Outlaw Marriages (15 page)

This idyllic life became somewhat less so when the rumblings of war began and then German forces occupied France in 1940. Friends who feared that the two Jewish women would be sent to a concentration camp encouraged them to cross the border into Switzerland. Stein and Toklas wouldn't budge, however, continuing to live quietly in their tiny French village throughout World War II.
50

While the couple managed to survive the global conflict, they weren't able to escape health problems. Stein first noticed in late 1945 that she was feeling tired after even minimal activity. By the spring, her physician recommended surgery. She rejected the idea and was soon diagnosed as suffering from cancer. She died in July 1946, at the age of seventy-two.
51

Major American newspapers gave the passing of the literary icon prominent coverage, many of them placing her obituary on page one. Every paper mentioned that Toklas had been at Stein's bedside when she took her final breath, but the publications varied widely in precisely how they identified the woman who'd shared the famous author's life for four decades. The
Los Angeles Times
opted for “friend and confidante,” while the
Washington Post
went with “companion of many years” and the
San Francisco Chronicle
used the term “Girl Friday.”
52

Toklas's priority after Stein's death was making sure the reading public had access to her famous partner's numerous works that remained in manuscript form. It was no longer a Herculean task to find publishers for the now deceased writer's work, and so, Toklas succeeded in having numerous additional titles released.
53

By the early 1950s, Toklas found herself in a new role vis-à-vis the literary world when a number of publishers suggested that she write a memoir, saying readers would be interested in learning more about the woman who'd lived in the shadow of her larger-than-life partner.
54

For her approach, Toklas chose to write a book that contained some of her favorite recipes interspersed with anecdotes from the couple's outlaw marriage. When Toklas suggested such a book to an editor at Harper's publishing house, he immediately offered her a hefty advance.
55

As the deadline for submitting the seventy thousand words grew near, however, Toklas found it difficult to put so many words to paper. She then asked friends to help her with the project by sending her their favorite recipes that she'd mix in with her own to meet the editor's length requirement. Ultimately, one of those borrowed recipes turned the final product into a storied publishing phenomenon.
56

The contribution came from painter Brion Gysin, and Toklas accepted it
without testing or reading the recipe that he accompanied with the warning, “Two pieces are quite sufficient.” Most of the items called for—including sugar, butter, and cinnamon—were innocuous, but one ingredient was something few cooks found in their cupboards:
cannabis
. And so, the directions for what became known as “Alice B. Toklas brownies” were sent out into the hands of thousands of eager readers, many of them developing an interest in cooking for the first time.
57

Reviews of
The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
, published in 1954, were highly positive. The
New Yorker
praised it as “a book of character, fine food, and tasty human observation,” and
Time
reported that “what gives the book its special charm is the stream of Alice's prattle.” Among the anecdotes that made the book come alive was the author's recollection of the day a friend gave her a crate of six white pigeons. Toklas wrote that she knew she had to kill, pluck, and clean the half dozen birds before Gertrude Stein returned home, as her partner “didn't like to see work being done.” Toklas went on to say that she didn't enjoy ending the lives of the birds, “though as I laid out the sweet young corpses, there was no denying one could become accustomed to murdering.”
58

Alice B. Toklas died in 1967 at the age of eighty-nine. America's leading newspapers took note of her passing, most of them running brief obituaries identifying her as Stein's “friend” or “companion.” A few papers, however, opted to publish longer stories. The
Washington Post
included details about the cookbook she wrote as well as the special brownies that carried her name. Toklas was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, next to her more famous partner.
59

Pioneering a New Style of Journalism

…

From 1925 through 1975, Janet Flanner served as the Paris correspondent for the
New Yorker
. During her remarkable half century as the author of the “Letter from Paris” column, she played a leading role in developing the unique style and voice that came to define the widely respected magazine. Her journalistic prose was widely praised as crisp, intelligent, and sophisticated. Flanner also authored several widely praised books—the first of them winning a National Book Award.

Flanner wouldn't have succeeded without the help she received from her same-sex partner. It was Solita Solano who first suggested that she and Flanner leave the United States and move to Europe, mainly to jump-start the fledgling journalist's career. Solano also worked closely with Flanner both in crafting her early columns and in writing her books.

Solita Solano was born into a middle-class family in Troy, New York, in 1888. She was christened Sarah Wilkinson, but that name wasn't exotic enough for her, so she gave herself the new one while in her mid-teens.
1

By that point, the adventurous girl also had eloped with a civil engineer, Oliver Filley, who was headed for a job in the Orient. The couple lived in China, Japan, and the Philippines for four years before Solano had the marriage annulled, accusing her husband of beating her.
2

In 1910, Solano made her way back to the United States and embarked on a career in journalism. She entered the field as a rookie reporter for the
Boston Traveler
, and, after succeeding in that job, she was promoted first to feature writer and then to drama critic and editor. She gained a reputation for being frank and fearless, as well as highly competent both as a writer and an editor.
3

The ambitious young woman next moved up to the
New York Tribune
, being hired in 1918 as the prestigious paper's drama editor. She had no problem holding her own in the largest journalism market in the country, bringing to her job an intensity that was equal to that of any man she came up against.
4

Janet Flanner was born in Indianapolis in 1892. Her family was securely positioned in the middle class, with her father earning his living as a mortician and her mother devoting her energy to caring for her husband and their three daughters.
5

By the age of eight, Janet had decided she wanted to pursue a career as a writer. She excelled in her composition and literature courses while attending high school, publishing a short story when she was fifteen.
6

Flanner enrolled at the University of Chicago but soon rebelled at the regimen of academic life. “I became engaged in a struggle with the university and its regulations,” she later wrote, “in which the university was the victor.” She dropped out of college after two years.
7

In 1917, Flanner landed a job with the
Indianapolis Star
. She was hired to review local art exhibits, but she soon began critiquing movies and local theater productions as well. The most frequently recurring theme in her reviews was that Indianapolis residents were woefully limited in their aesthetic sensibilities. In one piece, for example, she characterized the city's general population as being “more concerned with the price of beans than with art.”
8

Flanner enjoyed writing for the paper, but she felt stifled “by the manners and mores of Indianapolis.” After working for the
Star
for a year, Flanner escaped from the Midwest by marrying Lane Rehm, a friend from her days at the University of Chicago. Flanner confided to friends that she married Rehm because he was an investment banker in New York City, the location she believed offered the best opportunities for an aspiring journalist.
9

After their marriage in 1918, Rehm and Flanner, who kept her maiden
name, moved to Greenwich Village. The two years Flanner lived in New York were a mixture of failures and successes. Both her marriage and her career fell into the negative column. As she later admitted, “I was not very good to my husband.” Her only job, as a reporter for the
New York Sun
, ended after a week because her editor said her news stories were too opinionated. In the positive column, Flanner met many creative people who broadened her perspective on the world.
10

The most significant of Flanner's new friends was Solita Solano. Flanner had recognized her sexual attraction to women soon after arriving in New York, and she soon fell in love with Solano. They met in early 1919 and immediately began spending as much time together as possible. Flanner wanted to move in with Solano, but the situation was complicated by two factors—she was still married, and she didn't want her family to know she was a lesbian.
11

It was Solano who came up with a solution: the two women should leave the United States and live abroad. Solano insisted that Flanner's failure as a journalist was due to New York being saturated with talented reporters. Solano also argued that being several thousand miles away from the Flanner family would allow the two women to live together as a couple.
12

In the summer of 1921, Solano put in place the kind of situation she'd been hoping to find, as
National Geographic
magazine offered to send her on a freelance assignment to Greece. Flanner expressed concern that she'd be a burden on Solano because she had no money to pay her share of the travel expenses, but Solano ignored her partner's protests and bought two tickets on a ship bound for Piraeus.
13

Solano made the most of the next several months, writing stories about Greece and Turkey that the editor at
National Geographic
lauded as “brilliant.” In particular, the editor praised the descriptive passages that Solano wove into her pieces. Solano and Flanner traveled to Italy before moving on to Austria and Germany, with Solano writing more articles for
Geographic
.
14

In the fall of 1922, the two women rented a room in a Paris hotel that ultimately became their home for the next seventeen years.

“The Hotel Napoleon Bonaparte was perfect for our purposes,” Solano later wrote. “It cost a dollar a day and was near the Seine, the Louvre, and the auto buses.” Although the couple had to walk up five flights of stairs to reach their room and had to share a bathroom with the other dozen residents in the hotel, those inconveniences were more than offset by the Bonaparte being in an area of the city where many other expatriate Americans lived, near the
historic St. Germain-des-Prés church. “We were a literary lot,” Flanner said. “Each of us aspired to become a famous writer as soon as possible.”
15

Because Flanner couldn't find a job for the couple's first few years in Paris, she had the time to develop friendships with the other young people who frequented neighborhood cafés. The most celebrated of those friends was Ernest Hemingway, who agreed to read and critique some of Flanner's writing. Many years later, she wrote what the famous novelist had said about a piece she'd written on bullfighting: “Listen, Jan, I just want you to know that if a journalistic prize is ever given for the worst sports writer of the western world, I'm going to see you get it, pal, for you deserve it. You're perfectly terrible.”
16

In light of negative comments such as Hemingway's combined with her own assessment of her articles of the period as “dreadful hack things,” Flanner turned her attention toward writing a novel. She complained that she found this kind of writing difficult, but Solano insisted that her partner's work was excellent. “The first publisher that sees it will snap it up,” Solano wrote Flanner's sister. “I know of no one who writes more lovely prose than Janet.”
17

In 1925, Flanner received a letter from a woman she'd known during her New York days. Jane Grant had been a reporter for the
New York Times
back then, but she'd since left the paper to help her husband, Harold Ross, start a new magazine. Flanner had kept in touch with Grant by sending her gossip-filled letters about life in France, and Grant was writing to ask Flanner to become the Paris correspondent for Ross's publication, the
New Yorker
.
18