When people like Francis Ford Coppola used to telephone the author Kay Thompson, wanting to buy the film rights to her creation, Eloise, the little girl who lives at the Plaza, Thompson was ready for them. According to Hilary Knight, who illustrated the "Eloise" books, the reclusive author, who was in her eighties, wheelchair-bound, and a devotee of late-night talk radio, liked to listen to Hollywood pitches. "She'd toy with them a little, and then she'd drive them away," he said the other day.

"Eloise" which was first published in 1955 is the story of a skinny-limbed six-year-old who has a devilish spirit much like Thompson's. She confounds the staff of the Plaza with antics such as ordering a single raisin from room service and dumping pitchers of water down the mail chute.

The book was an immediate bestseller, and Thompson and Knight soon followed it up with "Eloise in Paris," "Eloise at Christmastime," and "Eloise in Moscow." The accompanying marketing blitz was, for its time, on a par with the current "Star Wars" merchandising bonanza. There were Eloise dolls and hatboxes, a clothing line, a hit song. But Hilary Knight was, for the most part, an outsider. Shortly before "Eloise" was published, Thompson had asked him to sign a contract granting her ownership of the copyright to the drawings and seventy percent of the royalties on any future projects. Then, in the mid-sixties, Thompson abruptly took all the books but the original off the market. She was tired of sharing Eloise with the world, she said.

Now, nearly a year after Thompson's death, Simon & Schuster has begun reissuing all four "Eloise" books, and there is a feeling within publishing circles that Knight, a trim, thoughtful man of seventy-three, is finally getting his due. "I don't want to give the impression that I have been moping around for the past forty years," he said, settled on a red sofa in the living room that adjoins his Beekman Hill studio.

"I was never thwarted by Kay," he insisted. "Yes, it was a wicked contract, but you have to understand, I adored her." I had always been attracted to exotic people. The two people who fascinated me most as a child were Carmen Miranda and Lena Horne."

Knight said that his collaboration with Thompson began to sour only after they began their fifth book, "Eloise Takes a Bawth." "We worked on it for four long years," he said. "But the relationship had worn itself out. I would give her drawings in the evening and come back to her studio the next day, and the place would look like a war zone. She would have taken pieces of paper and glued them over everything I'd done. She was trying to blot out what I'd invented. She didn't want to give me credit for anything. It bothered me a lot, but I always consoled myself with the thought that the books stood on their own. One reason I think the reissued books will be so successful is that they were withdrawn. Kay did a good thing, in a way. She made people want those books."

Hollywood has once again been clamoring for Eloise. A number of movie studios (Knight does not want to say which ones) are in a bidding war for the property. "We went to California and talked to ten different executives," Knight said, "and almost every one of them had a different idea of how to approach the story."

The Plaza has aligned itself with a New York-based production group that is also vying for the rights to "Eloise." Rose Ganguzza, a spokesperson for the hotel, said recently, "She doesn't belong on Sunset Boulevard. We feel very strongly about that. We've nurtured and cared for Eloise like a foster child for forty-five years."

Hearing this assertion, Knight rolled his eyes. "If I hear the word 'nurture' one more time. . ." he said. "The West Coast people kept throwing it around, too, and they've been familiar with Eloise for all of five minutes. If that.

"Kay and I were like parents to Eloise," he went on. "We decided that we'd never make her older than six, and that we'd always keep the parents in the background. When you really study the book, you see that Eloise is somewhat wistful. And I guess my job now is to continue what Kay might have thought she was doing when she pulled the books in the first place-to protect Eloise."

TOP      RETURN TO THIS SECTION'S INDEX      HOME