Kay Thompson (50 page)

To ensure she would not be forgotten, Thompson devised a secret plan of attack.

“On my first day at Random House,” Bernstein explained, “I opened the door to my office and four pigeons flew out. There was a gigantic sign on my desk that read, ‘Welcome to Random House,’ signed ‘Eloise.’ ”

“Okay, Kay, where are you?” Bob called out.

The door to the closet creaked open and out stepped Thompson with a devilish grin.

“Kay, it’s my first day,” Bernstein shrugged. “Could you get those goddamn pigeons out of here?!”

“Now calm down, Bob,” she said with a smirk. “You don’t think these are ordinary pigeons, do you? These are
showbiz
pigeons. I have their owner right here and they’ll be back in their cage in a few minutes because they are trained.”

Famous last words. “Three hours later,” Bernstein recalled, “the man was still chasing these pigeons all over Random House. I became instantly very well known.”

Meanwhile, the folks at Simon & Schuster were marketing
Eloise in Paris
full steam ahead. By year’s end, having sold nearly 125,000 copies in a mere six weeks,
Eloise in Paris
ranked as the No. 6 bestselling fiction book of 1957.

A
s 1958 got under
way, Bob Bernstein was devoting more and more of his time to new business at Random House—including the hot new series of children’s tomes by Dr. Seuss (the pen name for Theodor Geisel) published by the Beginner Books division. Dr. Seuss’ most recent works,
The Cat in the Hat
and
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
had both been unleashed in 1957, posing serious threats to
Eloise in Paris
during the highly competitive holiday season.

“I’ve worked myself into an absolute frenzy thinking about merchandising Dr. Seuss,” Bernstein wrote in a memo to his new boss. The timing could not have been worse for Kay because she desperately needed Bob’s undivided attention.

The unprecedented demand for Eloise dolls had brought Hol-le Toys to its knees. “It got so bad that the owner, Morris Levitch, had a nervous breakdown and disappeared,” recalled Vilma Kurzer. “His wife, Betty Gould, tried to run the company and carry on, but it didn’t work. The whole company went out of business within six months. Betty and Mr. Levitch ended up divorced. It was catastrophic.”

In addition to this crisis, there were a number of pending deals that needed to be finalized, including a line of Eloise Easter bonnets designed by the world-renowned milliner Mr. John (formerly of John-Frederics) and “an Eloise radio show with Eloise starring as disc jockey.” But without the concentrated follow-through that Bernstein had provided in the past, Thompson managed to bungle these deals by making unreasonable demands. With the future of Eloise Limited in crisis, it was obvious that Kay’s ying needed Bob’s yang. To truly justify his involvement, though, Random House needed to be a beneficiary.

“I said to Kay, ‘I would love it if you would come here,’ ” Bernstein remembered. “And she said, ‘Fine. We’ll do our next book at Random House.’ Needless to say, Simon & Schuster was furious.”

With no option clause for sequels in her Simon & Schuster contract, Kay was free to go wherever she pleased, and it just made more sense to have Bernstein overseeing all things Eloise. Business was business.

Kay had already announced
Eloise in London
as the next sequel, but extensive research and development in England had not yet been done. Bernstein did not want to wait; he needed something to come out in time for the Christmas buying season of 1958 to help drive merchandising deals.

“We had already done a short version of
Eloise at Christmastime
in
Good Housekeeping,
” Hilary Knight recalled, “so it was already all laid out—at least roughly.”

Under pressure, Kay agreed to delay
London
for instant gratification. On May 2, 1958, Random House announced that it would publish
Kay Thompson’s Eloise at Christmastime
on September 22 with a first printing of 100,000 copies.

In order to make the publication date,
Christmastime
would have to be completed in record time. Complicating matters, Knight had another project on his drawing board,
The Wonderful World of Aunt Tuddy
(Random House, 1958), by Jeremy Gury, about a “slightly cracked” spinster who spends “six or seven hours a day” in a department store “buying practically nothing.” The book was “based on an idea by Max Hess,” owner of Hess Brothers department store in Allentown, Pennsylvania—which just happened to be the exclusive local outlet for Eloise merchandise. Hess was hoping that Aunt Tuddy might do for department stores what Eloise had done for hotels. In both cases, the books’ heroines were strong-willed individualists who tested the patience of the staff of their respective domains.

“I was working on
Aunt Tuddy
at the same time for the same publisher,” Knight recalled, “and Kay was not pleased about that.”

Because
Eloise at Christmastime
was such a rush job, detailing was kept to a
minimum, with only one celebrity cameo (Rita Hayworth) and two corporate sponsors (Guinness Stout beer and The Plaza).

It was a bit of a miracle, but
Eloise at Christmastime
hit stores right on schedule, poised to jump-start merchandising machinations well in advance of the holiday season.

In the wake of Hol-le Toys’ demise, American Character Doll Company, which had previously rejected the Eloise doll, was only too happy to come to the rescue of the now-established goldmine. At the same time, a brand-new collection of Thompson-designed “Eloise Fashions” was introduced, in doll and life sizes, including the White Christmas Tree Apron Dress, the Think Pink Rose Dress (with “the Longest Long-Stemmed Rose Belt”), and the White Terry Robe with three “What-Goes-Where Pockets” embroidered “Brush,” “Soap,” and “Mitt” (featuring “Skipperdee’s Turtle-Shaped Puppet Scrub Mitten”).

There was a lot to promote, yet just four days after
Eloise at Christmastime
hit bookstores, Kay made the surprise announcement that she was leaving for England.

L
agging one year behind
their respective American release dates, the Eloise books were being published in the United Kingdom by Max Reinhardt, Ltd. (no relation to the Austrian director). The first book had become a huge bestseller on British soil, and, according to historian Judith Adamson, it had gotten an “enthusiastic” endorsement from Queen Elizabeth, who “had read the book to her children”—nine-year-old Prince Charles and seven-year-old Princess Anne.

Anticipation was building to a fever pitch for
Eloise in Paris,
due to be launched in the UK on October 6, 1958. So, when Reinhardt invited Thompson to come to England for an all-expense-paid publicity tour, she readily accepted—especially since the trip would conveniently double as research for
Eloise in London.

Media coverage of Kay’s advent rivaled a papal visitation. With the blessing of Buckingham Palace, the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, Baron Selwyn-Lloyd, was dispatched to London Airport for a ceremonial greeting amid a phalanx of paparazzi and gawkers. One of Selwyn-Lloyd’s bodyguards was assigned to protect Thompson from the waiting mob.

Amid an explosion of flashbulbs, Kay joked, “I love this hick town!”

Then she was whisked via Rolls-Royce motorcade to the Savoy, where, dressed to kill in black Dior, she held court at a press conference in the
illustrious Lancaster Ballroom—site of the 1953 Coronation Ball for Queen Elizabeth.

Tirelessly, Thompson toured stores in and around London for book signings and readings. Merchants created elaborate displays with Eloise dolls, bottles of French champagne, extralong loaves of French bread, and live Skipperdee the Turtle petting exhibits.

Kay also did a slew of radio and television shows. The most prestigious was on October 8, 1958, when she appeared on the live debut broadcast of
Riverside One
(BBC-TV), a top-drawer variety show produced by British showman Francis Essex and regularly hosted by actress Margaret Lockwood (star of Hitchcock’s
The Lady Vanishes
). Sharing the guest roster with actor Trevor Howard and several others, Kay performed “I Love a Violin” and “Eloise.”

“Kay was the most expensive guest we had on the entire series, by a wide margin,” Francis Essex related in 2008. “I still have the cost reports right here, which show that I paid Trevor Howard £262 [U.S. $733] for his appearance; Margaret Lockwood, the regular host, was paid £210 [U.S. $588] per show; and all the other guests that first week were paid around £190 [U.S. $532]—except for one person: Kay Thompson. She cost me £750 [U.S. $2,100] off my budget! Kay was in a class by herself.”

Having succumbed to Thompson’s chicanery, Brits were simply head over heels for Eloise, with the venerable
London Times
jointly placing
Eloise
and
Eloise in Paris
among its “Top 10 Literary Pleasures of 1958.” The newspaper’s year-end round-up declared, “For sophisticated amusement they cannot be easily bettered.”

At the end of her British tour, Kay wrote in
TV Times
(the British equivalent of
TV Guide
), “I am going to swoosh back to America with strict instructions from my publishers to write
Eloise in London,
which will be great fun.” According to her preliminary notes, Eloise was destined to cross paths with Nanny’s brother, “a bobby in Piccadilly Circus.”

B
y mid-October, Kay was
back on native soil to resume promotional duties for
Eloise at Christmastime
. In addition to large display ads in metropolitan newspapers, Eloise merchandise infiltrated many major Christmas catalogs, including FAO Schwarz, Bullock’s, Best & Co., Roos/Atkins, and Robinson’s (which made Eloise its cover girl).

The most anticipated catalog every year, however, was that of Neiman-Marcus, and for 1958, the store devoted a full page to Eloise. Neiman-Marcus was famous for its “His & Hers” merchandise; as a clever send-up of that tradition,
the store was offering exclusive Eloise Bath Towel and Washcloth sets and Eloise Two-Legged Christmas Stockings, all embroidered “Mine.”

Hallmark broached the idea of putting out a line of Eloise Christmas cards, but, typically, Kay botched the discussions. And her negotiations with Cadence Records for an Eloise album went no better. Unable to come to terms, she bought back the rights to the “Eloise” single. Her plan was to record the rest of the songs with her own money and shop the entire LP to other labels.

One tangible result of this work in progress was “It’s Absolutely Christmastime” (Kay Thompson), performed by Thompson (as Eloise) with a male chorus led by Andy Williams. A one-sided promotional single was pressed in limited quantities for broadcast on radio shows promoting the book
Eloise at Christmastime
. Otherwise, Kay possessively held the song in abeyance for inclusion on the
Eloise
LP—if that ever materialized.

Despite these missed opportunities, media hype was in full swing. At the office of Eloise Limited, surrounded by Eloise products, Kay posed for publicity photos and granted interviews for virtually every major publication. For television, she made guest appearances on
The Garry Moore Show
(CBS-TV, December 2, 1958) and on
three
installments of
The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar
(NBC-TV, September 22, December 9, and December 19).

But the reviews of
Eloise at Christmastime
were decidedly mixed. “Her bite isn’t so sharp as it was,” noted Ellen Lewis Buell in
The New York Times
, “even though she is still very funny to watch in Hilary Knight’s pictures.”

Kay was devastated. More than ever, Hilary’s drawings had upstaged her verbiage. Making matters worse, several critics chose to jointly review
Eloise at Christmastime
along with
The Wonderful World of Aunt Tuddy,
which shifted the spotlight toward those books’ common denominator: Hilary Knight.

Anne Nicholson of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
felt that Thompson’s text “on its own would sink,” but, like
Aunt Tuddy,
was “rescued” by Knight, who “has given [both books] their glories.”

The blow was somewhat softened by the fact that, at year’s end,
Eloise at Christmastime
was declared the No. 6 bestselling fiction book of 1958—beaten only by
Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak (No. 1);
Anatomy of a Murder
by Robert Traver (No. 2);
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov (No. 3);
Around the World with Auntie Mame
by Patrick Dennis (No. 4); and
From the Terrace
by John O’Hara (No. 5).

That was heady company, but unlike the first two Eloise books, which had flourished well beyond Christmas,
Eloise at Christmastime
had a built-in expiration date. And, after December 25, there was just no market for the Eloise Christmas Tree Apron Dress and the Eloise Two-Legged Christmas Stocking.

As sales screeched to a halt, Jill Herman announced she was leaving Eloise Limited to get married. And Bernstein was becoming more and more consumed with other Random House concerns, especially the Dr. Seuss franchise, which, with a considerably more cooperative author, was transformed into an enduring, multimillion-dollar empire.

When asked if Thompson felt threatened by the attention Bob was lavishing on Seuss, Bernstein replied, “Maybe . . . but she never said anything.” Her actions, however, spoke louder than words.

T
he New Year of
1959 had barely gotten off the ground when Richard Grossman convinced Kay to return to Simon & Schuster. Rather than the expected
Eloise in London,
though, he endorsed the idea of doing
Eloise in Moscow
.

“I mean, what a lark!” Grossman chuckled. “The juxtaposition of this indolent child of the rich and pampered going to a socialist republic was just too irresistible. And it really caught Kay’s fancy.”