have imagined.
THE OFFICIAL AND COMPLETELY untrue story about the birth of Eloise holds that Kay was late for a meeting (a photo shoot, a rehearsal) with the Williams Brothers—and when she finally rolled in, her non-excuse was offered in the squeaky voice of a little girl. “I am Eloise and I am six!” In truth, Eloise had always been one of Kay’s personalities. In her early 20s, when she was a counselor at a swanky camp for girls on Catalina Island, she routinely disciplined rowdy campers in her Eloise voice. Later, during her radio days, she would occasionally be paralyzed by stage fright, and her preperformance ritual included a shot of whiskey and an Eloise impersonation or two. At MGM, she swanned around the commissary in her trademark long mink coat and entertained the stars she lunched with by becoming Eloise. Kay didn’t think there was a book in Eloise. That imperious, squeaky voice was just something she did. D. D. Ryan, a junior editor at Harper’s Bazaar, thought differently, and in 1954 introduced Kay to a young and gifted illustrator, Hilary Knight.
At first, the collaboration was fruitful and joyous. In between her nightclub gigs, Kay made notes and Knight managed to capture the perfect Eloise (strawlike hair, tiny gut hanging over her waistband) in a Christmas card. “I took three months off and wrote it. I holed in at the Plaza and [Hilary and I] went to work…We wrote, edited, laughed, outlined, cut, pasted, laughed again, read out loud, laughed and suddenly we had a book.”
Published in November 1955, Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups initially had a print run of a modest 7,500 copies. Then Life magazine featured the book in its December issue, and Eloise took off. Kay took up permanent residence in the Plaza straightaway. She was a guest on all the talk shows. She was over the moon—until a review in the New Yorker appeared, mentioning that half of the book’s charm was due to Hilary Knight’s perfectly adorable illustrations.
In his biography of Kay, Sam Irvin makes a case for the many little girls who may have inspired the final iteration of Eloise: Kay’s goddaughter, Liza Minnelli; Lucie Arnaz; Sigourney Weaver; Princess Yasmin Khan; and others. But I don’t think Kay needed to look outside herself. The willful, shameless, impetuous Eloise was all her. This was something she reminded people of with increasing outrage and indignation as the world fell in love with the character and that love manifested itself by rapid identification. Every girl and woman who felt she had an inner rabble-rouser claimed that she was Eloise.
I should say right here that I’m probably the only female in the English-speaking world who did not think she was Eloise. I was an only child on good terms with my parents. When we took our occasional road trips around the West, we stayed only in motels—not hotels with big swimming pools. Even as a child, Eloise struck me as a little unhinged. The cool factor is nil, but I have to confess: I was always a Madeline girl.
Don’t tell the ghost of Kay Thompson.
Kay created her own licensing company with partner Bob Bernstein to merchandise the hell out of Eloise—not something routinely done back then. There were Eloise dolls, of course. Eloise clothes, Eloise wigs, Eloise luggage, Eloise bath towel-and-washcloth sets, Eloise postcards, and an Eloise emergency kit (complete with Bazooka bubble gum, turtle food, crayons, sunglasses, and Do Not Disturb doorknob signs from the Plaza). The hotel introduced a children’s menu, a Tricycle Garage, and an Eloise display room down the hall from Kay. An oil portrait of Eloise enjoyed a place of pride on the wall in the hotel’s Palm Court, where it still hangs today.
As time went on, the nation’s possessive embrace of Eloise began to irk. Kay did not like it when Knight was given credit for his sweet illustrations. After a while, she did not like it when fans would claim to “be” Eloise. She was Eloise, goddammit. Things got even weirder when she grew jealous and resentful of the child cast to play Eloise in CBS’s Playhouse 90 adaptation.
At first, Kay adored Evelyn Rudie. But when people started calling Evelyn “Eloise” Rudie, her affections cooled. One night at the Plaza, Kay and Evelyn ran into Eartha Kitt, who was performing at the Persian Room that week. Eartha said, “This is the new Eloise!” and Kay decided shortly thereafter that she would voice the character. Her completely unworkable method: Every time Evelyn was to speak, she would either need to have her back to the camera, her hand over her mouth, or a book in front of her face. Kay, crouching behind the nearest large piece of furniture closest to the mic, would then squeak out the line.
Of course it didn’t work, but people were afraid to tell Kay until the very last minute—because by this time, a lot of people were afraid to tell Kay things she didn’t want to hear. Which had become most things. At the 11th hour little Evelyn “Eloise” Rudie wound up delivering her own dialogue, but the show was panned anyway.
No matter. Eloise was an official cultural phenomenon, and three more books were published: Eloise in Paris (1957); Eloise at Christmastime (1958); and Eloise in Moscow (1959).
Kay accepted an advance for Eloise Takes a Bawth in 1962. By then her collaboration with Hilary Knight was on the rocks. She still despised that he got any credit for his work, and was loath to share any of the royalties. When he submitted his illustrations, she refused to approve them, and the project languished until her editor at Simon & Schuster simply gave up. Two generations later the project was revitalized, and Eloise Takes a Bawth was published in 2002, using Knight’s illustrations.
Nevertheless, Kay’s possessiveness of the character knew no bounds, and even as the years passed, she continued to be mama bear fierce. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of Eloise, a bookstore in New York staged a huge window display. Kay called up to complain that the display advertised Eloise and not Kay Thompson’s Eloise. It was 1995, and Kay was 86 years old.
IN 1957, KAY COSTARRED IN Funny Face with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, where she stole the show with the aforementioned “Think Pink!” number. Her role as Maggie Prescott was inspired by Diana Vreeland, editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar (see Chapter 23). It would be her only notable*4 Hollywood role. Let us pause for a minute to appreciate the irony. It took the success of a children’s book, which has absolutely nothing to do with her staggering gifts as an arranger, singer, or dancer, to finally land Kay an A-list movie role.
Funny Face was a hit, and every newspaper in New York (seven, at the time) heralded Kay Thompson as a blazing new star in the Hollywood firmament. She was 48 years old, and had been at it for almost 30 years. Kay had made it—both on her own terms and in every sense of the word. One of life’s mysteries is why getting exactly what you want doesn’t make you happier, or any easier to live with.
Movie offers rolled in like the waves at Malibu during a Pacific storm. Theater offers, too. Noël Coward pressed her to star in a play he had opening on Broadway, but Kay trotted out her by now ancient and threadbare excuse that she was still wounded by being fired from Hooray for What! a quarter of a century earlier.
It was all nonsense. In the end, her ego got in the way of everything. If she couldn’t be completely in control, she didn’t want any part of it. She entertained roles in movies that would become pop classics—Auntie Mame, Thoroughly Modern Millie, The Pink Panther—then passed on all of them.
In 1962, on a whim, Kay moved to Rome, where she sped around the city on her Vespa and fell in love for a minute or two with an American executive at the company that made Playtex bras. She rented a fancy, three-story apartment, painted the walls Mediterranean Sea blue, and varnished her coffee table with nail polish. Often, she sat on her rooftop terrace watching the gaudy Roman sunsets and thinking—just for a moment—that this is the life. She had a favorite hangout, the Blue Bar, where she liked to play the piano and sing. A favorite was “My Funny Valentine.”
The great Italian director Federico Fellini took an interest in Kay and invited her to his office to see if they might work together. She knew he was only interested in seeing whether he might use her to play one of his grotesque characters. She would have been perfect, of course. But she passed.
Kay was a kook—the kind they don’t really make anymore. Throughout her curious career, she always behaved like a diva, like a woman who was entitled to more. Arrogance isn’t usually something people accept in women, unless they are extraordinarily beautiful. Kay was merely extraordinarily gifted—and believed that alone earned her the right to be herself.
*1I’ve never understood the point of lying about your age. Does it really make any difference to anyone whether you’re 55 or 50? In Kay’s case it came back to bite her in the ass: Her New York Times obituary reported her age as between 92 and 95 when she died and she was only 88. Ha!
*2Totally excellent way to get your foot in the door. You go, Kitty!
*3It may be easy for me to say this as a relatively small-nosed person, but the only thing wrong with Kay’s nose is that it was strong and straight and maybe a little prominent. It wasn’t huge. It wasn’t even ugly. There was just rather more of it than we consider feminine in our narrow-minded culture.
*4Later she would play a bit role in the 1970 flop Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, with her beloved goddaughter, Liza Minnelli—but the less said about that, the better.