"Sly, We Call It"

For six years, on and off, nightclub audiences guffawed at a lanky, frenetic comedienne named Kay Thompson and her madcap act with the four Williams brothers (TIME, Nov. 10, 1947). Last summer the team folded, and Kay settled down to a quiet life near Beverly Hills. She redecorated her apartment, designed dressy slacks for long-legged women, began painting aaa la Toulouse-Lautrec, and wrote half of an autobiographical book before the quiet life began to pall. Next thing she knew, she was whipping up a one-woman show, and last week she was sashaying about the floor at Manhattan's Hotel Plaza.

Her wax-bean body looked stringy as ever in slim, bejeweled pants and matching long-sleeved blouse, her movements lithe as a dancer's. As soon as she stepped onstage, she peopled it with imaginary cocktail guests: she became an outrageously blase hostess greeting newcomers with explosive "Dahlings I" and whipping out quips behind their backs. From time to time she picked up the phone for heartless chats with her husband, who had apparently been hospitalized after a grave accident. Three times she interrupted her chatter to bellow out her own satirical songs.

Author, composer and arranger of all of her music, Kay sings a ditty called I Love a Violin ("My heart goes pizzi-pizzi-cat"), and a fast, brash number about

Madame from Paris, France, who successively falls for a French financier, a French diplomat and a French cowboy --none of whom have "enough of that nec essary stuff," so madame remains frantic and frustrated to the end. When she left the stage after 40 solo minutes, the crowd was hers.

The hostess type that she parodies "probably came from Iowa," says Kay, "although there's a touch of Dallas in her, too . . . She is insane, of course." Comedienne Thompson (who comes from St. Louis) thinks she will keep her act essentially the same, whether she books it into Las Vegas or Denver, although she is looking for a way to show that her hostess has "a heart underneath -- that she is vulnerable, like any other woman." But she adds that, especially in Manhat tan, "people expect Kay Thompson to be a certain someone, slightly dirty -- 'sly,' as we call it."

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