Questions and Answers

Last summer when I told one of my friends, who is also a big GertrudeandAlice fan, that I was going to write a blog devoted to them, his first response was that he hoped I’d be writing about things that hadn’t been written about and that I wouldn’t write silly things making fun of them.

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

1950's advertisement

Tagged Alice B. Toklas, Braille, Bruce Kellner, Denny Stein, Gertrude Stein, Jack Larson, Jimmy Olsen, John F. Kennedy, Julie Harris, Linda Bassett, Linda Hunt, Lord Byron, Marian Seldes, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Picasso, Rose Ellen Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Virgil Thomson, Waiting for the Moon, What is Remembered