New York Magazine
Edith Newhall
January 16, 1989
It's almost impossible to walk through the plaza hotel without thinking of Kay Thompson's Eloise, the fictional child who lived at the Plaza with her English nanny, her pug, Weenie and her turtle, Skipperdee. And that's why Ivana Trump, mother and mogul, has hired Hilary Knight, who illustrated the Eloise books, to design a children's suite for the 82 year-old hotel, with murals commemorating that precocious little girl. "It will be a room where guests can leave their children when they want to go shopping or whatever, with a resident nanny and a library filled with children's books," says Knight, 61, who is also creating new children's menus for the Plaza with Eloise drawings.
Though Knight has illustrated more than 60 children's books (Simon and Schuster has just published his Side by Side: Poems to Read Together, a new anthology of children's poems compiled by Lee Bennett Hopkins), he's also known for his theater posters (Sugar Babies, Half a Sixpence, Irene) and is working on the poster for Mike, a musical based on the life of Mike Todd, which producer Cyma Rubin is bringing to Broadway.
As if working with Trump and Rubin weren't enough, Knight is involved with yet another woman. "My third lady is Mrs. Onassis," he says, smiling, though he'll reveal only that he and the Doubleday editor are "working on a huge project, republishing books that have been out of print."
Aside from constant phone calls, Knight seems to lead a quiet life in his cozy East 51st Street apartment, which he shares with two Maine coon cats and vast collections of books, records, and paintings. Many of the books in his collection were illustrated by his parents, who did most of their work in the twenties and thirties. "That was the great period for illustration there wasn't much photography," says Knight. Raised in Roslyn, Long Island, and on West 11th Street in New York, he attended the Art Students League, where he studied with Reginald Marsh and George Grosz.
Knight has never used children as models, and, in fact, Eloise's face was inspired by an adult's. (It's been rumored for years that Thompson, who arranged Judy Garland's vocals at MGM, based Eloise's antic personality on the young Liza Minnelli.) "Her look-her little face-was based on a friend of my parents'," Knight confides, "a woman named Eloise Davison who was a food writer for the Herald Tribune. She was in her fifties when I knew her, so I imagined what she looked like as a little girl."