To the One I Love Best, Signed by Ludwig Bemelmans to Cyril Ritchard
[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 to the spine ends. It is inscribed to the actor whom Bemelmans had evidently discussed adapting this book to the stage, “To Cyril Ritchard, hoping he will be the one to play Sir Charles & direct it, Ludwig Bemelmans, March 1955.”
Of the books on Elsie de Wolfe, grand dame of American decoration, this may be the most personal and the most idiosyncratic. Ludwig Bemelmans was practically adopted by Elsie and her marriage blanc husband, Sir Charles Mendl, during their Hollywood glamour years, when he was writing screenplays for MGM and the Mendls, refugees from occupied France, were waiting out the war in Beverly Hills. De Wolfe was then in her eighties. Her health had begun to falter, but her appetite for pleasure, company, and performance remained gloriously intact. Written as a series of affectionate, sharply observed vignettes, the memoir captures Bemelmans gradually discovering the discipline, loneliness, and resilience beneath Elsie’s celebrated frivolity. A charming and unusually intimate portrait of a woman who made lightness into a very serious art.
“Elsie claims she is psychic and that she can feel people. She says of people that they have an aura about them, or not. Those that have the aura become her immediate friends; you, dear boy, have that aura; so has Coombs, so has Achille, the chauffer. They, of course, have servants’ auras—a small halo. I’m afraid I have none whatever.”
--Sir Charles Mendl