Alice Brock
Alice May Brock was an American artist, author and restauranteur. A resident of Massachusetts for her entire adult life, Brock owned and operated three restaurants in the Berkshires—The Back Room, Take-Out Alice, and Alice's at Avaloch—in succession between 1965 and 1979. The first of these was the subject of Arlo Guthrie's 1967 song "Alice's Restaurant", which in turn inspired the 1969 film.
Early life
Brock was born Alice May Pelkey in Brooklyn, New York City. Her mother, Mary Pelkey, was from a Jewish family in Brooklyn; her father, an Irish Catholic, was originally from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The Pelkey family was relatively well-to-do and often spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Mr. Pelkey sold artwork for Peter Hunt. Neither of her parents were religious, but her family had many connections to Jewish culture and she herself variously identified as a Jew and as half-Jewish. She gave mixed opinions about her early life and parents, crediting her mother for a love of cooking and her father with encouraging her love of art and taking her out to new restaurants regularly as a child, while suggesting that her parents were not "good parents" and that her father was "a bully," reasoning that her attachment to them was born more out of a people pleasing desire than familial love. She admitted being a difficult child who had never in her life been able to submit to authority, and continued to acknowledge a "mean and opinionated" side to her well into adulthood. After a stint in reform school, she graduated from the public high school in White Plains, New York. She attended Sarah Lawrence College. By her teen years, she had taken an interest in left-wing politics, and was registered with the Socialist Workers Party along with membership in the Students for a Democratic Society and Fair Play for Cuba Committee. She dropped out of college after her sophomore year.After leaving college, she spent a short period of time in Greenwich Village, where in 1960 she met, then married in 1962, Ray Brock, a woodworker from Hartfield, Virginia who was over a decade older than Alice. Alarmed at the radicalized environment, both Ray Brock and Mary Pelkey urged Alice to leave the area, and the Brocks and Pelkeys moved to her father's hometown of Pittsfield, where Ray and Alice initially lived on Mary's property. By June 1963, Mary had arranged for both to get hired at the Stockbridge School, with Ray working as a shop teacher and Alice as a librarian. With a gift from her mother, they purchased a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, which the couple converted into a residence for themselves and a gathering place for friends and like-minded bohemians. She would later describe the choice of a church for the group as a form of sacrilege, using a symbol of tradition and established religion to further her counterculture values. In 1991, the long-neglected building was restored and transformed into The Guthrie Center at Old Trinity Church, an interfaith worship center and performance venue. During the summer of 1963, the Brocks worked at a hostel for youth in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard, before returning to the church in the fall for the school year and preparing the church to be livable.
Littering incident
One of the Brocks' students at the Stockbridge School had been Arlo Guthrie, at the time an aspiring forester, a half-Jewish New York transplant like Brock, and the son of then-ailing folk icon Woody Guthrie. When Arlo Guthrie left Rocky Mountain College in Montana for Thanksgiving break in November 1965, he stayed at the Brocks' residence for their annual Thanksgiving dinner. The Brocks had largely only lived in a small corner of the bell tower, and thus large amounts of debris remained from the previous owners in the sanctuary that they had planned to use for the dinner; as a favor to the couple, Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins agreed to dispose of the debris, not realizing that the local dump was closed for the holiday. Guthrie and Robbins dumped their load over a cliff on private property. When Stockbridge chief of police William "Obie" Obanhein was made aware of the illegal dumping, he arrested Guthrie and Robbins. Brock bailed them out, and her anger at the incident nearly prompted Obanhein to arrest her as well. Brock was otherwise friendly with Obanhein, considering him "a very sweet man, and a very good cop." The turning point in their relations came after they had made the film. In the end, Guthrie and Robbins were levied a small fine and picked up the garbage that weekend.First restaurant
Brock was persuaded to open a restaurant by her mother, who saw the purchase as an opportunity for her daughter to become financially independent. She had already been doing a significant amount of cooking and housekeeping for her friends at the church, which frustrated her. Alice purchased an empty business space in the back of a row of stores on US 7 in Stockbridge and converted it into The Back Room in 1965, shortly before the Guthrie visit. There is some dispute over exactly when The Back Room opened; Brock would claim in 2008 that it was not until after the littering incident, but Guthrie's song about it implies the restaurant was already open by that time. At a jam session Guthrie had with the Brocks during his visit, he, Ray and Alice began formulating the basis for what would become the first half of "Alice's Restaurant". Alice said of the finished product: "The song is great, and it's very funny. Arlo is very clever. It's a lot of fun and it has a message of all the right things: of hope and music."Brock would reflect on this restaurant's opening as the breaking point in her marriage. According to her, because she was now living her life as an independent woman and needed her own transportation to work the restaurant, Ray no longer had financial control over her—prior to this he had only allotted her a small allowance—which increased tension between the two. Alice also admitted to not knowing much about either cooking at a professional level or business. Contrary to an implication made in the film about The Back Room, Alice says that she was faithful to Ray throughout the marriage and was not promiscuous; she did not sleep with Guthrie, for example. Guthrie also asserts that Alice was faithful to Ray in the final chorus of the song, noting a customer could "get anything you want...excepting Alice" at the restaurant, and his co-defendant, Richard Robbins, described the notion of Alice having affairs as being "complete bull."
Brock closed the restaurant in April 1966 and moved to the Boston area with friends, in addition to spending some time in Puerto Rico. She would return to Great Barrington and reconcile with Ray shortly thereafter, complete with a large hippie wedding that was written into the film, but the two would divorce permanently in 1968. According to her, Ray was "a bully, like my father." Ray returned to his home state of Virginia and died of a heart attack in 1979. There are no known remarriages or children after her divorce from Ray Brock; she commented in 2020 that she had a dim view of the nuclear family because very few of those she knew had healthy, close-knit family lives, and a statement from her caretaker upon her death implied no surviving direct next of kin, instead emphasizing Brock's "chosen family and friends." She did become a godmother to Richard Robbins's son Jesse.
Film
Brock agreed to participate in the production of the film Alice's Restaurant, including taking part in promotions and making cameo appearances in the film itself; unlike Guthrie and many other figures in the story, she declined an offer to portray herself in the film, and actress Pat Quinn played the role of Alice. Brock earned almost nothing from her promotional work and was dismayed after learning that Arthur Penn, the film's director and co-writer, inserted fictional material into the story that she felt "misrepresented me, embarrassed me, and made me into an object." She objected that "I wasn't sleeping with everybody in the world, for example—and not Arlo Guthrie! And I didn't know anybody who shot heroin." Additionally, the surprise success of the song and the film made Brock an unwilling celebrity. She specifically cited the film as the source of her unwanted fame and stated in hindsight shortly after it was released that she should have done everything in her power to prevent the film from being produced. Penn, who lived in Stockbridge, had heard of the story from Brock's father, who was on the board of directors at The Berkshire Playhouse, when the song was already out. Penn and co-writer Venable Herndon finished the screenplay in 1967 and the film was released in 1969. As of June 1970, Brock was living alone in a rented house in Lenox, Massachusetts, with plans to stay there long-term.As a way to compensate Brock, one of the film's producers arranged for her to write a cookbook, The Alice's Restaurant Cookbook, published in 1969. Brock later admitted that many of the featured recipes were created by her and her mother specifically for the book, rather than having originated at the restaurant, and had not been tested before being published; she has made it a life philosophy to frequently experiment with new recipes. The book proved to be a moderate success and went through four printings.