After his bath this past weekend, he surprised me with a most regal pose on one of our new sofas with its rose cushion, so how could I not feature him this week?!

By chance I also received an e mail and photo from a friend who had spent her vacation in a home on Lake Tahoe.  On the wall of one of the rooms was a framed California license plate with “Mr Fritz” on it.  She thought of me and thought of Fritz.

And then there was another dog who often posed regally both for photographs and portraits and thoroughly enjoyed the attention:

“Basket was a white poodle.  When I first came to Paris everybody every concierge had a poodle as they later had a fox terrier, then Alsatian police dogs came and then wire haired terriers and then we had a white poodle and we named him Basket.  The French children and the French men and women would all stop and look at him, they said each one as if it was a new idea one would think he was a lamb.

One day, Basket had just had just been washed, a little boy came along and said, one would call it a marriage he is so white…”

from EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Gertrude Stein

Mr. Fritz and Baskets I & II holding court in special places in everybody’s autobiography.

All families, I assume, have skeletons in their closets. Often these bones are fleshed out by  stories that have become embellished over the years of a relative who did this or that and forever became the black sheep of the family – as if  most families are all lambs from a  pure, white flock!

Biographers of well-known people relish unearthing these skeletons to get all the facts that are (usually) fit to print. This juicy information helps to sell books as reviewers often highlight these tidbits. (The recent Kitty Kelley biography of Oprah comes to mind.)

The Armoire, 1778

In the case of GertrudeandAlice, there were skeletons in their closets and I don’t mean the fact that they were lesbians and never really “came-out” of the armoire.  (Their close friends knew the score and many of Gertrude’s writings give plenty of hints about the relationship between her and her “secretary/companion.”)

Gertrude had three brothers and a sister, but one usually only hears about two of the brothers, Michael, the eldest and  Leo, who was two years older than she was.  Michael had been responsible for selling the family’s share in the street car business in San Francisco after their father’s death, giving the Steins enough money to live comfortably for almost fifty years.  And both Michael and Leo along with Gertrude were responsible for amassing the famous Stein family collection of major artists of the early 20th century.

The Steins circa 1881:( l to rt) Simon, Gertrude, Father,Michael,Mother,Leo and Bertha

It was the two other siblings, Bertha and Simon, who have been relegated to skeletons-in-the-closet status, though as far as I know neither did anything horrendous including bad-mouthing any of their more well-known kin, so maybe it would be fairer to call them “tibias or fibulas in the closet.”

Maybe Gertrude should take the heat for estranging this sister and brother. She referred to both of them as “simple-minded” in her book EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY – not exactly the kind of sentiment that brings families together.  Simon did have a simple life, first working as a brakeman on the San Francisco cable cars (he had to retire from that job when he gained too much weight and later ran the stationery and cigar concession in an Italian grocery store. Bertha lived in Baltimore, married, raised a family and had no contact with her brothers and sister. Gertrude,however, wrote word portraits of two of her sons, Daniel and Arthur.

Simon may have put the brakes on along this route on San Francisco's Castro Street

But then we come to Alice.

In her case, one fact that is included with biographical information about her is the suicide of her only sibling, a brother,  Clarence in 1937. No additional information is usually given.

Alice and Clarence circa late 1880s

What I knew before I began piecing together Clarence’s life  was that Alice had raised her brother after their mother’s death, Clarence was nine and Alice was twenty.  Alice remembers him as a child both in a 1952 interview in which she fondly recalls him coming home with soot around his eyes after playing on a locomotive making him look like a raccoon .  Later in her 1964 memoir she recounts her jealousy when he was born and her mother’s reassurance that she would still always come first.

By the time Alice left for Paris, Clarence was twenty one. According to one biographer, he and Alice had a falling out over legal  matters pertaining to family property and I have never been able to find any information as to whether they corresponded or saw each other again after Alice moved, possibly during the U.S. lecture tour stop in San Francisco in 1935.

Clarence Ferdinand Toklas, about the time he graduated from the University of California-Berkeley

What really prompted me to begin additional sleuthing into Clarence’s life was a visit to the Toklas plot in the Jewish cemetery in Colma, California. I found the graves of Alice’s parents and an aunt and uncle, but not Clarence’s grave.  Through an online search I found that he had been buried in the cemetery in San Francisco’s Presidio since he had served in World War I. I found the gravesite which also included the headstone of his wife, Claire.

The Toklas gravesite in the Presidio, San Francisco.

As I continued my search into the mysterious life of Clarence Toklas, I found his obituary on microfilm in the San Francisco Public Library.  Little did I know that that obituary, written more like a police report than a compassionate celebration of a life, though it provided many new facts, would in reality raise more questions than it provided answers.  Here is a copy of the obituary as it appeared on August 24th, 1937 in the San Francisco Chronicle:

What!

A jump into the ocean, three letters, ill health, a move to a boarding house and a young son?  Not to mention making Alice an authoress years before she wrote her first cookbook (maybe they thought she really had written THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS)?

What had prompted Clarence to end his life – his ill health, the breakup of his marriage, some financial problem alluded to in the letter to his wife? I have not been able to answer these questions though I did discover a number of things about his son, Teddy.

Teddy with his grandfather, Alice's father, circa 1920

Teddy was born in 1916, stayed in San Francisco and served in the Air Force during WW II. After the war he worked for the Department of the Navy for 30 years.  He married, but had no children. ( I have met one of his nieces who happens to live just about a mile from where I live in San Francisco!) He and his wife travelled extensively and he was very interested in the arts and served for many years as a volunteer at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum. He died in 1998. His obituary in the San Francisco paper ended with:

“Ted is missed, but will always be remembered for his zest for living, candor, and ability to strip away the unimportant and nonessential and cut with humor and understanding to the heart of the matter.” (Sounds a bit like his Aunt Alice!)

As for remembering Clarence…in 1915 in a poem called “All Sunday,” Gertrude Stein wrote:

“Please be rich.

Clarence.

Clearance.

Puget Sound.

Seattle.

Bay.

No mosquitoes at all.”

A fitting epitaph?  I don’t know, but certainly as mysterious and possibly undecipherable as the life of Clarence Ferdinand Toklas.

By the end of the first week that this edition was released, it was within the top fifty French cookbooks on amazon.com.  Not bad!

In the fifty six years since it first came out, the cookbook has only been out of print for a very short time and has been widely translated, most recently into Norwegian and became a bestseller in Scandinavia.

The continuing popularity of the cookbook is largely due to the  ”Haschish Fudge” recipe, page 259 of the latest edition, which though really more of a spicy, nut candy than a fudge, morphed into  ”Alice B. Toklas Brownies” in the 1960s.  (See Ruth Reichl note below.) The cookbook is, however, more than just this notorious recipe, and the story of how it came about and has endured all of these years is in itself blogworthy.

The latest edition with a cover blurb by friend Janet Flanner.

The writing of the cookbook was a struggle for Alice. She suffered a bout of jaundice during the writing of part of the book which she mentions in the foreword adding in typical Toklas style: “Illness sets the mind free sometimes to roam and surmise.”

A demure Alice (copyright David Levine)

Friends had long urged her to write a book about her life with Gertrude.  Her usual response was that Gertrude had said all that there was to say.  Ultimately she agreed to write a book, largely because she needed the money.  The publisher had stipulated that she was to send them a certain number of pages, but as the book’s deadline neared, Alice realized that she may not be able to meet the publisher’s demand though she had been collecting recipes ever since she was a young woman in San Francisco.

The 1st editions: U.S. on the left, British on the right, both with Sir Francis Rose illustrations.

She quickly wrote letters to her friends asking them to send her their favorite recipes. The responses were tremendous resulting in the 35 page chapter  titled “Recipes from Friends.” Composer Virgil Thomson  submitted a recipe for shad-roe mousse, designer Pierre Balmain sent his recipe for “Vent Vert” chicken, while salonista  Natalie Barney submitted a simple, four ingredient recipe for stuffed eggplant with sugar.

Norwegian edition, 2007

Other recipes were provided by Cecil Beaton, Carl Van Vechten and his wife and Sir Francis Rose, the artist who illustrated the book’s first edition.  The haschish fudge recipe came from artist Brion Gysin and there has always been conjecture as to whether Alice initially realized that its key ingredient, canibus sativa, would cause such an uproar. The U.S. publisher certainly didn’t want to take a chance with government authorities and left the recipe out of the first U.S. edition, while the British publisher included it. (All editions after 1960 include the recipe.)

The cookbook, a blending of reminiscences and recipes, became a best-seller.  Some of the reviewers of the book implied that Gertrude Stein’s writing style may have come about because of teatime snacks of the energized fudge!

Alice’s love of food, her love of entertaining and cooking, her love of humor and gossip, and her love of Gertrude Stein all come through in her book.  She has been acknowledged as both a forerunner of contemporary food-writing and the celebrity-chef movement of the last 40 years.

Japanese edition, 1998

A few years ago I wrote a letter to the editor of GOURMET magazine, Ruth Reichl, in response to an article relating to Alice’s cookbook.  In it I mentioned Alice’s most famous recipe and was quickly reprimanded by Ms. Reichl:

“…I think you do Ms. Toklas a disservice when you say she’s remembered largely for that brownie recipe.  In food circles she is widely revered not only for her recipes, which are wonderful, but also for her unique recipe writing style.”

(As a footnote to my Reichl encounter, several years ago I realized that her father, Ernst Reichl, was a book designer who designed a number of Gertrude’s books and Alice’s 1964 memoir, WHAT IS REMEMBERED.)

Following the success of the cookbook, Alice was asked by HOUSE BEAUTIFUL magazine to write a series of articles.  Some of these served as the basis for a second cookbook in 1958, AROMAS AND FLAVORS PAST AND PRESENT.  Alice was not happy with that book as the editor of the magazine, Poppy Cannon, author of  THE CAN OPENER COOKBOOK (1955), had modernized and simplified many of the recipes. (Hard to imagine Alice using canned anything!) The second book also does not contain stories about her life, an integral part of the first cookbook.  The second book did not sell well.

As we celebrate this new edition, if you have a copy of the cookbook, take it off the bookshelf or from its nook in the kitchen and find a recipe to cook this week.  If you don’t have a copy, get this latest edition and once you’ve read it, pick a recipe and invite over some friends.  In either case, if you chose the recipe “(which anyone can whip up on a rainy day),” I can assure you that a good time will be had by all!

"Roll out those lazy, crazy, hazy days of summer..."

For GertrudeandAlice getting away from Paris for the summer either to a European destination or their rented home near the French-Swiss border was a major part of their annual calendar.  Just for fun I imagined a group letter (with photos) from them to their friends highlighting a few of the events of the first weeks of summer. (Once the summer is over they can officially write that ubiquitous school essay “How I Spent My Summer Vacation!”)

“Dear All,

Enjoying our time away from Paris—good food, good company, a few good paintings we’ve brought along and two not so good dogs! Wish you were here.

"See Gertrude. See Gertrude try to write. Stay Pepé stay!"

The vegetable garden was planted weeks ago with the corn knee high by the 4th of July and Lovey has been hoeing up a storm keeping the weeds at bay.

"Hoe, hee hoe, hoe hum. Hoe hee hoe, hoe hum--and your dog Toto too!"

The garden has provided many a delicacy for our daily meals.  Alice has added her touch to our feasts three or four or even five times a day and neighbors are dropping by as the aromas of her culinary magic creep out of our kitchen, across the fields and valleys.  She must write a cookbook soon – it will become a bestseller.

"An empty table is the devil's playground. Pussy, where is the grub?"

What is summer without drives in the country and drive we do do.  Lovey at the wheel, guests holding on and the dogs in a tizzy. Someone made a joke the other day, I think it was Cecil Beaton, “Two Lezies in a [Tin] Lizzie,” saying he thought it would make a great Cole Porter song.  We were not amused.

Two guests and one Gertrude, on the road again.

The villages’ children are quite fond of us and all in all they are quite pleasant. They do enjoy receiving gifts.  We are still thought of as the two, rich American ladies who are always eating and have a Picasso and Cezanne hanging in their dining room.

The village people: ( l to rt) Jacques, Gigi, Mimi,Barack, Fifi, Collette,Coco, Justin, Edith, Lindsay, and Gertrude !

With the end of July here, can October and November be so far away?  We try not to think about it.  By the way Alice is in so few of the photographs since she was the one snapping away with the Kodak Brownie.  Next time she’ll be in more of the snapshots handling the dogs, changing the tire of the car and giving pre-pre-Halloween treats to the village youngsters.

A well-worn Kodak Brownie is a thing to behold.

Wishing you all the continuing joys of summer,

GertrudeandAlice”

GertrudeandAlice circa World War I

On the road to help the doughboys.

They stayed in touch with many of the doughboys including W.G. Rogers, the “Kiddie,” who wrote the first biography of Gertrude, WHEN THIS YOU SEE REMEMBER ME: GERTRUDE STEIN IN PERSON, published in 1948 two years after her death. (A few weeks ago I received an e mail from the son of one of the other doughboys they befriended named Duncan who is mentioned in both THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS and EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. They visited Duncan in 1935 during the U.S. lecture tour.  All of this will be a future post.)

At the end of the war that began 21 years after the WTEAW (so much for fighting wars to end wars), GertudeandAlice were liberated in Vichy France by GIs.  From then on,  a steady stream of them came to visit in Paris.  Rogers refers to these visitors in the last few pages of his book:

“Over many people Miss Stein cast a sort of spell, and what had happened in America in the strictly formal atmosphere surrounding the visiting celebrity [during the U.S. lecture tour] must have happened many more times in Paris.  To the one Kiddie of World War I were now added a hundred and a thousand more.  It wasn’t a following she had, but a court.  One man introduced a friend, who introduced a friend, who introduced a friend.  It was a chain process.  It was the old days at the rue de Fleurus over again…”

The conversations that GertrudeandAlice had with the GIs and the stories they told became Gertrude’s last book published during her lifetime, the novella BREWSIE AND WILLIE.

GertrudeandAlice with some Brewsies and Willies, 1945

Gertrude chowing down with the 101st Division, Germany 1945

The World Premiere of a play based on BREWSIE AND WILLIE opens in Los Angeles this week.

Here is complete information from the production’s news release:

“Long Neglected Modernist Masterwork Channels the Voices of War’s Aftermath

CalArts’ Center for New Performance (CNP) in association with Los Angeles-based Poor Dog Group Premiere Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie and Willie.

Los Angeles, CA, June 17—Men and women of the armed forces grapple with the anxiety of returning home in Brewsie and Willie, a world premiere stage adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s post-World War II novella. Produced by the California Institute of the Arts’ (CalArts) Center for New Performance (CNP) in association with Poor Dog Group, a groundbreaking experimental theater collective, Brewsie and Willie will run from July 13 to August 1, 2010. Performances will be on the 7th floor of 533 South Los Angeles Street. Tickets and other information are available at brownpapertickets.com.

In timeless fashion, Brewsie, Willie and an array of other soldiers and nurses exist in limbo bracketed by the end of the war and their return to civilian life. This period of aimless rest and relaxation becomes a space of rambling reflection and the progenitor of a vast, indescribable anxiety. The core performing ensemble is drawn from Poor Dog Group, a thrilling young company made up of recent CalArts alumni, whose work has drawn attention throughout the United States and eastern Europe.

Brewsie and Willie and friends in the CalArts production

“The Poor Dog Group brings its remarkable aesthetic courage to the production,” said CNP Artistic Director Travis Preston, who is also directing the production. “We are thrilled to pool our talents and resources with this vital collective of emerging artists and in the process, infuse both our organizations with fresh energy and direction.”

This exploration of Stein’s work exemplifies CNP’s and Poor Dog Group’s shared interest in developing original theatrical expression through radical reexaminations of existing texts. A closely knit ensemble, the group is uniquely suited to recreate the intimacy found among young soldiers. The fragility of their position as emerging artists is echoed in the vulnerabilities of Brewsie, Willie, and their fictional compatriots.

GIs, GIs, GIs, GIs-"...you got to hold out a little hope."

CalArts’ Center for New Performance (CNP), the professional producing arm of the California Institute of the Arts, was established in 1999 as a forum for the creation of groundbreaking theatrical performance. Originally entitled the Center for New Theater, the name was expanded in 2005 to reflect the broad range of the Center’s interests. Seminal artists from around the world are brought to CNP to develop work that expands the language, discourse, and boundaries of contemporary theater and performance. CNP productions have included Stephen Dillane’sMacbeth, directed by Travis Preston, which premiered in Los Angeles and has subsequently toured to London and Australia, with upcoming performances in France and Germany; What to Wear, a post-rock opera directed and written by Richard Foreman and composed by Michael Gordon; and AH!, an interactive opera no-opera performed in 13 languages, which received its world premiere last September at REDCAT.

Poor Dog Group most recently presented the absurdist comedy, The Internationalists, at the Lillian Theater in Hollywood. In summer 2009, they toured the production through Poland, Croatia and Serbia. Click here for more information about Poor Dog Group.

Brewsie and Willie has received significant support from Kashco, the downtown realtor and development corporation. As a part of President Obama’s American Recovery & Reinvestment Act, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) selected CNP and Poor Dog Group to receive $50,000 to support artist salaries for Brewsie and Willie.

CalArts has a multidisciplinary approach to its studies of the arts through six schools: Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music and Theater. CalArts encourages students to explore and recognize the complexity of the many aspects of the arts. It is supported by a distinguished faculty of practicing artists and provides its Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts students with the hands-on training and exposure necessary for an artist’s growth. CalArts was founded in 1961 and opened in 1969 as the first institution of higher learning in the United States specifically for students interested in the pursuit of degrees in all areas of visual and performing arts.”

***

“You got to, said Willie, you got to Brewsie, you got to hold out a little hope.  Yes, said Brewsie, the hope is that our generation is more solid more scared, more articulate than the last ones.  What do you mean, said Willie, those G.I.s those guys.  Yes I do said Brewsie, I do mean them.”

"Gertrude and Alice," hand-in-hand for the blog anniversary by Bruce Kellner, 1982

Over the years I have seen many attempts to copy Stein’s writing whether as an exercise in a creative writing class, as a spoof ( something that has been done ever since her first writings appeared more than 100 years ago), or as an acknowledgement of the power of her creative use of words. As a tribute to her and the power  words, I have taken the first two words and last two words of each blog to create the following Steinian piece:

***

BLOG LOG, LOG BLOG

One of to follow

When I the morning

At the for life

The envelope so mundane

"...so mundane"

As a is round

In the this week

Sixty three no answers

As I du Fleurus

"I have often walked down this street before..."

And she is it

A few next IPO

One of “There, there”

It’s fashion buy art

In a the hat

"...the hat," Matisse, 1905

When I on him

The puppies a Thanksgiving

People often user = 1fxhrwbaixbwi

For more Year! Hans

From the Year! ABT

ABT always on the run by Tom Hachtman

This past for art

On this happy birthday

Last November Rose again

In the Babette’s Feast

Alphabets and about “Mildew”

"Out,out damn mildew!"

My Mesdames Monique Truong

Last summer Chicken Left-overs

OK, I Gertrude Stein

GS holding court by Tom Hachtman

As a hundred years.

****

That’s another  328 words so only 499,485 to go and I’ll have my own MAKING OF AMERICANS !

Here are a few of the things I’ve come across. Those in my collection are marked with an asterick (*).

• A watch for those who not only want to know what time it is, but also want the scent of the White House rose garden encircling their wrist:

Rose-scented SWATCH, 1998 *

• For the Fifth Avenue shopper who is more concerned about what’s on the outside of her stylish bag than what’s on the inside:

Valentino Rose bag, 2010

• For the police officer who wants to be stylish and safe:

Tobias Wong's ballistic nylon, bullet-proof corsage, 2008

• For the art collector on a thrift-shop budget:

Rose paint-by-number paintings, early 1960s *

• For the Zelda Fitzgerald wannabee to put in the Valentino bag:

Art Deco celluloid pillbox, circa late 1920s*

• For a sip of iced tea on the Formica topped kitchen table with Lucy Ricardo or June Cleaver:

Rose stenciled glasses, circa late 1950s*

• To tastefully fasten that silk scarf,  a brooch by any other name…(not the one that Gertrude wore which Alice thought was speaking to her!):

Filigree brooch with faux coral roses, early 1920s *

• To remove those Alice B. treats from the oven:

"Rose is..." potholder, 1978*

• And for wrapping any of the items above for the truly rose obsessed:

Gift wrap designed by Ann Rieck, 1990s*

And Gertrude’s take on “Rose is a…:

“Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there.  All those songs that sopranos sing as encores about “I have a garden; oh what a garden!”  Now I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that line, because it’s just one line in a longer poem.  But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but you know it.  Now listen!  I’m no fool.  I know in daily life we don’t go around saying “is a…is a…is a…” Yes, I’m no fool: but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”

COPYRIGHT HANS GALLAS ©2010

*****

NOW REPEAT IN STEINESE

Four Gertrude Stein productions with four glasses of wine

A Winestein...it's for real!

EVERY TUESDAY IN JUNE AT 7:30PM
(June 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29)

AT UNDER ST. MARKS THEATER IN THE EAST VILLAGE

Producers Drew Pisarra and Andrew Frank  herewith announce Now Repeat in Steinese, an evening of Gertrude Stein at Under St. Marks Theatre at 94 St. Marks Place, between First Ave. and Ave. A.

Drawing upon Ms. Stein’s reputation for repetition, Now Repeat in Steinese is actually four productions of her early enigmatic one-act “White Wines” paired with four different white wines. Fruity? Dry? Acidic? Sweet? Now Repeat in Steinese has you covered both as a play and a beverage.

Participating Artistes

Ryan Bronz, founding member of the National Theater of the United States of America, has created original works for Symphony Space, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and Galapagos Arts Space.

Kurt Braunohler has taken his act to SXSW and the Edinburgh Fringe (where he was an IF.Comedy Award nominee). His troupe also won Improv Ensemble of the Year Award at Chicago Improv Festival.

Heidi Carlsen, a Fullbright scholar, brought her movement-theater experiments to Poland then returned to NYC where she’s staged works at H.E.R.E., the Ontological and through the Women’s Project.

Andrew Frank, aside from writing & directing, is cofounder of Manhattan Theater Source which recently celebrated 10 years. His off-Broadway musical Sidd was recently revived at a Midwestern college.

Steinese in the Forbidden City !

Mark Grenier is the Training Center Director and an instructor at Magnet Theater. He is also the Artistic Director of Shoot from the Hip, an improvisational filmmaking program based in the Catskills.

Drew Pisarra, a Steinese veteran, has staged her one-acts Curtain Raiser , Ladies Voices, and Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters plus the longer Yes is for a very young man.

Laura Sheedy has been a directorial advisor to such international acts as Circus Oz, La La Parlour and Suitcase Royale. Her solo show Undercover premiered at the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Tickets are $20 and may be purchased at www.smarttix.com or by phone at 212-868-4444   24 hours a day, seven days a week

For more information, contact Drew Pisarra at 917-974-6822.

“Cunning very cunning and cheap, at that rate a sale

is a place to use type writing.   Shall we go home.”

from WHITE WINES, Gertrude Stein

COPYRIGHT HANS GALLAS ©2010

As she wrote at the beginning of  her memoir WHAT IS REMEMBERED:

“I was born and raised in California, where my maternal grandfather had been a pioneer before the state was admitted to the Union.  He had bought a gold mine and settled in Jackson, Amador County.  A few years later he crossed the Isthmus of Panama again and went to Brooklyn, where he married my grandmother.  There my mother was born.  When she was three years old, they went to Jackson.”

And then there’s Gertrudes’s take on Alice’s beginnings in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS:

“I was born in San Francisco, California.  I have in consequence always preferred living in a temperate climate but it is difficult, on the continent of Europe or even in America, to find a temperate climate and live in it.  My mother’s father was a pioneer, he came to California in ’49, he married my grandmother who was very fond of music.  She was a pupil of Clara Schumann’s father.  My mother was a quiet charming woman named Emilie.”

Alice B. , circa 1878

In celebration, what were some of Alice’s favorite things?   Raindrops on roses minus the whiskers on kittens a la Julie Andrews may have topped the list, but here’s my compilation:

•  Gertrude. “It was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then.”

Venice, 1908

• Needlepoint/petit point.

Design by Picasso, petit point by Alice.

• Gardening. “For fourteen successive years the gardens at Bilignin were my joy, working in them during the summers and planning and dreaming of them during the winters.”

The house and gardens in Bilignin by Sir Francis Rose

• Entertaining guests (did she have any choice with a house filled with Picassos and Matisses that all wanted to see?) Here’s where Cooking comes in.

• Fashion with a focus on hats.

Alice on the left in a room full of hats, late 1950s

• Fauchon, the high-end Parisian grocer.

Birthday tea with Alice

• Organizing,  both as Gertrude’s “secretary” and as the maître d’household.

• Letter writing.  Was it a pleasure or an obligation or a sign of a proper Victorian upbringing?  Luckily, there are hundreds, which we can enjoy today.

published by Liveright, 1970

And Alice, two small gifts for your 133rd, some chocolates and a special cake!

Happy Birthday!

COPYRIGHT HANS GALLAS 

I did mention the chickens in England  named Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in an earlier post about items I’d received through my GoogleAlert.  I guess that was silly. Sorry.

But now to some  items about GertrudeandAlice that, though factual, could fall into the “Believe It or Not!” category.  Some are the kind of tidbits that scholars love to unearth or reference to indicate that they are really in the know and that they’ve scoured those boxes in the lower basements of research libraries.  For fans like me, they are like the shiny nuggets among the pebbles in a gold miner’s pan and almost as exciting as finding a previously unseen photograph of GertrudeandAlice tucked away in the pages of a rare book.

So, here goes…

• Alice was tall and thin while Gertrude was short and stout. BELIEVE IT? NOT.

Both Gertrude and Alice were just a bit over five feet tall, but Gertrude was the heavier of the two.  She loved the sun and was often tanned and as Hemingway once said, Gertrude reminded him of  ”a  northern Italian peasant woman.”

the long and the short of it, photo by Cecil Beaton 1936

• Some people think Alice really did write THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS.

BELIEVE IT? NOT.

"And then I said..." Linda Hunt (l) & Linda Bassett (r), "Waiting for the Moon's" GertrudeandAlice

edition currently available from Vintage Press

• Alice was cooking all the time. BELIEVE IT? NOT.

After her mother’s death when Alice was 20, she was in charge of supervising the cook in her father’s household and began collecting family recipes which became the basis of her cookbook. When she joined Gertrude in Paris, she played a major role in hiring and overseeing the cooks and other help . Alice devotes a whole chapter, “Servants in France,” in her cookbook to the hiring, firing and managing of their help. Though Alice undoubtedly paid very close attention to what their cooks were preparing, she was mainly responsible for cooking on Sundays, the cook’s day off, with Gertrude requesting “American food for Sunday-evening supper.”   During their stay in the French countryside during the German Occupation, life was more about utilizing the food they could get and creatively using it rather than handling a household staff.

In their country kitchen in Coluz, 1942

• Alice met Jimmy Olsen. BELIEVE IT! (Great Caesar’s ghost!)

Jack Larson, who played the ever-ready, impulsive Jimmy Olsen on the 1950s ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN television series,  was also a playwright and poet. He met Virgil Thomson through director John Houseman who had become familiar with his plays.  Thomson asked Larson to write the libretto of his opera LORD BYRON in the mid 1960s.  Larson was an admirer of  Stein’s work and Thomson, a long-time friend of GertrudeandAlice’s, arranged for him to meet Alice a few years before her death.

Jack Larson aka Jimmy Olsen

• Julie Harris played Alice. BELIEVE IT!

In the one-person  play “Staying on Alone: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” by Bruce Kellner, Julie Harris played Alice. The play was performed in May, 1998 as a staged reading to benefit the Theater of the Performing Arts on Cape Cod. The monologue begins on the afternoon of Gertrude’s death in 1946 and ends in March, 1967 right before Alice’s death . The script is included in Kellner’s book KISS ME AGAIN: AN INVITATION TO A GROUP OF NOBLE DAMES (Turtle Point Press, 2002).

Two Alices- Marian Seldes (l) who played her in "Gertrude Stein and a Companion" and Julie Harris (r), 2006

the Braille alphabet

• JFK wrote a note to Gertrude Stein asking if he could visit her in Paris.  BELIEVE IT!

Among the many boxes of materials in the Stein-Toklas Collection in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, there is a hand-written note by a young John F. Kennedy to Gertrude Stein requesting to visit her. Whether this visit ever occurred, I don’t know though Kennedy was in Europe with his family right before the start of WW II and seeking an audience with Gertrude may have been on his Grande Tour itinerary.

(I want to thank my friend Tirza Latimer for unearthing this at Yale. I have never seen it mentioned in any book about Gertrude.)

The Kennedys, 1939 (JFK 2nd from right)

•  The first Picasso acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was his portrait of Gertrude Stein. BELIEVE IT!

Picasso's Gertrude, 1906

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