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

by Amanda Vaill

  It was quite an event. “Will you ever forget with what trepidation you donned the newest and the best,” reminisced the History of the Class of 1912, “and took your stand fearfully among the other social lions at the station? And then the giggling girls gushing from every car in great profusion.” A slightly exotic bloom in this garden of giggling debutantes, Sara had a wonderful time, despite the watchful presence of Anna Murphy, who had come along to act as chaperon. There was lunch at the Lawn Club, and a tea and a Glee Club concert, followed by a small dance at the college’s Woolsey Hall—and although she had risen early that morning to catch the train Sara danced until 3:30.

  The next day, after staying in bed until nearly noon, she spent the afternoon in Gerald’s rooms listening to music on the gramophone (presumably with Anna along to keep things on the level); then in the evening they went to the prom in the New Haven Armory, which had been draped in shirred bunting and spangled with Christmas lights for the occasion. Sara’s dance card was filled with names like J. Biddle and R. Auchincloss and A. Harriman—in addition, naturally, to G. Murphy—and all the bright young things danced the waltz and that new dance sensation, the turkey trot. “Wonderful time,” wrote Sara afterward. “To bed about 5:30. Dead—rheumatism in knees.”

  Her fling as sweetheart of DKE was short-lived. Returning to New York, she found Adeline “in bed—on strict diet—Trained nurse—Return of old trouble.” Now all the dancing she did was in attendance on her mother. (Possibly this was Adeline’s plan.) Inevitably Sara began “feeling like the devil” herself, and “commenced taking 2 raw eggs daily” from the supply she purchased fresh each day for Adeline. Everyone was on edge, suffering from cabin fever in their Gotham Hotel digs: Sara later described the atmosphere to Gerald as “unspeakable.” February passed gloomily; at its end the whole family were delighted to flee to London on the Mauritania, where a fellow passenger was the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, then returning to England from an American tour.

  Stella Campbell had first achieved fame—even notoriety—in 1893 in Arthur Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, her first but by no means her last portrayal of a woman with a past. Dark-haired, white-skinned, both exotic and interestingly fragile, she had played Hedda Gabler and Elektra, as well as Melisande to Sarah Bernhardt’s Pelleas, and she was the inspiration for Shaw’s Cleopatra and his Eliza Doolittle. Her marriage to Patrick Campbell, a soldier who was killed in the Boer War, had coexisted with her long romance with the actor-manager Johnston Forbes-Robertson. She had also been entangled with the young actor Gerald du Maurier (later the father of the novelist Daphne du Maurier), and at the time of her Mauritania crossing she was having an affair with George Cornwallis-West, then ten years younger than she and married to Winston Churchill’s mother, the former Jennie Jerome. Despite her public carryings-on and her vampish onstage persona, “Mrs. Pat” counted numerous titled ladies as her friends, and her daughter had been presented by one of them at court; but such connections weren’t universally impressive. In New York, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt had asked the actress to attend a soiree as an entertainer for her guests, but she refused to invite Mrs. Campbell “in society as a lady.”

  Frank Wiborg might have shared Mrs. Vanderbilt’s dubiety about this cigarette-smoking, tragic-eyed siren (he never got beyond the “Mrs. Campbell” stage with her), but Stella Campbell became a close friend of Adeline’s and a mentor to the Wiborg girls. Her own daughter had embarked on a stage career and was about to announce her engagement; and Stella adopted Sara, Hoytie, and Olga as surrogates. Sara became her favorite; she would take her shopping and demand, in her famous husky voice, “Sara, darling, does the dress walk? Or does it make me look just like a cigar?”

  Once settled at their usual London address, the Hyde Park Hotel, the Wiborgs plunged into a round of activity: Harrods, the theater, lunch with the countess of Wemyss and Edith Lyttelton, dashing aristocrats and friends of Stella Campbell’s. “We sang afterwards,” notes Sara’s diary. They sang, also, at a weekend house party at Belvoir (pronounced Beaver) Castle, home of the duke and duchess of Rutland. The duchess was a notable beauty, famous for her elegant and unconventional style of dress. She wore her family tiara back to front, the better to confine her Grecian knot of hair, and looped her fabulous pearl necklace, which Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwyn had worn in her portrait by Lely, around her shoulders between two diamond drop earrings—a style Sara herself later adapted. In her youth she had been one of the Souls, “a rather self-conscious group of clever young men and pretty young women” (as one historian described them) that had lionized Oscar Wilde, and her daughters—Lady Marjorie, Lady Violet, and Lady Diana Manners—were just as spirited. They took to Sara at once: “I love Sara,” said Lady Diana, recognizing a kindred spirit. “She’s a cat who goes her own way.”

  Sara felt instinctively at home in this new world. “I think I shall move here to live!” she confided to Gerald in a letter later that summer. At Belvoir, mealtimes were announced by bells and gongs, the tables were set with historic china and Cellini silver, and the guests wore buttonholes or “sprays” chosen from a silver tray carried to all the guest rooms before dinner. The ladies (recalled Lady Diana) “dressed for tea in trailing chiffon and lace and changed again for dinner into something less limp, and all the men wore white ties and drank sherry, then champagne . . . and then port and then brandy.” On Sunday afternoons guests would take long walks a deux in order to indulge in interesting conversation. At bedtime the ladies would withdraw to one of the girls’ rooms for hair brushing, where they might be joined by a number of favored gentlemen. This mixture of grandeur and wit, formality and informality, was just the sort of social cocktail Sara craved.

  But she was permitted to have only a small taste of it. The stated purpose of the Wiborgs’ European visit was to attend the events surrounding the coronation, in June, of the new king, George V, and new clothes were needed. This meant Paris, and the couture houses of Worth and Poiret. On April 5 the family crossed the channel in a snowstorm—“most hideous crossing,” noted Sara; “all frightened as well as ill.” So ill, in fact, that a doctor was sent for on their arrival in Paris, and despite the allure of couture fittings, nights at the Opéra, and drives in the Bois, Sara continued to feel sick and depressed for some weeks. There doesn’t seem to have been anything constitutionally wrong with her, despite the heavy and painful menstrual periods she still occasionally suffered, one of which had kept her confined to bed and unable to make a return visit to Belvoir in March. It sounds as if she had had enough of living life as one of the matched pieces of her mother’s luggage, but couldn’t bear to admit it, much less express it.

  In Paris she tried to carve out some space for herself. She had secured a letter of introduction to Rodin and used it to gain admission to his two studios—one wonders what she thought of such frankly erotic sculptures as The Kiss—and she enrolled in sculpture classes at the Académie Julian, where her fellow Americans Maurice Prendergast and Edward Steichen had also studied. Each student at Julian was required to draw from a live nude model, which must have raised eyebrows Chez Wiborg, and which may have led to the row that Sara described as “one of the most fearful days ever spent.” But the issue was moot; by early June the Wiborgs swept her off to London and the coronation.

  June was a blur of dinner parties and luncheons (for which, Sara’s diary usually notes, “We sang”), of visits to the Horse Show and Royal Ascot (“nice day but bored”), and rehearsals and costume fittings for a grand coronation-eve quadrille in which the performers—all names familiar from the “Court Circular”—would represent characters from Shakespeare. (The Wiborg girls had been asked to join their well-connected countrywoman, Mrs. Waldorf Astor, in the Merchant of Venice figure.) This grand event—for which the Albert Hall was transformed into an enchanted Italian garden, complete with forty-foot cypress trees, yew hedges that had been clipped to resemble peacocks, vine-covered pergolas, stone statuary, and grassy banks, all under a pavilion
roof of blue silk—was attended by nearly four thousand guests, including the new king and queen, who put in an appearance, along with all the “royal and distinguished guests” staying at Buckingham Palace for the coronation, after midnight. Adeline Wiborg must have been in her element, and even Sara permitted herself to enjoy it.

  The coronation itself was almost an anticlimax. As commoners, and foreigners at that, the Wiborgs didn’t merit a seat in Westminster Abbey, but after the customary twenty-one-gun salute woke Sara at 4:00 A.M. the family proceeded to the house of friends in Mayfair (the American newspaperman Richard Harding Davis was also a guest) for lunch and rubbernecking. “Procession passed about 2,” wrote Sara in her diary, “gorgeous sight.” Then they went on to tea with their friends the marquess and marchioness of Headfort, who—still sporting the coronets and ermine-trimmed robes they had worn to the ceremony—were able to give an authentically regal account of the morning’s proceedings. The marchioness was a former showgirl, Rosie Boote, who before her marriage had been a “favorite” of the new king’s womanizing father, and her spontaneity and lack of stuffiness made her a favorite of Sara’s as well. “We have been having such a good time,” she wrote to Gerald, back in East Hampton, after the coronation. “I can’t remember when in years I’ve enjoyed myself more.”

  The purpose of Sara’s letter to Gerald wasn’t to gloat about her London season, but (as she put it) to “send you a handshake” on his election to the elite—and very secret—Yale senior society Skull and Bones, a development so momentous that his friend Keith Merrill had cabled her the news. “Would you mind,” she now asked Gerald, mock-seriously, “if it is allowable thanking him about it? I am afraid to myself—I feel I could face death if needs be, but not a breach of etiquette in these matters.”

  The near apotheosis that election to Bones represented had been denied to Fred. “Poor old Fred,” Sara wrote, “I do feel so sorry that he missed it—How much more pleased he will be about you on that account—being a most unselfish person—There is nothing [underlined twice] so ghastly in this world as to feel ‘out of it.’” If Fred was out, Gerald was, by the standards that Yale measured, in: That June he was also elected to a quasi-literary club called the Pundits, for which only five other incoming seniors were chosen; three of them, including his former roommate Larry Cornwall, were new Bonesmen as well. In January of his senior year, despite his rather unspectacular academic record, he was made one of eighteen undergraduate charter members of a new organization, the Elizabethan Club, which had been founded just that autumn to provide “a center for the literary life of the university” (as the Yale Daily News described it). Among the other “men of discriminating tastes and appreciations” on the initial membership list were the university president, Anson Phelps Stokes, and the legendary professor George Pierce Baker, soon to leave for Harvard, where one of his students would be Eugene O’Neill. The Elizabethans’ white frame headquarters on College Street contained First and Second Folio editions of Shakespeare, a copy of the First Quarto edition, and first editions of numerous other Tudor and Stuart writers—certainly a contrast to the macho austerity of the Bones crypt or the big table at Mory’s, where the undergraduates sat around “cussing and drinking lemonade.”

  Gerald was also elected manager of the Glee Club, and made a member of the Prom Committee. In the midst of all this extracurricular activity he managed to stage his best academic performance yet, earning a respectable C average (though he came close to failing geology). In February, when his classmates ranked their peers for the class history, Gerald was voted Best Dressed (he got 92 votes, nearly three times more than his nearest rival), Greatest Social Light (he was first of nine, with 58 votes), and Thorough Gent (first of 15, with 55 votes), and he was ranked fourth of ten in the category of Wittiest (Larry Cornwall was the winner). He even got seven votes for Most Brilliant, which would have startled Headmaster Buehler if he learned of it.

  But these coups appear to have made little impression on the senior Murphys. Patrick intended that Gerald follow Fred to Mark Cross, and he hoped his younger son would feel more enthusiasm for this task than the elder had. “I am not disappointed in my work for Cross,” he wrote Gerald. “What hurts is that Fred seems to value it so lightly.” Yet he himself put so little value on his younger son’s achievements that he didn’t even feign regret at missing a Glee Club concert Gerald had asked him to attend: “I cannot accept your invitation for March 17th,” wrote Patrick curtly, in a typed letter, presumably dictated to his secretary, from the Mark Cross factory at Walsall, in England, where he was on a business trip. “We cannot arrive until the 17th at the dock.” He gave Gerald an epistolary pat on the back for his solid academic performance in his junior year—“I’m proud of you and your record,” he wrote—but he seemed to take his son’s extracurricular accomplishments for granted.

  Inevitably, with so little encouragement from those whose approval he craved, Gerald began to find his Yale successes hollow. “Only in my senior year,” he complained years later, “did I realize how dissatisfied I had been, and how little I had benefitted from my courses.” It cannot have helped that he considered his achievements a kind of camouflage for his true self, a “distortion of myself into a likeness of popularity and success,” as he later put it.

  The person who seems to have cheered Gerald’s successes most enthusiastically was Sara Wiborg, but she did so in a sisterly way, playing Jo March to Gerald’s Laurie. Gerald, for his part, spent most of his last year at Yale acting as a kind of courtier to the Wiborg women. He dropped in on them at New Year’s when he returned from his winter Glee Club tour; he took Sara to a Glee Club concert, a John Barrymore play, the DKE dance, and—along with Cole Porter—to see Eddie Foy in Over the River; he accompanied Adeline when, terrified by the sinking of the Titanic on April 12, she went to the Cunard offices to cancel the family’s steamship tickets for a planned European trip. But Sara responded to this singular devotion with disarming casualness.

  For during the spring and summer of 1912 she was again seeing a good deal of Gerard Lambert. He took her to lunch, went driving with her, took her sailing. Perhaps his attentiveness had something to do with the fact that Ray was again expecting a baby—and then again, perhaps not. The Wiborgs (and the Murphys, who were also friends of the Lamberts) were invited en famille to Gerard’s birthday dinner on May 13; two days later Sara noted the actual anniversary in her diary, “Gerard’s birthday,” underlining it as if it had special significance.

  All through the East Hampton summer she played golf or drove or went walking or met visitors’ trains with Gerard. A typical entry in her diary reads:

  “Golf with G. [Gerard] and Chesley 10—In bathing—. . . L’s [Lamberts] to lunch—Mother, H. and O. and Hoyt out. To Devon with G, back 4. . . . To Sagaponack with G. to see . . . about cruise—Home 7:30.” As the summer progressed a note of strain crept into her relationship with the Lamberts, and the atmosphere at home worsened as well. Suddenly there were more “very depressed” notations in her diary, and a number of family quarrels broke out.

  There was a brief respite in June, in the form of a trip to the Republican Convention in Chicago, where Frank Wiborg was a delegate. Sara was awed by the “terrific crowds—11,000 people in the building”; and she returned to the convention each day, arriving at 10:30 in the morning and staying well into the night. On June 22, despite the forty-five-minute demonstration that had taken place for Roosevelt two days previously, Taft finally prevailed at 9:00 p.m. Olga, Hoytie, and Adeline had all returned to their rooms at the Blackstone Hotel by then, but Sara stayed to the end. She always did love a Scene.

  When she returned to East Hampton she fell again into her easy companionship with Fred and Gerald Murphy, who were both frequent summer visitors; and Adeline, possibly relieved to have Sara going about with two blamelessly unattached young men, made no objection. It seems not to have occurred to Sara to play favorites with either, but as the summer went on Gerald contrived, subtly, to
tilt things in his favor. Fred was working at Mark Cross—not entirely happily, for his father was an exacting superior—but he escaped to East Hampton on weekends and played golf with Sara, and the ubiquitous Gerard. Gerald, however, had been allowed a summer of leisure before going to work at Mark Cross, and he came to the Dunes almost daily to garden and read aloud with her, accompany her sailing on Gerard Lambert’s boat, the Wild Olive, and act as her partner in winning a “very important [golf] match” on September 17.

  One evening, Sara decided it would be fun to camp out overnight on the beach below the Dunes and she persuaded Gerald to join her. Frank Wiborg came along as a reluctant chaperon, and (Sara recalled later) the three of them bundled up in blankets on the sand and “watched very damp clouds go by—for the longest time, across the stars—at an immense distance up—and dew fell on my face and wool cap.” In the morning, when Sara awoke to crystalline sunlight and the cries of the gulls, she found that Frank had decamped to the house and Gerald was still asleep. For a long time—like Psyche and Cupid—she stared at the sleeping youth, thinking how “nice” he was. And then, feeling “awfully embarrassed” and afraid he would wake up and find her watching him, she fled in silence from the beach.

  5

  “I must ask you endless question”

  SO CUPID SLEPT ON, and Sara tried to fill the void in her life with work. During the previous winter she had begun painting with the American impressionist William Merritt Chase in his studio on Fourth Avenue and 25th Street. Now, in the autumn of 1912, she started taking illustration classes with Thomas Fogarty at the Art Students’ League. Her pictures, despite their clear palette and quick gestural shorthand reminiscent of her impressionist models, seem more those of a gifted amateur than the confident handiwork of a finished artist. But she spent long hours painting in the studio and, on weekends, in East Hampton. Certainly this work was more nourishing than another “artistic” venture she was involved in that January: an evening of tableaux vivants in Mrs. Orme Wilson’s ballroom, in which she posed as a portrait by Romney, wearing dull blue with a rose at her bosom, for a charity audience that included such social lights as Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan.