{"id":136106,"date":"2019-05-06T09:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-05-06T13:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136106"},"modified":"2019-05-03T16:55:40","modified_gmt":"2019-05-03T20:55:40","slug":"re-covered-to-the-one-i-love-the-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/06\/re-covered-to-the-one-i-love-the-best\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: To the One I Love the Best"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her monthly column<\/em>\u00a0Re-Covered<\/a>, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cShe weighed about ninety pounds without her jewels, and when I met her she was ninety years old.\u201d So Ludwig Bemelmans\u2019s introduces Lady Mendl, Elsie de Wolfe in his 1955 memoir To the One I Love the Best<\/em>. De Wolfe seems almost too eccentric to be true, a \u201cwonderful living objet d\u2019art,\u201d her \u201ccrepy throat\u201d festooned with jewels and her \u201carthritic hands\u201d encased in her trademark spotless white gloves. Bemelmans\u2014a celebrated illustrator and writer\u2014first encountered de Wolfe in Los Angeles in 1945, a city in which they\u2019re each more unmoored than most. He\u2019d been working for MGM but the \u201celegant world of Hollywood\u201d had left him feeling jaded, longing to take to the road as an \u201citinerant painter,\u201d while de Wolfe had been living out the war in Beverley Hills after having fled her beloved Villa Trianon in France.<\/p>\n

Bemelmans is best known today either as an illustrator\u2014some readers will undoubtedly be familiar with Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, decorated with murals he painted in the forties, or recognize his work from vintage New Yorker <\/em>covers\u2014or as the author of the Madeline<\/em> books, the first of which was published in 1939 and has sold over 14 million copies to date. Less well known, however, is the fact that he was actually the author of over forty books, and although he began his writing life by penning volumes for children in the mid-\u201830s, he went on to also write books for adult readers, too, many of which are now out of print, including To the One I Love the Best<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

De Wolfe\u2019s fascinating life story and her feted career have made her an appealing subject for biographers and historians, but the intimacy of Bemelmans\u2019s book\u2014it\u2019s an anecdotal account of his and de Wolfe\u2019s friendship, not a cradle-to-grave story of her life\u2014sets it apart from the rest. There\u2019s something especially poignant about the fact that it\u2019s a portrait of de Wolfe at the very end of her dazzling life\u2014she died in 1950, only five years after they met. How rarely is any aging woman\u2014regardless of how famous or pioneering she was during her heyday\u2014allowed to be the subject of such sincere and heartfelt adoration?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Born in New York City but educated in Scotland, de Wolfe was presented at court to Queen Victoria. She then shocked polite New York society by embarking on a career on the stage. She would take Broadway by storm in the 1890s, but her first love was interior design. In 1887, she and Elisabeth \u201cBessie\u201d Marbury\u2014one of the first female theater agents and Broadway producers, and de Wolfe\u2019s partner for over thirty-five years\u2014took a house together in Greenwich Village. The careful decoration of that home earned de Wolfe a reputation among her friends, and they encouraged her to turn her \u201cnatural gift for colour and arrangement\u201d\u2014as she recalls one describing it in her memoir After All <\/em>(1935)\u2014into a career. \u201cInterior design as a profession was invented by Elsie de Wolfe,\u201d wrote Dana Goodyear in The New Yorker<\/em>. \u201cShe popularized black-and-white, and created a vogue for Louis XVI chairs and leopard print.\u201d Or, as de Wolfe describes it to Bemelmans: \u201cI rescued the American house and made it liveable.\u201d One of her earliest commissions was the Colony Club, the first women-only private social club in New York City. The opening \u201cwas something more than a mere society event,\u201d De Wolfe notes in After All<\/em>: \u201cIt was the overture of one of the acts of the great drama of women\u2019s enfranchisement.\u201d After this, the work came thick and fast, and she quickly became famous for tearing down the heavy velvet drapes and antimacassars of Victorian decor. Henry Clay Frick hired her to decorate the second floor of the opulent mansion he was building on the Upper East Side, and under de Wolfe\u2019s direction, he spent, in the space of a single half hour, an estimated three million dollars on pieces from Sir Richard Wallace\u2019s eighteenth-century collection. De Wolfe\u2019s commission was ten percent, enough to make her an extremely wealthy woman. Both a canny businesswoman and a renowned society hostess\u2014the parties she and Marbury threw, in New York and at their second home in Versailles, were legendary\u2014de Wolfe was the first woman to tint her hair blue, and an advocate for dieting and yoga (her party trick was standing on her head). She was also awarded France\u2019s Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour for her hospital relief work during the First World War, and she shocked everyone, including her closet friends, by suddenly marrying Sir Charles Mendl, the press attach\u00e9 at the British Embassy in Paris, when she was sixty. Diana Vreeland perhaps put it best when she described de Wolfe as \u201cone of the independent swingers\u201d of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t paint, I can\u2019t write, I can\u2019t sing, but I can decorate and run a house, and light it, and heat it, and have it like a living thing, and so right that it will be the envy of the world, the standard of perfect hospitality,\u201d de Wolfe declares in To the One I Love the Best<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As far as de Wolfe was concerned, the pinnacle of style was her Villa Trianon in Versailles, which she had all but finished sumptuously redecorating when war broke out. \u201cAfter All,\u201d the name of her Beverley Hills home with its \u201cbaroque\u201d interior, could only ever be second best. \u201cSpeaking of the villa,\u201d she tells Bemelmans when he first visits After All, \u201conly yesterday a little souvenir arrived from there, a little part of its glory\u2014a footstool that once belonged to Pompadour.\u201d She then asks her guest to move the piece into a patch of sunlight in the center of the room so they can \u201cproperly appreciate it.\u201d A few minutes later, Sir Charles\u2014the exemplary British gentleman with his \u201cColonel Blimp moustache\u201d and \u201cjolly face that was like a ripe plum lying a little on its side\u201d\u2014enters the room and promptly falls over it:<\/p>\n

\u201cMy God, he\u2019s dead,\u201d said Lady Mendl.<\/p>\n

\u201cNonsense,\u201d answered Sir Charles. \u201cI\u2019m not dead. Having played polo all my life, I simply know how to fall. When one falls one remains absolutely still for a minute. Now don\u2019t anyone bother helping me up.\u201d<\/p>\n

He remained quiet for what seemed a long time.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you resting, dear?\u201d asked Lady Mendl.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, I\u2019m resting,\u201d said Sir Charles.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, don\u2019t overdo it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sir Charles was watching the dial on his wristwatch. At the end of a minute he got up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

De Wolfe was idiosyncratic, but in Bemelmans\u2019s adroit but tender hands the entertainingly quirky Sir Charles\u2014with his predilection for dining out with an endless stream of \u201cravishing creatures,\u201d a veritable who\u2019s-who of Hollywood\u2019s beautiful young talent, from Joan Fontaine to Olivia de Havilland\u2014certainly gives his wife a run for her money. Scenes like this one also prove Bemelmans something of a comic genius. Indeed, as he reminds de Wolfe, \u201chumour is the most serious form of writing.\u201d While de Wolfe takes Bemelmans under her wing\u2014she insists from their first meeting on calling him \u201cStevie\u201d ( \u201cprobably,\u201d Bemelmans conjectures, \u201cbecause a war was going on with Germany and she didn\u2019t like the Teutonic \u2018Ludwig,\u2019 \u201d), and refers to herself as \u201cMother.\u201d Bemelmans and Sir Charles establish a warm companionship, brothers-in-arms as victims of de Wolfe\u2019s whimsies.<\/p>\n

As Bemelmans depicts it, the unorthodox relationship between husband and wife is equal parts amusing and touching. De Wolfe has a meter installed in Sir Charles\u2019s rooms so she can bill him for the electricity he uses, but days later, on his birthday, she presents him with a pair of cufflinks that have clearly cost her several thousand dollars. Sir Charles is often put out, but he\u2019s never anything but gracious in defeat. \u201cShe is a remarkable woman,\u201d he tells Bemelmans, \u201cutterly selfish and at the same time irresponsibly generous. She is incapable of adjustment to the life of our day. She is perhaps the incarnation of someone\u2014I don\u2019t know, however, of whom, for no one like her has ever lived or will come after her.\u201d This, of course, is what makes de Wolfe such an enchanting subject, and Bemelmans knows it.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The charm of To the One I Love the Best <\/em>lies in the peerless combination of author and subject. Bemelmans and de Wolfe are kindred spirits; he the famed bon vivant\u2014\u201ca lover of life and a professor of happiness\u201d as he describes himself at the very beginning of the book\u2014and she a woman who, in Vreeland\u2019s words, \u201clived life to the hilt \u2026 loved life, and people, and fun and novelty.\u201d Bemelmans was an immigrant\u2014he had arrived in New York City when he was only sixteen years old, and spent the best part of the next two decades working in the hotel industry while honing his skills as an illustrator\u2014while de Wolfe was a woman in a man\u2019s world, but they both went on to become self-made success stories, living proof of the American dream.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re also united in the affinity they each feel for France, she with her beloved Versailles and Bemelmans with Paris. Although born in the South Tyrol in 1898 (then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Bemelmans spent his early years in the charge of a French governess who showed him picture postcards of Paris and taught him French. His life-long love affair with the City of Light can be traced back to these early memories, through his Madeline <\/em>books\u2014the first of which was written after he, his wife, and daughter returned from a trip to Europe in 1938\u2014and culminating in the period, during the early fifties, when he finally made the French capital his home.<\/p>\n

To the One I Love the Best<\/em> reads like a love letter to the country both author and subject adore. In the first part, \u201cElsie at Home,\u201d de Wolfe is all but counting down the days to her return to Versailles; then in the second, \u201cElsie Abroad,\u201d Bemelmans\u2014who\u2019s on assignment for Holiday <\/em>magazine, documenting the aftermath of the war\u2014Sir Charles, and de Wolfe (complete with their entourage) sail from New York to Le Havre. As the party passes through Paris, Bemelmans\u2019s happiness at being back in his \u201cmost beautiful, beloved of all cities\u201d is tempered by the sight of its scars: \u201cEverywhere on walls of houses small bouquets were fastened, and next to them were notices that here so-and-so had fallen defending the street during the last days. Most of the fallen were young people.\u201d This flash of death and destruction is all the more powerful because it sits in stark contrast to the frivolity of the book\u2019s first half. Upon arriving at the Villa Trianon, de Wolfe is upset by the disarray that awaits her\u2014it was requisitioned first by the Germans, then the Americans\u2014but she rallies magnificently, ordering everybody around as she oversees the clean-up and restoration. Observing de Wolfe among the glitz and glamour of Hollywood is one thing\u2014she\u2019s certainly a character, but she\u2019s hardly the only one in Beverley Hills\u2014but seeing her among the debris of postwar Europe is something else. She descends on her beloved home and her orphans\u2014yes, as insane as it sounds, she\u2019s also managed to house an orphanage in the villa in her absence\u2014like a bejeweled fairy godmother, but she\u2019s also an increasingly frail old woman who wants to recreate a past that\u2019s long gone, her obsession with beautiful objects eclipsing all else.<\/p>\n

At the end of \u201cElsie At Home,\u201d Bemelmans describes a trip he takes to Hearst Castle, the fabled, no-expense-spared home of publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst, which he built on his estate overlooking the Pacific and for which he imported shiploads of priceless objet d\u2019art. It allows Bemelmans a moment of quiet reflection among what\u2019s thus far been a series of quick-witted, immensely entertaining vignettes of de Wolfe in action\u2014Bemelmans writes like he paints, in animated, colorful scenes. \u201cI had met in Hearst the most lonesome man I have ever known,\u201d the author realizes on the long drive back to Los Angeles, \u201ca man of vast intelligence, of ceaseless effort, and all he had done was to make of himself a scaffold in which a metronome ticked time away. Like Elsie, he had fled to objects. The revelation is that you cannot protect yourself, for you become desolate as the prairie. You must give yourself, you must take a chance on being hurt; you must take the chance to suffer from love, for the other is nil. In this visit Elsie was mirrored: the metronome ticked away inside a magnificent puppet. As lonely as Hearst.\u201d Bemelmans revels in de Wolfe\u2019s frivolousness, but he also sees the melancholy that lies beneath. To the One I Love the Best <\/em>shows us all of de Wolfe, and the reader can\u2019t help but become enamored with her, too.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily, the<\/em> Financial Times,<\/em> The New York Times Book Review,<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ludwig Bemelmans is best known today as an illustrator or as the author of the Madeleine books, but his love letter to his best friend Elsie de Wolfe is profoundly charming. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46439],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-re-covered"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRe-Covered: To the One I Love the Best by Lucy Scholes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 6, 2019 \u2013 Ludwig Bemelmans is best known today as an illustrator or as the author of the Madeleine books, but his love letter to his best friend Elsie de Wolfe is profoundly charming.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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