After her success on screen, she jet-setted off to Rome, where she lived in a palazzo with a fake cardboard fireplace (which she herself had constructed), letting a stack of incomplete manuscripts languish outside. But in point of fact, Thompson, who had always averred that the Eloise character was based on herself, just went right on living like a real-life avatar of her beloved creation. Now, it might be tempting to look at Thompson’s collected writings and assume that the original Eloise books are basically the end of the story. She was Liza Minelli’s godmother-and somewhere in the middle of all this she had the time to create Eloise, one of the most beloved characters in all of children’s entertainment (though Kay herself always contended that her books were for adults-hence the original subtitle of the first Eloise installment, A Book for Precocious Adults.) She was a Ziegfield Follies alum with a long resume in radio, and as something of a musical virtuoso she helped such notables as Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra to refine and perfect the styles that would make them famous. Kay Thompson was Old Hollywood royalty, starring in Funny Face (1957) and sharing the screen with Fred Astaire (whom she hated). If you read this blog regularly, you pretty much know how the story goes.
If you’re looking for an adult Eloise, you need look no further than Kay Thompson herself.
How can we tell? Because Kay Thompson, creator of Eloise and author of the first four Eloise books, continued to live a life of elegant mischief that frankly beggared belief well into her eighties. Of course, that consensus is wildly unfounded.
Sarah Ferrell at the New York Times wrote that, “today, she’d probably be on Ritalin.” Carolyn Parkhurst at the New Yorker put together a short piece in 2014 imaging Eloise as a 46-year-old (still) living at the Plaza Hotel, which includes the line, “Some mornings, I wake up with a rawther awful hangover.” Surely somewhere there is a more optimistic take on the life trajectory of the maximally whimsical and mischievous among us-but the consensus seems a little bit dark. There’s been plenty of speculation about what Eloise would be like as a grown up.
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