Kay Thompson (42 page)

“It was my first plane trip,” Evelyn remembered. “Eleven and a half hours of horrible turbulence and I got very airsick. When we landed, Kay and I moved to the door of the plane and they were getting ready to open it.”

The flight attendant looked out the window and remarked, “My goodness, there are hundreds of photographers out there.”

“Well, that did it,” Evelyn said. “I turned to Kay and said, ‘I’m gonna be sick.’ ”

Thompson calmly opened her purse and said, “In here!”

“And I did,” Evelyn shrugged. “She actually let me throw up in her handbag. But that is the kind of trouper and the kind of person that she was. She closed the handbag, took my hand, and we walked onto that ramp, the photographers and the flashbulbs flashing.”

The resulting spreads in
Life, TV Guide, Cue, The New York Times Magazine,
and hundreds of newspapers across the country turned the marginally known moppet into an overnight sensation brandishing a new, media-anointed middle name: Evelyn “Eloise” Rudie.

The Plaza proved a dizzying playground for the wide-eyed young actress,
who, upon arrival, “dashed into the revolving doors and propelled two strangers into the same cubicle.”

“I’m beginning to think I should write my next book and call it
Evelyn,
” Kay quipped.

The headliner at The Plaza’s Persian Room that week happened to be Eartha Kitt. “Kay introduced me to Eartha in the hall one time as we were walking through,” Evelyn recalled, “and we had a brief conversation.”

“So this is the new little Eloise,” Eartha growled in her distinctive feline timbre.

“Kay sort of blanched at that for a moment,” Rudie observed. “I remember the reaction, but didn’t realize what it meant until later on.”

Obviously, Kitt’s remark had been intended as a compliment. But from Thompson’s perspective, it was the ultimate insult. To Kay, there was only one Eloise—and Evelyn Rudie was
not
her. From then on, Thompson made certain that interviews focused on herself—even if her attempts to finesse control were blatantly transparent.
Cue
magazine journalist Philip Minoff made light of the fact that his time with Evelyn Rudie had been cut short “because Miss Thompson sent her into another room just after we sat down, and we never saw her again. If we don’t see her on TV November 22nd, someone ought to call the police, for Lord’s sake. The room is 937. There’s only one person I’ve ever known who could match Miss Thompson’s love for children—W. C. Fields.”

Minoff also noted that whenever he asked questions about Eloise, Thompson’s eyes lit up “like two griddle-cakes” and she conversed in the screechy, high-pitched voice of the little girl. When he lamented “what a shame it was that she wouldn’t be able to talk Eloise’s part on television,” Kay shot back in her own voice that he was “not to worry about
that.
”

True to her word, when rehearsals commenced in Hollywood on November 1, Thompson announced that she herself would provide the voice of Eloise. Under any other circumstances, the folly would have been summarily dismissed, but because Kay had been granted contractual creative control, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

“So every time I had a line, I had to cover my mouth,” Evelyn explained. “I had to hold a book up; I had to turn away from the camera; I had to have a doll in front of my face. And Kay had to hide behind furniture or be in a little cubbyhole and speak in the direction of the microphone.”

They quickly discovered that it would be impossible for Kay to provide the voice for Evelyn while on-screen herself. One dilemma led to another and soon the entire teleplay was in flux.

“No one was happy,” Evelyn confirmed. “There were hushed conversations between Kay and Frankenheimer, or not-so-hushed conversations between everyone and everyone. There was a lot of ‘What if we tried this?’ and ‘Do you think that might work?’ ”

W
ith many problems still
unsolved, Thompson took time off to fly to New York for a prime-time television interview on
Person to Person with Edward R. Murrow
(CBS-TV, November 9, 1956), broadcast live from her suite at The Plaza. The chain-smoking Murrow himself was on assignment in the Near East, so Jerry Lewis had been recruited to take over his ashtray for the night. The pairing of these two entertainment giants was described by
The Hollywood Reporter
’s television critic, Leo Guild, as “sprightly.”

Behind the scenes, it was a different story. “Kay was
furious
that she didn’t get to be interviewed by Edward R. Murrow,” Hilary Knight remembered, “and she didn’t like Jerry Lewis. Absolute disgust.”

On camera, however, Thompson kept her cool and conveyed the sort of air-kissy camaraderie all Hollywood stars are supposed to have for each other. At least that was the case until Jerry asked Kay if she had received his holiday greeting card yet, insisting that she go digging through a pile of mail on her desk to locate it.

“And then when she finds it,” Knight observed, “she dismissively hurls it over her shoulder. That is the most typical kind of Kay put-down. She did things like that all the time.”

On the subject of nightclubs, Jerry asked, “Do you remember Chicago when we worked in opposition of one another?”

“Oh Jerry, I do so well,” Kay responded. “1947. I was at the Blackstone . . . the most plush, the most elegant, the most
marvelous
place. You were in Grant Park playing with pigeons.”

Then, in an obvious setup, Thompson went to a piano and said she’d play something if Jerry agreed to sing. Naturally, he suggested his new single, “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” the first serious recording of his career.

As Jerry started singing, Kay mischievously ad-libbed a jazzy scat—“a booba da, booba da, boob de ahhh . . . ”—which caught him off guard.

“Where did you find
that
part in the number?” he said, wincing, between verses.

Nonetheless, it worked and America was introduced to a whole new side of Lewis. “I never expected what happened next,” Jerry noted in his memoir.
“The single rose to No. 10 and remained near the top for almost four months, eventually selling a million and a half copies.”

“I’m still waiting for my commission,” Thompson later told friends, only half joking.

Aside from Jerry’s stolen moment, however, the rest of
Person to Person
was an Eloise infomercial. Kay recited passages from the
Eloise
book, sang a verse of the “Eloise” song, took viewers on a tour of the Eloise Room, and unveiled an enormous Eloise portrait that Hilary Knight had painted as a birthday gift (Thompson turned forty-seven the day of the broadcast). And, of course, she plugged the imminent
Playhouse 90
presentation of “Eloise” as though it were the Second Coming.

I
mmediately after the show,
Kay hopped a plane back to Hollywood to resume rehearsals for the main event. One week before the airing, she appeared with the all-star cast in a live, three-and-a-half minute “coming attraction” commercial. Just as they had rehearsed, Evelyn patiently held an
Eloise
book in front of her mouth while Kay spoke all the Eloise lines off camera. Disastrously, however, the young actress lowered the book before the last line of dialogue was finished, shattering any illusion that she was doing the talking herself. The flub demonstrated just how precise the cues had to be to pull off Kay’s ventriloquist act. And yet, despite the embarrassing omen, Thompson’s hubris was indulged until the wee hours of Thanksgiving, the very day that “Eloise” was to air.

“At one o’clock in the morning, my parents got a phone call from Martin Manulis,” Evelyn remembered.

“It’s not working,” Manulis confessed to Rudie’s mother and father. “I’ve got Johnny Frankenheimer here with me and we’ve been in conference all night. It just doesn’t work. It sounds wrong. Do you think it’s possible that Evelyn can learn the lines by tonight? We’ll get her a coach. We’ll do anything it takes.”

Evelyn’s father replied, “Well, let’s do a run-through in the morning and let’s see.”

“When you’re working on a show for three weeks,” Evelyn reasoned in hindsight, “you learn the lines anyway, even if you’re not speaking them. I came in the next morning, we did a run-through, and it worked. It was fine. It was
good.
”

Everyone was relieved—with one exception. “No sooner was the dry run finished than Kay appeared on the set with a cadre of lawyers and piles of new contracts,” Evelyn explained in
The New York Times.

If Kay agreed to allow Evelyn to speak the part of Eloise for this one-time-only broadcast, CBS would have to surrender all future rights. There would be no sequels, no TV series, nothing. Furthermore, Rudie’s parents and representatives “had to agree that while [Evelyn] could say in her publicity materials that she had
played
Eloise, she could never say that she
was
Eloise.” And never again could she be referred to as Evelyn “Eloise” Rudie.

“I am Eloise,” Kay roared. “No one else. Ever. Not as long as I live.”

“Shortly after the infamous meeting with the attorneys,” Evelyn recalled, “I was in a corner, going over my lines, when I overheard a conversation between Kay and John.”

“I know it’s not your fault,” Thompson whispered to Frankenheimer. “It’s that Martin. And that little girl.”

“Don’t worry about it, Kay,” Frankenheimer replied. “It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Kay shot back. “Just make sure when this is over that you never have anything to do with her again.”

If Evelyn felt like roadkill in the wake of Kay’s megalomania, she was hardly alone. In an atmosphere of forced congeniality, the show went on as scheduled. Thompson’s twenty-year-old niece, Julie Hurd (daughter of Kay’s older sister, Blanche), was a guest observer of the live broadcast at Television City and accompanied Kay afterward to a viewing party of the delayed West Coast broadcast, held at the home of Inger Stevens’ boyfriend, Robert Horton. Tellingly, Frankenheimer and Manulis were nowhere in sight. Apart from Inger and Kay, the only other “Eloise” cast member Julie recognized among the crowd was Monty Woolley. When asked if Evelyn Rudie was there, Julie said, “No. Kay hated her. Every time Evelyn showed up on-screen, the crowd would boo. They’d boo to the TV whenever
anybody
came on they did not like—especially when Conrad Hilton blew his line.”

Thompson’s vitriol, however, was tame compared to that of the critics. “Pretentious chaos . . . that was dull, dull, dull . . . awful, awful, awful . . . and sad, sad, sad,” bemoaned Harriet Van Horne in the
New York World-Telegram and Sun.

“Instead of worrying about the monopolistic economics of television,” wrote Jack Gould in
The New York Times,
“Congressional committees shall serve the public interest and find out how ‘Eloise,’ the musicalized evisceration of Kay Thompson’s story about the little girl at the Hotel Plaza, got on the air.”

Equally stinging was
TV Guide
’s assessment that “Eloise” was “among the worst flops of the electronic age.”

T
he humiliation was not
easy to live down when 26 million people had witnessed the train wreck. Furthermore, the sole aspect of “Eloise” that everyone seemed to like was the very thing that Kay had tried to silence.

“Only one member of this splendid cast emerged with dignity intact,” declared the
New York World-Telegram and Sun.
“That was 7-year-old Evelyn Rudie who played Eloise. She had poise and authority, plus a zest for the eccentric.” And
Variety
enthused, “The show’s real delights came when six-year-old Miss Rudie was on camera.”

Suddenly, the youngster’s career was on fire with offers for movies, television, and Broadway. “Hottest name in TV at the moment is seven-year-old Evelyn (‘Eloise’) Rudie,” observed
The Hollywood Reporter
—a middle-name reference that made Thompson’s blood boil.

Then, on the December 9 installment of
The Dinah Shore Show,
Dinah told her audience that the following week’s guest would be “Evelyn ‘Eloise’ Rudie.” That’s when Thompson lost it. She fired off a telegram to NBC “demanding the network desist from referring to Evelyn Rudie as ‘Eloise,’ ” or else she would file for an injunction.

Just when Kay thought things could not get any worse, ABC announced it had signed Evelyn for the title role of the
Omnibus
production of “Madeline”—the latest skirmish in the “War of the Moppets,” with Thompson’s ex-husband among the perpetrators.

If this didn’t keep Kay awake at night in her Plaza suite, the fact that Evelyn checked into the very same hotel to begin rehearsals for “Madeline” certainly did. When asked if she had run into Kay, Evelyn replied, “No, but I had my picture taken standing next to the new Eloise portrait.”

Hilary Knight’s enormous watercolor painting of Eloise, unveiled on
Person to Person
, was now on permanent display in the lobby of The Plaza, where it had become a hot destination for tourists to have their picture taken. Leading the pack was none other than Evelyn, who brazenly posed next to her verboten doppelgänger.

Timed to coincide with the “Madeline” airing on December 23, ABC’s publicists got
TV Guide
to run a new feature story on Rudie—and yet the article ended up being titled “Eloise Is For Real.” The “Madeline” broadcast fared no better, barely making a dent in the ratings. It was such a nonevent, newspapers did not even bother to run postmortem reviews. In the “War of the Moppets,” Eloise may have come out battered and bruised, but Madeline was down for the count.

As the New Year got under way, Thompson was relieved that all the fuss
was finally over. However, there was still one more ulcer-inducing addendum to the saga. On February 16, 1957, it was announced that Evelyn Rudie had been nominated for a Best Actress Emmy Award for her performance in “Eloise”—the youngest nominee in the Television Academy’s history. When the awards were presented on March 16, Evelyn lost to Claire Trevor, but she had won in the court of public opinion. “As a result,” Rudie proudly stated, “I received my star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame in 1958, the year it was started.”