Elsa Maxwell

Elsa Maxwell was born on May 24, 1883, in Keokuk, Iowa, and died on November 1, 1963, in a Manhattan hospital of heart failure. Though a story circulated for years that she had been born in a theater during a performance of the opera Mignon, Maxwell admitted late in life that she had fabricated the tale and had in fact been born at her maternal grandmother's home in Keokuk. She was raised in San Francisco, where her father worked as an insurance salesman and contributed freelance writing to the New York Dramatic Mirror. Her father did not believe in formal education and tutored her at home, meaning Maxwell never completed grammar school.

Maxwell's career spanned Broadway, film, radio, and print journalism. Her Broadway appearances ran from 1909 to 1935 and included the productions De Luxe and The Richest Girl. On screen, she co-starred in Hotel for Women (1939), for which she also wrote the screenplay and a song, playing the role of Mrs. Tilford. She appeared as herself in Stage Door Canteen (1943) and Rhapsody in Blue (1945), as well as in Public Deb No. 1 (1940), the short subjects The Lady and the Lug (1941) and Throwing a Party (1941), and Main Street to Broadway (1953). During the Depression she worked on movie shorts, without success.

In 1942, Maxwell launched two parallel media ventures: a syndicated gossip column based at the New York Post and a radio program called Elsa Maxwell's Party Line, for which Esther Bradford Aresty served as writer and producer. These platforms brought her an audience of millions in the years following World War II.

Maxwell became equally celebrated as a professional hostess whose parties drew royalty and high society figures. Her interest in entertaining traced back to age twelve, when she was excluded from a party because her family lacked money. She developed a talent for devising games and diversions, and built a livelihood around treasure-hunt parties, come-as-your-opposite parties, and similar events. She is credited with introducing the scavenger hunt and treasure hunt as party games in the modern era; a scavenger hunt she organized in Paris in 1927 caused disturbances across the city. In Venice in the early 1920s, she drew figures including Cole Porter, Tallulah Bankhead, Noël Coward, and Fanny Brice to the Lido shoreline for its daytime amenities and evening parties. The principality of Monaco subsequently engaged her services to establish it as a tourist destination, as she had done for the Lido. The Waldorf Astoria gave her a suite rent-free when it opened in New York in 1931, hoping her presence would attract wealthy clientele.

Porter and Maxwell maintained a lifelong friendship, and he referenced her in several songs, among them "I'm Throwing a Ball Tonight" from Panama Hattie, sung by Ethel Merman, and "I'm Dining with Elsa (and her ninety-nine most intimate friends)." Maxwell is also mentioned in Rodgers and Hart's "I Like to Recognize the Tune" from Too Many Girls, Irving Berlin's "The Hostess With the Mostes' on the Ball" from Call Me Madam, and "Listen, Cosette!" from Sherry.

Maxwell played a direct role in the career of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. Bergen had spent seventeen years performing in small theaters before seeking her assistance. After persistent telephone calls, Maxwell agreed to meet him. When Bergen demonstrated his act with Charlie McCarthy, Maxwell was immediately impressed and arranged for crooner Rudy Vallée to give Bergen a spot on his radio program. Maxwell also took credit for introducing Rita Hayworth to Prince Aly Khan in the summer of 1948, and both Anne Edwards's biography of Maria Callas and Peter Evans's biography of Aristotle Onassis credit Maxwell with introducing Callas to Onassis. Edwards additionally claims that Maxwell developed an obsessive romantic attachment to Callas, who was forty years her junior, a claim supported by love letters Maxwell wrote to Callas that were produced by Callas biographer Stelios Galatopoulos.

In 1953, Maxwell published a single issue of a magazine titled Elsa Maxwell's Café Society, featuring a portrait of Zsa Zsa Gabor on the cover. That same decade, her friendship with the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson drew considerable publicity in the United States. Maxwell had encountered the Duke on several occasions when he was the Prince of Wales and became acquainted with both him and the Duchess in 1946, when all three were living at the Waldorf Astoria Apartments in New York. Their friendship deepened the following year in France, and the Duke and Duchess entertained Maxwell, and sometimes her partner Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon, at their Riviera chateau, while also attending Maxwell's parties in Paris, Monte Carlo, New York, and elsewhere. A falling-out between Maxwell and Wallis Simpson was first reported in May 1953 and became a recurring subject in American gossip columns over the following years. In April 1957, columnist Cholly Knickerbocker announced a reconciliation following a letter Maxwell sent after newspapers accused her of deliberately upstaging Wallis by arranging for Marilyn Monroe to make a late entrance at a party, drawing attention away from the Duchess.

Maxwell shared a partnership of nearly fifty years with Scottish singer Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon, known as Dickie. The two met in 1912 and remained together until Maxwell's death. Maxwell was a closeted lesbian who publicly condemned same-sex relationships. In a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace, she stated that she had known from a young age that she did not belong in marriage and that she belonged instead to the world. In the late 1950s, Loretta Swit worked as Maxwell's personal secretary. Fellowes-Gordon was Maxwell's sole heir. Maxwell's last public appearance came one week before her death, when she attended the annual April in Paris Ball, which she had helped found, arriving in a wheelchair. She is buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.