Free Kay Thompson by Sam Irvin Page A

a San Francisco getaway had turned into a whirlwind of commitments. Of her opening night at the Palace Hotel with Coakley’s band, Kay recalled, “I was terrible. Really bad.” Despite her external exuberance, Thompson had recurring bouts of stage fright. The pattern is easy to trace—her teenage memory loss at her debut with the St. Louis Symphony, her sudden laryngitis attack at the audition with Al Lyons, and so on. Frequently nauseous before performances, she utilized many backstage tricks to calm her anxiety—such as a shot of whiskey or improvising comic conversations as Eloise. Unfortunately, none of those worked when she went onstage with Coakley. The hotel manager was so upset, he told the bandleader to get rid of her.
    “You can imagine how I felt,” Kay said, shuddering from the memory.
    Compassionately, Coakley insisted on giving her another chance, and the second night went well enough to convince the manager to let her stay. Now Kay had something to prove: “It was do or die.” Miraculously, she regained her footing and the breezy, self-confident Thompson was back in action.
    One night she blithely announced to the audience, “I cannot sing unless I wear a scarf.” This was the sort of nonsensical bon mot Kay had perfected over the years as a way to drum up attention—humorous, eccentric, and self-glamorizing, conveyed with an economy of words. When an interviewer later nailed her to explain the predilection, Kay couldn’t “tell you why to save her life.” But it got plenty of ink.
    Less savvy was her decision to sleep with the enemy. Coakley’s band was being nationally broadcast daily by NBC via their local affiliate, KECA, the initials of owner Earle C. Anthony, who also owned KFI in Los Angeles and twenty Packard dealerships throughout California. In both radio and automotive sales, Anthony was Don Lee’s archrival.
    So, it was beyond brazen for Kay to think she could get away with belting her pipes out on NBC, and yet that’s exactly what she did. When Lee lodged an objection, he assumed that would be the end of it, but Thompson, stubborn as a mule, kept right on singing, figuring she would solve the problem by using a pseudonym. Her voice had become so recognizable, however, few were fooled.
    “Kay Thompson is singing with Tom Coakley’s Orchestra under the name Judie Richards,” scooped the San Francisco Call-Bulletin on June 22. The following day, the San Francisco Chronicle insisted that her alias was not Judie Richards at all, but rather “Judy Rich.”
    Whether her name was Judy Rich, Judie Richards, or Kay Thompson, Kitty Fink’s goose was cooked. Don Lee not only fired her, he canned the Three Rhythm Kings as well. Predictably, their agent, Thomas Lee, dropped them as clients.
    Finally free to do as she pleased, Kay decided to stay with Coakley’s band at the Palace and appear as Kay Thompson on their nightly NBC broadcasts. “There is no thrill that compares with it,” Thompson later reminisced. “There’s something about having a swell orchestral background designed especially for your own torching which few songbirds can resist.”
    Her notices were good, too. “When she sings a number,” columnist Carroll Nye wrote in the Los Angeles Times , “the dancers gather around the band stand to give her a cheer—especially when she’s singing ‘Here Come the British.’ ”
    “I was jealous of Kay when she did ‘Here Come the British,’ ” said Virginia Haig, another of Coakley’s vocalists, “because I thought I should have had that song. Thank God she didn’t go with us on tour! She was extremely talented and that’s why I was losing it. I was jealous. I could sing, but not like Kay. She was a real star.”
    All of Coakley’s singers and musicians were given free accommodations at the Palace, which naturally led to some late-night shenanigans.
    “Kay and one of the guys in the band made goo-goo eyes at each other and fell in love,” Haig recalled. “His