Eloise didn’t have to strive like the older women, but she did have to create a sustainable fantasy life.Įloise loves to pretend. All were self-inventing city women in Chanel, Dior, and pinafore. Together, Eloise, Auntie Mame, and Holly Golightly helped sell a powerful collective portrait of making it in New York. Just a few years later in 1958, Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote was released. Patrick Dennis’s novel about his eccentric aunt, Auntie Mame, was published the same year as the first Eloise book, making both Eloise and Mame memorable creatures of their time. A favorite image of Eloise is that of a happy and sleeping little girl slumped in Nanny’s lap at Christmas, with Weenie the dog on her chest and her feet pointed to the burning Yuletide log in the fireplace. She is always close to exhaustion or passing out. She is a six-year-old Mame Dennis with an endless to-do list and a powerful need for sleep. Nanny gives Eloise the attention and caring she needs, along with her close companions - a pet turtle Skipperdee, and Weenie, "a dog that looks like a cat." With the jet-setting parents away, Eloise makes her own fun, energetically living life to the fullest. Her largely absent parents have left her with Nanny, a woman with a liking for beer and broadcasts of fight night. She orders whatever she wants and charges everything, including bottles of champagne. She is at turns delightful and capricious, taunting the hotel staff and summoning room service at will. Invented in a milieu of sophisticated New York, Eloise spoke to post-war fantasies of being young and reckless in the Plaza. Observe.Įloise was originally intended for grownups. The New-York Historical Society has recreated Eloise's bedroom for the exhibit, Eloise at the Museum. Eloise is forever a child but leaning into the pretend world of adults.
The Eloise brand lived on, not quite the same, in fits and starts. By 1960, though, the two collaborators, embodying contrasting sensibilities and personalities, had a falling out. Thompson and Knight had met in the hotel’s Persian Room in 1954, and a dynamic duo was born. 1926), a trained and accomplished illustrator, gave her the look. Author Kay Thompson (1909-1998), a cabaret singer and drama queen with a flair for self-promotion, gave voice to the character of Eloise. Eloise at the Museum is currently on display through October 9, 2017.Įloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-ups (original title, 1955), along with a series of follow-up books, became a phenomenal success in the late 1950s. The most famous resident of New York’s Plaza Hotel, a mischievous little six-year-old girl named Eloise, is the subject of a delightful and curious exhibit at the New-York Historical Society.
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