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Stretching The Truth — Dispelling the Myth (cont) False. He visited 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, where Stein and Alice B. Toklas made their home, in the winter of 1913-1914, at least once and perhaps more often. He visited there again in 1921, in the company of Marcel Duchamp and Marsden Hartley. Stein preserved every scrap of correspondence she ever received, including letters from casual acquaintances and illiterate notes from her concierge. Her brief notes from Demuth, of which there are only five, all dated 1921, only inquire if he might call on her.Several years later he arranged for Henry McBride to deliver a small watercolor to her. Stein accounted briefly for Demuth in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but she never mentioned him elsewhere in her writings, though it was her habit, especially during the period 1911-1930, to write word portraits of her friends. She did not write one of Demuth. When she returned to America, October 1934-May 1935, for a lecture tour, she and Demuth did not see each other, although she gave a November lecture in Philadelphia. His final illness lay just under a year ahead. Demuth was an intimate friend of Eugene O’Neill and his wife Agnes Boulton. False. He met the O’Neills on Cape Cod, circa 1915, and corresponded intermittently, though primarily with Agnes, until 1926, by which time O’Neill had left his wife for Carlotta Monterey. After that, Demuth’s comments to others about O’Neill and his plays were decidedly derisive, as his letters indicate. By 1929, when he painted his oil still life, Longhi on Broadway, identifying it with Pietro Longhi, a minor Renaissance painter, he was no longer in touch with O’Neill. Subsequently, attempts have been made to identify the painting as a poster portrait of the dramatist. Demuth wrote to Agnes in 1926 to ask if she thought O’Neill would resist being the subject of one of his poster portraits, for which he had done a sketch employing O’Neill’s name in a poster for one of the playwright’s Provincetown works. It never advanced beyond that stage. Three years later he painted Longhi on Broadway; some time after that, Agnes declared that it was a poster portrait of her ex-husband on the basis of Demuth’s 1926 letter. Demuth was cross-eyed. False. One of his piercing black eyes carried a decided cast – inherited from his father – which gave him a slightly maniacal look, since he seemed to be staring in two different directions, but not at his own nose. Demuth was dropped in infancy, which permanently shortened one of his legs so that he was obliged to use a cane. False. His friend, pediatrician and poet William Carlos Williams, thought the leg was the result of a “tuberculous hip.” Demuth suffered from the then unrecognized Perthes’ Disease, in which the growth of the hip ball is arrested in male children, causing one leg to be shorter than the other. He did sport a cane, but he also took long walks without it and often only affected it as part of his fashionable ensemble. Robert Locher remembered that Demuth was “an excellent swimmer and also danced well.” Demuth was a example of homosexual camp because of his effeminate behavior, lady-like speech, and gaudy apparel. False. Demuth’s cane gave his walk an undulating wobble. He used his expressive hands and their attenuated fingers when he spoke, and he often clutched a white handkerchief to his mouth during bursts of merriment in a whinneying giggle, and a high-pinched voice. Also,
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