by Amanda Vaill
That they did have a feeling about it, Ernest believed, stemmed from Scott’s melding of Sara’s and Gerald’s histories with Zelda’s and his own—Nicole’s madness, Dick’s drinking and brawling. What he implied—and what later readers have generally believed—was that Fitzgerald used the Murphys as models only for the glamorous parts of Nicole and Dick; that the wounded or wayward aspects of them were inspired by Zelda and Scott himself. And that this combination of disparate characters violated the integrity of his novel.
But Sara knew, and Gerald knew, how much else came from their own lives—not only as they were, but as they might have been. It was this airing of truths she could barely admit, or possibilities she couldn’t bear to imagine, that frightened Sara. How could she stand to read about Nicole, who shared so many of her characteristics and secret thoughts, leaving her husband for a dark, swashbuckling man who, like Ernest, “look[s] like all the adventurers in the movies”? Sara loved Ernest, even felt the pull of his sexual attraction, but the idea that she would betray her husband with him would have both scared and repelled her. And how could she endure the novel’s ending, in which the ruined Dick, stripped of his vocation and his family, about to leave forever the world he was once so happy in, makes a papal cross over the beach the way Gerald used to “say Mass” over his cocktails? The implications were too much for her, and it was a long time before she could be civil to Scott again.
That spring she sent him the kind of epistolary dressing-down she so often let him have when she was angry:
Dear Scott:—
We were sorry not to see you again—but it seemed, under the circumstances better not to—
Please don’t think that Zelda’s condition is not very near to our hearts—. . . and that all your misfortunes are not, in part, ours too—. . . We have no doubts of the loyalty of your affections (& we hope you haven’t of ours)—but consideration for other people’s feelings, opinions or even time is Completely left out of your makeup—I have always told you you haven’t the faintest idea what anybody but yourself is like—. . . You don’t even know what Zelda or Scottie are like—in spite of your love for them. It seemed to us the other night (Gerald too)—that all you thought and felt about them was in terms of yourself—the same holds good of your feelings for your friends. . . .
Please, please let us know Zelda’s news. . . . I think of her all the time—. . .
When Sara wrote this letter Zelda was back in Baltimore, at the Sheppard-Pratt sanatorium. She had been getting more and more unstable all spring, possibly as a result of reading the serialization of Tender Is the Night, with its liberal borrowings from her own correspondence, and at the beginning of March had been admitted to the Craig House sanatorium in Beacon, New York. She seemed to be improving; then, in April, she had another breakdown and returned to Sheppard-Pratt.
While she was at Craig House, however, there was a one-woman show of her paintings at Cary Ross’s gallery in New York. Zelda had painted for years as an avocation—mainly drawings and elaborate paper dolls for Scottie—but since her illness she had produced a substantial number of works in oil and gouache. They were, for the most part, strange, distorted images of the human figure, painted in vivid colors, something like Reginald Marsh on acid, or floral still lifes reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe. But they had great expressive power, and Scott, hoping to encourage her, had arranged this exhibition. It was covered by Time and The New Yorker and the New York Post; but the tone of their notices had the dusty sound of history: “Jazz Age Priestess Brings Forth Paintings”; “Paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald.”
Just before Sara went to Key West she and Gerald went to see the pictures, and Sara bought one—the only oil, in fact, to sell. Time described Chinese Theatre as “a gnarled mass of acrobats with an indicated audience for background.” Sara paid $200 for it, the largest sum Cary Ross took in. Gerald seemed almost revolted by the picture: “Those monstrous, hideous men,” he said later, “all red with swollen, intertwining legs. They were obscene—I don’t mean sexually. . . . they were figures out of a nightmare, monstrous and morbid.” Anything further from his own cool precision, his covert, almost hermetic iconography, would have been hard to imagine—and Zelda, with that intuitive flash of sympathy that had so often characterized their friendship, understood. “I am going to paint a picture for the Murphys and they can choose,” she wrote to Scott, “as those acrobats seem, somehow, singularly inappropriate to them and I would like them to have one they liked. Maybe they aren’t like I think they are but I don’t see why they would like that Buddhistic suspension of mass and form and I will try to paint some mood that their garden has conveyed.”
There’s no evidence that she ever did offer them an alternative, but she painted a still life that might have been intended for one: Mediterranean Midi, an undated oil of two wineglasses, a decanter, and fruit on a white table, shaded by a huge tree, with a view of the sea in the background. The picture is both precise and luminous, suffused with the golden light of Provence (the Midi) at noon (midi). And the glasses, globular and iridescent, bear a certain resemblance to the Venetian goblets that Scott had pitched over the wall at Villa America a seeming lifetime ago.
During that spring of 1934 Gerald and Sara gave a small dinner party for Ernest Hemingway, who happened to be in town, at the apartment to which they’d recently moved at 1 Beekman Place, on the East River. The other guests were Dottie Parker and her new young man, a heart-stoppingly handsome actor and writer eleven years her junior named Alan Campbell, and John O’Hara, whose novel Appointment in Samarra was just then making a sensation for its brutally unpleasant portrait of contemporary American life.
O’Hara was a journalist and screenwriter who had been taken up by their friend Adèle Lovett, the wife of Averell Harriman’s partner and Archie MacLeish’s Harvard Law classmate Robert Lovett; and although he was eager to break into the circles the Lovetts and Murphys moved in, he was defensive about his lack of background. (The joke was that his friends were getting together a collection to send him to Princeton.) As a newcomer to the Murphys’, he felt prickly in their presence; the small talk and funny-names games that Gerald liked to play with Dottie, and which Alan Campbell so gladly fell in with, left him cold. Ernest was late, and Dottie had made the mistake of bringing with her her two new Bedlington terriers, replacements for the much mourned Robinson, who got as restless as O’Hara, with predictable results: “I had the pleasure,” O’Hara wrote to Ernest afterward, “of watching first one dog, then another taking a squirt on Mrs. Murphy’s expensive rugs.” Mrs. Murphy, of course, didn’t care. But somehow Mr. O’Hara never quite caught on with her.
Not long after this evening Gerald and Sara got good news: Patrick’s doctors felt him strong enough to go to France that summer, where the Murphys would stay at the villa and go cruising on the Weatherbird with the Myerses; if all continued well in the fall he could go off to the Harvey School in Hawthorne, where Baoth had transferred that year, and resume his interrupted life as a healthy boy. After nearly five years of holding their breath, the Murphys must suddenly have felt that they could exhale cautiously. The only difficulties bedeviling them at the moment were the struggles of the Mark Cross Company and Hoytie Wiborg’s recently announced conviction that Sara’s purchase of the Dunes had been only a loan, secured by the property, which she now wanted assurance of repossessing. However, as Mark Cross was in Miss Ramsgate’s hands and not Gerald’s, and as Hoytie would surely come to her senses after talking to the family’s lawyer, there didn’t seem much point in worrying about either of these problems.
So they said their good-byes and packed their innumerable trunks for a June 9 departure on the Conte di Savoia. Just before they sailed they received two telegrams. One was from Dottie Parker: “THIS IS TO REPORT ARRIVAL IN NEWCASTLE (PENNSYLVANIA) OF FIRST BEDLINGTON TERRIERS TO CROSS CONTINENT IN OPEN FORD. MANY NATIVES NOTE RESEMBLANCES TO SHEEP. COULDN’T SAY GOODBYE AND CAN’T NOW BUT GOOD LUCK DARLING MURPHYS AND PL
EASE HURRY BACK AND ALL LOVE.”
The other was from Hoytie. “YOU WILL NOT HAVE A LUCKY JOURNEY FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE IN BREAKING FATHER’S PLANS FOR US. ALL HIS REPROACHES WILL BE WITH YOU.” She had signed it with only her initial, “H.”
19
“We try to be like what you want us to be”
IN THE HOME MOVIES they filmed that summer the sun is always shining. The wind bellies out the sails of the Weatherbird and flutters the flag Gerald designed for it, which Picasso so admired, a stylized eye in black, white, and red on a yellow ground that appears to wink as it waves. Sara squints into the sunlight or lifts her glass to toast the company. The boys, in striped jerseys that match the crew’s, shinny up and down the masts—Baoth sturdy and strong, Patrick wiry and quick—or have toe-wrestling matches with their bare feet, or swim naked in the crystalline water. Honoria, looking more like a Renoir than ever, smiles demurely from beneath her hat brim or giggles with her friend Fanny. Gerald, his white shirt open to the waist of his white trousers, a white kerchief around his neck and a white slouch hat on his head, points toward some wonderful destination.
In one sequence Baoth has stuffed something into the front of his jersey to give him a voluptuous, Mae West profile, which he exhibits proudly to the camera; in another some of the sailors put him into a canvas bag, like the count of Monte Cristo, and dunk him in the ocean. He emerges laughing moments later. In still others Patrick deftly receives the American flag when it’s taken in at day’s end, folding it carefully into a regulation triangle, or sits with his fishing rod in hand, intently waiting for a bite. The girls show off their swimming strokes and clamber up the floating stairs at the side of the boat. The camera pans slowly along the rocky coastline, past calanques and fortresses and picturesque fishing ports, or lingers lovingly on the sleek hull of the Weatherbird itself, low and dark in the water.
The country is beautiful: “260 kilometres of wheat, sun, mules, threshing, oxen drawing, hats, Tio Pepe,—well, you know,” writes Gerald on a postcard (with a little drawing of a hat) to Pauline and Ernest Hemingway. And “the boat (& the sea) were never so nice (or so blue),” adds Sara. It is a perfect summer.
Léger—bringing prints of Ballet mécanique and Entr’acte to screen—met them when they reached Gibraltar on the Conte di Savoia. He had sailed from Antibes with Vladimir and the crew, and as a thank-you to the Murphys he had made them a book of watercolors to commemorate his voyage, signing it, “A Sara à Gerald, leur mousse très dévoué” (“To Sara, to Gerald, their very devoted cabin boy”). He had reason for his devotion, for in addition to the cruise and the trip he had made to America in 1931 under their auspices, they had been sending him numerous “small checks” over the past year to help him out.
Villa America was lovelier than ever. Gerald (as he had done with Sara and Ellen Barry years ago) took Honoria and Fanny to Madame Vachon’s fashionable boutique in St.-Tropez to outfit them with dresses and crocheted sandals, scooping up other pretty things by the dozen to take home as presents. One evening he and Sara accompanied the girls to the casino in Juan-les-Pins for dinner and dancing, an outing for which Sara made sure they were both wearing stockings. She herself—she told them—had once been denied admission to the Monte Carlo casino because she was bare-legged; but she’d outwitted the fashion police of the Société de Bains de Mer by going outside, where she resourcefully pulled a brown eye pencil from her evening bag and drew a line down the backs of her legs to look like a seam. No such ruse was required on this occasion, though; and inside the casino Gerald swept them around the floor, just like the dancer who was making such a sensation in the movie of Cole Porter’s Gay Divorcee, Fred Astaire. Fanny Myers, a dark young beauty of considerable height who was wearing her very first evening dress, was horribly self-conscious to discover that her adolescent growth spurt (and her new high heels) had made her slightly taller than Gerald. In an effort to minimize the difference she slouched down when he led her onto the dance floor, but Gerald admonished her. “Stand up straight,” he told her. “I know I’ll be shorter than you, but you will look more beautiful if you stand tall.”
The Murphys sailed back to New York on the Aquitania the first week of September, and went directly to Hook Pond to get the children ready for school. There were new shoes to buy, routine doctor’s and dentist’s visits to make, trunks to pack—the familiar parental rituals of autumn. Meanwhile the children tried to catch the remnants of summer and make them last. One afternoon Baoth and Honoria were lying on the beach after swimming when Gerald came over the dune and walked slowly down to them. Honoria knew at once that something was wrong. “Children,” Gerald said, “I have some bad news for you. Patrick has had a rechute [relapse].”
A routine checkup had revealed a spot on Patrick’s “good” lung, the one he had been “living on,” in Gerald’s parlance. Almost immediately there followed the dreaded sequence of fever, loss of appetite, and difficulty breathing. Instead of going off to the Harvey School as he had dreamed of doing, Patrick was admitted to Doctor’s Hospital on East End Avenue in New York, where he was confined to bed and only occasionally allowed to sit up in order to use his beloved etching tools or paints. Honoria came to visit him on weekends home from her new school, Rosemary Hall, in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was struck by his pallor as he lay against the white pillows. He had always been a delicate-looking child, but now he seemed practically transparent.
“Isn’t it horrid?” wrote Sara to Ernest and Pauline: “And what a fool’s paradise it is ever to think you have won a victory over the White plague!!—Well, he is going to be alright ultimately, & all our fighting blood is up again . . . but at times it does seem too much,—Especially as he himself is so decent about it all.” The rest of the letter is cheery and gossipy; only in the hastily scrawled postscript did she let her anguish show. Under the message “Dow dow sends best love,” she wrote a single line, without closing punctuation: “I wish I knew some more words”
Sara’s fighting blood didn’t fool any of the Murphys’ friends, who saw—even if the Murphys could not bring themselves to admit—the seriousness of Patrick’s condition. Esther Murphy Strachey confided to a friend that “the doctors have told Gerald he cannot live through the summer.” Alice Lee Myers and Katy Dos Passos wrote to express their concern; and Ernest managed to go them one better by offering to send “either a Grants Gazelle or an Impalla” head to Patrick—whichever he’d like—They are really no trouble—(housebroken) very clean and light and quite beautiful to look at when you’re in bed—Impalla is the most beautiful I think and I have a record one he would like. . . . Tell Patrick they are the ones that float in the air when they jump and jump over each others backs.”
But it was Archie MacLeish who most perceptively, and poignantly, caught the meaning of what was happening to his friends, and to his friends’ son. He wrote Patrick a letter, detailed and enthralling, about finding an injured animal in the leaves:
I thought as I carried it that it was very hot in my hand but then I thought too that small animals always feel hot to us. When I came to the kitchen under the bright light over the sink I saw what it was . . . a young flying squirrel. . . . I . . . went back into the woods and put it into the bole of a great maple covered with leaves. It lay still there. All night under the brilliant moon I thought of it there and wondered about it. Somehow it had fallen and been hurt or perhaps some hunter had hit it. Its fur was softer than any squirrel. My love to you.
The young animal, flightless now, beautiful and vulnerable, tore at his heart.
In addition to the terrible anxiety they faced because of Patrick’s illness, Gerald and Sara now had the additional burden of financial worries caused by renewed medical expenses and by a crisis within the Mark Cross Company. By the autumn of 1934 the Depression had made serious inroads in sales of the luxury goods for which Mark Cross was known: matched sets of luggage, from steamer trunks to handgrips, were not in great demand if the prospective purchasers could no longer af
ford the steamer tickets and grand hotels that went with them; nor were sumptuously outfitted picnic hampers or engraved thermoses or noncrushable cigar cases for the finest Havanas. Worse, in her role as president, Lillian Ramsgate had spent down the company’s capital so that by the beginning of 1934 Mark Cross stood on the brink of bankruptcy. The other tenants at 37th Street and Fifth Avenue had already gone under and defaulted, leaving Mark Cross solely responsible for payments of $100,000 yearly to the landlord, Robert Walton Goelet.
Miss Ramsgate decided that the only course was to liquidate the company, and called a meeting of the board of directors in December. Gerald had remained a director even after his resignation as vice president, and his approval was necessary for Miss Ramsgate’s plan; she told him if he didn’t attend the meeting she would resign. He didn’t, and she did. And now the company he had run away from in 1919 was his responsibility.
On December 19 Gerald became president of Mark Cross. In a speech to the employees he said that “I didn’t know one thing about the business but it was all my sister and I had to live on, and so I would have to make a go of it.” Not strictly true, perhaps, but close enough. His first act was to allow Goelet to buy fifty percent of the company as compensation for unpaid rent; his next was to move the business to smaller but more fashionable quarters on Fifth Avenue and 52d Street. He set about a stringent recovery program with the help of a younger Yale man named Ward Cheney, who joined the company as chief financial officer, and he began to redesign the store and its merchandise to bring it into line with market demand. He hired Tomi Parzinger, a chic leather-goods designer, to help give the accessories a more contemporary look; and he retained the services of Alice Lee Myers (whose eye he trusted as he did his own and Sara’s) to seek out elegant European household goods. He even started a line of men’s colognes—there was one called “Cross Country” and another, with a cuir de Russie base, called “Leather.”