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. (The book’s blurb says it’s the 1930s, an unusual mistake for this fine publisher.)

There are parties of Petronian extravagance, and the most upscale restaurants on Earth. Because Lady Mendl can see auras and has taken an immediate liking to Ludwig, whom she always calls Stevie, she brings him along to a dizzying number of these. At one point someone sends him a 10lb tin of Oscietra caviar. With Europe in ruins and Russia otherwise occupied, this is something of a rare delicacy. (I looked it up: it would now cost about £5,600, and who knows how much then.) Bemelmans, who has recovered from a car accident whose causes are too ludicrous and complex to list here but are built up to splendidly, places the tin in a box which he seals with wax and, because he has to share a refrigerator, labels it: ‘Sulfa and penicillin, for emergency use.’