Kay Thompson (53 page)

“The following morning, I was in my apartment,” Kay explained, “and somebody from the hotel called to say, ‘Eloise is missing.’ And I said, ‘I’ll be right there.’ ”

Immediate suspicion fell upon the twelfth annual Debutante Ball of the New York Junior League, held the prior evening in the Terrace Room. It was
presumed that drunken teenagers had stolen the portrait as a prank, a theory that was already gaining momentum as the accepted version of the crime. The press had gotten wind of the abduction and a flurry of reporters descended on Thompson when she arrived at the hotel.

“I was interviewed,” Kay explained, “and I just couldn’t wait to talk to Walter.” As in Cronkite, CBS News.

Going along with the hotel’s explanation, Thompson postulated, “I think it was school boys and I keep seeing coonskin coats. You know,
that
kind of act. Just needless.” And to a reporter for United Press International, Kay speculated that the famous painting “now may be gracing the wall of some fraternity house or dormitory room of a college campus.”

But how did a five-by-three-and-a-half-foot painting, mounted in a heavy wooden frame, manage to slip by the doormen unnoticed?

“She was kidnapped and came through the window in the Persian Room,” Thompson dramatically hypothesized. “Through the window, on the Fifty-eighth Street side. The door is locked there. And the dance was going on . . . So they just slid that through the wide windows in the Persian Room, and out the window into a car and away you go.” She had certainly thought this one through—in startling detail.

“It made the papers,” Knight said, “and there was
a lot
of publicity.”

“There it was,
everywhere,
” Kay recalled. “And the [evening] papers were out by 6 o’clock . . . Walter Cronkite was on at 7 o’clock and his announcement, of course, was—to the entire world—‘Eloise kidnapped from Plaza Hotel.’ ”

Eschewing the “drunken teenage prank” account, however, the
New York World-Telegram and Sun
broke the case wide open, suggesting an entirely different theory. The newspaper’s society columnist, Frank Farrell, managed to track down Alphonse Salomone at the Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico. Salomone suspected “either Savoy Hilton manager Gene Voit or Waldorf banquet manager Clyde Harris” because “both Voit and Harris were execs of the Hotel Plaza while Eloise was becoming famous there” and “she became the center of so much attention that neither of these two Hilton execs could conceivably leave such a little darling behind when they changed jobs.”

Given the hostile transition of the new administration, it would seem that the disappearance of the Eloise portrait was more than just a random act of vandalism. And the rapidity with which the hotel’s management abandoned concern was only matched by the apathy of the police department. By year’s end, the case had essentially been dropped and forgotten.

Frustrated, Kay took matters into her own hands. On January 4, 1961, Dorothy Kilgallen reported in her column that Thompson was “offering a reward.”
But weeks went by with no leads. On February 18, United Press International issued a follow-up story stating that “officials at the Hotel Plaza are still puzzled by the disappearance.” Subsequently, for nearly half a century, “the Unsolved Mystery of the Stolen Eloise Portrait” remained a cold case. Until now.

“Some time later,” Hilary Knight admitted, “I got a mysterious, anonymous phone call. The voice on the phone told me the portrait was in a dumpster in a dark alley somewhere, if I wanted it.”

Knight went to the appointed location and retrieved the painting from the trash. Though no longer in its frame, the artwork was still more or less intact, having sustained only minor damage.

Instead of restoring it and having it rehung at The Plaza, Hilary decided to quietly bury the artifact in storage, where it has remained all these years. When asked why he did not report this to anyone, he sheepishly admitted, “It is a little embarrassing because the thieves were apparently after the
frame,
not my artwork. And, frankly, I made that first portrait for Kay, never imagining it would be put on permanent display at The Plaza. I never really liked it—I did it in a rush—so I was not unhappy when it disappeared.”

So, if the artist ended up with the goods
and
had a motive for the portrait’s suppression, doesn’t that earn him a spot in the lineup of prime suspects? Perhaps. But, in addition to the perfectionist illustrator, the megalomaniacal hotel manager, disgruntled ex-employees, scheming frame filchers, drunken teenage vandals, and maybe even Colonel Mustard, there is one other person of interest in this whodunit who cannot be ignored: the possessive copyright holder.

In unpublished portions of a 1993 interview with Stephen M. Silverman, Thompson confessed, “I found her [the Eloise portrait] on Eighty-something Street . . . torn up. It was torn up and put in one of those baskets, you know, the silver baskets . . . A trash thing.”

How was it that Kay just so happened to stumble upon this amazing discovery? Why didn’t she take possession of it? Did she place the call to Knight, disguising her voice? Or did she put someone else up to the task? Why did she claim the painting was “torn up” when it was later recovered intact? Indeed, this was curious behavior for an innocent victim.

It’s just too delicious
not
to imagine Thompson acting out an Eloise-like kamikaze heist, dressed in one of her black Nolan Miller catsuits, raiding the lobby of The Plaza in the wee hours of the morning, accompanied by Henry Mancini’s theme from
The Pink Panther.
Yet even that cinematic set piece falls apart in light of the reward money Kay offered for the return of the portrait.

Or was that just a ruse to throw off suspicion?

The one thing we do know is that if there were an Academy Award for acting in mysterious ways, Thompson would certainly have taken the prize. Annually.

S
witching channels from
film noir to courtroom drama, we come to Polan v. Thompson, a 1961 lawsuit that, according to
Variety,
was “brought by agent Barron Polan against Kay Thompson” for commissions allegedly due on all “peripheral rights” to Eloise, including sequels, merchandising deals, television and movie rights, and any other exploitation of the character.

To defend her in the case, Kay hired Horace Manges of Weil, Gotshal and Manges, the high-powered New York law firm that represented Random House and a dozen other top publishing companies. At a strategy meeting, Manges said, “Kay, all I ask you is while we’re there [in court], don’t say anything. We just go easy and you don’t have to worry about a thing.”

Of course, going “easy” was not one of Thompson’s strong suits. On the day of the trial, the double doors to the courtroom were flung open by a diva who was ready for her close-up. Think Dietrich in
Witness for the Prosecution
—and then some.

“I had on my new white Givenchy coat and
whoa
!” Kay gloated. “I could not have looked less like who I was going to be in this scene.”

New York Supreme Court Judge Samuel C. Coleman called Thompson to the witness stand. Pointing to Exhibit A, Polan’s attorney, Jack Pearl, asked, “Did you write this book?”

“Of course I wrote this book,” Kay testified.

“What book?” Judge Coleman queried.

“It’s a book about Eloise,” Thompson said.

And then, out of nowhere, a screechy, high-pitched voice suddenly announced, “I am Eloise and I am six, and here’s what I am. I live at this hotel.”

For an instant, the entire courtroom looked around, trying to spot the surprise witness who had just interrupted the proceeding—then realized that the voice of Eloise was, in fact, emanating from the mouth of Kay. Manges shot Thompson a warning glance to zip it.

“But the judge was really ready to hear who Eloise was,” Thompson rationalized. “He
wanted
to hear all about this.”

Looking back and forth between Polan and Thompson, Judge Coleman said, “You two people are friends. You don’t want to—”

“Well,
he
may want to,” Eloise squawked, pointing an accusatory finger at Barron, “because you know what his name is? His name is Stinky, and he named his own self.”

The courtroom erupted in laughter; even the judge cracked a smile. “And Barron then knew he was very sorry that he had come into this barbwire,” Kay later reflected.

“He named himself Stinky,” Eloise repeated. Then, looking straight into the judge’s eyes, she said, “Who are
you
? And who do
you
want to be?”

That’s when all hell broke loose. Guffaws . . . pandemonium . . . gavel beating . . . “Order in the court!”

When things finally settled down, a few basic questions managed to get answered seriously and Thompson was sent back to the table for the defense. Horace whispered, “I told you not to . . . but I’m so glad you did it.”

Next up, Polan took the stand but the wind had been sucked right out of his sails. The judge asked a few cursory questions and then simply dismissed the case. “At the same time,” reported
Variety,
“the Court ruled Miss Thompson was entitled to recover $619.14 overpayment by the book’s publisher to Polan.”

Magnanimously, she gave Barron a great big hug on the courthouse steps and then, with Givenchy coattails flapping in the breeze, she sashayed down the street in a blaze of glory.

Though Kay seemed to relish this sort of high drama, deep down she was becoming very weary of her creation. “I don’t know how Eloise managed to grow so big, so fast,” Thompson told a reporter for the Associated Press. “I’d hate to call her a Frankenstein, but she scares me, just the same. I just can’t seem to keep up with Eloise. If I had known all the things she would get me into, I’m not sure that I ever would have had her.” She was only half joking.

To Stephen M. Silverman, Kay candidly confessed her misgivings about all the Eloise sequels. “What is [Eloise] doing in Moscow?” Thompson asked rhetorically. “You know, she has no business there.” When asked what she thought of
Eloise in Paris
and
Eloise at Christmastime,
Thompson grimaced. “Those were just so rotten.
Eloise at Christmastime
was a piece in a magazine . . . it
wasn’t
a book . . . What’s next?
Eloise in Mexico
and then
Eloise in Barbados
and then
Eloise in East Hampton.
This has nothing to do with her . . . She’s
not
the girl with the hat on in Mexico, you know, smoking a cigar.”

Was Kay burned out on her own creation?

In 2008, Liza Minnelli offered a more positive explanation during an interview for
New York
magazine: “[Kay] conquered everything, then moved on. She was the greatest person ever at MGM, then she got tired of that. She did a nightclub act that was the greatest nightclub act that had ever been seen, then
she got tired of that. Then she wrote the best children’s book in the world. She lived her life!”

Kay’s philosophy had always been “Leave ’em wanting more.” And it would be no different with Eloise. Her mind made up, Thompson pulled the plug on Eloise Limited. American Character Doll Company stopped making the Eloise doll and no merchandising contracts were renewed or sought. With no author-supported promotions, and no Eloise portrait or Eloise Room at The Plaza to keep the flame alive, sales of all four books dwindled and Eloise gradually faded from the marketplace, ending the gravy train not only for Thompson, but also for Hilary Knight—who very much wanted to continue the franchise but was powerless to do so on his own. Out of sight and out of mind, Eloise was dead.

From Sinatra to JFK

(1947–62)

Kay’s a Thompson submachine gun.

—Jack O’Brian

A
s passionately as Kay sought the limelight herself, she could not resist the urge to help other stars—a continuation of the work she had been doing at MGM in the 1940s. She was a case study in love-hate ambivalence: a woman who was supportive and jealous of her colleagues in equal measure. As selflessly helpful as she may have seemed on the surface, Kay relished lording over the very stars she envied, feeding a sense of superiority that was as addictive as stardom itself.

Once the Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers act knocked the nightclub circuit on its ear, every star in Hollywood wanted Kay to create the same magic for them, including Judy Holliday, Peter Lawford, the Gabor Sisters (Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda), Lisa Kirk, Julie Wilson, Jimmie Garland (Judy’s sister), Pepper Davis and Tony Reese (a musical-comedy team), and June Havoc (the wife of Kay’s ex-husband, Bill Spier)—just to name a few.

A typical example was Van Johnson, who in April 1953 got a lucrative offer to play the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. There were three basic problems,
however. One: He had no act. Two: He’d never done this sort of thing before. Three: He had debilitating stage fright. His savior was Thompson.