Inventing Elsa Maxwell: How an Irrepressible Nobody Conquered High Society, Hollywood, the Press, and the World by Staggs Sam

Author:Staggs, Sam [Staggs, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-10-15T21:00:00+00:00

22 How to Become a Movie Star at Fifty-five

Given that every day in Elsa’s life was tops, a climax, the summit of living, it is difficult to assign one period more importance than another. And yet her beachhead in Hollywood stands out because that rich province, previously unexplored by Elsa, capitulated overnight. Alexander the Great and Napoleon would have gaped at her conquest.

Elsa arrived in Hollywood not starry-eyed but silver-tongued. Anything Hollywood said, Elsa said better, and besides, they couldn’t bullshit a bullshitter. She knew already any number of Hollywood names, and while the studios, the stars, the party circuit, the glamour, and the gossip appealed to her celebrity quest, she could take it or leave it. Like Mae West, Elsa was no little girl in a big town; she was a big girl from a big town comin’ to make good in a little town.

She spoke her mind from the minute she stepped off the train. From the Hollywood Citizen-News in 1932: “Elsa Maxwell, world’s most famous party thrower, says our Hollywood variety of party is plain dull.” The columnist quoted Elsa at length on the wrongs of entertaining à la Hollywood. Nor did Elsa hide her boredom at a failed Hollywood soiree. The same paper, a week later: “Fifty or so guests at the Lionel Atwill home the other evening waited in vain for an introduction to the guest of honor, Elsa Maxwell. While the guests were left to their own devices, Miss Maxwell sat off in a secluded corner in rapt conversation with Lilyan Tashman. She did not play or sing, neither did she deliver any of the pungent epigrams for which she is noted. The celebrities at that party still are wondering how Miss Maxwell became famous as a hostess. And the Atwills are still making apologies.” (Tashman was a big star in her day. When she died in 1934 at age thirty-eight, ten thousand people filled the streets around the Brooklyn cemetery where she was interred.)

Elsa hated the shop talk that dominated Hollywood parties, so she made sure that box office receipts in Omaha would never be discussed where she was hostess. Since actors crave attention always, Elsa asked the stars to perform at her gatherings. According to her, it struck everyone as a revolutionary innovation. “I made the piano, not the bar, the center of activity,” she said. One night, to launch the Elsa Maxwell party brand in this new territory, she invited about twenty people to a small house she had rented in Beverly Hills. Among them: Noël Coward, who needed no coaxing. He strolled to the piano and sang one of his latest songs. Next, Marlene Dietrich did “Die Fesche Lola” from The Blue Angel. By now, everyone had caught the excitement, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. did a satirical imitation of Hitler, who, in the early thirties, seemed as much farce as menace. Fanny Brice revived a comic skit from the Ziegfeld Follies, and a very young girl from Texas who had a date with someone on the guest list stood up and sang a tune.

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