Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story

by Amanda Vaill

  Although later critical reaction was mixed, the ballet scored an enormous hit with the audience. There was tumultuous applause: Rodgers and Platt came on stage to take six curtain calls. Gerald, however, was left in his seat. He and Platt, who left the Ballet Russe soon after for a career on Broadway, continued their friendship into the 1940s; but Gerald never tried his hand at the ballet, or indeed at any art form, again.

  In September, shortly after Honoria and Sara returned from Paris, Gerald received a disturbing telegram: “WAS TAKEN ILL OUT HERE LAST APRIL AND CONFINED TO BED FIVE MONTHS AND NOW UP AND WORKING BUT COMPLETELY CLEANED OUT FINANCIALLY WANT DESPERATELY TO CONTINUE DAUGHTER AT VASSAR CAN YOU LEND 360 DOLLARS FOR ONE MONTH IF THIS IS POSSIBLE PLEASE WIRE ME 5521 AMESTOY AVENUE ENCINO CALIF = SCOTT FITZGERALD.”

  Naturally the answer was yes; and Fitzgerald’s gratitude, when he was able to write, was profound, if slightly less than candid. “What a strange thing that after asking every other concievable [sic] favor of you at one time or another I should be driven to turn to you for money!” he said. “The story is too foolish, too dreary to go into.” Or, he didn’t say, too embarrassing. His screenwriting contract at MGM had been terminated the previous December, and when Walter Wanger hired him to write a script about the Dartmouth Winter Carnival with Budd Schulberg, he had gone on a week-long bender while on location in New Hampshire: so he was fired from that job, too. He had been unable to find work and although he told his agent Harold Ober and his editor Maxwell Perkins that he had a number of fiction projects in mind, the entire year had passed in a haze of alcohol—which in his letter to the Murphys was described as “a temperature of 102°”—and no novels or saleable stories resulted. Finally Ober had refused to advance him any more money, and Fitzgerald had been desperate. Gerald’s loan, he said, “saved me—Scottie and me—in spite of our small deserts. I don’t think I could have asked anyone else & kept what pride it is necessary to keep.”

  Gerald never knew—and probably wouldn’t have cared—that Scott did ask someone else: his old Minnesota friend C. O. Kalman, in a telegram that duplicated the wording in Gerald’s. Kalman was in the hospital, though, and couldn’t reply, as Gerald did: “Please don’t keep us ignorant ever again. Please take care of yourself. Please don’t worry about the money. If you knew how fond we are of you I think you’d believe this. One is fond of so few people.” Although he suspected Fitzgerald was dramatizing his ailments and covering up for his drinking—“I do not like to feel that you consider yrself ill. I can’t believe you are,” he said later—it didn’t really matter. As Sara had told Scott in 1935, “I don’t think the world is a very nice place—And all there seems to be left to do is to make the best of it while we are here, & be VERY grateful for one’s friends—because they are the best there is, & make up for many another thing that is lacking.”

  The friends were widely scattered now, many battered by the events of the past few years. In May 1939 Archie MacLeish had been offered the post of Librarian of Congress. Because it would seriously interfere with his poetry, wrote Gerald to Woollcott, “He was against accepting so were we his doing so.” But President Roosevelt persuaded him to say yes. Commented Gerald: “4,000 volumes! (and all sons of bitches) He’ll never get thro’ his dusting mornings.” Gerald had traveled with the Dos Passoses to Conway for a farewell clambake while Sara was in Europe, an occasion that imprinted itself indelibly on the memory of his godson Peter, now rechristened William. It was an enormous alfresco feast, with bonfires and music and laughter, and Gerald had brought a red, white, and blue beribboned jeroboam of champagne. Even the children partook. “We ate a very great deal,” says William MacLeish, “and I remember going to sleep with my head on my pa’s chest, and he went to sleep, and we all just snored for about an hour.”

  In October, Sara and Gerald went with Dottie Parker and Alan Campbell to see the opening of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, in which an arrogant, acid-tongued, but perversely lovable world-famous lecturer named Sheridan Whiteside—who seemed to Gerald only a pale simulacrum of Alec Woollcott—is stranded by a broken leg in the home of his small-town Ohio hosts. Monty Woolley, playing Whiteside in only his third Broadway appearance, made a huge personal triumph; but the somewhat collegiate humor that had amused Gerald in the days when he and Woolley played “stomach touch” in Antibes no longer seemed terribly funny. “The play depressed me,” he wrote to Woollcott afterward; “it doesn’t even succeed in being incisive. . . . I wonder if any of all those people you know know what you’re like. I’m not saying I do,—but I am saying that the play showed me (by what it lacks essentially) how fond I am of you.”

  Woollcott didn’t seem to share Gerald’s rather dour opinion, and in the spring consented to star (as “himself”) in the West Coast touring company of the play. But during one performance he suffered a severe heart attack; after spending time in a California hospital he returned to Neshobe, where he recovered slowly. This latest intimation of mortality, along with the death of Sara’s adored Puppy (“the last tie to the boys”), shook Gerald badly. In his dreams, night after night, the boys were dying over and over again, first Baoth, then Patrick. “Will one’s heart never touch bottom?” he asked Woollcott. “Is there a point beyond which impotent rage can carry you? By noon of every day the brain has reached saturation.” He could no longer share these feelings with Sara; she was too wounded herself to bear his losses too. And so he turned to Woollcott. “I probably shouldn’t have written this letter,” he said, “but I wanted to talk to you.”

  He and Sara were both concerned with helping Pauline Hemingway weather the irretrievable wreck of her marriage. During the previous autumn, when she was living in New York, Gerald had done his best to act as a surrogate father to her boys, buying Patrick and Gregory the puppy they craved and taking Bumby, who was now at boarding school, to grown-up treats like lunch at Gallagher’s Steak House or the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis, followed by a matinee—John Hemingway remembers a performance of the musical extravaganza Hellzapoppin with particular enthusiasm. Back in Key West that spring of 1940, though, Pauline seemed, Gerald reported to Scott Fitzgerald, “forlorn. . . . I guess women who really love have always been.”

  She sent up an SOS to the Murphys—“would like to be a little bitter about the way you haven’t come down here,” was how she put it—and so he and Sara traveled to Florida with the Dos Passoses in the spring. After stopping on the way to see Bea Tolstoy (formerly Stewart) and the Barrys, they took Pauline with them on a tour of the back country that included a moment that only the Murphys could have devised. Their trip coincided with a solar eclipse, and near Kissimmee they stopped to watch it: pulling over to the side of the road, they poured cocktails from a thermos and tuned in the car radio to Carnegie Hall, where the New York Philharmonic was playing Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps. Gravely sipping their drinks to Stravinsky’s throbbing dissonances, they stared upward as darkness covered the earth.

  That summer Pauline went to San Francisco to live, and Sara, trying to hold together the threads of all their old friendships, asked Ernest to come and stay in East Hampton. She signed her letter “Yr old shipmate, Sara.” But she never heard from him. It wasn’t until the following December—after he had married Martha Gellhorn and they had honeymooned in New York without seeing the Murphys—that he replied. “I felt sort of strange about the honeymoon business,” he wrote: “So I didn’t go to see Ruth Allen nor you nor other oldest friends (I have no closer friend than you) because it seemed sort of vulgar. . . . I didn’t want to strain your loyalties although I always marry good wives as you know. But I think you and me felt about the same and I love you the same as always.”

  By the time she got this letter, Sara and Gerald were coping with another loss. In September, Scott Fitzgerald had repaid $150 of the $360 they had sent him to cover Scotties Vassar tuition. He’d been writing a series of stories for Esquire about a failing alcoholic screenwriter called Pat Hobby, and
he had sold his long-ago short story “Babylon Revisited,” in which the little-girl heroine is named Honoria, to the movies. His secretary, Frances Kroll, recalled later that he wanted to repay out of first moneys “the people he spoke of most warmly.” Gerald remonstrated with him that “Yr cheque gave me a turn somehow. I wish we could feel that we’d done you a service instead of making you feel some kind of torment. Please dismiss the thought.” It was their last communication: On December 21 Fitzgerald suffered a fatal heart attack at Sheilah Graham’s apartment in Los Angeles.

  “How cruelly the world needs the beauty of his mind,” lamented Gerald to Woollcott. But only thirty people, including Gerald and Sara and Maxwell Perkins and Harold Ober, came to stand in the rain at his graveside on December 27. Because the Catholic Church considered his books immoral, and he had not received last rites, Fitzgerald was denied a Catholic burial in St. Marys Cemetery alongside his Maryland ancestors; the interment was held at Rockville Union Cemetery with an Episcopal priest officiating. Zelda wasn’t allowed to attend, but her letter to the Murphys afterward was a poignant farewell to the four-pointed star that their friendship had been since 1925: “Those tragicly ecstatic years when the pockets of the world were filled with pleasant surprizes and people still thought of life in terms of their right to a good time are now about to wane,” she wrote. “That he wont be there to arrange nice things and tell us what to do is grievous to envisage.”

  “Poor Scott,” said Ernest to Sara. “No one could ever help Scott but you and Gerald did more than anyone.”

  23

  “One’s very Life seems at stake”

  “WHAT SAD DAYS,” wrote Gerald to Archibald MacLeish in August 1940, when German soldiers were goose-stepping down the Champs-Elysées and sitting in the Deux Magots, putting an end definitively to the world the Murphys and their friends had loved. Now, with the same energy with which they had then painted backdrops for Diaghilev, Gerald and Sara threw themselves into war work: William Allen White’s Emergency Rescue Mission, an organization devoted to obtaining U.S. visas for European artists and intellectuals, “take[s] all our time & $,” Gerald wrote Archie. In addition Sara was acting as a virtual one-woman aid mission, procuring and shipping to Europe nine tons of powdered milk, and she was raising additional money for war relief. Said Gerald: “One’s very Life seems at stake: all one cares for, finally.”

  When the war broke out Stella Campbell had been living in France, most recently in the Murphys’ Ferme des Orangers, unable to return to England because of the quarantine laws that would have imprisoned her beloved Pekingese, Moonbeam. In the spring of 1940 Gerald received news from her nurse-companion, Agnes Claudius, that Stella was in the Pyrenees, ill and destitute. She needed medicine but couldn’t afford it; she had to be hospitalized, but the war had made the local hospital uninhabitable. As they never failed to do when they were needed, the Murphys responded, wiring funds immediately to her and to Claudius; but it was too late. On April 9 came the news that Stella had died. Claudius used the money they had sent for medicines to buy her a burial plot in the Cimetière Urbain at Pau. Sad days indeed.

  One of the Murphys’ strongest links with the Europe of their past remained Léger, who had been characteristically pragmatic and sardonic in the early days of the war, when it seemed as if the declaration were just a formality and, he complained, “Everything goes so slowly!” He urged Gerald to come back to France and start a new line of luggage: “You can do amazing things with ‘German hide’—the ‘Siegfried valise’ or something like that,” he said.

  In the summer, he wrote the Murphys that he had been invited to give the Harrison lectures in art at Yale University, and thus had been granted a visa to the still neutral United States; but he was reluctant to desert his country because “a Frenchman could not do that.” Then, however, the Germans marched into Paris: with half of France under German control and the remainder “self-governed” by the accommodationist Vichy regime, Léger was desperate to get out. He had been in a German prison camp in the last war and had no desire to repeat the experience. To Gerald, a fellow artist, he painted a grim picture of the present and future: “Everything is hard, and will get harder and harder. . . . We know what it is because we’ve already seen it in all its colors—only the colors change. The grays darken—they will deepen to black, broken only by a few rays of light.” Léger saw a terrible inevitability in what had happened. “We have paid a dreadful price for our taste for Impressionism, for the unfinished, the seductive, the charming. Our bourgeois culture hated anything that was too constructed: . . . [it preferred] the inspired sketch, the adorable, lightly-sketched indication. Unfortunately for us Hitler’s tanks aren’t sketches.”

  His next letter to the Murphys described an arduous journey to the south, during which one of his suitcases, containing the bulk of his travel funds, was lost. At Bordeaux there were air raids, and the city’s prominent Jews were fleeing en masse; in the unoccupied zone there were discreet signs posted in the train stations for all trains whose destination lay in the Nazi-occupied north: NO NEGROES, NO JEWS. “They’re whispering in Vichy that Hitler is going to make us a present of all the Jews in the Occupied Zone—and some people say they’re all going to be sent to a colony.” Whatever apologists for America’s neutral stance might say, the sharp-eyed Léger saw what was up; and so, through him, did the Murphys.

  From Marseille, Léger cabled Gerald and Sara to ask them to wire U.S. dollars to his account so he could pay for his passage; Gerald sent them that very day. And when the Murphys heard that Jeanne Léger (who had no visa and had to stay in France) had been dispossessed by German officers occupying the Légers’ Normandy farm and Paris apartment, they gave her shelter at the Villa America, which lay in the unoccupied south. “You have always been ‘my mighty refuge’ in difficult times,” Léger wrote, rather biblically, “and your great friendship pervades every part of my life.”

  These gestures cost the Murphys considerably at a time when they could ill afford it. Poor Copley Amory, their Boston Brahmin man of business, kept up a futile chorus of protest about their expenditures all through the forties, but Gerald would just sniff, “Anyone can live on his income,” and then do exactly as he pleased. Doing as Gerald pleased meant keeping up a certain style—but, perhaps more important, it meant helping friends whenever generosity dictated, or when, as in Légers case, “one’s very Life is at stake.”

  Léger’s letters made the newspaper headlines real, and as the conflict in Europe accelerated from phony war to blitzkrieg with no sign that America would intervene, Gerald grew increasingly unhappy. He went to work against inaction in the best way that he knew how: at the Mark Cross Company, which had an English factory since Patrick Murphy had established it in 1892, and thus had unique ties with beleaguered Britain. During one week in 1941 (he reported to Archie MacLeish) he removed the luxury leather goods from Mark Cross’s Fifth Avenue windows and substituted photographs of where they came from: the blacked-out factory in Walsall, four miles out of Birmingham, and the air-raid shelter that protected the factory workers from German bombs. These displays excited so much comment that he came up with another idea: that of asking his fellow members of the Fifth Avenue Merchants’ Association to join him in creating a week’s worth of windows “calculated to stop the passer-by in his tracks and make him think about what he stands to lose right now” from the advance of fascism.

  The Fifth Avenue merchants declined—they were afraid of offending clients who didn’t care what happened elsewhere as long as they were free to shop—but Gerald went ahead with the plan anyway. For a week Mark Cross’s six windows were each filled with five-foot-high white posters lettered with black type large enough to be read at thirty feet (shades of the Within the Quota backdrop!): On one was Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech (“Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle?”); on another, Thomas Paine’s words about the times that try men’s souls; on another, Daniel Webster�
�s “God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to defend it”—on the others quotations from George Washington, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, all elaborating on the theme that the only way to preserve freedom at home was to defend it anywhere it was attacked.

  The displays were a sensation. An average of three thousand people a day stopped to read every word; sometimes there were seventy to eighty people clustered at a window at one time, and foreign-language speakers were overheard translating them for those who couldn’t read English. It’s impossible to know whether they ultimately had the public impact Gerald was aiming for; but they did have a powerful effect on the man who put them in place. Delving into the writings of these bygone Americans had reawakened Gerald’s “sophomore predilection for reading from Ralph Waldo [Emerson] and Thoreau”; writing to Archie MacLeish to tell him all this, he closed with a quotation from Emerson: “This pale Massachusetts sky, this sandy soil and raw wind, all shall nurture us. Unlike all the world before us, our own age and land shall be classic to ourselves.” It was another answer, a decade later, to Archie’s “American Letter.” For Gerald, it was the beginning of a new direction.