Inventing Elsa Maxwell How an Irrepressible Nobody Conquered High Society, Hollywood, the Press, and the World

by Staggs, Sam

• ISBN13: 9780312699444
• ISBN10: 0312699441
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-10-16
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Summary

One of the most vivid personas of the twentieth century brought back to life in this biography by the author of All About All About Eve Elsa Maxwell's life was one of great self-invention. Built like a bulldog, with a face to match, she rose from simple beginnings as an only child in San Francisco to take New York City societyat its most mid-century cosmopolitanby storm. In London, Paris, Venice, and Monte Carlo, royalty, both genuine and aspiring, clamored for invitations to Elsa's legendary parties. At those glamorous happenings the titled, the talented, the monied, and those on the make all mixed together in let-'er-rip gaiety. Her guests expected the unexpected: black ties and paper plates, murder parties, treasure hunts, elephants, elaborate costumes. She fell in love with Maria Callas, and nursed a broken heart when the diva spurned her. Elsa's feud with the Duchess of Windsor made headlines for three years in the 1950s. An early and frequent guest on that new innovation, the TV talk show, Maxwell was also a bestselling author. The first biography ever of Elsa Maxwell is an enthusiast's witty story of a life lived out loud.

Author Biography

SAM STAGGS is the author of five books, including four biographies of movies: All About All About Eve, Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard, When Blanche Met Brando, and Born to be Hurt.  He has written for publications including Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest. He lives in Dallas, Texas. 

Table of Contents

1   The Sun Never Sets on Elsa Maxwell
 
 
Elsa Maxwell, introduced by Jack Paar on his late-night talk show in 1958: “Elsa, your stockings are wrinkled.”
Her response: “I’m not wearing any. Those are varicose veins.”
*   *   *
I first met Elsa Maxwell in the summer of 1922. I found her dynamic, gay, bursting with energy, courageous, insanely generous and, to me, always kind.
—Noël Coward, in his introduction to Elsa Maxwell’s last book, The Celebrity Circus, 1963
*   *   *
“Elsa was one of my aversions,” Walter Winchell wrote in his memoir. “Now along comes Mr. Paar and makes a brand-new life and career for Elsa, who’d publicly announced that she had ‘never had a man in her life.’
“The Lez said about it, the better.”
*   *   *
While filming The Black Rose on location in England in 1950, Tyrone Power sent a picture postcard to Clifton Webb back in Hollywood. Power, in costume, is holding a prop from a banquet scene: a boar’s head on a silver platter with an apple in its mouth. On the back he scrawled: “I’ll be home on the 15th. As you can see, I ran into Elsa Maxwell over here and she’s in fine fettle. Ty.”
*   *   *
Elsa Maxwell? Just another pretty face.
—Hermione Gingold
*   *   *
I went to a big party she gave in Paris. I don’t know why she bothered to ask me. I think it was because she needed extra men at these affairs from time to time, and I had a clean shirt.
—Claus von Bülow to author, 2009
*   *   *
The ugliest woman I have ever seen.
—Giovanni Battista Meneghini, divorced husband of Maria Callas. (He hated Elsa for her lesbian designs on his wife.)
*   *   *
A fat old son of a bitch!
—Maria Callas
*   *   *
As I remember every single person who was ever kind to me, I remember that often maligned woman very well.
—Maria Riva (daughter of Marlene Dietrich)
*   *   *
“I May Not Be Good Looking but I’m Awfully Good to Ma”
—one of many songs composed by Elsa, this one published in 1909
*   *   *
Old battering-ram Elsa always gives the best parties.
—the Duke of Windsor
*   *   *
The old oaken bucket in the Well of Loneliness.
—the Duchess of Windsor’s vicious epithet during their noisy feud in the mid-1950s
*   *   *
Elsa Maxwell was part of the old generation, a generation for whom sexuality was not intrinsic to public identity, whose community—even if predominantly with homosexuals—was defined more by class and privilege than anything else.
—William J. Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969
*   *   *
Elsa to the formidable Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of sugar baron Adolph Spreckels and, like Elsa, a San Franciscan: “How old are you, Alma?”
A. de B. S.: “Old enough to remember when there was no such person as Elsa Maxwell.” (She meant it figuratively, since they were born the same year. The remark implies, also, that Elsa’s social status as a girl in San Francisco was not of the highest rank.)
*   *   *
She preferred rich women with large houses in which she could stage her parties. What most people regard as amusing interludes were to Elsa a profession.
—R.V.C. Bodley, a military attaché at the British embassy in Paris after World War I, when Elsa was making an international name for herself.
*   *   *
Shaped like a cottage loaf with currant eyes.
—Stanley Jackson, Inside Monte Carlo
*   *   *
Monte Carlo. Elsa Maxwell, the cumbersome butterfly, staged her night parties with unbelievable mixtures of the great and near great.
—film director Jean Negulesco, recalling his youth on the Côte d’Azur in the Roaring Twenties
*   *   *
Asked why Elsa hadn’t been invited to a celebrity bash at his famed Hollywood restaurant, con man and faux Russian royalty “Prince” Mike Romanoff replied, “No phonies.”
*   *   *
Personal and Confidential Memo to J. Edgar Hoover from E. E. Conroy, an underling at the FBI, dated July 26, 1945:
“Miss Elsa Maxwell has been a Special Service Contact of this office since September of 1942 but contact has been had with her infrequently. The Bureau is aware, of course, that presently she is writing a column for the New York Post and for some time now she has enjoyed the reputation of a successful hostess at gatherings which she arranges for socially prominent people. However, it has come to the attention of this office in the recent past that generally they consider her now to be a person of somewhat unsavory background and reputation. In addition, the Bureau itself has evidence of the fact that she is indiscreet and not entirely trustworthy, as is indicated in G-2 reports forwarded as enclosures to this office with a letter from the Bureau dated January 8, 1943.
“For the reasons outlined above it is deemed advisable therefore to discontinue the services of Miss Maxwell as a Special Service Contact and this will be done unless the Bureau advises to the contrary.”
*   *   *
Elsa’s indictment of racism, from her column in the New York Post, November 16, 1943:
“Let’s look this matter of prejudice straight in the eye. I’m sick and tired of all the pussyfooting that’s been going on about Jim Crow. Either we are believers in the principles of democracy—as we piously declare, three times a day—or we are a collection of the greatest frauds the world has seen.
“For generations the conventional and learned citizens of this republic have stood stolidly silent while the American Negro has been vilified, libeled, and denied almost all access to the privileged places of sweetness and light.… Democracy has been wayward in the cause of democracy.”
*   *   *
Although as lively and perky as a sparrow, Miss Maxwell never strikes me as being a particularly happy woman herself. She has unsmiling eyes. She is restless. One of her idiosyncrasies is to eat chocolate continually between the courses of meals—which is to me only less disconcerting than that abominable habit of smoking between the courses.
—“The Talk of London,” a pseudonymous column by “The Dragoman” in the Daily Express, October 22, 1932
*   *   *
Headline in the New York Herald-Tribune, 1957: ELSA MAXWELL ORDERED TO PAY $840 TO FAROUK FOR INSULT, which, decoded, was reporting that a court in Paris had ordered Elsa to pay that amount to the deposed King of Egypt for defamation of character. While still on the throne, he had invited her to one of his parties. Elsa replied with a telegram to his equerry which read, “I do not associate with clowns, monkeys, or corrupt gangsters.” An intemperate reaction, surely, from the author of Elsa Maxwell’s Etiquette Book, published around the time of the king’s party. In it, Elsa wrote that “whenever you are asked to be a guest you are paid a compliment. Your host or hostess, in effect, looks upon you as someone who will contribute to the success of their party. A prompt reply will express your appreciation of the invitation.”
*   *   *
Elsa Maxwell took a bad fall on the Guinness yacht in Monte Carlo. The yacht is expected to recover.
—Earl Wilson’s column, 1961
*   *   *
Telegram sent from the White House, May 31, 1963, to Elsa at the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York: “Thank you very much for your birthday message. It was kind of you to remember me on this occasion, and I am most appreciative of your thoughtfulness. John F. Kennedy.”
The following day, Western Union notified the White House that the telegram was undelivered because Miss Maxwell was on the high seas aboard the SS France. It was her final trip abroad. (The telegram was missent to the Park Sheraton Hotel, rather than the Delmonico, where Elsa lived at the time. Had the address been correct, she would have received the telegram before departure. The great irony is that both Elsa and President Kennedy celebrated their last birthdays in that month of May 1963. She died on Friday, November 1, exactly three weeks before the assassination.)
*   *   *
In 1969, the director of Ferncliff Cemetery and Mausoleum, in Hartsdale, New York, assured Mickey Deans, widower of Judy Garland, that “your wife will be the star of Ferncliff. Jerome Kern rests here, and Moss Hart, Basil Rathbone, and Elsa Maxwell, but your wife will be our only star.”
—Anne Edwards, Judy Garland, page 305
*   *   *
As this book goes to press, there are 133 memorial “flowers”—i.e., kitschy floral icons and visual bric-a-brac—posted on findagrave.com at Elsa’s page (or should I call it her ePlot?). Many bear weepy sentiments such as “Happy Heavenly Birthday, Dearest Angel” (posted May 24, 2011) forty-eight years after Elsa’s death) and “Rest in peace, Great Lady.” But Judy Garland remains, as predicted, the star of Ferncliff, at least electronically; she has 6,150 tributes.


 
Copyright © 2012 by Sam Staggs

Excerpts

1   The Sun Never Sets on Elsa Maxwell
 
 
Elsa Maxwell, introduced by Jack Paar on his late-night talk show in 1958: “Elsa, your stockings are wrinkled.”
Her response: “I’m not wearing any. Those are varicose veins.”
*   *   *
I first met Elsa Maxwell in the summer of 1922. I found her dynamic, gay, bursting with energy, courageous, insanely generous and, to me, always kind.
—Noël Coward, in his introduction to Elsa Maxwell’s last book,The Celebrity Circus,1963
*   *   *
“Elsa was one of my aversions,” Walter Winchell wrote in his memoir. “Now along comes Mr. Paar and makes a brand-new life and career for Elsa, who’d publicly announced that she had ‘never had a man in her life.’
“The Lez said about it, the better.”
*   *   *
While filmingThe Black Roseon location in England in 1950, Tyrone Power sent a picture postcard to Clifton Webb back in Hollywood. Power, in costume, is holding a prop from a banquet scene: a boar’s head on a silver platter with an apple in its mouth. On the back he scrawled: “I’ll be home on the 15th. As you can see, I ran into Elsa Maxwell over here and she’s in fine fettle. Ty.”
*   *   *
Elsa Maxwell? Just another pretty face.
—Hermione Gingold
*   *   *
I went to a big party she gave in Paris. I don’t know why she bothered to ask me. I think it was because she needed extra men at these affairs from time to time, and I had a clean shirt.
—Claus von Bülow to author, 2009
*   *   *
The ugliest woman I have ever seen.
—Giovanni Battista Meneghini, divorced husband of Maria Callas. (He hated Elsa for her lesbian designs on his wife.)
*   *   *
A fat old son of a bitch!
—Maria Callas
*   *   *
As I remember every single person who was ever kind to me, I remember that often maligned woman very well.
—Maria Riva (daughter of Marlene Dietrich)
*   *   *
“I May Not Be Good Looking but I’m Awfully Good to Ma”
—one of many songs composed by Elsa, this one published in 1909
*   *   *
Old battering-ram Elsa always gives the best parties.
—the Duke of Windsor
*   *   *
The old oaken bucket in the Well of Loneliness.
—the Duchess of Windsor’s vicious epithet during their noisy feud in the mid-1950s
*   *   *
Elsa Maxwell was part of the old generation, a generation for whom sexuality was not intrinsic to public identity, whose community—even if predominantly with homosexuals—was defined more by class and privilege than anything else.
—William J. Mann,Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969
*   *   *
Elsa to the formidable Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of sugar baron Adolph Spreckels and, like Elsa, a San Franciscan: “How old are you, Alma?”
A. de B. S.: “Old enough to remember when there was no such person as Elsa Maxwell.” (She meant it figuratively, since they were born the same year. The remark implies, also, that Elsa’s social status as a girl in San Francisco was not of the highest rank.)
*   *   *
She preferred rich women with large houses in which she could stage her parties. What most people regard as amusing interludes were to Elsa a profession.
—R.V.C. Bodley, a military attaché at the British embassy in Paris after World War I, when Elsa was making an international name for herself.
*   *   *
Shaped like a cottage loaf with currant eyes.
—Stanley Jackson,Inside Monte Carlo
*   *   *
Monte Carlo. Elsa Maxwell, the cumbersome butterfly, staged her night parties with unbelievable mixtures of the great and near great.
—film director Jean Negulesco, recalling his youth on the Côte d’Azur in the Roaring Twenties
*   *   *
Asked why Elsa hadn’t been invited to a celebrity bash at his famed Hollywood restaurant, con man and faux Russian royalty “Prince” Mike Romanoff replied, “No phonies.”
*   *   *
Personal and Confidential Memo to J. Edgar Hoover from E. E. Conroy, an underling at the FBI, dated July 26, 1945:
“Miss Elsa Maxwell has been a Special Service Contact of this office since September of 1942 but contact has been had with her infrequently. The Bureau is aware, of course, that presently she is writing a column for theNew York Postand for some time now she has enjoyed the reputation of a successful hostess at gatherings which she arranges for socially prominent people. However, it has come to the attention of this office in the recent past that generally they consider her now to be a person of somewhat unsavory background and reputation. In addition, the Bureau itself has evidence of the fact that she is indiscreet and not entirely trustworthy, as is indicated in G-2 reports forwarded as enclosures to this office with a letter from the Bureau dated January 8, 1943.
“For the reasons outlined above it is deemed advisable therefore to discontinue the services of Miss Maxwell as a Special Service Contact and this will be done unless the Bureau advises to the contrary.”
*   *   *
Elsa’s indictment of racism, from her column in theNew York Post, November 16, 1943:
“Let’s look this matter of prejudice straight in the eye. I’m sick and tired of all the pussyfooting that’s been going on about Jim Crow. Either we are believers in the principles of democracy—as we piously declare, three times a day—or we are a collection of the greatest frauds the world has seen.
“For generations the conventional and learned citizens of this republic have stood stolidly silent while the American Negro has been vilified, libeled, and denied almost all access to the privileged places of sweetness and light.… Democracy has been wayward in the cause of democracy.”
*   *   *
Although as lively and perky as a sparrow, Miss Maxwell never strikes me as being a particularly happy woman herself. She has unsmiling eyes. She is restless. One of her idiosyncrasies is to eat chocolate continually between the courses of meals—which is to me only less disconcerting than that abominable habit of smoking between the courses.
—“The Talk of London,” a pseudonymous column by “The Dragoman” in theDaily Express, October 22, 1932
*   *   *
Headline in theNew York Herald-Tribune, 1957: ELSA MAXWELL ORDERED TO PAY $840 TO FAROUK FOR INSULT, which, decoded, was reporting that a court in Paris had ordered Elsa to pay that amount to the deposed King of Egypt for defamation of character. While still on the throne, he had invited her to one of his parties. Elsa replied with a telegram to his equerry which read, “I do not associate with clowns, monkeys, or corrupt gangsters.” An intemperate reaction, surely, from the author ofElsa Maxwell’s Etiquette Book, published around the time of the king’s party. In it, Elsa wrote that “whenever you are asked to be a guest you are paid a compliment. Your host or hostess, in effect, looks upon you as someone who will contribute to the success of their party. A prompt reply will express your appreciation of the invitation.”
*   *   *
Elsa Maxwell took a bad fall on the Guinness yacht in Monte Carlo. The yacht is expected to recover.
—Earl Wilson’s column, 1961
*   *   *
Telegram sent from the White House, May 31, 1963, to Elsa at the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York: “Thank you very much for your birthday message. It was kind of you to remember me on this occasion, and I am most appreciative of your thoughtfulness. John F. Kennedy.”
The following day, Western Union notified the White House that the telegram was undelivered because Miss Maxwell was on the high seas aboard the SSFrance. It was her final trip abroad. (The telegram was missent to the Park Sheraton Hotel, rather than the Delmonico, where Elsa lived at the time. Had the address been correct, she would have received the telegram before departure. The great irony is that both Elsa and President Kennedy celebrated their last birthdays in that month of May 1963. She died on Friday, November 1, exactly three weeks before the assassination.)
*   *   *
In 1969, the director of Ferncliff Cemetery and Mausoleum, in Hartsdale, New York, assured Mickey Deans, widower of Judy Garland, that “your wife will be the star of Ferncliff. Jerome Kern rests here, and Moss Hart, Basil Rathbone, and Elsa Maxwell, but your wife will be our only star.”
—Anne Edwards,Judy Garland,page 305
*   *   *
As this book goes to press, there are 133 memorial “flowers”—i.e., kitschy floral icons and visual bric-a-brac—posted on findagrave.com at Elsa’s page (or should I call it her ePlot?). Many bear weepy sentiments such as “Happy Heavenly Birthday, Dearest Angel” (posted May 24, 2011) forty-eight years after Elsa’s death) and “Rest in peace, Great Lady.” But Judy Garland remains, as predicted, the star of Ferncliff, at least electronically; she has 6,150 tributes.


 
Copyright © 2012 by Sam Staggs