Kay Thompson (4 page)

Keen to be up on the latest fashion trends, Kitty was a shopaholic. “There’s one department store that we’d always hit called Vandervoort’s,” Ginny related, referring to Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney. “It was a big deal. We’d look at all the clothes.”

Kitty and Ginny became fast friends with one of the store’s young employees—a vivacious new girl in town named Mary Lorena “Billie” Cantrell, who worked as a sales clerk in women’s sportswear. Department stores must’ve
been in Billie’s blood, because later, in 1932, she would marry Stanley Marcus of Neiman-Marcus in Dallas, the most prominent and influential department store outside of New York City.

In St. Louis, Billie’s family lived in an apartment building on Maple, just four blocks from the Fink residence. Jerrie Marcus Smith, daughter of Billie and Stanley Marcus, recalled hearing stories about the Finks’ wild child. “Kitty came over to my mother’s house to
pound
on the piano all the time,” Jerrie said, laughing. “My grandmother was always worried about the neighbors complaining.”

Among her late mother’s personal effects, Jerrie found a 1926 handwritten invitation “to pledge membership” with Xi Delta Sigma, signed “Catherine L. Fink.” And the sorority bond they pledged never ended. In later years, Kay kept in close touch with Billie, bringing her nightclub act to Dallas—twice—and making several personal appearances at the flagship Neiman-Marcus store, where she promoted
Eloise
and also served as a creative consultant on its International Fortnight expositions.

So, it was only fitting that Kitty had first become acquainted with Billie at a department store—and Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney was
the
favorite haunt among Kitty’s group of high school friends.

“It had a lovely tearoom,” Ginny recalled, “and we’d always end up having lunch there. Then we’d go and listen to the records in the music department. They had several listening booths. We just listened, though. We never bought ’em.”

“I’m a miser at heart,” Kay later admitted. Recalling her youth, she added, “I’d deprive myself of a lot. I’d much rather have money in the bank than anywhere else.” And at the age of sixteen, Kitty’s bank balance was about to increase.

Lalla Bauman, who ran a nearby dance school, suddenly found herself without an accompanist, so she called Kitty and asked how much she would charge.

“Three dollars an hour,” Kitty boldly replied.

“Why, that’s preposterous!” the woman responded. “The usual rate is a dollar-fifty at the outside.”

“Not
my
usual rate,” Kitty lied, never having worked a day in her life. “I always get three dollars.”

“Goodness,” said Miss Bauman. “Who do you think you are? Paderewski?”

Aware that the teacher was in a tight spot, Kitty held firm: “That’s my price.”

After a prolonged silence, the woman finally caved: “O.K., you little Big Shot. I’ll have to give it to you.”

“That was the first money I ever earned,” Kay later recounted. “It seemed so easy to make forty-five dollars a week.” In no time, she had saved six hundred dollars, a tidy reward for her brazen negotiation. It would not be the last time she drove a hard bargain.

While tinkling ivories at the dance studio, she came down with a serious case of dance fever. She enrolled at Clark’s Dance School, where she took lessons alongside Ruth Elizabeth Grable, seven years her junior, who later changed her name to Betty Grable and became the famous movie and pinup star. One of Grable’s other teachers at Clark’s was Robert “Bob” Alton, and, although Kitty only met him in passing back then, he later became her indispensable choreographer for stage, screen, and nightclub appearances.

L
ike Toad
in
Wind in the Willows,
Kitty was mesmerized by motorcars. They made her shoulders tingle—a feeling she always got when something was especially thrilling.

Kitty’s automobile fixation led to dating a fellow classmate named Krenning Duncan “Dunc” Dorris, son of George Preston Dorris, founder and chairman of the Dorris Motor Car Company. First introduced in 1906, the Dorris was a St. Louis–made luxury car, and when Kitty turned sixteen, there was nothing she wanted more than to get behind the wheel of the latest model. And Dunc had exactly the equipment she craved. Not to be outmaneuvered, Ginny was dating Dunc’s older brother, Pres (George Preston Dorris Jr.), so between the two, these industrious young ladies had managed to just about corner the high school market on automobile access. And, according to Kay, Dunc was one of several boys who tried to corner the market on her.

“I’ve been telling men I don’t want to get married ever since I was sixteen,” Thompson later bragged, “but they just wouldn’t believe me!”

The question is, should we believe her? Although she later made two trips to the altar, it is hard to imagine marriage proposals coming her way during adolescence, a time when even she freely admitted, “I was the official ugly duckling of the family.”

Far more believable is the anecdote in which Kitty and Ginny had a typical Lucy-and-Ethel moment. “One time we borrowed another boy’s car,” Ginny said with mischief in her voice. “His name was Chester Wolfe, a friend of the Dorris boys. While he was doing football, he let us borrow it. That was his big mistake. We slammed the door and accidentally broke the grind-up window on one side. Oh my Lord. We ran to some place that fixed windows and cried and carried on. It is just embedded in my memory how we had to sweat that
out until they fixed it.” But, with impish satisfaction, Ginny added, “Chester never knew about it at all.”

Everyone thought they were such angels. When asked about Kitty’s churchgoing habits, Ginny said, “I went to Westminster Presbyterian Church and she went to West Presbyterian. I’m not sure how often they went, or even
if
they went.”

As it was only a five-minute stroll from her address, Ginny was a frequent visitor to the Fink home. “The whole family was fun,” she recalled. “They enjoyed each other. They always seemed to have such a good time together—a wonderful, close family.”

However, when pressed, Ginny admitted that the men of the house were decidedly on the fringe. “Mr. Fink was a lot older than Mrs. Fink,” Ginny remarked, “and I think he was just overwhelmed by them all and he’d take a backseat. The women were all so extroverted—entertaining and singing and having such fun—he didn’t know what hit him! He just shook his head and paid the bills.”

Kitty’s brother, Bud, also made himself scarce. “He was a nice kid,” Ginny recalled, “but I mean, you know, nobody wants a little brother hangin’ around. I know. I had one, too.”

Ginny’s memories of Kitty’s mother, Hattie, were especially fond: “Oh, she was quite sharp, always dressed up, looked so nice. She liked to sing and when you would go over there, she was like one of the girls. So much fun.”

Most of Ginny’s time in the Fink home was spent around the piano. In adolescence, Kitty’s voice developed a squeaky quality that had become the butt of family jokes, so she stuck mostly to the keyboard while her mother sang along with Blanche, Marian, and visitors like Ginny.

There was never a need for sheet music. “Kitty played by ear,” Ginny marveled. “Anything you wanted to hear, she’d come up with it—all the popular songs, current jazz, musical comedy tunes, whatever was current at the time. ‘Tea for Two’ was a favorite.”

“Kitty could play serious music, too,” Ginny added. Her accomplished classical skills pleased her father and he hoped that she would find her calling as a concert pianist. To that end, in early 1926, during her junior year in high school, sixteen-year-old Kitty made her debut as a piano soloist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra for a performance of Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Fantasy” at the Odeon Theatre on Grand Boulevard. Making the event all the more momentous was the fact that the concert was broadcast live over KWK, Kitty’s very first radio exposure.

For her big night, she wore a very special new dress. “It was the kind of thin white stuff,” Kay later told a reporter, drawing the shape of it in the air
with her manicured index talon. “It wasn’t long enough and it wasn’t short enough, and it had scallops around the skirt. But my mother thought I looked grand.”

In preparation for the performance, Kitty had to memorize the entire ninety-page concerto. “[My mother] sat in the front row,” Thompson recalled, “and she was more nervous than I was. I told her to hold her breath till I came to an eight-bar passage I had to play alone. If I got past the place where I crossed my hands, she could go on breathing—the worst would be over.”

Just before her solo, however, the unimaginable happened: Kitty went blank. The distinguished conductor, Frederick Fischer, knew something was dreadfully wrong when he glanced over to the piano and saw the expression of a deer caught in the headlights. All Kitty could do was whisper, “Go right ahead, Fred.”

Balding, plump, and bespectacled, Mr. Fischer was not accustomed to brain-dead pianists any more than he was used to being addressed as “Fred.” He stared back at her in utter disbelief.

Kitty shrugged. “I’ll join you later.”

Somehow, the maestro managed to wing it through Kitty’s solo without missing a beat. After sixteen measures, when her next cue came up, Kitty hopped on board and gave the performance of her life. By the end, the audience was on its feet, cheering.

Kitty took her bows to thunderous applause, especially thrilled to see her father beaming with pride. It wouldn’t last long. As she stepped back toward the wings, Kitty stumbled into a row of potted palm trees, which fell like dominoes. The poor creature ended up sprawled on the floor amid a hopeless tangle of chiffon and palm fronds.

Kay later claimed to have made the decision then and there to renounce all aspirations of classical keyboarding. “I wanted to have long fingernails!” was her practical excuse.

In truth, the renunciation took quite a bit longer, due to strict orders from her father. Though she was loath to admit it, Kitty continued as the pianist for the St. Louis Symphony for three full years.

Despite the pressure to be a classical musician, Kitty favored popular tunes—which she handily parlayed into social invitations. “She was always the life of the party,” Ginny remembered, “because she’d sit down at the piano and that was it. She was just great.”

“I was always the one to play the piano while the others danced,” Kay confirmed. “Of course the ones that danced got the men. So I hit on this scheme: I’d sit down at the piano and sing blues. The tempo was impossible for dancing.
Pretty soon all the men would be grouped around the piano—and the other girls would be thinking of forming an organization to work for the repeal of the existing laws governing homicide.”

K
itty’s transformation to torch
songstress did not happen overnight. She longed to be taken seriously, like Fanny Brice, an ugly duckling Jewish girl from New York’s Lower East Side who had become a national sensation singing weepy ballads. They may have shared homely looks, but Kitty didn’t have Fanny’s distinctive voice or range. One night at a local vaudeville show, however, Kitty heard something that made her shoulders tingle: a female African-American blues singer with a deep, husky voice. Kitty announced that her latest goal was to be a blues singer, an aspiration met with considerable skepticism by her family.

“If my sisters hadn’t made fun of my voice,” Kay later explained, “I would never have buckled down to taking singing lessons seriously. And if they weren’t so sure I could never become a singer, I wouldn’t have fought for a career!”

Seething with resentment, Kitty set out to prove them wrong. “Mother, who gave singing lessons, had often said you could change the range of your tones,” Kay recalled. “I decided to get rid of my squeak and develop a lower range for blues singing.”

Using the keyboard as her guide to the depths of hell, Kitty groaned, growled, and grunted guttural sounds that could wake the dead. Eventually, the nightmare paid off. Incredibly, she had developed a lower register—an entire octave—rich and throaty. Not only did she sound great singing blues, the full range of her voice had miraculously
arrived
.

Stretching her newfound talent, Kitty landed a supporting role in, of all things, an operetta—the Soldan High production of
The Bells of Beaujolais,
performed on April 16, 1926. Since the entire student body was required to attend, she had a captive audience—including a schoolmate named Tennessee Williams.

Born on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, Thomas Lanier Williams and his family had moved to St. Louis when he was eight years old. Thomas would eventually be nicknamed Tennessee because of his thick hillbilly drawl, but back then, Kitty and his other neighborhood friends knew him as Tom. For three years starting in 1918, Tennessee resided in a furnished six-room apartment at 4633 Westminster Place, just a few blocks southwest of the Fink’s Parkland Place home. (The apartment would later be the setting for Tennessee’s play
The Glass Menagerie.
)

“[My sister] Rose and I made friends,” Tennessee recalled, “and we had an agreeable children’s life among them, playing ‘hide-and-seek’ and ‘fly, sheep, fly,’ and bathing under garden hoses in the hot summer.”

Tennessee’s older sister, Rose, was the same age as Kitty and Ginny. “We would run around together,” Ginny recalled, “and Tom would tag along, trying to keep up with us.” More often, he hung out with Kitty’s brother, Bud, his senior by only six days. Tennessee’s father worked for Ginny’s father at the Friedman-Shelby branch of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis (a factory where Tennessee later worked).

“Our mothers were co-joiners in the UDC, United Daughters of the Confederacy,” Ginny explained. “Once a month there was a meeting of ‘the children of the C’ and my brother and I were dragged kicking and screaming to a get-together where we sang ‘Dixie,’ had refreshments, and listened to another member play the cello. Kitty, Rose, and Tom were victims, too, but they seemed to enjoy it.”

Kitty was the local ham and Tennessee’s keen interest in student theatrical productions kept him abreast of her rise to stardom—first at Blewitt Junior High, then at Soldan High, and finally at Washington University. After leaving St. Louis, they would cross paths on many occasions around the world.