Little Girl from Keokuk

R.S.V.P.: ELSA MAXWELL'S OWN STORY (326 pp.)--Elsa Maxwell--Little, Brown ($5).

Elsa Maxwell was obviously destined to be the life of the party from birth. That occasion came one memorable evening in the back of a theater box at Keokuk, Iowa. Her mother had miscalculated and had confidently gone to the opera that evening. Elsa's birth cry rose mightily in the middle of a road company mezzo's big aria and overpowered an ill-fated Mignon. After that impressive debut, Elsa grew up poor, plain and plump. Her father was an insurance man and part-time drama critic. But she could play the piano and, to hear her tell it, attracted people "by the gaiety I radiate as naturally as I breathe." R.S.V.P. is Elsa's amusing, gossipy story of how the poor, plain, plump girl from Keokuk, Iowa radiated so much gaiety and attracted so many celebrities that she became a celebrity herself.

Through the Uppercrust. Even before she ran away from home with a troupe of traveling Shakespearean players, Elsa met (through her father's theatrical friends) the great Caruso and a couple of Jacks: London and Barrymore. She traveled to Europe and Africa as the piano accompanist of a vaudeville singer, and soon she had cut her way through the upper crust of three continents. Included among the names she drops: Actress Elsie Jams' mother, a thrifty Ohio housewife intent on buying her way into British society ("John dear, fetch a 75-c- Corona for the noble lord"), Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, arbiter of New York society ("Every woman should marry twice--the first time for money, the second time for love"), and Sir Lionel Phillips, a South African millionaire who would look at his own portrait and sardonically quote Whistler: "The innate vulgarity of the subject almost exceeds that of the painter."

During World War I Elsa hit the charity trail. She topped the big time at a gala for French war orphans in New York's Metropolitan Opera House by producing the notoriously unproducible Marshal Joffre. The hero of the Marne had secretly agreed to be taken prisoner, and Elsa had him "captured" by a National Guard cavalry escort. She went on in triumph to the Peace Conference and captured Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, as her dinner guest at the Ritz. Elsa was firmly launched as the hostess who combined a touch of Mme. de Recamier with the flair of P. T. Barnum.

Christmas Every Day. Elsa entertained kings and queens, broke bread with half the British Cabinet, got on first-name terms with most of the Almanack de Gotha. But she refused to meet Mussolini, and her telegraphed reply to an invitation to dine with Farouk I of Egypt went straight to the point: "I do not associate with clowns, monkeys or corrupt gangsters." Every now and then the plain, plump little girl from Keokuk speaks up: "I like pretty girls, too, at parties; they're cheaper and more decorative than flowers." Elsa insists that all her partying was done just for good clean fun and loud laughter, and that neither money nor sex ever appealed to her. After a half-hour chat with Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis murmured to Elsa what she took to be "a passing grade" in emotional development: "A healthy woman who will never suffer from neuroses . . ."

She has spent a lifetime living well at small cost to herself, and bringing profit and pleasure to others. Today, for the publicity she brings, a top Paris dressmaker supplies her with 14 dresses a year on the house. She can invite a score of guests to one of the smartest Paris restaurants and the check will be "lost." Elsa has what it takes. At 71, she is still going strong, still feels "like a little girl on Christmas morning," expecting that "something wonderfully exciting is about to happen." Most likely, it will be another party for an awful lot of famous people who will have a wonderful time. Readers of this lively book about a fabulous life will have a fine time, too.

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