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FREEKAY THOMPSONS ELOISE: A BOOK FOR PRECOCIOUS GROWN-UPS EBOOK Kay Thompson,Hilary Knight | 65 pages | 06 Mar 2000 | Prentice Hall (a Pearson Education Company) | 9780671223502 | English | Hemel Hempstead, United Kingdom Eloise ( book) - Wikipedia Kay Thompson was born in St. Louis, Missouri inthe daughter of a local jeweler. She showed early promise as a pianist; she started to play the piano when she was four, and at sixteen played Franz Liszt with the St. Louis Symphony. Shortly afterward, she appeared as featured vocalist with a local dance band. Thompson went to California inwhen she was seventeen. Her first job was as a diving instructor, but she soon found a job on the radio as a vocalist with Kay Thompsons Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups Mills Brothers. Later she joined Fred Waring's band in New York as a singer and arranger. She decided to produce her own radio show, which was aired over the CBS network under the name Kay Thompson and Company. The show was not as big a success as Thompson had hoped and so she signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios as an arranger and composer. She remained with the studio for four years until she created her own night club routine. The show opened at Ciro's night club in and was successful enough to be taken on the road. Thompson kept the act going until Eloise's birth was unexpected. Thompson prized punctuality, but one day she was late to rehearsals with the Mills Brothers. In a high, childish voice, she made her apology. One of her co-workers said, 'Who are you, little girl? The routine became a book after Thompson began performing in in a one-woman show at the Plaza. While she was appearing in the hotel's Persian Room, she was introduced to an artist, Hilary Knight, and he became the illustrator of Eloise, which was subtitled A Book for Precocious Grown Ups. Thompson wrote the book during a three-month break from performing. Later she wrote three other books about Eloise, which were also illustrated by Knight. In the first two years after Eloise came out,copies were sold. According to records beginning in, copies of "Eloise" have been sold in the United States since then. Thompson also founded Eloise Ltd. In later years, Ms. Thompson acted in movies, including "Funny Face," and on television. Kay Thompson died in July of Hilary Knight was born on November 1, He is the son of artist-writers Clayton Knight and Katherine Sturges. He was born in Hempstead, Long Island and grew up in the town of Roslyn. When Kay Thompsons Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups was six the family moved to Manhattan where he has lived ever since. He is the illustrator of over fifty books, nine of which he also wrote. He is best known as the illustrator of Kay Thompson's Eloise and others in the Eloise series. He lives in an apartment in midtown Manhattan which also serves as his studio and library. Eloise en Navidad. Kay Thompson. Eloise prepara el dia de Navida con su inseparable Nanny, la ninera que vive con ella en el Hotel Plaza, su perro Chimichurri y su tortuga. El dia antes de Navidad, Eloise y Nanny despliegan una gran actividad. Todos son Kay Thompsons Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups, hay que Kay Thompsons Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups las guirnaldas, adornar el arbol, caramelizar manzanas, colocar velas, envolver los regalos y no olvidarse de nadie. Todo el mundo en el hotel, por si no lo sabian, acaban enterandose que es Navidad. Eloise en Navidad - Kay Thompson - Google книги Sometime in the early 's, a young artist and illustrator slid a drawing of two little girls -- a scruffy little ruffian carrying a club and a fluffy one with an enormous pink hair bow -- under the door of his neighbor, a fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar. It was a game between them, a joke. The neighbor introduced the illustrator, Hilary Knight, to her great and glamorous friend Kay Thompson, who lived at the Plaza Hotel and had had a long, varied career that included being Judy Garland's vocal coach and inventing her own wildly successful nightclub act. Thompson, also as a game, for years had been improvising a 6-year-old alter ego she called Eloise to amuse her celebrated friends on movie sets and at parties; Eloise offered hilarious advice over the phone as well. Knight's little girls, it seemed to the neighbor, were kindred spirits to Thompson's alter ego. Thompson, who was in her 40's, was grand, given to leopard prints and trailing head scarves; Knight, then in his late 20's, was unassuming, the child of New York artists, and just at the start of his career. They hit it off right away. In November they produced ''Kay Thompson's Eloise,'' which became one of the best-selling children's books of all time. The three sequels that followed in quick succession -- Eloise in Paris''''Eloise at Christmastime'' and ''Eloise in Moscow'' Kay Thompsons Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups also hits, with a tsunami of marketing behind them, as well as Eloise fashion lines and toys and an enduring identity for the Plaza, which is now an official literary landmark. Then something happened. In a Garbo-esque gesture, Eloise suddenly and without explanation quit the stage. Though Knight and Thompson worked for four years on ''Eloise Takes a Bawth,'' Thompson wouldn't allow it to be published and pulled all three sequels from print as well, claiming that only the original had been worthy of publication. It continued to sell strongly, but it wasn't until after Thompson's death in that the sequels were again published. And now, at last, ''Eloise Takes a Bawth'' will have its long-delayed opening. With beautiful illustrations by Knight, and the hundreds of extant manuscript pages having been pieced together by the playwright Mart Crowley, author of ''The Boys in the Band'' and a longtime friend of Thompson's, the book will finally appear at the end of this month. Nearly 40 years after her retreat, this legendarily imaginative, eccentric 6-year-old star is as blithe and rambunctious as ever, a delightful ruffian in a school uniform and a hair bow. She hasn't changed. But have we? The first thing that anyone must understand about the Eloise books is that Thompson never thought she was writing them for children. Once, in a bookstore, upon discovering her titles sequestered with the kids' books, she gathered up as many copies as she could carry and marched them to a table in the adult section. She probably needn't have bothered, as adults found Eloise as fascinating as children did. Eloise -- pre-Beat, pre-hippie, pre-civil rights, pre- Stonewall, pre-Vietnam, pre-women's liberation -- doesn't have a political vocabulary of rebellion. She simply is rebellion, in the form of a tiny cyclone of charm. Living more or less by herself at the Plaza Hotel, in the company of her highly indulgent Nanny; her dog, Weenie; her dear, somewhat accident-prone doll, Saylor; and her turtle, Skipperdee, who wears sneakers and dines on raisins, Eloise spends her time doing whatever it is she would most like to do at the moment. She orders room service ''one roast-beef bone, one raisin and seven spoons to the top floor and charge it please''talks on the phone, lunches at the Palm Court, wears toe shoes on her ears, pours water down the mail chute and generally roams around the Plaza wreaking various kinds of havoc. Though gentle at heart, Eloise submits to no authority whatsoever. She is free with language, given to the invention of adjectives like ''everly'' and verbs like ''sklathe'' and ''skidder'' and ''slomp'' as in ''I slomp my skates if I want to make a really loud and terrible racket''. Her mother, who is never present, sends money and plane tickets. Eloise travels the world, speaks French, is dressed by Dior. She is a small sophisticate, freer and more cosmopolitan than not only the children to whom her story was being read but also most of their parents. She's the id. While it's true that Eloise has an id-like grandeur, a rampant sense of pleasure and disregard for any sorts of rules, the vehicle of her freedom hails from the more civilized realm of the ego: it is her precocity. This sophistication -- the French, the room service, the Plaza itself -- functioned for the generation to whom she was first read much as the rhetoric of liberation would in the 60's: as the way out of conformity. Because she is treated like a little adult, she can skidder wherever she wants. Thompson -- who partied with Garland and Lena Horne, who played a Diana Vreeland-esque fashion editor in the movie ''Funny Face'' and with whom Noel Coward and Blake Edwards both wanted to work although she declined -- was from Kay Thompsons Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups generation for whom the ''sophisticated'' life was life outside the box and far from one's dreary hometown. Eloise, whose story is offered ''for Precocious Grown-Ups,'' is a miniature emissary from a glittering metropolis where all manner of unimaginably madcap things go on day and night and no one gives a damn. You are 6, and the world is your oyster, sent up on a bed of ice, with Champagne. The sentimental idea of children's ''innocence'' was, he showed, a dubious construction at best; families, far from sustaining the fabric of civilization, in fact ''stifled.

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