Eloise, by that time, had become world-famous and had made the Plaza renowned along with her. Knight painted a portrait of Eloise that hung in the Palm Court (the place where Eloise goes for lunch when it’s raining). That picture became a sort of Mona Lisa for the Plaza. Mothers and daughters came to the Palm Court for tea just to look at it. Then one night during a raucous college frat-boy party the portrait was stolen and never recovered. Knight was brought in to do another painting to replace the missing one when, it is said, Princess Grace of Monaco arrived with her children to see the portrait and was vocally dismayed that she had come all that way to look at an empty wall. The new painting of Eloise, the one I first saw, now hangs on the wall opposite the Palm Court.
While Eloise’s parents are never part of the action of the books, the child does have a nanny and a couple of companions, specifically her pug dog, Weenie, and her turtle, Skipperdee. However, it wasn’t until after Thompson died in 1998 in her early nineties that readers were able to see Eloise come to life again on the screen. The rights to the character and the books passed to Thompson’s sister, Blanche Hurd, who gave consent for a number of TV movies and straight-to-DVD feature-film versions using the Eloise character. In 2003 two TV movies were made based on the character that featured none other than Julie Andrews as Nanny. Three years later an animated series debuted and is a solid seller on DVD. It boasts the voice of Lynn Redgrave as Nanny. At this writing there is a big-screen picture being planned around Eloise that will star Uma Thurman as Nanny. To this day, one of the bestselling items in the Plaza’s gift shop is the postcard version of the Knight portrait of Eloise.
So when people hear my story of living in the Royal York and say, “You’re just like the little girl Eloise,” I not only take that as a supreme compliment but have to admit that, yes, I am Eloise!
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For a number of years I covered the Toronto International Film Festival for Reel to Real, a television show I co-produced and co-hosted in the InterContinental Hotel on Bloor Street West. We secured a suite, turned it into a mini-studio where we interviewed actors and filmmakers, and shot segments for the shows during the festival. I literally moved into the suite for a few weeks amid the camera equipment, lighting gear, and all the other equipment necessary to make a daily television show on location. Year after year I lived for those weeks in the space left over in the suite as people such as Ed Harris, Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Bana, Joaquin Phoenix, Monica Bellucci, and many others filed in and out for interviews and various eccentric adventures. Every day I ate at least once or twice in the main all-day restaurant and came to know the menu as if I’d designed it myself.
During those years, I got quite familiar with InterContinental’s hotels as a brand. Later I visited other hotels in the chain in Montreal and in Cannes, France, but I truly appreciated brand familiarity as supremely important when I was asked to do a magazine story in Seoul, South Korea. The scenario was quite surreal. I was called on the phone by the editor of Dolce Vita, a magazine I’d been contributing to for a few years. The editor asked if I had plans the following week. I told her no, and she asked if I wanted to go to Seoul. Although I’d never been to Asia at that point in my life and Seoul wasn’t somewhere I’d given much thought about visiting, I agreed to go. I flew to Los Angeles (five hours from Toronto), then lay over for a couple of hours before boarding a Korean Air jet for Seoul’s Incheon International Airport (13 hours more on a plane). When I arrived in South Korea’s capital, I was met by a smiling guide/driver who enthusiastically welcomed me, asked how my flight was, and told me I’d be relaxing in my suite at the COEX InterContinental inside an hour.
Seoul is a massive city, and the COEX InterContinental is a huge hotel in the centre of it. When I arrived in the lobby of the COEX, I was surprised that it resembled a combination of the lobbies of the two InterContinental hotels in Toronto (the other InterContinental is on Front Street West). After I got to my suite 22 storeys up, I was immediately struck by the fact that it looked similar to the suite we used to shoot the interviews at the InterContinental in Toronto. So while I was still a bit freaked out about being in this giant Asian city, I was very much at ease because I knew what to anticipate inside the hotel. Outside, in Seoul, I had no idea what to expect, but inside my suite I was relaxed and comfortable and knew where everything was and was familiar with everything, including the scent of the shampoo in the bathroom. The one big difference was that the COEX InterContinental was considerably more technologically advanced than I was used to, including air conditioning and lights that seemed able to sense when I was in the room, switching on and off accordingly.
During my time in Seoul, I crawled around in a tunnel in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea and glanced across the fence into the former at a soldier staring back at me. I made a Korean paper lantern with a group of schoolchildren, toured a palace, lay on a bed that a Korean princess was murdered on, and had lunch in a high-tech restaurant with a glass floor that was about 60 floors above the bustling city between two colossal office towers. But none of those experiences compared to the surreal episodes I had each day at the health club and then at the restaurant, The Brasserie, in the hotel, where I ate breakfast each morning.
To this day, living as I do in the Royal York, I put in an hour’s worth of laps in the swimming pool before breakfast, then commence working. My time in Seoul was no different. I timed it so I could swim for an hour and have breakfast in The Brasserie before meeting my guide for whatever was planned for that day.
The health club at the COEX (called the Cosmopolitan Fitness Club) is state-of-the-art. That first morning when I headed down for a swim I was given a rubber bathing cap by a pretty young Korean female pool attendant. I handed it back because I don’t wear bathing caps. She smiled and returned it to me. I passed it back and told her I didn’t use bathing caps. She then said in broken but serviceable English that wearing a bathing cap was a requirement for swimming in the pool. I apologized and said I would wear the cap if that was the rule.
When I got into the pool, I tried to put the cap on, but it kept sliding up my skull and off. The young Korean woman noticed I was having trouble and entered the pool area to help. She offered to put it on for me, but given my height (six foot four) and hers (not a hair over five feet), I literally had to get on my knees in front of her as she expertly snapped the cap on my head, where it stayed in place for the whole hour. Every subsequent morning I went down for the swim, and she put the cap on for me.
After swimming I went to The Brasserie for breakfast because I wanted to have one meal of the day that was familiar to me, since everything else I would eat during the day would be authentic Korean. The Brasserie looked almost exactly the same as the all-day restaurant at the InterContinental on Bloor Street in Toronto, only much bigger to reflect the size of the hotel. At The Brasserie I could have a bowl of oatmeal and some scrambled eggs and toast and coffee. On my first morning there I made the mistake of allowing the waiter to put kimchi in front of me. He explained that Koreans usually ate kimchi at every meal and that while there were many varieties of kimchi (there is actually a Kimchi Field Museum in Seoul), the kind I was exposed to was made from fermented cabbage stuffed with vegetables and seasonings (perhaps even nitroglycerin!).
I made the mistake that first morning of having oatmeal, then getting some eggs and toast and letting the waiter lay some kimchi on me. It was so spicy and tasted so diabolically vile that once I swallowed it I thought it might actually kill me. I drank about seven glasses of water and had three cups of coffee, but still the raging esophageal wildfire remained and a taste that couldn’t be described in words still lingered. At virtually every other meal I had in Korea, including every breakfast at The Brasserie, I was offered kimchi. Finally, I told my regular Brasserie waiter that if he dared bring kimchi to the table again, I would have no choice but to throw it on the floor. He never brought me more and seemed to go out of his way to not even mention it. Once, he even covered the word kimchi on a special addition to the menu so I wouldn’t have to think about it. That was