Elsa has boasted: “I’m full of beans. You can’t embarrass an old woman like me.” Four of her friends once sat together at luncheon in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Each came from a different city, and each was well up in society. One woman steered the conversation to the subject of their common friend: “I felt desperately sorry for her when Elsa’s mother died in Los Angeles. She sent me a cable from Paris, saying she hadn’t a bean and would I cable $3000 so she could bury her mother. Of course, I was happy to.”
The woman across the table broke in. “But I had the same kind of cable, and I sent the money. It was I who buried Elsa’s mother.”
The third woman could scarcely believe her ears. “But I mailed Elsa a check for the same purpose.”
The fourth of them, who lived in San Francisco, said quietly: “You are all mistaken. My husband knew Elsa and her mother well. He had several cables from Elsa like that over the years. Finally, she convinced him she was telling the truth one day, but he went down to Los Angeles to make certain. Sure enough, her mother had died. My husband took care of her funeral.”
Elsa and I met again in San Francisco, during the birth there of the United Nations in 1945. Ina Claire was giving a party for Averell Harriman, who was then our ambassador to Moscow. As a joke, she confided to six other guests, including Elsa and myself, that each of us was the guest of honor. Harriman told us off-the-record tales of the horrors committed by Stalin and his gang. “How can you talk like that to us,” I demanded, “when you say just the opposite to the newspapers?”
“It couldn’t be printed,” was his only reply.
Elsa sailed away with that party, if you could believe what she wrote about it. She was Ina Claire’s real guest of honor—so Elsa said. Her special brand of self-promotion demands that she has a celebrated name to play on. She built her own reputation by using other people’s names, such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as the drawing card. She took up Maria Callas, and with the burning-eyed prima donna beside her, Elsa could attract virtually anybody into the Maxwell circle.
I was introduced to Callas and her then husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, by Henry Sell, who runs Town and Country magazine. He gave a luncheon for the three of us at Pavillon. I did my bit, in turn, by introducing Maria to some people sitting directly across from us who were members of the board of the San Francisco Opera. “Why don’t you get her to open your season?” I prompted. Later, it was arranged that she would do just that, in Lucia di Lammermoor, the coming September and, in October, also launch the Los Angeles season.
But before either event could take place, Callas went to Europe and met Elsa, who fell hook, line, and sinker for her. The verbal bouquets blossomed in every Maxwell column. Overnight, Maria became “my favorite friend ... La Prima Donna del Mondo ... a goddess ... a joy forever.” She was out until all hours, caught up in a hectic round of parties. Preparations for Lucia got lost by the wayside. Only a matter of days before she was due to arrive in San Francisco, she canceled out.
Elsa couldn’t forgive what I promptly wrote about her loved one, Maria: “The day of the temperamental opera star is over; has been for some time. Her rich husband, a businessman, should know you can’t do business that way.” San Francisco opera lovers couldn’t forgive Maria.