Everybody Was So Young

by Amanda Vaill

  It’s not clear which picture he started first—those first paintings are lost now, and he never could remember correctly the order in which he’d done them. He called one of them Turbines, the other Pressure (or Pression). The former was a closely cropped, nearly abstract close-up view of the parts of a nameless machine, the latter a perspectival rendering of the working heart of an ocean liner, an enormous engine with the name of the manufacturer emblazoned (including a Dadaist typo) on the side of the engine block. He worked on each painting the same way, as if he were preparing and executing a scenic design: he made a maquette, or sketch, in tempera on paper; then, painstakingly, using a pencil and a grid, he transferred the outlines of the picture onto airplane linen that had been mounted on three-ply veneer panels; finally he painted in the design in oils on the canvas. It was a deliberate process, and it showed: the surface of the paintings had the sharp, even clarity of something, well, machine-made. Cogs, wheels, pistons, crankshafts, all of them gleaming and impermeable.

  He worked all morning or all afternoon, for the first time in his life completely absorbed in what he was doing. He had never, he told an acquaintance later, been truly happy until that moment.

  On June 12 Gerald put aside his brushes and paints to accompany Sara, the children, and the children’s nanny, Mademoiselle Henriette Géron, to Houlgate, a seaside resort on the English Channel in Normandy. The Channel beaches were the summertime refuge of fashionable Parisians, and the Murphys must have thought of Houlgate as the French equivalent of East Hampton. They would be looking forward to the sort of summer they remembered from their youth—minus, of course, the familial strains that had made the Dunes so difficult in recent years.

  They settled in for the summer at the Hôtel des Clématites, and Honoria, Baoth, and even little Patrick enjoyed riding donkeys along the beach and digging in the sand. The children acquired a dog, a liver-and-white English spaniel named Asparagus, and they didn’t lack for company because the Pickmans and their five children were nearby in the Villa Germaine. But the weather was all wrong, chilly and gray, perfect for a polite stroll along the promenade in layers of fashionable clothes, but not good for the basking or sea-bathing the Murphys craved. So when Cole and Linda Porter asked them to come down to stay for a week or so in a château they’d rented in Antibes, on the Mediterranean coast, Gerald and Sara accepted.

  The Côte d’Azur was not yet a byword in chic circles. Largely the haunt of English and German vacationers who didn’t swim or sunbathe and came only for a short January-to-May season, it was deserted in summertime. But Cole Porter “always had a great flair, a sense of the avant garde, about places,” recalled Gerald. “So we went down there in that hot, hot summer . . . and on the Cap d’Antibes was this little tiny beach—I think only about 3 or 4 hundred yards long—covered with a bed of seaweed that must have been there for ages. It was three or four feet thick. We dug a little corner of it out and bathed and sat in the most wonderful sun—absolutely dry weather, cool evenings, constant breeze in the evenings and clear, sunny days one after the other, and this perfectly beautiful, crystalline water.” It seemed like paradise. And at the end of their stay, they knew they would come back.

  10

  “A prince and a princess”

  THERE WERE MANY SIGNS of spring in Paris, from the setting out of the café tables at the Closerie des Lilas to the budding of chestnut trees in the Bois; but for the people who cared about art, the opening of the Salon des Independents was the first sign that winter was over.

  The Société des Artistes Independents was an organization of antiestablishment artists united under the slogan “Ni jury ni récompenses” (“Neither jury nor rewards”); its thirty-fourth exposition opened on February 10, 1923, in the Grand Palais, a monumental art nouveau fantasy of stone, glass, and steel built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900, the first world’s fair in Paris. Since the Independents required of their exhibitors only the desire to be seen and the payment of a small entrance fee, the number of works on view was enormous, as the glossy arts journal, Shadowland, made clear: “Think for a moment of a place as large as Madison Square Garden, with two floors divided into about seventy rooms. Think then of all the paintings of every known and unknown school, of all the pieces of sculpture, illustrations and designs for carpets and tapestries; and imagine them to the tune of six thousand sent in by almost two thousand artists and you begin to have a vague idea of what this Salon means.”

  Visitors milling under the Grand Palais’s domed and vaulted glass roof could look at paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Tsuguharu-Léonard Foujita, Francis Picabia, Michel Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova—but the point of the Independents was to discover new talent, and this season there were four pictures by an unfamiliar name: Gerald Murphy.

  In the course of little more than six months of painting Gerald had produced four pictures for the Salon: two oils, Turbines and Pression; one watercolor, Taxi; and one drawing, Crystaux. This was their first public viewing; in fact, because Gerald preferred to avoid criticism of his work in progress, it was the first time he had had any real reaction to it. The results had to please him: his “cubistic studies of machinery” were singled out for special mention in Shadowland, and the Paris Herald’s reviewer gave his “very personal point of view in the study of machinery” a new label: “centrifugalist.” Mr. Murphy, the Herald declared, revealed “a feeling for mass and a sense of decorative effect.”

  It was the beginning of a kind of annus mirabilis for Gerald Murphy. Having his pictures hung in the Salon des Independents was one thing, but even more cachet attached to his invitation to design the “American” booth at a spectacular charity benefit given to raise money for impoverished Russian émigrés. This four-day bazaar, featuring art, crafts, and entertainment, opened on February 23 with a fantasy Bal des Artistes Russes at which four orchestras, including a jazz band, played the latest dance music. The guests showed up in Russian folk dress or in costumes derived from current avant-garde paintings (there were a lot of harlequins and cubist-inspired top hats), Tristan Tzara declaimed one of his poems while mechanical birds flitted through the air, and the Fratellini brothers performed their circus tricks.

  Everything—even the champagne bottles popped open by the bartender, Michel Larionov—was decorated. Paintings by Goncharova, Gris, Hélène Perdriat, and others covered the walls with a chaotic blaze of color. The artists who had been asked to design exhibition booths had outdone themselves: near Picasso’s was Sonia Delaunay’s, where the young painter and designer was selling modernist bibelots; Goncharova had decorated the Russian booth, which featured her striking handmade masks; and at the Japanese booth, the artist Tsuguharu-Léonard Foujita had constructed an entire kabuki theater, complete with live dancers. But even among these stars Gerald Murphy’s contribution stood out: an extraordinary construction of skyscrapers topped with electric signs whose lights blinked on and off, the Great White Way transported to the banks of the Seine. It was monumental, futuristic, and thrillingly American, and it announced that this American artist had arrived.

  That winter and spring of 1923 were so full of new people and new things that it was difficult, later, to remember what had happened when. When was it, exactly, that Gerald and Sara met Fernand Léger? Who introduced them to Gilbert Seldes, the American critic and editor of The Dial who had come to Paris to write the book that would become The Seven Lively Arts? Was it Rue and John Carpenter? (John had just created a ballet, Krazy Kat, based on the George Herriman cartoon strip that Seldes considered an example of the American sublime.) Or did they get to know him through Amy Lowell? It was all a wonderful blur of exhibitions, performances, and publications.

  Gerald and Sara had returned from the Côte d’Azur at the end of the summer. They’d given up the rue Greuze apartment) and had resettled in the Hôtel des Reservoirs in Versailles, not far from the palace, where Sara delighted in prowling around the local antiques shops and the children could have a country at
mosphere while still being close to the city. But Sara and Gerald wanted to be in the thick of things, and by the end of the year they had found an apartment on the top two floors of an old François ler house on the corner of the quai des Grands-Augustins and a narrow street called rue Gît-le-Coeur. It was full of light, and from its windows overlooking the Seine you could see all the way from the Îie St.-Louis to the Tuileries. But it was small, with only two bedrooms and a kitchen so tiny that food had to be stored in a garde-manger, a box hung outside the window. And it was dilapidated—probably its last face-lift had come just after the French Revolution—and there were rats on the stairs. It wouldn’t do for a permanent family home, but they could use it as an in-town pied-à-terre while still maintaining a residence at Versailles. And they could justify the expense of remodeling it because they had decided to burn their New York bridges at last. They had sold 50 West 11th Street for $40,000 in February.

  They began work on the apartment to make it habitable, but even before they were finished they gave their first dinner party in it, a soirée for the avant-garde Kamerny (Chamber) Theater, a Moscow troupe that was appearing in Paris that spring. The Kamerny actors were determinedly experimental: they did Racine’s Phèdre in constructed faces (not masks), with the star, Alice Coonen, climbing up a steeply raked platform, trailing a red cape as long as the set was wide; they did an adaptation of G. K. Chesterton’s chase-thriller, The Man Who Was Thursday, on a three-story set featuring scaffolding, stairways, elevators, and slides and poles for quick escapes; they did a silly 1890s operetta called Giroflé-Girofla on the wings of a biplane. Gerald and Sara were wild about them, went to all ten of their performances, and at the end of the run threw a party that would have given Adeline Wiborg nightmares, but that their friends still remembered half a century later.

  Inspired, perhaps, by the Kamerny’s inventiveness, Gerald and Sara made their apartment’s half-finished state into a virtue: they had no chairs or sofas, so they piled mattresses and pillows along the wainscoted walls and covered them with yards of brocade. Tables were improvised out of planks mounted on blocks. The lighting was provided by acetylene plumbers’ lamps, and the bare plaster walls were hung with “found” sculptures made by their new friend Fernand Léger out of discarded bicycle wheels and other junkyard objects. There were mounds of couscous made by the Murphys’ new Algerian cook, and plenty of wine to wash it all down; for dessert there was fruit and a chocolate mousse, molded into a suggestive shape and cloaked in crème Chantilly, called négresse en chemise. But the Russians, still not sated, invaded the kitchen and devoured the lemons they found there, skin and all. The rooms buzzed with laughter and singing and Russian and French conversation. The only mournful note was struck later, when the troupe’s director, Alexander Tairoff, confessed to his hosts that the Kamerny’s tour had not been a financial success. The company was, in fact, unable to meet its obligations, and would probably be stranded in Paris without the funds to get home.

  It was the first time—though by no means the last—that Sara and Gerald exchanged the look that said, “We must Do Something.” The something in this case was a draft on their bank for $3,000, an enormous amount of money, which they lent to Tairoff “with great difficulty.” But they felt they had to come up with it: after all, Tairoff’s company was doing such wonderful and important work. The Murphys didn’t know that repayment was a chancy proposition at best. It was only later that they discovered that in Russia under the Bolsheviks “foreign debts were not honored and no money [was] allowed sent out of the country.” Even if they had known, it might not have mattered.

  Was it on the afternoon of the Kamerny party, or another day, that Gilbert Seldes’s friend, Donald Ogden Stewart, came by the quai des Grands Augustins with another writer he wanted them to meet, John Dos Passos? Stewart, a comic novelist and aspiring playwright from the Midwest, had gone to Yale a few years behind Gerald, and his Yale experience had been shadowed first by his father’s disgrace in a fraud accusation, then by the father’s death some time afterward. Always conscious of feeling like an outsider pressing his nose against the windows of those more fortunate than he, Stewart was dazzled by the Murphys’ aura. To him they were figures in a fairy tale: “Once upon a time there was a prince and a princess,” he wrote: “that’s exactly how a description of the Murphys should begin. They were both rich; he was handsome; she was beautiful; they had three golden children. They loved each other, they enjoyed their own company, and they had the gift: of making life enchantingly pleasurable for those who were fortunate enough to be their friends.”

  Dos Passos, a Harvard man who had served in France as an ambulance driver during the war, fancied himself too tough and street-smart to fall for a line like that. He had been hanging around with the Left Bank expatriate journalist crowd that ran with the Toronto Star’s young correspondent, Ernest Hemingway, and he was resistant to the Murphys’ charm.

  “Sara was obviously a darling,” wrote Dos Passos later of their first meeting (which, it should be remembered, took place when the Murphys were preparing for a party), “but Gerald seemed cold and brisk and preoccupied.” Put off by Gerald’s sartorial splendor and the diffidence he sometimes had with strangers, Dos Passos declined the Murphys’ invitation to stay for their party. But not long afterward he ran into Gerald again on the street, walking with Fernand Léger. Léger was a burly butcher’s son from Normandy with dark eyebrows, a drooping black mustache, and a cigarette that seemed permanently affixed to his lower lip, who painted with the same vigor and passion with which he attacked life. He already had a considerable reputation for his bold, collage-like paintings, and his designs for the ballet Skating Rink—which showed fashionable women in the same pearls and turbans that Sara favored—had been lavishly praised. Gerald, who admired him intensely, found him “an apostle, a mentor, a teacher,” and the two men frequently roamed around the city to explore railroad yards or shop displays or factories, any of which might be subjects for a picture, or merely interesting or provocative in their own right.

  Gerald and Léger hailed Dos Passos and they walked along the quai together—Gerald tall and sandy-haired in his beautifully cut suit, Léger hulking and broody, Dos Passos peering shyly through his thick glasses. Gerald and Léger were looking at things in a way Dos Passos had never seen. “Regardez-moi ça,” Léger would say, his finger jabbing at a winch on a barge, wound about with coils of rope, or the shape of a tugboat’s funnel; or Gerald would point out the way you saw only half of a woman’s face behind the geraniums in the cabin window of her barge. Later, in his notebook, Gerald described the scene in his artist’s shorthand: “tugs clustered, deck details, barges or barge, living quarters, lattices, painted woods, nautical form, 1 or 2 solid humans at table.” Dos Passos was enchanted. “The banks of the Seine never looked banal again,” he said.

  Soon he was a frequent presence in the Murphys’ lives, happiest to drop in on them when they were en famille. His shyness and his stammer made large parties difficult; and besides, he said, he “had never had a proper home life, and was developing an unexpressed yearning for it.” The illegitimate son of a prosperous lawyer who would not divorce his wife to marry his mistress, Dos Passos had grown up lonely in the luxury hotels his father’s money paid for, and he couldn’t help feeling a pang when he saw the Murphys’ obvious love for, and ease with, what he called “their three little towheads.”

  Who else did Gerald and Sara meet in that spring of 1923? Donald Ogden Stewart, who seems to have been treating the Murphys almost as a tourist attraction, brought the playwright Philip Barry and his wife, Ellen, to the quai des Grand-Augustins and rang and rang the bell downstairs. Suddenly a window flew up on the top floor and a head poked out. Ellen Barry, looking up, saw a smiling woman, her fair hair pinned into a French twist. “Come up, come up!” she cried, when they protested they were just passing by and didn’t want to intrude.

  Barry, another Yale man (he had entered in 1913, a year after Gerald’s graduation),
had just made a splash in New York with his boulevard comedy, You and I, and he and Ellen were in France to take possession of the villa in Cannes that his father-in-law, a wealthy lawyer named Lorenzo Semple, had given the young couple. This was another link: the Murphys were planning a return to Antibes that summer and would be only a few kilometers away along the Corniche; they made plans to see one another again on the Riviera.

  Ellen Barry, a dark-haired beauty in her own right, was struck by Sara’s elegance—“she wore beautiful clothes,” she remembered, “not the chic of the day, but wonderful flowing things that suited her perfectly”—and by the freshness and originality of the Murphys’ apartment. The walls had been painted dead white, and the floors lacquered a glossy black, with white Mexican rugs scattered about; the floor-to-ceiling windows, with their picture-postcard view of the Seine, were framed in red antique brocade curtains. Apparently the Murphys’ Empire chests and settees had been largely left in storage. “Sara was the first to have modern furniture,” Ellen Barry remembered. There were chairs and sofas upholstered in the kind of black satin tailors used to line men’s vests, little coffee tables with mirrored tops, and an ebony grand piano on which was displayed an enormous industrial ball bearing that looked like a piece of sculpture—which is what most visitors mistook it for. (Gerald said it was better than having a Rodin that could turn out to be fake.) The sitting room was filled with arrangements of flowers and—an innovative touch—stalks of pale green celery in black or white opalescent vases; but in the spare cubicle of a dining room Sara would place only a single rose in a vase against the bare wall. “Oh, la valeur de ça!” Fernand Léger exclaimed when he saw it—and put a single rose in a series of paintings afterward.