Please note that the following is a digitized version of a selected article from White House History Quarterly, Issue 63, originally released in print form in 2021. Single print copies of the full issue can be purchased online at Shop.WhiteHouseHistory.org No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All photographs contained in this journal unless otherwise noted are copyrighted by the White House Historical Association and may not be reproduced without permission. Requests for reprint permissions should be directed to rights@whha.org. Contact books@whha.org for more information. © 2021 White House Historical Association. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions.
OPPOSITE: GET TY IMAGES / RIGHT: COP YRIGHT JOHN BEMELMANS MARCIANO, VIKING CHILDREN ’S BOOKS, PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
MADELINE’S Fifty-Year Journey To the White House The Friendship Between First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Ludwig Bemelmans That Led to a White House Book co urt ney speckm an n
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Île d’Yeu, where Bemelmans collided with the only motor vehicle on the island while riding his bicycle and ended up in the hospital. In the bed next to his was a young girl who had had her appendix removed, and she became the fictional Madeline. Her character is just seven, more adventurous than the other girls in the convent school, and the only one with red hair. In the story, she gets sick and Miss Clavel, who takes care of the girls, calls the doctor. Madeline is rushed to the hospital, where she has her appendix taken out. When Miss Clavel takes the girls to visit her and they see all the toys and candy she has been given to cheer her up, then they want to have their appendixes removed, too. Bemelmans earned a Caldecott Honor for Madeline, and the first of its sequels, Madeline’s Rescue, won the Caldecott Medal in 1954. Four more Madeline books followed—Madeline and the Bad Hat (1956), Madeline’s Christmas (1956), Madeline and the Gypsies (1959), and Madeline in London (1961). Each begins with the same rhyme—“In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines”— and several
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Caroline Kennedy enjoys Madeline, by Ludwig Bemelmans, with her parents, John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy, 1960 (left). Fifty years in the making, Madeline Visits the White House, by Bemelmans’s grandson John Bemelmans Marciano (right), was released in 2011.
D E G L O Y E R L I B R A R Y, S O U T H E R N M E T H O D I S T U N I V E R S I T Y
during an april 2013 visit to an elementary school in seattle, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy, listened to students recite poetry and answered their questions. A third grader, who was reading a biography of President Kennedy, held up a photograph of young Caroline reading a book titled Madeline with her parents. “Do you remember this book?” he asked excitedly. “Let’s see,” said Schlossberg. “Oh, Madeline! That’s fun, right? Twelve little girls in two straight lines, the smallest one was Madeline.”1 The memorable children’s book about Madeline, a spirited and adventurous schoolgirl who pooh-poohed the tiger at the zoo, has captivated the hearts of children and adults alike since it was first published in 1939. Madeline became an instant success and is still famous today. Ludwig Bemelmans, the author and illustrator, got the idea for the book when he took his wife, Mimi (whose real name was Madeleine), and their twoand-a-half-year-old daughter, Barbara, on a trip to France. They first traveled to Paris and then to the
BRUCE WHITE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICA L ASS OCIATION
opposite and above
Madeline was Ludwig Bemelmans’s legacy, and the series soon led to many commercial and private commissions including the cover of the 1955 Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog, and the iconic murals in the Carlyle Hotel’s Bemelmans Bar. He included Madeline and the girls in two straight lines in the famous murals.
end with “That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.” The books were beloved, selling tens of millions of copies and launching adaptations in films, a television series, toys, and video games. The Madeline series has been continued by Bemelmans’s grandson, John Bemelmans Marciano.
LUDWIG BEMELMANS, AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR Ludwig Bemelmans was born in Meran, Austria (now Merano, Italy), on April 27, 1898, and enjoyed an early childhood in the mountains of Gmunden. He moved to Regensburg, Germany, with his mother at the age of six, shortly after his father abandoned the family. When he was a teenager, Bemelmans immigrated to the United States. John Bemelmans Marciano, Bemelmans’s grandson, believes that his grandfather did not speak any language without an accent: “I don’t know that he really had a first language. He spoke French, basically until he was 5, then he moved to Germany until about 13 or 14. And then he moved to America.
By the time he was 18, I think he had all three of those languages in his head.”2 Bemelmans joined the U.S. Army during World War I and permanently settled in New York City, where he worked at the Ritz-Carlton for fifteen years and began a long career as an artist and writer. He wrote novels, short stories, humorous articles, and a movie. He drew comic strips, illustrated articles, created dozens of magazine covers, and exhibited oil paintings. Among all his extensive work, Bemelmans knew that Madeline would be his legacy. When in 1948 he painted murals in the bar at the Carlyle Hotel in exchange for free accommodations for eighteen months, he included Madeline, Miss Clavel, and the girls in two straight lines, and the bar was named for him. In 1953, he decorated the playroom of Aristotle Onassis’s yacht with fifteen paintings dedicated to Madeline. In 1955, Stanley Marcus invited Bemelmans to create a Madeline cover for the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalog, called “Madeline’s Christmas in Texas.”
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A FRIENDSHIP WITH THE FIRST LADY Jacqueline Kennedy enjoyed reading the Madeline stories with Caroline, and she wrote to Bemelmans to let him know how much the books meant to her family. From this they began a correspondence and developed a friendship. In one letter, Mrs. Kennedy describes Caroline wanting to jump off the Key Bridge, like Madeline did in Madeline’s Rescue, as “the quickest way of obtaining notoriety and a dog and 12 puppies. I hope I shan’t have to sue you for your evil influence at some future date.”3 In early 1961 Bemelmans worried over Madeline in London, which was published later that year. He struggled with the story and feared that the illustrations “resembled whiskey ads, traveling posters, or ‘Come visit England’ throw aways.”4 Although the book took Bemelmans ten years to prepare, he felt rushed. In his notes from May 1961, he describes additional pressure from Mrs. Kennedy:
Bemelmans had met the Radziwills, Mrs. Kennedy’s sister and brother-in-law, at a dinner at the White House on March 15, 1961. So after Madeline in London was published, Bemelmans and Mrs. Kennedy exchanged ideas for a collaboration that would bring Madeline to the White House. Bemelmans proposed calling the book “Madeline Visits Caroline” and that the text be written by Mrs. Kennedy herself. In November 1961, Bemelmans wrote the following note to the first lady: Yes we have to do it—but it will have to be the best of the lot. For me, Madeline is therapy in the dark hours when the black cosmic cloud sinks down—I make up the verses. Much must happen that is amusing at the White House—I’ve been thinking of a white mouse—but there are millions of things—and
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the embarrassment of choice will be the biggest problem—pictorially there is all that we need. The next Madeline is Madeline and the Magician which is finished in my head—so there is lots of time.6 Mrs. Kennedy invited Bemelmans to the White House again while they were discussing ideas for the book. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 1998, his wife Mimi said that he had an opportunity to spend a night in the Lincoln Bedroom.7 He also received a coveted invitation to the Nobel Prize Winners dinner at the White House on April 29, 1962, when President Kennedy famously remarked: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”8 Unfortunately, Bemelmans was unable to accept the invitation and sent an amusing reply to Mrs. Kennedy’s social secretary, Letitia Baldrige,
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Bemelmans and Mrs. Kennedy exchanged many letters detailing their ideas for a White House book. In 1961 (above) Bemelmans wrote of his white mouse idea. In 1962 he sent an illustrated letter to express his regrets that he could not accept an invitation to the Kennedys’ Nobel Prize Winners dinner. GETTY IMAGES
The mess that Madeline in London is in, is due to the First Lady—I wanted to do Madeline and the Magician first, for that is ready, all the rhymes fit, the pictures are plotted, it is a good watch that runs—she said, “Oh do Madeline in London first, Caroline loves that story.” Why? Because she has two cousins in London, the children of the Radziwills. So I said, “Yes I’ll do it, if you help me with Madeline in Washington,” which is something I will most probably never do. So Jackie is happy, I’m not.5
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J O H N F. K E N N E D Y P R E S I D E N T I A L L I B R A R Y A N D M U S E U M
saying that he was desolate that he could not attend and to “please thank the President and Madame for me and give them my apologies.”9 An April 5, 1962, letter to Mrs. Kennedy begins: “Hello Jacqueline! Are you thinking? About the story? I am.”10 One idea they considered was “The White Mouse in the White House.” The mouse “lived there because nobody could see it,” he suggested in a typed outline that was filled with ideas. “So please start rhyming, work on it while I’m gone. When we have a story, or when we have none. Then I’ll get a place somewhere in Washington, a studio to walk around, and start doing the pictures and the story will float down, it always does, sometimes the very last minute. The basic work on it we could do in the autumn.”11 Sadly, Bemelmans did not have the “lots of time” he alluded to in the letter from the previous November. He was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer and passed away on October 1, 1962, before any work on the White House book had begun and before the Madeline and the Magician book could be finished. In a letter of condolence to Bemelmans’s wife, Mrs. Kennedy wrote:
UNFINISHED PROJECTS COMPLETED
The story of Madeline and the Magician was never published. The Magician character had been inspired by Bemelmans’s visit to North Africa in 1951 and showed up as Mustapha in Madeline’s Christmas, which was published in McCall’s magazine in 1956. As a way to gauge the public’s reaction, Bemelmans often published his stories first as magazine pieces. He planned to make extensive changes to Madeline’s Christmas and rename it Madeline and the Magician, but it was not completed before his death. Madeline’s Christmas was published as a book in 1985, based on the original McCall’s version, with illustrations by Jodie Wheeler. In the original version of the story, Madeline helps Mustapha who then provides the girls with
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magic rugs that take them home to surprise their parents for Christmas. In the revised version that Bemelmans was working on before his death, Miss Clavel sends the Magician away at the end of the story and he disappears; only his fez remains. While the girls are mourning Mustapha, Miss Clavel enters their room with a cat who is wearing a fez, suggesting that the Magician will be able to stay with the girls forever. One of the last pictures Bemelmans ever drew was a sketch for the last page of the book that shows Mustapha the cat surrounded by the girls. Marciano describes this as one of his favorite drawings by his grandfather and interprets it as suggesting that his grandfather is actually the magician who will stay with Madeline and the girls forever. “He knew that he was gravely ill when he penned those drawings and their accompanying rhymes,” states Marciano. “This makes the final events of the book—the Magician’s apparent death, his return, and his yearning to stay with the girls unnoticed—seem too fitting, too poetic to be mere chance.”13 Marciano never had an opportunity to meet his grandfather. but he has a deep appreciation of his family legacy. At his grandmother’s house, he discovered giant metal flat files full of unpublished work, sketches, paintings, and more, most of which
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Artist Ludwig Bemelmans, seen at work in 1941, died of cancer at age 64 in 1962 before completing the Madeline book he had planned with Mrs. Kennedy.
SHUTTERSTOCK
That is how I got to know him—One stormy afternoon when I was alone in Hyannis with my daughter—and all we did was stay inside and read Madeline—I wrote him a letter saying how much they meant—and he sent me back a sketch of Madeline—inscribed “for Jacqueline’s baby” which hangs in Caroline’s room.12
BARACK OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM /YOUTUBE
John Bemelmans Marciano never met his grandfather but came to appreciate his work and now carries on the Madeline series. In 2011 he read Madeline at the White House to children on the South Lawn during the White House Easter Egg Roll.
had never been seen by the public. In 1999, the sixtieth anniversary of Madeline, Marciano published a biography about his grandfather, Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator, that weaves his personal life story with his work. In the introduction, Marciano writes: “No conventional biography could capture what my grandfather was as a writer and artist. Only his work can do that. So I have gone through all of it, over forty published books and hundreds of magazine pieces, and put into this book what I feel best represents the many different facets of his creative life.”14 Writing his grandfather’s biography gave Marciano an intimate familiarity with his drawings, materials, and technique and inspired him to continue Madeline’s legacy by completing some of the work that his grandfather had started. That same year, Marciano also published Madeline in America and Other Holiday Tales, based on three unpublished manuscripts written by Bemelmans, together with sketches. The first story, “Madeline in America,” was based on Bemelmans’s original Neiman-Marcus Christmas booklet “Madeline’s Christmas in Texas.” For the other stories, he completed the illustrations in his grandfather’s style. Marciano then continued the Madeline stories with
his own original content, publishing Madeline Says Merci: The Always Be Polite Book (2001), Madeline Loves Animals (2005), and Madeline and the Cats of Rome (2008). Marciano’s biography of his grandfather includes a brief section called “Dear First Lady,” containing reproductions of several letters that Bemelmans sent to Mrs. Kennedy. After mentioning the concept for a Madeline at the White House book to his publisher, Marciano decided to make it his own. “My publisher thought it’d be such a great thing to bring Madeline to Washington, and it ties so many things together. My grandfather immigrated to the United States when he was 15, served in the army in World War I and loved Europe. But he also loved this country—he’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and loved the pageantry of Washington.”15 Marciano decided to combine elements of his grandfather’s unpublished material from the book about Madeline and the Magician with the ideas about Madeline visiting the White House. In 2011 he published Madeline at the White House, fifty years after the initial idea was proposed. In Madeline at the White House, Madeline, Miss Clavel, and the girls visit Washington, D.C., where they are the guests of the president’s lonely daughter, Miss Penelope Randall, for the White House Easter Egg Roll. Her nickname is Candle, “on account of a wildly stubborn curl that like a flame would dance and twirl.” The president’s daughter is not based on Caroline Kennedy, although she was an initial source of inspiration, and the busy president is not based on any particular person. Marciano researched the Kennedy White House for the book, but he did not want to restrict his story to a particular time period.16 The character of Candle is loosely based on Marciano’s own daughter, Galatea, who at two-and-ahalf was the same age as his mother Barbara when Bemelmans created the original Madeline story: “It took me 12 years to come up with the right story, and somehow it all came together just about the time she was born,” he recalls. I became focused on the idea of adding a new little girl to the story. . . . My daughter has curly, blondish reddish hair, and when it first grew she had a curl on top of her head that looked like a candle. It occurred to me then that Candle would make a great name for a book character. And lo and behold, the curl became a
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Mustapha the Magician is also a key character in Madeline at the White House. On the title page, there is an illustration that depicts the Magician arriving to visit Madeline and the girls for Easter but is sad to see them leaving. He shows up at the White House inside Madeline’s bag, disguised as a rabbit who is wearing a fez. He plays with Madeline and Candle and takes them on a magic nighttime flight above Washington, D.C.
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Marciano embeds a few additional tributes to his grandfather in the story. The endpapers show Madeline, Miss Clavel, the girls, and Mustapha standing at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery, where Bemelmans is buried. On their visit to the White House, they stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, just as Bemelmans once did. Like the first Madeline book, this one ends: “That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.” Marciano was invited to the 2011 White House Easter Egg Roll to read his book to families on the
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Madeline, seen here front and center racing across the South Lawn with fictional first daughter Candle, finally arrived at the White House in 2011, fifty years after Mrs. Kennedy and Ludwig Bemelmans envisioned the book.
COP YRIGHT JOHN BEMELMANS MARCIANO, VIKING CHILDREN’S BOOKS, PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
nice little feature to distinguish the president’s daughter and give her a personality.17
Art in Amherst, Massachusetts, created a special exhibition called Madeline at 75: The Art of Ludwig Bemelmans. It debuted at the New-York Historical Society in New York City as a tribute to Bemelmans’s adopted home and included more than ninety original artworks, including drawings and paintings, as well as menus, matchbooks, and lampshades from Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel. Also on display was a collection of letters and a typescript of plot ideas from Bemelmans and Mrs. Kennedy, along with original art by John Bemelmans Marciano from Madeline at the White House, a book that has now been firmly cemented as part of Madeline’s legacy. NOTES 1.
“Caroline Kennedy Visits Seattle School for Day of Poetry,” King-TV Channel 5, April 8, 2013, online at www.king5.com.
2. “At 75 She’s Doing Fine; Kids Still Love Their Madeline,” interview of John Bemelmans Marciano by Renée Montagne, October 11, 2013, National Public Radio, online at www.npr.org. 3. Quoted in Alan Bisbort, “Madeline Turns 75: Ludwig Bemelmans in Amherst,” Hartford Courant, December 8, 2014. 4. Ludwig Bemelmans to May Massee, January 13, 1961, quoted in John Bemelmans Marciano, Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator (New York: Viking, 1999), 116. 5. Quoted in Amy Fine Collins, “Madeline’s Papa,” Vanity Fair, July 1998, 129. 6. Ludwig Bemelmans to Jacqueline Kennedy, November 1961, quoted in Marciano, Bemelmans, 137. 7. Collins, “Madeline’s Papa,” 130. 8. John F. Kennedy, “Remarks at a Dinner Honoring Nobel Prize Winners of the Western Hemisphere,” April 29, 1962, online at American Presidency Project website, www.presidency.ucsb.edu. 9. Ludwig Bemelmans to Letitia Baldrige, April 9, 1962, Papers of John. F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, White House Staff Files of Sanford L. Fox, p. 4, online at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website, www.jfklibrary.org. 10. Ludwig Bemelmans to Jacqueline Kennedy, April 5, 1962, quoted in Marciano, Bemelmans, 139. 11. Quoted in ibid., 138. 12. Jacqueline Kennedy to Mimi Bemelmans, quoted in ibid., 136. Mrs. Bemelmans donated the letters to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. John Bemelmans Marciano, interview by author, June 18, 2020. Some of Bemelmans’s letters were included in a permanent exhibition devoted to Mrs. Kennedy in 1997, along with sketches of Madeline and a postcard he sent to five-year-old Caroline from the French Riviera, signed “Miss Clavel.” Michael Kenney, “JFK Library Finally Giving Jackie Her Due,” Baltimore Sun, May 30, 1997. 13. Marciano, Bemelmans, 143. 14. Ibid., vii.
South Lawn. In an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram around the same time, Marciano shared: “I feel like my grandfather died too young. He was 62, but he was young in the sense that his skills as a painter were really reaching a new level. He was doing amazing work when he passed away, and I feel like some of his unrealized projects could have been among his best. So completing this book represents something quite important to me.”18 For the seventy-fifth anniversary of Madeline in 2014, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book
15. Quoted in Kate Hogan, “Madeline Comes Stateside in New Book,” People, February 21, 2011. 16. Natasha Lennard, “Madeline Visits Washington,” Politico, January 13, 2011, www.politico.com. 17. Sally Lodge, “Madeline Visits the White House,” Publishers Weekly, January 27, 2011. 18. Quoted in David Martindale, “50 Years Later, Young Madeline Is Still Going Places,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, April 29, 2011. 19. Jane Bayard Curley, Madeline at 75: The Art of Ludwig Bemelmans. (The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, 2014), Exhibition catalog.
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