At 17, she moved to California, changed her name from Kitty Fink, got a severe nose job and invented Kay Thompson. Louis Symphony, tripping over a potted palm on her way off the stage. We do know she started playing jazz piano at the age of 4 and at the age of 15 performed Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Fantasy” with the St. The facts are not important because, like Diana Vreeland, she made them up as she went along. Kay didn’t give a fig about the past, but to explain why she was in a class by herself, a bit of background is necessary. Let’s keep it crisp as lettuce.” She liked the result and sent me a dozen peonies in an old ice bucket with a note: “Bobbledy Boo Bop do Boo Bop do Bobbledy Bop … It’s Great–Love, Kay.” She never spoke to the press again. “This isn’t going to be one of those ‘And then I wrote’ pieces, is it? I don’t like looking back. She looked like a cross between Georgia O’Keeffe and a syncopated condor and spoke with talons for teeth. She wore chamois pants by Halston with a black-ribbed Italian scoop-neck sweater, a black belt with a big silver Pilgrim buckle, no makeup, and sunglasses on her head as she folded her frame (5 feet 5 inches that seemed more like 7 feet) into a leather chair like crushed chiffon. “Bobbledy Boo Bop do Boo Bop do Bobbledy Bop!” she scatted, popping her fingers as she time-stepped her way to a corner table in the Oak Room of the stuffy old Plaza Hotel like a magic ray from a voodoo moon. I first met her on a windy autumn day in 1972 when I interviewed her for Harper’s Bazaar.
She gave me the last formal interview she ever granted, and we were friends and fellow mischief-makers for 26 years.
She invented the word “Bazazz” and she had plenty of it. There will never be anyone else like her. 9, but she was younger than anyone I know. Stylish, elegant, supersophisticated and fun to experience, Kay was an accomplished singer, dancer, actress, composer, pianist, arranger, author, satirist and businesswoman who was ahead of her time for nine decades–awesomely professional and never dull. Yes, she was best known as the creator of Eloise, the precocious 6-year-old who poured Perrier down the mail chute at the Plaza Hotel in the first of four children’s books that have sold more than a million copies, and the blazing star, with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, of the classic 1957 movie musical Funny Face. None of the obituaries got it right and The New York Times didn’t even try. Roy Rogers got more space, but Kay Thompson got more tears. Kay Thompson, one of the most uniquely fascinating women in New York, passed away on July 2.
0 kommentar(er)
