At the Plaza by Curtis Gathje

Author:Curtis Gathje
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Clockwise from top left: Bob Hope amusing friends onstage, Liberace with Ted Straeter (the room’s bandleader), a tent card from the fall of 1971, and Dorothy Kilgallen at a charity auction.

Tent cards from the 1950s.

Newspaper ads and record jacket art for songbirds Ethel Merman and Eartha Kitt (who also made a recording in the room).

Record jacket art from recordings made in the 1950s and 1960s.

Miss Kay Thompson

Many writers have used The Plaza as a setting in their fiction, but few are as closely identified with the place as Kay Thompson, creator of the infamous Eloise. Her wry tale about a mischievous six-year-old hotel guest has sold in the millions and become part of Plaza lore, yet Eloise was but one of Thompson’s many accomplishments.

She began her career as a singer with Fred Waring’s band, but she discovered that her talents lay in an emerging field of the music industry, vocal arranging. Signed by the Freed unit at MGM in the 1940s, she is credited with introducing jazz styling into the vocal arrangements of such stars as Judy Garland and Lena Horne during the golden age of Hollywood musicals. (Horne later called her “the best vocal coach in the world.”) When her MGM contract expired, she decided to experiment with a new kind of nightclub act, an elaborately choreographed program in which she shared the bill with a vocal quartet, the Williams Brothers. Pictured here in an ebullient publicity still, the act was a hit and toured for several years. (Trivia buffs might recognize the brother behind Thompson’s left shoulder as Andy Williams, before he embarked on a solo career.) Included in their tour were several engagements in the Persian Room; here, an advertisement for an appearance in October 1952; here, the group performing.

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