by Amanda Vaill
At first—even though Sara had started to refer to their years in Paris and Antibes as “the era”—they didn’t see the chapter as finally ended. Their closest friends—the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Dos Passoses, the MacLeishes, Dottie Parker—were all in America, and to maintain those friendships in their customary way meant doing so on American soil. “Some day we’ll all be together again,” Gerald had written Archie in February; and their voyage that July fulfilled that promise.
Almost immediately, however, they were reminded of at least one of the reasons they had left America in the first place. Hoytie met them at the dock and, before they were through customs, she began filling them in on her financial and legal vicissitudes. As she’d already informed them, she’d “lost [her] shirt in the stock market,” and in addition had invested heavily and unsuccessfully in New York City real estate, attempting to buy and develop a large property at Park Avenue and 72d Street. Her stock market losses had left her unable to meet the payments, and she had other obligations as well. Like many another developer before and since, she thought she could seek refuge in personal bankruptcy. But to do so she had to protect, or dispose of, her share of the East Hampton property she had inherited from Frank Wiborg. In October she had bullied Frank’s elderly sister, Aunt Mame, into buying all twenty-seven oceanfront acres, plus the house, for a token $1. Then she’d set up a shell corporation to receive the property and had Aunt Mame transfer the deed to it.
Now, however, she owed money to the government for unpaid taxes. The bank had foreclosed on her 72d Street property; and to avoid liens and creditors she was, as Sara put it, “living here and there under assumed names.” Borrowing to cover her obligations wouldn’t help; she needed a large infusion of cash into her shell corporation, called Trex, where her creditors couldn’t get at it, but she could draw on it for her needs. What she proposed was that someone should buy the East Hampton property from Trex and pay the money, in cash, into that account; but in July 1932 the country was sliding toward the deepest part of the Depression, and the amount she needed, $25,000, was serious money. She had already approached friends and family members, such as Sara Sherman Mitchell and her husband, Ledyard, and Olga and Sidney Fish, and they had all turned her down: now she turned to Sara and Gerald.
It was the same old story: Hoytie and her “unsound, headstrong” behavior, as Sara described it, “always a problem to the family.” Sara had run away from it before, but it had caught up with her. This time sentiment made her vulnerable: her parents had loved the Dunes, and her children did also. And wouldn’t it be better, she rationalized, to save Hoytie from disaster now instead of having to bail her out later, without any property to show for it? So Sara called nice Mr. Copley Amory at Loomis-Sayles in Boston and had him sell some of her stock (at a terrific loss, of course) and paid Hoytie $22,500 in cash, with another $2,500 check to the government for taxes due on the property, and she lent Hoytie an additional $1,000.
So now the Murphys owned a semistaffed villa on two and a quarter acres in Antibes, which they hoped vaguely to sell but couldn’t seem to; a twenty-seven-meter schooner requiring a crew of five; and a cottage, twenty acres, and an enormous, unheatable mansion on the dunes at East Hampton. All this, along with Patrick’s medical bills and the other children’s tuitions and other expenses, was in the debit column. On the credit side were Sara’s capital (already reduced in value by the fall in stock prices) and the expectation of income from a struggling Mark Cross Company. Somehow, by renting the Dunes and some of the Antibes property, they managed to offset some of the damage, but the next years would be trying ones for them financially.
They were, of course, difficult years for everyone, and the Murphys’ circle of friends was no exception. Archie MacLeish’s patrimony, his stock in the Carson Pirie Scott Company, had stopped paying dividends, and Archie was working as a journalist at Fortune to pay the bills; Dick Myers lost his job at the Paris bureau of Ladies’ Home Journal and had trouble finding a new one; John Dos Passos was making little from his writing and was suffering from health problems, particularly rheumatic fever. Worst off were the Fitzgeralds, who had come back to the United States soon after their stay with the Murphys in Bad Aussee. They had settled in Alabama, near Zelda’s family, but in February 1932 Zelda had had a relapse and had been hospitalized at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. Scott had found a house in the vicinity, named, with cruel irony, La Paix, and once Zelda regained sufficient composure to become an outpatient she moved in with Scott and Scottie. But Scott—beset by Zelda’s heavy medical expenses, the cost of constant relocation, and his own inability to finish his long-overdue novel—had begun to drink heavily again and was himself seeing a psychiatrist at Phipps.
Not surprisingly, he was in only perfunctory touch with the Murphys that summer, but other friends helped them pick up some of the threads of the past: John and Katy Dos Passos, whom they hadn’t seen since that grim Christmas in Switzerland, came to stay at Hook Pond Cottage, as did the MacLeishes, and Dottie Parker was a frequent guest on weekends. And at the close of summer they went to stay with Ernest and Pauline Hemingway at a hunting and fishing ranch that Ernest had discovered, the L Bar T, located in southwestern Montana, not far from Yellowstone Park.
Although Patrick had to remain behind with Miss Stewart, the older children “adore[d] it,” Gerald reported to Archie MacLeish. “Ernest [was] an angel about arranging their lives.” They rode all day through the glorious mountains, and Ernest took Honoria fishing. He overcame her squeamishness at killing the trout she caught by showing her its lacy fins and beautiful gills; she was mesmerized, and proud to have “performed well for Ernest.”
Sara and Gerald, on the other hand, had mixed feelings about the visit. They were both delighted to see Ernest and Pauline again, and Sara enjoyed riding over the “lovely trails” and “com[ing] back at night [to] have those Dainties Pauline used to whip up with the moon cocktails.” But other aspects of their stay were less delightful. It was the custom of the owner, Olive Nordquist, to take the game and fish caught by the guests and turn it into the equivalent of Spam, flouring it and frying it and then packing it in Mason jars to steam for three hours—and the Murphys’ reactions were to be expected. Sara, who had an instinctive sense of how far she could go with Ernest, dared to make fun openly of the first course one evening: a pillow of iceberg lettuce with canned fruit salad plopped over it, topped by a dollop of mayonnaise and a maraschino cherry. Ernest told her it was “good for her.” Gerald kept his feelings about the ranch-killed beef (“tasteless, without variety—and indifferently cooked”) and the fresh trout (“neutralized”) to himself, but he was troubled by what he thought of as a lack of authenticity about the whole experience, which was light-years away from the thrill of discovery he had felt with Ernest in Pamplona. “I suspect,” he confided to Archie MacLeish, “that just as the vastness of our industry and amassed fortunes in the East seems to have dulled our people spiritually,—so here in the West the reaction of the people to their vast and spectacular Natural surroundings and resources is not as fine as one would expect.”
But Ernest had bought into this Western mythology—he had given one of the “indifferent” colts bred on the ranch to Pauline with the sort of ceremony befitting the bestowal of a purebred Arabian by a royal sheik—and Gerald could no longer talk to him about things that were hitched up to the universe. He had noticed a change in his old friend. “I find him more mellowed, amenable, and far more charitable and philosophical than before,—more patient also,” he wrote Archie. But that was because “he is never difficult with the people he does not like, the people he does not take seriously. He has crossed swords with Sara and Ada, with you, with Dorothy (whom he likes), with Dos. But he will never do it with me, [and] there has been no real issue with Don or with Scott whom he no longer respects.”
Ernest still loved Sara, but Gerald was increasingly closed out. In the photographs Sara saved fr
om those three weeks, Ernest is shown with his arm around Sara, or around Pauline, but Gerald stands apart.
That fall Baoth was enrolled in the Fountain Valley School in Colorado, where Sara and Gerald dropped him off before returning east, and Honoria also went away to boarding school, to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, Connecticut, where the Pickman girls, Jane and Daisy, were also students. Despite Gerald’s still profound mistrust of Catholicism and his and Sara’s dislike of the boarding school environment most of their class thought essential to a proper upbringing, they recognized Honoria’s need for regular study and the companionship of children her own age. Gerald and Sara and Patrick, who was still delicate, would divide their time between Hook Pond Cottage and a house they had rented in the rural Westchester village of Bedford. It was about an hour’s journey by train from New York and only a short distance from a cottage the Barrys owned—and were currently lending to the Myerses—in nearby Mount Kisco.
After a brief trip to Paris in November with Dottie Parker, whom they were trying to console for the sudden death of her little dachshund, Robinson, Gerald and Sara spent Christmas in Conway, Massachusetts, with the MacLeishes. It was a holiday from a Currier and Ives print: Baoth and Patrick and Honoria sledded and skied with the MacLeish children, Archie put up clay pigeons for the boys to shoot at, and everyone went for a ride in a horse-drawn sleigh. Ada and Sara cooked “a goose with all its accessories,” giblet sauce and sweet potatoes, and Gerald ransacked the 1916 Manhattan Club cellar he had inherited from his father for the very best wines and liqueurs. They laughed and sang and generally carried on; as Archie wrote to John Peale Bishop, the Murphys’ reappearance in his and Ada’s lives “restored] a few of the geodetic points of our lost topography.”
The Murphys were trying to retrieve some of their own lost topography. That winter Gerald had surgery for a bony growth in his sinus cavity, a “nasty mean operation” from which “he suffered agonies,” reported Richard Myers to Alice Lee, who was in Paris. Although “rather rickety and looking too much like the Phantom of Crestwood for Sara’s comfort,” he wasn’t so consumed by his own distress that he couldn’t spare a thought for the Myerses, who were struggling financially. He and Sara wrote them a check for $3,000, with the promise of more if need be. By springtime Gerald was recovered enough for the Murphys to make two more trips to Europe: in March they cruised the Mediterranean with the MacLeishes, and in June they sailed around the coast of Spain with John and Katy Dos Passos. The Dos Passoses, who were living in Katy’s house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, had had their own health emergencies that winter: Katy had been suffering from persistent tonsillitis, and Dos, more seriously, had had another bout of rheumatic fever. Gerald had sent him $300, “a chip of a little legacy that mother left me and which I’d like you to use for something you shouldn’t”; he and Sara paid for Dos and Katy’s steamer tickets to Europe as well.
Dos Passos had recently completed a group of three plays—The Garbageman, Airways, Inc., and Fortune Heights—and he and Gerald were thinking about trying to produce one of them. Although nothing came of this effort, Gerald clearly wanted to reconnect with the world of art and artists he had once moved in so confidently; and in the spring of 1934 he had a chance. Archie MacLeish had been approached to do a ballet libretto by a Russian émigré composer named Nicholas Nabokov who was desperate to make a living in America and saw a collaboration with a prizewinning poet (MacLeish had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize that spring for Conquistador) as a meal ticket. Although MacLeish had no experience with such a project, Nabokov pressed him to come up with a story line; and MacLeish thought of some research he’d been doing for Fortune about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. He could, he thought, carve a good story out of that, but he realized that “Nick had no idea about America. He was here just because he had to get out of Europe [and] he didn’t know where to turn.” Remembering that Gerald Murphy had an unparalleled collection not just of Negro spirituals, but also of nineteenth-century American sheet music, MacLeish sent Nabokov to Gerald. “Gerald’s collection was invaluable to him,” MacLeish remembered, “and he used that music, which is incredibly exciting and foot-twitching,” as the basis of his score.
Gerald’s involvement didn’t end there. He also helped to put together the financing that made production possible. Nabokov had approached Colonel Vassily de Basil, a “white Russian crook” (as Archie described him) who had taken over the remnants of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, about mounting the ballet. As choreographer, Nabokov proposed Leonide Massine, later to achieve celluloid fame as the warped ballet master in the film The Red Shoes. But the wily de Basil took on no projects without backers: so Sara Murphy, Hoytie Wiborg, Lila Luce (the wife of MacLeish’s employer, Henry Luce), and several others wrote him checks for $1,000 apiece, with the promise of more money from solicitations by Esther Murphy Strachey. It felt a little as if the sweat-equity philanthropy of the old Diaghilev days had returned. In March, after a song recital by Ada MacLeish, Gerald and Sara celebrated by giving a dinner party to which they invited Nicholas Nabokov, the Barrys, the Myerses, the Stephen Vincent Benéts, Aaron Copland, and Virgil Thomson, who distinguished himself by speaking to no one, standing at the buffet table and devouring an entire serving bowl full of strawberries and cream, and leaving immediately afterward.
In early April the ballet, now called Union Pacific, opened at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia to huge acclaim, and it played to packed houses in New York, Chicago, Paris, and London that spring and summer. “What carried that ballet,” said Archie years afterward, “was not my idea and not the dancing of the ballerinas of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, it was Gerald’s music.” But Gerald’s name and contribution were nowhere noted on the program. Nor were Sara, Hoytie, Mrs. Luce, or the other investors ever repaid by de Basil, even though Hoytie, who still thought of herself as a businesswoman, had supposedly engineered an agreement that would have paid them out of the first night’s proceeds. The whole experience seems to have precipitated another of Gerald and Archie’s fallings-out. “Archie has hurt him very deeply,” commented Alice Lee Myers later, “and it seems too bad for that long devotion to be dissipated—however, Gerald’s reaction is based on emotion and no one can change that.” Archie, for his part, was aware of the alienation Gerald felt: “He’s a pretty lonely guy you know,” he wrote to a mutual friend that summer. “He knows it now.”
In April, though, Gerald was still wrapped up in the business of Union Pacific’s premiere, and so decided not to accompany Sara on the first of what would become nearly annual visits to the Hemingways in Key West. For obvious reasons Archie didn’t go, either, although Ada did. She and Sara stayed with John and Katy Dos Passos in their rented house on Waddell Avenue, thus earning the nickname the “Waddell Girls.”
The weather in Key West was bad, but the Waddell Girls made light of it: they went fishing with the Dosses and Ernest and Pauline and concocted lime juice cocktails and played Sara’s records. Ada and Sara and Ernest got tight and danced after dinner in the Hemingways’ living room, where the kudu and impala heads he had shot on his African safari that winter stared down at them. Afterward Ernest sent Gerald an oddly polite note enclosing some money he owed: “It was lovely having Sara here,” he said, “but we missed you very much. You would like it I think.” To Sara he wrote rather differently: “Dearest Sara,” he began: “I love you very much, Madam, not like in Scott’s Christmas tree ornament novels but the way it is on boats where Scott would be sea-sick.”
The “Christmas tree ornament novel” was Tender Is the Night, which had been appearing in Scribner’s Magazine in installments, the last of which came out while Sara was in Florida. The book itself was published in April, and Hemingway’s sideways shot at its author is an indication that it had been an item of table talk in Key West. Certainly Sara was both outraged and shaken by Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the Divers and their world: more than twenty-five years later she couldn’t speak of it withou
t indignation. But was she angry because Fitzgerald had missed the mark—or because he had come too close?
There were obvious parallels between Fitzgerald’s characters and his friends, evident to anyone who knew the Murphys: the seductive figure of Nicole Diver on the beach with “her bathing suit . . . pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, [shining] in the sun”; the description of Dick Diver “mov[ing] gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel” from the beach; the picture of the villa and its spacious gardens; the conversations and witticisms that Fitzgerald had reproduced; the portrait of Baby Warren, Nicole’s sister, “a tall, fine-looking woman” with Hoytie Wiborg’s imperiousness. But none of this should have upset Sara. After all, she hadn’t been upset by Picasso’s pictures of her wearing nothing but her pearls on La Garoupe. What bothered her?
Ernest, who had told Gerald that “Scotts book, I’m sorry, is not good,” finally wrote to Scott in May to say, “I liked it and I didn’t like it.” The problem, he maintained, was that
It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald. . . . Then you started fooling with them, making them come from things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that, Scott . . . You can take you or me or Pauline or Hadley or Sara or Gerald but you have to keep them the same and you can only make them do what they would do. . . . You could write a fine book about Gerald and Sara for instance if you knew enough about them and they would not have any feeling, except passing, if it were true.