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 6 of 8)

Bobsy, carrying a monkey and wearing a dress from the 1870s, at Chicago's 1932 Architects' Ball

As things turned out, Toklas was absolutely right. With war looming (and eventually exploding across Europe and Asia) and time taking its toll, the years following Stein's U.S. tour were a slow but inexorable descent. Suffering from mental burnout, Thornton Wilder visited Stein and Toklas in France in July 1935. Bobsy was there, too, and she shot home movies documenting the visit: Stein hoeing the garden at Bilignen (a task she would never have performed if the camera weren't rolling); Toklas and the couple's beloved dogs, Basket and Pepe, walking among the boxwoods.

In February 1937, Bobsy hosted a dinner inaugurating Chicago's newly decorated Arts Club dining room. Most of the women who attended wore black frocks and other sedate garb; Bobsy, noted the Tribune, "presided over the revels attired in a Grecian costume." She continued to stand out wherever she went: a golden apparition—she was "gilded throughout," noted the Tribune, "eyebrows and hair too"—at a Chicago Architect's Ball, or "looking like a Matisse" in a black-and-red-striped bodice and skirt at an Arts Club performance by the voodoo chanteuse Elsie Houston. In May 1937, the Goodspeeds attended the coronation of England's George VI; Bobsy came back doing a dead-on imitation of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée who had precipitated the upheaval among the British monarchy.

But time was catching up with Bobsy. In August 1939, Wilder saw her at Weeping Willows, the house in Cape Cod that she and Barney had inherited from her mother-in-law. "Her hair is greyer," he wrote Stein, "but she is as pretty and sure of herself as ever." That November, a newspaper article about Chicago opera lumped Bobsy in with the city's "old guard."

The beginning of World War II led to even more drastic change. Stein and Toklas disappeared behind the wall of Nazi occupation; though in his 40s, Wilder enlisted in the service, ultimately rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Forces. As she had done a quarter of a century earlier, Bobsy channeled her energies into a variety of fundraisers that supported the war effort. But that didn't mean a girl couldn't still have a little fun. In October 1942, one society scribe noted that military uniforms and otherwise informal attire had now become de rigueur at Chicago Symphony concerts. As the Tribune noted, there was one exception: "It remained for Mrs. Charles B. Goodspeed, who was making her first appearance after a summer in the east, to introduce the 'short' evening frock to concertgoers. Mrs. Goodspeed, who is noted for her chic, arrived in a midcalf length black chiffon dress trimmed with black lace around the bottom of the skirt."

The war in Europe also meant no more trips overseas. The Goodspeeds now regularly escaped the Midwestern winters in Arizona at a luxe resort outside Phoenix called Castle Hot Springs. "Barney Goodspeed informed us that he had been coming to the springs every year since the [first] world war," wrote a Tribune reporter, "and that he had no intention of ever staying away."

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Photograph: Chicago Tribune photo