Elsa Maxwell

Vanity Fair May 1934

flashback

The summer season leaps out of the gate this month at Royal Ascot. But while Elizabeth II weighs what to do about her wayward brood, social queen Elsa Maxwell, here crowned by royal photographer Cecil Beaton, always knew how to sit very firmly on her throne. An Iowabom "faded beauty by the age of four," whose tutor was hanged for murder, Maxwell became what George Bernard Shaw called the "eighth wonder of the world." She was censured twice by Parliament for her licentiously madcap soirees, conferred with everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to the Duke of Windsor, and was deemed by Dr. Freud "a healthy woman who would never have neuroses." And while she may seem a more apt icon for the eighties, pioneering as she did a P.R. and "charity ball" boom, Maxwell also set the tone for recessionary chic. "The best parties are given by those who can't afford them," she claimed, and demonstrated it by being evicted from her two-room flat on the same night she opened her Parisian boite with headliner Josephine Baker. And she partied heartiest for suffragettes and the French Resistance—which proves she wasn't just another reveler without a cause.