Alice, Annette and a writer, Harriet Levy, who lived next door at 920 O’Farrell Street, were Jewish, lesbian, interested in artistic expression, uninterested in finding husbands and, after its devastation, keen to leave San Francisco. Annette had studied and exhibited at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in Mason Street. The building was destroyed the day after the earthquake by the fires that raged. Harriet was a close friend of Gertrude’s sister-in-law Sarah Stein, who had also studied art at the Institute.
Sarah and Michael Stein owned rental houses in San Francisco and when safe to do so they came from Paris to assess the damage. To impress her American artistic friends, and share a taste of the salon d’automne, Sarah Stein took three Matisse paintings with her; one was the portrait of Madame Matisse with a green stripe down her nose. Harriet Levy invited Alice to see these pictures. ‘Since the startling news that there was such stuff in town has been communicated, I have been a very popular lady,’ Sarah Stein wrote to Gertrude. Alice, intrigued by Matisse’s portrait and tales of salon life, voiced her wish to go to Paris. Sarah Stein invited her and Harriet to travel back with her, but Alice had no money and felt responsible for her brother, Clarence.
The following year, Clarence was twenty-one and Alice thirty. San Francisco remained in a parlous state, without infrastructure or adequate hospital provision and with outbreaks of bubonic plague. Harriet agreed to lend Alice the money for her fare. They sailed together at the beginning of September 1907.
The day they arrived in Paris, 9 September, they visited Sarah and Michael Stein at their apartment in rue Madame. Alice was aware of vast rooms, tall windows, oak furniture, Persian rugs, paintings on every bit of wall, and Gertrude:
She was a golden presence burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair. She was dressed in a warm brown corduroy suit. She wore a large round coral brooch and when she talked, very little, or laughed, a good deal, I thought her voice came from this brooch. It was unlike anyone else’s voice – deep, full, velvety, like a great contralto’s, like two voices. She was large and heavy with delicate small hands and a beautifully modelled and unique head.
Alice wrote that promotional piece in her eighties, long after Gertrude was dead. It showed her skill as a publicist. From first meeting, she became the agent and servant of Gertrude Stein. She heard, she said, bells ringing in her head and so knew she was in the presence of genius. And Gertrude thought their meeting destined by some internal force of nature: ‘It is inevitable that when we really need someone we find them. The person you need attracts you like a magnet.’
Alice the maidservant and more
Alice wasted no time. Gertrude, demoralized by Leo’s scorn of her work, needed to be revered. Alice needed a home. She was an experienced and capable manager, adept at subsuming her own ego. And she was a very good cook. Whatever Gertrude wanted, Alice would provide. The paradox was that Alice, while seeming to serve, dictated the agenda. She was the casting director: Gertrude would be the genius and Alice everything else. No outsider must get too near.
Alice B. Toklas © Culture Club / Getty Images
Next day they walked in the Luxembourg Gardens and had tea at Fouquet’s. On the Saturday, Alice attended the salon evening at 27 rue de Fleurus. She looked at Picasso’s Melancholy Woman, his preparatory works for the Desmoiselles d’Avignon, Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, Boy with a Butterfly Net, Self-Portrait and La Coiffure, Pierre Bonnard’s The Siesta, Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse, Lautrec’s Le Divan, little paintings by Daumier and Delacroix, two Gauguins, dozens of Renoirs, Cézanne watercolours… She met Picasso, Fernande Olivier, Matisse, Miss Mars and Miss Squire. Every so often, Hélène came in and filled the iron stove with coal.
On 30 September Alice went, at Gertrude’s invitation, to the preview of the autumn salon. Cézanne had died the previous year and there were over fifty of his paintings on show.
‘Right here in front of you is the whole story’, Gertrude told her. ‘It was indeed the vie de Bohème, just as one had seen it in the opera’ was Alice’s view. And at the heart of this grand opera was Gertrude:
It was the enormous life she’d led that you could see… All the past experience gives a richness to every new vision. That’s part of the genius… I wasn’t so much younger in years. I was only two years and a few months younger. But I was so much younger in experience.
Alice’s arrival was timely. In August 1906 May Bookstaver married a New York stockbroker and became Mrs Charles Knoblauch, and later that year Mabel Haynes married an Austrian army captain. Both Gertrude and Alice were uxorious, but not for a man. Alice would gladly have been known as Mrs Gertrude Stein. It was Gertrude who had the money, the house and sat in the captain’s chair.
Gertrude arranged for Alice to have French lessons with Fernande Olivier and she gave her pages to read of The Making of Americans, about bottom nature and dependent independent and independent dependent characters and everyone who had ever lived.
The Making of Americans
By the time Alice arrived, Gertrude had filled up many exercise books in writing The Making of Americans: Alice read:
The strongest thing in each one is the bottom nature of them. Other kinds of natures are in almost all men and in almost all women mixed up with the bottom nature in them. Some men have it in them to be attacking. Some men have it in them to be made more
