Word: thompson
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...They think she's real," says Eloise's illustrator, Hilary Knight, 75, who first drew the plucky character in the 1955 book Kay Thompson's Eloise. In the next decade, he and the eccentric Thompson produced four more books featuring the 6-year-old imp who resides at the Plaza with her saucy au pair, Nanny, and who thrives on creating elevator traffic jams...
...almost 50 years after her debut, that naughty little girl returns in Eloise Takes a Bawth, the series' fourth tale, written by Thompson in the 1960s but never published. It is the first "new" Eloise book in 40 years. Fans, aware of its existence, have long clamored for it, and Simon & Schuster is so certain of the pent-up demand that it is printing 200,000 copies...
...startling publishing success, sharing the best-seller list with works by Graham Greene and John O'Hara. To date, it has sold more than 2 million copies. But the three other sequels--Eloise in Paris, Eloise at Christmastime and Eloise in Moscow--were yanked out of print by Thompson in the mid-'60s. She let the original remain. After Thompson's death in 1998, her estate allowed Simon & Schuster to resurrect the three sequels the next year, and together they have since sold more than half a million copies. Eloise Takes a Bawth had made...
Bawth's release is rewarding Knight with some late-career fanfare. During the initial Eloise craze, he was often overshadowed by the zany Thompson, an accomplished nightclub performer and voice coach to such stars as Judy Garland and Lena Horne. Given to bouts of melodrama, she once sawed the legs off her baby grand piano so that she could serenade her pug "eyeball to eyeball." By all accounts, her sanity teetered as she aged. She spent her last years holed up in the apartment of her goddaughter Liza Minnelli, refusing contact with almost everyone...
...When Thompson began to withdraw Eloise from the public--some say she did not want to compete with her fictional creation's fame--Knight pursued other projects. He went on to illustrate more than 60 books (Where's Wallace?, Sunday Morning). He is currently a staff artist for Vanity Fair. But it's his iconic depiction of Eloise, the enfant terrible with porcupine-needle hair, that he will be known...