Recently I’ve been on something of an Elsa Maxwell kick.

After re-reading Cleveland Amory’s hilarious skewering of the glitterati entitled Who Killed Society in which he hoists Elsa Maxwell on her own petard, I went back to the books I have in my collection that she wrote and began to dip into them for amusement’s sake.

One might be surprised by the extent of Elsa Maxwell’s oeuvre. Besides her books on etiquette and entertaining, of which she wrote several, there are two memoirs, The Celebrity Circus and R. S. V. P. In England, the latter was published as I Married the World. I began to read this version and was immediately struck by its differences from the American edition. One chapter in particular stuck out like a sore thumb.

What I discovered is that for all her reputation as “the queen of Cafe Society” and the darling of the nabobs of the glitterati, Elsa Maxwell was an ungainly blowhard. She may have been the best friend of Cole Porter and Noel Coward, the nemesis of the Duchess of Windsor, and the tireless promoter of Maria Callas, but Elsa Maxwell was her own worst enemy, a deeply conflicted person who routinely bit the hand that fed her. Worst of all, she was a hypocrite and a bore. You’ll see why in a moment.

For in her memoir, which purports to explain her rise from being a homely upstart in Keokuk, Iowa to the dazzling doyenne of society in Paris, Monte Carlo and New York, she abandons her endless name-dropping for a moment to tackle a subject which is far more troubling to her than war, famine or poverty: homosexuality. Below are a few paragraphs taken from this appalling tirade.

“Much as I dislike to mention a distasteful subject I cannot gloss over the shocking increase in homosexuality that is apparent today. Thirty years ago, Lesbians and sash boys were almost unknown to the majority of people. I call them ’sash boys’, because they always go about as though waving a sash in their hands and because I prefer that euphemism to the commoner terms I do not care to use. Perhaps I was more naive at the time, but I never saw a woman who was an obvious Lesbian until I went to Europe. Of course there were homosexuals in theatrical and artistic circles, but outside that one rarely, if ever, encountered one. Now it is like a contagious disease, spreading here, there and everywhere.

The incidence of homosexuality always has been greater in some countries than others. It varies in time and place. I believe in England it can be attributed in some measure to the general custom of sending boys to boarding-schools at an early age and confining them in this unnatural environment during adolescence. But there are so many confusing and contributing factors to the disease that it is difficult to isolate one particular cause. I have seen scores of thoroughly normal men and women turn to perversion in their forties or fifties simply through boredom, or idleness, or dissatisfaction.

In a large measure, women are greatly to blame for the increase in homosexuality. They are unconscious carriers of the germ. At a recent house party in England an obvious sash boy — obvious to me, that is, for I can spot them the moment they enter a room — came over for cocktails. After he had left, his hostess said, ‘What a charming man, so amusing.’

At which her daughter, aged fourteen, said with obvious disgust, ‘Oh Mother, how can you say that! He was horribly effeminate. He even wore a bracelet.’

The girl’s repugnance was refreshing; she took no account of the fact that in her mother’s eyes the man could be excused all else because he was ‘amusing’. Sash boys, with their feminine sensitivity and graceful manners, make especially agreeable companions to women. They are ’safe’, they are entertaining. A husband will hardly object to his wife’s friendship with a man he knows he has no reason to fear, who can give no cause for jealousy.

For older women, particularly those who are rich and manless, whose husbands have died or who have never married, the homosexual is the complete answer. Because women live longer today, because they outlive the age of sexual attraction, they take refuge in the society of the homosexual ‘gigolo’. For that is what many of them are, taking commissions and percentages on any purchase they may arrange of jewellery, cars, furniture and property. It is for the older woman a sweet illusion of youth to have young or even middle-aged sash boys around, lavishing on them all the appearance of lovers.

A further carrier of the germ is the mother caught up by an almost incestuous love for an only son, whom she constantly keeps beside her, pampering him and denying him the normal friendship of other women. Little do such mothers realise the perverted prison to which they condemn their beloved sons.

The aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trial placed such a social stigma on perversion that it virtually disappeared for two decades in London. Then little by little it reappeared, flourishing first in Berlin after the First World War, then Paris, and now London. From the world of the theatre, it spread to successful male dressmakers and interior decorators and elsewhere, until you have the terrible situation today that a normal young man comes to realise that it will actually be an advantage in his career to become ‘queer’, that perversion pays. It is a frightening prospect.

A number may say, ‘How can you take up this attitude when you know very well a number of these men are among your friends and acquaintances?’

It is quite true. I am guilty of contradiction here. But I just cannot apply the same rules to genius. It may be morally indefensible but I feel there must be one law for the especially rich in mind and another for the remainder. I fully appreciate the danger in condoning it in the few, because the insidious prestige they create makes it only too easy for others to follow.

Values change, of course. Recent events, in England at least, have shown that if Oscar Wilde came out of prison today he would not spend the rest of his life in furtive seclusion abroad. Today much of the world seems, as it were, to be discovering sex as though for the first time, sex is rampant, flaunted everywhere, naturally and unnaturally. I read only recently that the number of persons tried for homosexual offences in England and Wales has increased over the past fifty years from five hundred a year to five thousand.

Only perhaps by some revival of puritanism will there come about a corresponding revival in moral restraint. Either that or a change in fashion and manners. The world is fickle. It turns against a certain type of person as it turns against a style in clothes. The sash boys may soon come to find themselves as out of date as a cloche hat, and perversion be no longer a priority passport to material, artistic and social success.

I say that because there are already straws in the wind. Until last year dressmakers and interior decorators were holding their position on the social roost in Paris. Now I see a change; there are signs that their prestige is on the wane, in a word that they are slipping from their favoured niche. People are growing a little bored with them. And something of the same thing is happening, in Paris at least, with the sash boys. At my last party out of four hundred there were only nine present. That is a very low percentage in these times.

To my mind, it is in the power of women to stop the spread of homosexuality, to set up a barrier to their effete, lavender decadence by no longer courting and coddling their presence in their homes and at their parties. A dearth of hospitality will achieve a quicker death to homosexuality than any act of Parliament. You will never destroy it, human nature being what it is, but you can deter the spread of the disease by applying the social stigma of ostracism. As Lord Vansittart said in a debate in the House of Lords, he had “an uneasy fear that the great increase in this vice would not be checked without some balanced revival of the reprobation with which it was once reported.’

One can only wonder what Elsa’s friends Cecil Beaton, Cole Porter and Noel Coward thought of this unladylike outburst!

Most chroniclers of Elsa Maxwell’s life claim she was a lesbian. She lived with Dickie Gordon-Fellowes for nearly fifty years. A casual search online leads one immediately to a list of famous lesbian couples. Elsa and Dickie are on the list. But Elsa Maxwell clearly did not think of herself as a lesbian. Nor as a member of a burgeoning gay movement. She was resolutely stuck in the past, unable and unwilling to see beyond her own tired prejudices. It’s tragic, in a way. And pathetic. But it also perhaps explains why Elsa Maxwell is not more famous today and why she was basically forgotten the moment she died.

Recently I watched a video of her being interviewed by Mike Wallace on TV. In it Elsa Maxwell says that she is loved by 25 million of her fans. It’s a ballsy statement, but there’s little doubt that she believed it. The sad thing is that just six years after giving the interview, Elsa died. Barely a dozen people went to her funeral. It’s no wonder. She was a tireless self-promoter, but she gave so little in return.

You can watch this video of Elsa and Mike at this link. The University of Texas in Austin has an amazing archive of interviews that Mike Wallace did in the 50s and 60s. Just scroll down to Elsa’s from 11/16/1957. Perhaps you too will come away wondering what demons inspired Elsa to make such ridiculous critiques of Elvis Presley, Jayne Mansfield and others. It’s almost as if she had a self-destructive streak and was compelled to spout off the most outlandish and ill-considered ruminations. She may have known how to toast her titled friends, but she was a poor judge of talent. Ultimately the last laugh is on her, not with her. She dismisses Cleveland Amory as a nobody, but ironically it is he today who is still in print, and has legions of fans, while she languishes in the bowels of used bookstores, gathering dust.