Questions and Answers

Question: “What happened on April 30, 1877 in San Francisco, California at 922 O’Farrell Street?”

Answer: “Alice Babette Toklas was born.”

One thing I have enjoyed in this blog is adding photographs of GertrudeandAlice into my posts. Many of them are familiar to GertrudeandAlice fans and are widely featured in books and articles.  These are the ones that show up in most Google Image searches or on Pinterest. When I come across  unfamiliar photographs of them, it’s as if I’ve discovered an old, dusty, leather bound family photo album in the attic. 

Today, on Alice’s 143^rd birthday, I’ve compiled an album of pictures of Alice that are less well known. They are taken from a book by L. Arnold Weissberger (1907-1981),  FAMOUS FACES: A PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM OF PERSONAL REMINISCENCES (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York , 1973.) The 443 page coffee-table book contains 1477 photographs, almost half of them in color, taken of celebrities at parties and various events between 1946 and 1971. The book ends with a biographical index which does go from “A” to “Z.”

Weissberger was a New York based entertainment attorney and theatrical agent. Some of his clients included Martha Graham, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Helen Hayes, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. (More from Ruth and Garson later.)

He began taking informal snapshots of his circle of friends with a simple Kodak Bantam camera in the late 1940s never using special equipment and only available light.

 It was a color photo of Alice from 1959 by Weissberger on a postcard that first introduced me to him. The picture was not only eye catching because it was in color, but also because Alice was wearing a very fashionable, black feather adorned hat. I’ve wondered why the image was printed as a postcard though it may have been manufactured for those postcard racks that still appear in some bookstores featuring writers, movie stars and other celebrities.

I discovered Weissberger’s book a few years ago in hopes of finding additional photos of Alice. To my surprise it included six photographs I had never seen before as well as the one of Alice in her feathered chapeau!

Weissberger also wrote a short tribute to her which is included in between the following photographs from his book.

“I never knew Gertrude Stein, but I met Alice B. Toklas through Virgil Thomson in Paris in the summer of 1949. Standing on the terrace of her apartment at 5, rue Christine, I snapped a picture of her at the window.

We became good friends, and thereafter I visited her – and usually took a few pictures – every time I came to Paris. 

One of her friends told me that she took a dim view of people photographing her, but with me she was not only tolerant but pleasantly cooperative. 

She was no longer cooking her famous dinners, so I always took her to one of the best restaurants, where she enjoyed eating a large meal that seemed disproportionate to her small size. 

In the last years, when she could no longer go out, I would buy her a box of delicacies from Fauchon’s, which she would still write me about the following Christmas. 

Her knowledge was extraordinary and she was keen and witty. (“All the right people at the wrong party,” she remarked to me of one soirée). When I saw her for the last time, at the age of eighty-nine, she was bright and interested as a young girl.” – L. Arnold Weissberger

And now for a couple of birthday gifts. First one to myself – the latest addition to my collection: a copy of Alice’s memoir, WHAT IS REMEMBERED, from the library of actress Ruth Gordon and her playwright husband, Garson Kanin!

And from my artist friend in Australia and big GertrudeandAlice fan, Gisela Züchner-Mogall, a just completed monoprint of Alice. Thanks so much Gisela!

And Happy Birthday, Alice B.!

P.S. About a week after I posted this, I received a copy of a catalog from a Weissberger photo exhibition. It was called “Close-Up,” and was held in October, 1967 at the Museum of the City of New York. And the second to the last photograph was this 2-page spread: