Everybody Was So Young (19 page)

As dawn whitened the sky over Notre-Dame, Kochno and Ansermet took down the laurel wreath from the ceiling and held it between them like a clown’s hoop. Stravinsky, showing he had lost none of the form he had displayed in the pillow fight after the Pulcinella premiere, ran the length of the room and jetéd through the center. After that, everyone decided, they might as well go home.

Top left: “My father wanted boys”: Frank Wiborg in the 1880s

Top right: Adeline Wiborg and (clockwise from upper left) Hoytie, Sara, and Olga

Bottom: The Wiborg girls in fancy dress: Olga as a Pierrot, Sara as a Chinese empress, Hoytie as a Dutch girl

Top left: Gerald in one of his earliest disguises—a solemn, rather wistful child

Top right: Fred (left) and Gerald “always appeared to act as members of a royal family.”

Lower left: Patrick Murphy avoided all “close relationships, even family ones”; his wife, Anna, was “devoted, possessive, ambitious, Calvinistic, superstitious, [and] hypercritical.”

Above: The drawing room at the Dunes.

Upper left: “The women all had tiny waists and they wore long fluttering eyelet dresses.”

From left: Sara Sherman, Olga, Hoytie, and Sara in East Hampton, about 1905

Lower left: The Lorelei—Sara steering her own course in Gardiners Bay

Lower right: Sara on the lawn, circa 1913: “Is anything so satisfying as to be picturesque? I am nearly dead with it.”

Sara, circa 1910. “My own dear girl,” Gerald wrote her, “if you knew how I thought of you!”

Gerald as a man about town, circa 1915: “The game in N.Y. . . . is not for me—is not real.”

Sara’s engagement photograph: “the face from Town and Country”

Sara, Honoria, and pearls

Gerald in the uniform of a private first class—perhaps one part for which he was not well cast

“They look so well laundered.” From left: Baoth, Gerald, baby Patrick, Sara, and Honoria in Cambridge, just before they moved to France

Sara took an almost visceral pleasure in her children—here with Honoria and Baoth at Houlgate, 1922.

Top left: Sara [foreground] and Olga Picasso

Top right: Left to right: Gerald, the de Beaumonts, and Sara at La Garoupe

Middle left: Picasso (foreground) and Gerald

Middle center: Sara and Gerald (and Picasso’s hat on the sand)

Middle right: Sara and Picasso

Bottom: Left to right Honoria, Baoth, Paulo Picasso (partly hidden by hat), Gerald, and Patrick

Sara by Picasso. Both portraits echo photographs of Sara at left, one in a turban, with Picasso, the other—clothed—at the Garoupe.

Gerald’s drop curtain and some of the characters (in costumes designed by Sara) from Within the Quota

The picture that caused the sensation: Boatdeck, with its “huge almost vertical red-lead-colored smoke-stacks and dead-white mushrooming ventilators with black, gaping pure-circle mouths”

Watch: Gerald was “struck by the mystery and depth of the interior” of this instrument de précision.

Cole Porter

Gerald and Sara at Étienne de Beaumont’s “automotive ball”

Archibald and Ada MacLeish were the Murphys’ neighbors at St.-Cloud.

Easter party at St.-Cloud. Front row, left to right: Honoria, Baoth, Patrick; back row, left to right: Frank Wiborg, Patrick Murphy, Sara, Gerald, and Vladimir Orloff

Esther Murphy “looked exactly like Gerald but moins jolie,” said a friend.

Villa America—the modest chalet transformed into a deco variation on a Mediterranean theme. Gerald is on the terrace, Baoth is driving a minicar on the patio.

Gerald’s sign for the villa, which, like its owners, existed in two worlds at once: France and America, the real and the imagined

Robert Benchley (left) and Donald Ogden Stewart showing their mettle

At Antibes the day might begin with exercises on the beach. Left to right: Gerald, Baoth, Honoria, and Patrick

In the afternoon there might be a children’s party for which the celebrant dressed specially—Honoria as an Infanta, Baoth as a knight, and Patrick as Charlie Chaplin

“The last unalloyed good time.” Left to right: Dos, Ernest, Sara, Hadley, and Gerald at Schruns

Murphy beach parties might feature Elsie de Wolfe (holding parasol), her husband, Sir Charles Mendl (behind her), or Monty Woolley (back row, far right) . . . or Philip Barry, Ellen Barry, Zelda Fitzgerald, or Peter Benchley—all surprised at close range by Sara’s camera.

Cocktail. When Gerald mixed drinks, Philip Barry told him, “You look like a priest saying Mass.”

Top: La Garoupe, summer 1926. “They have to like it,” said one of Fitzgerald’s characters about the Murphys’ fictional counterparts, “they invented it.”

Middle: All hands aloft. Left to right: Ellen Barry, Sara, Phil Barry (partially hidden), and Gerald

Bottom: Pamplona, summer 1926. Left to right: Hadley, Ernest, Pauline, Sara, and Gerald

COSTUME
OR DISGUISE?

What might have seemed self-conscious on someone else looked, on Gerald, somehow exactly right.

Gerald as an apache

On the terrace at Villa America

À l’espagnol at La Garoupe

In robes brought back from China by Archie MacLeish

11

“There is American elegance”

“ON
THE
PLEASANT
SHORE
of the French Riviera,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote in Tender Is the Night, “about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short, dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April.”

He has changed the name, but Fitzgerald is describing the Hôtel du Cap in Cap d’Antibes. It’s wedding-cake white now, not pink, and the beach never was right in front of it. In fact, it’s almost a half mile away. The hotel has a swimming pool instead, sunk into the rocks overlooking the Mediterranean. But the palms are still there, and the gigantic, primordial-looking aloe plants, and the Aleppo pines, their spindly silver trunks topped by tufty foliage. If you squint your eyes, obscuring the recent additions that have turned it into a hôtel de grand luxe, it looks almost as it must have on July 3, 1923, when Sara and Gerald, their three children, and Mademoiselle Géron arrived to spend the summer.

In past years the hotel would have been shut from May to September. But the previous summer’s arrival of the Porters and their guests at the Château de la Garoupe, just down the road, had encouraged the hotel’s owner, Antoine Sella, to think about keeping his establishment open this summer on a trial basis. When the Murphys proposed a return visit he agreed to keep a skeleton staff for them and for the family of a Chinese diplomat who, hearing the hotel would not close as usual, decided to stay on. After all, Sella rationalized, the weather was unseasonably wet and cold in the north that year, and perhaps other vacationers would come south for the sun.

At the time Antibes was a sleepy little port whose claim to fame was that Napoleon had been posted there when he was a loyal revolutionary soldier. There was a railroad station, and a pretty lemon yellow Romanesque church in the old town, where the narrow streets between the pastel stucco houses were bright with flower boxes. The tiny movie theater operated only once a week, and telephone service shut down for two hours at midday and altogether at 7:00 P.M. South of town a dozen modest villas were scattered on the piny slopes of the Antibes peninsula, but the shoreline was deserted except for fishermen’s shacks, and the few roads crisscrossing the peninsula were unpaved.

This sense of remote tranquillity was exactly what the Murphys were seeking after the sometimes exhausting excitement of the past months in Paris. For Gerald, however, Antibes was a working vacation more than a real escape. Before he left Paris he had begun an enormous painting, which he hoped to complete for the Independents in February. Possibly inspired by a large model of the liner Paris which had been exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in the fall of 1921, it depicted in gigantic scale the funnels and smokestacks of an ocean liner. Gerald had taken more than sixty photographs on deck while making transatlantic visits home on the Paris and the Aquitania and that spring had started the painstaking process of transferring his preliminary sketches to a canvas the size of a billboard. Now, although he had left that project behind in his studio, he had other work to do, an exciting commission from Rolf de Maré, the director of the avant-garde Ballets Suédois.

A rich and aristocratic Swede, de Maré had set up the Ballets Suédois in 1920 as a Paris showcase for his male lover, a stocky blond dancer named Jean Bôrlin. Modeling his company on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, de Maré had sought out those artists and composers considered to be on the cutting edge of fashion. Because de Maré’s pockets were as deep as Diaghilev’s were shallow, he had been able to pay not only for designs and music, but for costumes by the couturière Jeanne Lanvin, scenery executed by the Opéra’s head scene painter, and the kind of full hundred-piece orchestra that Diaghilev could rarely afford. By 1923 he had seriously challenged Diaghilev’s hegemony and was commissioning scores from Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honneger, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy, and décors from Picabia, Bonnard, and Léger.

De Maré had scheduled a new African-inspired ballet, to be entitled La Création du monde, from Léger and Milhaud, with a scenario by the novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars. His intention was to include the piece in the company’s winter 1923–24 American tour. But it was short, and he wanted an “American” ballet as a curtain-raiser, designed and composed by Americans, to give the box office a boost. Gerald’s skyscraper construction for the Bal des Artistes Russes made him an obvious candidate to provide the ballet’s décor, and his friendship with Léger, the artist on the other half of the proposed double bill, was a deciding factor. The commission was a considerable coup, and de Maré had done Gerald the additional honor of asking him to suggest a composer and outline the scenario.

Gerald, in his turn, had proposed his old friend and sometime protégé, Cole Porter. Porter’s career had been languishing: after See America First, the show whose tryout Gerald had gone to see in New Haven in 1916, Cole had written only occasional songs, and Linda wanted him to concentrate on serious orchestral music. She had even asked Igor Stravinsky to come to Antibes the previous summer to teach him harmony and composition. (Stravinsky, after consulting with the Murphys, had declined.) But here was a chance for Cole to write an orchestral composition in the style of Milhaud’s jazzy Boeuf sur le toit, to use his strength with popular idiom to good effect in a “classical” piece. And if he found himself over his head trying to score the piece, de Maré could certainly afford a first-rate orchestrator. Porter got the commission, and Gerald and Sara made plans to visit him and Linda in their rented palazzo in Venice later in the summer so that the two collaborators could work on the ballet.

In the meantime they luxuriated in the bright Provençal sun: Gerald raked seaweed from the deserted little Garoupe beach, the children splashed in the improbably blue water, and Sara—as had been her habit since East Hampton days—stretched out on a blanket in the sand, reading or writing or dreaming. Sometimes she wore some long white linen dress, sometimes a bathing suit, but always she wore her pearls, looped around her back like the duchess of Rutland’s, so they wouldn’t leave a white mark on her suntanned décolletage. She claimed the sun was good for them.

One day, not long after their arrival, the Murphys came down to the beach to discover they had company: Pablo Picasso, his wife, Olga, their two-and-a-half-year-old son, Paulo, and Picasso’s mother, Señora Maria Ruiz, who had come to France for the first time in her life to meet her grandson. Picasso was no stranger to the area. The summer before Paulo’s birth Pablo had dragged the unwilling Olga, who would have preferred the chic of St. Raphaël, to a villa in unfashionable Juan-les-Pins, just on the other side of the peninsula, and he had wanted to come back ever since. When the Murphys told him of their own summer plans in Paris that spring, he needed little encouragement to follow them.

Although Picasso ultimately rented a villa for his family in Juan-les-Pins, at first he and his household (including Paulo’s nounou, or baby nurse) installed themselves in the hotel, and the two families had their meals together in the cavernous, nearly empty dining room, the children at one table and the adults at another. Señora Ruiz, according to Sara, “didn’t speak a word of English,” nor of French, and she tried in vain to teach the Murphys Spanish. Despite their lack of a common language they got on famously. Olga was harder to get to know. She was very pretty, except for a rather weak chin and a tight, thin-lipped little mouth, but she was, as the Murphys noticed, “entirely prosaic” and had no gift for small talk.

In the beginning the relationship between the couples was formal. “Chère Madame Picasso,” wrote Sara in French, “our children are going to the beach at 9:45 and will return at 11:30 (they eat lunch at 12). We would be so happy if your baby could accompany them, with his nurse. Would you and M. Picasso come swimming with us later, at eleven? The beach is really very nice and we have an American canoe.”

Soon, however, they were on more playful footing; and when the de Beaumonts and the Barrys appeared at their respective villas in Cannes later in the month, they all gathered regularly on the Garoupe beach.

Sometimes there were well-organized (if disorderly) diversions: The de Beaumonts planned a “concours et costume de bain” one Friday noon for which the invitees added fantastical elements to their usual swimming costumes. Count Etienne had a hat like a chefs toque trimmed at each temple with Aztec tassels, and the countess had a latticework of beads on her bathing suit and over her hair. Olga wore her ballerina’s tutu and toe shoes, and coiled a twisted black and white scarf around her head. Sara put on a huge white top hat with a ribboned cockade at the brim; and Picasso wore his trademark black homburg over his white shirt and trousers. Señora Ruiz retained her Andalusian widow’s black, and sat on the sand looking like a Buddha. They all clowned around and posed for photographs: Picasso supporting Olga en attitude, then stripping to his bathing suit and putting on Sara’s white hat, and finally joining the others for a mock Victorian group portrait in the Murphys’ canoe.