Kay Thompson (38 page)

Eloise Explodes

(1955–57)

The
Alice in Wonderland
of the Atomic Age.

—Los Angeles Times

I
was shoved into it,” Kay Thompson conceded.

“
Eloise
never would have happened as a book had it not been for D. D. Ryan badgering Kay and putting us together,” Hilary Knight explained.

After years of carrying on phone conversations with Eloise as if she were a real person, D. D. finally blurted out, “Look Kay, Eloise is a book.”

“There’s nothing to write about,” Thompson replied. “It’s just fun.”

Since childhood, Kay had been assuming the persona of her alter ego to entertain friends, but that’s as far as she had taken it. D. D. Ryan, a junior fashion editor under Diana Vreeland at
Harper’s Bazaar,
passionately believed that Eloise was a book just waiting to happen—especially if the right illustrator could be found.

D. D. lived in a brownstone on Swing Street, above the hotbed of jazz clubs lining West Fifty-second Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues (including the Famous Door, where Thompson performed in 1940). Across the hall lived a man named Hilary Knight, an artist of many mediums.

In 1951, Hilary had created an elaborate fan of white feathers and rhinestones that caught D. D.’s eye. She immediately grasped its potential as an outré prop for a photo shoot she was setting up in Los Angeles. Hilary gladly loaned it for the occasion, which turned out to be a Richard Avedon session for Kay Thompson. Kay posed with the fan but, for reasons unknown, the shots were never published. Nevertheless, it represented the first fusion of Thompson and Knight—presaging better things to come.

“[Hilary] used to make little drawings and shove them under my door,” D. D. explained. “One morning he made a drawing of a fat little prissy pretty girl with frizzy blonde corkscrews. She had a satin ribbon in her hair and a bulging belly, and she was facing a little girl who looked just like Eloise. I said, ‘I have a drawing of Eloise.’ And Kay got enormously interested.”

“Around December 1954, D. D. and I went to the Persian Room and saw her new act,” Hilary Knight recalled. “After the show, D. D. introduced me to Kay and we sat down in The Plaza and had a long conversation.”

“He seemed terribly impressed with me,” Thompson remembered, “which naturally impressed me terribly with him. I noticed his hands, which were slim and artistic, and thought that was a step in the right direction.”

They discussed his background. Born November 1, 1926, Hilary had spent his early youth in Roslyn, Long Island; and then, in 1932, he and his family had moved into Manhattan. “I attribute any abilities I possess to the fact that both my parents are artists and writers,” Knight explained. “My father, Clayton Knight, is well-known for his aviation paintings and books. My mother, Katharine Sturges, has done fashion drawings, fabric designs as well as many children’s books.”

Notably, his parents had collaborated on the cover art for the April 17, 1926, issue of
The New Yorker,
a portrait of a thoroughly modern flapper in pink, black, and white. The color scheme would be resurrected for
Eloise
.

Hilary had attended the Art Students League under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh (who taught him “how to make a figure move”), and since the early 1950s, he had been selling humorous illustrations to magazines like
Mademoiselle, House and Garden,
and
Family Circle
.

When Kay saw Hilary’s drawing of the two little girls, she was intrigued. “The prissy one Kay would call Dorothy Darling,” Hilary explained. “The other suggested the wicked schoolgirls of Ronald Searle.”

Kay envisioned her brainchild as something in between—not too frilly and not too demonic. “So I wrote twelve lines on a piece of paper and handed it to him,” Thompson explained. “ ‘I’m going to write this book,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave this with you. If you’re interested, get in touch with me.’ ”

From there, the visualization of Eloise began to percolate. “Physically, Eloise is a composite of a lot of things,” Hilary noted. “About 1930, my mother did one small painting of a little girl in Victorian costume—but not quite a Victorian air—and when it came time to develop a character for Eloise, unconsciously, I used this as a model.”

Other seminal works included Ernest Shepard’s drawings for
Winnie the Pooh
and
The Wind in the Willows;
Edmund Dulac’s exotic depictions in
Stories from the Arabian Nights
; and, most especially, the illustrations of Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel in the 1887 book of manners,
La Civilité
. “[Boutet de Monvel’s] drawings of naughty children using damask curtains for handkerchiefs and forks as combs planted the seed that became Eloise,” said Knight.

There were more roots as well. “In the 1940s, I discovered
Punch
and
Lilliput,
” Hilary elaborated, “famous British satirical magazines that featured black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings, including the wicked little St. Trinian’s girls by Ronald Searle.”

A real-life Eloise was part of the recipe, too. “A relative of my brother’s wife, named Eloise Davison, was a food writer for the defunct
Herald Tribune,
” Hilary explained. “She was a roly-poly little woman with this very bizarre hair that went straight out in various uncontrolled angles. She was in her fifties when I knew her, but I thought, ‘What would this woman have looked like when she was a little girl?’ ”

Distilling these ideas to paper, Hilary used pen and ink to come up with his version of a six-year-old Eloise.

“That Christmas [of 1954] I received a card from Knight,” Kay explained. “It was an interesting, beautifully executed and highly stylized picture of an angel and Santa Claus, streaking through the sky on a Christmas tree. On the end of the tree, grinning a lovely grin, her wild hair standing on end, was Eloise. It was immediate recognition on my part. There she was. In person. I knew at once Hilary Knight had to illustrate the book.”

“We started working on the book right away,” Hilary confirmed. “Exclamations of ‘Go!’ or ‘Get cracking!’ were typical Thompson orders to work. But ‘work’ it never was—just exhilarating, all-out fun.”

Because Eloise was drawn in black ink, her hair color was up for interpretation. Knight initially envisioned her as a brunette but Thompson thought of her as a blonde, as a tribute to her own bleached locks. That’s why the dust jacket of the book, and other color representations, would have a wash of yellow applied to Eloise’s flyaway mop.

Regarding her silhouette, Thompson originally imagined Eloise as “thin” and “wiry,” much like herself. But, at Knight’s suggestion, Eloise was given,
as Kay called it, “a
rawther
large stomach.” Thompson embraced the idea that Eloise was entirely guilt-free: “ ‘Ooooooooo I absolutely love meringue glace,’ Eloise says, with some delight and with no shame whatever.”

While on tour with her nightclub act in early 1955, Kay spent off-hours jotting down Eloise chitchat. “Ideas popped out of my head like grapes,” Thompson marveled. “I used to go to bed with a notepad on my chest. Fifty brainstorms would come and I would whisk them down. You ought to see the material we threw away.”

Some of those discarded bon mots included: “Nanny eats a cucumber like an apple.” “I have a fleet of elevator cars that zoom me from the lobby all the way to Mars.” “When I go to sleep, hallways have to wear don’t disturb signs.”

Subliminally or otherwise, Kay drew inspiration from the many precocious young girls she’d known over the years, including Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, Gail Jones (daughter of Lena Horne), Lucie Arnaz (daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz), Rebecca Welles (daughter of Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles), Princess Yasmin Khan (daughter of Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan), Sigourney Weaver (daughter of Pat), Dena Kaye (daughter of Danny), Portland Mason (daughter of James), Sylvia Sheekman (daughter of Gloria Stuart), Margaret O’Brien, Elinor Donahue, and many others. There were a few mischievous boys in the mix, too, like David Carradine (whom she’d met at the Garden of Allah), John Jenney (son of her first husband, Jack), and Stephen Bogart (son of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart).

Cue the grave spinning. When Kay was alive, she’d go ballistic when anyone claimed to be an inspiration for
her
alter ego. “Eloise is
me,
” Kay once declared to fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert. “All me!”

In less possessive moods, she would flip-flop to the other extreme. “Understand me, she’s completely imaginary,” Kay insisted in a 1956 interview for the
Los Angeles Times
. “I never knew any little girl like Eloise. I didn’t live in hotels as a little girl. I invented her years and years ago.”

The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. Fleshing out the bible of Eloise’s world, Thompson chose The Plaza for the child’s home because it was her own New York residence and had been one of her most familiar and beloved stomping grounds since the 1930s. “Write what you know,” the sage advice goes. Well, Kay knew every nook and cranny of The Plaza, and the members of the staff were like family.

Freud would have had a field day analyzing the way Thompson presented Eloise’s parents. “The father is not only not seen, but never mentioned,” Hilary Knight noted. “The mother is talked about, but always away somewhere. It was Kay’s choice not to have her visible.”

One early draft, found in the collection of Joan Denise Hill, reveals that when the mother was in town, she kept a busy schedule of “private meetings.” Eloise innocently explained, “You can set your watch. There’s a lawyer named John who comes at ten. There’s a doctor named William who comes at two. There’s a doorman named Dudley who comes after four. And the night watchman, Sam, who comes anytime after twelve. I overheard Mabel, the afternoon maid, saying that mother was a nymphomaniac.” Ultimately, for the sake of decorum, the mother’s promiscuity was left to the reader’s imagination.

Early drafts also had Eloise interacting with eight neighborhood boys: Stinky, Junior, Melvin, Nicky, Fenwick, Bruce, Balfour, and Harcourt. As things progressed, however, Kay opted to concentrate all the action in the hotel, where adults would be Eloise’s only friends.

O
f course, Eloise needed
a caretaker, and that character took the form of Nanny, a British au pair.

“I helped her write that,” claimed Paul Methuen, Noël Coward’s friend who played Kay’s British butler in her 1954–55 nightclub act. “I was appearing with her when she was writing it. Of course, I had a darling English nanny when I was young, so I gave Kay all the things an English nanny would say.”

When Kay went into her Eloise voice, Paul would pretend to be her nanny and they would improvise endless conversations that Kay would jot down or tape-record for later transcribing.

“My drawings of Nanny,” revealed Hilary Knight, “were based partly on Kay and a British actress named Martita Hunt, who played Miss Havisham in
Great Expectations
[General Films, 1946]. But Nanny is very much Kay’s personality.”

Besides Thompson and Hunt, there was another movie star who came to mind. “Kay and I loved the old Fred Astaire film
Yolanda and the Thief
[MGM, 1945],” Hilary recalled. “In it, Mildred Natwick played an eccentric woman who says everything in threes, like ‘Hurry hurry hurry!’ and ‘March march march!’ Kay made Nanny speak like that.”

That predilection for speaking in triplets came from one of the movie’s writers, Ludwig Bemelmans, author of the
Madeline
children’s book series—a precursor and leading rival to the
Eloise
franchise. Kay knew Ludwig when they were both under contract at MGM and she certainly took notice of his work and success. And, there was no question that Mildred Natwick embodied the nanny that Kay envisioned. Not only had Thompson gotten to know
Natwick while working as the vocal arranger on
Yolanda and the Thief,
but later, when it came time to dramatize
Eloise
for television in 1956, Kay would personally choose Mildred to portray Nanny.

Eloise had two pets: a turtle named Skipperdee and a pug dog named Weenie. Kay was very chummy with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who famously collected pugs. So, when Hilary suggested the breed, she thought it would be a funny nod to her blue-blooded buddies.

One more likely inspiration was the pug in
Her Highness and the Bellboy
(MGM, 1945), another film for which Kay did the vocal arrangements. The movie took place in a fictionalized version of The Plaza where a bellboy (Robert Walker) takes a stroll through Central Park, exercising a guest’s pug—a dead ringer for Weenie.

People were divided over the name Kay gave the pooch. “I didn’t want a dog named Weenie,” grimaced actress Mariel Hemingway, granddaughter of Ernest. “That was embarrassing to me when I first read it as a child.”

More devilish minds relished it. “Any girl who named her dog Weenie was a friend of mine,” quipped Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

Eloise was not going to be sugarcoated. For decades, Kay had been a fan of the adult cartoons that sprinkled the pages of
The New Yorker,
especially those of Peter Arno and Charles Addams, both of whom she knew socially. Their sardonic worldview was just the sort of sophisticated wit to which Thompson aspired for Eloise.

“I took three months off and wrote it,” Kay explained. “I holed in at The Plaza and [Hilary and I] went to work. I just knew I had to get this done. Eloise was trying to get out . . . We wrote, edited, laughed, outlined, cut, pasted, laughed again, read out loud, laughed and suddenly we had a book.”

I
n May 1955, Kay
and Hilary decided it was time to see if a publisher agreed. “D. D. brought [
Eloise
] to Jack Goodman, her friend at Simon & Schuster,” noted Knight.

“[Jack] recognized and understood Eloise immediately,” Kay remarked. Not only did Goodman want to publish the book, he agreed that the target audience should primarily be adults. In fact, he was the one who came up with the clever copy line that emblazoned the top of the dust jacket: “A book for precocious grownups.”