Elsie Fox

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Elsie Fox (born November 27, 1902; died November 5, 1993, Nantucket, Massachusetts) was an American minor screenwriter in the 1930s. She is the biological mother of novelist Paula Fox.

Life and career

Elsie was born Elsie de Sola in Mantanzas, Cuba[1] to a sugarcane plantation owner, Fermin de Sola, and Spanish-born Candelaria de Carvajal. Her mother had been married at age 16 and arranged by her father, Vicente de Carvajal. Elsie was the only daughter and had four older brothers, Fermin, Leopold, Frank (also known as Panchito), and Vincent.

At age 19, Elsie married novelist/screenwriter Paul Hervey Fox, and they collaborated on numerous films. By all accounts, both Elsie and Paul were alcoholics; their script for "The Last Train from Madrid" (1937) was reportedly so bad that Graham Greene called it "the worst movie I ever saw." However, Elsie and Paul led an outwardly glamorous and excessive life, in the same vein as the Fitzgeralds (and in fact socialized with F. Scott and Zelda, among others), and were devoted passionately to their drinks, cigarettes and madcap outings. Elsie partied with her husband's cousin Douglas Fairbanks, and was once thrown into a lake by Humphrey Bogart because, according to her granddaughter, she "was quite awful... She was really mean."

When Paul and Elsie gave birth to daughter Paula in 1923, they were ill-equipped to raise a child, and gave the infant up for adoption. According to Paula, Elsie meant to abort Paula but didn't notice she was pregnant in time. After being passed among friends and relatives, Paula met her mother for the first time at age 5, whereupon Elsie snatched her away for a chaotically itinerant life roaming Manhattan, Florida, Cuba, New Hampshire, and Hollywood.

According to the Seattle Weekly, Elsie was Courtney Love's "intellectual wild-child doppelgänger." Her granddaughter Linda Carroll said, "They [Paul and Elsie] were wild ... I think what's fascinating is that Courtney has this showbiz life inside her that emerged with no knowledge that it was in her background."

According to Paula's 2001 memoir, Borrowed Finery, encounters with Elsie ranged from hysterical to brutal. During one visit, Elsie threw her full drink at Paula, who wrote, "For years I assumed responsibility for all that happened in my life, even for events over which I had not the slightest control... It was a hopeless wish that I would discover why my birth and my existence were so calamitous for my mother."

In the mid-1940s, Elsie married writer Harmon Tupper and moved to Nantucket, Massachusetts, where they co-authored dozens of lifestyle articles under the names "Harmon and Elsie Tupper" for magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly.

When Paula was grown, she and Elsie became so estranged that they did not see each other for nearly 40 years. Paula described their final visit before Elsie died, at age 92. The visit was so disastrous that when Elsie died months later, Paula "felt hollow, listless," and did not mourn her. Paula's daughter, Linda Carroll, also visited Elsie shortly before her death, and claimed that Elsie "answered the door and said, 'Are you a Jehovah's Witness?' I said, 'No, actually I'm your granddaughter.' She was really remarkable, really fun. She was very estranged from my mother. She was very gracious, but she wasn't warm. She was very cold."

Harmon Tupper died in 1988 and Elsie remained in Nantucket until her own death, bequeathing her estate to the Nantucket Atheneum library.

Further reading

  • Seattle Weekly, Courtney's Family Curse: Kurt Cobain's wild widow comes from a long line of misbehaving mamas, March 22, 2006, by Tim Appelo
  • Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (Henry Holt) by Paula Fox, 2001s

References

  1. ↑ Ancestry of Frances Bean Cobain

External links

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