by Karen Karbo
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 d
ebut 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.