“It is, as Gertrude used to say, unfamiliarity that breeds contempt.” – Alice B. Toklas, 1949
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Picture: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (April 30, 1877 – March 7, 1967), 1944.
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Alice Babette Toklas, who was born in San Francisco one hundred and forty years ago today, fled to Paris after the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906. On September 8, 1907, the day after Toklas arrived in Paris, she met Gertrude Stein. “I was impressed by the corral brooch she wore and by her voice,” Toklas wrote later. “I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom [ ] I speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead.”
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After their meeting, Toklas and Stein became friends and lovers and ultimately were inseparable until Stein’s death in 1946.
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While it was Stein’s work—including “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” (1933)—that gained the author more notoriety as a public figure, it was Toklas who ran the couple’s famed salon (she adored F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, while she barred Ernest Hemingway from the house).
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Although Stein willed her estate to Toklas, the couple’s four-decade relationship had no legal significance, and Toklas’ efforts to keep intact their art collection—which included twenty-seven Picassos, seven Grises, and one Matisse—failed as Stein’s family took action to collect the valuable pieces. Toklas lived her final years in poverty.
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Alice B. Toklas died on March 7, 1967; she was eighty-nine. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #AliceBToklas
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