Everybody Was So Young (28 page)

There is another photograph, from July in Pamplona, the Fiesta of San Fermín. Sara and Gerald are sitting at a café table with Ernest, Pauline, and Hadley. On the table there are glasses and a soda siphon. It is hot; the sun glares in the foreground. Gerald is squinting beneath the brim of his cap;

Sara, with a cigarette smoldering between rigid fingers, eyes the photographer distrustfully. Ernest sits between Pauline and Hadley, wearing tweeds and a tie and black beret, smiling slightly at the camera. He looks, paradoxically, both uncomfortable and self-satisfied. Hadley, seated next to Ernest, is looking across at Gerald; she seems tired. Pauline, a slight, dark, crop-haired figure in the center of the group, sits with eyes cast down at her lap. She is smiling to herself.

They had arrived some days earlier, having left Bumby in Antibes with his French nurse. They had found the town filled with farmers and pilgrims who had come for the fiesta—many of them, unable to find lodgings, sleeping in the streets. Strange music played all day long and through the night—brass bands and men with drums and a plaintive reed pipe, like a short recorder—and itinerant vendors sold wine in wineskins, which they squirted into your mouth from a foot away. There were processions with banners and effigies and giants and dwarfs, and of course the legendary running of the bulls, who thundered through the streets on the first day of the fiesta with the young men of Pamplona racing alongside them. It was all strange, earthy, and exhilarating, but there was a peculiar undercurrent of tension.

The Hemingway party stayed in the bullfighters’ hotel, the Quintana, on the main square, with two of the most prominent matadors at the fiesta, Villalta and Nino de la Palma, just across the corridor. Gerald was particularly struck by seeing them lying on their cots in the afternoon before the corrida, looking like effigies, their bullion-encrusted suits of lights draped across the chairs at their feet. Later he tried to put his reaction into words: “these men, living, as it seems to me in a region between art and life, . . . make you feel that you are as you find most other people—half-alive . . . They are a religion for which I could have been trained.”

In fact, in Pamplona, Gerald felt very much the religious novice to Hemingway’s father superior. Although he could still call Hadley and Ernest “you two children” and sign a postcard to them “dow dow,” the balance in the relationship between the two men had begun to shift. Before they went to Spain, Gerald, who admired Pauline’s gamine chic and her wit, had begun calling her “Daughter,” his nickname for any young girl he liked; in Pamplona, Hemingway started doing it, too, and seemed annoyed when Gerald wouldn’t relinquish the habit. And Ernest had started calling himself “Papa.”

Gerald felt insecure enough to start worrying about what to wear, he with his unerring clothes sense and gift for disguise. Finally he settled on a pearl gray gabardine suit and an old golf cap of his father’s—“I didn’t want to wear a Panama hat,” he recalled—and, to his relief, won Ernest’s approval. The cap, Ernest told him, was just right: “it looks tough,” he said. And, he reported to Gerald, the suit was a success with the townspeople: “They say you’re called the man in the silver suit,” Hemingway said. “Do they approve?” Gerald asked anxiously, and Ernest replied, “Yes, they think it’s fine.”

There was a tradition in Pamplona that in the mornings local aficionados could try their hands with the young bulls; it was at one of these sessions that Don Stewart had been tossed the year before. This time, with Hadley, Pauline, and Sara watching, Ernest put Gerald up to going into the bullring. Gerald had begged off running with the bulls—he hadn’t wanted “to look or feel a fool”—but Sara had said, “I’m sorry you didn’t run. It would have been a great feeling afterwards.” So later he promised Ernest that next year he would run, “and I’ll do it well, Papa.” And now he took up Ernest’s challenge in the ring. “He was watching me all the time out of the corner of his eye . . . to see how I would take it,” Gerald recalled. When he saw Gerald execute an impromptu (and terrified) veronica with his raincoat, standing to one side as the bull brushed past, Ernest inevitably went him one better. With nothing in his hands to distract the bull, he waited until the animal charged him, then vaulted over its horns onto its back. His weight brought the animal to its knees, and, said Sara, “everybody yelled ‘Ole.’”

Afterward, although he was already caught in a triangle with Hadley and Pauline, Ernest seemed compelled to flirt with Sara. Why did she never wear her diamond jewelry in the daytime, he asked; her diamonds would look so wonderful in the sunlight. Think how she would look at the bullfights with her jewelry blazing in the sun. So that afternoon, when they all went to the corrida, Sara put on “a little silk dress” and “all my diamonds” to sit beside Ernest in the barrera seats (paid for by Gerald), as close to the ring as possible. But when the corrida began, the slaughter of the picadors’ horses by the bulls sickened and enraged her, and, she said in a recorded interview many years later, “I stamped out and walked back to the hotel,” diamonds and all. “I wonder if anybody noticed,” she mused. In the tape recording her husky voice, with its soft southern Ohio drawl, is regretful, almost plaintive. “I don’t think Ernest ever knew that I’d left, did he?” she said. “He didn’t notice.”

She went back to the arena the next day, though, and the next, and sat through enough to tell Ernest that “no one has anything on me about liking bullfights—, even if I don’t like seeing bowels—But that is just a woman’s whimsey and does not count.”

In the end she and Gerald were both disturbed and attracted by Pamplona’s elemental quality. Perhaps it was the strangeness, or the sense of danger and sexual excitement. Whatever it was, Gerald told Ernest that their time there “kept unearthing and over-topping the best we’ve known together since we’ve known each other.” They pillaged Pamplona’s shops for gifts and memories—a guitar for Baoth, a drum for Sara herself—and they all ate the olives and wonderful roasted almonds and drank the very dry sherry. And one night there was a fireworks display and dancing in the plaza, and they all did the sardana and then a crowd of people, put up to it by Hadley or Ernest, surrounded the Murphys, clapping and calling out “Dansa Charles-ton! Dansa Charles-ton!” And Gerald and Sara, who had got a professional troupe from the Cannes casino to come to the Villa America and teach them the steps to the hot new dance craze from the U.S., rose and danced for the whistling, cheering crowd.

The Murphys arrived back in Antibes to find summer in full swing. Monty Woolley, who was teaching drama at Yale and had yet to make his celebrated appearance as The Man Who Came to Dinner, came to visit, and he and Gerald devised a sort of vaudeville routine, called “stomach touch,” a parody of two old Yale alumni literally bumping into each other in a bar, full of hearty Bulldog banter. They also became fascinated with a visitor to the Hotel du Cap, the Romanian-British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl. Sir Charles’s impenetrable (and acquired) British accent—he pronounced “fire” as “fahhh”—entranced them, so they kept striking up conversations with him just to hear what he would say. One day Gerald asked him for his definition of a cad: Sir Charles struggled with the subtleties of this for some moments, then blurted out, to Woolley’s and Gerald’s intense delight, “Oh, hang it! A cad is someone who makes you go all crinkly-toes!” The expression became a byword in the Murphy family, and Scott Fitzgerald drew heavily on Sir Charles for his portrait of the Englishman Campion in Tender Is the Night.

There were other visitors as well: Picasso brought Man Ray, who photographed Honoria in a harlequin suit with a matador’s bicorne hat beside her (the same costume Paulo Picasso had worn in his father’s 1924 portrait) and Sara and Gerald, separately, each dressed in white against the lush tangle of the garden, with the three children. The humorist Robert Benchley, a friend of Don Stewart’s, came to stay, bringing his two sons and his wife, Gertrude, a Massachusetts girl whose Yankee vowels Gerald loved (he always spelled, and pronounced, her name “Gaytrûd”); Alexander Woollcott also visited; and eventually Don Stewart himself, newly married, with his bride, Beatrice. The Murphys greeted them at the station with Baoth’s guitar and Sara’s drum, and planned a party to welcome the newlyweds. They invited the Hemingways, who had just returned from Spain, and the Picassos, who were in Juan-les-Pins again; but Bea Stewart fell victim to what Sara tactfully referred to as a crise de foie and the party had to be postponed. “Brides, I find, just aren’t as sturdy as they used to be,” complained Sara to Picasso. “What is it they all seem to have??”

Suddenly there was a pervasive feeling of malaise in the air. Scott Fitzgerald, it was clear, was drinking more than ever; and although Zelda was in better physical health since an appendectomy in June, her behavior was exceedingly peculiar. Late one evening when the Murphys had joined the Fitzgeralds at the casino in Juan-les-Pins, all four of them were sitting at their table when Zelda suddenly got up and, lifting the skirt of her evening dress above her waist, began, slowly, hypnotically, like a dervish, to dance. “She was dancing for herself,” Gerald remembered, “she didn’t look left or right, or catch anyone’s eyes. She looked at no one, not once, not even at Scott. I saw a mass of lace ruffles as she whirled—I’ll never forget it. We were frozen.”

Typically, neither Gerald nor Sara found this behavior reprehensible; they didn’t judge Zelda, only appreciated her. “She had this tremendous natural dignity,” said Gerald. “She was so self-possessed, so absorbed in her dance. Somehow she was incapable of doing anything unladylike.” Not even when she hurled herself over a parapet at a restaurant in St.-Paul-de-Vence, a picturesque medieval village in the hills behind Antibes, where Gerald and Sara had taken the Fitzgeralds to dinner to escape the crowds now increasingly prevalent on the coast. La Colombe d’Or was a rustic inn, much beloved of the artists like Picasso, Léger, Signac, and Bonnard, who sometimes paid for their meals with drawings; the Murphys had reserved a table on the stone terrace overlooking the Loup valley, two hundred feet straight below, with Antibes and the Esterel visible in the distance. At the end of their meal, when the other diners had left, they were fascinated to discover Isadora Duncan seated at a neighboring table with three admirers. Although she was hugely fat and middle-aged and henna-haired, she still had enough of her old star power that Fitzgerald—when Gerald and Sara told him who she was—went to sit at her feet. Duncan was entranced by this blond, boyish acolyte and began running her hands through his hair and calling him her “centurion.” That was when Zelda, without warning, stood up on her chair and leaped over the table—and over Gerald, who was seated with his back to the view—into the darkness beyond the parapet.

“I was sure she was dead,” remembered Gerald, but moments later Zelda reappeared. She had fallen onto a stone staircase that ran down from the terrace, and now she stood at the top, her knees and dress bloody, but otherwise unharmed. Sara flew to her and tried to wipe away the blood with her napkin; as for Gerald, his first thought was “that it had not been ugly. I said that to myself over and over again.”

To Fitzgerald, the contrast between his own fraying marriage and the Murphys’ seemingly durable one had to be painful, and—as he worried at the manuscript he had begun, which was currently entitled World’s Fair—he tried to analyze what it was that made them somehow different. One evening, when the Murphys had given a party for the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, and the MacLeishes, Fitzgerald started quizzing Gerald about his and Sara’s relationship: Why did they seem so formal with each other? When they told each other jokes, he said, it seemed as if they were telling them to strangers. Had they slept together before they were married? Did they still sleep together? Sara was outraged. “Scott, you just think if you ask enough questions you’ll know all about people,” she said. “But you don’t know anything about people.” Goaded to repeat this remark by Fitzgerald, who was almost sick with fury, she did. And the evening, like others, ended badly. “Dear Scott,” wrote Sara, with her usual haphazard punctuation, the next day,

I’ve generally said what I thought. And it seems another of those moments.

We consider ourselves your friends. . . . But you can’t expect anyone to like or stand a Continual feeling of analysis & subanalysis, & criticism—on the whole unfriendly—Such as we have felt for quite awhile. . . . It certainly detracts from any gathering,—& Gerald, for one, simply curls up at the edges & becomes someone else in that sort of atmosphere. . . . [L]ast night you even said “that you had never seen Gerald so silly & rude”. . . .—and if Gerald was “rude” in getting up & leaving a party that had gotten quite bad, then he was rude to the Hemingways and MacLeishes too. No, it is hardly likely that you would stick at a thing like manners—it is more probably some theory you have,—(it may be something to do with the book),—But you ought to know at your age that you Can’t have Theories about friends.

Although Scott wrote her an apology he couldn’t seem to stop himself from making more and uglier scenes: getting drunk and pitching three of Sara’s prized Venetian wineglasses out onto the driveway, one by one, so that Gerald banished him from the Villa America for three weeks; following two young Frenchmen around the dance floor at the casino and asking them, over and over, if they were “fairies,” to the intense embarrassment of Ada MacLeish, who was dancing with one of them. Possibly the ugliest scene was the last: The Murphys were going to New York in October, and to celebrate the end of the summer they put on a “Dinner-Flowers-Gala” with a vengeance, inviting not only their American literary friends but all the gratin of the coast, including an aristocratic French neighbor, the Princesse de Poix, and her houseguest, the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay. Some time after the Fitzgeralds arrived Scott accosted another guest, a young, openly homosexual writer and pianist named Eugene McGowan, whom the Murphys liked because he was witty and charming. “Are you a homosexual?” Scott asked baldly, and—when McGowan said that he was—“What do you people do, anyway?” After this Fitzgerald subsided for a time, but when dessert was served he found his form again: plucking a ripe fig from a bowl of pineapple sorbet, he pitched it right between the bare, blue-blooded shoulder blades of the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay, who was seated at the next table. With impeccable sangfroid she pretended not to notice, but Gerald did, and asked Archie MacLeish to try and restrain Fitzgerald. Archie took Scott to the bastide and proceeded to give him a tongue-lashing, but Scott threw a punch at him and—as Gerald remembered it anyway—“Archie knocked him cold.”