McCall's Magazine
Cynthia Lindsay
January 1957
In show business the noun "genius" is as loosely used as the adjectives "great," "fabulous" and "sensational." In the case of Kay Thompson they have been applied endlessly and justifiably to her talents as a singer; arranger; pianist; composer; choreographer; actress; creator of night-club acts, radio and television shows; and author. Her notices have been phenomenal. One critic on Variety simply gave up and said "Miss Thompson is more than an act; she is an experience." Audiences, musicians and critics alike raised their hands and cried. "Hallelujah! Here at last is a genuine genius."
Meanwhile back at the Plaza in New York . . .
"Please give me room service," said Kay Thompson. As she held the telephone, she lit a cigarette, did a couple dance steps, hummed, pulled on a lock of hair and finally flung herself on the couch, two long legs over the back. From here she leaped up again, sang a few bars in a deep throaty voice, and then, her voice changing entirely to a childish prattle, said, "Hello, room service? This is me. Eloise. Here's what I want. Hot coffee. Hot, hot, hot. Here's what I don't want. To wait for it. So you skibble right up here, will you, please? Otherwise I feel as if I might sklonk someone." Miss Thompson received her coffee almost immediately and nobody was sklonked.
Eloise is a figment of Kay Thompson's imagination. Or Kay Thompson of Eloise's. It is sometimes difficult to differentiate.
Eloise was conceived, in proper theatrical tradition, whole Kay was on a night-club tour. During rehearsals and between shows Kay entertained her fellow performers with the ingeniously mimicked stream-of consciousness prattle of a little girl. The little girl's name was Eloise and she became a running gag.
Everybody went along delightedly with the gag, and Kay says about her friends: "Bless them! They kept her alive; I didn't. They just wouldn't let loose of her. They'd call and say, 'Hello, Kay, I don't want to talk to you. I want to talk to Eloise.' Then I would go into the bit and pretty soon it all became a habit." Eloise herself was born at the Plaza. Kay was playing at the Persian Room and staying at the hotel. One Sunday a close friend called, started the "Let me talk to Eloise" line, then asked Eloise to answer some of her own, rather serious, grownup problems. Eloise's wisdom in answering must have impressed the friend, because suddenly she said, "Look Kay, Eloise is a book - and I've got just the person to illustrate it. His name is Hilary Knight. You come right over here.
"I went over," says Kay, "carrying my own ashtray. This girl doesn't smoke and hates dirt. When I arrived, my friend said, 'I'll call Hilary from across the hall.' A Princetonian young man, shy, gentle and soft-spoken, came in. He seemed terribly impressed with me, which naturally impressed me terribly with him. I noticed his hands, which were slim and artistic, and thought that was a step in the right direction. So I wrote twelve lines on a piece of paper and handed it to him. 'I'm going to write this book,' I said. 'I'll leave this with you. If you're interested, get in touch with me.' Then I spoke a few words of Eloisiana and left."
"That Christmas I received a card from Knight. It was an interesting, beautifully executed and highly stylized picture of an angel and Santa Claus, streaking through the sky on a Christmas tree. On the end of the tree, grinning a lovely grin, her wild hair standing on end, was Eloise. It was immediate recognition on my part. There she was. In person. I knew at once Hilary Knight had to illustrate the book. I knew also that I'd have to write it first. So I took three months off and wrote it.
" I holed in at the Plaza and we went to work. I just knew I had to get this done. Eloise was trying to get out. I've never known such stimulation. This girl had complete control of me. Ideas came from everywhere. Hilary and I had immediate understanding. Eloise was a little girl who lived at the Plaza, and she was a very special kind of little girl. We wrote, edited, laughed, outlined, cut, pasted, laughed again, read out loud, laughed and suddenly we had a book. We took Eloise to Jack Goodman at Simon and Schuster and he recognized and understood Eloise immediately. We all became close friends, and the book went into print--only a thousand copies the first time, just to see how it went. It went. The avalanche started and hasn't stopped-we're in the sixth printing with no sign of a letup."
A part of the Thompson pattern is that when she decides to do something she does it, or is it, immediately. After college she decided to be a singer. So in radio she was a singer. "I was a singer," she says, "and I wasn't a good one of them. It took a close friend, a black Irishman he was, to wise me up to what I did have - musicianship. 'Kiddo,' he said, 'you have creative talent obviously, so if you're not getting it across there's something wrong. There's a reason.' As soon as he spoke the whole thing unfolded and I knew the reason. I was doing the wrong thing."
So she started to do the right thing. She joined Fred Waring, not only as a singer but as an arranger, and was a brilliant success at both.
Having mastered two creative forms, she tried for a third. "I thought as long as I was doing so well as an arranger, I'd stop and be an actress. My mind changed rapidly about that, however. I did a show called 'Kay Thompson and Company' with Jim Backus for which Jim and Larry Burns did the writing. We didn't, any of us, know what we were doing. But despite the fact that we were an instantaneous flop, we all learned a lot from it. It was my first chance at coordinating a whole project, and it enthralled me. After this show I came to a serious decision. I had to be an actress and I had to be alone. So I went to Hollywood, where I was neither."
Through two song-writer friends, Ralph Blaine and Hugh Martin, she went to M-G-M studios as an arranger. Most studios being giant filing systems, people are inclined to be departmentalized to an extent that is rough emotionally on artistically free souls like Kay Thompson. "I learned that in a big studio you are so categorized that you have to become what people think you are or get out. So I got out. My option was due for renewal, and I said good-by and hit the saloon beat.
Although Miss Thompson likes to give the impression that this means she became an alcoholic, it really means that she put together, with the aid of her friend Robert Alton, who did the staging and choreography, an enormously successful and very chic night-club act. She was on the road with the act for four years, when she stopped for her confinement with Eloise.
At the present time she could perfectly well stop, go sit down in the sun and let this baby-talking annuity take care of her form now on. But she is running faster than ever. She has completed both the movie Funny Face, with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, in which she sings, dances and acts, and an Eloise spectacular for C.B.S.
While developing the spectacular, she leaped from one aspect of rehearsal to another, putting things together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. One would believe that anything moving with this frenzied drive simply has to fall apart like a two-dollar clock, but as the magic moment comes and when she and the accompanist, or she and the writer or choreographer simultaneously get the message. Somebody screams, "That's it! We've got it!" And she miles beautifully, whispers gently, "Isn't it lovely?" and sits down quickly, hands in lap, like a little girl in Sunday school. For a minute. Then she leaps to her feet and says, "Isn't this like everything in life - anybody's life? Somehow it is held back until you are ready to handle it."
Miss Thompson seems more than able to handle it, whatever "it" may be. She doesn't think that her diversity of talent is unusual. "If artistically you are able to do one thing, " she says, "you are more than likely able to do them all." When asked her plans for the future, she says, "The thing that comes up next is what I'll do next."
