My Aunt Maxine on Ebay Gail Heriot

You can get anything on Ebay … even pictures of your ancestors.  I knew I had a great, great, great aunt (or something like that) named Maxine Elliott (1868-1940) who had been a Broadway actress.  But all I knew about her was that she used to send Christmas cards from the Riviera to my mother’s family in rural Maine during the Depression.  According to my mother, she would enclose a picture of her monkey.  Mom was impressed with the monkey.  And my grandmother always added sadly, “She was one’s of Broadway’s biggest stars, but she never married.”

Through the miracle of the internet, I now know that my mother and grandmother were both wrong.  Maxine’s monkey was actually a lemur.  And she did marry and divorce twice early in life (the second time to noted comedian Nat Goodwin).  Through Ebay, I’ve been able to get photographs of Maxine, her sister and fellow thespian Gertrude and Gertrude’s husband, Shakespearean actor  Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, all of which now grace my bathroom.  I also got a little painting of Maxine’s home in France and her biography (written by her niece in 1964)–all from Ebay.  Most important, I’ve learned a disturbing fact:  If my life is going to be even half as interesting as Maxine’s, I’m going to have to get cracking.

Being perhaps Broadway’s most popular actress in the first decade of the 20th century is only mildly interesting to a great, great, great grandniece who inhabits the 21st century.   But it turns out she was also J.P. Morgan’s mistress for a number of years.  And she appears to have picked up his business savvy.  At the time, acting was a glamourous but not necessarily lucrative career.  So at the height of her beauty and popularity, she marketed a line of facial soaps and “cleaned up.”  She acquired her own theater in New York–called Maxine Elliott’s Theater.  Pretty soon, she was able to retire from the stage a very wealthy woman and move to London, where she fell in love with New Zealand’s Wimbledon star, Anthony Wilding.  Wilding was handsome, dashing and quite a bit younger than Maxine, but they were engaged to be married.  When he was killed in WWI, she was devastated.  She purchased a barge to bring medical supplies and entertainment to British and American soldiers–her own combination USO and Red Cross.  God bless women (and men) who don’t wait for other people to do useful things.

After the war, Maxine performed perhaps her most valuable service to the world.  She befriended a guy named Winston who had held a few odd jobs with the British government.  During the 1930s he was having a tough time of it.  It seems he had it in his head that the new German government was a bit of the threat, but he couldn’t get anyone in Britain to agree.  During these wilderness years, he would go down to Maxine’s home in France and paint for weeks on end.  She’d make sure he’d get enough food and rest, so he could go back home and fight it out.  According to her biographer, he was the only human being in the world she would allow to be late for meals.

Here’s to you, Aunt Maxine.  Under the circumstances, the world should forgive you for your youthful indiscretions.  Who knows how the history of the world would have turned out if Churchill hadn’t been able to relax somewhere warm and sunny?