In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  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.

  CHAPTER 25

  LAVERNE COX

  Undaunted

  LAVERNE COX TELLS A STORY ABOUT being a kid in Mobile, Alabama. I don’t know when this is, because Laverne does not give her age. (Life is challenging enough as an African-American trans woman; throwing some good old-fashioned ageism on top of the heap of bigotry, phobia, and well-meaning misunderstanding is not something she’s up for just now.)

  Every day Laverne took the bus home after school, and every day when she got off, kids would chase her. She would start to run the moment her foot hit the ground. Sometimes they caught her and beat her up. On this day, her tormentors were members of the school band. When they wrestled her to the ground, they beat her with their drumsticks. A parent saw what happened and called the principal, who called Laverne’s mother. Laverne didn’t want her mother to know, because her mother felt the problem could be solved if Laverne fought back. But Laverne was afraid and didn’t want to fight back. Thus, every time she got beat up, she was treated as if it were her own damn fault.

  Laverne Cox is best known for her role as the credit card scammer and hairdresser Sophia Burset in the Netflix hit women’s prison drama Orange Is the New Black. She was born Roderick Laverne Cox in Mobile, Alabama, where she and her identical twin brother, M. Lamar, were raised by their mom. As early as third grade, she identified as female. In conversation with Time magazine about her landmark June 2014 cover she said, “…I just thought that I was a girl and that there was no difference between girls and boys. I think in my imagination I thought that I would hit puberty and I would start turning into a girl.”

  When she did hit puberty, the only thing she turned into was someone who liked boys, which compounded her growing confusion and shame. A teacher had already told her mother that unless she took Laverne in hand, “your son is going to end up in New Orleans wearing a dress.” Whatever that meant, exactly, Laverne knew it was shameful; she imagined her grandmother sitting in heaven, looking down on her with great disappointment. So she swallowed a bottle of pills she found in the medicine cabinet. She went to sleep expecting to join her grandmother, but instead woke up with a stomachache to end all stomachaches. She never told a soul, even her mother.

  In the end, Laverne was saved by her creative drive: her strong desire to be an artist and to make a living as a performer. She studied dance and acting at Indiana University Bloomington, and then Marymount Manhattan College. Before landing the role of Sophia in Orange Is the New Black, she’d only portrayed sex workers. Seven hookers preceded the role that would change her life. Orange Is the New Black premiered in 2013, and then came all the firsts: first openly trans woman to be nominated for a prime-time Emmy, first trans woman on the cover of a major magazine (Time), first trans woman wax figure at Madame Tussauds! She attended the 2015 White House Correspondents Dinner and collected a hug from First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2017, she became the first transgender person to play a transgender person on a scripted network show (Doubt, on CBS, which got yanked after two episodes for unknown reasons).

  Laverne Cox has clearly arrived. She’s become the star she always dreamed of being, and could be forgiven for kicking back a little and enjoying the fruits of her success. She could focus on her acting career, attend A-list parties, present awards (as she did at the 2017 Grammys), show up for magazine cover shoots, or score some awesome couture from designers eager to dress her stunning, statuesque bod—all while politely deflecting questions about being transgender (most of which tend to be awkward, offensive, and pretty clueless). She could have saved herself a lot of effort, frustration, and the need to summon every last ounce of patience she possesses. She could have just gone on and lived her life. She could have refused to deal with it. But she’s committed to the simple human cause of showing the world that trans people are also human, and has no intention of keeping quiet or going away. She is undaunted.

  In 2014, Katie Couric interviewed Laverne and transgender model Carmen Carrera on her talk show, Katie. In an effort, I imagine, to do the hard-hitting journalist thing, Couric asked questions like “Was the whole process painful, physically, for you?” and “Your private parts are different now, aren’t they?”

  It’s impossible to find a correlation to such questions for a cisgender person. The best I can do is to recall the time I was on the Today show to talk about a funny essay I’d written for some magazine about being in a relationship with a guy 16 years my junior. Ann Curry and I yukked it up in the predictable “You go, girl!” fashion, discussing how much Bon Jovi I was expected to endure and whether I worried that he would one day leave me for a woman his own age.* But what if instead she had focused on the state of my middle-aged vagina? What if she asked, “Is sex painful for you? How much lube do you have to use?”

  In the wake of Couric’s interview with Laverne, the Internet was swift and unforgiving, condemning her interview tactics mercilessly.

  But Laverne, however miffed she may have been privately, welcomed Couric’s awkward, invasive let’s-talk-genitals question, because it gave her a chance to push the conversation in a meaningful direction. If the conversation had been all platitudes and analysis of TV roles, Laverne would never have found the opening to say: “The preoccupation with surgery objectifies trans people. We then don’t get to deal with the real lived experiences, with the reality of trans people’s lives. So often we’re targets of violence. Our unemployed rate is twice the national average. If you’re a trans person of color, it’s four times the national average. The homicide rate in the LGBT community is highest among trans women. If we focus on transition, we don’t get to talk about those things.”

  This was a daytime women’s talk show. Mothers trying to get their babies to go down for a nap were watching, women home with the flu, or folding laundry, or figuring out what to cook for dinner. Laverne could easily have done a typically feminine thing and played it off. She can be very funny. She could have said, “Oh, Katie, I’ll just leave it to your imagination,” and then changed the subject. But now that she is in the public eye, visibility and education have become part of her job; she is using her celebrity to bring awareness to what she calls “the lived life” of a trans person, day by day. The blog posts she writes for HuffPost are well-considered essays with titles like “Voter Suppression and the Transgender Community” and “Everybody’s Trans: Gender Oppression Hurts All of Us.”

  In 2015, Lave
rne posed nude for Allure. She had previously declined their offer, twice. I’m sure she wondered whether, aside from the risk of career suicide, she was setting herself up for some serious backlash—on a par with getting beaten up by the band kids, or worse. “But I’m a black transgender woman,” she observed. “Black women are not often told that we’re beautiful unless we align with certain standards. Trans women certainly are not told we’re beautiful. Seeing a black transgender woman embracing and loving everything about herself might be inspiring to some other folks. There’s beauty in the things we think are imperfect.”

  True enough, but she looks pretty dang perfect in the stunning black-and-white portrait that eventually ran in the magazine. The camera loves her, it turns out. In summer 2017 Beyoncé tapped Laverne to be one of the faces of her Ivy Park fitness line. Laverne is so breathtaking it’s just plain ridiculous.

  It’s not overstating things to say that just walking down the street as a transgender person in America is to risk your life. Hate crimes against transgender people tripled between 2014 and 2015; the rate was highest against African-American trans women. In August 2013, a woman named Islan Nettles was walking down a New York street when a guy started flirting with her, realized she was trans, and beat her to death.

  That Laverne is fully aware of these dangers, and nevertheless chooses to put herself out there, challenging assumptions and making people think, takes a lot of guts. It makes her a brave woman, which in my book makes her difficult: bold, unafraid to kick ass, and unwilling to minimize herself—an action women have often taken to avoid conflict and unpleasantness. With grace and a hell of a lot of dignity, Laverne welcomes her detractors. It’s a lesson we could all stand to learn.