answered in a little girl voice, “I am Eloise!” and proceeded to lay the blame for her tardiness on her little girl alter ego. Over the next few years, the singer/dancer incorporated the precocious Eloise into her stage act. In 1954 Thompson’s friends encouraged her to put Eloise on paper in a children’s book. Thompson was introduced to illustrator Hilary Knight, whom it was thought could bring Eloise to life. Over Christmas of that year, Knight sent Thompson a Christmas card with her first impression of what Eloise would look like riding in a sleigh with Santa Claus. Thompson glanced at the picture and said, “It was immediate recognition on my part. There she was. In person.”
Knight moved into the Plaza with Thompson, who had been living there for years, to work on the first book. While the collaborators engaged in “writing, editing, laughing, outlining, cutting, pasting, laughing again, reading out loud, laughing some more,” it seemed natural to have Eloise live in the Plaza. The idea flowered fully for Thompson when she thought of Liza Minnelli, her own goddaughter, who was often left in the company and care of hotel staffers while mother Judy Garland was on the set of a film or singing in a club or recording an album. Now everything fitted together like a Swiss watch. Eloise would show up at weddings she wasn’t invited to, and she would crash meetings and parties and interrupt all sorts of different people in the hotel. The inaugural book, Eloise, was published on November 28, 1955, and was so successful that offers to write more installments were immediate, as were requests to record versions of the stories, do product endorsements, and authorize dramatizations of Eloise’s life. Thompson and Knight then set up Eloise Ltd., with the Plaza, of course, as their headquarters.
In 1956 Thompson allowed the TV anthology series Playhouse 90 to do a show adapted from her book. It was billed as “Eloise — based on the hilarious bestselling story about the sprightly six-year-old girl who runs — and often runs ragged — the lives of the celebrated guests and devoted employees of a distinguished New York hotel.” But the writer who penned the teleplay strayed wildly from the basic innocence and good nature of the character and created a drama involving Eloise being caught in the middle of her parents’ divorce and the hotel being filled with intrigue and scoundrels. The reviews of the show were terrible, and people who loved the books completely rejected this dramatization. Thompson was so angry about what had been done to her book that she vowed never again to allow her character to be dramatized in another medium.
New York City’s fabled Plaza Hotel is best known as the home of the delightful but fictional Eloise.
(Courtesy Fairmont Hotels & Resorts)
Later in the 1950s three more Eloise books were published, and Thompson became a celebrity mainstay at the Plaza where she organized huge tea parties for fans and entertained them with Eloise stories. In 1958 she helped create the children’s menu at the Plaza that features such dishes as “Teeny Weenies” and “Eggs Eloise.” For a number of years there was a special room at the Plaza named the Eloise Room. It was a large sitting room where guests could relax and mingle. There was also, for a while, an ice-cream parlour in the Plaza called the Eloise.
By 1989 the Eloise books had been in constant print for decades and were huge bestsellers. At the Plaza a new owner, Donald Trump, wanted to use the image of Eloise in an advertising campaign for the hotel. Hilary Knight was brought in to design special children’s suites in the hotel that featured murals on the walls commemorating the adventures of Eloise. She was also asked to design children’s menus with Eloise drawings on them. But Thompson didn’t like Trump and refused to allow him to exploit her character to sell his hotel. The entertainer’s aversion to Trump had arisen after the financier took control of the Plaza. Thompson had been living in the hotel for many years free of charge because the previous owners were eternally grateful to her for putting their hotel on the map in such a unique and indelible way. Trump, however, insisted that Thompson pay for her suite. Thompson said if that was the case then Trump would have to start paying her for the rights to use her character.
Eloise, by that time, had become world-famous and had made the Plaza renowned along with her. Knight painted a portrait of Eloise that hung in the Palm Court (the place where Eloise goes for lunch when it’s raining). That picture became a sort of Mona Lisa for the Plaza. Mothers and daughters came to the Palm Court for tea just to look at it. Then one night during a raucous college frat-boy party the portrait was stolen and never recovered. Knight was brought in to do another painting to replace the missing one when, it is said, Princess Grace of Monaco arrived with her children to see the portrait and was vocally dismayed that she had come all that way to look at an empty wall. The new painting of Eloise, the one I first saw, now hangs on the wall opposite the Palm Court.
While Eloise’s parents are never part of the action of the books, the child does have a nanny and a couple of companions, specifically her pug dog, Weenie, and her turtle, Skipperdee. However, it wasn’t until after Thompson died in 1998 in her early nineties that readers were able to see Eloise come to life again on the screen. The rights to the character and the books passed to Thompson’s sister, Blanche Hurd, who gave consent for a number of TV movies and straight-to-DVD feature-film versions using the Eloise character. In 2003 two TV movies were made based on the character that featured none other than Julie Andrews as Nanny. Three years later an animated series debuted and is a solid seller on DVD. It boasts the voice of Lynn Redgrave as Nanny. At this writing there is a big-screen picture being planned around Eloise that will star Uma Thurman as Nanny. To this day, one of the bestselling items in the Plaza’s gift shop is the postcard version of the Knight portrait of Eloise.
So when people hear my story of living in the Royal York and say, “You’re just like the little girl Eloise,” I not only take that as a supreme compliment but have to admit that, yes, I am Eloise!
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For a number of years I covered the Toronto International Film Festival for Reel to Real, a television show I co-produced and co-hosted in the InterContinental Hotel on Bloor Street West. We secured a suite, turned it into a mini-studio where we interviewed actors and filmmakers, and shot segments for the shows during the festival. I literally moved into the suite for a few weeks amid the camera equipment, lighting gear, and all the other equipment necessary to make a daily television show on location. Year after year I lived for those weeks in the space left over in the suite as people such as Ed Harris, Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Bana, Joaquin Phoenix, Monica Bellucci, and many others filed in and out for interviews and various eccentric adventures. Every day I ate at least once or twice in the main all-day restaurant and came to know the menu as if I’d designed it myself.
During those years, I got quite familiar with InterContinental’s hotels as a brand. Later I visited other hotels in the chain in Montreal and in Cannes, France, but I truly appreciated brand familiarity as supremely important when I was asked to do a magazine story in Seoul, South Korea. The scenario was quite surreal. I was called on the phone by the editor of Dolce Vita, a magazine I’d been contributing to for a few years. The editor asked if I had plans the following week. I told her no, and she asked if I wanted to go to Seoul. Although I’d never been to Asia at that point in my life and Seoul wasn’t somewhere I’d given much thought about visiting, I agreed to go. I flew to Los Angeles (five hours from Toronto), then lay over for a couple of hours before boarding a Korean Air jet for Seoul’s Incheon International Airport (13 hours more on a plane). When I arrived in South Korea’s capital, I was met by a smiling guide/driver who enthusiastically welcomed me, asked how my flight was, and told me I’d be relaxing in my suite at the COEX InterContinental inside an hour.
Seoul is a massive city, and the COEX InterContinental is a huge hotel in the centre of it. When I arrived in the lobby of the COEX, I was surprised that it resembled a combination of the lobbies of the two InterContinental hotels in Toronto (the other InterContinental is on Front Street West). After I got to my suite 22 storeys up, I was immediately struck by the fact that it looked similar to the suite we used to shoot the interviews at the InterContinental in
