by Amanda Vaill
Gerald and Fred had a formal rather than fraternal relationship. According to the actor Monty Woolley, who was a class ahead of Gerald at Yale, “They always appeared to act as members of a royal family. Their politeness to one another was formidable. They never relaxed in one another’s presence.” But by this time Fred had already started to suffer from the recurrent infections and stomach problems that would plague his later life; and Gerald, who was trying hard to live up to everyone’s expectations, took Anna’s exhortation seriously.
So Gerald sweltered in hot, empty New York City, while Patrick and Anna took Esther to Paris, Switzerland, and England, and wrote him about the fine time they were having, and what a sensation little Esther—or Tess, as they called her—was making. Esther was by then eleven, a prodigious and precocious reader with a conversational sangfroid that disarmed (and sometimes demolished) adults. She also had a noticeable case of strabismus, or a “lazy eye,” which Anna hoped could be helped by a visit to a European specialist. But despite her odd appearance and scholarly demeanor, Esther was “the belle of the ship” on the Murphys’ transatlantic crossing, and “the pet of the prominent men on board.” The Amerika’s captain had opened the ship’s ball with her, reported Anna. But Esther’s real triumph was the mock trial she got up to decide a “case” brought by one of the passengers, a man named McDonald, who complained that his wife smoked in bed. Appointing herself counsel for the defense, Esther won her case by, among other things, calling the prosecutor “a persecutor.”
“Tess is a wonder,” wrote Patrick, in a letter in which he also congratulated Gerald perfunctorily for working hard during his first year at Yale. “Never have I seen such a mind; everybody who meets her stamps her as a ‘genius.’” The contrast between Patrick’s effusions about Esther and his lukewarm praise of Gerald must have hurt. Gerald knew he would never be a scholar, nor a star athlete. And he was still nagged by the feelings of difference that had surfaced for him at Hotchkiss. When he’d complained about the college atmosphere to his father the previous spring, Patrick had adjured him that “your environment is inevitable; you can’t change that—so it is philosophy to accept it.” But acceptance wasn’t Gerald’s style; transformation was. And when he returned to Yale in the fall he proceeded to make himself into a big man on campus by transforming his environment, devoting himself to what his class historian referred to as “the aesthetic side” of undergraduate life. He was one of the five members of the Sophomore German Committee, the organizers of the sophomore prom; he was chosen as manager of the Apollo Glee Club, an underclassmen’s chorus; he was elected to DKE (or Deke), the most exclusive junior fraternity on campus; and in the spring he became assistant manager of the Musical Club.
He was becoming known as someone with a talent for arranging things—people, events, objects. He was far from the wealthiest, or most patrician, of his contemporaries. His college mates included members of the horse-racing and polo-playing Tower and Clark families, and Leonard Hanna, nephew of the Midwest millionaire and presidential kingmaker Mark Hanna, who was one of the richest men in the United States. But he was tall, well groomed, and well dressed—as a scion of the house of Mark Cross he could hardly be anything else—and he had a reputation for wit and the kind of social gallantry that made any occasion, from a dance to a picnic, go more smoothly. And so he was popular as well as successful. Robert Gardner, who chaired the Junior Prom Committee, deferred to Gerald on all questions of protocol—“my social secretary,” he called him—and claimed that the New Yorker was “so metropolitan I naturally am rather afraid of him.” He was such a stickler for good manners and proper form that when a group of undergraduates summoned up the nerve to invite the alluring actress Elsie Janis to tea at the college, Gerald made Gardner rewrite the invitation to make it correct.
Inevitably, however, Gerald’s expanding social life took a toll on his studies: in late November the dean sent a form report to Patrick Murphy saying that Gerald’s work was unsatisfactory in philosophy, economics, geology, English, and rhetoric. (In fact, he was failing three courses and barely passing the other two.) At the bottom of the form, the dean had typed a personal note: “Please urge him to devote more time and greater effort to his studies.”
Patrick did so. “Come, brace up,” he wrote Gerald. “You can’t afford to let this thing go now. It means failure.” He signed his letter “Affectionately, Papa.” Gerald did manage to pull his marks up to passing that year, and he never received another probation notice, but it was clear that his real attention was elsewhere, with the “aesthetic side” of his campus existence. He left the envelope containing Patrick’s exhortation lying on his desk, where a friend used it as a message pad. “Dear Gerald,” ran the penciled note, “I very much want to see ‘Herod.’ Will you leave a ticket for a seat at the [box] office for me?”
Gerald’s circle of acquaintance at Yale was wide—his roommates Harold Carhart and Esmond O’Brien were varsity stars in hockey and (in Carhart’s case) in baseball—but two of his closest Yale friends were cut from somewhat different cloth than most boola-boola Old Blues: Edwin Montillion Woolley, called Monty, a stoutish homosexual actor and director of the Yale Dramatic Association who later earned fame portraying Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner; and a young man from Indiana named Cole Porter. Gerald met Porter in the fall of 1910 while vetting sophomore candidates for DKE. “I can still see [Porter’s] room,” Gerald recalled later: “there was a single electric light bulb in the ceiling, and a piano with a box of caramels on it, and wicker furniture, which was considered a bad sign at Yale. . . . And sitting at the piano was a little boy from Peru, Indiana, in a checked suit and a salmon tie, with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down, looking just like a Westerner all dressed up for the East.”
Gerald, who was already something of a dandy—a photograph taken at the time shows him in a batik jacket, ascot, silk sash, and solar topee, the very image of the pukka sahib—decided to overlook the checked suit and loud tie. He discovered that Porter shared his passion for Gilbert and Sullivan, and they had a long chat about music that somehow segued into a recitation of Porter’s life story. By the time Gerald had heard all the details of Porter’s childhood on an apple farm, not to mention the lyrics of “Bulldog,” the ditty Porter had just submitted for the football song competition, this rather unlikely pair had cemented a lifetime friendship. Perhaps each saw in the other what he kept so carefully hidden from others: the soul of an outsider concealed behind a facade of urbanity.
Gerald got Porter elected to DKE, and to the Apollo Glee Club (in which both boys sang second tenor). That winter he also managed to persuade the officers of the combined Glee, Banjo, and Mandolin clubs to allow Porter, a lowly sophomore, a solo spot in their winter tour so he could sing a song he’d written in praise of motorcars: the sight of the diminutive Porter backed by the rest of the glee club humming “Zoom, zoom, zoom,” brought down the house.
Although the Glee Club appeared at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York during its tour, the Wiborg girls didn’t come to the concert; they were preparing to leave for an extended European trip that would keep them abroad for nearly six months. But Gerald hadn’t lost touch with them. On the contrary, he had become an even closer family initiate, although his friendship with Hoytie had cooled somewhat. It was with Sara that he had developed a new closeness: during the summer, he had spent days at a time at the Dunes, and the two of them had gardened and done chores (Gerald painted and varnished the porch chairs), or gone walking or driving together, or read Emerson aloud to each other in the evenings. And when it came time for the Yale junior prom (for which Gerald was one of the eight organizers), Sara was the girl he asked to accompany him.
At twenty-seven, Sara Wiborg was emphatically not one of the dewy debutantes his classmates swooned over. In a way that was the point. She was an unconventional choice: not a beautiful girl, but a beautiful woman. Up to now, with the exception of Hoytie, Gerald had had no real flirtations. With
girls he was charming but not threatening—his friend Gardner called him “Galahad the Pure”—the boy all the mothers loved because he was at ease with them while he was impartially, and politely, attentive to their daughters. Whether this impartiality meant he was indifferent to them is debatable. Whatever the nature of the “defect” he had discerned in himself at Hotchkiss—and despite the fact that many of his Yale friends, such as Woolley, Hanna, and Porter, were homosexual—Gerald’s sexual preferences were far from clear, even to himself. What was clear was that he had spent twenty-two years in a cold, withholding family, trying, not always successfully, to live up to someone else’s expectations. By taking twenty-seven-year-old Sara Wiborg—who had been presented at court, who was a society sensation on two continents—to the Yale junior prom, he not only trumped everyone else’s aces, he changed the game entirely.
But there was something else going on. With Sara, increasingly, Gerald felt he could let down his guard. Well traveled, well read, she was someone with whom he could discuss Emerson or music. She shared his sense of the absurd, collecting peculiar or pompous phrases she had overheard and sending them to him for his amusement. Most interesting to someone as wary and contained as Gerald had become, and most unsettling, was that edge about her, that repressed wildness, that sense that (as he later described it), “I have no idea what she will do, or say, or propose.”
What Sara saw in him—whether she saw anything—he still didn’t know.
4
“Thinking how nice you are”
“THE SADDEST PEOPLE,” Sara said years later, “are the ones with no love in their life—I realized that,—& feared it—for a long time.” It was that fear, a cold, clammy fog of doubt, that sent her into a neurasthenic gloom one August morning in 1911. Her cousin, Hoyt Sherman, and Gerald and Esther Murphy had all been staying at the Dunes for some days, but today they had left, and Sara was despondent. “Spent day in bed,” Sara wrote in her diary, rather forlornly. “Got up for dinner—Horribly depressed.”
Depression was a recurring theme in her journal. She was by now twenty-seven years old, an age when most of her contemporaries were married and starting up their own households. In fact, her two closest friends in New York were married—one, Rue Carpenter, to the composer John Alden Carpenter, and the other, Rachel (nicknamed Ray) Lambert, to the pharmaceutical heir Gerard Lambert. But she herself was still one of the three beautiful Wiborg girls, supporting, like a caryatid, the familial facade. She longed desperately for something more.
Since her schooldays she had had an interest in art and now she began to pursue it seriously, taking classes and drawing from the model every morning, and doing charcoal or oil studies of friends like Ray Lambert in the afternoons and evenings. Like other fashionably au courant New Yorkers, she also visited various artists’ ateliers on “open days” in order to see their work in progress. “Went to H. Mann’s studio,” she wrote in February 1910, “wonderful portraits.” Another such visit was less pleasant. She and Rue Carpenter went to look at pictures in the studio of Ben Ali Haggin, a socially prominent New York painter, but all that Sara recorded about the afternoon was a description of as “a dreadful thing,” her frequent code for someone who made unwelcome advances or behaved in a louche manner.
Possibly Haggin misread her signals. She was, after all, a very pretty young woman, and a single one, whose tentative forays into the artist’s vie de bohéme might be open to misinterpretation. But Sara was no free love advocate. She was a well-brought-up millionaire’s daughter who had been carefully taught, as Ray Lambert’s daughter recalled, “never even to glance into the windows of a men’s club.” She had a rigorous sense of personal correctness—she was aghast to discover, for example, that little Esther Murphy, a schoolgirl in her teens, not only read but talked about racy French novels at the luncheon table. Whether by her own choice or her mother’s, Sara led a somewhat cloistered existence; and her social life, in New York at least, had lost the giddy frenzy of her debutante days. She went to the de rigueur events, of course, like Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.’s, wedding in June, and she kept up her volunteer commitments with the Junior League, of which she was a member. But more and more it was Olga and Hoytie who went to dances at the Whitneys’ or tableaux at the Clarence Mackays’—where Olga dressed as a Greek libation bearer in a Fortuny-inspired chiton—and it was Sara who stayed at home drawing, or accompanied Frank on his icy dips in the autumn Atlantic, or went to the opera or ballet with the Lamberts or the Murphys or other married friends of the family. (Her taste in music was more adventurous than that of many of her peers—she found Strauss’s Elektra “stirring” and when she felt bemused by Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande she went to a repeat performance and “liked it much better” the second time.)
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 o
f 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.