"This has been a most wonderful evening. Gertrude has said things tonight it will take her 10 years to understand."

From The New York Times, fifty years ago today:

March 8, 1967

Alice Toklas, 89, Is Dead In Paris

aris, March 7--Alice B. Toklas, the longtime friend of Gertrude Stein, who helped the late writer preside over a celebrated literary salon, died here early today. She was 89 years old, and had been ill for several years.

With Miss Toklas's death, an important art collection--27 Picassos, 7 Juan Grises and a Matisse-- will pass into the possession of Miss Stein's relatives in the United States.

Miss Toklas achieved fame in 1933 in Miss Stein's autobiography, which was entitled "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas." Previously, she had been known chiefly by the hundreds of writers and artists who flocked to the Stein-Toklas salons.

After a funeral mass at St. Christophe's Roman Catholic Church on Friday, Miss Toklas will be buried beside Miss Stein in Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Potpourri of Skills

"What would Alice have been without Gertrude?" a friend of Miss Toklas and Miss Stein once asked.

For nearly 40 years--from about 1907 to 1946, when Miss Stein died--Miss Toklas and the writer were inseparable companions, faces in the mirror to each other, and conductors of probably the most renowned cultural salon in the world.

At their Paris homes they gathered a dazzling array of the famous, the ambitious, the wealthy and the curious--Ernest Hemingway, Carl Van Vechten, T.S. Eliot, Alfred North Whitehead, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Braque, Virgil Thomson, Charles Chaplin, Sherwood Anderson, Glenway Wescott, Paul Robeson, Jo Davidson, Pavel Tchelichev, Ford Maddox Ford and Richard Wright, to name some.

Miss Toklas stood so much in Miss Stein's larger reputation that it was said that "Alice sat with the geniuses' wives." In fact, however, Miss Toklas was by no means such a dimmed figure, according to Robert Lescher, Miss Toklas's editor.

She took a perceptive part in the literary and art conversations that frequently swirled all afternoon and far into the night. This is also attested by Miss Toklas's autobiography and that of Miss Stein. Nevertheless, Miss Toklas was mainly content to let Miss Stein scintillate in public, while she operated the household.

'She Ran the House'

"Alice Toklas neither took life easy nor fraternized casually," Mr. Thomson wrote in "Virgil Thomson," published last year by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

The composer wrote:

"She got up at 6 and cleaned the drawing room herself, because she did not wish things broken. (Porcelain and other fragile objects were her delight, just as pictures were Gertrude's. She liked being occupied anyway, and she did not need repose, ever content to serve Gertrude or be near her.

"She ran the house, ordered the meals, cooked on occasion and typed out everything that got written into the blue copybooks that Gertrude had adopted from French schoolchildren.

"From 1927 or '28 she also worked petit point, matching in silk the colors and shades of designs made especially for her by Picasso."

Made an Odd Couple

Miss Toklas and Miss Stein were an oddly contrasted couple. Miss Stein was massive, with a large face and close-cropped gray hair. Miss Toklas was small and wispy and at one time had brown hair, which she wore bobbed and with bangs. "Nicely ugly," was the way James Beard, the gourmet and cooking authority, described her.

"Alice was one of the really great cooks of all time," Mr. Beard said. "She went all over Paris to find the right ingredients for her meals. She had endless specialities, but her chicken dishes were especially magnificent. The secret of her talent was great pains and a remarkable palate."

Miss Toklas wrote two cookery books--"The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book" and "Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present," both published by Harper. The former contained a recipe for fudge made with marijuana or hashish, which, she said, "anyone could whip up on a rainy day." Taxed with this, Miss Toklas shrugged and remarked:

"What's sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander. But it's not necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the guinea hen."

If Miss Stein dominated the couple's salon, Miss Toklas seemed to command Miss Stein. "Small or not, she was steel, absolutely," Mr. Lescher recalled. Several instances of Miss Toklas's influence have been recorded. One occurred in 1935, when Miss Stein was giving a shipboard interview to a group of reporters in New York.

"Miss Toklas's slight, menacing figure appeared in the doorway," The New York Herald Tribune's account read.

"'Come, lovey,' said Miss Toklas, in a steely-sweet voice. 'Say good by to your guests. They are leaving.'

"Miss Stein leaped to her feet and bounded off into the corridor."

Another instance was reported by Hemingway in "A Movable Feast," an account of his years in Paris in the nineteen-twenties.

He had gone to the Stein-Toklas apartment, he recalled, and was waiting in the living room when he overheard a bitter quarrel between the two women.

"I heard [Miss Toklas] speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever," Mr. Hemingway wrote.

He immediately left the apartment, he said, because "it was too bad to hear."

This incident was not mentioned by Miss Toklas or by Miss Stein in their published writings.

Hemingway's feelings about the two women apparently were known to Miss Toklas. Asked to give an opinion of Hemingway, she replied:

"I don't give you my opinion about that. It might be unpublishable anyway."

Miss Toklas recounted her association with Miss Stein (she called her "the mother-of-us-all") in "What Is Remembered," published in 1963 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Her style, in sharp distinction to Miss Stein's convolutions, was simple, spare and economical. It was, indeed, the same style in which Miss Stein had written her autobiography in 1933. Published by Random House, "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," related Miss Stein's life as if Miss Toklas were the narrator.

Born on West Coast

Alice Toklas was born in San Francisco April 30, 1877, the daughter of Simon and Emily Toklas. She was reared, she wrote, in "necessary luxury" and learned to play the piano well enough to think of a concert career.

Instead, she went to Paris with Harriet Levy, a girlhood friend, at the suggestion of Michael Stein, Gertrude's brother. Describing her initial meeting with Miss Stein, Miss Toklas wrote:

"In the room were Mr. and Mrs. [Michael] Stein and Gertrude Stein. It was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since them. She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair."

After a notable quarrel with Leo Stein, another of Gertrude's brothers, Miss Toklas and Miss Stein established their salon. Its earliest members included Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet.

Within a few years, it became one of the centers of Paris's intellectual life. With the influx of Americans after World War I, "the lost generation," the salon took on an international character and became an institution.

The thrust and parry of conversation was swift and keen, and opinions flew about the room like swarms of angry bees.

When Miss Toklas wrote her autobiography, she carried her life up through the fifties, but she dropped the final chapter in its published form. She concluded her book at Miss Stein's death.

"I sat next to her," Miss Toklas wrote, "and she said to me early in the afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question?"

Lived on Left Bank

Afterward, Miss Toklas lived alone in the couple's apartment in the Rue Christine, on the Left Bank, an apartment so crammed with paintings and sketches that it was a veritable museum.

Miss Stein left her property in trust, providing for the care of Miss Toklas for life. In recent years, however, a dispute over the conditions of the art collection and the sale of some of it caused the art to be placed in a Paris bank vault.

Even with her income reduced, Miss Toklas insisted in preparing the finest meals and on shopping at Fauchon, Paris's smartest greengrocer. Mr. Beard recalled having fetched her a brace of grouse from Fauchon for a dinner.

Three years ago, Miss Toklas was evicted from her apartment and went to live in the Rue de la Convention. She was bedridden and arthritic, and her sight and hearing were much impaired.

She was supported by a fund gathered from writers and old friends and administered by Janet Flanner (Genet), The New Yorker correspondent in Paris, Mr. Thomson and Doda Conrad, an old friend.

Miss Toklas gave her papers to Yale University.