Word: elsas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Songs for a Smoke-Filled Room (Elsa Lanchester; Hifirecords LP). A fey, offbeat collection of songs both sprightly and shivery by the apricot-haired English comedienne, with tongue-in-jowl introductions by husband Charles Laughton. The selections range from Fiji Fanny, a raucous burlesque of the songs the trade calls "grass-skirt numbers," to a haunted, spine-crawling ditty titled If You Peek in My Gazebo, which tells the tale of a mad New England spinster who sits each evening in a summerhouse on the hill secretly watching the lusty young village bucks stroll...
...ELSA PARSONS...
...most wonderful week I have ever spent," Partygoer Elsa Maxwell, 74, submitted a rose-colored report from Venice, where "all class snobbishness is removed-the doorman at the hotel, the gondoliers, the bellboys, maids, duchesses, princesses, they are all the same: kind, sweet, delightful." So charged did she feel in the early hours of one of her own parties that, with large numbers of titled internationals hovering in the background and Soprano Maria Callas (a shapely unoperatic bathing beauty by day) beside her humming Stormy Weather, Elsa banged away at the piano, blew the saxophone, valiantly beat the drums-admittedly...
Covering the Mediterranean waterfront for the Hearst press, Elsa Maxwell tersely laid the scene of a Stavros Niarchos wingding-"The Creole, at anchor in the port of Villefranche, lay low in the water like a black panther of the sea"-pounded out the hard news with dispatch-"It was too funny for words. Mrs. Guinness took off her shoes. The Duchess did her conception of the calypso. Harold Vanderbilt begged me to dance with him. I refused only because, though I love Harold, I cannot dance"-but lost, control in her bread-and-butter blurb: "When I said good night...
...name-dropping autobiography, R.S.V.P., fickle Party Girl Elsa Maxwell, 74, dropped lowest of all the name of Egypt's fat, fatuous ex-King Farouk: "My R.S.V.P. to an invitation to dine with Farouk [in 1950] was a telegram to his equerry which read, 'I do not associate with clowns, monkeys or corrupt gangsters.' I learned that Farouk screamed like a pig-what else?-when he saw the telegram." Farouk, always in need of money, slapped a $14,000 defamation-of-character suit on Elsa, who also has little money but seldom needs it. The hearing ended last...