I Still Love You, Alice B. Toklas

 

I’ve recently finished reading a colleague’s new, and award-winning, biography of Gertrude Stein. (The author is Francesca Wade, and her impressively researched book is called Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.) When I was an artsy college student in the Sixties, I’m guessing that few of my classmates had actually dipped into Stein’s artistically challenging writings. I myself certainly hadn’t. But we all knew “rose is a rose is a rose,” and that Stein—an American in Paris—had published in 1933 a faux biographical work of her longtime companion. The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. So the title of a 1968 romantic comedy, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, would have been enticing to us—especially since its cast and crew included some of the hippest people in Hollywood.

 One of the creators of the original script was Paul Mazursky, who would go on to both write and direct such comedy hits as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Harry and Tonto (1974), and Moscow on the Hudson (1984). I Love You, Alice B. Toklas was his very first produced film project, and he badly wanted to direct it.  But when Peter Sellers came aboard as the film’s star Mazursky was removed from contention. (Instead, the movie was directed by TV veteran Hy Averback.)

 Aside from Sellers, prominent cast members included Leigh Taylor-Young as a sexy Flower Child with a butterfly tattoo on her thigh. (She was barely twenty-one and making her first film.). The plot focused on Sellers as Harold Fine, a stereotypical (Jewish, natch!) buttoned-down lawyer who’s being pushed toward the chuppah by his girlfriend, played by Joyce Van Patten. Just as matrimony seems inevitable, he meets a free-spirited hippie chick, Nancy. After they’ve hopped into the sack, she whips up a batch of Alice B. Toklas brownies, and he finds himself thoroughly hooked on his new lifestyle. Soon he’s growing out his crewcut, and dressing in caftans and love beads.

 It was quite clear, back in 1968, that an Alice B. Toklas brownie was some kind of psychedelic treat. (The comic spectacle of a middle-aged square suddenly tuning in and turning on was almost unavoidable in movie houses of the late Sixties.) But I didn’t fully grasp the implications of those brownies until I read Francesca Wade’s book. It seems that Toklas, who had no part in the writing of her famous “autobiography” (other than efficiently typing up the manuscript) ultimately chose, following Stein’s 1946 death, to fill her empty days by putting forth a cookbook. Toklas was a whiz in the kitchen, specializing in French cuisine, but she chose to fill out her book with recipes received from friends. One of them, a Morocco-based artist named Brion Gysin, contributed instructions for making a dessert item he called "Haschich Fudge," a heady combo of fruit, nuts, spices, and what he referred to as “Cannibis sativa.” Though the cookbook’s American edition, fearing legal consequences, decided to axe this particular recipe, it was included in the volume published in Britain. Once Time magazine had spilled the beans (so to speak), the rather prim and naïve Toklas discovered she’d published a best-seller.

 The Hollywood film is scored with a perky tune sung by a rock group known as Harpers Bizarre:. It begins “I love you, Alice B. Toklas/ and so does Gertrude Stein/ I love you, Alice B. Toklas/ I’m gonna change your name to mine.” The lyrics then go off on a psychedelic trip—”Green wooly golden gardens, Marvin Gardens”—of which the very avant-garde Gertrude Stein might possibly have approved.  (Though, I suspect, probably not.)