Delicious Dish
GERTRUDE STEIN AND ALICE B. TOKLAS
What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.
—Gertrude Stein, The Mother of Us All
Before “coming out” became commonplace, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas lived openly as a couple. Setting up house together in Paris, the American expats fashioned a life for themselves centered on art, literature, and each other. Smitten from the moment they met, the trailblazing pair’s relationship was far more successful than many traditional marriages.
“Please Miss Stein and Miss Toklas, don’t disappoint us: we do be expecting you!” entreated a Vanity Fair editor prior to the pair’s much-anticipated U.S. arrival in November 1934. From the time the ship ferrying them from France docked in New York Harbor until they departed six months later, the middle-aged celebrities were front-page news.
Their newfound fame was a result of the best seller The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Written by Gertrude, the irreverent book is told in the voice of her longtime love, Alice, and recalls their life together. An item for almost thirty years by the time they ventured to America, the duo had been brought together by an unlikely matchmaker: Mother Nature.
When an earthquake rumbled through San Francisco on April 18, 1906, it rattled the Toklas residence, where twenty-eight-year-old Alice was living a humdrum existence, keeping house for her widowed father and brother. All that changed after a chance encounter with Gertrude’s brother and sister-in-law, who were visiting from Paris to check on the postquake condition of real estate they owned. Intrigued by the Steins’ glamorous stories of life abroad, the adventure-craving Alice eventually packed her bags and set sail for Paris.
Her first stop in the French capital was a soiree at the Steins’ place, where she barely spared a glance for her hosts or anyone else in attendance. Her attention was focused solely on Gertrude. “She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair,” Alice reminisced in her memoir, What Is Remembered. She heard a bell chime in her head after they were introduced, a sound signaling she was in the presence of genius (or so Gertrude claimed).
Not wasting any time, Gertrude asked Alice to take a stroll with her the next day in the Luxembourg Gardens. They quickly became constant companions and two years later moved in together. Their legendary salon was attended by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Man Ray. Their role at the center of the Parisian avant-garde fascinated their fellow Americans, who reveled in the colorful stories depicted in Gertrude’s autobiography.
The sixty-year-old writer relished her late-blooming rise to fame, which saw her and Alice treated like royalty during their coast-to-coast American tour. Along with being invited to tea with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House, they rode along in a squad car with Chicago police officers, partied in Hollywood with Charlie Chaplin and Dashiell Hammett, and were given the keys to Edgar Allan Poe’s dorm room shrine at the University of Virginia. For six months, with Alice at her side, Gertrude traveled across the United States by car, train, and plane, delivering lectures to packed audiences. Meanwhile, Alice attended to the writer’s creature comforts, making sure she dined on her preferred foods—honeydew melon and oysters—before appearances.
The puritanical American public seemed unfazed by the fact that the media darlings were a lesbian couple. To Gertrude’s surprise, there were no insulting letters, crank calls, or other displays of bigotry while she and Alice crisscrossed the country. The pair’s relationship was essentially an open secret; they didn’t flaunt that they were lovers, but neither did they try to hide it. They were interviewed together in their shared hotel room, and Alice appeared alongside Gertrude in almost every published photo.
By contrast with other bed-hopping, divorcing couples in their social circle, Gertrude and Alice’s devout, monogamous relationship seemed almost old-fashioned. In many ways they resembled a typical heterosexual couple. Gertrude was the more masculine half of the duo and referred to herself as Alice’s husband, while Alice tirelessly managed the details of their home life. Since Alice willingly took on the household responsibilities, Gertrude was free to spend her time writing, acquiring paintings, holding court during her salon, befriending and mentoring up-and-coming artists and writers, and ruminating on her genius.
Emphasizing their respective gender roles, each cultivated a dramatically different personal style. Short and stout, Gertrude (who reminded British poet Edith Sitwell of an Easter Island statue) never donned trousers but did favor plain, simply cut or loose-fitting attire in muted, solid colors. When she decided to trade her long hair for a close-cropped, Caesar-style cut, Alice did the shearing.
The more feminine Alice often wore couture dresses in bold colors or floral prints, flashy earrings, and feather-topped hats. She sported her dark hair in a bob with long, fringed bangs (reportedly to cover a cyst that Picasso compared to a unicorn’s horn) and refused to remove the fuzzy down on her upper lip. Foodie James Beard described Alice as “nicely ugly,” while a magazine editor once noted that other faces seemed nude in comparison. After the couple stayed with Gertrude’s family in Baltimore during their U.S. tour, a three-year-old relative candidly remarked that she liked the man but wondered why the lady had a mustache.
Beyond their distinctive appearances and division of household affairs, the couple’s adherence to convention played out in other ways. Although they couldn’t make it legal, Gertrude proposed to Alice, offering her a ring and suggesting they move in together. Afterward, they honeymooned in Spain. When they bought a Ford during World War I, so they could distribute medical supplies in the French countryside, Gertrude always took the wheel and Alice organized the goods.
At times Gertrude could even be chauvinistic toward other women, such as when, rather than remark on her prose, she informed fellow writer Djuna Barnes that she had gorgeous gams. And when creative types came to converse with Gertrude, who enjoyed the adoring attention of handsome young men like Hemingway, their wives were banned from the conversation and expected to chitchat with Alice about clothes and cooking.
Relishing her role as domestic goddess and gatekeeper, Alice took on the task of vetting the steady stream of callers that came to see Gertrude. She even did the dirty work, like dumping friends who had worn out their welcome, usually accomplished with a terse phone call or note. As playwright Thornton Wilder, a longtime friend of the couple, put it, “Alice was merely the dragon protecting the treasure.”
Although Alice excelled at playing the piano and once considered making a career of it, she ultimately decided her talent wasn’t up to par. Instead she devoted herself to cultivating Gertrude’s literary achievements. She directly contributed to her partner’s professional endeavors, acting as typist, sounding board, critic, editor, publicist, and muse. At one point she even launched a publishing company dedicated solely to producing Gertrude’s modernist works, which confounded mainstream publishers because of their experimental style.
“What would Alice have been without Gertrude?” an acquaintance of theirs pondered. Likewise, Gertrude might have toiled forever in obscurity if not for Alice, who offered her emotional stability, an abundance of encouragement, and inspiration for the book that made her a celebrity. Early on, even as Gertrude bitterly lamented her growing stack of manuscripts with no hope of publication in sight, Alice’s support was steadfast.
When Alice’s own autobiography appeared after Gertrude’s death, rancorous reviewers maligned the life she had chosen and suggested she was nothing more than her dynamic lover’s pale shadow. One went so far as to call her memoir “the sad, slight book of a woman who all her life has looked in a mirror and seen someone else.” But there was much more to Alice behind the deliberately crafted persona of helpmate to a talented spouse. A spirit of adventure inspired her to leave the family fold and forge a new existence abroad, and a rebellious streak led to impetuous acts like throwing her cherry-red corset out a train window during a trip through the sweltering Italian countryside. While Alice’s modest, subdued public persona complemented Gertrude’s domineering personality, she was secure enough to stand up to her partner, even rebuking her in front of salon guests on occasion.
According to some acquaintances, Alice encouraged her partner’s dependence on her as a way to drive others out of her life. Rumor has it Gertrude’s brother and roommate, Leo, was the first casualty. He initially called Alice’s move to their flat a blessing and gave up his study for her to use as a bedroom, but he later had harsh words for the pair. He derided Alice as “a kind of abnormal vampire who gives more than she takes” and maligned his sister’s excessive dependence on her helpmate. Leo declared he had “seen trees strangled by vines in this same way.” The bickering siblings, who had lived together for many years, were more than ready to go their separate ways by the time Alice moved in.
While Alice might have been blamed unfairly for Gertrude’s falling-out with Leo, she did send others packing. One was American patroness Mabel Dodge, who entertained the couple at her Italian villa. When the hostess flirted with Gertrude and received a sultry look in return, Alice stormed away from the luncheon table, signaling the beginning of the end of Dodge’s friendship with the writer.
Largely immune to criticisms of their interdependence, Gertrude and Alice even bestowed pet names on each other: the writer was Lovey, while Alice was Pussy. Lovey unabashedly expressed her affection and desire for Pussy in verse, penning lines like “Alice B. is the wife for me” and describing her as a “tiny dish of delicious.” After late-night writing sessions, Gertrude would often leave missives—by turns romantic, humorous, sexually charged, or apologetic—for early rising Alice, who responded with notes of her own to her “strong-strong husband.”
As Gertrude romanced Alice with words, the latter used her skills in the kitchen to do likewise. In Aromas and Flavors of Past, one of two culinary-themed books she wrote (the other is Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, with its notorious recipe for hashish fudge), she offered some evocative advice that showed her clever sense of humor. “Consider the menus carefully, that there is a harmony and a suitable progression,” she counseled. “In the menu there should be a climax and a culmination. Come to it gently. One will suffice.”
During their four decades together, the couple endured both world wars in France, harrowing experiences that only served to strengthen their bond. They garnered controversy for remaining in the country during World War II under the protection of a longtime friend who supported the pro-Nazi Vichy government. While living in the south of France, where they rode out the majority of the war, they endured some of the same shortages and hardships as their neighbors. As Jews, lesbians, and Americans, they were particularly vulnerable to persecution but nonetheless refused to leave their adopted country and ignored warnings to flee to Switzerland.
In 1946, two years after World War II came to a close in Europe, Gertrude, suffering from stomach cancer, didn’t make it out of the operating room alive. The grieving Alice survived her partner by nearly two decades. Not long before her own demise at age eighty-nine, she converted to Catholicism, asking the priest if it would allow her to see Gertrude in the afterlife. The soul mates are buried side by side in Paris’s Père-Lachaise Cemetery, where Alice does not have a marker of her own. Her name, date of birth, and death date are etched in gold on the back of Gertrude’s headstone, right where she wanted them.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS