Questions and Answers

As a boy in Springfield, Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, I recall that the aunt of a family friend once mentioned that she had met Mark Twain in San Francisco. How amazing, I thought, to know someone who had known someone who was that famous!

When it comes to GertrudeandAlice, they met lots and lots of famous people and lots and lots of not  so famous people.   Many of them flocked to rue de Fleurus, rue Christine and their country place near Bilignin while others got to know them on their travels.

It’s been said that there have probably been more people who have written about  meeting GertrudeandAlice than have written about encounters with any other well-known 20th century personalities. They were a very sociable couple.

Who doesn’t know about some of the key players in their circle – Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gris, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wilder, and Van Vechten?

But then there are  other individuals, though in most cases no less famous, who became a part of this Mutual Admiration Society.  Society members  fell in and out of favor with the arbiters of this charmed circle, but GertrudeandAlice certainly attracted a diverse coterie.

The Duncan family, particularly Isadora and Raymond, knew Gertrude from her days in Oakland and once they all moved to Europe, Raymond made her sandals. After Isadora’s death-by-flowing-scarf, Gertrude reportedly said “Affectations can be dangerous.” So much for that family friendship!

GertrudeandAlice met Josephine Baker at the premiere of La Revue Nègre which made her a star in Paris in 1925. Gertrude helped the producer of the show find an apartment at 26, rue de Fleurus.   One can  imagine Josephine strutting down the rue, baguette in hand.  Many years later, Alice included a dessert in her cookbook, Custard Josephine Baker, which includes three bananas – a tribute to her scandalous skirt?

Anita Loos, most famous for her book GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES  first published in 1925 and made into a blockbuster hit with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in 1953, was a lifelong friend of Alice’s and by some accounts Gertrude was jealous of the friendship thinking that it was more than just casual. Alice in turn was jealous of Mabel Dodge’s friendship with Gertrude.

And as mentioned in the last blog, there were many Hollywood A-listers who met GertrudeandAlice, marveling at their celebrity without  the studios’ star-making publicity departments – Charlie Chaplin, Dashiell Hammett, Marlene Dietrich, Paulette Goddard and stage stars such as Katherine Cornell and Helen Hayes.

The list goes on:

Alfred Lord Whitehead,

Man Ray,

Cecil Beaton.

Virginia Woolf,

Sylvia Beach,

Paul Bowles,

Aaron Copeland,

Natalie Barney,

Mabel Dodge (Luhan),

Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson,

James Joyce,

Mildred Aldrich,

Pierre Balmain,

Sherwood Anderson,

Bennett Cerf,

Eleanor Roosevelt (but not FDR),

Clare Booth and Henry Luce,

Janet Flanner,

Virgil Thomson,

Leonard Bernstein,

Richard Wright,

Samuel Steward aka Phil Andros,

William Saroyan,

Truman Capote,

Eric Sevareid,

and on and on.

Mark Twain died before GertrudeandAlice met. (Gertrude honored him as an important American writer because of his “essential intelligence.”)   Don’t know if Alice ever met him  when she lived in San Francisco, though I believe that as a child she saw Susan B. Anthony, the prima donna of the Stein/Thomson opera “Mother of Us All.”

Ms. Anthony was a contemporary of Mr. Lincoln, whom I never met but his general, U.S. Grant, was a favorite of Gertrude’s and the namesake of my junior high school in Springfield.

Strange how circuitous this all is, but after all the world is round!

COPYRIGHT HANS GALLAS ©2009

Tagged Alice B. Toklas, Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Mark Twain, Raymond Duncan