And the Rest Is History

by Marlene Wagman-Geller

  Virginia’s happy and literate childhood did not presage the tragedies that were to shadow her life. Her mother passed away in 1895, followed by her sister, who died two years later. Always psychologically fragile, she was shattered at the specter of death. Before she could recover, her father succumbed to his illness and she lost him in 1904. Her grief culminated with her first mental breakdown at age twenty-two. She was briefly institutionalized and would struggle for the rest of her years to maintain mental and emotional equilibrium. A further contributing influence to her psychological instability was the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth. Upon the passing of her parents, the siblings moved to a new home in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum. It was to become the meeting place of London’s intellectuals, and where Virginia fell in love.

  Virginia’s destiny, Leonard Sidney Woolf, was born in London, the third of ten children of a barrister, Solomon Rees Sydney and Marie (de Jongh) Woolf. As a Jew in anti-Semitic England he developed what he called his “carapace,” a hard shell, to shield himself from the “outside and usually hostile world.” A brilliant student, he won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he met some of the great thinkers of the era: Lytton Strachey, Rupert Brook, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and E. M. Forster. He also became friendly with Virginia’s brother Thoby, whose nickname was “the Goth.” Upon graduation Woolf took a position in the Ceylon Civil Service; accompanying him were seventy volumes of Voltaire and a fox terrier, Charles.

  The first time Virginia met Leonard was when she and her sister Vanessa went to Cambridge to visit Thoby. Leonard later recalled, “She was a vision in white—resplendent in a summery dress, large hat and parasol. Her beauty literally took one’s breath away.”

  After graduation he would see them again every Thursday evening when he attended their literary salon. Enraptured with her beauty and intellect, Leonard proposed twice; however, she rejected him with the comment that he was a “penniless Jew.” Undeterred, he wrote her, “If I try to say what I feel, I become stupid & stammering: it’s like a wall of words rising up in front of me & there on the other side you’re sitting so clear & beautiful & your dear face that I’d give everything in the world to see now.” Upon his third proposal, she accepted, and Virginia and Leonard were married on August 10, 1912, at a registry office in London. The newlyweds honeymooned in France, Spain, and Italy.

  Leonard greatly encouraged his wife to write, as both a form of therapy and something to engage her interest. She had already penned a piece on Hayworth, the Brontës’ parsonage, and had contributed to the Sunday Literary Supplement. She said of her passion, “I am ashamed, or perhaps proud, to say how much of my time is spent in thinking thinking, thinking about literature.” Cognizant of his wife’s ever-fragile psyche, Leonard suggested starting their own printing press. He felt this would not only give his wife a project; it would also promote controversial literary works that otherwise would not have made it into print.

  In 1917 the Woolfs founded the Hogarth Press, named after their London home. The original machine, small enough to fit on their kitchen table, published Virginia’s novels as well as Katherine Mansfield’s short stories and T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. They also printed nonfiction, such as the complete twenty-four-volume translation of the works of Sigmund Freud. When Virginia met the psychoanalyst in 1939 when he had fled Nazi Germany, she wrote in her diary, “A screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, paralyzed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert.”

  During the 1920s Virginia became the high priestess of the Bloomsbury Group, and the Hogarth Press also published her soon-to-be classic novels: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. Leonard, an aspiring writer, never envied the success that eluded him; his entry into literary immortality was as Mr. Virginia Woolf.

  However, despite Virginia’s professional acclaim and adored husband, she was never able to keep at bay “the hairy black devils” of her mental instability. On and off, Virginia struggled with anorexia, insomnia, and headaches. What always presaged a complete nervous breakdown was when she began hearing birds singing in Greek. Leonard’s sign of the horror to come was when his brilliant wife began to talk, nonstop, in gibberish. He said of these precursors, “She talked almost without stopping for two to three days, paying no attention to anyone in the room or anything said to her ... Then gradually it became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociated words.” Had it not been for his support, she would have been placed in an asylum. Instead, he ministered to her in her madness, and, when obliged to work, hired nurses.

  The 1920s also saw the birth of Virginia’s affair with the similarly married writer Vita Sackville-West, whose aristocratic family could trace their lineage to William the Conqueror. This relationship resulted in Woolf’s novel Orlando, which she dedicated “to V. Sackville-West.” Vita’s mother was enraged at the book, which exposed what she had tried so hard to conceal—her daughter’s fondness for women. She referred to Virginia as “the Virgin Woolf.” Leonard hailed his wife’s book as a groundbreaking literary masterpiece. He was also there to pick up the pieces of his wife’s heart when Vita cast Virginia away for another woman.

  Leonard never condemned his wife’s affairs. He remained committed to his tenet that Virginia’s happiness was his greatest good. Virginia also reciprocated his affection. She wrote in her diary, “Love-making—after 25 years can’t bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.”

  While the 1920s brought literary fame and Vita into Virginia’s life, the 1930s brought ever mounting depression. In 1935 Leonard and Virginia, along with their pet marmoset Mitzy, who liked to perch on Leonard’s shoulder, drove through Germany and saw the growing horrors of Nazism. Virginia had relinquished her earlier anti-Semitism and wrote to a friend, “My Jew has more religion in one toenail—more human love, in one hair.”

  In 1940, while the Woolfs were staying in their country home, Monk’s House, near the village of Rodmell in Sussex, they received the devastating news that their London home had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe. They were forced to remain in Sussex, which exacerbated Virginia’s psychological frailty, cutting her off from her circle of friends and the distractions of London. Moreover, the two realized that if the Nazis took over England, Leonard, as a Jew and an intellectual, would be sent to a concentration camp. The couple made a suicide pact: If Leonard was ever in danger of imprisonment they would shut their garage door, take a lethal dose of morphine, and end their lives together.

  The specter of world events, ones that threatened Leonard, her only emotional life jacket, contributed to Virginia’s ever-evolving web of depression. As with all the other onsets of her breakdowns, her words and writing began to slip away; the birds once more began to sing in Greek. In 1941, Virginia Woolf, her pockets laden with stones, journeyed into the River Ouse near her country home. After Virginia’s death, Leonard wrote, “I know that she is drowned and yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page, and yet I turn it over.” In her suicide note Virginia wrote her last words to her first love: Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoilin
g your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

  Leonard’s words from his letter proved as true after her death as those from before their wedding: “your dear face that I’d give everything in the world to see now.”

  Postscript

  Leonard arranged for his wife to be cremated; her ashes were scattered at Monk’s House, under its elms. Below a bust of Virginia, Leonard inscribed a quote from her novel The Waves: “I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.”

  When Leonard Woolf passed away in 1969, his ashes were scattered at Monk’s House, under its elms.

  13

  Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

  1907

  The years between the two world wars can be viewed as the French Renaissance, as the greatest creative minds of the century congregated in Paris. The luminaries indulged in a meeting of minds in a famous salon dominated by Gertrude Stein and the woman she considered her wife, Alice B. Toklas.

  Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania into a wealthy Jewish family. After a European sojourn the Steins relocated to Oakland, California, about which Gertrude wrote, “There is no there there.” Her closest confidante was her brother Leo, and when he went to Harvard, she followed him to Boston. However, as the school would not admit women, she attended Radcliffe. The pivotal event of her university years was being tutored by the psychologist William James, whose influence would later emerge in her subsequent novels’ stream-of-consciousness style.

  Later Gertrude transferred to Johns Hopkins; there, although intellectually stimulated, she felt emotionally bereft. Her notebooks of this period reveal a troubled and depressed young woman unable to envision herself fitting into the prescribed roles as wife and mother. Her “red deeps,” as she termed her inner turmoil, were exacerbated when she fell in love with May Bookstaver, who, involved with another woman, did not reciprocate Gertrude’s feelings. Distraught, Gertrude dropped out of medical school and once more followed Leo, this time to Europe.

  Gertrude’s destiny, Alice Babette, was born in San Francisco in 1877, the only daughter of middle-class Jewish parents, Ferdinand and Emma (Levinsky) Toklas. After Alice’s mother passed away (a few weeks before Alice’s twentieth birthday), her life had evolved into the role of housekeeper for her father and brother.

  In 1906 Michael Stein (Gertrude’s eldest brother) and his wife, Sarah, paid a visit to his friend Alice when they arrived in San Francisco to check on the earthquake’s damage to their properties. They brought along with them three Matisse paintings and tales of Parisian life. When Michael extended an invitation to visit him in France, Alice accepted, to escape the drudgery of her current life and in the hope that the trip would provide an exciting interlude.

  The first time Gertrude met Alice was on Alice’s first day in Paris on September 8, at the home of Michael and Sarah Stein. When she was introduced to Gertrude, she said a bell went off in her head, a sound signifying that she was in the proximity of a genius. Gertrude had been quite fond of declaring herself a genius long before Alice heard bells, and that became the first thing they agreed upon. A similar note resounded in her heart; she wrote of that initial meeting, “She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair. She was dressed in a warm brown corduroy suit. She wore a large round coral brooch and when she talked, very little, or laughed, a good deal, I thought her voice came from this brooch. It was unlike anyone else’s voice—deep, full, velvety, like a great contralto’s, like two voices.”

  The two women were quick to fall in love, and their attraction to each other was immediate. In her memoir Alice wrote, “It was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her.”

  Although both were horizontally challenged (Gertrude was five feet one, while Alice was four feet eleven), they adopted very different styles. Gertrude, rotund, wore her hair in a Roman emperor cut and favored severe, mannish outfits. Alice knitted for her the shapeless garments and heavy woolen stockings she felt most comfortable in. Alice, who was extremely slight, favored couture outfits (though she wore them badly) and gypsy earrings, and chain-smoked Pall Malls. Gertrude’s term of endearment was “Pussy,” while Alice called her “Baby.”

  Gertrude expressed her love in words. Alice, an early riser, often woke to notes that Gertrude, who wrote late at night, left on her pillow. These were often signed “Y. D.” (“Your Darling”). The couple was inseparable; if Ms. Stein appeared at a café, by her side would be Ms. Toklas. The high-profile women also liked to stroll the streets of Paris and browse flea markets, walking their enormous white poodle, Basket, who, upon his passing, was replaced by Basket II.

  In 1908, on a hillside outside Paris, Gertrude proposed to Alice and presented her with a ring. Stein wrote of the day, “It happened very simply that they were married. They were naturally married.”

  When Alice B. Toklas first hitched her heart to Gertrude’s star, little did she imagine that by doing so she was destined to become half of one of the most famous lesbian couples of the twentieth century. Alice and Gertrude’s Left Bank apartment became the living room for all the great artists living in Paris between the two world wars. Their salon’s walls showcased the avant-garde painters of the day: Picasso, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne. These stars orbited Stein, the grande dame of her salon, and Pablo Picasso painted Stein’s portrait, which currently hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When Toklas commented on it, he responded, “Yes. Everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will.” Not to slight Ms. Toklas, he rewarded her with a needlepoint pattern, which she used to make tapestries for two Louis XVI chairs.

  The writer closest to Stein was Ernest Hemingway, who had arrived on her doorstep armed with a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson. Gertrude and Alice became the godmothers of his first child, John. His parents’ nickname for him was Bumby; the two ladies called him Goddy, as they were his godparents. (John became the father of actresses Margot and Mariel.) It was about Hemingway that Stein coined her famous expression: “You are all a lost generation.” Toklas, fanatically possessive when it came to Gertrude, banned Hemingway from their home when she felt he was getting too close to Stein. Perhaps in retaliation, in his memoir A Moveable Feast, he recounted an argument between the two hostesses: “I heard (Miss Toklas), speaking to Miss Stein as I have never heard one person speak to another, never, anywhere, ever.”

  Toklas, in a similar jealous vein, in reference to Gertrude’s youthful crush on May Bookstaver, forced the author to replace every instance of the word may with can in Stein’s 1932 epic poem “Stanzas in Meditation.”

  The conversation during Gertrude and Alice’s Saturday night soirees always revolved around art. While Gertrude entertained the men, Alice gossiped with their wives and girlfriends. She also provided fragrant, colorless liquors that she made herself from plums and raspberries. While Gertrude shone in the drawing room, Alice excelled in the kitchen, as she was one of the finest chefs in Paris. Later she wrote a cookbook of her famous recipes, which included her specialty: brownies with a dash of hash. (Some believe that the term toke when referring to marijuana is derived from the surname Toklas.) However, Alice’s main task was to ensure that nothing disturbed the flow of Gertrude’s genius. Thornton Wilder called Alice “the dragon protecting the treasure.” Without Alice, Gertrude would not have been Gertrude.

  When the Nazis goose-stepped into Paris, Gertrude and Alice’s friends encouraged them to return to America; Stein refused by explaining, “America is my country, but Paris is my hometown.” As lesbians and Jews, they managed to escape by moving to Bilignin, their country retreat in the south of France, where they were aided by a collaborator. After liberation, Stein wrote to Toklas, “I love you so much more / every war more and more and more and / more.”

  In 1946, Stein began to experience stomach pain and was diagnosed with ca
ncer. When the end was near she was taken to a hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine. On vigil was Alice, already grieving the remaining empty years. However, like Rick and Ilsa, they would always have Paris.

  As Gertrude died, Alice listened to her “deep, full, velvety, contralto’s voice for the last time,” ask, “What is the answer?” Alice did not reply. Gertrude then said her last words to her first love, “Then what is the question?”

  Postscript

  Gertrude Stein was buried in the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

  Not long before Alice died in 1967, she converted from Judaism to Catholicism. She had asked her priest, in reference to her new religion, “Will this allow me to see Gertrude when I die?” Toklas was interred in the adjoining grave to Stein’s.

  14

  William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies

  1916

  Standing high above the sea and close to the sky, a California castle stands silent sentry. If its walls could talk, it would recall the glory days of yesteryear when Hollywood’s elite rushed to San Simeon for a coveted invitation to William Randolph Hearst’s pleasure dome. However, its most riveting tale would be of the romance of the tycoon and his showgirl.

  Marion Cecilia Douras, born in 1897, was the youngest of five children. At a young age she was bitten by the showbiz bug as she watched her sisters perform in local stage productions. She determined that she would stand on stage one day, and she was not going to let her stutter be an impediment. In order to reinvent herself, after seeing a Brooklyn realty sign, Davies Real Estate, she adopted the name as her own. With her eye on the prize, she traded her native Brooklyn for Broadway. In the end, Marion achieved immortality not for what she did in front of the bright lights, but for her love affair with the man who sat in front of them.