Young Man with Guitar, Lower Topanga Canyon

Sacred to the Chumash Indians, Lower Topanga was once owned by William Randolph Hearst who rented out cottages on the beach to his and Marion Davies' friends [Source].  It was to one of these beach shacks (for $40.00 a month) that Ludwig Bemelmans moved from the Beverly Hills Hotel where the studio had put him up while he wrote anti-Nazi films.  It was the end of the war and he was planning on getting away to do some painting.  As he was leaving the hotel he received a message from a Miss West, secretary to Lady Mendl, inviting him to cocktails.

"I accepted this one invitation," he writes in To the One I Love the Best (New York: The Viking Press, 1955).  "I'm very glad I did, for since I met her, when I sit and look through the blue haze of my cigar, there always appears the one creature who gave me inspiration, who fought the phantoms, who, day in and out, set me an example that made beautiful sense.  She weighed about ninety pounds without her jewels, and when I met her she was ninety years old."

Mr. Bemelmans was referring of course to Lady Charles Mendl, otherwise known as Elsie de Wolfe.

"In Hollywood, one can find almost anything," he continues, recalling the first of many visits he would make to Elsie de Wolfe's home, "but I did not expect to ... come across a little palace exactly like the lovely silver and blue Amalienburg that stands in the park of Nymphenburg outside Munich.  Nor hope to find therein, reflected in faded mirrors, the fabulous creature who with discipline unmatched defied the eternal fears."

The "fishing village" where Bemelmans rented his beach cabin is long gone, (as too is Marion Davies' beach mansion further down the coast); for many years the Los Angeles Athletic Club owned the land on the other side of the Pacific Coast Highway where an informal community of surfers and artists and hippies lived, until the land was sold to the California State Parks in 2001.  The last of the remaining residents were evicted in 2006 when the area was bulldozed in what was said to be an effort to restore the landscape to its natural state. 

I have written of Ludwig Bemelmans here and of Elsie de Wolfe here and elsewhere so there is no need to repeat their importance as far as turning points in 1904 are concerned.  But the other day, as I was returning from my visit to Topanga and gazing out over the Pacific as I turned out of the Canyon and onto the PCH, I half-imagined Ludwig and Lady Mendl here -- her faithful attendant and chauffeur Achille standing by her car at a respectful distance, waiting.  No, not walking on the beach -- I can't picture Elsie going very far in the sand in heels -- but the two of them poised on the bluff above the beach, silhouetted against the haze of water and sky, artist and muse, both fabulous in their own fashion, sublime and interesting, in this sacred place.