The <i> Grande Patronne</i> of the Villa

From a tattered velvet wing chair, Basha Maxwell, 97, is holding court in the vast lobby of the Villa Carlotta in Hollywood. The handsome young men cluster around.

The evening belongs to Shannon McMackin, who is celebrating her 25th birthday but, as always, Maxwell is the presence . That’s just as McMackin and other tenants of this once-elegant 1920s-era villa want it.

“She’s our illustrious grande patronne ,” says Don Paul, an actor who has lived here since 1985.

Ask others about Maxwell and the words they choose are grit and indomitability.

She is, they concur, “a sweetheart.”

At the grand piano, Tim Moss-White, a computer programmer who lives just down the hall, is playing Christmas songs. The villa is alive; actors, artists and writers emerge from their apartments, bearing food and wine.

Tom Ellis, an artist who has been Maxwell’s friend since moving to the villa 12 years ago, tucks a Christmas-red comforter around her.

Maxwell recalls when she moved in 33 years ago, the building was quite grand. Then, only those in the arts were welcome. Pianist Josef Hofmann lived here and, later, famed architect Wallace Neff.

In such company, she demurs, she was a “nobody.” But a nobody who once sang as Mimi in “La Boheme” in Milan and as Liu in a Hollywood Bowl production of “Turandot.”

Recently, a crippling fall forced her to accept a wheelchair--”imagine me in a wheelchair,” she frets--but Maxwell has lost neither her sense of humor nor her eye for the men.

Ah, she remembers them all. In her photo gallery is Henri, who spurned her when they were young and gay. “He calls me every day. Now he’d take me in a minute.”

Then there were her three husbands. At 15, she ran away from an orphanage in San Francisco and auditioned to sing at the Odeon Cafe. She landed more than the job.

A little glass of champagne--her first--and her tight black corset proved a fatal combination. “Just as I opened my mouth to sing,” she says, “I threw up all over the violinist.” He took her home--and married her.

Widowed young, she married another musician--”He left me for a beautiful woman.” Her third husband? “An alcoholic.” She left him.

As she does almost every day, Maxwell is receiving , here in this big lobby where, in the heyday of Hollywood gossip columnists, Louella Parsons held her wedding reception.

At the piano, Moss-White segues into “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

And Steve Teague, a handsome young baritone--and friend of Basha’s--sings to her. Then he blows the diva a kiss.

Judges Listen Hard, All for a Song

The quintet of judges sits on folding chairs all in a row, scribbling numbers on paper napkins as they listen intently to the music and lyrics blaring from the stereo.

They are here this Saturday morning in a back room of a church in Long Beach to help choose a new national anthem. Something perhaps a bit peppier, a little less arcane than “The Star-Spangled Banner” with its dreaded “rockets’ red glare.”

In charge is Jack Johnson, a chiropractor whose passion is country music. The judges--among them a pair of music teachers, a duo of singers from the ‘50s and a PTA leader--have eight cassettes to sit through.

Johnson has been recruited by the man behind Anthem! America, Anders Skaar (pronounced score ), a Raleigh, N.C., executive headhunter who sees his mission as a grass-roots crusade to find a song America can actually sing.

After all, he reasons, Francis Scott Key scribbled the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner” during a battle in the War of 1812. No wonder it’s all about rockets and bombs and conquering.

War as the theme might no longer be appropriate, Skaar suggests. Besides, the tune--originally a British drinking song--is hard to sing even sober.

He longs for an anthem that will be “a song of action,” bold and creative and relevant to Americans of all ages.

Still, if these eight anthem-wanna-bes are any indication, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is safe, scrambled syntax and all.

Consider the one on which the singer twangs his way through some quite awful lyrics, and then races through a bunch of words, hoping-to-fit-them-all-in.

The judges roar. “I can picture this guy,” says Johnson. “He has this beard and he’s sitting on his front porch.”

The judges, scoring from 0 to 9.9, give their highest marks to “America, America,” a rousing and singable tune submitted by Libby Benson of Columbus, Ohio. There are some nice phrases, such as “broad stripes for the blood of brotherhood, bright stars of liberty.”

“It hits your patriotic button,” says judge Laurie Phillips, who grew up in the Navy.

Still, she always gets choked up when she hears “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Sixty finalists are being chosen by panels in five cities; the winner will be named in March. Then, Anthem! America intends to have a bill introduced in Congress to adopt it as our new national anthem.

That’s going to be tough, figures Johnson. With the “Star-Spangled Banner,” hard to sing or not, “you’ve got tradition here.”