Everybody Was So Young (2 page)

Early in the novel he was writing that summer—and would work on intermittently for nearly eight more years—Fitzgerald describes an alfresco dinner at his protagonists’ villa:

Rosemary . . . had a conviction of homecoming, of a return from the derisive and salacious improvisations of the frontier. There were fireflies riding in the dark air and a dog baying on some low and far-away ledge of the cliff. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights. . . . [T]he two Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand. . . . Just for a moment, they seemed to speak to everyone at the table, singly and together, assuring them of their friendliness, their affection. And for a moment the faces turned up toward them were like the faces of poor children at a Christmas tree.

His model for that magical moment was a dinner party at the Murphys’, one of many that seem to run together in the memories of those who were lucky enough to be there. What was the special quality about Gerald and Sara Murphy—“the golden couple,” the actress Marian Seldes called them—that made this alchemy possible? It wasn’t just nurturing, although their generosity and supportiveness were famous. It wasn’t only inspiration, although they left their imprint, or their images, in works as diverse as Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Dos Passos’s The Big Money, MacLeish’s J.B., or Tender Is the Night. It wasn’t simply example—the example of lives lived with grace and, ultimately, courage in the face of personal disaster. It wasn’t, even, the transformations they effected on the character and work of those close to them.

Late in his life their friend Archibald MacLeish tried to put it into words for an interviewer who had asked him what “the special pull of the Murphys” was. “No one has ever been able quite to define it,” MacLeish said—but he came as close as anyone: “Scott tried in Tender is the Night. Dos tried in more direct terms. Ernest tried by not trying. I wrote a Sketch for a Portrait of Madame G. M., a longish poem. They escaped us all. There was a shine to life wherever they were: not a decorative added value but a kind of revelation of inherent loveliness as though custom and habit had been wiped away and the thing itself was, for an instant, seen. Don’t ask me how.”

“A revelation of inherent loveliness”—it was a strong charm, indeed, against the confusion and ugliness of so much of their century. It enabled them to survive. More potently, it enabled those to whom they gave it to make art out of life.

1

“My father, of course, had wanted boys”

SARA
SHERMAN
WIBORG
MURPHY
was a figure of myth long before the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways and MacLeishes met her in France. Her father, Frank Bestow Wiborg, had been born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1855, the son of Henry Paulinus Wiborg, a Norwegian immigrant who was either a deckhand on a lake steamer (as family legend has it) or “one of the pioneer businessmen of Cleveland” (as the Centennial History of Cincinnati describes him). When Frank was about twelve, his father died; according to the deckhand legend, he contracted pneumonia while saving the victims of a boat accident, and his widow, Susan, remarried a man with whom young Frank could not get along. In the best Horatio Alger tradition, Frank Wiborg then reportedly left home to seek his fortune and found his way to Cincinnati, where he managed to gain admittance to the Chickering Institute, a select college preparatory academy emphasizing the classics and sciences.

He graduated in 1874—in his family’s account, he paid his way by peddling newspapers—and got work as a salesman for a producer of printer’s ink, Levi Addison Ault, and so dazzled his employer that a mere four years later Ault offered him a partnership in the company. This was the great period of printmaking, when newspaper lithographs, sheet music, poetry broadsheets, glossy magazines, and posters were the predominant mode of graphic expression, and the new company of Ault and Wiborg, which manufactured and mixed its own dry color to produce high-quality lithographer’s ink, found its product in great demand, not only in the United States but worldwide. Toulouse-Lautrec was just one of the artists who used Ault and Wiborg inks for his prints; and the company commissioned him to create an advertising poster, using as a model the beautiful Misia Natanson, patron and muse of Vuillard, Proust, Bonnard, Faure, and Ravel.

The engineer of this dynamic expansion, Frank Wiborg was the very model of the spirit of American enterprise. Young, handsome in a foursquare, mustachioed, Teddy Roosevelt kind of way, restless, dynamic, and smart, he was clearly a man on the way up. And he gave himself an immeasurable boost by marrying, in 1882, the daughter of one of Ohio’s most illustrious families.

Adeline Moulton Sherman was willowy, dark-haired, and pretty, the daughter of Major Hoyt Sherman, a lawyer and banker who had served as United States paymaster during the Civil War and accumulated an enormous fortune in Iowa, his adopted state, which he represented as a state legislator for many years. One of his brothers was Senator John Sherman of Ohio, who gave the Sherman Anti-Trust Act its name; another was the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, who memorably marched through Georgia from Atlanta to the sea, burning and pillaging as he went, and remarked (from personal experience, no doubt) that “War is hell.” Marrying Adeline transformed Frank Wiborg from up-and-coming to already-there; all that was needed was a son to set the seal on his happiness.

He was destined to be disappointed. The year after their marriage, Addie Wiborg gave birth to a daughter. “After an awful struggle,” noted the new father in his diary for November 7, 1883, “at 7:15 [P.M.] a little girl baby arrives. I never experienced such great relief and we are all very happy over it.” At the top of the page he wrote, in large round letters: “Sara Sherman Wiborg born.” Sara was followed, four years later, by a second daughter, Mary Hoyt, and two years after that by a third, Olga Marie. “My father, of course, had wanted boys,” said Sara many years afterward, “but he became resigned to girls later on and was always wonderful to his three daughters.”

Certainly, in a material sense, he was. At the time of Sara’s birth, Wiborg had already established his household outside of Cincinnati proper, in the country suburb of Clifton; soon he built a mansion for his growing family, complete with stables and a sunken garden, at the intersection of Clifton Avenue and Senator Place—the latter, almost inevitably, was named after another uncle of his wife’s, Senator George H. Pendleton. The new house, which one reached by driving over a wooden bridge from Clifton Avenue, was a showplace, positively bristling with imported boiserie and fancy furniture. The lofty ceilings, towering mantels, and winding staircases were embellished with carved birds and garlands; the walls were hung with splendid tapestries; the floors were inlaid with rare woods; and in the large parlor, the drawing room, and the spacious hall, Venetian and French mirrors reflected back the glow of chandeliers. There was a library and music room, and just off the library—as one Cincinnati society reporter breathlessly noted—a little Turkish smoking room, “all the appointments of which were brought from Cairo by the Wiborgs, even to the carved jalousies through which the veiled daughters of the Turkish Beys see and remain unseen.”

The Wiborg daughters, veiled or not, were emphatically not unseen. They attended Miss Ely’s private school for girls in Cincinnati, to which they were driven each morning in a two-horse barouche. In winter, to protect them from the chill, the carriage was closed, causing what Sara referred to as “squeamish feelings,” so that the girls arrived at school “sometimes pale and shaken.” At Miss Ely’s the girls worked hard: they learned French from a Madame Fredin as well as geography, arithmetic, composition, grammar, history, music, and drawing; but in the afternoons and on holidays they ran decorously wild through the woods and fields of Clifton, riding, “coasting” (sledding), and playing outdoors with the dogs—the Wiborgs kept dachshunds and wolfhounds—or picking wildflowers in the pasture.

Birthdays were celebrated with enthusiasm and much suspense over who would draw what favor out of the traditional cake: would it be the thimble (which foretold spinsterhood), the sixpence (riches), or the ring (marriage)? At other times the children played at dressing up, or bundled into bed with their friends to watch a magic lantern show. But often their amusements had a more worldly cast—a performance of the opera Hansel and Gretel at Christmastime, a Paderewski concert (“beautiful,” pronounced twelve-year-old Sara), or an excursion to see Ellen Terry and Henry Irving in King Arthur.

Sara exhibited an early interest in music, but her two favorite pastimes were drawing (“I think drawing is lovely,” she confided to her diary at age twelve) and dancing. “I went to dancing school and had a good time,” she wrote. “Always do on Thursdays!!!” Blond and fresh-faced, with slanting eyes and delicate features, she had an elfin quality that set her apart from her equally beautiful but strikingly different sisters: the dark, intense Mary Hoyt (who was called Hoytie) and the classically serene Olga. Hoytie, an imperious, self-involved child who once protested, in a sudden summer rainstorm, “It’s raining on me!” was her father’s favorite, and she and Sara had an uneasy relationship. Sara was far closer to Olga, despite the difference in their ages.

Their father, who was known as an exacting but fair employer, ran his family the way he ran his company. He expected from his womenfolk the same enterprise and industry that had made him a millionaire by the time he was forty; and for the most part he got it. The strain of living up to Frank’s expectations took its toll, however: as time passed, Adeline suffered increasingly from headaches and digestive twinges and other manifestations of late-Victorian malaise, although she soldiered on valiantly. She was a world-class party giver who could turn a drawing room into a bower of enchantment (as the society columnists were fond of saying) with the best of them. And as she progressed from entertaining le tout Cincinnati to consorting with the presidents and princes who were Frank’s clients and associates at home and abroad, she realized that her three charming daughters were potent weapons in her social arsenal.

In 1898 the Wiborgs went to live in Germany so Frank could expand Ault and Wiborg’s European presence, and the young Misses Wiborg proved themselves as adept at charming royalty as they did the citizens of Cincinnati. They had met Kaiser Wilhelm II in Norway the previous summer, when they were invited on board the imperial yacht, the Hohenzollem, and His Imperial Majesty had given the girls ribbons emblazoned with the ship’s name for their broad-brimmed hats and had “kissed us all around,” as Sara reported to an aunt. Now they renewed the acquaintance at an afternoon audience at the kaiser’s Charlottenburg Palace, which fourteen-year-old Sara, aware of the event’s importance, chronicled in a leather-bound journal. At the palace a footman in silver livery led the Wiborgs up a marble staircase to a waiting room where, after a few moments, “the door flew open and two large Russian hounds came bounding in and close after them the princes and the little princess. Last of all came the Kaiser and the Kaiserin.”

The Wiborg girls politely kissed the empress’s hand and tried to do the same to the kaiser, but—possibly sensitive about his withered left arm—he demurred. They exchanged handshakes with the princes and princess, but soon all the children were romping with the dogs on the rug. The oldest princes provided a diversion by trooping off upstairs to do their lessons and making such a clatter that, wrote Sara with typical candor, “it sounded as if the ceiling were falling down.” But the kaiser and kaiserin only laughed, and offered their guests hot chocolate “with whip cream” and cakes. There was one tricky moment during this momentous occasion when eight-year-old Olga lost her gloves and thought she must have dropped them under the table—to grope, or not to grope?—but the youngest prince simply dived beneath the cloth to retrieve them, shooing away the footmen who tried to help him.

All this familial gemütlichkeit gave Frank Wiborg, and his company, a kind of most favored nation status in Germany, and enhanced Frank’s standing among American industrialists as well. Four years later, when the kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, made a trip to the United States, the Wiborgs were among his official hosts, and “lavishly entertained” him (as the Cincinnati Enquirer’s reporter put it) at Clifton. But by then Frank and Adeline Wiborg had extended their social horizons far beyond the banks of the Ohio.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, New York City was the mercantile, artistic, and social capital of America. It was the fulcrum on which J. P. Morgan rested the lever of his millions; it was home to Mrs. Astor’s ballroom and the four hundred blue bloods who could dance in it; it boasted the Metropolitan Opera, Andrew Carnegie’s palatial Florentine-inspired Music Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ladies’ Mile, and Madison Square Garden. If you were going to be a leader of industry or society—and the Wiborgs aspired to be both—you had to conquer New York. Cincinnati might be the Queen City of the West, but compared to New York it was sleepy and provincial.

Adeline Wiborg already had New York connections through her sister, Helen Sherman Griffith, who was married to Lieutenant General Nelson Miles, and through a cousin, Colgate Hoyt. And with Frank on the move so much of the time, shuttling between Ault and Wiborg offices and factories in Europe and Asia and South America, it made sense for her to establish some kind of pied-à-terre in New York. She settled on the Gotham Hotel, which had recently been built on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, a fashionable address, with smart, up-to-date accommodations, and no servants to hire or worry about.

Many women of Adeline’s class and economic bracket would have made a move to New York in order to launch their daughters on a course toward a brilliant marriage, but this thought seems to have been far from Adeline’s mind. Although by now Sara was in her teens, an age when most young girls of her class were being prepared for presentation to society and then for marriage, Adeline tried to postpone this inevitable progression. Perhaps, as her granddaughter later theorized, she simply enjoyed Sara’s company and wished to keep her to herself; or perhaps she and Frank were simply too busy to attend to the business of marrying Sara off. Possibly she needed Sara as a buffer against her energetic and demanding husband. Whatever the reason, their eldest daughter, like a princess in a fairy tale, grew ever taller and fairer—and still she stayed in the schoolroom with Hoytie and Olga. It was as if the three sisters were a matched set, “the Wiborg girls,” traveling companions and social ornaments, to be shown off in public but enjoyed only in private.