Why do so many respectable newspapers and magazines go weak at the knees the moment an unreadable autobiography of some illiterate rock star is published? I guess no hack, however literate, can resist dropped names, or perhaps it is simple hero worship, tout court, as they say in French. I’ve never read a single one, just the reviews of some, and they leave me absolutely cold. So they took a lot of dope and slept with lotsa groupies, and then trashed the hotel suite. Big deal. Seen and done that and it’s no longer fun. But give me something well written about someone I met, however briefly, when I was young, and I’m hooked. Elsa Maxwell, for example.
The great American critic George Jean Nathan said that what a man looks for in a woman is something like a good piano, minus the loud pedal. Elsa Maxwell was all pedal, without tone or modulation, just noise.
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