Ludwig Bemelmans: When You Lunch with the Emperor

Reviewed by LINDA HERRICK

Ludwig Bemelmans is hardly a household name, yet one of his creations is. Madeline, the classic children's picture book series, was written - and drawn - by the Austrian-born, America-based wit.

Madeline was just one of his many outlets, however. The Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan is also a monument to his diversity, with its recently restored Bemelmans Bar decorated by his whimsical murals of little animals romping in Central Park.

He also wrote magazine columns and many other books, including My War with the United States (quick! call the CIA), designed film sets, and maintained a lifelong interest in the restaurant trade.

But it was Bemelmans' outrageously colourful life that was his true work of art. Tell Them It Was Wonderful, the title of another book and the words he chose for his gravestone, say it all.

Lunch with the Emperor gathers together a collection of semi-autobiographical essays, and it is an enthralling experience to travel through his life with him.

His range of gifts almost seems too much for one man. He combines powerfully evocative writing with simple yet effective little drawings. He makes minute details about place and characters fascinating to the reader. He is extremely funny, and with a finely crafted - but apparently effortless - sentence or two, he has created some of the most beautiful passages about nature I have read.

As if that isn't enough, although he died in 1962, his writing is as contemporary as if he had dashed the book off last week.

Born to a wealthy family in the Austrian Tirols in 1898, young Ludwig worshipped his nanny. Unfortunately, so did his profligate father, who ran off with another lover and left nanny pregnant and his mother in disgrace.

Moving to Bavaria, where mother and son stayed with her father, Bemelmans was hopeless at school and at 16 was apprenticed to his uncle, a hotelier.

Legend has it, although Bemelmans refers to the incident only obliquely, that he shot the hotel's head waiter and was given the choice of the army or America. He chose America and, armed with two pistols to protect himself against the Red Indians, arrived in New York in 1914.

There, the lad embarked on a series of waiting jobs in the grand old hotels, where he dropped dishes, wore mismatching shoes, made sketches of the customers and finally settled at what he calls the Hotel Splendide, but was actually the Ritz-Carlton.

His observations in this volume of the big Jewish weddings, and his characterisations of some true eccentrics are fabulous entertainment, but young Bemelmans was never destined to just be a waiter. As his drawing progressed, he was encouraged to leave his job and take up freelance cartooning in 1929 - just as the Great Depression hit.

To survive, Bemelmans worked his passage - without doing much actual work - on the liners between Europe and the United States. Bemelmans' playground of life had expanded into the international arena, and he later spent a considerable amount of time travelling in South America and Cuba.

In 1935, he married, had a daughter, Barbara, who inspired the Madeline books, "and settled down to life as a bon viveur". What an aspiration. But he nearly came a cropper in Bavaria in 1939, which he writes about most amusingly in the story "Bride of Berchtesgaden".

Berchtesgaden was near Hitler's mountain resort, and Bemelmans was staying at an inn with "Bride", a grizzled mountain guide and drinking companion.

With a visit from Hitler imminent, the hotel was full of soldiers, and the bored Bemelmans and Bride, forced to stay indoors for three days because of rain, got roaring drunk, then went to the dining room where the troops had gathered to listen to the Fuhrer on the radio.

After Hitler's speech, at an hour and a half only slightly longer than the local head of the Nazi Party's address which followed, Bemelmans stuck a cigar butt under his nose, rose to his feet and started screaming "in that hysterical tone" of Herr Hitler. The consequences were rather dire, but luckily more adventures follow ...

I can't speak too highly of When You Lunch With the Emperor. I want everyone to read it, and now I also want to read more by Ludwig Bemelmans, bon viveur. He really does make you feel It Was Wonderful.

Random House, $27.95