To the One I Love Best, Signed by Ludwig Bemelmans
[Signed] Bemelmans, Ludwig. To the One I Love Best, Episodes from the Life of Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe). First Edition. 1955. Book is in very good condition; dust jacket is in very good minus condition—jacket shows chipping and fraying to the spine ends. Book is signed “Ludwig Bemelmans” on the half title page. The previous owner has neatly written her name on the upper corner of the blank page preceding the title page.
Of the books on Elsie de Wolfe, the grand dame of American decoration, this memoir is the most personal, the most idiosyncratic. Bemelmans became the protégé of de Wolfe and her marriage blanc husband, Sir Charles Mendl during their celebrity-filled Beverly Hills years. They met during World War II when he was writing screenplays for MGM, and the Mendls, refugees from German-occupied France, were waiting out the war from the comfort of California. De Wolfe was then in her eighties. Though her health had begun to wobble, her zest for living remained at full throttle. The book is a series of vignettes in which Bemelmans began to understand the substance (sadness?) beneath Elsie’s professed frivolity.
“Now [America] is a young country, and you can’t expect Louis Fourteenth to come overnight.”
--Elsie de Wolfe