by Amanda Vaill
Although the summer had begun hopefully, it was soon obvious that things were no more right with the Fitzgeralds than they had been. Scott was drinking, not just as an escape from work, but as an intended stimulus for it; and Zelda seemed to be lost in some alternative universe of her own. Sara Murphy went with her to a luncheon at which a number of people came up and introduced themselves, and as they did so Zelda took their hands, smiling, and muttered, under her breath, “I hope you die in a marble ring.” “She was so charming and polite as she said it,” Sara recalled. “Of course no one suspected that she was saying anything but the usual pleasantries; I heard her because 1 was standing right next to her.”
One day Zelda invited the Murphys to come to Egorova’s studio to watch her dance, an invitation they accepted reluctantly. The floor of the studio was raked to simulate a ballet stage, which caused spectators to look uphill at the dancers. “The view was not a flattering one,” Gerald remembered, “for it made her seem taller, more awkward than she was. There was something dreadfully grotesque in her intensity—one could see the muscles stretch and pull; her legs looked muscular and ugly. It was really terrible. One held one’s breath until it was over. Thank God, she couldn’t see what she looked like.” Gerald and Sara fled to Antibes with something like relief.
One morning, soon after their return, they called their children to a hasty and secret family conference. They said they had received anonymous instructions in the mail, telling them to dig up a map buried in their garden which would lead them to pirate treasure buried somewhere on the coast between Antibes and the Spanish border. Being careful not to attract attention, the children raced to the garden and dug in the spot marked X; soon they unearthed a small, rusty metal box, which appeared to be old and which contained a faded parchment map of the Mediterranean coast. On the map, remembered Honoria, was a cross drawn in some brownish substance that might have been blood; it marked a cove near St.-Tropez. The only way to get to it, Gerald told his now goggle-eyed children, would be to organize a sailing expedition: so food and tents and bedding and shovels were bought and brought on board Honoria, and two days later, with Vladimir navigating, they set off.
The treasure voyage was a long one. There were pauses for lunch, for swims in the limpid Mediterranean, and for dinner and the night in port at St.-Tropez; at last they arrived at a secluded cove where they dropped anchor, rowed ashore, and struck camp outside a small cave. But because they could see a man walking on a distant hill Gerald made them defer their excavations until morning. That night he told them ghost stories, and Sara played Stravinsky and Debussy’s La Cathédrale englouti on the windup record player she had brought along. The next day they dug up another little metal box, this time with a key in it, and, at last, what seemed like a very old chest, its lock rusted from age and disuse. Sara fitted the key into the lock and opened the chest, and with gasps of delight the children saw that it was filled to the top with coins and jewels that dazzled in the brilliant sunlight.
It was years before any of them learned that the maps had been drawn by Gerald and Vladimir, who had also found the chest in a secondhand shop somewhere on the Left Bank in Paris, and that Sara had bought the costume jewelry at flea markets. But by then the treasure hunt had achieved mythic proportions. “It was such a success,” said Gerald, “that sometimes I feel it didn’t ever happen.” Whether or not the treasure, or the pirates, were real had ceased to matter. Like a Fabergé egg, it was more wonderful because it was fabricated.
Some time before the treasure hunt, Gerald had entered Honoria in an extended ocean race from Marseille to Corsica called the Course Croisière de la Méditerranée. This was a very grand affair indeed, with twenty-three boats of different sizes and rigs, each with a handicap, and the contestants were all seasoned yachtsmen. Gerald’s crew of four, including himself and Vladimir, set out on the first leg without ever having had Honoria under sail before. But after the first two stages, from Marseille to Toulon, and Toulon to Cannes, they had beaten all the other fancy yachts and were ranked first. Sara joined them at Cannes, bearing food and drink, which turned out to be a blessing because a thirty-hour dead calm off Corsica put them well back in seventh place. Sara kept them all going with cold beer, and with some skillful sailing by all hands they whisked into the harbor at Ajaccio in third. Gerald was jubilant—“I’ve never been exposed to an incessant excitement day AND night for twenty-one days before,” he wrote to Dos Passos, who was in Russia—and he was looking forward to an August rematch with the boat that had beaten him for second place.
But events conspired to keep him from becoming a yachtsman along the lines of Sara’s old friend Gerard Lambert; for before the August race something happened that, in unforeseen ways, would change the Murphys’ lives forever.
In the summer of 1928 the American director King Vidor came to France to publicize the opening there of his film The Crowd, a picture much influenced by Fritz Lang’s dark masterpiece Metropolis. Vidor himself was the first to admit this debt: he had, he said, consciously adopted the “shadowy effects” Lang invoked so tellingly in his film, and used “a lot” of false perspective, rather in the manner of Picasso, Léger—or Murphy. “[I]t was a time of the German Expressionist paintings, and the Picasso paintings were all with table tops tilted toward the painter, the viewer,” Vidor recalled. He had been aiming at the same thing.
While he was in Paris, Vidor had read an article in Variety that announced a sort of Doppler shift in the movie industry: the phenomenal success of Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, which had opened on October 6, 1927, had convinced studio executives that talking pictures were not a gimmick but the wave of the future; and now they were all paddling hard to catch up. If Vidor wanted to survive, it was clear he’d have to do likewise, so he quickly submitted a list of ideas to the MGM brass. At the top of his list was a musical drama called Hallelujah! a story of black sharecroppers in rural Mississippi featuring a love triangle gone wrong, a murder, a chain gang, a flood, and final redemption. Vidor wanted to use undiscovered black actors and explore expressionistic film techniques instead of producing “a classic country down south type of thing.” And because he claimed to know and love Negro spirituals—“in my home town of Galveston,” he said, “you could hear them down on the docks, pushing cotton bales around and singing songs”—he wanted an authentically African American score. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom Vidor had worked in Hollywood in the fall of 1927, told him he knew just the man to help him: Gerald Murphy.
On Fitzgerald’s recommendation, Vidor came to see both Murphys at the Villa America. Vidor admired Gerald’s pictures and seemed to be thinking about incorporating some of his work into the film; as he recalled later, “I thought that the type of painting he did would fit very well into the type of photography that I was going to use” in Hallelujah! On his side, Gerald had been impressed by Vidor’s work, particularly The Crowd. His conversations with Léger had made him only more eager to explore the possibilities of film as an artistic medium, and he immediately understood what Vidor said he was after in Hallelujah! He and Sara ran through their repertoire of spirituals for him; and when Vidor invited him to come to Hollywood to consult on the photography and the score, Gerald immediately said yes.
Before he could leave, however, Gerald had to complete a canvas for a small show of his work which was to be held at the Galerie Georges Bernheim in Paris that winter. Even though it was conceived as a kind of appetizer to a larger exhibition of the paintings of Armand Guillaumin, it was his first one-man exhibition, and he was pardonably excited about it. “My latest things,” he wrote John Dos Passos, “are a moving mass of looseness and liberation.” Certainly, in the picture he was working on that summer of 1928, the rigid geometry and cubist displacement characteristic of his work after Boatdeck had begun to give way to something else.
Portrait is different in feeling from its predecessors. It’s freer, less framed, and it seems not so much to deconstruct or refract reality as to assemble it. The pai
nting had begun in the pages of Gerald’s art notebook, not as a completed idea but as a series of images. “An eye,” Gerald had written, “lashes, brow, lids, etc. big scale,—even pores, hairs.” Elsewhere he added, “*(Use tracing of a foot in picture).” The picture that took shape from those notes was composed entirely of the parts of its subject—an eye, a footprint, three thumbprints, a mouth, a profile. All were presented as differently scaled objects on separate fields set off by rulers or measuring sticks, a device Léger had been experimenting with, although Gerald personalized it by his use again of the number five on the ruler. The eye, which was rendered in surreal, proto-pop detail, might have been a fragment of the advertising poster for the monstrous eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg at the beginning of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In fact, it was Gerald’s own, magnified and reproduced on canvas. The foot, too, was Gerald’s, a tracing from life, with its own inked imprint superimposed on top. The thumbprints were also his; he had taken three impressions on paper with ink, and then painstakingly reproduced them using a brush from which he had removed all but a single camel’s hair. But the profile at the picture’s bottom left-hand corner was an image he copied from the “conglomerate standard facial profile of the Caucasian Man, from the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale.”
Gerald was a meticulous craftsman who labored through countless preliminary studies and the process of recreating his thumbprints on canvas must alone have taken him months; so it’s likely that he began work on Portrait early in 1928, when the MacLeishes were visiting Villa America before their return to the country Gerald wasn’t yet ready to embrace. That September, as he finished Portrait, he received a letter from Archie—a letter in the form of a poem, which MacLeish later published, with some minor alterations, as “American Letter—For Gerald Murphy” in his collection New Found Land.
“Dear G,” he wrote from Uphill Farm, his and Ada’s new home in Conway, Massachusetts:
. . . Why should I think of the dolphins at Capo di Mele?
Why should I see in my mind the taut sail
And the hill over St. Tropez & your hand on the tiller?
. . .
This land is my native land. And yet
I am sick for home for the red roofs & the olives,
And the foreign words & the white of the sea fall.
“How can a wise man have two countries?”
How can a man behold the sun & want
A land far off, alien, smelling of palm trees,
And the yellow gorse at noon in the long calms?
. . .
It is a strange thing to be an American.
. . .
It is strange to sleep in the bare stars & to die
On an open land where few have perished before us.
. . .
It is strange to be born of no race & no people.
In the old lands they are many together. They keep
The wise past & the words spoken in common.
. . . They eat
The same dish, their drink is the same & their proverbs.
. . .
They are many men. . . .
Here it is one man and the wind in the boughs.
. . .
Nevertheless this is our land & our people,—
This that is neither a land nor a race. . . .
. . .
Here we must live or live only as shadows.
This is our race, we who have known, who have had
Neither the old walls nor the voices around us—
This is our land, this is our ancient ground—
. . .
It is this we cannot leave though the old call us.
“American Letter” was MacLeish’s answer to the question—implied between them ever since the quarrel last spring—“Who am I?” Portrait was Gerald’s. Shortly after he completed it, on October 23, the five Murphys sailed from Marseille on the liner Saturnia, bound for the United States.
16
“A dismantled house where people have once been gay”
ON NOVEMBER 1, 1928, the Saturnia docked in New York, and Gerald and Sara maneuvered their considerable entourage from the pier to the Savoy Plaza Hotel, on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. This took some doing, for the Murphys traveled in grand style. There were Sara and Gerald and the three children; there were Mam’zelle Géron and Vladimir, who was acting as majordomo and was going to help on the film; there were the dogs, who sailed in the shipboard kennel and were walked on deck every day; there were the portable gramophone and the favorite records; there was Sara’s bottle bag, a sort of doctor’s satchel filled with bottles of alcohol, witch hazel, Dobell’s solution for gargling in case of sore throats, pastilles Vichy for upset stomachs, and a variety of other remedies, including good bootleg whiskey decanted into perfume bottles to evade customs. Then there were the trunks and valises, made to order by Mark Cross and color-coded by owner: a red stripe woven into the luggage fabric for Honoria, a blue one for Baoth, a yellow one for Patrick, green for Sara, and brown, gray, or black for Gerald, to make it easier to recognize and sort them all. “I’m afraid we traveled with an awful lot of bags,” Honoria says now.
Their rooms at the Savoy Plaza faced Fifth Avenue, Central Park, and Grand Army Plaza, and from their windows the children could see Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s gilded equestrian statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman being led southward by Victory in her tunic and laurel wreath. “C’est l’Oncle Général et Tante Hoytie” (“It’s our uncle the General and Aunt Hoytie”), they assured one another. After all, as Saint-Gaudens had immortalized their famous ancestor, would he not have done the same for their tall and imperious aunt?
After the possibly mixed pleasure of watching Don Stewart make his acting debut impersonating Gerald—or the Geraldesque half of a couple described by the heroine as “the brightest, happiest people I’ve ever known”—in Phil Barry’s new play, Holiday, the Murphys boarded the Super Chief for Los Angeles. The children were thrilled to see actual Indians and cowboys from the train, although they were somewhat anxious about the possibility of Indian raids and had to be assured by Sara that such things no longer happened. In fact, Gerald told them, most Indians had now been unfairly confined to reservations, something he condemned in no uncertain terms.
In Hollywood the Murphys moved into a stucco bungalow at 1737 Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills, where the children made friends with their nice black chauffeur, learned how to roller-skate and rode horses, and soon acquired a menagerie equal to the one they had left behind in Antibes: a turtle for Patrick, and a canary, named Dicky, for Honoria. They visited movie sets or went to elaborate parties—Marion Davies gave one at her faux-eighteenth-century Malibu “beach house” at which they met Charlie Chaplin. Or, dressed in Tom Mix Stetsons and pony-skin chaps, they played at cowboys and Indians (“Patrick,” wrote Baoth mysteriously to Miss Roussel, “has become a babouni and a fighter of the Indians”). To them, Hollywood was a fragrant paradise; but Gerald and Sara hated it.
Everywhere they went they were bombarded with signs bearing egregiously cute or bathetically grandiose names like Hippedy-Hop Cake Shop, Oakwood Storknest Hospital, Holsum Wonder Bread, Rite Spot, Home of the Aristocratic Hamburger, or The Bedspring Luxurious. “My God what a place this is,” wrote Gerald to Dos Passos in exasperation. “The whole works has gone quaint. . . . The kitchen utensils have enamelled handles in pastel shades. Bootblacks and barbers wear indigo and jade-green smocks at their toil. . . . Waitresses are costumed as Watteau Shepherdesses, Matadors, Holland Maidens (with wooden shoes), Sailors (the effect somewhat marred because of the prevalence of make-up and plucked eye-brows).”
Almost worse than the cuteness was the lack of authenticity. “I don’t demand good art of a country,” grumbled Gerald, “but when they can’t cook a decent meal or sell a vegetable with any taste to it, then something’s up. There is nothing to eat except when Sara cooks it.” And even she was laboring under formidable handicaps. One day she went to the gr
ocery store for a box of crackers and was told by the grocer that she must be looking for Cupid Chips. “In my time,” she told the grocer, through gritted teeth, “they were called Saltines.”
“Well, same thing, I guess,” said the grocer—to which Sara tartly replied, “Not at all. A big man like you calling things Cupid Chips!”
In self-defense they spent as much time as possible in the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles (“It saves our lives, that place,” said Gerald) and commiserated with a group of kindred spirits who helped them “cut the grease of Marion Davies and Mary Pickford”: Edmund Wilson, who was writing a novel in a borrowed Santa Barbara beach house; Bob Benchley, who arrived in December to do three short movies for Twentieth Century-Fox; and Dorothy Parker, who was trying to make money writing scripts at MGM. Parker was so starved for company at the studio that she had put up a sign saying “Men’s Room” on her office door—but perhaps no company at all was preferable to the company of the director who boasted to her that he owned “a $150,000 liberry with a first edition of Edith St. Vincent Millay.”