APARTAMENTO MAGAZINE
NOVEMBER 2018
GERTRUDE ABERCROMBIE
On meeting Gertrude:
I first encountered Gertrude - perhaps ‘observed’ would be a better term - at the
South Art Fair. I had moved to the south side in 1952 at the end of my second
year at the Art Institute of Chicago. I was 19 years old. At the art fair she did not
just take a place along the sidewalk like the other artists. Instead, she installed
her Rolls Royce in the cente of the vacant lot, propped her paintings in the
fenders and running board orf the car, sitting around with her husband Frank
Sandiford and other guests as if they all were at a picnic in the country. They wore
extraordinary clothes: Gertrude in a sack dress and espadrilles, Frank in a kind of
pyjama, also in espadrille,and their friend Guy Cardin never without an ascot tie
or cigarette in an eight inch holder. My, my, they were so weird I would not have
dared to get close, afraid of being thought in some way interested in or attached
to any group so queer. Not just odd, but perverse. And to a young man of 19,
trying to pass as straight and adult - threatening. I never even got close enough to
examine the paintings, but from a distance I them almost as foolish as the artist
and her companions. Contrived, folksy, commercial.
The Rolls Royce, by the way, was a prop. Just like the ironstone bowls and
pitchers and stuffed owls, and the Victorian furniture with fake leopard-skin fabric.
There were actually two Rolls Royces. The first, the one that I saw at the fairs,
used to be owned by Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune in the ‘20s.
Its doors were continually falling off their hinges because the bulletproof glass
installed to protect the colonel in the days of Al Capone was too heavy for them to
support. it was replaced later with one of a similar vintage. Her Rolls Royces were
ancient machines and were purchased at prices well below the cost of an ordinary
contemporary automobile. Nevertheless, they had their effect on Gertrude’s public
image. Gertrude, however, was never without money worries. Being an artist in the
‘50s, even a well-known one, did not sustain anything beyond a modest middle-
class existence.
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by August Becker
Two years later, the artist and cura tor Don Baum took me to Gertrude and Frank’s
on a Saturday night. I remember borrowing cuff links from him for the occasion
because he found mine vulgar, leftover as they were from high school proms and
dances in Miami, Florida. I must emphasize that I did not know who this ‘Gertrude’
of ‘Gertrude and Frank’s’ was. I was startled to discover that my hostess was the
Gertrude of the art fairs, and was quickly bewitched-as if I were meeting fictional
characters who had come to life. I danced all night, and that night I also met
Wendell and Esther Wilcox for the first time. In fact, at nearly 4am they invited me
home for breakfast. Don Baum had long since disappeared with another guest·
Gertrude’s residence
Today I thought of the house on Dorchester Avenue. In her biography on Gertrude,
Susan Weininger refers to it as a ‘row house’, which is true, but the term in our
time seems to denote something rather banal. The house was four storeys high.
On the salon floor it was immense; there was a quite grand staircase that spread
gracefully down from its first landing. Servant quarters occupied the top floor, and
back stairs led down to the kitchen, which was on the ground floor. We entered
the house most times at the ground level, where there was a housekeeper’s ample
sitting room, with a fireplace. And a bit further to the back, the kitchen led out to a
rear garden. The great double outside doors to the salon floor, doors that opened
from a narrow porch after one climbed up a remarkably wide staircase that spread
across much of the facade, were seldom used. These doors were opened only for
the grandest parties.
By the way, in the end, that lower housekeeper’s sitting room is where Gertrude
ended up. That is where I last saw her, shortly before her death. She sat,up on
the bed that had replaced the Victorian drawing-room furniture. As we talked she
reached down to refill a glass from the jug of Gallo at her feet. I thought at the time
that that was the only thing never to have changed. There was always plenty of
choice of what to drink at the soirées, but all the choices other than a jug of red or
white were imports from guests.
An aside on alcohol and sexuality
This is an aside that i think is best to get out of he way. An important dimension
if Gertrude’s life (all our lives at the time) was the influence of alcohol - and
especially its effect on outsized sexual appetites. There were very few
preconceived atitudes as to whom one mightend up in bed with. THere was not
a hard line drawn between straight and queer identities in Gertrude’s world. We
were all of us quite mixed up, and most party evenind ended in drunkenness.
Nevertheless, despite the free-wheeling sexual expression, there was a great deal
of clandestine activity as well, the sexua ethic among us in gertrude’s circle was
perhaps singular, even for Chicago. Certainly there were many social circles that
were exclusively gay or straight, but at Gertrude and frank;s all melded. Both of
Gertrude’s husbands had homosexual appetites; Bob Livingston’s perhaps not as
demanding as Frank Sandiford’s. There was nothing apparently gay about either.
There is just enough of the gentleman left in me that I do not want to disclose
Gertrude’s own sexual proclivities, except to say they were focused exclusively on
males, whether gay or straight.
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Guy Cardin, for example, was a very bright and clever dandy, extremely well read,
intellectual without visible means of support. When I first knew him, he was kept
by Dana Stone, a well-off gentleman of the Near North Side who as a teen used to
procure sexual companions for his mother’s society bridge partners. There was
a suggestion that Dana had never quite given up his sex trafficking. He had other
business interests, but I cannot recall what-maybe real estate.
In any case, Guy also later lived with Miriam Andre as in her penthouse on the
North Shore, under the auspices of Osborn Andreas, who even after divorcing her
to marry Margot Beman was totally responsible for her. (Once when she taxied all
the way from the Near North Side to Hyde Park and asked the driver to wait while
she set fire to Osborn and Margot’s house, he was forced to have her arrested
and jailed, and then in the morning had to bail her out.) Guy was supposed to act
as a check on Miriam’s drinking, but that was a fantasy. While I was in the army,
away from Chicago for two years, Guy Cardin was found dead and naked on a
rooftop in Chicago. It was assumed his end was the result of some aborted sexual
encounter and robbery. The Chicago Tribune would not write ‘naked’, so reported
that he had died in his underwear. I can’t remember how I know this. And looking
back, I wonder if the rooftop were Miriam’s. That would explain it to some extent.
Gertrude and art
I never knew Gertrude to talk about art. If she contributed to any discussion
about art, it would be something non committal or cryptic, such as ‘Ya gotta learn
to draw’, which might feel dismissive or condescending, but one couldn’t tell
whether it was dismissive of the art or the conversation about it. There was very
little art in her house that was not her own,with the exception of work by Charles
Sebree. A very large Charles Sebree shared a wall in the grand salon with one of
her largest self-portraits. Sebree, whom the writer Wendell Wilcox thought the,
best storyteller of all storytellers, just like Gertrude Stein considered Wendell to
be the greatest letter writer of the 20th century, was no longer a figure in Chicago
when 1 was there. I went with Gertrude and ohers to Milwaukee for the opening
of his play Mrs Patterson, which was the beginning of Eartha Kilt’s career. I met
Charles again in Washington years later and I always called on him when I visited
there. Charles was a self-taught artist, like Gertrude claimed to be, but what
Gertrude meant by that is she decided on her own what she would paint and who
she would be. Wendell’s take on that last sentence would be that there was no
decision involved, that Gertrude simply was. Any interest of Gertrude’s in the art
of others would not have run very deep. However, her offering me the use of the
Rolls Royce after a show to pick up my painting from the Art Institute so stunned
everyone (and me)-so untypically generous-that I felt it to be a gift almost as
important as the prize I just won. I wouldn’t have dared drive the Rolls on my own,
so Frank acted as chauffeur. My arrival at the foot of the great stairs that led up to
the entrance of the Art Institute in the Rolls, with Frank in chauffeur cap and coat,
caused a lot of jaws to drop. I got a taste of what it must be like to be a character
rather than myself. For Gertrude I’m sure there was never a dichotomy; the two
were the same. I once asked Wendell why he thought Gertrude never went to the
theatre or to concerts or even to important shows at the Art Institute. ‘Gertrude is
simply not interested in being somewhere where someone else is on stage’, he
said.
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Gertrude and jazz
I do not know when Gertrude switched from clas sical music to jazz. It might
have been a gradual change of interest, but it was certainly cemented when
she changed husbands. Bob Livingston was and remained a classical music
fan. Frank Sandiford had had a record shop and hung out at the Beehive, an
old theatre turned jazz club in one of the slummier old buildings of Hyde Park.
He knew all the black musicians and singers. Charlie, Dizzy, Sa rah, Billie, all
of them, and he sometimes recorded their music. Frank’s devotion to jazz
developed in prison; jazz and blues were an appropriate complement to the pain
of incarceration. He had been a jewel thief, safe robber, imprisoned twice. Af ter
his divorce from Gertrude he moved to New York and wrote jazz reviews for the
Village Voice. Its also when Gertrude learned from her wronged and vengeful
daughter, Dinah, that she, the daughter, had managed to seduce her stepfather
into a relationship that was enacted for years under Gertrude’s nose. In his last
attempt at attempt at pulling together a publishable novel, this illicit relationship
theme, a confession to an unspeakable addiction. But it was a nearly incoherent,
unreadable, because in the end he was never not stoned on pot. Musicians
coming to Chicago often needed a place to jam, especially when they had gigs
and wanted to practise, or need a place with a piano, The house of Dorchester
was available to them, and when they assembled to jam, we all wanted to be
there.
A singular moment
There was nothing else going on in Chicago like it, period. And certainly not in
New York City, which would be the most unlikely place of all to find something
similar. Friendships and relationships are more transient in New York, and
probably now in Chicago as well. The grind to achieve fame and success in
New York precludes the existence of such a commu nity as we knew in Chicago.
Perhaps in the higher echelons of society people still give parties and some who
attend may reciprocate. Beyond that, few in New York have the space or means
or time for such social gatherings, and after attending one, if it did exist, it would
be ‘been there, done that’. There is just too much going on in the way of theatre,
exhibitions, opera, concerts, for anyone to interact in such a way.
But even in Chicago, after a while rock ‘n roll arrived in some of those old bars.
What a trip! Jazz began to fade. I remember Gertrude remarking about Janice
Joplin, ‘I’m not sure what she’s doing, but it isn’t music’. And finally for Gertrude,
her life turned into that of a sick old landlady collecting rent from the occupants of
the upstairs bedrooms, none of whom were promising or talented like in the days
of Ned Rorem-who remembered his residence there with affection-but just figures
that came and went and sometimes defaulted on the rent.
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