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

By Geoffrey Johnson

(page 5 of 8)

The opera singer Claire Dux Swift (seated) with (from left) Fanny Butcher, Bobsy, Stein, and the Goodspeeds' parrot

Gertrude Stein's tour of the United States in 1934 and 1935 preoccupied her for the rest of her life. The questions it provoked—about identity, memory, and eternity—figure prominently in her final writings, most notably in the chatty book she entitled Everybody's Autobiography. While pondering those questions, the book also exudes a real warmth prompted by the sights Stein had seen, the adulation she had received, the new friends she had made, and the big Midwestern city she came to love. As Stein put it (eschewing the commas she feared enfeebled her writing): "Chicago besides being an adventure was home."

After their quick overnight visit to see Four Saints on November 7, 1934, Stein and Toklas returned to Chicago at the end of the month for an extended stay. They split their time between The Drake hotel and the Goodspeeds' apartment, where Toklas had other opportunities to enjoy what she called Bobsy's "perfect cuisine." Stein signed books at Marshall Field's and delivered lectures at the Arts Club, the Friday Club, the Chicago Woman's Club, and the Renaissance Society. Bobsy took her twice to the opera and threw a number of dinner parties in her honor (one ran so late that Barney appeared in his pajamas and told everyone to go home). But Stein's most significant moments here, probably set in motion by Bobsy, involved the University of Chicago, its president, Robert Hutchins, and two of his closest friends and colleagues: the philosopher Mortimer Adler and the writer Thornton Wilder, a professor of literature at the university who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (and who would win two more for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth).

Stein met Wilder on November 25th (he and Bobsy were already close friends), and the two hit it off immediately. Two days later, Wilder joined Stein, Toklas, and the Goodspeeds for dinner at the President's House on the U. of C. campus. The dinner itself proceeded pleasantly enough. Hutchins and Adler were both absent—they were conducting one of their innovative Great Books classes—so Maude Hutchins presided. A graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts, Maude, an accomplished artist, had a studio in the carriage house behind the President's House. There was often a shocking sexual undercurrent to her work—one of her annual Christmas cards featured a nude rendering of what was clearly her pubescent daughter Franja—and Maude, a tall, beautiful brunette, projected a strong erotic aura of her own: plied with martinis, a staple of the Hutchinses' evening routine, Adler (as he explained it in his 1977 autobiography, Philosopher at Large), suffered "a state of embarrassed excitement" when first he met Maude.

So, were Maude and Bobsy lovers? At this writing, no evidence exists to answer that question. Their husbands were colleagues, and the two women were certainly friends, visiting each other's homes and attending a variety of entertainments together. But the only suggestion of an affair remains Bernard Faÿ's letter, and though Faÿ certainly had the opportunity to gather such information—a French scholar devoted to U.S. history and literature, he had visited Chicago while lecturing at Northwestern University in 1933—his reputation as an unlikable scoundrel (and this based on the testimony of his friends) undercuts his credibility.

After dinner concluded at the President's House, Maude led her guests to the upstairs sitting room. As Wilder settled into a chaise longue, Hutchins and Adler arrived, tired from their long day. Stein immediately confronted them, asking, "Where have you been, Hutchins, and what have you been doing?" Startled by the force behind the question—"the energy Gertrude exuded in a small room hit one like Niagara Falls," Adler wrote in his account of the event—Hutchins made the mistake of addressing his interrogator as Miss Stein. "Don't call me Miss Stein," barked Stein. "Call me Gertrude Stein." Things went downhill from there.

Hutchins tried to explain the philosophy behind the Great Books program, and Adler produced a list of the books they were discussing, many of which had originally been written in Greek, Latin, and French. The students, it turned out, were reading the books in English translation, which infuriated Stein, who badgered Hutchins as she paced back and forth. "The argument soon turned to the real meaning of 'ideas,' and, naturally, from that moment on, grew into a great altercation," wrote Bobsy in a letter to the gossip columnist and celebrity hostess Elsa Maxwell.

Barney Goodspeed jumped to Hutchins's defense, as did Adler. "I decided that Gertrude needed a dose of her own medicine," he later wrote. "I began to ask her questions, one after another, with gathering force and rising pitch." Stein (in Bobsy's written account) responded by approaching Adler and pointing at him. "Look at your forehead," she shouted. "It is narrow, narrow. With your dialectics, you could prove anything to me, but, of course, you would be wrong." And with that, she whacked him on the head.

As if on cue, a maid entered the sitting room. "Madame," she announced, "the police." Adler turned white and rose to his feet. The room filled suddenly with laughter. Unbeknownst to the party's late arrivals, the Tribune's Fanny Butcher had arranged for Stein and Toklas to ride around that evening with a couple of Chicago homicide detectives. ("The way I felt about her at that moment, I wished they had [arrived] earlier and taken her for a ride Chicago-style," wrote Adler.) The two women thanked their hosts and prepared to leave. At the doorway, Toklas turned to Adler. "This has been a wonderful evening," she said. "Gertrude has said things tonight that it will take her ten years to understand."

Not one to hold a grudge, Hutchins, probably encouraged by Wilder, later asked Stein to return to Hyde Park in a few days to lead a class on Aristophanes and epic poetry. Impressed by her ability to draw out the students in the poetry class, Hutchins arranged for Stein to come back for the university's spring session to teach for a couple of weeks. (According to Richard Goldstone, a biographer of Wilder, Hutchins shelved a plan to offer Stein a permanent position at the university.)

On Wednesday, December 5th, Stein threw a dinner party for her Chicago friends and presented them with Christmas gifts: autographed copies of her books. (Bobsy gathered Stein's handwritten messages and published them as a booklet called Chicago Inscriptions.) On Thursday morning, she and Toklas caught a morning plane to Madison, Wisconsin, the next stop on their national tour.

On February 24, 1935, Stein and Toklas returned to Chicago for another extended stay. Thornton Wilder turned over his Drexel Avenue apartment to them, and there Stein, delighting in the snowy vistas of the Midway, wrote the four lectures on narration that she would deliver at the U. of C. during the first two weeks of March. (Those lectures each drew about 500 students; Stein conducted smaller classes with 30 students selected by Wilder.) She also found occasions to socialize with Bobsy, just back from a winter getaway in Arizona.

Stein and Toklas flew to Dallas on March 17th, but, making their way back toward New York and France, they returned for one final Chicago visit on April 19th. Again they stayed at the Goodspeeds' apartment, where Bobsy threw them a special dinner. "Gertrude was really a very good guest," Bobsy recalled years later. "She entered into everything with the greatest enthusiasm. She had a rollicking charm that was contagious."

An amateur filmmaker, Bobsy made a short movie that evening. It reveals Stein crammed on a long couch with Toklas and others, while Wilder sits off to the side on a piano bench. Seated on the floor, her fabled charm and mischievous eyes on full display, Bobsy holds a large paper flower and flirts playfully with Fanny Butcher's husband. Later we see Thornton Wilder, on his feet now, gesturing grandly with the flower and delivering a speech that reduces everyone to laughter. Oh, for a lip reader.

On May 4th, finally back in New York, Stein and Toklas boarded the same boat that had brought them to America. "It was not until we were on the Champlain again," Toklas wrote wistfully in her cookbook, "that I realised that the seven months we had spent in the United States had been an experience and adventure which nothing that might follow would ever equal."

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Photograph: Yale Collection of American LIterature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library