Word: elsas
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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...
Christmas Every Day. Elsa entertained kings and queens, broke bread with half the British Cabinet, got on first-name terms with most of the Almanack de Gotha. But she refused to meet Mussolini, and her telegraphed reply to an invitation to dine with Farouk I of Egypt went straight to the point: "I do not associate with clowns, monkeys or corrupt gangsters." Every now and then the plain, plump little girl from Keokuk speaks up: "I like pretty girls, too, at parties; they're cheaper and more decorative than flowers." Elsa insists that all her partying was done just...