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Lyhapter I wentij-vJne "No one was ever born into the world with such a brightgeniusfor living. " Though many of the Harrisons' friends had known Kay was dying, to her family it came as a complete and sudden shock. Her grandmother, Marie Kendall, was told by her daughter Moya. Gladys was staying in New York and was reached by transatlantic telephone. Kim was sailing with her husband off Nantucket for Labor Day weekend and had been trying to reach Kay through the local party line, with no success. The next day, her stepdaughter Pauline heard of Kay's death on the radio and broke the news to Kim. It was perhaps hardest of all on Kay's father, Terry, as his wife, Doric, was herself a week away from death in another hospital. "I was so sure that Kay was going to come through it," a shattered Terry told the press. "Rex has been a wonderful husband to her and she absolutely worshipped him." Kay was buried on September 9 in London's picturesque Hampstead Cemetery, opened in 1876 and featuring many beautiful monuments. Among her neighbors today are several theater people: Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Anton Walbrook, Marie Lloyd, and Kay's friend Gladys Cooper. Also in Hampstead are the graves of artists Kate Greenaway and John Constable, author Gerald Du Maurier, and medical pioneer Joseph Lister. Noel Harrison remembers sitting in a car outside the graveyard with his father and half-brother, Carey, before the service. "We had a bottle of something comforting," he says, "and had the hardest time getting the cork out. It broke, finally, and we had to push the last bit in. We were all convinced Katie's spirit was responsible for the problem, and there was a treasured moment when we shared the echo of that divine impishness." Kay's classically shaped, pale green slate tombstone reads "Kay Kendall Harrison" in an elegant script and, below, "Kate, Deeply loved wife of Rex." Supported by his sons, Harrison placed a spray of crimson roses on her grave. Noël Coward wrote in his diary that "I went to the funeral with L^haptep Iwentij-LJne 153 Vivien [Leigh], quite small and quiet and nicely done. There were no mobs and shaming demonstrations, only a few scruffy newspaper photographers clambering about on the cemetery railings and snapping the coffin being lowered into the ground." On September 15, memorials were held for Kay in New York and Los Angeles. Irene Mayer Selznick presided over the one in New York, at the famed "Little Church Around the Corner," known for its theatrical patronage; Rex Harrison asked Dirk Bogarde to read at the one in Los Angeles. "We were all doing it together at the same time, and finally I couldn't do it, I just broke. So Gladys Cooper, who adored Kate, did it very bravely, with tears pouring down her face," said Bogarde. "Rex had made a rule that there were to be no wreaths of any sort. The first one we saw was this bloody great wreath from David Niven. So we hid that behind a door, and then went in to check the church, and on the altar there were hundreds of red roses." They were wired together, so Bogarde had to rip apart the displays with bleeding hands. The U.S. services were packed with celebrities: Moss and Kitty Carlisle Hart, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, Phil Silvers, Margaret Leighton. Bogarde said that "Four major studios closed that morning for Kate. Even the man who sold hot dogs outside the studio came along—he closed his stall. The church was jammed—you couldn't move with people. She'd only made one film in Hollywood." Kay's British memorial service was held on September 22 at St. Martinin -the-Fields and was a star-packed affair. Among the thousand participants were Alec Guinness, Terence Rattigan, Julie Andrews, Cecil Beaton, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Muriel Pavlow (of her immediate family, only Kay's father and his mother, Marie Kendall, were able to attend). Kim, eight months pregnant and in the U.S., was not able to come to the service ("though I was not invited anyway," she notes). Ralph Richardson read from the Bible, then Vivien Leigh got up to speak: "No one was ever born into the world with such a bright genius for living. . . . It was almost as if she had a premonition that the gift of life would not be...

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