Everybody Was So Young (20 page)

On other days Sara’s Kodak captured just the four of them: Picasso and Gerald at the water’s edge, Gerald tall and slender in his rolled-up trunks and white fisherman’s cap, turning somewhat deferentially toward Picasso, who is wearing his homburg and standing on one foot, the other at his knee, like a ballerina’s in passé, grinning hugely at the camera. Picasso and Sara, arms linked, she wearing a turban, he holding his hat in his hand—a photograph that he kept until the end of his life. Picasso alone, with a huge fig leaf pinned on the front of his bathing trunks. And a set of two pictures, one of Gerald and Picasso, the other of Olga and Sara, each in profile gazing at the horizon. Picasso is the figure in the foreground in one, Sara the figure in the foreground in the other. Gerald and Olga are each shadowy and indistinct.

Despite the air of tranquillity and holiday joie de vivre that pervades these photographs, all was not serene. Relations between Picasso and Olga had begun to cool imperceptibly by that summer. Olga’s tension and anxiety, particularly around little Paulo, contrasted strongly with Sara’s almost visceral delight in her children and her air of luxe, calme, et volupté. And increasingly, it seemed, Picasso was entranced by Sara. She had all the worldly and social experience that Olga only aspired to; but her directness and candor were the exact opposite of the flirtatiousness or politesse Picasso would have been accustomed to in European, and most American, women. (“She is never coy,” Gerald said of her.) Picasso loved her habit of wearing her rope of pearls to the beach, and he found her unconventional gaiety contagious. One day she was arranging a picnic cloth on the sand with brightly colored plates and a straw-covered Chianti bottle, around which she had wound a garland of ivy. As she placed a little pottery vase of fresh flowers in the center of the cloth, Picasso said, in his idiosyncratic French, “Sara est très festin.”

Gerald was fascinated by Picasso, by his “sense of the grotesque” and the absurdist anarchism that made him say, observing a chauffeur-driven car brought to a screeching halt when a sleeping dog refused to move until shooed away by the chauffeur with a lap robe, “Moi, je voudrais être un chien” (“I’d like to be a dog”). And Picasso seemed to appreciate Gerald’s individual style. At the Opéra in Paris he had pointed out the younger man, who was wearing a high-crush opera hat, to Etienne de Beaumont by saying, “There is American elegance!” They rarely talked about art, though; about the closest they came was Picasso telling Gerald that he “resembled very much in face and body El Greco’s model.”

During those golden July weeks Picasso began working on a series of drawings and oils, done in the classical manner of Greek vase painting, of a fair-haired woman with slanting eyes. Many of the drawings show her seated on a beach that looks like La Garoupe. In three of the oils the paint is mixed with sand from the beach. Sometimes the woman is holding a child on her lap, her hair twisted lightly at the back of her head, as Sara’s often was, then streaming loosely down her back. In some sketches she is shown in one of the long, classically flowing dresses that Sara favored. In one she is wearing the turban Sara was photographed in with Picasso. In others she is naked except for a rope of pearls.

Some of these pictures must have been openly drawn from life. Ellen Barry and Gerald both remembered that during their time in Antibes, Picasso had used Sara as a model or inspiration, and the painter’s French biographers took it as a given. But what about the nudes? After all, painting your friend’s wife is one thing, painting her naked with her trademark string of pearls is another. And scholars familiar with Picasso’s methods now believe these drawings, and the obsessiveness with which Picasso returned to the same subject, indicate that his involvement with Sara went deeper than mere admiration.

“Picasso was in love with her,” says the noted art historian and Picasso scholar William Rubin, adding that, although “nobody really knows,” he believes Picasso and Sara might have had a “short-lived sexual adventure” that summer. John Richardson, the author of what is regarded as the definitive biography of the painter, concurs. “I would have thought that nothing was more likely,” he says. “Picasso was tremendously attractive and charismatic, and very physical, and it would have been hard for her to resist.” Rubin believes that the artist expressed his feelings for Sara by making her the subject of his neoclassical masterpiece The Woman in White, and by beginning a series of studies for a “mystic marriage” composition in which Sara assumed the role of Venus, and Picasso that of Venus’s virile consort, Mars. In several of these, a group of pale, misty pastels, Mars holds a mirror up to Venus to reveal to her her true beauty—a metaphor for the artist’s presentation of his subject—and he and Venus are flanked by a youth playing panpipes and a little Cupid holding a garland.

Oddly, the panpipes show up in another of that summer’s creations, a play that Philip Barry was writing, but which he never produced or published. Called “The Man of Taste,” it tells the story of Adrian Terry, “thirty-five, tall, of youthful figure. His face is unusually fine and sensitive. A man of wealth, education, and, above all, taste.” A man, in other words, who was the same age as Gerald Murphy and looked very like him. Adrian’s wife, Lissa, who is known for her beauty and her legendary rope of pearls, was “born twenty-eight years ago with a silver spoon in her mouth”; despite the deaths of her parents on the Titanic she has enjoyed a privileged if oversupervised transatlantic upbringing and “a debut party of more than the usual gorgeousness.” Like Sara, she has married “a curiously tender, understanding [man with] a rare gift of enjoying life to the fullest and of making others enjoy it with him.” But the marriage is threatened when a former lover of Lissa’s, with whom she had a one-night affair during her engagement, shows up and plans to lure her into an elopement.

The catch is that Adrian knows what’s happening, and he’s planned a May eve party, “a dinner with at least the suggestion of the fiesta about it,” for which the drawing and dining rooms will be transformed into “what is referred to as ‘a sylvan grove.’” (The echo of Gerald’s occasionally ornate speech is uncanny.) As entertainment during this “dinner fit for the gods, Pan and Bacchus,” he has engaged an Italian boy to play panpipes, the flutes of love. But Adrian won’t be there to hear them. He has arranged to be summoned away by a make-believe telegram, and he has also managed to turn away all the other guests by telling them the party has been canceled. Gambling on the principle that a move by the other man will offend and repel his wife, Adrian has stage-managed things so that Lissa will be alone at the feast with her tempter.

The parallels between this play and Picasso’s picture, and between the play and life, are unsettling. But art is art, and life is life. What really happened that summer?

In August the Murphys went to Venice, and Sara dashed off a farewell note to the “chers Picassos,” dating it with a little drawing of a train. She promised to send them some American ties Picasso had admired, along with a present for Olga, and she looked forward to seeing them again at the end of the month. After saying that the Murphy family sent best wishes, she added, “We love you very much, you know—Sara.”

The Murphys spent two weeks together with the Porters in the Casa Papadopoli on the Grand Canal, where Gerald and Cole were meant to work on their ballet. But there were distractions: Venice was the place to be for the roving European smart set that Linda Porter ran with, and so there were grand parties and trips to the Lido to swim and be seen. They posed like tourists in the Piazza San Marco—Sara and Cole and Gerald and Ginny Carpenter, Cole striking an attitude with his arms linked in the women’s, Sara and Ginny smiling at the camera from beneath their hat brims, and Gerald, with his Panama hat and Norfolk suit and malacca cane, looking not at the camera but at Sara.

Despite the gaiety there was a sense of strain in the visit. Sara felt that Linda Porter disapproved of her and of Gerald, perhaps for different reasons. And Cole and Linda had increasingly begun to go their separate ways; Cole had discovered the city’s homosexual netherworld and had begun seeking out gondoliers and other rough trade for pleasure. After two weeks Sara returned to Antibes, leaving Gerald to finish his work with Cole. The two of them went swimming at the Lido one day and Gerald swam far out past the buoys, causing the lifeguard to scream at him to come back—it was pericoloso. “So is love pericoloso,” shouted Gerald in return, and went on swimming.

If Picasso and Sara had an affair, it would have happened then. In this version of that summer’s events, Sara would have been responding not only to Picasso’s animal magnetism but to her own frustration at being abandoned in favor of her husband’s homosexual friend. But such a scenario seems unlikely. As someone who was acquainted with them both pointed out, Cole was attracted to rather lowlife men, and Gerald was most emphatically not his type. More important was Sara’s “sense of austerity” (as Ellen Barry described it) about extramarital relationships. “Sara,” stated Hester Pickman’s mother, Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, “is incorruptible.” However attractive Picasso might have seemed, her unwavering integrity and her very real love for Gerald and her children made any long-term backdoor relationship impossible.

Love might be perilous, but it seems as if Gerald’s gamble—if, like Adrian Terry, he was gambling—paid off. Some time after Sara returned alone to Antibes, Picasso painted over the composition he had been working on, the large oil we now know as The Pipes of Pan, eliminating the figures of Venus and Cupid, and leaving only the haunting, rather mournful image of two lonely men by the shore, one of them playing a double flute. Why? According to William Rubin, whose X-ray examinations of the picture revealed the ghost images beneath its painted surface, Picasso had planned The Pipes of Pan as a climax to his mystic marriage series, a way of consummating his love for Sara on canvas. When she put a halt to whatever was going on between them, he had to alter the painting.

It’s difficult, as Gerald himself was later to acknowledge, to say what has gone in private between two people. But it appears that Sara had begun to master the art of balancing friendship and eros. In the years since her encounter with Walter Sickert she had learned to go beyond writing “Hate man not going back” in her diary. Whatever had or had not happened in Antibes, she managed to stay friendly with Picasso, but on her terms. “Will you come, both of you,” she wrote to him and Olga in French later that year, “and have one of our orgies? We’ll dance, we’ll drink, we’ll go a little crazy . . . ?” This note is signed “With best wishes” (underlined twice), and the words “from Gerald and me” have been added, like an afterthought—or a reminder?—in the margin.

This wasn’t coquetry. It was a kind of chaste sensuality that was as new to Picasso as it was to others who would encounter it, a spirit that was mirrored in the Garoupe drawings, the sand paintings, The Woman in White. It’s the spirit of unfulfilled desire and ineffable promise that has animated neoclassicism since Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” As paradoxical as it seems today, perhaps it was Sara’s withdrawal, rather than her surrender, that inspired the work Picasso did that summer.

Gerald and Cole Porter’s ballet, entitled Within the Quota, received its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on October 25. The preopening buzz was considerable: The ballet had been originally planned as a curtain-raiser for Léger, Milhaud, and Cendrars’s startling African-inspired La Création du monde. But after seeing the rehearsals Léger asked Rolf de Maré to change the performance order because he feared the Americans’ ebullient jazz-inflected spoof would make the more serious pleasures of his piece seem like heavy going to the audience. On the day of the premiere there was a front-page story about the ballet in the Paris Herald, which of course would be read by all the members of the American colony in Paris and might very likely be picked up by the New York edition of the paper as well. The accompanying photograph was of Gerald, who told his interviewer that the ballet was “nothing but a translation on to the stage of the way America looks to me from over here. I put into the play all the things that come out of America to me, you see, as I get things into perspective and distance.” The composer seemed to agree: The score, which had been orchestrated by Charles Koechlin, blended Milhaudesque jazz and Stravinskyan syncopation with the obbligato of a silent-movie piano. And Porter explained, “It’s easier to write jazz over here than in New York . . . because you are too much under the influence of popular song in America, and jazz is better than that.”

Within the Quota tells the story of a fresh-faced, clueless innocent from Sweden who arrives in New York with only a satchel, a hobo’s bundle, and a landing card, and subsequently undergoes a series of picaresque adventures at the hands of a dramatis personae straight from central casting, circa 1923—a Jazz Baby, a Cowboy, a Millionairess, a Colored Gentleman, a Social Reformer, America’s Sweetheart. At the ballet’s end he is improbably transformed into a movie star by a cameraman who “films” the action on stage.

This sort of burlesque bore more than a passing resemblance to parodie sketches like Fred’s Maidstone Club triumph, Mrs. Clymer’s Regrets, or the undergraduate reviews Gerald had seen at Yale. But it also had impeccable avant-garde antecedents in Cocteau’s Parade, in which the characters are the Acrobats, the Managers, the Chinese Magician, and the Little American Girl, and he Boeuf sur le toit, with its Policeman, Barman, Negro Boxer, and Woman in a Low Cut Dress. Parade (the title refers to a sideshow or display) was a ballet about how the advertising image, the sideshow, comes to be more important than the real attraction inside the circus tent. Within the Quota was about how the image becomes the real attraction. For an artist who wanted to “represent” real objects as abstractions, the progression was obvious.

The power of the image was even emphasized in the costumes, most of which Sara had either designed or drawn, to Gerald’s specifications. The Hollywoodish cast of characters was dressed in clothes from a semiotician’s sign book: the Tom Mix-like cowboy wore furry chaps that might have been stolen from a grizzly bear and what looks like a twenty-gallon hat; the sheriff had a dinner plate-sized star for a badge; the gilt-haired Mary Pickford type was bedecked with roses, which Cocteau told Gerald were “the most powerful symbol in the world.” Fascinatingly, Sara’s sketch of the Millionairess, whom Gerald described as “a study of American women entering the Ritz,” and who is wearing a rope of golf-ball-sized pearls, an ostrich-plumed cape, and a tiara, looks exactly like Hoytie Wiborg.