Everybody Was So Young (18 page)

It was the first time—though by no means the last—that Sara and Gerald exchanged the look that said, “We must Do Something.” The something in this case was a draft on their bank for $3,000, an enormous amount of money, which they lent to Tairoff “with great difficulty.” But they felt they had to come up with it: after all, Tairoff’s company was doing such wonderful and important work. The Murphys didn’t know that repayment was a chancy proposition at best. It was only later that they discovered that in Russia under the Bolsheviks “foreign debts were not honored and no money [was] allowed sent out of the country.” Even if they had known, it might not have mattered.

Was it on the afternoon of the Kamerny party, or another day, that Gilbert Seldes’s friend, Donald Ogden Stewart, came by the quai des Grands Augustins with another writer he wanted them to meet, John Dos Passos? Stewart, a comic novelist and aspiring playwright from the Midwest, had gone to Yale a few years behind Gerald, and his Yale experience had been shadowed first by his father’s disgrace in a fraud accusation, then by the father’s death some time afterward. Always conscious of feeling like an outsider pressing his nose against the windows of those more fortunate than he, Stewart was dazzled by the Murphys’ aura. To him they were figures in a fairy tale: “Once upon a time there was a prince and a princess,” he wrote: “that’s exactly how a description of the Murphys should begin. They were both rich; he was handsome; she was beautiful; they had three golden children. They loved each other, they enjoyed their own company, and they had the gift: of making life enchantingly pleasurable for those who were fortunate enough to be their friends.”

Dos Passos, a Harvard man who had served in France as an ambulance driver during the war, fancied himself too tough and street-smart to fall for a line like that. He had been hanging around with the Left Bank expatriate journalist crowd that ran with the Toronto Star’s young correspondent, Ernest Hemingway, and he was resistant to the Murphys’ charm.

“Sara was obviously a darling,” wrote Dos Passos later of their first meeting (which, it should be remembered, took place when the Murphys were preparing for a party), “but Gerald seemed cold and brisk and preoccupied.” Put off by Gerald’s sartorial splendor and the diffidence he sometimes had with strangers, Dos Passos declined the Murphys’ invitation to stay for their party. But not long afterward he ran into Gerald again on the street, walking with Fernand Léger. Léger was a burly butcher’s son from Normandy with dark eyebrows, a drooping black mustache, and a cigarette that seemed permanently affixed to his lower lip, who painted with the same vigor and passion with which he attacked life. He already had a considerable reputation for his bold, collage-like paintings, and his designs for the ballet Skating Rink—which showed fashionable women in the same pearls and turbans that Sara favored—had been lavishly praised. Gerald, who admired him intensely, found him “an apostle, a mentor, a teacher,” and the two men frequently roamed around the city to explore railroad yards or shop displays or factories, any of which might be subjects for a picture, or merely interesting or provocative in their own right.

Gerald and Léger hailed Dos Passos and they walked along the quai together—Gerald tall and sandy-haired in his beautifully cut suit, Léger hulking and broody, Dos Passos peering shyly through his thick glasses. Gerald and Léger were looking at things in a way Dos Passos had never seen. “Regardez-moi ça,” Léger would say, his finger jabbing at a winch on a barge, wound about with coils of rope, or the shape of a tugboat’s funnel; or Gerald would point out the way you saw only half of a woman’s face behind the geraniums in the cabin window of her barge. Later, in his notebook, Gerald described the scene in his artist’s shorthand: “tugs clustered, deck details, barges or barge, living quarters, lattices, painted woods, nautical form, 1 or 2 solid humans at table.” Dos Passos was enchanted. “The banks of the Seine never looked banal again,” he said.

Soon he was a frequent presence in the Murphys’ lives, happiest to drop in on them when they were en famille. His shyness and his stammer made large parties difficult; and besides, he said, he “had never had a proper home life, and was developing an unexpressed yearning for it.” The illegitimate son of a prosperous lawyer who would not divorce his wife to marry his mistress, Dos Passos had grown up lonely in the luxury hotels his father’s money paid for, and he couldn’t help feeling a pang when he saw the Murphys’ obvious love for, and ease with, what he called “their three little towheads.”

Who else did Gerald and Sara meet in that spring of 1923? Donald Ogden Stewart, who seems to have been treating the Murphys almost as a tourist attraction, brought the playwright Philip Barry and his wife, Ellen, to the quai des Grand-Augustins and rang and rang the bell downstairs. Suddenly a window flew up on the top floor and a head poked out. Ellen Barry, looking up, saw a smiling woman, her fair hair pinned into a French twist. “Come up, come up!” she cried, when they protested they were just passing by and didn’t want to intrude.

Barry, another Yale man (he had entered in 1913, a year after Gerald’s graduation), had just made a splash in New York with his boulevard comedy, You and I, and he and Ellen were in France to take possession of the villa in Cannes that his father-in-law, a wealthy lawyer named Lorenzo Semple, had given the young couple. This was another link: the Murphys were planning a return to Antibes that summer and would be only a few kilometers away along the Corniche; they made plans to see one another again on the Riviera.

Ellen Barry, a dark-haired beauty in her own right, was struck by Sara’s elegance—“she wore beautiful clothes,” she remembered, “not the chic of the day, but wonderful flowing things that suited her perfectly”—and by the freshness and originality of the Murphys’ apartment. The walls had been painted dead white, and the floors lacquered a glossy black, with white Mexican rugs scattered about; the floor-to-ceiling windows, with their picture-postcard view of the Seine, were framed in red antique brocade curtains. Apparently the Murphys’ Empire chests and settees had been largely left in storage. “Sara was the first to have modern furniture,” Ellen Barry remembered. There were chairs and sofas upholstered in the kind of black satin tailors used to line men’s vests, little coffee tables with mirrored tops, and an ebony grand piano on which was displayed an enormous industrial ball bearing that looked like a piece of sculpture—which is what most visitors mistook it for. (Gerald said it was better than having a Rodin that could turn out to be fake.) The sitting room was filled with arrangements of flowers and—an innovative touch—stalks of pale green celery in black or white opalescent vases; but in the spare cubicle of a dining room Sara would place only a single rose in a vase against the bare wall. “Oh, la valeur de ça!” Fernand Léger exclaimed when he saw it—and put a single rose in a series of paintings afterward.

If their charming nineteenth-century house on 11th Street had been an expression of the Murphys’ flair for the quaint and unexpected, this apartment was a statement about newness and originality. Unlike Cole and Linda Porter’s grand residence on the rue Monsieur, which boasted platinum wallpaper, zebra-skin rugs, and priceless eighteenth-century furniture, it was not an advertisement for the Murphys’ affluence. Instead it was a declaration of their own brand of unconventional modernism, an extension from canvas to life. To visiting Americans like the Barrys it had the excitement of Paris at that moment—and to Europeans like Léger and Stravinsky it symbolized the machine-age inventiveness of an America most of them could only dream of. “The Murphys were among the first Americans I ever met,” said Stravinsky once, “and they gave me the most agreeable impression of the United States.”

That June all Paris was buzzing with curiosity over Stravinsky’s new ballet, Les Noces, which Diaghilev would produce at the Théâtre Gaîeté-Lyrique to open the last week of his season. Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, all the papers bristled with front-page items calling it “this year’s gift,” “an aesthetic revelation,” and more. The music, which Stravinsky had originally written for player piano and percussion, had been rescored for four pianos, a chorus, drums, bells, and a xylophone—a novel ensemble—and the choreography was singular in that it emphasized the movement of the corps de ballet over that of the principals. In fact, that was the idea: this primitivist wedding fable was intended to convey a sense of implacable social force in which the individual wishes of the bride and groom were meaningless. In addition, the traditional gender divisions of ballet had been abolished. Men and women performed the same steps, there was no support work—the ballet was as revolutionary sexually as it was musically.

Natalia Goncharova had been commissioned to do the sets and costumes for Les Noces; but a series of misunderstandings and disagreements with the choreographer, Bronislava Nijinska, had put her formidably behind an already tight schedule. Nijinska had persuaded Diaghilev to abandon Goncharova’s literally folkloric costumes and décors in favor of stylized ones in tones of brown and white; as a result Goncharova was desperate to finish in time, and called on her henchmen the Murphys for help. Although Gerald was by now consumed by his own painting, he spent a week helping to spread brown and white paint on muslin flats. He also seized this opportunity to include John Dos Passos, who was passionate to know more about the Ballets Russes in its backstage life. Dos Passos found the conditions in Diaghilev’s atelier hot (June in Paris can be brutal) and confusing (the cacophony of French and Russian, and the histrionics of the crew, bewildered him). But Gerald kept him going with frequent pit stops at the local brasserie, and they finished their task.

Gerald and Sara also invited him to one of the ten stage rehearsals Les Noces would receive before its opening (they themselves went to all ten), and when Dos Passos asked if another of his friends, the poet and novelist e. e. cummings, could come too, they were delighted. But at the theater cummings perversely and ostentatiously sat three or four rows behind the others—perhaps the Murphys’ “well-laundered” elegance was off-putting to someone who often considered squalor a matter of principle—and although Dos Passos tried to make light of the incident he was reportedly deeply embarrassed.

The day before its official opening on June 13, Les Noces received a preview performance at the rococo hôtel particulier of Stravinsky’s patroness, the Princesse Edmond de Polignac (née Winaretta Singer), the handsome lesbian heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune. “Tante Winnie,” as she liked to be called, was a fixed star in that affluent and sexually ambiguous universe that surrounded the Ballets Russes and, therefore, was a friend both of the de Beaumonts (who were there) and of Hoytie Wiborg, so it would have been natural for Gerald and Sara to have attended this private performance. But in addition they had decided they must make their own gesture of homage to the creators of Les Noces; and so—Gerald later recalled—they invited “everyone directly connected to the ballet, as well as friends . . . who were following its genesis” to a party in what they hoped would be “a place worthy of the event.”

The first venue they thought of was the Cirque Medrano, the funky one-ring-circus-cum-vaudeville house that was home to the Fratellini brothers; nothing could have been farther from Winnie de Polignac’s marbled halls with their José Maria Sert frescoes and busts of Louis
XIV
, and nothing could have been more Murphyesque. But the circus manager was not amused. “The Cirque Medrano,” he told Gerald frostily, “isn’t an American colony yet.” Then they had a better idea: a converted barge tied up in front of the Chambre des Députés that, except on Sundays, served as the deputies’ restaurant. Celebrating Les Noces there had a certain dadaist correctness: it was a bit like letting the lunatics take over the asylum.

The party took place on June 17, at 7:00 p.m., and was quickly transformed into legend. It almost began with disaster: Sara had forgotten that because it was a Sunday, the huge open-air market on the Île de la Cité would be selling birds instead of flowers, and she could find no fresh blooms for her center-pieces. But she quickly recouped by going to a Montparnasse bazaar and buying quantities of cheap toys—trucks and fire engines, dolls, and stuffed animals—which she arranged in pyramids along the banquet table. Over it, suspended from the ceiling, was positioned a huge laurel wreath bearing the inscription “Les Noces—Hommages.”

The guests gathered on the canopied upper deck for cocktails—all but Stravinsky, who first went below to the dining room to check the seating arrangements and rearrange the place cards to his liking. Diaghilev came, with his amanuensis, the devoted Boris Kochno, and the de Beaumonts and Winaretta de Polignac and Misia Sert. Although Gerald and Sara had wanted to invite all the dancers, the antiegalitarian Diaghilev disapproved: but his new favorite Serge Lifar was there, and the beautiful dark-haired Vera Nemchinova, and Leonide Massine. Larionov and Goncharova came, but not Nijinska—possibly the Murphys wanted to avoid a contretemps between her and Goncharova about the designs for the ballet. Rue and John Carpenter were there with their nearly grown daughter Ginny. So were the Porters, and Darius Milhaud, Walter Damrosch, Ernest Ansermet (who had conducted the ballet), Germaine Taillefer, and the “preferred pianist of les Six,” Marcelle Meyer. Scofield Thayer, the editor-in-chief of The Dial, turned up (someone said later that this was the last night before he went mad), and so did Gilbert Seldes and Lewis Galantière and his wife, Dorothy Butler. Tristan Tzara was there, and Blaise Cendrars, and Picasso and his wife, and Jean Cocteau, who, however, refused to come aboard until after the last bâteau-mouche had gone by because he feared the heaving from their wakes would make him seasick.

As the guests came down to the dining room Picasso, captivated by Sara’s toy decorations, rearranged them into a giant assemblage that culminated in a stuffed cow atop a fire truck’s ladder. The dinner went on and on: a great deal of champagne was consumed, Marcelle Meyer played Scarlatti on the piano, Goncharova read the guests’ palms and promised them fame and fortune, and Cocteau—who had pinched the captain’s dress uniform from his cabin—scurried around the deck with a lantern, sticking his head through the portholes to proclaim, “On coule” (“We’re sinking”). Gilbert Seldes picked up one of the menus put at everyone’s place and went about getting the guests to autograph the back of it; across the top someone wrote: “Depuis le jour de ma première communion c’est le plus beau soir de ma vie” (“Since the day of my first communion this is the most beautiful evening of my life”).