The care and feeding of friends

Only child of Vogue editor-in-chief Edna Woolman Chase and a classmate of tastemaker Pauline de Rothschild — they attended the same small boarding school near Paris in the early 1920s — the tart-tongued Ilka Chase (1905—1978) was a boldface personality in the mid-twentieth century. A well-known character actress, she appeared in such films as “Now, Voyager” and “Ocean’s Eleven” and numerous stage productions (she was in the original Broadway casts of “The Women” and “Barefoot in the Park”). She hosted a radio program and wrote novels and memoirs too, as well as a handful of mirthful books about her worldwide travels. And near the end of her life, Chase, then living in retirement in Mexico City with her third husband, a doctor, penned a cookery book: The Care and Feeding of Friends (Doubleday, 1973).