Everybody Was So Young (17 page)

In fact, they had been caught up in what Gerald later called “a sort of movement,” the group of artists and musicians and amateurs and hangers-on that clustered around the Ballets Russes. “You knew everyone in it,” said Gerald, “and you were expected to go to the rehearsals, and they wanted your opinion and they discussed it with you.” Sometimes the new recruits gave even more material aid: Gerald and Sara were watching one rehearsal for Stravinsky’s new ballet Le Renard, a Russian fable with snow-encrusted scenery by Larionov, when Stravinsky lost his temper with Bronislava Nijinska, who was playing the fox, because she seemed not to be paying attention to his directions. She protested that she couldn’t hear what he was saying because the scarf she was wearing around her head muffled the sound of his voice.

“Then we must cut it in two,” thundered Stravinsky. He was legendarily short-tempered, and Gerald had once seen him leap out of the orchestra pit to the stage, using the laps of two violinists as stepping-stones, in order to berate a dancer. Now he grabbed the scarf from Nijinska—“a beautiful scarf,” remembered Sara wistfully; “I’d give my eyes to have it”—and snapped, “Who has a scissors?”

Almost against her will, Sara piped up. “I always have my scissors,” she said, digging in her bag and handing them over.

Stravinsky beamed at her. “Only Americans have scissors,” he said.

“He was a wonderful man,” Sara said fondly afterward.

His work with the Ballets Russes had given Gerald the confidence that he was a painter, not just a dilettante, and he now felt ready to start working on his own. He enlisted a cousin of Diaghilev’s whom he’d met at the atelier, a former naval cadet named Vladimir Orloff, to act as a technical assistant, and began looking for studio space. Obviously the Murphys’ rented quarters in the rue Greuze were unsuitable. Unlike Picasso, who had an atelier upstairs from his apartment in the rue la Boétie, Gerald could not find an appropriate space nearby. But he discovered a sculptor’s studio in a shabby block of what looked like old stables on the rue Froidevaux, a street that ran along the southern perimeter of the Cimetière du Montparnasse. This leafy necropolis, crisscrossed with access roads that have the character of country lanes, was full of mausolea inscribed with the name of this or that upper bourgeois Parisian family; the lack of any other buildings in the vicinity meant that the studio got wonderful light. For obvious reasons, it was also very quiet.

Gerald’s quarters consisted of one spacious room with a cement floor and skylight. There was a gas stove in one corner, and in the other a stairway went up to a kind of loft that could be used for sleeping or for storage. He whitewashed the walls and hung a curtain to separate the loft from the rest of the studio; he bought oil and tempera paint, brushes, canvas, and other supplies. He even began sporting a broad-brimmed black hat and red sideburns in the style of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster. He was ready to begin.

Because the space at his disposal was huge—the studio ceiling was approximately thirty feet high—and because he had been working on a large scale in his theatrical painting, Gerald seemed from the first to have conceived his pictures in monumental terms. “I seemed to see in miniature detail,” he said many years afterward, “but in giant scale.” The influence of his theatrical mentors, the futurists Goncharova and Larionov, also made itself felt in his initial choice of subject matter. Futurism and its near descendant, constructivism, exalted the powers and materials of technology—the “iron, glass, concrete, circle, cube, cylinder, synthetically combined with mathematical precision and structural logic,” as the painter Louis Lozowick described it in a 1922 article in the little magazine Broom. So Gerald began painting machines. The shapes themselves, their order and their raw power, fascinated him.

It’s not clear which picture he started first—those first paintings are lost now, and he never could remember correctly the order in which he’d done them. He called one of them Turbines, the other Pressure (or Pression). The former was a closely cropped, nearly abstract close-up view of the parts of a nameless machine, the latter a perspectival rendering of the working heart of an ocean liner, an enormous engine with the name of the manufacturer emblazoned (including a Dadaist typo) on the side of the engine block. He worked on each painting the same way, as if he were preparing and executing a scenic design: he made a maquette, or sketch, in tempera on paper; then, painstakingly, using a pencil and a grid, he transferred the outlines of the picture onto airplane linen that had been mounted on three-ply veneer panels; finally he painted in the design in oils on the canvas. It was a deliberate process, and it showed: the surface of the paintings had the sharp, even clarity of something, well, machine-made. Cogs, wheels, pistons, crankshafts, all of them gleaming and impermeable.

He worked all morning or all afternoon, for the first time in his life completely absorbed in what he was doing. He had never, he told an acquaintance later, been truly happy until that moment.

On June 12 Gerald put aside his brushes and paints to accompany Sara, the children, and the children’s nanny, Mademoiselle Henriette Géron, to Houlgate, a seaside resort on the English Channel in Normandy. The Channel beaches were the summertime refuge of fashionable Parisians, and the Murphys must have thought of Houlgate as the French equivalent of East Hampton. They would be looking forward to the sort of summer they remembered from their youth—minus, of course, the familial strains that had made the Dunes so difficult in recent years.

They settled in for the summer at the Hôtel des Clématites, and Honoria, Baoth, and even little Patrick enjoyed riding donkeys along the beach and digging in the sand. The children acquired a dog, a liver-and-white English spaniel named Asparagus, and they didn’t lack for company because the Pickmans and their five children were nearby in the Villa Germaine. But the weather was all wrong, chilly and gray, perfect for a polite stroll along the promenade in layers of fashionable clothes, but not good for the basking or sea-bathing the Murphys craved. So when Cole and Linda Porter asked them to come down to stay for a week or so in a château they’d rented in Antibes, on the Mediterranean coast, Gerald and Sara accepted.

The Côte d’Azur was not yet a byword in chic circles. Largely the haunt of English and German vacationers who didn’t swim or sunbathe and came only for a short January-to-May season, it was deserted in summertime. But Cole Porter “always had a great flair, a sense of the avant garde, about places,” recalled Gerald. “So we went down there in that hot, hot summer . . . and on the Cap d’Antibes was this little tiny beach—I think only about 3 or 4 hundred yards long—covered with a bed of seaweed that must have been there for ages. It was three or four feet thick. We dug a little corner of it out and bathed and sat in the most wonderful sun—absolutely dry weather, cool evenings, constant breeze in the evenings and clear, sunny days one after the other, and this perfectly beautiful, crystalline water.” It seemed like paradise. And at the end of their stay, they knew they would come back.

10

“A prince and a princess”

THERE
WERE
MANY
SIGNS
of spring in Paris, from the setting out of the café tables at the Closerie des Lilas to the budding of chestnut trees in the Bois; but for the people who cared about art, the opening of the Salon des Independents was the first sign that winter was over.

The Société des Artistes Independents was an organization of antiestablishment artists united under the slogan “Ni jury ni récompenses” (“Neither jury nor rewards”); its thirty-fourth exposition opened on February 10, 1923, in the Grand Palais, a monumental art nouveau fantasy of stone, glass, and steel built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900, the first world’s fair in Paris. Since the Independents required of their exhibitors only the desire to be seen and the payment of a small entrance fee, the number of works on view was enormous, as the glossy arts journal, Shadowland, made clear: “Think for a moment of a place as large as Madison Square Garden, with two floors divided into about seventy rooms. Think then of all the paintings of every known and unknown school, of all the pieces of sculpture, illustrations and designs for carpets and tapestries; and imagine them to the tune of six thousand sent in by almost two thousand artists and you begin to have a vague idea of what this Salon means.”

Visitors milling under the Grand Palais’s domed and vaulted glass roof could look at paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Tsuguharu-Léonard Foujita, Francis Picabia, Michel Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova—but the point of the Independents was to discover new talent, and this season there were four pictures by an unfamiliar name: Gerald Murphy.

In the course of little more than six months of painting Gerald had produced four pictures for the Salon: two oils, Turbines and Pression; one watercolor, Taxi; and one drawing, Crystaux. This was their first public viewing; in fact, because Gerald preferred to avoid criticism of his work in progress, it was the first time he had had any real reaction to it. The results had to please him: his “cubistic studies of machinery” were singled out for special mention in Shadowland, and the Paris Herald’s reviewer gave his “very personal point of view in the study of machinery” a new label: “centrifugalist.” Mr. Murphy, the Herald declared, revealed “a feeling for mass and a sense of decorative effect.”

It was the beginning of a kind of annus mirabilis for Gerald Murphy. Having his pictures hung in the Salon des Independents was one thing, but even more cachet attached to his invitation to design the “American” booth at a spectacular charity benefit given to raise money for impoverished Russian émigrés. This four-day bazaar, featuring art, crafts, and entertainment, opened on February 23 with a fantasy Bal des Artistes Russes at which four orchestras, including a jazz band, played the latest dance music. The guests showed up in Russian folk dress or in costumes derived from current avant-garde paintings (there were a lot of harlequins and cubist-inspired top hats), Tristan Tzara declaimed one of his poems while mechanical birds flitted through the air, and the Fratellini brothers performed their circus tricks.

Everything—even the champagne bottles popped open by the bartender, Michel Larionov—was decorated. Paintings by Goncharova, Gris, Hélène Perdriat, and others covered the walls with a chaotic blaze of color. The artists who had been asked to design exhibition booths had outdone themselves: near Picasso’s was Sonia Delaunay’s, where the young painter and designer was selling modernist bibelots; Goncharova had decorated the Russian booth, which featured her striking handmade masks; and at the Japanese booth, the artist Tsuguharu-Léonard Foujita had constructed an entire kabuki theater, complete with live dancers. But even among these stars Gerald Murphy’s contribution stood out: an extraordinary construction of skyscrapers topped with electric signs whose lights blinked on and off, the Great White Way transported to the banks of the Seine. It was monumental, futuristic, and thrillingly American, and it announced that this American artist had arrived.

That winter and spring of 1923 were so full of new people and new things that it was difficult, later, to remember what had happened when. When was it, exactly, that Gerald and Sara met Fernand Léger? Who introduced them to Gilbert Seldes, the American critic and editor of The Dial who had come to Paris to write the book that would become The Seven Lively Arts? Was it Rue and John Carpenter? (John had just created a ballet, Krazy Kat, based on the George Herriman cartoon strip that Seldes considered an example of the American sublime.) Or did they get to know him through Amy Lowell? It was all a wonderful blur of exhibitions, performances, and publications.

Gerald and Sara had returned from the Côte d’Azur at the end of the summer. They’d given up the rue Greuze apartment) and had resettled in the Hôtel des Reservoirs in Versailles, not far from the palace, where Sara delighted in prowling around the local antiques shops and the children could have a country atmosphere while still being close to the city. But Sara and Gerald wanted to be in the thick of things, and by the end of the year they had found an apartment on the top two floors of an old François ler house on the corner of the quai des Grands-Augustins and a narrow street called rue Gît-le-Coeur. It was full of light, and from its windows overlooking the Seine you could see all the way from the Îie St.-Louis to the Tuileries. But it was small, with only two bedrooms and a kitchen so tiny that food had to be stored in a garde-manger, a box hung outside the window. And it was dilapidated—probably its last face-lift had come just after the French Revolution—and there were rats on the stairs. It wouldn’t do for a permanent family home, but they could use it as an in-town pied-à-terre while still maintaining a residence at Versailles. And they could justify the expense of remodeling it because they had decided to burn their New York bridges at last. They had sold 50 West 11th Street for $40,000 in February.

They began work on the apartment to make it habitable, but even before they were finished they gave their first dinner party in it, a soirée for the avant-garde Kamerny (Chamber) Theater, a Moscow troupe that was appearing in Paris that spring. The Kamerny actors were determinedly experimental: they did Racine’s Phèdre in constructed faces (not masks), with the star, Alice Coonen, climbing up a steeply raked platform, trailing a red cape as long as the set was wide; they did an adaptation of G. K. Chesterton’s chase-thriller, The Man Who Was Thursday, on a three-story set featuring scaffolding, stairways, elevators, and slides and poles for quick escapes; they did a silly 1890s operetta called Giroflé-Girofla on the wings of a biplane. Gerald and Sara were wild about them, went to all ten of their performances, and at the end of the run threw a party that would have given Adeline Wiborg nightmares, but that their friends still remembered half a century later.

Inspired, perhaps, by the Kamerny’s inventiveness, Gerald and Sara made their apartment’s half-finished state into a virtue: they had no chairs or sofas, so they piled mattresses and pillows along the wainscoted walls and covered them with yards of brocade. Tables were improvised out of planks mounted on blocks. The lighting was provided by acetylene plumbers’ lamps, and the bare plaster walls were hung with “found” sculptures made by their new friend Fernand Léger out of discarded bicycle wheels and other junkyard objects. There were mounds of couscous made by the Murphys’ new Algerian cook, and plenty of wine to wash it all down; for dessert there was fruit and a chocolate mousse, molded into a suggestive shape and cloaked in crème Chantilly, called négresse en chemise. But the Russians, still not sated, invaded the kitchen and devoured the lemons they found there, skin and all. The rooms buzzed with laughter and singing and Russian and French conversation. The only mournful note was struck later, when the troupe’s director, Alexander Tairoff, confessed to his hosts that the Kamerny’s tour had not been a financial success. The company was, in fact, unable to meet its obligations, and would probably be stranded in Paris without the funds to get home.