9 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About “Eloise”

5. ELOISE FEATURES SOME UNUSUAL PRODUCT PLACEMENT.

Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight traveled abroad to research and write Eloise in Parisand Eloise in Moscow. Thompson and Knight actually went to Paris twice because, as Knight is quoted in Sam Irvin’s 2010 biography Kay Thompson: From Funny Face to Eloise, “Kay didn’t think we got enough material the first time in Paris.” While the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, wouldn’t pay for a second trip, Thompson managed to exchange four round-trip tickets on a Belgian airline for product placement in Eloise in Paris—consequently, the airline Sabena appears on three pages in the book.

After Paris, Eloise’s next adventure abroad was going to be in England but Thompson, entranced by comedic possibilities of a wealthy child flouncing around a socialist republic, went for Moscow instead, where Eloise danced with the Bolshoi ballet. She and Knight spent four weeks there, feeling monitored as many visitors did at the time. This was represented in Eloise in Moscow by a little drawing of a man in a trenchcoat hidden on every page.

6. THERE ARE SEVERAL CELEBRITY CAMEOS IN THE ELOISE BOOKS.

They start in Eloise in Paris. Thompson and Knight are featured dining at Maxim’s, while Lena Horne and her husband at the time, Lennie Hayton, were drawn at a sidewalk cafe. Eloise’s passport photographer is none other than Richard Avedon. Knight and Thompson visited Christian Dior on their trip and put the famed designer in the book with his assistant, a young Yves Saint Laurent. Eloise at Christmastime features Rita Hayworth.

7. HILARY KNIGHT’S INSPIRATION ELOISE WAS A PAINTING BY HIS MOTHER

Hilary Knight was born to a pair of artist parents, Clayton Knight and Katharine Sturges, and remembers being surrounded by artwork and the creative process at a young age. Eloise was partially inspired by a painting his mother did in the 1930s of a little girl in a black-and-white dress on a pink background. “It’s just a little girl, but it’s the attitude of her,” Knight says. Eloise, and much of Knight’s other illustrations, were also influenced by the work of Reginald Marsh, Ronald Searle, and Ernest Shepard. Shepard drew A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books and you can see the influence of his illustration of Piglet running in Knight’s drawings of Eloise running.