GERTRUDE STEIN AND ALICE B. TOKLAS
Avant-garde writer and culture impresario Gertrude Stein was a stolid, heavy presence, monolithic, unladylike. She liked to gossip and had a great laugh. She boxed with welterweights for exercise. Art expert Bernard Berenson described her as looking "like a statue from Ur of the Chaldees." Alice B. Toklas was a chain smoker with a slight mustache, given to exotic dress, Gypsy earrings and manicured nails. They met in Paris in 1907. Alice, 29, found Gertrude, 33, "a golden brown presence." Gertrude insisted that Alice had heard bells heralding Stein's "greatness." Alice said Gertrude was simply struck by love at first sight.

They became inseparable. Alice cooked, typed manuscripts, fended off the unwanted, did promotions and chatted up the wives and significant others of famous men, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. Alice was "Pussy" to Gertrude; Gertrude was "Lovey" to Alice. And if out walking for a while with a friend, Gertrude would say, "We must be getting back to Alice. If I am away from her long, I get low in my mind." Discussing homosexuality, Stein once told Hemingway that men were disgusted after sex together but "in women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted by...afterwards they are happy and can lead happy lives together." After Gertrude died in 1946, Alice lived on, serving Stein's reputation as always and, in the end, choosing to find religion because, as their friend the composer Virgil Thompson said, she wanted a ticket into the afterlife, "since Gertrude, she could not doubt, was immortal."

SPENCER TRACY AND KATHARINE HEPBURN
Tracy and Hepburn. If there was billing, that was it. That's how they both wanted it. America's quintessential outspoken Yankee, Kate Hepburn, met the fantastic actor Spencer Tracy when she was 33 and he was 42. They felt an instant attraction and, in an arrangement very much like the films they made together, what he wanted to do, what he wanted to eat, what he desired was what she always did, in the end.

Hepburn once said men and women should live next door to each other, and for years, she and the very married Tracy kept company but never lived together, never went out together. Only when he fell ill, after years of binge drinking, did she retire from films to care for him at the estate of George Cukor, where they lived. After he died, she called his wife and said, "You know...you and I can be friends." "Well, yes," Louise Tracy said, "but you see, I thought you were only a rumor."

It was a "rumor" Hollywood stood in awe of. The public never seemed to get the aura of the word adultery, for Hepburn and Tracy seemed so very like the attractive people they played in nine films together.

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