William Edwards Cook - Friendship With Stein

Friendship With Stein

On a more personal level, Stein and Cook were also friends for other reasons. Shortly before World War I, Stein and Toklas ended up vacationing together on the Spanish island of Majorca with (by coincidence) Cook and his mistress, a French artist's model and cleaning woman named Jeanne Moallic. Eventually, when the two couples returned to Paris, Cook worked in an automobile factory, then became a taxi driver, in the course of which he also test-drove Renaults. Using his taxi, Cook became Stein's driving instructor, so that she and Toklas could transport supplies for the French war effort. During this same time period, Cook may also have become a clandestine agent for the U.S. Secret Service, while continuing to work as a taxi driver. Inadvertently (as described in a piece called "A Movie" by Stein), he and Moallic apparently contributed to the arrest of U.S. Army thieves, with the result that they were invited to ride (together, in their Renault) in the famous victory parade through the Arc de Triomphe in July 1919. For several years after the war, Cook was a Red Cross worker in the Caucasus region of the USSR (and perhaps, as is sometimes suggested, a Secret Service source as well), providing food and other aid to refugees in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Prior to Cook's departure on that, he and Moallic were married on March 2, 1922, at an informal ceremony in which Stein and Toklas were their legal witnesses.