Everybody Was So Young (51 page)

Gerald and Sara continued to fuss over Dos Passos like a pair of mother hens. For his birthday in January 1949 Gerald organized “an old-fashioned theatre party” (as he described it) of the kind they had enjoyed so many years before to mark the occasion. First, dinner at Sixty-sixth Street with Lloyd and Diddy Lowndes: very dry martinis, followed by hot clam broth, squab, new potatoes, Brussels sprouts, salad, iced shredded pineapple, and a birthday cake with one candle, all washed down with Chateau Carbonnieux champagne, “really cold.” Then tickets to Cole Porter’s hit musical Kiss Me, Kate. Dos was terribly moved. “Nobody’s ever done anything about my birthday before,” he kept saying.

The Lowndeses lived in the Rockland County hamlet of Sneden’s Landing, a sleepy collection of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century houses on the banks of the Hudson River. Shaded by huge old trees and bounded on one side by the majestic expanse of the Hudson, Sneden’s (as its residents call it) has the air of being in the middle of nowhere instead of just twenty-five minutes from midtown Manhattan. When Sara and Gerald came to visit, they were predictably entranced. In fact, while out on a walk with his hosts along the river, Gerald saw a house that so caught his fancy that he wanted to buy it. It was a beautiful, pre-Revolutionary Dutch stone house with a pillared second-story porch running the length of the building and wide dormers overlooking the broad expanse of the Hudson; but it was owned by an old woman who, Diddy Lowndes said, would never sell it.

“Don’t worry,” Gerald had replied. “The house will be available in a year.” By coincidence or, Diddy Lowndes believed, some Celtic kind of second sight, his words came true: a year later the old woman died and the house was for sale.

By an even greater coincidence, in 1941 Vladimir Orloff had sold the Weatherbird (the boat they had built “in spite of thunder”) to a Swiss named Gérard de Loriol, whose “highly marginal and equally lucrative” activities during the war enabled him to pay for her in gold and thus save her from being impounded by the authorities. Vladimir had managed to hang onto this sum all through the war and contrived to send it—via Fanny Myers and her fiancé, Francis (Hank) Brennan—to Gerald in 1945. So despite a continuous leakage of funds from the Murphys’ accounts they had enough to respond to the opportunity the Sneden’s property presented. Researching the title, they discovered that the house had been built in 1700 by the then mayor of New York, William Merritt, who had given it the rather Dickensian name of Cheer Hall. After two decades of loss and accommodation, they may have felt that they could use some cheer themselves, and by the beginning of 1949 the house was theirs.

Having a new house to conjure with, a new life to invent, always stimulated the Murphys. At Sneden’s they ripped out rotting boards, replastered walls, built in bookshelves, sanded and stained floors (“dark seal brown” was how Gerald described the color). They added a small wing on one side, but before starting construction Gerald researched where the original stones had been quarried, got the quarry reopened, and ordered new stone for the addition. Although the Murphys still kept two in help, including the faithful Ernestine, Gerald had been taking classes at the Cordon Bleu school and had begun doing much of the household’s cooking. At Cheer Hall he put in a state-of-the-art kitchen that included space for that new invention, a dishwasher, as well as a separate bar area where he could mix his specialty concoctions: sometimes Black Velvets, sometimes glôgg, sometimes planter’s punch served in a hollowed-out coconut. He still made a production out of mixing drinks, and also out of drinking them. A neighbor remembers Gerald instructing him that the only way to sip champagne was to do it while “looking up into the branches of a tree.”

Sometimes there were parties, particularly in summer, when Sara would light the grounds with candles placed in little paper bags—a charming and unusual idea in 1950, before Martha Stewart came on the scene; but both Murphys preferred intimate dinners with a few friends or houseguests. These would be preceded by apéritifs and hors d’oeuvres—the sablés of La Garoupe had given way to squares of whole-grain bread (with the crusts removed, of course) topped with a slice of peeled, seeded tomato and a dollop of whipped cream spiked with very hot horseradish—and there would be pheasant with bread sauce, perhaps, or veal poached in broth. Afterward Gerald and Sara would sit at the piano and sing as they used to do, or play their now priceless old records of Le Boeuf sur le toit or Louis Armstrong or Marlene Dietrich or Fats Waller; or Gerald would indulge in his latest enthusiasm, the harpsichord. Finally, as Dawn Powell said, they would all sink into “wondrous black hushed sleep.”

Powell described Cheer Hall as “curiously beautiful and still—like Arlington in fact—like a beautiful mausoleum in a private cemetery.” Her words reflect the hypnotic effect of the stately river winding by its lawn, but also the fact that if the Murphys’ previous houses had been adventures in forward-looking flair, exercises in the modern, this one was almost a retreat into the past. Not just the house itself, but its surrounding area, which was rich in Colonial and Revolutionary history. Having become a propertyholder, Gerald now began to immerse himself in the “native classicism” of the Hudson valley. And he would regale anyone who would listen with stories of patroons and patriots, Colonial schools, shad fishing, and Hudson River steamboats. In 1950, the year Cheer Hall’s restoration was finished, the Murphys celebrated Washington’s Birthday with a grand fête for which Gerald appeared as the Father of His Country, in powdered wig and Continental uniform with knee breeches and buckled shoes, to ladle out the punch; his costume was a surprise even to Sara, and Dawn Powell was “still reeling” from the effect of it when she wrote “Dear George and Martha” to thank them.

The eighteenth century must have seemed a welcome refuge from the clamor of what increasingly filled the newspapers and the radio waves in the late 1940s and early 1950s—the ever rising pitch of anti-Communist hysteria in America, and the deepening silence from behind the Iron Curtain. Gerald found himself increasingly compelled to take a stand. What he did wasn’t radical, or even, by the standards of Dorothy Parker or Don Stewart, particularly engagé: in 1946 he joined the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, a political action committee dedicated to electing legislators opposed to “the increasing growth in our country of antidemocratic forces.” But even being associated with such a group could be thought questionable in the paranoiac atmosphere of the time.

In 1947 the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives had held the Hollywood hearings that resulted in the blacklisting of ten “suspected Reds”—the Hollywood Ten—and their associates. Increasingly people like Parker and Stewart could no longer find work in the studios because of their political beliefs; but the Red-hunting juggernaut was only gearing up. By the early 1950s
HUAC
took on the aspect of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, and at that point its reach came closer to home.

Gerald and Sara had been seeing quite a lot of Lillian Hellman, who by her own account came to stay at Sneden’s “any number of times,” and their relationship had already survived at least one challenge. Hellman had invited the Murphys to her farm in Duchess County and, in a fever of historic authenticity, had cooked them a meal composed entirely of foods the local Indians had eaten, including skunk cabbage; afterward Sara had become “deathly sick.”

“What shall I do?” wailed the rarely-at-a-loss dramatist, to which Gerald replied, “I don’t think you’d better do anything. You’ll kill her.” He had gone to the pharmacist in town and said, with great tact and gallantry, “I don’t like to mention Miss Hellman’s name in such a context, but she has poisoned my wife. Can you give me anything to make her throw up?”

A different and more serious test of their friendship came in July 1951, when Dashiell Hammett, Hellman’s longtime companion, was arrested for refusing to provide the names of contributors to the bail fund of the Civil Rights Congress, a group of which he was a trustee. The fund had provided bail for four Communists, convicted of antigovernment activity under the Smith Act, who had then disappeared. Now the judge in the case, Sylvester Ryan, and the assistant U.S. attorney, Roy Cohn—soon to become a byword as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s counsel—wanted to indict the bail fund contributors for aiding fugitives. Hammett didn’t know who the contributors were; but he refused to cooperate in what he felt was a witch-hunt. So the judge put him in jail for contempt.

The talk on the street was that the judge would set Hammett’s bail very high—the figure Hellman remembered was $100,000; but Hammett was in frail health and Hellman was desperate to spare him the rigors of imprisonment. She didn’t have the money; she couldn’t mortgage her brownstone quickly enough; and even after she pawned all her mother’s jewelry she had only $17,000. The rich friends she called for help weren’t home. She called the Murphys, and Gerald told her to come down to Mark Cross. He said he would give her everything in the store’s safe that day (it was a Saturday), and he wrote her an additional personal check for $10,000. Hellman always maintained that the Mark Cross contribution was a fiction, “made up to save my feelings,” and that that money was Gerald’s, too. Whatever it was, it was typical. “Gerald Murphy was always a champion of victims,” said another blacklisted artist, the dancer Paul Draper, Muriel Draper’s son, who also ran afoul of the Red hunters at this time.

But Draper had it only half right. Gerald, and Sara, were motivated by friendship, not charity, and they were never limousine liberals who supported underdogs out of some kind of nostalgie de la boue. In 1939 Dorothy Parker had asked Gerald to a power lunch at the Bayberry Club—an elite midtown watering hole full of gold leather banquettes and black glass tables shaded by jade faux-bayberry trees—with Donald Ogden Stewart, his recent bride, the “formidable and far from alluring” Ella Steffens, and one of the editors of The New Masses. Gerald found the whole setup incongruous: “The talk was violent and technical,” he told Sara, “and the check very high. Being a guest I did not pay, but Don insisted on paying himself and everyone told him he should save his money for his children, etc. etc. Why didn’t we go to Schrafft’s then? I have luncheon there every day.” Needless to say, The New Masses didn’t get any money out of Gerald.

In 1953, after the Iron Curtain had descended with a clash, Gerald had one of those fallings-out with Parker which punctuated so many of her friendships; this time, Gerald concluded, “To be anti-Communist is to be anti-Dottie, apparently. Too bad!” But if he was, or became, anti-Communist as the fifties went on, he was still a liberal. In the late forties or early fifties, on one of the slips of paper that served as his unbound commonplace book, he jotted down—because he liked it or wanted to repeat it in company—a comment about congressional investigating committees, calling their actions “a pernicious nonsense and a direct denial of the principles of the Constitution.” And there’s another scrap, even more expressive, bearing a quotation from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, that eternally pertinent political commentary adapted in the 1950s by Bertholt Brecht (whose flight from the United States when under investigation had turned the Hollywood Eleven into the Hollywood Ten): “You fragments! You shames of Rome, you!” cries Caius Martius Coriolanus to his craven fellow citizens. “You souls of geese, that bear the shapes of men, how have you run from slaves that apes would beat! Pluto and Hell! All hurt behind, backs red and faces pale with fright and agu’d fear!”

It was all so unlike the way things had been after that other war, in that other city—or so the Murphys seemed to think. “By and large what we did had a kind of personal style,” grumbled Gerald to Ellen Barry. “I don’t see its like around anywhere today.” In fact, New York was at the center of what was new and exciting in the cultural avant-garde, just as Paris had been after the end of World War I. Between Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, George Balanchine and Martha Graham, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Miller and the Beats, everything was happening there. But although the Murphys picked up the threads of a friendship with Alexander Calder, whom they had barely been aware of in Paris (he made Sara a zigzag silver bracelet that she wore constantly, and she was enormously fond of him, although she complained that he “always smelled of wet tweed”); although they admired Calder’s mobiles and sculptures; although Gerald was so riveted by Death of a Salesman that he went to see it twice; and although he found John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, for instance, both “provocative and sympathetic,” he and Sara seemed to watch these phenomena from the sidelines, as observers, not participants.

They had begun to find refuge in the familiar, so their new Sneden’s circle contained old faces—along with Katharine Cornell and Agnes de Mille and her husband, Walter Prude, there was Helen Hayes, the widow of their old Antibes friend Charles MacArthur, and the Lowndeses. Despite their dismay at his increasingly conservative politics, they kept up their close connection with Dos Passos and—after his remarriage in 1949—his new wife, Elizabeth Holdridge. And during these postwar years they reanimated their friendship with Cole Porter, which had languished during the latter twenties and thirties.

Cole had suffered a crippling riding accident in 1937 that left him without the use of his legs: the blow to his vanity, not to mention the often excruciating pain and the anguish of immobility, had softened him somewhat. Linda was also in somewhat frail health, suffering, Honoria remembers, from emphysema, and she seemed glad to be with old friends with whom she did not have to try so hard.

Now the two couples often had dinner together at the Waldorf-Astoria, where Cole and Linda had adjoining suites; sometimes, though not always, they went on to the theater. Even with this renewed rapprochement, however, there was still the slightest hint of reserve between the two men. Although Gerald had thought Porter’s 1949 hit, Kiss Me, Kate, was “Very stunning, stylish, sophisticate. Cole at his best with all its limitations. . . . Clever idea, brilliantly staged,” he couldn’t help adding: “I wish I didn’t know Cole. It would have more freshness for me.”