She often means well, and her mother neglects her. She is also ill-mannered, ill-tempered and ugly. Looking back in 1957, Publisher's Weekly said: ''As everyone who can read must know, Eloise is an overprivileged 6-year-old, the terror of the Hotel Plaza in New York. In the first two years after ''Eloise'' came out, 150,000 copies were sold. Later she wrote three other books about Eloise, which were also illustrated by Mr. Thompson wrote the book during a three-month break from performing. 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.'' Ms. Thompson began performing in 1954 in a one-woman show at the Plaza. I am 6.' The others joined in the game, each assuming a juvenile identity, and it became a regular rehearsal pastime.'' The routine became a book after Ms. One of her co-workers said, 'Who are you, little girl?' Ms. In a high, childish voice that she had never used before, she made her apology.

At rehearsals of her act with the Williams Brothers, Ms. She also worked as an arranger and songwriter for ''The Ziegfeld Follies'' and other movies, and performed in nightclubs, singing with the Williams Brothers from 1947 to 1953.Īs The New York Herald Tribune reported in 1958, ''Eloise's birth was unexpected.

She became a singer with the Mills Brothers on radio, an arranger and singer with Fred Waring's Band and co-producer of ''Kay Thompson and Company,'' a CBS radio show. ''I was a stage-struck kid,'' she recalled later, ''and I got out of St. Abelman said it was unclear where she died. She was taken from the apartment to Lenox Hill Hospital, but her longtime lawyer Arthur E. She lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her goddaughter, Liza Minnelli. Kay Thompson, an entertainer who became the author of the hugely successful book ''Eloise,'' about a bratty child living at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, died on Thursday.

Eloise books