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Elsie Fox


Elsie Fox (born Elsie de Sola; November 27, 1902 – November 5, 1993) was an American minor screenwriter in the 1930s. She was the biological mother of novelist Paula Fox and great-grandmother of singer-songwriter and actress Courtney Love.

Fox was born Elsie de Sola in Mantanzas, Cuba to Spanish-born Candelaria de Carvajal and her husband Fermin de Sola, a sugarcane plantation owner she had married at age 16. Candelaria's father, Vicente de Carvajal, had arranged the marriage. The youngest of five, Elsie had four older brothers: Fermin, Leopold, Frank ("Panchito"), and Vincent.

At age 19, Elsie married American novelist/screenwriter Paul Hervey Fox, and they collaborated on numerous films; by all accounts, both were alcoholics. Their script for The Last Train from Madrid (1937) was reportedly so bad that it resulted in a film Graham Greene called "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 passionately devoted to liquor, 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 Elsie gave birth to daughter Paula in 1923, she and Paul were ill-equipped for parenthood and gave her up for adoption. According to Paula, the Foxes were "cruelly feckless parents" who passed her among various family friends and relatives from Long Island to Cuba—just prior to the 1933 revolution—to Florida, California, and ultimately to boarding school in Montreal.

According to the Seattle Weekly, Elsie was her great-granddaughter Courtney Love's "intellectual wild-child doppelgänger." Her granddaughter Linda Carroll (Love's mother) 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."


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