I am often saddened to think that I have missed out on knowing and experiencing thru interaction some of the great characters of the past. Granted it never reaches the maudlin stage, with pining away just around the corner! Yet I will say; I do get a bit nostalgic for having not known them in person. For if I had, I would no doubt have been in esoteric overdrive in attempting to absorb all I could whilst in their presence.
One lady in particular who tends to always entice me into such states of ennui based on the fact that we never crossed paths was one, Miss Elsa Maxwell!
Gossip columnist extraordinaire, prolific author, talented and established songwriter, professional hostess renowned for her parties for the royalty and high society figures of her day, and in her early twenties a member of a touring Shakespeare company; Maxwell was by default and still is for that matter, perfect fodder for an esoteric dream. A literal minefield of arcane fact, blended slightly with a tad bit of fiction.
For those of us who know her, we can all relate to an Elsa Maxwellesque individual in our lives. Whether an old aunt, distant friend, or neighbor, the likes of ‘Elsa’ are abundant in many forms.
Personally speaking, I had a step-grandmother who mirrored Elsa in so many ways, except on a smaller; more local scale. Although she was slight in frame, she was just as big in personality as Elsa was!
Interestingly, Elsa exited this plane of existence the same year I entered it. Ironically, we bookended the year to a degree, I was born in January, while she passed away in November. Almost by divine connection there is something that binds us.
By the time she took her final bow, she had grown more caustic, was in many ways marginalized by the new space age, almost to the point of being a living anachronism, and considered by many to be an opinionated old bat!
With the distance of time, perhaps we can appreciate her more for the varietal talent that she ‘brought to the table’ so to speak.
As her personality unfolds below, it is evident at the very least that Elsa would have been a delight to sit next to at a dinner party. No detail would have escaped her notice and no doubt she would have thrown in a writhing ‘bon mot’ or two for extra measure to insure an enjoyable evening!
CROSSED THE OCEAN TO
COMPOSE AN OPERETTA
Miss Elsa Maxwell, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont’s
Collaborator In Suffrage Play
First Heard Of It Last November
Now Score Is Finished
The New York Times
January 23, 1916
Miss Elsa Maxwell, one of the few women writers of popular music and musical revues, who is collaborating with Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont in the operetta and social satire, ‘Melinda and Her Sisters,’ to be produced as a suffrage benefit at the Waldorf on Feb. 18, has a special affection for the piece. It brought her back to this country.
Miss Maxwell is an American girl, born in San Francisco, but she left the United States, eight years ago, and during the last four years has made both fame and fortune in England. Some of her popular songs have been successes here, but she is better known in London, where her revues have been produced at all the West End theatres. She had been wishing for just the right chance to make a visit to her native land and show America what she could do. Then came the opportunity.
Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont is the originator of the plot of ‘Melinda and Her Sisters.’ It had been lying fallow in her brain for some time, and she mentioned it once in a while to her friends. The only thing needed was someone to help her knock it into shape, get up some clever lines, songs and music. One of these friends, going to London, chanced to mention this to Miss Maxwell. This was in November. Two days later that enterprising young woman was on the steamer, coming west to ‘Melinda and Her Sisters,’ and incidentally to talk things over with Mrs. Belmont. She did not know Mrs. Belmont, though she had known the Duchess of Marlborough, who was Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt, Mrs. Belmont’s daughter, and she did not stop to write. She came to Mrs. Belmont unannounced, saw her, and the whole thing was as good as settled.
Now it is January and music, lyrics and words are written for the ‘Melinda’ operetta, which is not only going to show in a humorous way that the suffrage worker is the noblest thing on earth and monopolizes most of the noble sentiments, but will be a satire on society. It will be filled with jolly little songs, and is going to have a remarkable cast. It will have in it some excellent actresses of different varieties of talent, a grand opera singer, a dancer of highest fame, as well as a number of society women who are charming and can sing and dance, too. The first rehearsal was held last week and many of the boxes were sold before that, and no one protested at the charge of $125 each. To use an Americanism that Miss Maxwell would not use, that is ‘going some.’
‘Mrs. Belmont is a clever woman, and it is a pleasure to work with her,’ said Miss Maxwell, talking with a New York Times reporter about ‘Melinda,’ and little about herself. ‘And (mysteriously) this is not the only thing Mrs. Belmont and I are going to do. We have some other ideas that will be worth considering when this is finished.
It is interesting to know something about Miss Maxwell, because she is an American girl, and has had an unusual success. She claims to have been born only twenty-nine years ago, and that is a short time to have reached the success mark in her profession. It would never do to tell how much money – one of the few definite ways by which one can measure success – she made in England last year. She did not breathe this herself, or hint at it, but someone else did, and it was a very nice little income.
She has been successful enough in the last few years to have a charming old house of her won in England, an interesting house that belonged to Nell Gwynne. In its garden is an old mulberry tree, the last one in New Gwynne’s Mulberry Forest, and Miss Maxwell watches the blossoms on the tree and gathers the fruit as Nell Gwynne herself used to do.
The house is of severe Queen Anne style. Miss Maxwell has done the dining room over after the Queen Anne room at Hampton Court. The whole house is interesting, with old Dutch fireplaces and Dutch tiles. It is in South Kensington, and in New Gwynne’s day, when London was smaller than it is now, it was her country place, and there was an outside wash house. This Miss Maxwell has turned into a studio, and in it she has her famous piano. It is a baby grand and has, she says, no duplicate, for its case is in old red lacquer done in the days when the English copied with an excellent degree of success the Chinese designs and Chinese lacquer. Here Miss Maxwell does her composing, in a charming setting, for the remainder of the studio is furnished with old ‘Chinese Chippendale.’
Miss Maxwell commenced her professional work in New York, doing some dramatic criticism and working at serious ballads, words and music. Then, being a businesslike young woman as well as a musician, she concluded that there was more opportunity and money in popular songs than in anything else in her line of work, and she also decided that in England there would be less competition and a better chance for success. After traveling a few years, she settled down to attain her claim.
Her last musical revue, ‘Ladies First,’ is just getting to London after its first tryout in the provinces. She has written for Mlle. Eve Lavalliere, a well known French actress of the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris, who created the chief roles in ‘My Wife,’ ‘Tantalizing Tommy,’ and other plays with Charles Frohman brought to this country. She has written for all the leading music hall stars of London, among them Gertie Miller and Ethel Levey. Three Queens heard the latter sing one of these songs, at the Woman’s War Hospital benefit, Queen Alexandra, Queen Mary, and Queen Amelie of Portugal, and Queen Mary said it was the most amusing song she had ever heard. ‘Tango Dream,’ which Miss Grace La Rue is singing in this country in vaudeville with success, is Miss Maxwell’s.
Miss Maxwell says that England is a delightful place to live in and that there never were more charming people.
‘They are so entirely simple and natural,’ she says. ‘The people of the highest rank are cordial and courteous. They never ask who or what you are, but consider what you do and throw open their doors to you. And I would like to say something about the wonderful spirit there is in England now, and it is shared by all alike, the high and the low, the rich and the poor. I have written many recruiting songs, and played for the soldiers and organized recruiting concerts before the men began to enlist as they are doing now. Then I assisted Lady Tree, the wife of Sir Herbert Tree, with a concert at King George’s Hospital, and it was such a sight. There were 200 Tommies in the room, and hardly one who had not an arm or a leg gone, and they were all so cheerful and in such good spirits, and it is the same with the big men who you see in the War Office.
‘Our American women are doing good work in England. Lady Paget, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Mrs. John Astor, who, I believe, is here now, are public spirited women. The latter is working for the officers’ wives and does a special work for the British prisoners. Their families and friends are allowed to send them supplies and provisions, and there is a regular organization looking out for them.’
Miss Maxwell wished to have something to say about the much discussed Zeppelins.
‘The people are not the least but afraid,’ she said. “They are as interested as they would be in some great pageant or great game hunting and look at it in the same way. I was in London when different ones arrived. I stood directly under on the 16th of last October. The people were out to see the show and, as the Zeppelin was fired at, they watched with the keenest interest and shouted and cheered when there seemed to be a chance of its being hit.’
MOST AMUSING
OF ELSA MAXWELL’S
PROVE NATURAL
The Victoria Advocate
January 10, 1938
NEW YORK, Jan. 10. – Miss Maxwell, the nation’s No. 1 creator of original parties, started the New Year off by naming not one but two ‘Lists of 10.’
Propped in bed in her Waldorf-Astoria suite where she was trying to get rid of a cold before departing for Palm Beach, the plump, dark-haired woman named the ’10 Most Interesting’ and the ’10 Most Humorous’ persons.
At the same time, she announced plans for her latest brain child – ‘a coming out party for a pair of legs’ – and unburdened her mind about café society, which ‘does not exist!’
Her Lists:
MOST AMUSING:
1. 1. Cole Porter, composer.
22 2. Alexander Woolcott, author.
3. Frederick Lonsdale, British playwright.
4. Countess Dorothy di Frasso, Internationally known hostess.
5. Charles MacArthur, playwright.
6. Herbert Bayard Swope, Chairman of the New York State Racing Commission.
7. Prince Christopher of Greece.
8. Lynn Fontaine, actress.
9. Alfred Lunt, actor.
10. Lord Castlerosse, London Columnist.
Her Second Ten:
MOST INTERESTING:
1. Dorothy Thompson, columnist.
2. Arthur Rubenstein, pianist.
3. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, actress.
4. Igor Stravinsky, composer.
5. James Cagney, actor.
6. Walter Chrysler, industrialist.
7. Somerset Maugham, novelist.
8. Count Volpi, former Italian Minister of Finance.
9. Arturo Toscanini, conductor.
10. Mme. Colette, French novelist.
The Amusing Analyzed
About her ‘most amusing people,’ Miss Maxwell said:
‘They don’t take themselves seriously; they have a natural sense of humor. There are no professional humorists on the list because it’s their business to be funny and people like that usually are quite dull when not at work.’
As far as her ‘most interesting people,’ the woman who once milked champagne from a ‘cow’ at one of her parties, had this to say:
‘They command attention: they mean something: they’re alive. They make you feel interested in them and they give you an alive feeling. They are human, they respond to other persons and they can find a responsive chord in you and vibrate on it.’
How About It Dale?
There is no such thing as developing personality, according to Miss Maxwell.
‘it’s born in you like charm; you either have it or you don’t and you can’t read books or attend classes to develop it.’
‘Personality has a lot to do with your stomach. Who ever heard of a dyspeptic person having friends?’
The patient’s temperature went up two degrees when a recent article about café society in a well-known magazine was mentioned. According to its author, Miss Maxwell was a member of the ‘regency council’ of a café society.
No Café Society
‘Why there is no such thing as café society,’ she said, popping straight up in bed. ‘It doesn’t exist. There is society and there are night club hounds as there are bridge, horse racing and Wall Street hounds, but there is no café society. Only people who have no homes and no real friends entertain in night clubs. And a night club is the dullest and most uninteresting place outside of a morgue.’
‘She admitted that she once had been a night club entertainer ‘but only for fabulous salaries so that I’d have money to entertain my friends – at home!’
‘The coming-out party for a pair of legs’ has nothing to do with Marlene Dietrich or any of the other gals who have famous pins. It will be held Jan. 17 for Cole Porter to celebrate the removal of the casts from his legs which were broken when a horse fell on them last October. It will be a small affair, Miss Maxwell said. Only a few hundred of her ‘most intimate’ friends will attend.
Café Society Loses
Queen Elsa In Abdication Scene
Queen Elsa In Abdication Scene
Miss Maxwell Astounds Broadway By
Proclaiming Her Profound Scorn Of Night Clubs
The Pittsburgh Press
July 2, 1939
NEW YORK, July 1 – Elsa Maxwell, the chubby little lady with her fingers in all the café society pies, just came back from film land and sailed for Cannes. But before leaving she declared Hollywood is the most prim and proper community she ever visited, adding that in the cinema citadel, the only women who are seen out with husbands – are their wives. Elsa found it all rather dull. And then she had some things to say about New York café society, of which she is supposed to be arbiter and queen.
‘I never go to night clubs,’ she revealed to a startled listener, ‘they are a refuge for those who have no other place to go. In night clubs you are compelled to rub shoulders with people you don’t want to know!’
But Elsa had more to say on this fragile subject and at risk of alienating some of her Park Avenue patronage. ‘You can’t dance in those night clubs,’ she continued, ‘because the floor is too small. The food is poor and indigestible and the liquor is not always the best. Night club life is bogus and people are beginning to find it out. It has been overplayed. Nice people entertain in their own homes!’
In short, her renunciation of Café Society, forever!
ELSA MAXWELL’S
Party Line
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
February 11, 1944
Café Versus Society
I hold no brief for café society.
Some well meaning person once said to me ‘Elsa, you know all about café society, and. . .’
I never found out what came after the ‘and’. Because like most healthy people, when I’m attacked I defend myself. ‘Café society! What is it? I don’t even know. You can have cafes – and do. You can have society. But I don’t see how you can possibly have both at once.’
Perhaps I am prejudiced by my good fortune. I am one of those lucky people who fin d society wherever they go. What is society?
The only society worth talking about is the kind you make for yourself, in a quiet room at your home or in the home of your friends. It is the friends themselves, the people you want to dance with, laugh with, play games with, and best of all talk to and listen to.
It’s strange how much better the intelligent sensitive people of the world know how to play. The people who can only play are somehow never very good at it. I am fortunate enough to cherish among my friends the kind of people you want to talk to – intelligent, informed, and not people who frequent nights clubs. But don’t ever think that they aren’t good at playing.
That is my society. It has nothing to do with cafes. Cafes are places where you cannot talk, where you go in order not to talk; in order not to think. The people you see regularly inc cafes, in night clubs, in hot spots, are people who are hurrying through life, making a noise, drinking, and filling the air with smoke, because they are afraid – afraid of quiet, of thoughts, afraid of society in the true sense of the word.
The name ‘Café Society’ was introduced by my friend, the late Cholly Knickerbocker. He meant it as a joke. But it came to be more than a joke. It came to be some kind of crazy fact.
Café Society, as it now proudly calls itself is made up of people who are rushing around, hurrying to get some place – running in circles, afraid of being left out – and left out of everything that counts.
That’s what I think about café society and so I never expected to be defending the idea, or the people who make it up. Yet that’s exactly what I find myself doing lately. Because when Café Society is blamed for murder, it’s too much and that is what happened in the Lonergan case. Whose fault is it if a Lonergan goes to night clubs? That isn’t what makes him a murderer. If some householder with $50 a week murders his wife, no one blames it on the class from which he comes. No one says it serves them right. But when a wild young man murders his wealthy playgirl wife, in the eyes of the world it’s money, night clubs, and swing music that are behind the brass candle stick that killed her.
No these people aren’t bad. Don’t ever let them hear that I said so, but they are sad people. One reason I stay away from night clubs is that they depress me, there poor humans trying so hard to have fun, these people with their tired faces, their forced smiles, their pushing to get to the right place at the right time, to get on dance floors where there is no room to dance, to get next to people they will never known and never talk to. It gives them the illusion that they are alive and moving instead of just being pushed around. For a short time they assume a personality where they have none. They see friends where there are no friends. They dance to a band without having to pay $500 to have it play for them at home.
P.S. FROM PARIS
Elsa Maxwell Eats Words
By Art Buchwald
Sarasota Herald Tribune
May 29, 1957
Our good friend Elsa Maxwell has just returned to Paris after dining with all sorts of dukes and princes in Rome, and now the social season in the French capital can officially be considered open. It doesn’t promise to be a very exciting one, for the simple reason that Elsa and the Duchess of Windsor, who weren’t speaking to each for the past four years have been reconciled.
The hatchet was buried on the high seas, according to Elsa, when they shook hands on the deck of the S.S. United States and promised to let bygones be bygones, and to forget what they said about each other when the feud was going strong.
We found a chastened Elsa Maxwell at the Ritz when we went to visit her the other day. She had just dined at the duchess’ house.
We asked her why she did it.
‘I like the Duchess very much,’ she said.
‘That isn’t what you told me last year,’ we said.
‘I’m a violent woman’ she replied. ‘Perhaps it was all my fault. Now I can only speak of her in friendship. I’m going to do everything in my power to make amends. I’m an older and wiser woman.’
‘How dull,’ we said.
‘Yes, I’m afraid it is.’
‘But how can you eat so many words at one dinner?’
‘I can’t help it. At times I spill over with youthful audacity and there is nothing I can do about it. But later I’m sorry. The same thing happened with Maria Callas, the great opera singer. I heard her at the Met and when I didn’t like her I expressed myself in no uncertain terms. Then I discovered later she had had a bone in her throat when she sang at the Met, and after I heard her at La Scala, I forgave her. Now she’s the guest of honor at my party next month in Paris. Feuds are youth to me.’
The only person Elsa is feuding with, at the moment, is ex-King Farouk. As a matter of fact, Farouk is suing her in the French courts.
‘Why is he suing you?’ we asked her.
‘Because I called him a ________ and _________,’ said Miss Maxwell.
‘You mean, he’s __________?’
‘No, I mean he’s a _____________ and ____________ a _____________ and – and – and’
‘Why, that’s defamation of character,’ we said.
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘that’s what he’ suing me for.’
Elsa is being sued for 5,000,000 francs with the Duc de Noailles, who translated her book into French, as well as the publishers. She feels she has a strong defense.
‘I’ve got witnesses to prove he is not only a _____________ and _____________ but a
______________ and _____________.’
______________ and _____________.’
The waiter started to perspire.
She said she was calling as character witnesses Jean Desses, Louis Arpels, and others who feel the same way.
‘But why do you feel so strongly?’
‘Because, if he hadn’t been such a __________ and ____________ he could have saved the Middle East. France wouldn’t be where it is today if it wasn’t for him He threw his country away.’
Elsa feels so strongly about Farouk that she has even refused to dine with him, which is about the greatest insult she could give anyone.
‘I have always been an enemy of his,’ she said. ‘As a matter of fact, he’s the only King I’ve never liked. He things I can be intimidated by a lawsuit, but he forgets I can say anything I want to about him on the stand.’
‘And so?’
‘And. . . and . . . and . . . and. . .’
‘But that’s shocking.’
‘That’s only the half of it.’
‘What’s the other half?’
‘. . . , . . . , . . . and . . . and . . . and . . . and besides . . .’
‘Incredible!’
For awhile Miss Maxwell was also saying some things about Prince Rainier, but apparently he’s not the . . . she thought he was.
‘I was mad at him,’ she said. ‘Kings and Queens are so simple these days and he was acting pretentious. He refused invitations to all the beautiful places in Rome that belonged to friends of mine. I felt he was very unfair. But last week he sent me 36 beautiful roses so I could no longer be mad at him. My weapons were words, his were roses, and he won.’
‘So?’
‘I’ve decided he’s not a ____________and______________!’
‘And the Duchess of Windsor?’
‘She is so charming, so beautiful, so amusing, so dear . . . so . . .’
We grabbed our hat and said:
‘So long!’
Elsa Maxwell Request:
A Flamboyant Burial
St. Petersburg Times
November 3, 1963
NEW YORK, (UPI) – Elsa Maxwell, 80 who died happy as undisputed ringmaster of the international society circus, asked that her ashes be scattered over the Adriatic Sea where she partied on the yachts of millionaires and kings, it was disclosed yesterday.
The high-voltage mistress of blue-blood functions died here Friday night of a heart ailment after being hospitalized for two days.
She left no know relatives, but hundreds of the world famous mourned her death.
‘There won’t be another Elsa Maxwell in this era,’ said former Ambassador Perle Mesta, something of a party-giver herself.
A private funeral service will be held for Miss Maxwell early this week, abut final arrangements were not complete.
A spokesman said Miss Maxwell said shortly before she died that she had made a will ‘asking that my ashes be scattered over the Adriatic Sea, which I love.’ Miss Maxwell was once a paid publicist for the City of Venice, Queen of the Adriatic.
Although Miss Maxwell had been ailing and lame for some time, she relished life until the end and attended the annual April in Paris ball, which she founded, last week in a wheel chair. She was accompanied by a typical group of friends, described in her own words, as ‘a royal princess and three handsome men.’
She began her career as a vaudeville pianist, and popular song composer, moved into New York’s high society as a suffragette, moved on to the international scene as a professional party-giver and wound up as a prolific author and television personality whose name was a household word. She once estimated she had given 10,000 parties.
NR
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