Ludwig Bemelmans, the Austrian-born American writer and artist, had no retirement savings but used to tell his wife, “Madeline will be our Social Security.” When he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 64 in 1962, his estate was valued at only $200,000.
Today Bemelmans’s legacy has evolved into a family business worth millions, and as he predicted, it all revolves around a valuable piece of intellectual property named Madeline—that fearless, independent Parisian schoolgirl he created (although his descendants talk about her as if she were real). In six books, starting with the original Madeline published in 1939, she has an appendectomy, gets lost at the circus and nearly drowns in the Seine.
Madeline books have sold more than 13 million copies. Yet, her recent perils highlight the challenges of protecting and building on an intellectual property inheritance. Unlike other famous literary legacies mined to huge economic advantage after the author’s death—for example, those of Dr Seuss and Agatha Christie—the Madeline brand has only partially tapped its potential. Now her future is clouded by a lack of succession planning.
Artistic talent skipped a generation from Ludwig Bemelmans to his youngest grandson, John Bemelmans Marciano, 43, born eight years after his death. Marciano has written and illustrated eight Madeline books—the latest, Madeline and the Old House in Paris, published in October.
But Marciano hasn’t inherited the keys to the kingdom. Those are still held by his mother, Barbara Bemelmans, 77, the late artist’s only child. Ludwig Bemelmans left the copyrights to Madeline, 11 other children’s books and about 20 adult books, as well as all his paintings and drawings, in equal shares to Barbara and to his wife, Madeleine. Barbara has been in sole charge since her mother died in 2004. Despite demand for Ludwig’s artwork, Barbara hasn’t sold anything in recent memory and stores hundreds of paintings and drawings at Crozier Fine Arts, a New York storage facility.
“They’re good stewards to the extent that they look after what they have” but have been leery of taking the franchise in new and potentially lucrative directions, says Jane Bayard Curley, curator of a Bemelmans exhibit scheduled to open in July at the New-York Historical Society. Both John Marciano and his mother have been unreceptive to ebooks, for example. And they’ve done very little to develop Madeline.com—even after spending more than $10,000 during the late 1990s to buy the domain name from a cybersquatter who threatened to sell it to a porn site.
At times, Barbara acknowledges, she has found the burden of protecting her father’s legacy overwhelming. “If my father had left me a shoe factory, and sometimes I wish he had, that would be simpler,” she wrote in an email to Forbes.
Today the centre of operations for Ludwig Bemelmans LLC is a 69-acre New Jersey horse farm where Barbara and her ex-husband gave riding lessons, held horse shows and ran a summer day camp while raising their three sons. She still lives in a 19th-century farmhouse with two poodles and rents out the huge stable where she keeps her 12 miniature horses.
Nearby is a two-storey building, once a general store, that Barbara also owns. She has filled its capacious downstairs with many of the contents of the Gramercy Park apartment where her father was living when he died 51 years ago. The arrangement gives the impression that Ludwig Bemelmans has just stepped out, with jars of paint brushes, his Olivetti typewriter, tubes of oil paints and a watercolour palette scattered around. On a table are stacks of institutional china: Demitasse cups from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York (closed in 1951), where Bemelmans worked before he became a writer; dinner plates from the Carlyle Hotel, where he once lived; and more plates, from Lüchow’s, a famous German restaurant (it closed in 1986) in New York that he frequented.
It all sets the scene for Barbara Bemelmans’s show-and-tell about “Poppy”, as she refers to her dad. The family moved 17 times while Barbara was growing up. Ludwig Bemelmans roamed the world, mingling with the rich and famous: Armand Hammer, Greta Garbo, Princess Margaret and Aristotle Onassis. Often Barbara Bemelmans travelled with her bon vivant father, meeting Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway, and lunching with him at the iconic New York restaurant 21. When her dad died, “I realised that I would never get a good table at 21 again,” she quips.
Where Barbara can’t part with anything, Poppy was extravagant. “I never got the feeling that we were poor, but I often got the feeling that we were broke,” she recalls. As Ludwig wrote in one undated letter to his daughter: “I consider money a fluid and that it runs through my pockets like a sieve.” Ludwig’s many letters, along with notes and sketches—on napkins, hotel stationery, the backs of menus and inside of matchbook covers—were a valuable resource for grandson John Marciano when he took up the family franchise after studying art history and studio art at Columbia College and working as a newspaper reporter and editor.
In 1999, John published a biography of his grand-dad, Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator, and his first Madeline book, Madeline in America and Other Holiday Tales, based on a mock-up for a book in his grandfather’s papers.
Equally surprising, given Barbara’s protection of Madeline’s image, is that the family has apparently not registered the trademark to the name Madeline or the name along with an illustration of the character, says Edward H Rosenthal, a lawyer with Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz in New York. Here’s why that matters: Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline books will go into the public domain when the copyrights expire starting in 2034, leaving anyone free to publish them. But a trademark can last forever. By registering the trademark for books and other printed materials, for whatever goods the limited liability company is licensing, and by getting international trademark protection, the family could prevent others from making a movie or products, based on Ludwig Bemelmans’s stories, long after the books’ copyrights have expired. Without the trademark the family is left to rely on so-called common-law trademark rights, based on their being the first to use the name or illustration for certain purposes. That’s weaker protection in the US and no protection in countries where the trademark belongs to whomever files the application first.
(This story appears in the 24 January, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)