If Lady Mendl didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent her

It is Hollywood, in perpetual summer, and Ludwig Bemelmans has driven past some unusually well-groomed eucalyptus trees for a meeting with Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, interior decorator to the stars. In her salon is a footstool that once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. Lady Mendl’s husband comes into the room and trips over the stool. ‘My God, he’s dead,’ says Lady Mendl.

He isn’t, of course. He’s the classic English booby beloved by Hollywood, so is immortal. Death hangs over this book in a way I’ll return to later, but at this point it’s mainly because Lady Mendl is old, old. 80? 90? No one knows for certain. But she has a force for life which is close to insanity.

Everyone here is mad in one way or another. Bemelmans, a painter and story-teller for Hollywood, is the sanest; but he has his own demons, such as melancholy, which he keeps at bay with fine living – and in Hollywood in the 1940s there is plenty of that around.