Elsa Maxwell is a curious figure in world history because she was famous for throwing amazing parties and being friends with famous people, but she also shows up in the background of other biographies and memoirs of the period with what can only be described as a dark air of menace — as in Philip Van Rensselaer’s Million Dollar Baby, where Elsa is portrayed as a person who lures rich young women into marriages with con artist playboys and then takes a cut of the dowry money. This is most vividly shown when young Barbara Hutton is offered up to Alexis Mdivani, who takes full advantage of Barbara’s youth, inexperience, and romantic temperament to seduce her over the course of several years while he himself was married. Of course, Elsa remembers this quite differently and claims in her autobiography, I Married the World, that she never would do such a thing and indeed just loves love and setting people up, but she would never ask for any money for it and really has been poor her whole life! She’s a simple beacon of joy and happiness who wants to throw parties.
Sufficed to say this book should be read with a huge grain of salt. I will never really know the absolute truth about what Elsa was up to, and I’m sure many of the negative rumors about her are untrue. But there’s a tone under the surface of this book that my mother immediately clocked when I read her a random excerpt. Elsa is out for Elsa’s own good and that’s it. She also was a closeted lesbian who has a whole ugly section in this book where she rails against gay men and says they should all be socially ostracized. I understand that she could not be openly gay at the time, and even that she might have had to openly say she was against gay people in order to remain safe, but there is a rage and hatred in her descriptions of gay people and a desire for their extermination from society that goes beyond a smokescreen to protect oneself. She was with Dickie Fellowes-Gordon 51 years and left her her whole estate! Her best friend Cole Porter was also a closeted gay man and she had to have known that! The whole thing again smacks of a very smooth operator who was willing to do whatever it took, and beyond, to be successful, and the ugly tone and anecdotes about mean things she said or did are a constant throughout this book.
To her credit, she also did a lot for charity and some kind things as well, because people are complicated and can be not all one thing. I do think she loved seeing people happy and throwing a fun party. She invented the use of the murder mystery party, scavenger hunts, and treasure hunts in the modern day. She helped to put Venice and Monte Carlo on the map as vacation destinations. She was everywhere, knew everyone, and name drops endlessly throughout this book — Einstein, FDR, the Duke and Wallis, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, Duff Cooper, Cole Porter, movie stars, theater stars, writers, fashion designers, painters, poets, singers, musicians — everyone who was anyone is here and Elsa has a story about them, usually about how she helped them to accomplish something. She is always in the right place at the right time. It does make for interesting reading if you enjoy social gossip of the 20th century, which I very much do. But I was doubtful of the truth throughout in terms of her internal thoughts and feelings, and I’m going to have to read a biography of her to puzzle out where the facts really lie. This was worthwhile for me but I didn’t leave it loving her, as I think she really wanted me to.