Thornton got wilder and wilder the more and more he ate, gravity loosing it's grip as he and a multitude of Matisse and others became moons in orbit in the heyday high days of the literary salons with it's star studded "lost generation" galaxy of expatriate writers. As the artists came and went, there was one consistency, one universal sun-star that held everything in place. It was a schizoid star to be sure, composed of two seperates welded together as one spiritual same sex sculpture depicting two forbidden lovers as one unified entity. That sculpture was a bronzed patena of a paternal Gertrude Stein and her looking glass wonderland Alice in a mad hatters world....Alice "Babette" Toklas of San Francisco.
Alice B. Toklas, and no, not the "you can get everything you want at Alice's restaurant" Alice. This Alice was born in San Francisco in 1877 to a middleclass Jewish family. She developed an interest in music which she studied in the rain soaked northwest at the University of Washington. The limiting world of the drizzle abundant northwest created an urgency to travel and see what Europe had to offer. Paris was beckoning to her, a muse in a soft colorful silken Chinese dress with creamy Asian thighs, and Babette landed in the land of revolution in September of 1907. It was on that first French day that she met the women who would change her life and whose own life would forever be intertwined with hers as finely woven fabric in a Persian rug. Gertrude Stein. Stein and Toklas, together they would shape and share a life of literary foreplay, along with physical foreplay, behind the invisible curtains of a salon they hosted together that appealed hungrily to the expatriates that were crashing ashore on the Parisian Left Banke. Writers, poets, painters, sinners and saints. A Picasso landscape of twisted bodies tossed onto the war swept pages of a Hemmingway novel. They all paid homoge.
Stein was the engine that powered the ship, born in 1874 in Pennsylvania of railroad wealthy parentage that for business reasons moved to Vienna and Paris when the young Stein was three years old then back to the America, to the land of Jack London in Oakland, California across the bay from the city of San Francisco, the jewell of the Pacific Left Coast. Eventually in 1903, Stein moved back to Europe and lived with her brother Leo, an art critic, in Paris. It was during this period that her notoriety was becoming well known.
If Ellen Degeneres thinks she is breaking new ground, she best think again. In this day and age it's a safe bet to "come out" but when Stein did in the 1950's it was precarious. She wrote "Things As They Are" in 1903 but was not published until 1950. It's a story based on a menage a trois will studying at John Hopkins in Baltimore. One of the partners developed a relationship with another woman who also intrigued Stein who could not make any headway with her herself.
Stein became not only intriqued with her own sexuality, but enamoured of her own masculinity which in the day was accepted theory as Jewish men were considered effeminate and Jewish women as homosexuals according to a study and the ideas of Otto Weininger's Sex and Character written in 1906. Steins division of household labor lesbian relationship with Toklas was described by Hemmingway that Toklas was Steins wife.
Babette warmed to her role as Steins lover, cook, secretary, critic, editor, muse and gal Friday (actually her gal Monday through Sunday) and was happy to remain submissively in the background. Stein eventually published her own memoirs in 1933 under the titilating title, "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas!" This became Steins bestselling book. Stein died in 1946. In one account of a Picasso portrait painted by Picasso, a critic said to him "It doesn't even look like Stein" to which Pablo replied, "She will!"
Toklas then published her own memoirs in 1954, that mixed reminiscences and recipes under the title, "The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook" with the foremost recipe being that for Hashisch Fudge, a mixture of fruit, nuts, spices and cannibus sativa. This recipe led to the legendary Alice B. Toklas brownies and the cook book has not been out of print since it was first published, and it was followed by a second cookbook in 1958 called "Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present" and wrote articles for magazines and newspapers. As an interesting aside, although no truth can be accurately subscribed to it is the that the slang term "toke" was derived from her name by the Cannibus faithful to describe the act of inhaling marijuana. Others claim it is a word derived from a Mediterreanean word "tocar" so who knows. It's a matter of choice and which mythology you wish to inhale for your own pleasure. The original cookbook has been translated into many languages, including the latest in Norwegian, ja!
In 1963 she published another account of her autobiography which abruptly ends with Steins death. Later years saw poor health and financial problems which were aggravated as the Stein family heirs took away the paintings Stein had left to her. Toklas died at the age of 89 and is buried next to Stein in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Gay Paree.
Popular pot culture has not neglected Babette and her Lost Generation Brownies. There was a cinematic tribute of sorts in 1968 starring the irrepressible Peter Sellers in I Love You Alice B. Toklas, and both Toklas and Stein are referred to in the stage play "Mame" which also made the transition to the silver screen, and actress Linda Hunt portrayed her in film. Politics and pot? Wwatch out Tea Party, there is a "tea" chapter of the Stonewall Democrats, an organization within the Democractic Party that is named after Toklas! Brendan Behan sums it up best in his poem about Paris and Gertrude Stein. He said, "I absolutely must decline, to dance in the streets with Gertrude Stein. And as for Alice B. Toklas, I'd rather eat a box of fucking chocolates!"