Elsa Maxwell gave to the world of society, in which boredom is the occupational disease, an illusion that it was composed of marvelously amusing people having a wonderful time. They thanked her for it by giving her a free ride through the caviar-and-champagne life, the transatlantic life, the gaspy-gossipy life, which she enjoyed so much that she made lots of other people enjoy it too. She was a clown always ready and willing to take a pratfall, and she was often compared to a court jester. But Elsa was really a kind of super cruise director, working with diligence and resourcefulness to keep the passengers amused—sometimes even with each other.
Last week, at 80, a sad-faced woman with a failing heart, she died in a Manhattan hospital. She had helped form the manners and mores of the rich, the talented and the glamorously beautiful—though she herself was poor, uneducated, and wore her homeliness like a badge.
The very first thing Elsa did in her life was to steal the show; she was born in an opera box during a performance of Mignon, in Keokuk, Iowa. “My mother should have known better than to go to the opera that night,” she once observed. She grew up, fat and unhappy, in San Francisco, where her father was an insurance man and stringer for the New York Dramatic Mirror.
A Series of Disturbances. It was not until after World War I that Elsa began her blast-off on the trajectory that was to put her into international orbit for the rest of her life. She had an eye for the bright young comers—”darling Cole” Porter, with whose “secret songs” she sent many a titled gathering into a state of delicious shock; and, of course, “dear Noel” Coward.
The redoubtable Miss Maxwell soon discovered that she could not only keep a party going with her thumping piano and her grainy contralto—she could stage one like nobody’s business. She also learned that the established rich would pay for a party if it promised amusement, and the aspiring rich would pay to be insulted. She came up with all kinds of gimmicks—Treasure Hunt parties, Come-As-Your-Opposite parties (“I could have met my expenses selling tickets to psychiatrists”), Come-As-You-Were-When-the-Autobus-Called parties, and uncountable sessions of The Game.
A famous party was a scavenger hunt staged in Paris in 1927, with a gallon of Patou perfume awarded to the player who brought back the most unusual items. Recalls Elsa: “The players took off, and a series of disturbances promptly broke out all over Paris.”
Crushes & Feuds. Back in the U.S. during the Depression, Elsa tried her hand at some unsuccessful movie shorts in Hollywood and was in danger of sinking into an un-Maxwellian obscurity, when the postwar wave of international prosperity brought her back with a new cast of characters. Now she was a newspaper columnist, playing for an audience of millions her roles of social arbiter, super name-dropper, gossip and buffoon.
Her syndicated column gave her a new leverage in the publicity-oriented world of the jet-setters, and Elsa knew how to use it. In print she staged a schoolgirl crush over the late Aly Khan and an insult-fest with Opera Star Maria Callas. When she suddenly turned into a devout Callas admirer, gossipmongers inevitably asked each other in what language Callas’ husband, Industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini, had talked to Elsa. Maxwell readers also thrilled to a three-year feud with the Duchess of Windsor, which had its well-publicized happy ending aboard the United States on Easter Sunday 1957.
A Celebrity Anyhow. Elsa, whose face in repose was sometimes a touching contrast to the roly-poly jollity that was her public trademark, made as much copy out of her unsexiness as Zsa Zsa Gabor makes out of her libido. “Crawling out of bed, I girdled myself,” she would write, “with the aid of a block and tackle.” Or, “I’ve been favorably compared to a whale, a pachyderm, a hippopotamus, an untidy featherbed, an Eskimo igloo during the summer thaw, a charwoman at daybreak. Prince Christian of Hesse, spotting me in bathing costume offshore at Antibes, mistook me for a rubber mattress. But I became a celebrity anyhow.”
How did she do it? Her advice on the subject was characteristically blunt. “Widening one’s circle is not always a very ‘nice’ occupation. Let’s face it. It involves losing contact with those who insist on remaining at dead center . . . Climbing is an activity that most people seem to think reprehensible. Well, I am all for it.”
Down with Boredom. Elsa was a great matchmaker; she claimed credit, among others, for getting together Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan. But that kind of love was not for her. Once when she was a girl, a young man (named Baron Alexander von Schroeder) kissed her on the mouth. “It’s difficult to describe the feeling of revulsion that swept over me,” she reported. As she discovered later: “I never liked the idea of sex. I wouldn’t subject myself to it.” In the numerous costume parties she attended, she often came as a man.
Elsa Maxwell could not live without friends: “All I want is love from the world, and that is what I give it.” Or enemies: “I go hell-for-leather. People are terrified of me. I can say anything. Isn’t that dreadful? I don’t hate anyone. I dislike. But my dislike is the equivalent of anyone else’s hate.”
She wrote her own good epitaph when she said: “I’ve done my small part to stamp out boredom in certain quarters of this world where it threatened to become rampant. If I accomplish little else, I shall consider my life justified by that one fact. Down with boredom. It has to go.”
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