Elsie de Wolfe's Paris: Frivolity Before the Storm

Photographs and stories of the legendary hostess's extravagant parties and glamorous guests in the final months before the Nazis invaded France.

The American decorator Elsie de Wolfe was the international set's preeminent hostess in Paris during the interwar years. She had a legendary villa in Versailles, where in the late 1930s she held two fabulous parties—her Circus Balls—that marked the end of the social scene that her friend Cole Porter perfectly captured in his songs, as the clouds of...