Biography
Kay Thompson pursued an expansive professional path as a singer, songwriter, actress, pianist, vocal arranger, vocal coach, and writer of children’s books, with activities extending across concerts, radio, legitimate theater, recordings, motion pictures, publishing, nightclubs, and television for thirty years during the central decades of the twentieth century. Remarkable adaptability enabled her to alternate between the center of attention as a performer and positions supporting others from offstage, so that she herself never attained widespread personal recognition even though those who benefited from her contributions—actress and singer Judy Garland, vocalist Andy Williams, and the fictional character Eloise—did reach prominence.
Catherine Louise Fink, later known as Kay Thompson, entered the world on November 9, 1909, in St. Louis, Missouri; the precise day stands beyond dispute, though accounts of the year have varied between 1902 and 1913. Her birth certificate confirms 1909. Classical piano instruction during childhood led to recognition as a prodigy, and at age sixteen she performed Liszt with the St. Louis Symphony. While enrolled at Washington University she sang on radio station KNOX. After relocating to California she collaborated with the Mills Brothers in 1929, appeared on the program California Melodies, and hosted her own Kay Thompson show on KTM in Santa Monica in 1931. In San Francisco she joined bandleader Tom Coakley as a vocalist and made her first commercial recording in 1934 with the RCA Victor single “Take a Number from One to Ten.” The 2003 compilation The Queen of Swing Vocals & Her Rhythm Singers later incorporated an unreleased 1933 Brunswick test pressing of “My Galveston Gal,” her earliest surviving recording. She next moved to New York, where Fred Waring engaged her to assemble and direct a ten-member female choir; she performed with him on radio for a year beginning in December 1934. On April 20, 1935, she joined the cast of the inaugural broadcast of Your Hit Parade and remained with the series for the following two years. Additional mid-1930s radio work encompassed Dodge All-Star Revue, Chesterfield Dance Show under conductor André Kostelanetz, and Saturday Night Swing Club.
On November 11, 1935, she recorded for Brunswick accompanied by a studio orchestra. The resulting sides, issued in 1936 under the name Kay Thompson & the Boys, paired “You Let Me Down” with “You Hit the Spot” and “Don’t Mention Love to Me” with “Out of Sight, Out of Mind.” In 1937 she appeared on radio with bandleader Hal Kemp. On April 13, 1937, Kay Thompson & Her Orchestra recorded four titles for RCA Victor—“Carelessly,” “There’s a Lull in My Life,” “It Had to Be You,” and “Exactly Like You”—which appeared on two singles later that year. In November 1937 Kay Thompson & Her Ensemble performed in the film Manhattan Merry-Go-Round. Her initial Broadway credit arrived on December 1, 1937, when she and Hugh Martin served as vocal arrangers for the musical Hooray for What!, which opened that evening. In 1938 she briefly hosted her own radio series, Kay Thompson and Company; as the decade closed and the 1940s began she participated in another program, Tune-Up Time. In 1941 she sang as featured vocalist on several singles by Jack Hastings & His Orchestra for the Viking label.
In 1942 Thompson shifted direction, moving to Los Angeles to join the music department at MGM, thereby replacing Hugh Martin, who had entered the army after U.S. entry into World War II. She formed a close professional association with songwriter and producer Roger Edens, whose work centered on musical films, especially those featuring Judy Garland. Thompson became Garland’s vocal coach and contributed substantially to The Harvey Girls (January 1946). The two can be heard on a demo of “In the Valley” included in Rhino Records’ 1996 soundtrack reissue; Thompson also collaborated with Ralph Blane on additional lyrics for Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer’s “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.” She composed “The Interview” (also known as “A Great Lady Has an Interview”), the Garland segment of the anthology film Ziegfeld Follies, which opened in March 1946. That same month she became godmother to Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli. She continued occasional singing, recording the 1945 Decca singles “The Steam Is on the Beam” and “You’re Mine, You” as vocalist with Johnny Green & His Orchestra.
Further MGM contributions in the mid-1940s included co-writing lyrics with Ralph Blane and Georgie Stoll for “Vive l’Amour” in Thrill of a Romance (May 1945); a small acting role in The Kid from Brooklyn (March 1946); writing “Isn’t It Wonderful” and co-writing “Love on a Greyhound Bus” with Blane and Stoll for No Leave, No Love (August 1946), a song later recorded by Guy Lombardo, Kay Kyser, Vaughn Monroe, and the Dinning Sisters; satiric musical commercials for The Hucksters (July 1947); and, with Edens, additional material for “Good News,” “He’s a Ladies’ Man,” and “Varsity Drag” in Good News (December 1947). She departed MGM in 1947 to resume performing, forming a nightclub act with the Williams Brothers quartet, which included teenage Andy Williams. The group recorded two Columbia singles—“Back Home in Indiana” backed with Thompson’s own “Jubilee,” and “I See Your Face Before Me” paired with “Louisiana Purchase”—both released in 1948, with Thompson singing the first side of each solo and the quartet joining on the second. After moving to Decca she cut “‘Bout You ’n’ Me” backed with Frank Loesser’s “(Where Are You?) Now That I Need You” in 1949 and “That Old Feeling” paired with “Was That the Human Thing to Do” in 1950. The Allied Record Sales Company issued the 1953 single “On the Caribbean” backed with “Old Fashioned Hammock,” both Thompson compositions. The act appeared at major clubs throughout the United States and in London.
Thompson continued occasional film work in the early 1950s, co-writing “More Wonderful Than These” with her second husband, radio director and producer William Spier, for the 1951 picture Lady Possessed. (He was by then already her second ex-husband; in the 1930s she had been married to trombonist Jack Jenney, with whom she wrote “What More Can I Give You?”—a marriage that also ended in divorce.) Following the Williams Brothers’ dissolution in 1953 she launched a solo nightclub career, opening at the Plaza Hotel in New York. In 1954 she recorded the solo album Kay Thompson Sings for MGM Records, released in January 1955. Among its tracks was her composition “Violins,” also known as “Violin” and “I Love a Violin,” later recorded by Teresa Brewer, Petula Clark, Dorothy Collins, Michael Feinstein, Liza Minnelli, and Dinah Shore.
In November 1955 Thompson published Kay Thompson’s Eloise, illustrated by Hilary Knight, the first of four children’s books centered on a six-year-old resident of the Plaza Hotel. Although these volumes constituted a sideline to her primary musical activities, they became her most widely recognized work. She soon capitalized on the character across other media, writing the song “Eloise” with Robert Wells and recording it for Cadence Records; the single reached the Top 40 in March 1956, her only such hit. On November 22, 1956, the Playhouse 90 series broadcast the television musical Eloise, which featured Thompson, songs she had written, Ethel Barrymore, and Louis Jourdan. Around the same period she supplied uncredited assistance to Broadway when the musical Happy Hunting opened on December 6, 1956, starring Ethel Merman but hampered by a weak score by Harold Karr and Matt Dubey; Thompson added two new songs, “I’m Old Enough to Know Better (And Young Enough Not to Care)” and “Just a Moment Ago,” enabling a modestly successful run. A more conspicuous project followed with her largest screen role, portraying a magazine editor in the musical Funny Face (March 1957) alongside Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. She performed “Think Pink!,” “Bonjour, Paris!,” “Clap Yo’ Hands,” and “On How to Be Lovely” both on screen and on the Verve soundtrack album. Verve also released her separate single “Bazazz” backed with “Light Up the Candle on the Birthday Cake.” (“Bazazz” is a term coined and often employed by the character she portrayed.) On October 15, 1957, she headlined her own television special. In 1959 the Hanover-Signature label issued the spoken-word comedy album Kay Thompson Party, Vol. 1: Let’s Talk About Russia and the single “Dasvidanya (Until We Meet Again)” paired with “Moscow Cha Cha Cha,” both songs co-written with Dick Grossman.
As her performing career diminished in the late 1950s, Thompson focused increasingly on songwriting. “You Gotta Love Everybody,” composed with Bill Norvas, was recorded by Della Reese, while “Promise Me, Love,” written alone, was recorded by Andy Williams and reached the Top 20 in fall 1958. Williams continued to record her material in subsequent years: “Stop Teasin’ Me” and “Straight from My Heart” appeared on his 1957 debut album Andy Williams; after the success of “Promise Me, Love” he included “Summer Love” on Lonely Street (1959), “Sweet Morning” on The Village of St. Bernadette (1960), “Au Revoir, Paris” on Under Paris Skies (1961), and both “Kay Thompson’s Jingle Bells” (an adaptation of the traditional carol) and “The Holiday Season” (in a medley with Irving Berlin’s “Happy Holiday”) on The Andy Williams Christmas Album (1963). The Osmonds and Michael W. Smith have also recorded “Kay Thompson’s Jingle Bells,” while “The Holiday Season” has been recorded by the Manhattan Transfer and by Tonic.
After the early 1960s Thompson maintained only limited musical activity, restricted to occasional television appearances, though she returned briefly to acting with a role alongside her goddaughter Liza Minnelli in the 1970 film Tell Me You Love Me, Junie Moon. That year she published another children’s book, Kay Thompson’s Miss Pooky Peckinpaugh and Her Secret Private Boyfriends Complete with Telephone Numbers. She spent her final years residing with Minnelli in a Manhattan apartment and died on July 2, 1998, at age 88. In 2008 Minnelli recreated Thompson’s nightclub act with the Williams Brothers as part of her own engagement at the Palace Theater on Broadway. Thompson’s recordings, originally scattered across numerous labels, remained accessible only through the scarce LP The Kay Thompson Reviews and the equally elusive CD The Golden Years 1934–1954 until Baldwin Street Music issued The Queen of Swing Vocals & Her Rhythm Singers, which covered only 1933–1937. In 2009, benefiting from the fifty-year European copyright limit on recordings, the British reissue label Sepia released the three-CD set Think Pink! A Kay Thompson Party, which continued from the Baldwin Street collection and incorporated more than two dozen previously unreleased tracks drawn from airchecks and private sources; the set was compiled by Thompson’s biographer Sam Irvin. Irvin also contributed significantly to the documentary Kay Thompson: “Think Pink,” included in a 2009 deluxe two-DVD edition of Funny Face.
Catherine Louise Fink, later known as Kay Thompson, entered the world on November 9, 1909, in St. Louis, Missouri; the precise day stands beyond dispute, though accounts of the year have varied between 1902 and 1913. Her birth certificate confirms 1909. Classical piano instruction during childhood led to recognition as a prodigy, and at age sixteen she performed Liszt with the St. Louis Symphony. While enrolled at Washington University she sang on radio station KNOX. After relocating to California she collaborated with the Mills Brothers in 1929, appeared on the program California Melodies, and hosted her own Kay Thompson show on KTM in Santa Monica in 1931. In San Francisco she joined bandleader Tom Coakley as a vocalist and made her first commercial recording in 1934 with the RCA Victor single “Take a Number from One to Ten.” The 2003 compilation The Queen of Swing Vocals & Her Rhythm Singers later incorporated an unreleased 1933 Brunswick test pressing of “My Galveston Gal,” her earliest surviving recording. She next moved to New York, where Fred Waring engaged her to assemble and direct a ten-member female choir; she performed with him on radio for a year beginning in December 1934. On April 20, 1935, she joined the cast of the inaugural broadcast of Your Hit Parade and remained with the series for the following two years. Additional mid-1930s radio work encompassed Dodge All-Star Revue, Chesterfield Dance Show under conductor André Kostelanetz, and Saturday Night Swing Club.
On November 11, 1935, she recorded for Brunswick accompanied by a studio orchestra. The resulting sides, issued in 1936 under the name Kay Thompson & the Boys, paired “You Let Me Down” with “You Hit the Spot” and “Don’t Mention Love to Me” with “Out of Sight, Out of Mind.” In 1937 she appeared on radio with bandleader Hal Kemp. On April 13, 1937, Kay Thompson & Her Orchestra recorded four titles for RCA Victor—“Carelessly,” “There’s a Lull in My Life,” “It Had to Be You,” and “Exactly Like You”—which appeared on two singles later that year. In November 1937 Kay Thompson & Her Ensemble performed in the film Manhattan Merry-Go-Round. Her initial Broadway credit arrived on December 1, 1937, when she and Hugh Martin served as vocal arrangers for the musical Hooray for What!, which opened that evening. In 1938 she briefly hosted her own radio series, Kay Thompson and Company; as the decade closed and the 1940s began she participated in another program, Tune-Up Time. In 1941 she sang as featured vocalist on several singles by Jack Hastings & His Orchestra for the Viking label.
In 1942 Thompson shifted direction, moving to Los Angeles to join the music department at MGM, thereby replacing Hugh Martin, who had entered the army after U.S. entry into World War II. She formed a close professional association with songwriter and producer Roger Edens, whose work centered on musical films, especially those featuring Judy Garland. Thompson became Garland’s vocal coach and contributed substantially to The Harvey Girls (January 1946). The two can be heard on a demo of “In the Valley” included in Rhino Records’ 1996 soundtrack reissue; Thompson also collaborated with Ralph Blane on additional lyrics for Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer’s “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.” She composed “The Interview” (also known as “A Great Lady Has an Interview”), the Garland segment of the anthology film Ziegfeld Follies, which opened in March 1946. That same month she became godmother to Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli. She continued occasional singing, recording the 1945 Decca singles “The Steam Is on the Beam” and “You’re Mine, You” as vocalist with Johnny Green & His Orchestra.
Further MGM contributions in the mid-1940s included co-writing lyrics with Ralph Blane and Georgie Stoll for “Vive l’Amour” in Thrill of a Romance (May 1945); a small acting role in The Kid from Brooklyn (March 1946); writing “Isn’t It Wonderful” and co-writing “Love on a Greyhound Bus” with Blane and Stoll for No Leave, No Love (August 1946), a song later recorded by Guy Lombardo, Kay Kyser, Vaughn Monroe, and the Dinning Sisters; satiric musical commercials for The Hucksters (July 1947); and, with Edens, additional material for “Good News,” “He’s a Ladies’ Man,” and “Varsity Drag” in Good News (December 1947). She departed MGM in 1947 to resume performing, forming a nightclub act with the Williams Brothers quartet, which included teenage Andy Williams. The group recorded two Columbia singles—“Back Home in Indiana” backed with Thompson’s own “Jubilee,” and “I See Your Face Before Me” paired with “Louisiana Purchase”—both released in 1948, with Thompson singing the first side of each solo and the quartet joining on the second. After moving to Decca she cut “‘Bout You ’n’ Me” backed with Frank Loesser’s “(Where Are You?) Now That I Need You” in 1949 and “That Old Feeling” paired with “Was That the Human Thing to Do” in 1950. The Allied Record Sales Company issued the 1953 single “On the Caribbean” backed with “Old Fashioned Hammock,” both Thompson compositions. The act appeared at major clubs throughout the United States and in London.
Thompson continued occasional film work in the early 1950s, co-writing “More Wonderful Than These” with her second husband, radio director and producer William Spier, for the 1951 picture Lady Possessed. (He was by then already her second ex-husband; in the 1930s she had been married to trombonist Jack Jenney, with whom she wrote “What More Can I Give You?”—a marriage that also ended in divorce.) Following the Williams Brothers’ dissolution in 1953 she launched a solo nightclub career, opening at the Plaza Hotel in New York. In 1954 she recorded the solo album Kay Thompson Sings for MGM Records, released in January 1955. Among its tracks was her composition “Violins,” also known as “Violin” and “I Love a Violin,” later recorded by Teresa Brewer, Petula Clark, Dorothy Collins, Michael Feinstein, Liza Minnelli, and Dinah Shore.
In November 1955 Thompson published Kay Thompson’s Eloise, illustrated by Hilary Knight, the first of four children’s books centered on a six-year-old resident of the Plaza Hotel. Although these volumes constituted a sideline to her primary musical activities, they became her most widely recognized work. She soon capitalized on the character across other media, writing the song “Eloise” with Robert Wells and recording it for Cadence Records; the single reached the Top 40 in March 1956, her only such hit. On November 22, 1956, the Playhouse 90 series broadcast the television musical Eloise, which featured Thompson, songs she had written, Ethel Barrymore, and Louis Jourdan. Around the same period she supplied uncredited assistance to Broadway when the musical Happy Hunting opened on December 6, 1956, starring Ethel Merman but hampered by a weak score by Harold Karr and Matt Dubey; Thompson added two new songs, “I’m Old Enough to Know Better (And Young Enough Not to Care)” and “Just a Moment Ago,” enabling a modestly successful run. A more conspicuous project followed with her largest screen role, portraying a magazine editor in the musical Funny Face (March 1957) alongside Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. She performed “Think Pink!,” “Bonjour, Paris!,” “Clap Yo’ Hands,” and “On How to Be Lovely” both on screen and on the Verve soundtrack album. Verve also released her separate single “Bazazz” backed with “Light Up the Candle on the Birthday Cake.” (“Bazazz” is a term coined and often employed by the character she portrayed.) On October 15, 1957, she headlined her own television special. In 1959 the Hanover-Signature label issued the spoken-word comedy album Kay Thompson Party, Vol. 1: Let’s Talk About Russia and the single “Dasvidanya (Until We Meet Again)” paired with “Moscow Cha Cha Cha,” both songs co-written with Dick Grossman.
As her performing career diminished in the late 1950s, Thompson focused increasingly on songwriting. “You Gotta Love Everybody,” composed with Bill Norvas, was recorded by Della Reese, while “Promise Me, Love,” written alone, was recorded by Andy Williams and reached the Top 20 in fall 1958. Williams continued to record her material in subsequent years: “Stop Teasin’ Me” and “Straight from My Heart” appeared on his 1957 debut album Andy Williams; after the success of “Promise Me, Love” he included “Summer Love” on Lonely Street (1959), “Sweet Morning” on The Village of St. Bernadette (1960), “Au Revoir, Paris” on Under Paris Skies (1961), and both “Kay Thompson’s Jingle Bells” (an adaptation of the traditional carol) and “The Holiday Season” (in a medley with Irving Berlin’s “Happy Holiday”) on The Andy Williams Christmas Album (1963). The Osmonds and Michael W. Smith have also recorded “Kay Thompson’s Jingle Bells,” while “The Holiday Season” has been recorded by the Manhattan Transfer and by Tonic.
After the early 1960s Thompson maintained only limited musical activity, restricted to occasional television appearances, though she returned briefly to acting with a role alongside her goddaughter Liza Minnelli in the 1970 film Tell Me You Love Me, Junie Moon. That year she published another children’s book, Kay Thompson’s Miss Pooky Peckinpaugh and Her Secret Private Boyfriends Complete with Telephone Numbers. She spent her final years residing with Minnelli in a Manhattan apartment and died on July 2, 1998, at age 88. In 2008 Minnelli recreated Thompson’s nightclub act with the Williams Brothers as part of her own engagement at the Palace Theater on Broadway. Thompson’s recordings, originally scattered across numerous labels, remained accessible only through the scarce LP The Kay Thompson Reviews and the equally elusive CD The Golden Years 1934–1954 until Baldwin Street Music issued The Queen of Swing Vocals & Her Rhythm Singers, which covered only 1933–1937. In 2009, benefiting from the fifty-year European copyright limit on recordings, the British reissue label Sepia released the three-CD set Think Pink! A Kay Thompson Party, which continued from the Baldwin Street collection and incorporated more than two dozen previously unreleased tracks drawn from airchecks and private sources; the set was compiled by Thompson’s biographer Sam Irvin. Irvin also contributed significantly to the documentary Kay Thompson: “Think Pink,” included in a 2009 deluxe two-DVD edition of Funny Face.
Albums
