Kay Thompson 1912-1998

(Born Kitty Fink) American author of picture books.

The following entry presents an overview of critical commentary on Thompson's work through 2003. For further information on her life and works, see CLR, Volume 22.

INTRODUCTION

A noted singer, songwriter, actress, and choreographer, Thompson is best known in the literary world as the creator of a series of picture books about Eloise, an animated six-year-old girl who lives in New York City's Plaza Hotel. An intelligent and frank child, Eloise gets herself into one scrape after another, often providing insights into the world of adults along the way. Her thoughts are written as stream-of-consciousness and are frequently filled with colorful phrases and a definite lack of inhibition. The first volume in the series, Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown Ups (1955), became an instant commercial success, and the subsequent merchandising pioneered the marketing of ancillary products for books and movies. Eloise has continued to be a top seller for fifty years, inspiring multiple lines of dolls, records, clothes, and other Eloise paraphernalia.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Thompson was born on November 9, 1912, in St. Louis, Missouri—her birth name is Kitty Fink. At the age of four, she began playing jazz piano. As a child, Thompson trained as a pianist at Washington University and, at the age of fifteen, she performed with the St. Louis Symphony. At seventeen she moved to California and changed her name to Kay Thompson. She soon began singing with the Mills Brothers on radio programs and performing at jazz clubs in San Francisco. Thompson later moved to New York City, where she worked with the Fred Waring Band as a singer and arranger and with Jim Backus as a co-producer on a short-lived radio show for CBS. As Thompson's reputation as a jazz singer and arranger grew, she attracted the attention of film studios. From
1942 to 1946, Thompson worked under contract with MGM as an arranger, songwriter, and vocal coach on such films as The Ziegfeld Follies, The Harvey Girls, and The Kid from Brooklyn. As a vocal coach, Thompson had a number of high-profile students, including Judy Garland, Lena Horne, and Frank Sinatra. After leaving MGM in 1946, Thompson performed with Andy Williams and his brothers in a nightclub act. It was during a rehearsal with the Williams Brothers that the character of Eloise was invented. One day in 1949, Thompson arrived late for rehearsal and made her apologies by saying in a high-pitched voice, "I am Eloise. I am six." The other performers played along, inventing their own characters, and Eloise evolved into Thompson's backstage persona. In 1955 Thompson collaborated with illustrator Hilary Knight and published Eloise. The immense popularity of the character Eloise spawned three sequels in four years as well as a host of paraphernalia. During this period, Thompson appeared as fashion editor Maggie Prescott in the film Funny Face, which starred Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. By 1959, however, unhappy with the cross-marketing of Eloise, Thompson refused to release any more Eloise books, revoking television and merchandise privileges for the series. Thompson moved to Rome in 1962, later appearing in the 1972 film Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. In 1973 she mounted a fashion show of American designers in Versailles and then slowly began to withdraw into seclusion. She passed away in New York City on July 2, 1998. After Thompson's death, her estate began licensing reprints of the Eloise series and released two posthumous works—Eloise's Guide to Life: How to Eat, Dress, Travel, Behave, and Stay Six Forever (2000) and Eloise Takes a Bawth (2002).

MAJOR WORKS

"I am Eloise. I am six." Eloise thus introduces herself in Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown Ups. The rest of the book, illustrated by Knight, introduces readers to Eloise's world—her indulgent English nanny, her dog Weenie, her turtle Skipperdee, and the long-suffering staff of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Offering a comedic slant on the cliche of the "poor little rich girl," Eloise follows its protagonist, with her absent socialite mother and nonexistent father, as she unrepentantly wreaks havoc throughout the Plaza Hotel, gate-crashing weddings and diplomatic receptions, commandeering the elevator, spying on hotel guests, and escaping blame-free from punishment for her misdeeds. The actual Plaza Hotel's management was delighted with its newfound popularity due to the success of Eloise, hanging a portrait of Eloise in the lobby and decorating Room 934 as "Eloise's Room." Shortly after Eloise was published, Thompson insisted that Knight grant her the copyright for his drawings along with seventy percent of the royalties on future projects. Thompson, with Knight's illustrations, published three Eloise sequels during her lifetime—Eloise in Paris (1957), Eloise at Christmastime (1958), and Eloise in Moscow (1959). She then refused to allow the Eloise sequels to be reprinted after their initial run and stopped publication of a fifth Eloise book, Eloise Takes a Bawth, weeks before it was to go to press. Millions of copies of the Eloise books have been sold, and after Thompson banned the reprint of the sequels, existing copies became valuable collectors items. After Thompson's death, her heirs republished the Eloise sequels and, with new drawings by Knight, finally released the fifth, previously unpublished work, Eloise Takes a Bawth.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Despite the book's popular success, Eloise and its sequels have received mixed reviews, with some critics expressing horror at the title character's unfettered destructiveness. However, others have cheered Eloise for both her assertive self-reliance and creative independence. Thompson often insisted that Eloise was written for adults, not children, though this has not stopped children from enjoying the book. Commentators have noted that the rhythm of Eloise's words are reflective of Thompson's background as a jazz singer. Eve Zibart has stated that, "Eloise is a joyously unconstrained explosion of hedonism, a natural anarchist with an affection for the entire world. . . . A sort of Caliban of cultural pretentiousness, she speaks in an almost jazz-riff tumble of rhymes and advertising-speak." Additionally, Eloise has been credited by some for defining the spirit of the women's movement in the 1950s. Diane Peck has suggested that Eloise, "embodies New York's spirit of experimentation, iconoclasm, and energy in the Fifties." Detractors of the series have argued that Eloise's lack of responsibility for her actions makes her a poor role model for children, noting that Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeline—which shares several thematic and plot similarities to Eloise—offers a stronger female protagonist for children to emulate.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown Ups [illustrations by Hilary Knight] (picture book) 1955

Eloise in Paris [illustrations by Hilary Knight] (picture book) 1957

Eloise at Christmastime [illustrations by Hilary Knight] (picture book) 1958

Eloise in Moscow [illustrations by Hilary Knight] (picture book) 1959

Kay Thompson's Eloise: The Absolutely EssentialEdition [illustrations by Hilary Knight] (picture books) 1999

*Eloise's Guide to Life: How to Eat, Dress, Travel,Behave, and Stay Six Forever [illustrations by Hilary Knight] (picture book) 2000

†Eloise Takes a Bawth [illustrations by Hilary Knight] (picture book) 2002

*This work was assembled posthumously, collecting sections of the previous four Eloise books.

†This unfinished work of Thompson's was completed by Mart Crowley in 2002.

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Publishers Weekly (essay date 16 December 1957)

SOURCE: "This Is Me, Eloise." Publishers Weekly 127, no. 25 (16 December 1957): 16-18.

[In the following essay, the critic describes the marketing of Eloise products after the publication of the first book and Thompson's involvement in both the production and marketing of the series.]

You may think that Eloise is in Paris, but the fact is, Eloise is absolutely everywhere. She is in the nation's bookshops, department stores, toy shops, children's apparel stores and Schraffts. She has the approval of Good Housekeeping. This year she is giving the nation's merchants an absolutely joyous Christmas. No book has come along to stir up trade this way since Ferdinand, the Bull, refused to come out and fight. (Davy Crockett, of course, got his start in TV and the movies.) Eloise is rawther unique. As everyone who can read must know by this time, Eloise is an overprivileged six-year-old, the terror of the Hotel Plaza in New York. She is among the hotel's more sophisticated residents. She is also ill-mannered, ill-tempered and ugly. But she has her charm. She often means well, and her mother neglects her. Even though you know that you would do the same thing if she were yours, you can't help finding this appealing. Since Kay Thompson, who used to star as a night club entertainer in the Hotel Plaza's Persian Room, wroteEloise, published by Simon and Schuster in 1955, the book has sold more than 150,000 copies in this country. It is still selling briskly. The second book,Eloise in Paris, was published on November 14, which some people might consider a bit late for the Christmas trade. Well, the customers were just waiting for it, that's all. The demand has been so great that 100,000 copies were in print and 80,000 sold within three weeks of publication. Single day's orders have run as high as 6,071.Eloise has also been very successful in England under the imprint of Max Reinhardt, Ltd.

This, however, is only the beginning.Eloise has launched an industry. An Eloise record, made by Cadence records, has sold out absolutely all the available stock of 100,000 records. There are Eloise dolls made by Hol-le Toy Company of New York in two sizes. There is a 21-inch doll-sized doll and a 42-inch doll that is bigger than some six-year-olds. Eloise's own peculiar smirk has been reproduced with remarkable accuracy on the Hol-le dolls, which are selling just as fast as they can be made. Johnston's of Dallas has created a line of charming and durable dresses, inspired by Eloise, for little girls who wear sizes 3 to 12. Miniatures of these chic dresses are being made by Jane Miller Company of Lafayette, California, to fit the Eloise dolls. Kaybobs of New York has made an Eloise Emergency Kit, a child-sized hat box containing such Eloisiana as bubble gum, crayons, turtle food, sun glasses, and soap, note pads and Please-Do-Not-Disturb signs from the Hotel Plaza.

In 1958 Easter bonnets designed for Eloise by Mr. John will make their appearance and several other products are also in the planning stage. There will be Eloise French postcards this spring. They are clean and adorned with some of the hilarious drawings done by Hilary Knight forEloise in Paris. These cards, which will sell for 25 cents, are available in lots of 3 dozen from Eloise, Ltd., an organization which has its headquarters, appropriately, at the Hotel Plaza. Kay Thompson is president of the firm, and Robert Bernstein, formerly of Simon and Schuster, is executive vice-president. Jill Herman, another recruit from S & S, serves as publicity director. Eloise, Ltd. has bought the Eloise record, and plans to have new recordings ready early in the spring. Miss Thompson will appear on these as both Eloise and Nanny. She also writes the words and music. She is an old hand at this, having been both writer and arranger of many popular songs. This amazingly versatile artist has also been a dancer and choreographer, a movie actress whose last appearance was in Funny Face, a singer, a TV star, and the designer of a line of garments known as Kay Thompson Fancy Pants and ideally suited to tall, rangy girls like Kay Thompson.

When not engaged in any of the above-mentioned activities, Miss Thompson has somehow found a few hours in which to introduce Eloise products to the customers of a number of major stores. She was on hand, for example, when Nieman-Marcus of Dallas launched the Eloise dresses during its glamorous "French Fortnight" in October. The store has no book department, but it sells the Eloise books in its toy shop and children's wear departments and in the small children's book department in its suburban store. She visited J. L. Hudson, Detroit, recently when the store held a huge store-wide promotion for Eloise. There were signs absolutely all over the store directing customers to a replica of Eloise's rawther cluttered room at the Plaza. Hudson's advertised the promotion extensively, and Kay Thompson appeared on a number of local TV shows. Recently, Miss Thompson autographed at Best & Company in New York where various Eloise products are available. While PW's representative was in the store, Best's well-known Lilliputian Bazaar seemed to be selling a good many books along with the dolls and dresses. The store, which has no book department, has sold to date more than 1000 copies ofEloise. Best's has advertised the Eloise products widely, using pictures of Eloise in the ads. During the week of Miss Thompson's appearance the store devoted three of its Fifth Avenue windows to Eloise dresses, dolls and books.

In general, however, Eloise, Ltd., has found television to be its most effective promotion medium. Miss Thompson has appeared in the past month on the Dave Garroway, Arlene Francis, and Tex and Jinx shows, and she is slated for appearances on the TV programs conducted by Dinah Shore, Perry Como, and Patrice Munsel.

With or without the author, however, Eloise books and other products are being featured this fall by about 100 of the nation's big stores, including: Foley's, Houston; Rike-Kumler, Dayton; Hutzler's, Baltimore; F. A. O. Schwarz, New York, Lord & Taylor, New York; L. S. Ayres, Indianapolis; Filene's, Boston; Strawbridge & Clothier, Philadelphia; Bloomingdale's, New York; Garfinkel's, Washington; Higbee Company, Cleveland; Carson, Pirie Scott, Chicago; Dayton Company, Minneapolis; Roos Brothers, San Francisco; I. Magnin, San Francisco, and J. W. Robinson, Los Angeles. Bonwit Teller in Philadelphia plans a big "Charge It Please with Eloise" promotion early in the new year, aimed at getting new charge customers for the store. Jordan Marsh in Miami recently held a fashion show for Eloise dresses. No store seems to be deterred by the fact that Eloise products may have been promoted by other stores in the same city, and the demand for Eloise products and promotions has been and still is terrific.

Time magazine has used Eloise in an ad, and Renault automobiles plans to base a year's campaign on Eloise, who will be depicted by Hilary Knight in the ads riding in a Renault and proclaiming it to be her absolutely favorite car. Bloomingdale's, New York, recently made up a guide for sales people written in Eloise 's rawther unusual style.

In the past year, Eloise has had a considerable amount of publicity in national magazines. Stories have run in Life (twice), McCall's, Good Housekeeping, Harper's Bazaar and This Week. Books and dolls have been pictured in a great many stores' Christmas catalogs. Next year about this time the booksellers hope there may be another book about Eloise. After all, the possibilities are endless. Merry Christmas, Eloise!

Diane Peck (essay date 18-25 December 1999)

SOURCE: Peck, Diane. "A View from New York." Spectator 283, nos. 8941-8942 (18-25 December 1999): 74-5.

[In the following essay, Peck recalls her own memories of reading Eloise as a child and ruminates on critics's responses to the reprints of the Eloise series.]

Sometime in the past few years, the word 'parenting' selfishly drowned out 'child-rearing' here in media-driven New York. Not coincidentally, I believe, 'sophisticated' lost its joie de vivre and confined itself almost exclusively to dead people, like Frank Sinatra, and technological toys for the cross-generational consumer public and government, like DVD players and surface-to-air missiles. The infantilisation of America, encouraged by journalists whose jobs depend on following the orders 'Dumb down!' and 'Skew young!,' manifests itself paradoxically: pre-teens with 'attitude' adopt the look of sullen hookers on heroin, and their overbearing parents wear baby-blue jogging suits and try to get in touch with their inner child.

What does all this have to do with the revamped edition of the firstEloise (1955), billed as 'a book for precocious grown-ups, about a little girl who lives at the Plaza Hotel', and the reissuing of its three sequels (1957, 1958, 1959), which have been out of print here for 35 years? Quite a lot, I think, judging by the way they've been repackaged and censored by their publishers and misrepresented by many commentators. I feel I have to defend my favourite (along with the equally rebellious Jane Eyre) childhood heroine Eloise, a dishevelled six-year-old dynamo, whose cannily illustrated, frank accounts of exploring the real-life wonderland of city sophistication were instant bestsellers with children and grownups alike. Noël Coward said, 'Frankly I adore Eloise.' And so do I.

Funny how the more sophisticated you are, the more prone you are to fits of wild childish frivolity, as if you were a dressage horse let loose in a field. Think of Edward Lear and his nonsense verse. Think of the screwball comedies of the Thirties and Forties and their most silly and worldly practitioner, Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve). Satirical cartoonists had a field day in Punch and the New Yorker and thought nothing of applying their talents to children's books, too, during most of this century. In the Fifties, when even a poet like Frank O'Hara could afford to live in Manhattan, artists and high society partied together as freely as fashion and high culture did in Harper's Bazaar (which, along with The New Yorker, is the only reading matter pictured inEloise ). So everyone got a big kick out of watching the 1957 Gershwin musical movie, Funny Face, when Kay Thompson spoofed Harper's Bazaar's fashion editor Diana Vreeland and sang, 'Red is dead, blue is through, green's obscene and brown's taboo, and there isn't the slightest excuse for plum or puce—or chartreuse. Think pink! Think pink when you want that quelque chose.'

Eloise embodies New York's spirit of experimentation, iconoclasm and energy in the Fifties. (Think abstract expressionists like de Kooning at the Museum of Modern Art, think Balanchine and Stravinsky's ballets at City Center.) Thompson and Knight flouted all the rules of book publishing, in much the same way that Vreeland and the art director Alexei Brodovitch did at the Bazaar, as it was then called. Thompson echoes Vreeland's voice in Eloise's penchant for French phrases, American slang, Britishisms, neologisms, exaggeration and inspired opinionatedness. (A vocal coach at MGM for many years, Thompson is credited with putting the sob in Judy Garland's singing, and her mimicry was impeccable.) Significantly, the firstEloise is all Dior colours: grey-pink, lipstick-red, dove-grey, and (the designer's favourite) black. And Hilary Knight's page mistreatment—characters running off the page, movie-frame-like repetitions, changes of scale, blocks of text placed erratically in the vicinity of the illustrations—recalls Brodovitch's layouts at the Bazaar. Knight—a former student of Reginald Marsh, who founded the 'ashcan' school of painting and was famous for his soft-hued, ink-and-watercolour street scenes featuring New York prostitutes and drunks—drew in details that together with the text, make you laugh (you literally read between the lines). Text and drawings exchange witty repartee. Here is one example, fromEloise in Paris : the heroine, practically falling off the upper berth of a transatlantic jet (pink-striped pyjamas stretched to the point of baring her bottom), shines a flashlight on the man and woman below, who are cringing. She says, 'During the night the motors are on fire. Absolutely no one slept.'

Not that you're cracking up every time you turn a page. The beauty of these books is their naked honesty. Eloise is such a completely realised character—perhaps, to borrow a Fifties concept, the most outer-directed child in all of literature—that she reveals the full palette and musical range of her emotions, one of which is her poignant love of her 'mostly companion' nanny, a rather past-her-prime, world-weary version of Margaret Rutherford. Nanny, in turn, is full of charity in its truest sense—indulgence and forbearance in judging others. She knows that children, like certain admirable dogs and horses, hate scrutiny and hypocrisy, and compensates as best she can for Eloise's absent mother and for a father who is never even mentioned. In the middle of the night, Nanny will drag herself out of bed and chase Eloise's nightmare demons away by putting cotton soaked in witch-hazel on her charge's toenails. Love, indeed.

That's why I'm shocked by how crudely Simon & Schuster (who will publish the books in England in March) have overhauled the original firstEloise. They've obliterated the coverline 'for precocious grown-ups' with a marquee-like advertisement for their edition's 'new scrapbook', a messy kind of afterword with photos and other 'Eloisiana', thereby ghettoizing the book in the children's section. And they've done their level best to destroy the cover image's sly subversion of Sir John Tenniel's delicate drawings of Alice climbing onto a mantelpiece about to enter a mirror in Through the Looking Glass. On the original's cover, Eloise, very Alice with her long blond hair tied in a bow and her unvarying child's uniform, is pictured climbing down from the mantel having contented herself with scrawling her name on the mirror with a very adult lipstick; on the new cover, vulgarly glitzed-up—not unlike the way Donald Trump garishly regilded the interiors of the Plaza—the mirror is festooned ridiculously with a banner declaring 'The Absolutely Essential'. Whole phrases are changed or omitted from the text: I particularly despise the replacement of a reference to Lilly Dache with the name Coco Chanel, next to a drawing of Eloise with a cabbage leaf on her head. Dache was a milliner, Chanel wasn't—hell, women were so into hats in the Fifties they even wore snoods. The line 'Here's what I hate: Peter Rabbit' has been taken out, I'm guessing for PC reasons. They tout an afterword 'by Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner', which is so egregiously idiotic and error-riddled that I can't bring myself to say anything about it. (Okay, one example of its slovenliness: Brenner asserts that Eloise never hops when there's a whole page on which Eloise is not only seen hopping, but actually tells us she loves to hop.) Newsweek's heavy-minded Anna Quindlen takes the opportunity in her introduction to Mad about Madeline: The Complete Tales (books I found tedious as a child) to insult Eloise with near lunatic viciousness:

Truth to tell [writes this Pulitzer winner] I have always found Eloise's chaotic existence and her self-protective little asides about her mother shopping at Bergdorf's a bit pathetic and lonely, a decidedly grown-up version of the madcap child. When I think of Eloise grown up, I think of her with a drinking problem, knocking about from avocation to avocation, unhappily married or unhappily divorced, childless. When I think of Madeline grown up, I think of her as the French Minister of Culture . . . Perhaps they have apprehended all this, but while my children like Eloise, they live Madeline, which makes all the difference.

Other critics, sadly, say nasty things about this mischievous, but not mean-spirited, little girl. I think they disapprove of Eloise for the simple and bad reason that she happens to be rich. One reviewer actually refers to her as 'an icon of crass consumerism'. My response is to quote Charlotte Brontë, from her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, an occasion she took to champion Thackeray's Vanity Fair: 'Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. They are as distinct as is vice from virtue.'

Eve Zibart (essay date November 2002)

SOURCE: Zibart, Eve. "Bathing in the Glory of Eloise." Book Page (November 2002): 22.

[In the following essay, Zibart reminisces about her childhood impressions of Eloise while reviewing Eloise Takes a Bawth.]

When I was only three or four, my parents took me to New York to spend a few days at the Plaza Hotel. The visit held a special thrill, not only because my mother and father had met in New York and knew the hotel's Oak Room and Oyster Bar and Palm Court of old, but also because of Eloise. Tangled, hoydenish, extroverted and newly outfitted with pleated pinafore, I was the double of the storybook character whose life-sized portrait already hung in the hotel hallway. The Plaza staff called me Eloise. So did the buggy driver who, in those prelitigious days, lifted me to sit on the back of his horse. I was in heaven. Why not? I was Eloise at the Plaza.

If you did not know Eloise in her 1950s, high-fashion heyday—Eloise, who lived at the Plaza with her presumably divorced and well-compensated mother; her Nanny; Weenie the dog and Skipperdee the turtle; Eloise, who, having conquered her New York audience, went on to captivate and infuriate the Parisians and even the Muscovites—if you have never experienced Eloise, you simply have not lived. And now, with the long-delayed publication ofEloise Takes a Bawth you can begin, preferably while waving about a glass of champagne and perhaps making your daughter tipsy as well as yourself.

The creation of the late Kay Thompson (who also caricatured high society as the fashion editor in the Hepburn-Astaire movie Funny Face), Eloise is a joyously unconstrained explosion of hedonism, a natural anarchist with an affection for the entire world and a true scapegrace's knack of squeezing out of the inevitable consequences of her impulsiveness. A sort of Caliban of cultural pretentiousness, she speaks in an almost jazz-riff tumble of rhymes and advertising-speak. Part infuriating brat, part Pippi Longstocking and altogether insouciant observer of society's foibles, she is the classic poor little rich girl, but with enough spunk and imagination (an extraordinarily vivid one) to fill her life with a surrogate family—and that includes pretty much everyone at the Plaza.

Thompson's arch collaborator Hilary Knight, whose drawings of Eloise are easily half the story, recognized the Plaza as the funhouse it could be to a child's eye, even without the Carnival masque of the plot. The pigeons that populate the windowsills become Baroque-like doves lifting the corners of concealing draperies. The bas-relief Cupids over the doorways steal glances at the action below. Beds are canopied and crowned with ostrich plumes; visiting celebrities' noses point straight up in absolute contrast to their equally sharp high heels.

Eloise Takes a Bawth, the fifth installment of her misadventures, was originally scheduled for publication in 1964 but never released. Finally, almost 30 years later, Hilary Knight and the estate of Kay Thompson agreed to let Simon & Schuster publish the book, which was completed "with a little help from" writer Mart Crowley. Eloise displays all her amazing inventiveness and oblivious destructiveness by flooding the hotel on the day of a huge Carnival ball. The water in Knight's illustrations is a pale blue wash of fantasy that gradually pervades the black-and-white reality of the structure, while the bathtub that is the crucible for this crisis grows magically larger, from swimming pool to dinghy to bay to ocean to pirate's lagoon.

These days, of course, children are more accustomed to special effects, andBawth offers a couple in the form of two gatefold illustrations, one opening vertically and the other horizontally. The first shows the hotel's facade peeled back to expose a Rube Goldberg-ish vision of the piping and a score of frantic plumbers hunting the elusive leak. The other, which serves both as a visual and dramatic climax, is a brilliantly illuminated carnival scene, complete with swags and masks and guests up to their waists in water, somehow thinking the situation too too clever.

The humor may have more layers for older readers, but children will have no trouble spotting the Esther Williams-style water chorus line, or the apparently omnipresent Eloise as acrobat, gondolier, maitresse and guest of honor (or the fact that most of the food appears to be the stuff of six-year-old fantasies, such as ice cream sundaes).Eloise Takes a Bawth is like a Roman candle going off to explode all those drearily realistic and heavy-handed children's books. It is its own celebration and should be a must on Christmas lists for all ages.

Alexandra Starr (essay date 2-9 December 2002)

SOURCE: Starr, Alexandra. "Joy Ride." New Republic 227, nos. 23-24 (2-9 December 2002): 42.

[In the following essay, Starr discusses the reasons behind the enduring popularity of Eloise.]

Every afternoon, the Plaza Hotel in New York City serves a proper tea. While gray dowagers dominate the clientele, little girls are nestled in the crowd as well, munching on Nutella and banana sandwiches. The Palm Court might seem an odd place for a kid to spend the afternoon, but I suspect the girls are enormously excited. To understand why, look no further than the lobby, where there is an enormous portrait of their heroine, Eloise.

You may or may not have made the acquaintance of Eloise, the fictional six-year-old star of a series of best-selling children's books, who lives on the top floor of the Plaza. Eloise lives without parental authority. Her mother sends plane tickets and cash from undisclosed locations; her father is completely absent. Nominally supervised by her British nanny, the precocious ruffian answers only to herself. Eloise spends her days roaming the labyrinthine hotel, crashing weddings and hijacking elevators. She jets to Paris and Moscow in the company of her dog Weenie and her turtle Skipperdee. She takes liberties with language: Eloise doesn't "get up" every morning—she "sklathes" herself out of bed. The four Eloise volumes created by the late Kay Thompson and the illustrator Hilary Knight in the 1950s turned millions of little girls into Eloise acolytes. Now Knight has come out with a fifth in the series:Eloise Takes a Bawth. I bought it last week as a gift for a friend's toddler. It joins on my bookshelfEloise andEloise in Paris —books I'd also intended to give away.

I fell in love with Eloise as a kindergartner, when I carried the first volume around with me like a permanent appendage. She was my favorite female children's book character by far. Nancy Drew, while preternaturally accomplished, had the personality of an inflated Barbie doll. Madeline was spirited but too serious. The eponymous heroine of Harriet the Spy was resourceful and bright yet lacked Eloise's charm. Granted, Eloise could be bratty. But she was also irresistible. Her rich, urban existence was profoundly exotic to a little girl marooned in the Northern Virginia suburbs. Eloise dined at Maxim's in Paris wearing pink bunny slippers. She ordered drinks like "straight Johnnie Walker Black without ice" from room service (punctuating the order with her signature, "And charge it please. Thank you very much!"). Her mother knew Coco Chanel, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and, of course, the owner of the Plaza. It was heady stuff for a young reader whose leitmotifs were the Brownies and neighborhood soccer games. The rich, they are different from you and me. And how.

But what made Eloise special wasn't just her outrageous affluence, as was the case for her comic book counterpart, Richie Rich. And it wasn't just her tomboy antics, like those of Pippi Longstocking, literally a poor girl's version of Eloise. Eloise was a tomboy with panache. On a trip to Moscow, she rode her tricycle across the frozen Baltic Sea. Back at the Plaza, she poured a bottle of wine down the mail chute. I derived a special pleasure from those escapades and some comfort, too. Even as a kid, I recognized that being a girl carried distinct disadvantages. The "boys will be boys" ethos allowed a range of behavior—from wreaking havoc on the playground to biking after dusk—that seemed off-limits to those with the double-X chromosome. And yet, here was Eloise, my literary mascot, doing precisely what she wanted. She breathed life into the trope "girls can do anything boys can do."

She also demonstrated that the converse wasn't true. Eloise possessed attributes foreign to male children's book protagonists. Take Tintin. Like Eloise, he journeyed to exotic corners of the globe. And he did cool things, such as battle the Abominable Snowman with James Bondish aplomb. But, while courageous and focused, Tintin was utterly lacking in mirth. Eloise, by contrast, exploited the female license to be idiosyncratic, if not outright frivolous. She watched television with a parasol "in case there's some sort of glare." She insisted on bathing with a raccoon hat in case the water was cold. Both Eloise and Alexander—of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day—end their days with a soak in the tub. But Eloise doesn't just take a bath. She takes a bawth—and floods New York's most venerable hotel in the process.

Thompson said she was writing not for children but for "precocious grownups." She may be onto something because, in some ways, I appreciate Eloise even more now that I am the same age as her mother. I am drawn to her version of the so-called feminine advantage. It clashes with the message that women are bombarded with today: namely, that the benefit of being female hinges on exploiting sex appeal. The best example of this is another Manhattan heroine, Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw. Carrie and her three comrades-in-arms are held out as the epitome of female autonomy. And, as they traipse through innumerable bedrooms and score yet another pair of Manolo Blahniks, you do get the impression they enjoy being women. They offer evidence that there are benefits to being a girl—but those benefits mainly have to do with boys. While this quartet may shun long-term relationships, their identity is inextricably linked to attracting and seducing men.

Eloise, by contrast, doesn't tailor her behavior to suit anyone but herself. Whether she's leaping into a Bolshoi Ballet performance or spraying her bare feet with seltzer water at a ritzy Parisian café, Eloise's focus is maximizing opportunities for pleasure. And those frissons of enjoyment don't come from accruing clothes or being a babe. Christian Dior may have been her personal designer, but Eloise wears the same uniform—pink bloomers, black jumper, and shiny Mary Janes—every day. And her identity doesn't depend on being attractive. As the book jacket acknowledges, "She is not yet pretty, but she is already a Person." The implication, of course, is that Personhood is more desirable than being merely pretty.

Maybe girls who make their pilgrimage to the Palm Court for tea will remember that message as they grow up. Following Eloise's example, they could mine gender to their advantage. Sex appeal wouldn't dominate their mindset. Instead, they could take traditionally boyish risks and perform them with the flamboyance reserved for girls. Eloise holds out the hope that life's possibilities can be more generous and thrilling if you have courage and imagination. "Be what you are. Give what is yours to give. Have style. Dare," writes Stanley Kunitz in Journal for My Daughter. "Daughter read: what do I want of my life? More! More!" That passion and fearlessness undergirds everything Eloise does. And she seems to be wise to her own wisdom. At the end ofEloise in Moscow, she confides, "Oh, I could tell you a lot." It might be her sole understatement.

TITLE COMMENTARY

ELOISE: A BOOK FOR PRECOCIOUS GROWN UPS (1955)

Ted Dewan (review date 19 May 2000)

SOURCE: Dewan, Ted. Review of Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown Ups, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. Times Educational Supplement, no. 4377 (19 May 2000): 23.

It wouldn't take many more drawings to make an animated cartoon of Hilary Knight'sEloise (text by Kay Thompson—as seen in the film Funny Face with Fred Astaire).Eloise has been a favourite in the US since the 1950s, and she returns to the UK after a long gap. The six-year-old daughter of wealthy socialites who have left her to her own devices in New York's Plaza Hotel, she fills her days making mischief.

The text wriggles and rambles in the first person, while the pictures express her every twist and turn to the point where she appears to move on the page. If you fall for her, there are several Eloise books in print, and new titles in the works.

Layout is just one of the many visual tools illustrators have at their disposal. Its use is a subtle subject to ponder, and may be best introduced to early teens and older pupils (unless children are precociously visually literate). However, because of the broad audience pictures address, these books will appeal to a far wider age-range than if they were unillustrated texts.

ELOISE IN PARIS (1957)

Robin Denniston (review date 28 November 1958)

SOURCE: Denniston, Robin. Review of Eloise in Paris, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. Spectator (28 November 1958): 779.

Finally,Eloise in Paris. Ballyhoo and attendant by-products are all at work to make us Eloise-conscious and Eloise-resentful. Let us be fair to the author and to Hilary Knight, whose pictures are more telling and rather less knowing than the text. The first few pages will keep most people in stitches. But eventually laughter dies away. There is only one joke, which is Eloise, and she is far too long sustained. There is no story, only Eloise's reaction to Paris, France. Where all the girl's money comes from, why all the skivvies don't throw caution to the wind and strangle her, what she is going to do with all those terrible traumas when she grows up—well nobody really cares. As part of the ballyhoo, many personalities of show business testify to their love of Eloise on the back of the wrapper. Amongst them, Robert Morley says, 'I recommendEloise ' (he does not say what for). A cat may look at a king, and my own quote is that, like rather a lot of children especially fiction,Eloise is hell.

ELOISE AT CHRISTMASTIME (1958)

Ilene Cooper (review date 15 November 1999)

SOURCE: Cooper, Ilene. "Golden Girls?" Booklist 96, no. 6 (15 November 1999): 638.

Less successful is the reissue of Kay Thompson's Eloise at Christmastime, the latest in the recent effort to relaunch the career of the little girl who lives at the Plaza in New York.Eloise, always less read than Madeline, evokes a hazy memory for many adults and is probably unknown to most children. Kids who don't know Eloise's story will wonder where her parents are and what she's doing running around a hotel. The hodge-podge text is hard to read aloud, right from the first rhyme: "Once there was this child / You know her I believe / Here's who she is me ELOISE / and it's Christmas eve."

The best part of the Eloise series has always been Hilary Knight's bursting-with-life artwork, and that's especially true here. The very long text bouncing all over the place, gets both support and focus in Knight's pictures, four spreads of which are new to this book. It is the pen-and-ink art juxtaposed against peppermint-pink backgrounds that makes the book worth purchasing for libraries that want to own all four Eloise titles or that have demand.

ELOISE IN MOSCOW (1959)

Library Journal (review date 15 March 1960)

SOURCE: Review of Eloise in Moscow, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. Library Journal 85, no. 6 (15 March 1960): 152.

Irrepressible as ever, Eloise, Nanny, and Weenie (in a porcupine coat) visit Moscow [inEloise in Moscow ], and it is a moot point as to who comes out best, Eloise or the Russians. In any case, it is a lot of fun for the reader as Eloise arrives at the National in a Rolls Royce, tries to cope with a Russian menu, shops in GUM, visits the marble subway, and attends the Bolshoi. Eloise would not be Eloise, if she did not take a nocturnal stroll through the hotel, and her keyhole comments on what is going on in the other rooms is one of the best parts of the book. Her digs at Russian life: "Everybody can see what everybody's doing in Moscow." "Is possible to see . . ." "Is not possible to see . . ." will be fully appreciated by young people. This is the best one since the first Eloise.

New Statesman (review date 3 December 1960)

SOURCE: Review of Eloise in Moscow, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. New Statesman 60, no. 1551 (3 December 1960): 887.

Eloise in Moscow I can see, without being a great Eloise fan myself, also succeeds on the yes-yes level, in fact at two yes-yes levels. With wild generalisations such as 'The hotel lobby smells like chicken' and 'They have purple ink' it appeals to those who have been to Russia and remember, or are prepared to kid themselves that they remember, that the hotel lobby did smell like chicken; and with even wilder generalisations such as 'None of our luggage was missing' and 'But they didn't take our camera' it appeals to those who have never been to Russia but who take all this Siberia stuff with a pinch of salt.

Miriam Drennan (review date March 2000)

SOURCE: Drennan, Miriam. "Little Miss Diplomat." Book Page (March 2000): 29.

Here's the thing of it:Eloise in Moscow has returned.

The final published collaboration of author Kay Thompson and illustrator Hilary Knight,Eloise in Moscow was originally released in 1959, following on the heels of its enormously successful predecessors Eloise, Eloise in Paris, andEloise at Christmastime. And now, Simon & Schuster has reissuedEloise in Moscow to the delight of readers of all ages.

The idea of someone like Eloise in a country like Cold War Russia is dangerously funny. Thompson and Knight took this idea and traveled to Russia, spending three weeks absorbing information and sketching. This was before glasnost, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before Russian democracy. And yet, despite all the changes Russia has undergone, Eloise's stint as "Little Miss Diplomat" remains timeless.

Eloise tours us through this mysterious and gray country, describing all she sees and does with the honesty and frankness of an explicitly observant six-year-old. It takes a couple of history lessons (or a grandparent's recollections) to read between Eloise's baffled yet authoritative lines. It is also important to note that Knight veered from the traditional Eloise pink, illustrating spreads in yellow and black instead.

This is what we are: absolutely thrilled, thank you very much.

ELOISE'S GUIDE TO LIFE: HOW TO EAT, DRESS, TRAVEL, BEHAVE, AND STAY SIX FOREVER (2000)

Publishers Weekly (review date 1 May 2000)

SOURCE: Review of Eloise's Guide to Life: How to Eat, Dress, Travel, Behave, and Stay Six Forever, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. Publishers Weekly 247, no. 18 (1 May 2000): 73.

The Plaza Hotel's most famous resident helps send up advice books inEloise's Guide to Life: How to Eat, Dress, Travel, Behave, and Stay Six Forever, a compendium of pronouncements culled from Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight's four Eloise books. Sample wisdom: "You have to eat oatmeal or you'll dry up / Anybody knows that"; "An egg cup makes a very good hat." For this volume, a very gifty 4¾" × 7", Knight has contributed six new drawings.

Abbey Anclaude (review date June 2000)

SOURCE: Anclaude, Abbey. Review of Eloise's Guide to Life: How to Eat, Dress, Travel, Behave, and Stay Six Forever, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. Book Page (June 2000): 30.

Let's just start by saying that the latest Eloise installment is NOT for grownups to read to children. So if you're a grown-up, stop reading this and hand it over to a child. Assuming this has made it into the hands of a child, the rest of this review is for your eyes only.

Now, dear children, you know that Eloise creates big fun in the grown-up world that surrounds her.Eloise's Guide to Life, complete with new Hilary Knight illustrations, will offer you no new revelations. I mean, you all know how to chew gum, keep a suitcase packed in case of a quick getaway, and that getting bored is simply not allowed. But take a good look at the grownups around you—do they know these things? Have they ever?

To help you reach the grownups in your life, our perennially six-year-old heroine tirelessly took on the task of starring in her own self-help book.

Eloise's Guide to Life is a must-have for any child trying to reach the post-pubescent. Adults may need some of the text and illustrations explained; for example, why are paper cups the best way to communicate with Martians? What good is a rubber band on the end of one's nose? These are vital things to know if we (and they) are to remain six forever.

So when I say that the latest offering from Eloise is not intended for an adult to read to a child, it is simply because it is intended for a child to read to an adult. I mean, when it comes to self-help, why wouldn't you turn to the best possible source?

ELOISE TAKES A BAWTH (2002)

Publishers Weekly (review date 23 September 2002)

SOURCE: Review of Eloise Takes a Bawth, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. Publishers Weekly 249, no. 38 (23 September 2002): 72-3.

Ever-irrepressible Eloise absolutely loves taking a bawth [inEloise Takes a Bawth ], and her devotees will absolutely love seeing her "splawsh, splawsh, splawsh" her way through a delightfully disastrous—yet ultimately propitious—time in the tub. "You have to be absolutely careful when you take a bawth in a hotel," announces the famous Plazadweller, who ignores her own advice and turns on all of the faucets ("Let that water gush out and slush out into that sweet old tub tub tub and fill it up to the absolutely top of its brim so that it can slip over its rim onto the floor if it wants to"). A judicious use of blue on [Hilary] Knight's trademark pen-and-inks traces the flow of water as it seeps from the penthouse through the floors of the Plaza Hotel into the grand ballroom, where workers feverishly prepare for the Venetian Masked Ball. Featuring two gatefold spreads, Knight's drolly detailed pictures depict the hotel's startled guests and employees as water gushes from such unexpected sources as elevator buttons and chandeliers. Oblivious Eloise, meanwhile, blissfully imagines herself driving a speedboat full throttle, water skiing and battling pirates in the Caribbean. A postscript (cleverly presented as a message in a bottle) explains that Thompson and Knight collaborated on this book 40 years ago, and it has been brought to light with the help of playwright [Mart] Crowley. Since the buoyant art and humorously bubbly text surely rise to the level of its precursors, it's high time this book appeared, "for Lord's sake," as Eloise herself might say.

Kirkus Reviews (review date 1 October 2002)

SOURCE: Review of Eloise Takes a Bawth, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. Kirkus Reviews 70, no. 19 (1 October 2002): 1482.

Proving herself once again more Force than Child, Eloise wreaks watery havoc upon the Plaza Hotel in an episode announced nearly 40 years ago but never published [Eloise Takes a Bawth ]. Has it been worth the wait? "For Lord's sake," need you ask? After Nanny imprudently tells her to draw her own bawth, Eloise immediately locks the door and embarks on an all-taps-full-on adventure that takes her from ocean's bottom to a battle with Caribbean pirates—and sends water pouring between floors to gush from every fixture, threatening to wash out the Grawnd Ballroom's Venetian Masked Ball. Working from his original sketches, [Hilary] Knight creates splawshy close-ups of the self-absorbed six-year-old bounding balletically about a variety of imagined settings, interspersed with cutaway views of lower floors peopled by soggy guests and panicked hotel staff. The pages are so brilliantly conceived that readers will need to share bawth after bawth just finding the jokes and noticing something new with each soak. When Mr. Salomone, the manager, invites Eloise to tour the destruction, a mahvelous double gatefold opens to reveal—a whirl of floating gondolas, extravagantly costumed performers, and delighted (or at least urbane) guests. Thanks to Eloise, the Ball is the social season's high-water mark. And she knows just what to do about the five-million-dollar repair bill, too: "I'd absolutely charge it." Here's the extraordinary extrovert at her very grawndest (and most destructive); rare is the reader who won't be up for repeat dives into her upper-crust, never-humdrum world.

Carol Ann Wilson (review date December 2002)

SOURCE: Wilson, Carol Ann. Review of Eloise Takes a Bawth, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. School Library Journal 48, no. 12 (December 2002): 110.

Irrepressible Eloise continues to confound the staff of the Plaza Hotel with her imaginative and disaster-producing adventures [inEloise Takes a Bawth ]. Nanny informs the mischievous child that she must take a bath as Mr. Salomone, "the sweetest old manager in this sweet old world busy busy busy with the Venetian Masked Ball in the Grawnd Ballroom tonight," is taking a much-needed break and coming for tea. The resulting elaborate pretub rituals and an endless soak full of pirates, motorboats, water skis, etc., create major plumbing problems that saturate the hotel and flood the ballroom. However, when Eloise is hauled off by the manager to confront the mess she has made, what do they discover but a highly authentic Venetian celebration complete with floating gondolas and wet but enthusiastic revelers. [Hilary] Knight's witty line drawings capture Eloise's wild imaginings and capricious personality and those fascinated with the underpinnings and plumbing of a huge hotel will find the myriad details fascinating. The two double-gatefold illustrations are awesome. The text and pictures wander all over the page in perfect imitation of this cantankerous heroine. As in her previous adventures, the language is quirky and sophisticated, sometimes difficult to follow, and probably more appealing to adults. A "rawther" necessary purchase where Eloise is wildly popular.

Ilene Cooper (review date 1 December 2002)

SOURCE: Cooper, Ilene. Review of Eloise Takes a Bawth, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. Booklist 99, no. 7 (1 December 2002): 679-80.

Eloise is back [inEloise Takes a Bawth ], this time in a story suitable to her fame and much better than the last book, which found her in Moscow, for goodness' sake. Apparently ready for publication way back in 1964, this was buried because of "artistic differences." Starting with sketches he originally made 40 years ago, [Hilary] Knight, working with Thompson's heirs and editors, has put together a sprawling, "rawther" amusing tale of Eloise and an ill-fated bath. Nanny tells Eloise not to dawdle in the tub, because the manager of the Plaza Hotel is coming to tea, despite fevered preparations for the Venetian Masked Ball in the "Grawnd" Ballroom. Oh, but Eloise does dawdle. She fills the tub to the "top of its brim, so that [the water] can slip over the rim," which is exactly what it does as Eloise flits in and out of the tub, splishing, splashing, and totally oblivious to the fact that water is seeping, then pouring down into the Grand Ballroom. Thompson's involved rhymed text is enhanced by Knight's inventive artwork, which views the wreckage from every vantage point. Kids will adore seeing Eloise in her room and the wreckage down below, and they'll love the foldout revealing the plumbing of the Plaza. The final spread, showing the Venetian Ball, now authentic because water is flowing everywhere, is an elaborate delight, quite worthy of Eloise.

Christine M. Heppermann (review date January-February 2003)

SOURCE: Heppermann, Christine M. Review of Eloise Takes a Bawth, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight. Horn Book Magazine 79 (January-February 2003): 63-4.

For much of 2002, New York City was under a drought warning, but no one seems to have told Eloise. And why would they have, since this fifth volume of her antics, [Eloise Takes a Bawth, ] in which she manages to flood the Plaza's Grand Ballroom, was supposed to have been published in 1964, almost forty years ago? In this new, refurbished edition authorized by Thompson's estate, the Plaza's infamous resident is still six years old, still enchantingly self-absorbed, and still out of control. Hilary Knight's signature black-and-white line drawings, here accented with blue in addition to the classic red and pink, have lost none of their verve, wit, and panache. While Eloise "splawshes" in an overflowing tub and oblivious Nanny watches a soap opera, scenes from which cleverly mimic the watery goings-on outside the TV, the activity in the rest of the hotel is all about getting ready for the Venetian Masked Ball and trying to discover the source of those worrisome drips. The leaks are subtle at first: they spurt from the elevator buttons, plop into a room service beverage, make a small puddle near the histrionic event-coordinator's foot. But, as Eloise gets deeper into her imaginative play, pretending she's a speedboat driver, then a pirate, then a mermaid, the water gets deeper, too. In the end, the Plaza's floors and walls may be ruined, but the ball is saved, with the ballroom (shown in a sumptuous pull-out spread) doing an impressive imitation of a Venetian canal. Kay Thompson may have pulled the plug onEloise Takes a Bawth in 1964, butEloise fans will be grateful for her relatives' decision to start the faucet running again.

Thompson, Kay 1912-1998

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