Word: elsas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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R.S.V.P.: ELSA MAXWELL'S OWN STORY (326 pp.)-Elsa Maxwell-Little, Brown...
...Elsa Maxwell was obviously destined to be the life of the party from birth. That occasion came one memorable evening in the back of a theater box at Keokuk, Iowa. Her mother had miscalculated and had confidently gone to the opera that evening. Elsa's birth cry rose mightily in the middle of a road company mezzo's big aria and overpowered an ill-fated Mignon. After that impressive debut, Elsa grew up poor, plain and plump. Her father was an insurance man and part-time drama critic. But she could play the piano and, to hear...
Through the Uppercrust. Even before she ran away from home with a troupe of traveling Shakespearean players, Elsa met (through her father's theatrical friends) the great Caruso and a couple of Jacks: London and Barrymore. She traveled to Europe and Africa as the piano accompanist of a vaudeville singer, and soon she had cut her way through the upper crust of three continents. Included among the names she drops: Actress Elsie Jams' mother, a thrifty Ohio housewife intent on buying her way into British society ("John dear, fetch a 75? Corona for the noble lord"), Mrs. O.H.P...
During World War I Elsa hit the charity trail. She topped the big time at a gala for French war orphans in New York's Metropolitan Opera House by producing the notoriously unproducible Marshal Joffre. The hero of the Marne had secretly agreed to be taken prisoner, and Elsa had him "captured" by a National Guard cavalry escort. She went on in triumph to the Peace Conference and captured Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, as her dinner guest at the Ritz. Elsa was firmly launched as the hostess who combined a touch of Mme. de Recamier with the flair...
...strangest lady on Fifth Avenue. Her face looked a little like a reduced version of Elsa Lanchester's, her flower-covered, tubular body was rooted in the ground, and for a hat she wore a fragment of a vase full of spreading greenery. She looked like Maud who had finally come into the garden and been left there too long. The lady was all clay, and the creation of Denmark's Bjorn Wiinblad (rhymes with keen blot), one of the brightest ceramists in the business...