Inventing Elsa Maxwell
by Sam Staggs
St. Martin’s Press
One of the most widely successful high-society hostesses in the world has been described as:
“The ugliest woman I’ve ever seen.”
“Shaped like a cottage loaf with currant eyes.”
“A fat old son of a bitch!”
Yet, as the Duke of Windsor put it, the “old battering-ram Elsa gives the best parties.”
Elsa Maxwell was the frumpy queen, the dowdy denizen of high society, a woman who had neither looks nor pedigree, yet all of white-gloved society bowed to her for an invitation to one of her outrageous soirees.
Earls and dukes hobnobbed with Cole Porter and Marilyn Monroe at her events, which ranged from murder-mystery parties to barnyard-themed hoedowns on Park Avenue.
She was as “famous a name as Martha Stewart or Joan Rivers today,” notes author Sam Staggs in a new biography, and her legendary parties — of which she’s thrown over 3,000 according to her own estimations — made international news spanning decades from the 1910s to the 1960s.
Maxwell, with a no-name family and a minor inheritance, managed to climb the social ladder by aligning herself with powerful benefactresses, many of whom were allegedly her lovers.
Maxwell sums her own childhood up in one neat sentence: “A short, fat, homely piano player from Keokuk, Iowa, with no money or background who decided to become a legend.”
Rarely does life fit into such a neat archetype — and when it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. And so it goes with Elsa’s largely fabricated backstory.
She only spent a little over a year of her toddler life in Iowa. Shortly after her christening in 1882, her family moved to San Francisco and never returned to the Midwest.
And her family was far from poor. Her father, who spent his days as a successful insurance salesman, also worked as a Pacific Coast correspondent for the New York newspaper the Dramatic Mirror, covering theater and art.
Still, they were nowhere near A-list status. Often, Maxwell would later recall, her family would not be invited to events because as her mother put it, “We weren’t rich enough.”
This was Maxwell’s tragedy, one that she would make good: “Some day I would give parties — big parties, expensive parties — to which no rich people would be invited. That is, of course, unless they happened to be nice people or talented people as well,” Maxwell said in a 1941 interview.
She got another nudge toward the pursuit of her unique version of the high life from her father on his deathbed.
“It won’t be easy for you after I’m gone,” he told his daughter. “You are plain and plump, and as time goes by you will get plainer and plumper. You can turn your looks into an asset because no woman will be jealous of you and no man will be suspicious of you.”
In 1907, Maxwell moved to the Big Apple with only $3 in her purse, and began playing the piano and writing songs. She also struck up a relationship with coal industry heiress Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon, “Dickie” for short.
Their affair would last on-and-off for 51 years. And though Dickie took on her fair share of male lovers, she always returned to Maxwell.
Through Dickie, Maxwell was introduced to New York’s elite names from the Vanderbilts to the Whitneys and began singing and entertaining at parties.
She often boasted that “never in my life have I been depressed, and never tired.” Her enthusiasm seemed to be catching. And many powerful and wealthy women — such as Vanderbilt divorcee and Rothschild wife Mrs. Alva Belmont and Millicent Hearst — footed her bills in exchange for a bit of her je ne sais quoi.
Within 10 years, Maxwell had risen from piano-playing friend of a friend to the main event. Her treasure-hunt parties, boating excursions and charity balls were the stuff of legend.
One party — a murder mystery set in London — in particular propelled her into fame. The hostess (who was in on the gag) pretended to be worried about her houseguest Zita Jungman, a young model, who had not arrived to be seated for the dinner.
Maxwell gathered the guests to search Zita’s room and found the model’s “dead” body on the bed, complete with a “bloody wound” through the chest. As people screamed and panicked, the butler corralled the party into one room where “detectives” arrived and pinned the crime on the Duke of Marlborough.
Once the farce was revealed, the Duke was a good sport about being a murder suspect. The headline in the paper the next day: “Mayfair Party ‘Murder.’ Girl ‘Stabbed’ to Death”
Maxwell held a hoedown at the Waldorf, where women were rounded up for cow-milking contests. One party even featured a troupe of trained seals.
She threw a “Come as Your Opposite Party” at the Ritz-Carlton in New York — George Gershwin came as Groucho Marx; Fanny Brice dressed as Tosca; Cole Porter arrived as a football player; and Virginia Fair Vanderbilt came as Elsa Maxwell herself.
She also threw a “Come as You Were” party in Paris in 1927, requiring all attendees to arrive in the state of dress that they were when the invitation arrived. (Invitations were sent at all odd hours of the day and night.) Women wore slips; men arrived without pants. One artist even arrived in a dressing gown with a telephone on one ear and shaving cream smeared on half of his face.
Despite all this she loathed the idea that she was “hired” to give parties and often snapped at interviewers who said as much, saying, “I never give parties professionally.”
Yet the parties are what made her famous — infamous really. She released her own perfume line, at $40 an ounce the most expensive ever yet marketed, called Joy.
As for the rent, little “Christmas gifts” from friends got her by. Stagg relates that, after Maxwell’s mother died, a group of aristocratic ladies were saying how sorry they were when one admitted that she loaned her $5,000 for the burial. All of the other women disagreed — because they were the ones who had loaned her $5,000 for the burial!
In addition to setting the social schedule of the upper echelon of society, she also was a columnist —and even wrote about politics and parties for The New York Post. She also began appearing regularly on Jack Paar’s talk show, where the host would introduce her as “the Orphan Annie of the Waldorf.”
Though her home away from home was on the 26th floor of the Waldorf (she even helped lure Porter, the Shah of Iran and Marilyn as guests), she was decidedly peripatetic, calling herself “Europe’s pioneer press agent.”
Surprisingly, that designation is not entirely far-fetched. Maxwell helped spur on tourism in Venice by suggesting to officials there that they host a regatta. She even told the Prince of Monaco to acquire beachfront property to improve the country’s reputation with tourists.
But it was the beauty she could never woo, opera singer Maria Callas, who broke her heart.
The two met after Maxwell had written several fairly scathing column about Callas’ performance. But Callas won the columnist over during their first meeting, when she insisted: “You are the one woman in New York I do want to meet, because — you are honest.”
Maxwell was smitten. And Callas had found a powerful supporter.
Yet on a return flight home from a concert in Dallas, the two had a serious falling out when, the author suggests, as a result of “Maria’s rebuffing of Elsa’s sexual overtures.”
This can only be confirmed by the existing letter that Maxwell sent Callas that same year: “I had to write to thank you for having been the innocent victim of the greatest love one human being could feel for another.”
It was a goodbye letter and Callas was already gone — in the arms of Aristotle Onassis, who would later leave her for Jacqueline Kennedy.
But despite her ups and downs, we can be certain even Maxwell’s death, in 1963, wasn’t boring.
“If I knew I were to die tomorrow, I’d want my epitaph to be, ‘I die happy,’ ” she told an interviewer late in life. “For I was born gay, and my life has been glorious, transcendently magical, full of glamour.”