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 7 of 8)

Stein writing at the Goodspeeds' apartment

For many, the surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945 marked a new beginning. For others, it was a final curtain coming down. Stein was the first to go, dying in a Paris hospital in July 1946 after an unsuccessful operation to remove a cancerous tumor from her stomach. Following her partner's death, Toklas continued her friendship with Bobsy, cooking her lunch on at least one occasion when the Chicagoan visited Paris. After Faÿ's arrest and life sentence for his wartime activities—his collaboration with the Nazis likely led to the deaths of hundreds of French Freemasons, Faÿ's particular bête noire—Toklas turned to Bobsy and other friends to help secure his freedom. "Is there any other way of working the miracle—can nothing be done," she pleaded with Bobsy in an October 1946 letter (like Stein, Toklas abstained from using the question mark). "To me it has become a sacred trust—it was so near to Gertrude." (As it turned out, Faÿ eventually escaped to Switzerland; he died in 1978.)

In February 1947, alone in her Paris apartment, Toklas contemplated the famous 1906 portrait of Stein by Pablo Picasso, soon destined to depart for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "I cant bear to think of its not being here," she wrote Bobsy. "Gertrude always sat on the sofa and the picture hung over the fireplace opposite and I used to say in the old happy days that they looked at each other and that possibly when they were alone they talked to each other. . . . I send my dearest love to Barney and to you. I think of you constantly." Poverty-stricken and at odds with Stein's family, Alice Babette Toklas died in Paris in 1967.

By the time of that 1947 letter, Barney had already been ill for several months, confined to Chicago's Presbyterian Hospital. In town for a concert, the pianist Artur Rubinstein stopped by for a visit in January 1947, performing an impromptu concert for the hospital staff. Hoping that the Arizona desert might provide a cure, Barney and Bobsy traveled to Castle Hot Springs, but Barney died there on February 23rd at 62.

The next casualty was the Hutchinses' marriage. No longer able to endure his wife's shrewish and erratic behavior, Bob Hutchins walked out of the President's House early one morning in 1947 and never saw Maude again. Following their 1948 divorce, Chicago gossips thought it likely he would marry Bobsy; instead he married his secretary and former student, Vesta Sutton, a pretty, younger, more compact version of his first wife.

After lingering far too long in the President's House, Maude finally moved to Connecticut. She did realize her dream of becoming a writer, releasing several racy novels (NYRB Classics re-released her 1959 novel, Victorine, this past August). But even New Directions, Maude's avant-garde publisher, grew tired of her fictional experiments, and the partnership fell apart. For several decades, Maude vanished from public view. She died in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on March 28, 1991, having outlived her ex-husband by 14 years. She was 91.

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