The Press: Elsa at War

“Elsa Maxwell is a stoutish lady who has won something of a national reputation for throwing gay parties.

“On the basis of that rather dubious claim to fame, some 20 impressionable newspapers buy her syndicated wares which are presented in a rather fluffy column to attract what we once called the gum-chewing trade.”

Thus, in his first “Publisher’s Notebook” column for his newly purchased Chicago Daily News, dynamic John S. Knight launched a blast at civilian complacency in general, at exuberant Elsa Maxwell’s recent Hollywood “Victory Party,” celebrating the liberation of France, in particular. Concluded Publisher Knight: “I’m afraid it made me retch” (TIME, Oct. 30).

Last week in her own syndicated column, “Elsa Maxwell’s Party Line,” which is printed not by 20 but by 35 U.S. newspapers, the “World’s Greatest Hostess” cracked back: “Speak for yourself, John.” Declared she: “In ordinary times, such notice . . . would be flattering. Today it reflects something peculiar in the sense of proportion of certain segments of the Fourth Estate. … I pit my record against yours on the fight for freedom. My party . . . had behind it one single purpose: to bring every influential force in this country into a liberal, intelligent front against reaction, and for both a military and a democratic victory.”

Later in the week, from the depths of a rumpled bed in Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria, beside the dictaphone to which she confides notes for her daily column, the fabulous Elsa admitted that she had been very angry with Mr. Knight. She could think of no one he could accuse of superficiality with less justice than herself. Her Paris party, she said, was not a party at all: “It was a very beautiful dedication.” Perhaps, she added, Mr. Knight was angry because he wasn’t invited. “Don’t you think so?”

Laughs … “I like best of all,” Elsa once observed, “the sincerity in the anxious eyes of all the little American women who are trying to be useful to their country.” Elsa, not little but conspicuously American, considers her parties, like her “Line,” an important contribution to the nation’s morale. She once swore she would never do a column, because she hates gossip and abhors café society (“The only society I recognize is that of intellect and talent”). Only because “people needed to laugh more” did she yield in 1941 when Paul Winkler of Press Alliance syndicate offered her 40% of the gross proceeds if she would try her hand at columning.

. . . and Philosophy. But all is not laughter with Elsa, who claims she is really two people. Her other self is intensely “interested in profound philosophy ” and feels that through her column she can bring an understanding of authors like Rousseau, Freud, Lao-Tse, and Tolstoy to many people who might never otherwise get to know them. In the same way, she declares, her parties are really organized to bring intellects together in an informal atmosphere. She is proud of having invented such games as Treasure Hunt and Scavenger Hunt, because of their psychological importance. Not unmindful of science (she once devoted most of a column to the fact that she has never had to blow her nose), she says: “Let’s break them down scientifically. In the Treasure Hunt . . . intellectual men were paired off with great beauties, glamor with talent. In the course of the nights escapades anything could happen.”

Elsa, who admits she is not a great writer, was rather pleased that Publisher Knight had called her column “fluffy.” “I try hard to be fluffy,” she says, “but it isn’t easy, you know.” Being friends with the famous of two continents has proved a weighty and sobering responsibility for her. She prides herself on her political insight. Said she last week, slapping her dictaphone: “Politically I have been right. I have called the turn on everything.”

Of the war she says, “I have done as much as any woman my age [63*] could do.” With her column to produce daily (she is assisted by a ghostwriter), a heavy schedule of voluntary entertainment for servicemen, a movie (Weekend at the Waldorf) in the making, Author-Actress Maxwell commutes frequently between her Waldorf apartment and Hollywood, where she lives with Evalyn Walsh McLean and the Hope diamond. Having been at one time or other in her career a pianist, composer, vaudevillian, singer, music critic, impresario and hotel keeper, she now describes herself as homeless, without a possession in the world, and terribly busy. Fortnight hence, after the Dec. 7 premiere of her “beloved crony” Cole Porter’s new musical Seven Lively Arts, she plans to give a party for the cast. “They’ve got to have supper somewhere. They might as well have it with me.”

But the party will not begin until 12:15 a.m., Dec. 8, “so people like Mr. Knight won’t be able to accuse me of celebrating Pearl Harbor.”

* Elsa Maxwell was born in a box at the opera in Keokuk, Iowa, during a performance of Mignon.