Dizzy-Making

Kay Thompson had been writing music for Hollywood musicals for years, and auditioning her own songs. M-G-M Producer Arthur Freed would say: "Kay, you sang that great. You are terrific. Now, who will we get to sing it?" No candy-box beauty, lean, angular Kay Thompson was simply one of the well-paid but subsidiary hirelings that some Hollywoodians call "movie trash." Last week, movie trash had become nightclub treasure.

In the polar calm of Hollywood's Ciro's, whose audiences are notoriously cool to anyone who isn't yet fashionable in Manhattan, Kay Thompson was packing them in at $3,000 a week. Dressed in one of her 25 sleek slack-suits, Comedienne Thompson stepped into the spotlight, looking like a caricature of the neurotic, world-weary woman of the '20s. Bouncing about behind her were the four young, mobile-faced Williams brothers, who served as a kind of combination corps de ballet and hot choir. Anything went: patter, pantomime or pratfalls, and Pauvre Suzette, a song about a young woman with a Restoration bosom. Says Kay: "We ram it down their throats."

Scouts from six Manhattan nightspots had ringside tables. So did Irving Berlin, with a Broadway musical in mind. They were watching what Comedienne Thompson describes as "the greatest group that ever hit humanity." Says she: "We're five very virile people. Everything we do is to the hilt. If it's a chord, it's the most beautiful chord. If it's a dance, it's the most exciting dance. It's dizzy-making--loaded with personality. It's rhythm, energy, humor, vitality, and sex all wangled into one." Also wangled: shades of Bea Lillie, Agnes de Mille, Noel Coward and Mime Angna Enters.

The daughter of a St. Louis jeweler, Kay started playing the piano when she was four, appeared with the St. Louis Symphony at 15. Says she: "I was a stage-struck kid, and I got out of St. Louis fast." She went to California at 17 to teach diving, but made a bigger splash on the air, with the Mills Brothers, and later with Fred Waring. She had a radio program of her own, the Kay Thompson Festival, before ending up at MGM.

In Las Vegas, Nev. last summer, to get a divorce, Kay put on her act in a nightclub show to pass the time, and surprised even her own confident self by bringing the house down. Teamed up with the Williams Brothers, a quartet from Iowa who had knocked about on their own for about ten years with little success, she was ready for Ciro's.

Onstage, Kay, her blonde hair brushed severely back, looks about 30, but owns to 35. One Hollywood wag says she "has a young face made up of old materials." Says she of her act: "I always wanted to be a big fat ham."

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