by Amanda Vaill
But it wasn’t long before dadaism was everywhere. In February the wiry-haired, sad-eyed poet Jean Cocteau joined forces with the composer Darius Milhaud to present a dadaist opéra bouffe entitled Le Boeuf sur le toit (The Ox on the Roof; the English equivalent would be “shaggy-dog story”), which featured the Fratellinis—clowns from the Cirque Medrano—and a jazzy, Latin-inspired score. It drew its audience equally from the aristocratic salons of the Right Bank and the artists’ ateliers of the Left Bank. And when the show closed Milhaud had the bright idea of reincarnating it as a nightclub, also called Le Boeuf sur le toit, where the walls were covered in artists’ sketches, and Les Six—Milhaud, Poulenc, and fellow composers Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Germaine Taillefer, and Arthur Honneger—would jam into the wee hours.
The same mix of society and avant-garde that had made a sensation of Le Boeuf sur le toit filled the Opéra on May 15, when Serge Diaghilev—the astute, dandyish impresario who had dazzled Sara Wiborg with Le Sacre du printemps in 1913—opened his first Ballets Russes season after the war. Always at the cutting edge, Diaghilev had produced the first cubist-inspired ballet, Parade, in 1917, with music by Erik Satie, décors and costumes by Picasso, and a program note by Guillaume Apollinaire which introduced the word surrealism into the popular lexicon. Now he celebrated the arrival of the postwar era with a quadruple bill that exemplified the eclecticism and excitement of the moment: La Boutique fantasque (music by Gioacchino Rossini, orchestration by Ottorino Respighi, sets and costumes by André Derain); Le Chant du Rossignol (music by Igor Stravinsky, sets and costumes by Henri Matisse); Le Tricorne, also known as The Three-Cornered Hat (music by Manuel de Falla, sets and costumes by Picasso); and Pulcinella (music by Stravinsky after Giambattista Pergolesi, sets, costumes, and drop curtain by Picasso).
The premiere was followed by a legendary party given by Prince Firouz of Persia at a château just outside Paris owned by an ex-convict named René de Amouretti. As one guest, the artist and set designer Jean Hugo, recalled it: “The ground floor was taken up by an enormous room with a balcony running around it onto which opened the doors to the bedrooms. . . . We drank a lot of champagne. Stravinsky got drunk and went up to the bedrooms, grabbed all the pillows, bolsters, and feather beds, and hurled them from the balcony down into the great hall. We all had a pillow fight and the party ended at three in the morning.”
Prominent among the revelers at this not-to-be-missed event were Auric, Poulenc, Picasso, the choreographer and leading danseur Léonide Massine, Diaghilev, the Count and Countess Etienne de Beaumont, Cocteau, and Cocteau’s object of affection, a beautiful seventeen-year-old youth named Raymond Radiguet. Radiguet must have stayed fairly sober because he noticed everything and then committed it to fiction in the form of a roman à clef entitled Le Bal du comte d’Orgel. And one of Radiguet’s characters in that novel, the tall, rather comically drunk American heiress Hester Wayne, was a barely disguised portrait of none other than Hoytie Wiborg.
Hoytie was now living in Paris in an elegant apartment on the quai de Conti which had been conferred on her for her lifetime in gratitude for her services to France during the war. As beautiful as always but haughtier and more peremptory than ever, she had conceived a hopeless crush on Diaghilev’s patroness, the fascinating Marie Godebska Natanson Edwards Sert. Misia, as everyone called her, had been an inspiration and support to painters, poets, and musicians since Hoytie was just a little girl and she was Madame Natanson, Toulouse-Lautrec’s model for Ault and Wiborg’s signature poster; now, married to the Spanish painter José Maria Sert, she exercised her charm upon and dispensed favors to a circle that included Stravinsky, Picasso, Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, Poulenc, Cocteau, and a host of others.
Misia didn’t return Hoytie’s passionate attention (reportedly she called her l’emmerdeuse, an extremely vulgar term meaning “the Nuisance”), but she put up with her. Everyone did, in fact, and Hoytie had a wide and influential group of friends to whom it became her pleasure to introduce her newly arrived sister and her husband. Although Gerald and Sara were both leery of what Gerald referred to as Hoytie’s tactics of “subjugation and domination,” they had to admit that “she knew everybody.” And pretty soon, so did they.
One of the people she introduced them to was the original of Count Orgel himself. A tall, long-faced, blue-blooded aesthete with a squeaky voice and prominent blue eyes, Etienne de Beaumont “opened the ball after the war” (as Radiguet said of Orgel), meaning he originated the spectacular costume parties that characterized Parisian social life in the twenties and thirties. These glittering entertainments, which the French call travestis, each had a theme—the age of Louis Quatorze, Perrault’s fairy tales, card games, legendary heroes, sea creatures—and each was organized with the precision of a military campaign. Once the date was chosen, de Beaumont would drop hints of the planned treat to a chosen few, partly to get a buzz of gossip going and partly to give everybody time to worry whether this year he (or she) would be In or Out. By the time the little pasteboard invitation cards went out, delivered in person by a de Beaumont footman, some people would be ill from anxiety. But the parties themselves were never anticlimactic.
The Murphys might not have been at the Bal de Mer, where Jean Hugo, impersonating one of four waiters from Prunier’s, carried in a tray on which reclined the maharanee of Kapurthala, disguised as caviar; Hugo had had a little too much champagne and let his corner of the tray drop, unseating the maharanee and causing the maharajah to mutter, “In India he would have been put to death at once.” But they were almost certainly invited to the New Year’s party with which the de Beaumonts welcomed 1922—and at which, the count announced, Marcel Proust was expected. During the course of the evening Celeste, Proust’s housekeeper, telephoned several times to make sure there were no drafts and to ask if the hypersensitive author’s herbal tea had been prepared. Finally, about midnight, recalled Hugo, “there was a stir in the crowd, and we knew that Proust was there. He had come in with the new year, that of his death. . . . His sallow face had become puffy; he had acquired a paunch. He only spoke to dukes. ‘Oh, look,’ Picasso said to me. ‘He’s sticking to his theme.’”
The milieu in which the Murphys now found themselves was, as another contemporary chronicler put it, “a world somewhere between Guermantes’ Way and Sodom,” where “a well-set-up young man would attract the glances of as many men as women.” It was alluring, polymorphous, perverse: utterly unlike anything Gerald and Sara had ever experienced. Hoytie, seemingly, had taken to it as a duck to water—survivors of the circle, and their descendants, still speak of her with affection—and Sara and Gerald were diverted by it. But they had come to Paris looking for more than diversion. Almost by accident, they found it.
It is October 1921. The last of the summer heat has left the pavements, and the sky is that peculiar pearlescent blue of the Ile-de-France. Gerald Murphy is walking under the yellowing chestnut trees on the avenue des Champs-Elysées. He is wearing an exquisitely tailored suit, gloves, a felt hat; his malacca cane is jauntily deployed. His long-legged stride carries him past the Hôtel de Langeac, a beautiful eighteenth-century mansion that was Thomas Jefferson’s home in Paris, and Fouquet’s, the smart café-restaurant where the Irish writer James Joyce is somewhat improbably to be found in the evenings. At the corner of the rue la Boétie, the street where the city’s fashionable art dealers have their galleries, he turns.
Perhaps he has been reading about the forthcoming sale—the second in a series liquidating the holdings of the German dealer Kahnweiler—of work by cubist painters, among them Derain, Braque, Vlaminck, Gris, Léger, and Picasso; perhaps he is mildly curious about the pictures of artists whose scenery for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes is all the rage. Perhaps he is just on his way to lunch. But through the glass of a gallery window he sees a series of paintings that, literally, stop him in his tracks.
“There was,” Gerald wrote later, “a shock of recognition which put me into an entirely new orbit.” He couldn’t
remember the pictures themselves, or even—accurately—where he had seen them, whether they were all at one gallery or in a series of windows he peered through that autumn day. Picasso, Derain, Gris, Braque, a kaleidoscope of color and form. “I was astounded that there were paintings of that kind,” Gerald later recalled, perhaps forgetting his brief glimpse of the Armory Show. But in New York in 1913 he had been too busy trying to fit the mold of the up-and-coming young businessman to pay sympathetic attention to avant-garde art. Now, in the adventurous light of Paris in 1921, he could see. He returned from his walk transfigured. “If that’s painting,” he told Sara, “that’s the kind of painting that I would like to do.”
It was a life-changing decision, and characteristically Sara was galvanized by it. They had money to support themselves; they had leisure; they had a nanny to look after the children; why not study painting? As it turned out, Hester Pickman was eager to explore a new direction in her own work, so the three of them found a teacher, a Russian émigré named Natalia Goncharova—a descendant and namesake of the wife of Aleksandr Pushkin—who had designed a number of productions for the Ballets Russes. She was an inspired choice. Although barely forty, Goncharova had made a considerable reputation for herself in Russia before the revolution, when she was one of the founders of rayonism. She worked in two genres: a blend of cubism and futurism which used strong shapes and colors in energetic semiabstract compositions, and a neoprimitive pictorial style that had its source in Russian folk and religious art. It was in this latter mode that she had designed the scenery and costumes for Diaghilev’s production of Le Coq d’Or, which Sara had seen in New York during the war and adored: “a crazy Russian fairy tale,” she had called it, “done . . . with color,—and irresponsible childishness.” There was no irresponsible childishness, however, in the way Goncharova proceeded with her new American pupils.
Every morning the three of them would travel to Goncharova’s Left Bank studio in the rue de Seine and set to work. A “charming, extraordinarily attractive” woman, according to Hester Pickman, Goncharova was a rigorous teacher. “She started us with absolutely abstract painting,” Gerald recalled, still sounding bemused nearly forty years later. “Absolutely non-representational.” They would subdivide their canvases into nonfigurative shapes, and then—depending on whether the shapes were stronger or weaker—they would color the shapes, making the weaker ones more striking, the stronger ones less so. Goncharova’s one rule was that her students could commit nothing to canvas that resembled in any Way anything they had ever seen. “No apple on a dish,” commented Sara dryly.
For Gerald this discipline was a liberation. All his life he had responded to the beauty of objects, not for what they connoted but for their shapes and surfaces: the worn plank floors, luster pitchers, and squatty Empire chests he and Sara had rhapsodized about, or a doe in the Adirondack snow, a red locomotive, the draft horses and tightrope walkers he had written about in his letters to Sara. The kind of art he despised, such as his childhood pet hate, Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, commanded him to “feel” something. Goncharova’s triangles and rays simply pleased him.
He and Sara and Hester worked with Goncharova for six months, painting nearly all day and then, in the evenings, taking criticism from her and from her companion, another Russian futurist named Michel Larionov. (Although they had lived together for some twenty years, Goncharova “was still Mademoiselle because she didn’t approve of religious marriage.”) Larionov was also in the Ballets Russes loop, and had designed settings and costumes for Contes russes and Chout. Stravinsky described him as “a huge, blond mujik [peasant] of a man . . . who had an uncontrollable temper [and] once knocked Diaghilev down.” He was also, according to the composer of Le Sacre du printemps and Firebird, chronically lazy. Stravinsky believed that Goncharova did all his work for him. But Gerald and Sara found him enchanting, and they were particularly amused by “how he rushed up at the sight of you and kissed you ‘plein sur la bouche’ (full on the mouth).”
Soon the American novices had distinguished themselves enough for their teacher to speak of them to Diaghilev, who saw in them, as he saw in so many others, a means to an end. A number of sets for his ballets had fallen victim to wear and tear and careless handling—Goncharova used to mourn that working in the theater was “a sad business, because the costumes and decors are only beautiful when they’re new.” They needed to be refurbished quickly for the company’s spring season at the Opera. But, alas (and as usual), Diaghilev had no money. Would Mademoiselle Goncharova’s pupils like to paint sets for him, gratis, in the Ballets Russes scenery shop? They would.
It was, Gerald remembered, “serious and trying work.” Diaghilev’s atelier was located in the run-down district of Belleville on the outskirts of Paris. There were six other workers, all young Russian émigrés, and the new apprentices coped with their paints and glue pots and huge muslin flats and drop curtains in a language that was probably French, or French mixed with Russian. Certainly it wasn’t English. The canvases were fastened to the floor, and the scene painters used soft brushes with long handles, like janitors’ brooms, to spread the paint on them. Then they had to climb thirty-foot ladders and look down at their work to get the proper perspective. Diaghilev, a sleek, portly man with a streak of white in his glossy black hair, “hovered,—but pleasantly,” peering through his monocle at the finished flats, and the artists whose designs they were executing, Braque and Derain and Picasso, came in to supervise and offer corrections.
Pablo Picasso was already a familiar figure to the Murphys, at least from a distance, but up close he made an indelible impression. “A dark, powerful, physical presence [who] always reminded me of the bulls of Goya,” was how Gerald recalled him. He was nothing like the other artists they had known, the Sargents, Chases, and Sickerts who handled a teacup with the same facility as a paintbrush. Although Hester Pickman might pronounce him “very attractive,” Picasso was emphatically not the kind of person who would have been welcome in the drawing rooms she and Sara had grown up in. First there were his pictures themselves, unsettling deconstructions that didn’t look anything like the objects they were supposed to represent. And then there was Picasso’s reputation. Although he had recently married one of Diaghilev’s ballerinas, Olga Kokhlova (reportedly it was the only way he could get her to go to bed with him), Picasso had a famously roving eye and a long string of mistresses with whom he had lived openly. But the Murphys were irresistibly drawn to him, and soon they were all on friendly enough terms to arouse the suspicious ire of Hoytie Wiborg, who swept into the atelier one day and reprimanded them, “What are you all doing down here wasting your time?”
In fact, they had been caught up in what Gerald later called “a sort of movement,” the group of artists and musicians and amateurs and hangers-on that clustered around the Ballets Russes. “You knew everyone in it,” said Gerald, “and you were expected to go to the rehearsals, and they wanted your opinion and they discussed it with you.” Sometimes the new recruits gave even more material aid: Gerald and Sara were watching one rehearsal for Stravinsky’s new ballet Le Renard, a Russian fable with snow-encrusted scenery by Larionov, when Stravinsky lost his temper with Bronislava Nijinska, who was playing the fox, because she seemed not to be paying attention to his directions. She protested that she couldn’t hear what he was saying because the scarf she was wearing around her head muffled the sound of his voice.
“Then we must cut it in two,” thundered Stravinsky. He was legendarily short-tempered, and Gerald had once seen him leap out of the orchestra pit to the stage, using the laps of two violinists as stepping-stones, in order to berate a dancer. Now he grabbed the scarf from Nijinska—“a beautiful scarf,” remembered Sara wistfully; “I’d give my eyes to have it”—and snapped, “Who has a scissors?”
Almost against her will, Sara piped up. “I always have my scissors,” she said, digging in her bag and handing them over.
Stravinsky beamed at her. “Only Americans
have scissors,” he said.
“He was a wonderful man,” Sara said fondly afterward.
His work with the Ballets Russes had given Gerald the confidence that he was a painter, not just a dilettante, and he now felt ready to start working on his own. He enlisted a cousin of Diaghilev’s whom he’d met at the atelier, a former naval cadet named Vladimir Orloff, to act as a technical assistant, and began looking for studio space. Obviously the Murphys’ rented quarters in the rue Greuze were unsuitable. Unlike Picasso, who had an atelier upstairs from his apartment in the rue la Boétie, Gerald could not find an appropriate space nearby. But he discovered a sculptor’s studio in a shabby block of what looked like old stables on the rue Froidevaux, a street that ran along the southern perimeter of the Cimetière du Montparnasse. This leafy necropolis, crisscrossed with access roads that have the character of country lanes, was full of mausolea inscribed with the name of this or that upper bourgeois Parisian family; the lack of any other buildings in the vicinity meant that the studio got wonderful light. For obvious reasons, it was also very quiet.
Gerald’s quarters consisted of one spacious room with a cement floor and skylight. There was a gas stove in one corner, and in the other a stairway went up to a kind of loft that could be used for sleeping or for storage. He whitewashed the walls and hung a curtain to separate the loft from the rest of the studio; he bought oil and tempera paint, brushes, canvas, and other supplies. He even began sporting a broad-brimmed black hat and red sideburns in the style of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster. He was ready to begin.
