Maxwell, Elsa

▪ American writer and hostess

born May 24, 1883, Keokuk, Iowa, U.S.

died Nov. 1, 1963, New York, N.Y.

      American columnist, songwriter, and professional hostess, famous for her lavish and animated parties that feted the high-society and entertainment personalities of her day.

      Maxwell grew up in California. She left school at age 14 but later claimed to have continued her education at the University of California and the Sorbonne. Although she never had a music lesson, she began to earn a living as a theatre pianist and accompanist in her early teens. She left San Francisco in 1905 as an odd-jobs girl in a Shakespearean troupe and subsequently appeared in vaudeville and for a time in South African music halls. In 1907 she began to write songs, and she eventually published some 80 compositions.

      About this time Maxwell started meeting socially important people, showing up at soirées in the United States and in Europe, and working her way up the social ladder into the international set. By the end of World War I she was giving parties for royalty and high society throughout Europe. She organized the International Motor Boat Races at the Lido in Venice (1925–26) and in 1926, under the auspices of the prince of Monaco, planned the Monte Carlo Beach Club, the Casino Hotel, and the Piscine Restaurants of Monte Carlo. Her renowned parties were noted not only for her chic guests but also for the novelties Maxwell devised to keep them amused. She was credited with inventing the “scavenger hunt” that became a popular party game in the 1930s. Maxwell returned to New York City in the early 1930s, but the Depression prompted her to move to Hollywood in 1938, where she appeared in several not very successful movie shorts, including Elsa Maxwell's Hotel for Women (1939) and The Lady and the Lug (1940). She later appeared in Stage Door Canteen (1943).

      Her radio program, Elsa Maxwell's Party Line, began in 1942; she also wrote a syndicated gossip column. All the while she continued to organize parties for prominent social figures. In 1936 her I Live by My Wits was published serially in Harper's Bazaar, and two years later her Life of Barbara Hutton was serialized in Cosmopolitan. Her autobiography, R.S.V.P., appeared in 1954. In 1957 she published How to Do It: The Lively Art of Entertaining and began making weekly television appearances on Jack Paar's Tonight show.

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