Kay Thompson (39 page)

Kay’s agent, Barron Polan, negotiated the agreement. Dated June 15, 1955, the contract called for a $1,000 advance against future royalties, a final deadline of July 30, and a publication date set for November 28.

“The timing was unheard of,” Knight reflected in amazement. “You know, it normally takes a year to get a book out but I can remember doing the color overlays, for the pink and red, with Fourth of July rockets going off.”

The division of monies between Thompson and Knight was never mentioned in the original deal, a serious oversight that would be addressed in a March 14, 1956, addendum—months after the fact—retroactively awarding a hefty 66
²
/
₃
percent to Kay and 33
¹
/
₃
percent to Hilary. The industry norm for books of this ilk was a fifty-fifty split between author and illustrator, but evidently nothing was normal in the world of Miss Thompson.

“I totally trusted her,” Knight confessed with considerable regret.

Kay was driven by more than mere greed. Though nothing in the contracts mandated it, she managed to maneuver her name above the title in its possessive form:
Kay Thompson’s Eloise
. Later, when booksellers created promotional display signage, Kay would call up and complain if her name didn’t appear “as part of the title,” a prerogative that was manufactured and policed by Miss Thompson alone.

In a significantly smaller font, “Drawings by Hilary Knight” appeared at the bottom of the dust jacket, indicating that any presumed equality between the “authors” was pure fiction (the font size was equalized on editions published after her death). Forever regretting her fifty-fifty deal with the Williams Brothers, Kay was taking no chances. If she could have gotten away with paying Hilary a flat fee as an artist for hire, she would have done so—just as she had done with her trio of dancers and Paul Methuen.

There wasn’t any fanfare when the first copies of
Eloise
rolled off the presses in mid-November 1955. Based on tepid advance orders from booksellers of only 4,000 copies, Simon & Schuster’s run for the first printing had been set at a conservative 7,500 copies.

But that was before
Life,
the largest-circulation magazine in the country, ran a spread in its December 12, 1955, issue, exposing
Eloise
to millions of consumers in the days leading up to Christmas. Kay was so overwhelmed, she sent a telegram to Simon & Schuster’s publicist, Larry Vinick, that read:
CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE THE END. YOU’RE A COUP D’ÉTAT. THE EDICT OF NANTES. THE LACE ON MY PANTIES. YOU’RE DIVINE, OH LARRY OH LARRY OH LARRY. I’M PRETTY GRATEFUL TO YOU. HUGS HUGS KISS KISS, A PAT AND A SQUEEZE FROM KAY YOUR FRIEND AND ELOISE
.

Next, Bloomingdale’s department store featured Thompson’s character in a
New York Times
advertising campaign for Kalistron Luggage. A steady stream of gushing reviews followed. The
Los Angeles Times
hailed the book as “the
Alice in Wonderland
of the Atomic Age.”

One line of the glowing review in
The New Yorker
, however, sent chills down Miss Thompson’s brittle spine: “Mr. Knight’s drawings give the book at least half its charm.” To Kay, any implication that Eloise was not
all
her creation was tantamount to heresy. Consequently, her jealousy of Hilary began to fester.

Not long after her Ciro’s gig was done, Thompson flew back to New York to take charge of her baby, taking up residence at (where else?) The Plaza. Within days of her arrival, Kay made her first appearance on
The Tonight Show Starring Steve Allen
(NBC-TV, December 16, 1955) to talk up
Eloise
. She was also joined onstage by her protégé and secret paramour, Andy Williams, to perform one of their old nightclub routines, “Broadway, Street of Dreams,” spoofing Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward.

As a reciprocal gesture, on December 21, Noël Coward sent a telegram stating,
FRANKLY, I ADORE ELOISE
, which promptly headlined an advertisement in
The New Yorker
. After that, Kay solicited a slew of endorsements from her many famous friends for a series of ads that quoted Lauren Bacall, Cole Porter, Vivien Leigh, Douglas Fairbanks, Walter Winchell,
The New Yorker
’s Cornelia Otis Skinner, Pulitzer Prize–winning author John P. Marquand, Bennett Cerf (cofounder of Random House, a top competitor of Simon & Schuster), and, most amusing, Groucho Marx, who wrote, “I admire Eloise enormously—and I am very happy that I am not her father.”

In the wake of all this, Simon & Schuster ordered a second printing of 9,500, but it was too little, too late. As Christmas approached,
Eloise
books became a rare commodity. With only 17,000 copies in print, frantic buyers rushed from bookstore to bookstore in a futile attempt to locate any remaining copies.

“Booksellers were angry,” confessed Simon & Schuster in a mea culpa trade ad. “People . . . took [
Eloise
] home in such quantities that the publishers couldn’t print or ship copies fast enough to fill the vacuum.”

By early January 1956, a third printing of 15,000 was hitting stores (bringing the total number of copies in print to 32,000)—but the book was just one part of the success story.

O
n December 20, 1955,
The Plaza hosted a cocktail party honoring “Kay Thompson, author of
Eloise,
a brat living in the hotel,” attended by Alphonse Salomone, the beleaguered managing director of The Plaza who had just been immortalized in the pages of
Eloise
.

“All the children who come here want my autograph,” Mr. Salomone was quoted as saying in
The New Yorker
. “They also want me to bow to the waist, as I do in the book. I oblige on both counts.”

“After the first book was published,” Kay explained to
TV Times,
“someone phoned up [The Plaza] long distance from Ohio and asked: ‘Please may I speak to Eloise?’ And the telephone operator, without a moment’s hesitation, replied: ‘I am sorry. Eloise is on the 13th floor helping with the air conditioning.’ Later, calls began to increase in number, so did the operators’ excuses . . . ‘Eloise is riding in Central Park’ . . . ‘Eloise is swonking pigeons on the roof’ . . . ‘Eloise is in the lobby—she has to be in the lobby a lot, you know.’ ”

Publishers’ Weekly
confirmed that Thompson personally handled “as many of the phone calls as possible when she was at The Plaza, ‘until I realized Eloise was getting more calls than I was,’ she says.” Not long after that, the hotel had Kay record a telephone message from Eloise that operators would access when callers requested the little girl.

“The success of
Eloise,
” noted
The New Yorker
, “has caused [The Plaza] to become a favorite hangout of the pre-teen-age set. The management of The Plaza is delighted with this turn of events and goes out of its way to foster the impression among the impressionable that Eloise really and truly lives there.”

When children came to the front desk asking for Eloise, staff played along and made up replies such as, “Oh, I’m sorry, you just missed her. But if you run into Eloise, please tell her we found her missing shoes.” To authenticate the illusion, a pair of patent leather Mary Janes would be lifted into view, causing young eyes to widen in amazement. Suddenly, Eloise was as real as Santa Claus and The Plaza was teeming with children on the lookout for her.

“[Thompson] gets letters addressed to Eloise from 6 and 7-year-olds,” claimed the
Los Angeles Times
. “It is reported in New York that the small fry set is dropping in on The Plaza in hordes to ask to see Eloise in person . . . The hotel is delighted with the book and sells copies in the lobby, as do other hotels including the Biltmore here [in Los Angeles]. The book has had an enormous effect on hotels.”

The Plaza was only too happy to give away promotional postcards that featured Knight’s drawing of Eloise saluting the doorman at the entrance to the hotel. To the surprise of the hotel’s staff, the demand for this Eloise souvenir far outnumbered requests for traditional postcards featuring The Plaza’s facade.

Reacting to the unexpected windfall of free publicity, an incredulous Conrad Hilton (whose company, Hilton International, managed the property) sent a telegram to Mr. Salomone demanding to know:
HOW MUCH DID YOU PAY HER
?

Of course, Kay’s choice of The Plaza as the setting for her book had been completely innocent, devoid of any ulterior motive. Or was it? Once the inherent value of Eloise was clear, Kay demanded and got free accommodations at the hotel.

In short order, Suite 937 was Thompsonized from floor to ceiling. Kay brought in two white chaise lounges and side tables where she displayed eclectic bric-a-brac and clusters of framed photographs (including a handsome 8×10 of Andy Williams). On the walls, she hung magnificent French theatrical posters by the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec.

“These are odds and ends,” Kay explained, “that I have picked up from places I have been to . . . Rome and Paris . . . Dallas and Chicago. [Shifting into her favorite Southern drawl] And honey dawlin’, I’ve got some magnolias just to let us know we’re all so Southern and Tallahassee and all.”

Thompson occasionally conducted interviews in the privacy of her suite, but she preferred to perform for the press in The Plaza’s public areas. She’d get more attention that way. “People love to play kid,” Kay explained while sipping tea in the Palm Court with newspaper columnist Charles Mercer. A fellow tea-timer asked Kay to “talk Eloise.” And with a piercing, high-pitched voice, she did, shrieking, “I am all over the hotel . . . half the time I am lost . . . but mostly I am on the first floor because that’s where catering is.” Kay’s childlike voice, Mercer wrote, “penetrated the four corners of the room and startled customers into unaccustomed silence.”

“People are frightened of me only because I talk so loud,” Kay reasoned disingenuously. On the contrary, she knew very well that she was making a scene, and she relished every moment of playing a certified nut.

“She cut a wide swath, that dame,” marveled Richard Grossman, Thompson’s editor at Simon & Schuster. “I mean, I’d known Salvador Dalí for Christ’s sake. I’d gone to lunch with him at the St. Regis and I knew what it was like to sweep up the steps with a man in a cape, performing for the world. And Kay had a lot of that.”

Indeed, by the 1950s, the real Kitty Fink from St. Louis was buried so deep, it was questionable whether anybody would ever crack the surface of Kay Thompson again. The facade had petrified. And now with Eloise, she had a transformation mask that was one step farther from reality. But who cared what intimate thoughts might be running through Kay’s head when there was money to be made on her alter ego?

The Plaza certainly made good use of the opportunity. “Thus the idea of the Tricycle Garage was born,” wrote Plaza historian Curtis Gathje. “Carved out of the corner of the Fifty-Eighth Street loading dock and done up in jolly red-and-white candy stripes, the garage opened in May 1956 and provided bike racks and numbered license plates for a fee of fifteen cents a day or three dollars per month. Plaza guests were allowed to use it gratis and were also loaned tricycles for free.”

Providing some va-va-vroooom for the opening of the Tricycle Garage was buxom bombshell Jayne Mansfield and her five-year-old pedal-pusher, Jayne Marie.

“The combined success of the garage and
Eloise
has led to some major changes in the hotel,” Mr. Salomone explained to
The New Yorker
in May 1956. “For the first time in history, we’ve issued a children’s menu. It has a picture on the cover of Eloise riding a tricycle.”

In collaboration with The Plaza’s executive chef, Humbert Gatti, Kay came up with a bill of fare that was as tasty as it was humorous. For starters, there was a “Kiddie Kar Kocktail” followed by entrée choices such as “Teeny Weenies” and “Mary-Had-a-Little-Lamb Chop,” and side dishes like “Punch and Judy Peas, Purée” and “Jack-&-The Beanstalks, Julien.”

“The pièce de résistance was the Tricycle Treat,” added Gathje, “a dessert featuring a tiny bike rider cast in vanilla ice cream, riding on a square of sponge cake in a drift of whipped cream doused with raspberry sauce.”
The New Yorker
mused that the concoction “must have set Escoffier spinning in his grave.”

The very fact that the merits of Eloise desserts were being debated—albeit tongue in cheek—in such urbane forums as the pages of
The New Yorker
was confirmation that Thompson’s imp had captured the imagination of more than just children.

Then, Plaza management decided to create an Eloise exhibit on the ninth floor—just down the hall from Kay’s private quarters. Decorated like Eloise’s room in the book, Room 931 was opened to the public for tours “by appointment only.”

“Eloise, of course, was never there,” noted journalist Mary Anne O’Callaghan, “but a real-life Nanny hired by the hotel would greet visitors.” The young guests were also treated to an unexpected telephone call from you-know-who, usually prerecorded but occasionally live.

“In 1957, I insisted my mother bring me to The Plaza so I could go to the Eloise room and pick up the telephone,” recalled
Vanity Fair
writer-at-large Marie Brenner. “And Kay Thompson, herself, still was on that telephone in 1957. And the thrill, at age seven, to hear Kay Thompson’s voice saying, ‘It’s me, Eloise,’ I just never—I
still
haven’t gotten over it.”

M
aking up for lost
time, Simon & Schuster made an all-out push for Valentine’s Day—with in-store displays and advertising in newspapers across the country. On February 12, Walter Winchell wrote in his column, “Kay Thompson hit the literary jackpot with her book
Eloise.
40,000 copies sold.”

The true benchmark of fame, however, was notched on Sunday, May 6, 1956, when
The New York Times
crossword puzzle included the following clue for 75 Down: “Kay Thompson’s heroine.” The answer was a six-letter word beginning with
E.
And, once again, it proved Thompson’s point that
Eloise
appealed to grownups.