Everybody Was So Young (7 page)

Despite the pleasure she took in these diversions, there were many days when she felt very low. She was headachy, and she suffered from painful menstrual periods (“awful pains,” notes one diary entry). February found her “much depressed,” “frightfully depressed,” and “fearfully depressed”; a family trip to Cincinnati in May, preceded by several days of “packing hard,” left her cross and mopey; and even in her beloved East Hampton, where she busied herself with staking the driveway, sewing curtains, weeding, raking the terrace, gathering leaves, and swimming, she still felt empty and sad. Matters weren’t helped when her cousin, Sara Sherman, who had lived with the Wiborgs since the death of her own parents, married Ledyard Mitchell in July. Despite Adeline’s skittishness about suitors, and despite the fact that Mitchell had been raised a Roman Catholic, Frank and Adeline Wiborg had given their blessing to their niece’s marriage and held the ceremony at the Dunes in grand style. Sara Sherman (she was always referred to in the family by both names, to distinguish her from her cousin) lent Sara Wiborg her wedding veil to try on, and when the cake was cut Sara got the ring in her slice—but although the ring was supposed to signify marriage, there was no groom in sight for her.

For unlike Hoytie, who increasingly preferred women to men, or Olga, who was speculatively and publicly linked to various eligible bachelors, Sara seemed not to have any serious suitors. Her friendships with Gerald and Fred Murphy, and with Chesley Richardson, one of the usefully neutral gentlemen who would nowadays be described as a “walker,” were just that—friendships. But there was another man in her life who was potentially more dangerous than they, Gerard Barnes Lambert, the husband of her friend Ray.

Lambert’s father was a St. Louis man who made a fortune by inventing the household antiseptic Listerine. The son had come east to attend Princeton University, graduating with the class of 1908 and marrying Rachel Lowe the same year. At the time Sara first knew him, he was studying architecture at Columbia University; but he later went to work in his father’s company, where he would distinguish himself by repositioning Listerine as a mouthwash designed to ward off bad breath, or, as Lambert put it with faux-clinical flair, “halitosis.” The advertising campaign he devised—featuring a despondent debutante wondering why she has so few admirers—was one of the first to be built entirely on sex appeal, a quality Lambert himself possessed in abundance. He was so tall, long-legged, and handsome that “people just fell in love with him,” recalls his daughter, Mrs. Paul Mellon. An avid sportsman, he played golf and raced oceangoing yachts.

He had a car, too, a sleek affair called a Simplex, and he used to take Sara motoring. Ray was at this time expecting a baby, her first, and might not have felt well enough to gad about with her husband and friend, which may explain why she didn’t accompany them to see the Whistlers at the Metropolitan, or to the show of “The Ten’s” paintings, or to the various lunches that Sara recorded in her diary. Perhaps Sara was doing her friend a favor, keeping her husband amused while she was confined. Why else would she spend so much time with a man who was so clearly off-limits? Whatever Lambert’s attraction for Sara (and he was certainly attractive), it would have been counterbalanced by Sara’s strict sense of propriety and loyalty. “She had a sense of austerity about these things,” recalled Ellen Barry many years later, speaking of another married man and another relationship. The situation was complicated, and potentially uncomfortable.

Gerald Murphy, on the other hand, was a kind of tonic, both flattering and amusing: he was someone to whom she could describe her sighting of Hailey’s comet (“like a searchlight”) or the “terrific” pink lightning that raged over the Dunes during a summer thunderstorm. She began calling him “Jerry,” and their summer friendship only deepened when he returned to Yale for his junior year. Just after her birthday, which left her “depressed” and “feeling rottenly,” she went to New Haven for the Harvard-Yale football game, although she returned to New York and dinner with Ray and Gerard Lambert directly afterward. More significantly (it was, after all, a real date), she accepted Gerald’s invitation for the junior prom in January.

It was quite an event. “Will you ever forget with what trepidation you donned the newest and the best,” reminisced the History of the Class of 1912, “and took your stand fearfully among the other social lions at the station? And then the giggling girls gushing from every car in great profusion.” A slightly exotic bloom in this garden of giggling debutantes, Sara had a wonderful time, despite the watchful presence of Anna Murphy, who had come along to act as chaperon. There was lunch at the Lawn Club, and a tea and a Glee Club concert, followed by a small dance at the college’s Woolsey Hall—and although she had risen early that morning to catch the train Sara danced until 3:30.

The next day, after staying in bed until nearly noon, she spent the afternoon in Gerald’s rooms listening to music on the gramophone (presumably with Anna along to keep things on the level); then in the evening they went to the prom in the New Haven Armory, which had been draped in shirred bunting and spangled with Christmas lights for the occasion. Sara’s dance card was filled with names like J. Biddle and R. Auchincloss and A. Harriman—in addition, naturally, to G. Murphy—and all the bright young things danced the waltz and that new dance sensation, the turkey trot. “Wonderful time,” wrote Sara afterward. “To bed about 5:30. Dead—rheumatism in knees.”

Her fling as sweetheart of
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was short-lived. Returning to New York, she found Adeline “in bed—on strict diet—Trained nurse—Return of old trouble.” Now all the dancing she did was in attendance on her mother. (Possibly this was Adeline’s plan.) Inevitably Sara began “feeling like the devil” herself, and “commenced taking 2 raw eggs daily” from the supply she purchased fresh each day for Adeline. Everyone was on edge, suffering from cabin fever in their Gotham Hotel digs: Sara later described the atmosphere to Gerald as “unspeakable.” February passed gloomily; at its end the whole family were delighted to flee to London on the Mauritania, where a fellow passenger was the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, then returning to England from an American tour.

Stella Campbell had first achieved fame—even notoriety—in 1893 in Arthur Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, her first but by no means her last portrayal of a woman with a past. Dark-haired, white-skinned, both exotic and interestingly fragile, she had played Hedda Gabler and Elektra, as well as Melisande to Sarah Bernhardt’s Pelleas, and she was the inspiration for Shaw’s Cleopatra and his Eliza Doolittle. Her marriage to Patrick Campbell, a soldier who was killed in the Boer War, had coexisted with her long romance with the actor-manager Johnston Forbes-Robertson. She had also been entangled with the young actor Gerald du Maurier (later the father of the novelist Daphne du Maurier), and at the time of her Mauritania crossing she was having an affair with George Cornwallis-West, then ten years younger than she and married to Winston Churchill’s mother, the former Jennie Jerome. Despite her public carryings-on and her vampish onstage persona, “Mrs. Pat” counted numerous titled ladies as her friends, and her daughter had been presented by one of them at court; but such connections weren’t universally impressive. In New York, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt had asked the actress to attend a soiree as an entertainer for her guests, but she refused to invite Mrs. Campbell “in society as a lady.”

Frank Wiborg might have shared Mrs. Vanderbilt’s dubiety about this cigarette-smoking, tragic-eyed siren (he never got beyond the “Mrs. Campbell” stage with her), but Stella Campbell became a close friend of Adeline’s and a mentor to the Wiborg girls. Her own daughter had embarked on a stage career and was about to announce her engagement; and Stella adopted Sara, Hoytie, and Olga as surrogates. Sara became her favorite; she would take her shopping and demand, in her famous husky voice, “Sara, darling, does the dress walk? Or does it make me look just like a cigar?”

Once settled at their usual London address, the Hyde Park Hotel, the Wiborgs plunged into a round of activity: Harrods, the theater, lunch with the countess of Wemyss and Edith Lyttelton, dashing aristocrats and friends of Stella Campbell’s. “We sang afterwards,” notes Sara’s diary. They sang, also, at a weekend house party at Belvoir (pronounced Beaver) Castle, home of the duke and duchess of Rutland. The duchess was a notable beauty, famous for her elegant and unconventional style of dress. She wore her family tiara back to front, the better to confine her Grecian knot of hair, and looped her fabulous pearl necklace, which Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwyn had worn in her portrait by Lely, around her shoulders between two diamond drop earrings—a style Sara herself later adapted. In her youth she had been one of the Souls, “a rather self-conscious group of clever young men and pretty young women” (as one historian described them) that had lionized Oscar Wilde, and her daughters—Lady Marjorie, Lady Violet, and Lady Diana Manners—were just as spirited. They took to Sara at once: “I love Sara,” said Lady Diana, recognizing a kindred spirit. “She’s a cat who goes her own way.”

Sara felt instinctively at home in this new world. “I think I shall move here to live!” she confided to Gerald in a letter later that summer. At Belvoir, mealtimes were announced by bells and gongs, the tables were set with historic china and Cellini silver, and the guests wore buttonholes or “sprays” chosen from a silver tray carried to all the guest rooms before dinner. The ladies (recalled Lady Diana) “dressed for tea in trailing chiffon and lace and changed again for dinner into something less limp, and all the men wore white ties and drank sherry, then champagne . . . and then port and then brandy.” On Sunday afternoons guests would take long walks a deux in order to indulge in interesting conversation. At bedtime the ladies would withdraw to one of the girls’ rooms for hair brushing, where they might be joined by a number of favored gentlemen. This mixture of grandeur and wit, formality and informality, was just the sort of social cocktail Sara craved.

But she was permitted to have only a small taste of it. The stated purpose of the Wiborgs’ European visit was to attend the events surrounding the coronation, in June, of the new king, George V, and new clothes were needed. This meant Paris, and the couture houses of Worth and Poiret. On April 5 the family crossed the channel in a snowstorm—“most hideous crossing,” noted Sara; “all frightened as well as ill.” So ill, in fact, that a doctor was sent for on their arrival in Paris, and despite the allure of couture fittings, nights at the Opéra, and drives in the Bois, Sara continued to feel sick and depressed for some weeks. There doesn’t seem to have been anything constitutionally wrong with her, despite the heavy and painful menstrual periods she still occasionally suffered, one of which had kept her confined to bed and unable to make a return visit to Belvoir in March. It sounds as if she had had enough of living life as one of the matched pieces of her mother’s luggage, but couldn’t bear to admit it, much less express it.

In Paris she tried to carve out some space for herself. She had secured a letter of introduction to Rodin and used it to gain admission to his two studios—one wonders what she thought of such frankly erotic sculptures as The Kiss—and she enrolled in sculpture classes at the Académie Julian, where her fellow Americans Maurice Prendergast and Edward Steichen had also studied. Each student at Julian was required to draw from a live nude model, which must have raised eyebrows Chez Wiborg, and which may have led to the row that Sara described as “one of the most fearful days ever spent.” But the issue was moot; by early June the Wiborgs swept her off to London and the coronation.

June was a blur of dinner parties and luncheons (for which, Sara’s diary usually notes, “We sang”), of visits to the Horse Show and Royal Ascot (“nice day but bored”), and rehearsals and costume fittings for a grand coronation-eve quadrille in which the performers—all names familiar from the “Court Circular”—would represent characters from Shakespeare. (The Wiborg girls had been asked to join their well-connected countrywoman, Mrs. Waldorf Astor, in the Merchant of Venice figure.) This grand event—for which the Albert Hall was transformed into an enchanted Italian garden, complete with forty-foot cypress trees, yew hedges that had been clipped to resemble peacocks, vine-covered pergolas, stone statuary, and grassy banks, all under a pavilion roof of blue silk—was attended by nearly four thousand guests, including the new king and queen, who put in an appearance, along with all the “royal and distinguished guests” staying at Buckingham Palace for the coronation, after midnight. Adeline Wiborg must have been in her element, and even Sara permitted herself to enjoy it.

The coronation itself was almost an anticlimax. As commoners, and foreigners at that, the Wiborgs didn’t merit a seat in Westminster Abbey, but after the customary twenty-one-gun salute woke Sara at 4:00 A.M. the family proceeded to the house of friends in Mayfair (the American newspaperman Richard Harding Davis was also a guest) for lunch and rubbernecking. “Procession passed about 2,” wrote Sara in her diary, “gorgeous sight.” Then they went on to tea with their friends the marquess and marchioness of Headfort, who—still sporting the coronets and ermine-trimmed robes they had worn to the ceremony—were able to give an authentically regal account of the morning’s proceedings. The marchioness was a former showgirl, Rosie Boote, who before her marriage had been a “favorite” of the new king’s womanizing father, and her spontaneity and lack of stuffiness made her a favorite of Sara’s as well. “We have been having such a good time,” she wrote to Gerald, back in East Hampton, after the coronation. “I can’t remember when in years I’ve enjoyed myself more.”

The purpose of Sara’s letter to Gerald wasn’t to gloat about her London season, but (as she put it) to “send you a handshake” on his election to the elite—and very secret—Yale senior society Skull and Bones, a development so momentous that his friend Keith Merrill had cabled her the news. “Would you mind,” she now asked Gerald, mock-seriously, “if it is allowable thanking him about it? I am afraid to myself—I feel I could face death if needs be, but not a breach of etiquette in these matters.”