Portrait of a Lady

Between the world wars, a beautiful, artistic woman named Bobsy Goodspeed stood at the heart of Chicago's social and cultural scenes. Now, prompted by a salacious if glancing remark in a recent book, this forgotten woman re-emerges and opens the door on a vanished era peopled by painters and pianists, plutocrats and politicians—and an irresistible force named Gertrude Stein

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Young Bobsy, a darling of the society pages, depicted in the Tribune in 1916

I caught my first glimpse of Bobsy Goodspeed last fall while reading Janet Malcolm's latest book, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. Over the course of three decades, Malcolm, a regular contributor to The New Yorker (where portions of Two Lives first appeared), has written a number of books that, among other things, explore the nature of truth and the art of the storyteller. In Two Lives, Malcolm examines how Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, two well-known Jewish lesbians, managed to survive in France during the deadly and oppressive Nazi occupation. She concludes that the pair endured thanks in large part to the help they received from their good friend Bernard Faÿ, a French scholar who received a life sentence in prison following World War II for collaborating with the Nazis.

Two Lives is a valuable book, its significance residing in the important contributions—interpretive, textual, and biographical—it makes to Stein scholarship. (It's also a pleasure to read.) But near the midpoint of her book, almost as an aside, Malcolm quotes a 1934 letter from Faÿ. Writing to Stein, he describes Bobsy Goodspeed as "a good-looking, silly-clever Evanston lady, wife of the foremost trustee and lover of the wife of the president of the University of Chicago." Wow! As lurid, gossipy bombshells go, that one's pretty good, even if it does demand a little deciphering (and even if Malcolm did slightly alter the original language in Faÿ's letter).

In 1934, the 35-year-old Robert Maynard Hutchins, education's wunderkind, was in the fifth year of his 16-year tenure as the president of the U. of C. (from 1945 to 1951 he would serve as the school's chancellor). He and his wife, Maude Phelps Hutchins, made a striking couple—they were both tall, darkly handsome, and terribly smart—though Maude had a reputation for a chilly aloofness. An artist and aspiring writer, she made it absolutely clear she had no intention of hosting teas or otherwise shouldering the traditional duties of a university president's wife. She did make friends with a few high-placed Chicagoans, however, among them Mr. and Mrs. Charles Goodspeed. Called Barney by friends (his middle name was Barnett), Charles Goodspeed was, among other things, a trustee at the University of Chicago—and Barney was married to Bobsy. So what Faÿ is telling us is that Maude and Bobsy were having an affair, a bit of news that once would have set wagging tongues aflame all across Chicago.

Given the involvement of Robert Hutchins and his wife, Faÿ's assertion still resonates today. And though it runs counter to every unwritten rule in the storyteller's handbook, let me tell you up front that for all I could discover, that bit of news remains nothing but rumor. If you are following this story merely to catch Bobsy and Maude entwined in erotic embrace, stop reading now. That's not going to happen.

But as I tried to prove (or disprove) that rumor, I got to know and become half-obsessed with the remarkable Bobsy Goodspeed. In her day—in those years between the two world wars—there was no brighter light in the Chicago firmament than Elizabeth Fuller Goodspeed. Pretty, rich, accomplished, mischievous, she orchestrated a whirlwind of social activities in the city and beyond. Yet Bobsy was much more than the stereotypical Chicago socialite circa 1934. The roles she played not only served Chicago society but also advanced on several fronts—art, music, literature—the local course of modernism. To take one instance alone, Gertrude Stein might never have visited the United States nor developed her special fondness for Chicago if not for Bobsy. Neither would Stein have met the writer Thornton Wilder, with whom she developed the most important new friendship of the last decade of her life. Yet for all most people remember about Bobsy today, she might well have never existed.

Prompted by Faÿ's letter, I began poking around, looking for Bobsy in famous people's letters and in the footnotes to scholarly texts. She is a fleeting presence there, appearing suddenly and briefly before vanishing back into the shadows. Bobsy began coming into sharper focus only when I started digging through old newspapers and encountered that Domesday Book of the early decades of the 20th century: the society pages.

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Photography: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

This article appears in the October 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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