Had a love-affair with hard-boiled short story writer Paul Cain, who
wrote for the screen under the pseudonym
Peter Ruric. After they broke up,
Cain wrote about her in the only novel of his published during his
lifetime, "Fast One." Both Gertrude and Cain were alcoholics, and in
the novel published several years later after they called it quits, she
was the inspiration for the dipsomaniac lover, Granquist.