Everybody Was So Young

by Amanda Vaill

  If their charming nineteenth-century house on 11th Street had been an expression of the Murphys’ flair for the quaint and unexpected, this apartment was a statement about newness and originality. Unlike Cole and Linda Porter’s grand residence on the rue Monsieur, which boasted platinum wallpaper, zebra-skin rugs, and priceless eighteenth-century furniture, it was not an advertisement for the Murphys’ affluence. Instead it was a declaration of their own brand of unconventional modernism, an extension from canvas to life. To visiting Americans like the Barrys it had the excitement of Paris at that moment—and to Europeans like Léger and Stravinsky it symbolized the machine-age inventiveness of an America most of them could only dream of. “The Murphys were among the first Americans I ever met,” said Stravinsky once, “and they gave me the most agreeable impression of the United States.”

  That June all Paris was buzzing with curiosity over Stravinsky’s new ballet, Les Noces, which Diaghilev would produce at the Théâtre Gaîeté-Lyrique to open the last week of his season. Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, all the papers bristled with front-page items calling it “this year’s gift,” “an aesthetic revelation,” and more. The music, which Stravinsky had originally written for player piano and percussion, had been rescored for four pianos, a chorus, drums, bells, and a xylophone—a novel ensemble—and the choreography was singular in that it emphasized the movement of the corps de ballet over that of the principals. In fact, that was the idea: this primitivist wedding fable was intended to convey a sense of implacable social force in which the individual wishes of the bride and groom were meaningless. In addition, the traditional gender divisions of ballet had been abolished. Men and women performed the same steps, there was no support work—the ballet was as revolutionary sexually as it was musically.

  Natalia Goncharova had been commissioned to do the sets and costumes for Les Noces; but a series of misunderstandings and disagreements with the choreographer, Bronislava Nijinska, had put her formidably behind an already tight schedule. Nijinska had persuaded Diaghilev to abandon Goncharova’s literally folkloric costumes and décors in favor of stylized ones in tones of brown and white; as a result Goncharova was desperate to finish in time, and called on her henchmen the Murphys for help. Although Gerald was by now consumed by his own painting, he spent a week helping to spread brown and white paint on muslin flats. He also seized this opportunity to include John Dos Passos, who was passionate to know more about the Ballets Russes in its backstage life. Dos Passos found the conditions in Diaghilev’s atelier hot (June in Paris can be brutal) and confusing (the cacophony of French and Russian, and the histrionics of the crew, bewildered him). But Gerald kept him going with frequent pit stops at the local brasserie, and they finished their task.

  Gerald and Sara also invited him to one of the ten stage rehearsals Les Noces would receive before its opening (they themselves went to all ten), and when Dos Passos asked if another of his friends, the poet and novelist e. e. cummings, could come too, they were delighted. But at the theater cummings perversely and ostentatiously sat three or four rows behind the others—perhaps the Murphys’ “well-laundered” elegance was off-putting to someone who often considered squalor a matter of principle—and although Dos Passos tried to make light of the incident he was reportedly deeply embarrassed.

  The day before its official opening on June 13, Les Noces received a preview performance at the rococo hôtel particulier of Stravinsky’s patroness, the Princesse Edmond de Polignac (née Winaretta Singer), the handsome lesbian heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune. “Tante Winnie,” as she liked to be called, was a fixed star in that affluent and sexually ambiguous universe that surrounded the Ballets Russes and, therefore, was a friend both of the de Beaumonts (who were there) and of Hoytie Wiborg, so it would have been natural for Gerald and Sara to have attended this private performance. But in addition they had decided they must make their own gesture of homage to the creators of Les Noces; and so—Gerald later recalled—they invited “everyone directly connected to the ballet, as well as friends . . . who were following its genesis” to a party in what they hoped would be “a place worthy of the event.”

  The first venue they thought of was the Cirque Medrano, the funky one-ring-circus-cum-vaudeville house that was home to the Fratellini brothers; nothing could have been farther from Winnie de Polignac’s marbled halls with their José Maria Sert frescoes and busts of Louis XIV, and nothing could have been more Murphyesque. But the circus manager was not amused. “The Cirque Medrano,” he told Gerald frostily, “isn’t an American colony yet.” Then they had a better idea: a converted barge tied up in front of the Chambre des Députés that, except on Sundays, served as the deputies’ restaurant. Celebrating Les Noces there had a certain dadaist correctness: it was a bit like letting the lunatics take over the asylum.

  The party took place on June 17, at 7:00 p.m., and was quickly transformed into legend. It almost began with disaster: Sara had forgotten that because it was a Sunday, the huge open-air market on the Île de la Cité would be selling birds instead of flowers, and she could find no fresh blooms for her center-pieces. But she quickly recouped by going to a Montparnasse bazaar and buying quantities of cheap toys—trucks and fire engines, dolls, and stuffed animals—which she arranged in pyramids along the banquet table. Over it, suspended from the ceiling, was positioned a huge laurel wreath bearing the inscription “Les Noces—Hommages.”

  The guests gathered on the canopied upper deck for cocktails—all but Stravinsky, who first went below to the dining room to check the seating arrangements and rearrange the place cards to his liking. Diaghilev came, with his amanuensis, the devoted Boris Kochno, and the de Beaumonts and Winaretta de Polignac and Misia Sert. Although Gerald and Sara had wanted to invite all the dancers, the antiegalitarian Diaghilev disapproved: but his new favorite Serge Lifar was there, and the beautiful dark-haired Vera Nemchinova, and Leonide Massine. Larionov and Goncharova came, but not Nijinska—possibly the Murphys wanted to avoid a contretemps between her and Goncharova about the designs for the ballet. Rue and John Carpenter were there with their nearly grown daughter Ginny. So were the Porters, and Darius Milhaud, Walter Damrosch, Ernest Ansermet (who had conducted the ballet), Germaine Taillefer, and the “preferred pianist of les Six,” Marcelle Meyer. Scofield Thayer, the editor-in-chief of The Dial, turned up (someone said later that this was the last night before he went mad), and so did Gilbert Seldes and Lewis Galantière and his wife, Dorothy Butler. Tristan Tzara was there, and Blaise Cendrars, and Picasso and his wife, and Jean Cocteau, who, however, refused to come aboard until after the last bâteau-mouche had gone by because he feared the heaving from their wakes would make him seasick.

  As the guests came down to the dining room Picasso, captivated by Sara’s toy decorations, rearranged them into a giant assemblage that culminated in a stuffed cow atop a fire truck’s ladder. The dinner went on and on: a great deal of champagne was consumed, Marcelle Meyer played Scarlatti on the piano, Goncharova read the guests’ palms and promised them fame and fortune, and Cocteau—who had pinched the captain’s dress uniform from his cabin—scurried around the deck with a lantern, sticking his head through the portholes to proclaim, “On coule” (“We’re sinking”). Gilbert Seldes picked up one of the menus put at everyone’s place and went about getting the guests to autograph the back of it; across the top someone wrote: “Depuis le jour de ma première communion c’est le plus beau soir de ma vie” (“Since the day of my first communion this is the most beautiful evening of my life”).

  As dawn whitened the sky over Notre-Dame, Kochno and Ansermet took down the laurel wreath from the ceiling and held it between them like a clown’s hoop. Stravinsky, showing he had lost none of the form he had displayed in the pillow fight after the Pulcinella premiere, ran the length of the room and jetéd through the center. After that, everyone decided, they might as well go home.

  Top left: “My father wanted boys”: Frank Wiborg in the 1880s

  Top right: Adeline Wiborg and
(clockwise from upper left) Hoytie, Sara, and Olga

  Bottom: The Wiborg girls in fancy dress: Olga as a Pierrot, Sara as a Chinese empress, Hoytie as a Dutch girl

  Top left: Gerald in one of his earliest disguises—a solemn, rather wistful child

  Top right: Fred (left) and Gerald “always appeared to act as members of a royal family.”

  Lower left: Patrick Murphy avoided all “close relationships, even family ones”; his wife, Anna, was “devoted, possessive, ambitious, Calvinistic, superstitious, [and] hypercritical.”

  Above: The drawing room at the Dunes.

  Upper left: “The women all had tiny waists and they wore long fluttering eyelet dresses.”

  From left: Sara Sherman, Olga, Hoytie, and Sara in East Hampton, about 1905

  Lower left: The Lorelei—Sara steering her own course in Gardiners Bay

  Lower right: Sara on the lawn, circa 1913: “Is anything so satisfying as to be picturesque? I am nearly dead with it.”

  Sara, circa 1910. “My own dear girl,” Gerald wrote her, “if you knew how I thought of you!”

  Gerald as a man about town, circa 1915: “The game in N.Y. . . . is not for me—is not real.”

  Sara’s engagement photograph: “the face from Town and Country”

  Sara, Honoria, and pearls

  Gerald in the uniform of a private first class—perhaps one part for which he was not well cast

  “They look so well laundered.” From left: Baoth, Gerald, baby Patrick, Sara, and Honoria in Cambridge, just before they moved to France

  Sara took an almost visceral pleasure in her children—here with Honoria and Baoth at Houlgate, 1922.

  Top left: Sara [foreground] and Olga Picasso

  Top right: Left to right: Gerald, the de Beaumonts, and Sara at La Garoupe

  Middle left: Picasso (foreground) and Gerald

  Middle center: Sara and Gerald (and Picasso’s hat on the sand)

  Middle right: Sara and Picasso

  Bottom: Left to right Honoria, Baoth, Paulo Picasso (partly hidden by hat), Gerald, and Patrick

  Sara by Picasso. Both portraits echo photographs of Sara at left, one in a turban, with Picasso, the other—clothed—at the Garoupe.

  Gerald’s drop curtain and some of the characters (in costumes designed by Sara) from Within the Quota

  The picture that caused the sensation: Boatdeck, with its “huge almost vertical red-lead-colored smoke-stacks and dead-white mushrooming ventilators with black, gaping pure-circle mouths”

  Watch: Gerald was “struck by the mystery and depth of the interior” of this instrument de précision.

  Cole Porter

  Gerald and Sara at Étienne de Beaumont’s “automotive ball”

  Archibald and Ada MacLeish were the Murphys’ neighbors at St.-Cloud.

  Easter party at St.-Cloud. Front row, left to right: Honoria, Baoth, Patrick; back row, left to right: Frank Wiborg, Patrick Murphy, Sara, Gerald, and Vladimir Orloff

  Esther Murphy “looked exactly like Gerald but moins jolie,” said a friend.

  Villa America—the modest chalet transformed into a deco variation on a Mediterranean theme. Gerald is on the terrace, Baoth is driving a minicar on the patio.

  Gerald’s sign for the villa, which, like its owners, existed in two worlds at once: France and America, the real and the imagined

  Robert Benchley (left) and Donald Ogden Stewart showing their mettle

  At Antibes the day might begin with exercises on the beach. Left to right: Gerald, Baoth, Honoria, and Patrick

  In the afternoon there might be a children’s party for which the celebrant dressed specially—Honoria as an Infanta, Baoth as a knight, and Patrick as Charlie Chaplin

  “The last unalloyed good time.” Left to right: Dos, Ernest, Sara, Hadley, and Gerald at Schruns

  Murphy beach parties might feature Elsie de Wolfe (holding parasol), her husband, Sir Charles Mendl (behind her), or Monty Woolley (back row, far right) . . . or Philip Barry, Ellen Barry, Zelda Fitzgerald, or Peter Benchley—all surprised at close range by Sara’s camera.

  Cocktail. When Gerald mixed drinks, Philip Barry told him, “You look like a priest saying Mass.”

  Top: La Garoupe, summer 1926. “They have to like it,” said one of Fitzgerald’s characters about the Murphys’ fictional counterparts, “they invented it.”

  Middle: All hands aloft. Left to right: Ellen Barry, Sara, Phil Barry (partially hidden), and Gerald

  Bottom: Pamplona, summer 1926. Left to right: Hadley, Ernest, Pauline, Sara, and Gerald

  COSTUME OR DISGUISE?

  What might have seemed self-conscious on someone else looked, on Gerald, somehow exactly right.

  Gerald as an apache

  On the terrace at Villa America

  À l’espagnol at La Garoupe

  In robes brought back from China by Archie MacLeish

  11

  “There is American elegance”

  “ON THE PLEASANT SHORE of the French Riviera,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote in Tender Is the Night, “about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short, dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April.”

  He has changed the name, but Fitzgerald is describing the Hôtel du Cap in Cap d’Antibes. It’s wedding-cake white now, not pink, and the beach never was right in front of it. In fact, it’s almost a half mile away. The hotel has a swimming pool instead, sunk into the rocks overlooking the Mediterranean. But the palms are still there, and the gigantic, primordial-looking aloe plants, and the Aleppo pines, their spindly silver trunks topped by tufty foliage. If you squint your eyes, obscuring the recent additions that have turned it into a hôtel de grand luxe, it looks almost as it must have on July 3, 1923, when Sara and Gerald, their three children, and Mademoiselle Géron arrived to spend the summer.

  In past years the hotel would have been shut from May to September. But the previous summer’s arrival of the Porters and their guests at the Château de la Garoupe, just down the road, had encouraged the hotel’s owner, Antoine Sella, to think about keeping his establishment open this summer on a trial basis. When the Murphys proposed a return visit he agreed to keep a skeleton staff for them and for the family of a Chinese diplomat who, hearing the hotel would not close as usual, decided to stay on. After all, Sella rationalized, the weather was unseasonably wet and cold in the north that year, and perhaps other vacationers would come south for the sun.

  At the time Antibes was a sleepy little port whose claim to fame was that Napoleon had been posted there when he was a loyal revolutionary soldier. There was a railroad station, and a pretty lemon yellow Romanesque church in the old town, where the narrow streets between the pastel stucco houses were bright with flower boxes. The tiny movie theater operated only once a week, and telephone service shut down for two hours at midday and altogether at 7:00 P.M. South of town a dozen modest villas were scattered on the piny slopes of the Antibes peninsula, but the shoreline was deserted except for fishermen’s shacks, and the few roads crisscrossing the peninsula were unpaved.

  This sense of remote tranquillity was exactly what the Murphys were seeking after the sometimes exhausting excitement of the past months in Paris. For Gerald, however, Antibes was a working vacation more than a real escape. Before he left Paris he had begun an enormous painting, which he hoped to complete for the Independents in February. Possibly inspired by a large model of the liner Paris which had been exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in the fall of 1921, it depicted in gigantic scale the funnels and smokestacks of an ocean liner. Gerald had taken more than sixty photographs on deck while making transatlantic visits home on the Paris and the Aquitania and that spring had started the painstaking process of transferring his preliminary sketches to a canvas the size of a billboard. Now, although he had lef
t that project behind in his studio, he had other work to do, an exciting commission from Rolf de Maré, the director of the avant-garde Ballets Suédois.

  A rich and aristocratic Swede, de Maré had set up the Ballets Suédois in 1920 as a Paris showcase for his male lover, a stocky blond dancer named Jean Bôrlin. Modeling his company on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, de Maré had sought out those artists and composers considered to be on the cutting edge of fashion. Because de Maré’s pockets were as deep as Diaghilev’s were shallow, he had been able to pay not only for designs and music, but for costumes by the couturière Jeanne Lanvin, scenery executed by the Opéra’s head scene painter, and the kind of full hundred-piece orchestra that Diaghilev could rarely afford. By 1923 he had seriously challenged Diaghilev’s hegemony and was commissioning scores from Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honneger, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy, and décors from Picabia, Bonnard, and Léger.