"EIGHTH WONDER" SYNDICATED

Dumpling, 58-year-old Elsa Maxwell, professional party-thrower and No. 1 U.S. hedonist, will "do anything for a laugh--with me or at me." (Once, hard-pressed for a laugh, Elsa threw a banana peel on the stairs, laughed and laughed as she bounced black & blue to the bottom.) But one thing she drew the line at was writing a gossip column. So last week she turned columnist.

The fabulous Elsa signed a five-year contract to write a six-day-a-week syndicated column, Elsa Maxwell's Particles. Her reason: a laughter shortage in national defense. "It is a matter of morale," she says, "to be as happy as you can through it all."

Incidental, according to Elsa, who scorns all "stodgy security," is the fact that her column will pay well. It starts in 20 papers with a circulation of 3,000,000.

Breezily dictaphoned in her swanky, cluttered Waldorf-Astoria apartment, her first columns anecdotalized her famed party guests, repeated such well-known Elsiana as the story of how she rejected a gift of $5,000 worth of jewels from Cartier's, instead hired Fritz Kreisler for that sum to play at a Paris party. (Afterwards, she alleges, Bernard Shaw "rushed up and pointed a finger at my nose. 'Tell me just one thing,' he said, 'is it true? If it is, you are the eighth wonder of the world.' ")

In print, unfortunately, Elsa is not so entertaining as when bubbling in her energetic flesh.

A newcomer to the U.S. is the syndicate which signed up Elsa. Called Press Alliance, Inc., it is headed by Paul Winkler, a slight, 43-year-old, U.S.-admiring Frenchman who, until the Nazis arrived, operated Europe's largest feature syndicate (Opera Mundi). A sort of French version of Hearst's King Features (whose representative Winkler was for years), Opera Mundi differed from U.S. syndicates in two respects: It also acted as a literary agency and publisher of magazines. It had the largest women's magazine (Confidences: circ. approximately 1,000,000), three children's magazines, including a Mickey Mouse weekly with a circulation of over 400,000; Presse-Publicite, sort of a French combination of Editor & Publisher and Printer's Ink. Reason for these successes, says Winkler, was his adoption of U.S. editorial and advertising techniques rather than the venal methods of the kept French press.

Except for Elsa's column Press Alliance thus far has acquired only syndicate small fry, notably a South American comic strip called G. Whiskers. But Press Alliance has started patiently to expand along the lines of its Blitzkrieged French predecessor. So far Winkler has sold U.S. publishers three books by Genevieve Tabouis, Pierre Lazareff, H.R. Knickerbocker.

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