Alice urges Franz to burn her letters after a hasty reading: “We don’t want posterity to know that such a perverse girl was ever in love with you.”6
Was Alice in love? Peter thought Sommerfeld seemed like “a more serious connection than Vasco,” in part because both he and his mother called Franz by the affectionate “Franzl” and because he sent Peter a Lionel science experiment kit for Christmas. In February of 1962, the wife of one of Franz’s colleagues called Alice to tell her that Franz was at Providence Hospital. Franz soon sent a letter explaining that the problem was simply an arrhythmia of “no prognostic significance.” She replied with a stream of chatty, flirtatious, self-deprecating letters. She’s worried about money and writing stories but confident of Franz’s recovery: “In a way I like to think of your being safely in a nice warm hospital… It’s so bloody cold and unsafe anywhere else. What are you reading?”
Franz Sommerfeld never answered those letters. He was lying in a coma. Rey visited him in the hospital and watched as the unconscious man with long wires attached to both arms struck himself. “It seemed as if the wires were chains from which he wanted to free himself. The nurse tried to console me by pointing out that he, in his unconscious state, could not feel anything. But I was not convinced of that.”
Sommerfeld died on March 3, 1962, survived only by cousins in Australia.7 He serves as a model for characters in two of Adams’s best stories: Richard Washington in “The Swastika on Our Door” (who has a defective heart and is given to “isolated, hopeless love affairs, generally with crazy girls”) and the young lover named Paul who dies of his congenital heart condition in “Return Trips.” When Alice reread The Portrait of a Lady years later she realized that Isabel Archer’s beloved cousin, Ralph Touchett, was “so very much like” Franz; she called Franz, “one of my greatest, most truly loved friends—a man who taught in Seattle and died young.”8
* * *
Peter was a little surprised when he eventually figured out that his parents’ divorce had been his mother’s idea. “Her life seemed more tenuous, she was alone sometimes. But I can remember her sitting and writing. And I remember her laughing and drinking and having a great time. She liked cooking and entertaining and sometimes we would have dinner, the two of us with the guy she would be dating. It wasn’t a totally unhappy thing.”
But by the time Peter was eleven or twelve, he began to feel awkward when Alice had men over. Often he spent weekends at his father’s house and returned to his mother’s on Sunday evening. For his stepmother, Frances Linenthal, this meant feeding and caring for four boys, two of whom were surly teenagers. In letters to her own mother she complained that Alice was unreliable: “Peter has a stomach ache so we kept him here over night because his God Damn Mother is never home Sunday night when we bring him home,” she wrote at the end of one weekend. “She does this every week and Mark is just going to have to speak to her about it. But this is a difficult thing to do, because her reactions when angry are so unpredictable and likely to be extreme and unconscious and make our relations over Peter less good… and she refuses to have this stomach thing checked by a doctor, thinking him too hypochondriac, which he is a little but not to an extreme, and he’s had this mild stomach ache for four days now. We called our doctor last night. It’s tough on Mark.”9
* * *
Perhaps Felix Rosenthal stepped into Alice’s life to comfort her after the death of their mutual friend Franz, or perhaps he had been there all along. A friend and neighbor of Alice’s, metal artist Imogene “Tex” Gieling, remembered Felix for spur-of-the-moment outings in his old Triumph roadster with a rumble seat. Felix came from a wealthy, multilingual assimilated Jewish family whose antiquarian bookstore in Munich faced a park where Hitler held rallies; he once shook Hitler’s hand when his German nanny brought him along to a Nazi meeting. By 1935 his family had relocated to Florence, where Felix attended public school and was required to join the fascist youth organization Avanguardisti Sciatori—which purported to emphasize skiing. He was attending the University of Milan in 1938 when Mussolini’s party forbade foreign Jews to attend Italian schools. He next studied engineering in Paris before emigrating to Chile and then joining his brother, Bernard, at UC Berkeley. Both brothers were classified as “enemy aliens” and lived with nightly curfews and travel restrictions until they were drafted into the US Army and were awarded American citizenship.
Near the end of the war, Master Sergeant Felix Rosenthal interrogated German prisoners of war and became known as “the Third Army’s Hitler scholar.” Recognized as the only member of Patton’s G-2 unit who had personally met and spoken with Hitler, Rosenthal became obsessed with “probing the deranged mind of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi mindset.” That fascination served him well when, with Berkeley art historian and first lieutenant Walter Horn, he was assigned to Eisenhower’s MFAA (Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives) team charged with finding the missing imperial crown, globe, scepter, and swords of the Holy Roman Empire. They interviewed high-level Nazis imprisoned at Nuremberg and were given access to secret files.
Felix Rosenthal was the imaginative theorist of a team that sought to probe “the roots of Hitler’s psychosis not in Germany but in Vienna, when he was an itinerant art student, hating Jews and romanticizing his personal destiny,” according to author Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, who writes in Hitler’s Holy Relics that Rosenthal thought “Hitler and Himmler were laying the groundwork to make Germanic Christianity the new national religion of Germany” by manipulating the New Testament to suggest “that Jesus was making a holy war against the Jews and that Jesus’ inner circle were not Jews but Gentiles.” Relics from the Holy Roman Empire were part of a scheme wherein Hitler would crown himself emperor. In quest of the relics—they were eventually found underground in Nuremberg—Rosenthal and Horn were granted extraordinary privileges in postwar Germany.10
Discharged in 1946, Rosenthal returned to Berkeley, where his parents now lived, and completed an architecture degree under the renowned modernist Erich Mendelsohn, the designer of Maimonides Hospital (now Mount Zion) and the Russell House (for Madeleine Haas Russell) in San Francisco. Felix became Mendelsohn’s right-hand man at UC Berkeley; but in 1950 Felix refused to sign the university’s controversial anticommunist loyalty oath and was dismissed.
Then Felix moved to the Italian neighborhood on a steep slope of Telegraph Hill, where his Florentine accent was much admired. His apartment at the top of a rickety house above the Vallejo Street Stairway had a rooftop terrace with a view. It was, according to his brother, Bernard, the kind of bachelor pad that gave “every married man who entered it a touch of melancholy or nostalgia.” Felix made his own vinegar and cooked passionately in his big kitchen with hanging pots and pans and a solid-core door for a table. He was friendly with all the North Beach shopkeepers and picked up bargains everywhere. In his brother’s view, Felix “had an eye for the commercially disastrous. He was always designing and dreaming of all the money he would make. A paper airplane for cereal boxes! He picked the cheapest printer—a disaster.” Nonetheless, Felix completed one of his most beautiful projects while he was dating Alice. That commission came to him by way of the serendipity Felix (and Alice) so much enjoyed.
When Felix had surgery for gallstones, Alice, perhaps still alarmed by the sudden death of Sommerfeld, held his hand all night in the hospital. When he was discharged, Ruth Haas Lilienthal, who had become a second mother to him, took him in her Cadillac to recover at her estate near San Mateo. Her recently divorced son, Philip III, soon arrived. Hoping her two fragile guests would get along, Ruth Lilienthal asked them to organize her wine cellar, which had been neglected since her husband’s death. During a day spent tasting antique wines and whiskeys, Phil asked Felix to design a pavilion to honor his father’s memory at a Boy Scout camp in the Sierra foothills.
When the shelter was done, Felix took Alice and Peter to see it. Peter remembered “an interesting origami-pleated copper-clad roof on rustic stone columns” and was amus
ed to learn that Felix and a sculptor friend, Jacques Overhoff, had peed on the roof to initiate its verdigris. In Careless Love, which she was writing throughout the early sixties, Adams describes a knotty-pine-paneled motel in the Sierra foothills where she and Felix stayed but omits the architectural job itself. The narrow focus of that novel on the love affairs of Daisy Duke turns the Felix character, Jack Peterson, into a minor and somewhat laughable man Daisy dates in her first year as a divorcée.
Another portrait of Felix emerges in Adams’s unpublished story “A Bachelor’s Fate.” Investigating single life from a man’s point of view, Adams shows an egotistical bachelor who is so wary of emotional women looking for husbands that he fails to be curious about their lives. Nonetheless, this bachelor stays in long-term affairs because he dislikes “the expenditure of energy involved in beginning a new one.” Realizing he may lose this girl that he likes, he asks her to marry him. “I can’t do that. I’d starve,” she replies, before explaining, “Partly you like to be loved, but I always had a feeling that I was giving you a present you didn’t know what to do with.”
When Norman Mailer; his pregnant girlfriend, Beverly Bentley; and their big black poodle, Tibo, came to San Francisco in the summer of 1963, Alice borrowed Felix’s apartment for them while Felix stayed with her. Mailer was “in the first flush of being in love with Beverly, and he was his terrific old self,” Alice thought, tapered down from his violent craziness during the past decade (during which she hadn’t seen him). To Mark Linenthal on this visit, Mailer offered a “mea culpa evaluation… something like ‘I’ve been so crazy’… but that’s not the way it’s gonna be in the future.”11 Alice was relieved to find Mailer intensely curious about everything. Knowing Rosenthal was an architect, he geared his conversation to topics that he might care about.
Bentley, a talented actor who had previously been the lover of Miles Davis, also impressed Alice: “I thought she was incredibly pretty, very funny. I was sure she was lying about her age.” One day Alice found Beverly at the ironing board in Felix’s apartment, doing Norman’s shirts and scarves—“practicing to be a good wife,” she thought. Meanwhile, Norman tested his mettle by walking narrow ledges on Telegraph Hill. As a foursome they spent a glorious day picnicking under tall oak trees at an abandoned winery Felix knew of in Napa Valley. Back in New York after meeting Beverly’s family in Georgia, Mailer wrote a thank-you letter addressed “Dear Alice, Dear Felix” complaining about how hard it was to be back in the city. He invited Alice to come east for a visit and she was already making plans to do so.12
Felix was a persistent suitor in Alice’s life for about three years. He never married. Tex Gieling said, “He was serious about Alice, he really was. I think it sort of spoiled him for anything else.” Alice explained her ambivalence about Felix in a letter to Judith Adams, who was still happily married to Tim and awaiting the birth of her fifth child in Washington, DC: “Sometimes I think he isn’t crazy enough to interest me strongly, other times I think he just isn’t interesting enough. At best it seems a pleasant relationship of which not too much should be made.”13
Other men passed through Alice’s life while she was debating the merits of Felix. Trummy Young continued to perform in the Bay Area until January of 1964, when he retired from the All-Stars and moved to Oahu.I Others were one-night stands, just names on her roster of lovers: Who are Art, Noel, Larry S, Al N, and Lucas M? John A, Ed D, Mosely, and Zulli? Other encounters turned into long friendships—or long social embarrassments. Judging by the notes and letters that Alice saved, it seems that she was looking for interesting, independent men who might validate her work and her ambitions.
One of these was James “Jack” Boynton, an abstract painter from Texas who arrived in San Francisco in 1960 looking like a young Elvis Presley with longish, thick black hair and blue eyes. Jack taught at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where he mixed with California figurative painters David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn. His work was showing in New York—in the Whitney Museum Annual and in “Younger American Painters” at the Guggenheim, and he was preparing a one-man show for the Staempfli Gallery. Boynton’s incipient success was coming on the heels of severe difficulties. His wife, Texas artist Ann Williams Boynton, had suffered a stroke on their honeymoon. After the couple had two daughters, she became severely depressed and was repeatedly hospitalized.
Boynton was still married and very short of money when Alice met him. He enjoyed her intelligence and wry sense of humor. He gave her a small painting and welcomed her and Peter to his brick-walled studio in the old produce district where the Embarcadero Center stands now—“the first loft I ever visited,” Peter recalled. Writer Donald Barthelme, Boynton’s close friend in Houston, kiddingly called the painter an “illiterate bastard,” so perhaps Boynton never noticed himself in the character of Luke Taylor in the final pages of Careless Love. Cheerful, handsome Luke provides Daisy with a catharsis as she recovers from her obsession with Pablo: “Daisy, true to form, made declarations. Luke didn’t; he called her by no endearment other than what his voice made of her name. Daisy thought she had never felt more loved.” Daisy learned to appreciate Luke’s separateness: “He seemed then very separate, and their being together seemed an accident, a collision. She knew that he was essentially a loner. After San Francisco he would go to New York. Or Paris. He cared about painting. With people, even with her, he was finally elusive.”
In the end, Boynton went back to Houston to raise his daughters. His wife committed suicide in the spring of 1963.14 Alice corresponded with Jack for the rest of her life. Boynton’s second wife, Sharon, came to admire Alice for her “wonderful gift of remaining friends with former lovers,” and noted, “I wasn’t jealous at all, and Jack wasn’t about my previous boyfriends. He really loved being around women, talking to women.” When Sharon needed surgery for breast cancer, Boynton soothed her fears of mutilation by recalling that the beautiful Alice Adams had surgical scars on her breasts.
Irving Howe, the founding editor of Dissent magazine and a leading New York intellectual and scholar of Yiddish literature, also met Alice Adams in the early 1960s. He’d come west at the end of his second marriage with hope that his new love, Edja Weisberg, would join him. She didn’t. His “unwavering and desperate” attempt to persuade her to change her mind led to nothing but huge phone bills. Howe complained about California’s intellectually bland “second-rate culture” where everything shut down by nine p.m. He’d fled Palo Alto for an apartment on the north slope of Telegraph Hill, which should have been cramped and urban enough to remind him of New York, but he still felt “unmoored.”15
Throughout two years of misery in California, Howe always appeared “in the company of attractive women,” his biographer writes.16 Alice became one of these in the spring of 1963. The San Francisco political activist Paul Jacobs, married to Alice’s divorce lawyer, urged Howe to call Alice. Certainly Alice knew Howe’s literary criticism and shared many of his political views, though they disagreed about the radical youth then emerging through the civil rights movement and students’ rights groups in Berkeley. Arriving at her apartment, Howe made a faux pas that Alice never forgot. “You’d be beautiful if it weren’t for your teeth,” he told her. If her story “A California Trip”—in which the teeth become a nose—can be trusted, she had a comeback: “God, thanks. Have you ever taken a good long look at yours?”17
Howe confided to Alice that he was in terrible shape and recounted his “total, shattering” affair with Edja. She told him about Vasco Pereira and the death of Franz Sommerfeld. When Alice took Howe to a party at the home of friends Eleanor and Albert Haas in Marin County, he realized that none of the guests knew of him or his work, but was flattered to hear that Eleanor thought him “sexy.”18
After Howe returned east to teach at Hunter College, he and Alice corresponded and spoke of future meetings. “We knew each other a mere 10 days,” he reflected, “but it feels like a great d
eal more, and when I think back to them there is a happy sense of crowding and richness. We had much pleasure together.” He asked her how she managed to recover so quickly from the loss of Franz Sommerfeld. “Is it just that you’re better than me at putting up a front, or that in the tradition you were born to there is a greater stress than in mine on public restraint? And I wonder how you manage to keep up such a surface, or is it a reality, of good cheer.”19
This view of Adams seems to have appealed to her. When she was wrote stories about both Howe and Rosenthal narrated from the man’s point of view, she portrayed herself as a not-very-literary, blond, healthy, good-humored woman who turns down offers of marriage from men who are needier than she. Such exercises (both stories went unpublished) suggest she was finally healing the long split between femininity and independence.
I. No sooner had Young resettled in Hawaii than “Hello, Dolly!,” one of his last recordings with the All-Stars, spent a week at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, displacing the Beatles and making Armstrong the oldest artist ever to occupy the number 1 spot. Alice probably heard Trummy whenever she turned on a radio.
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