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

by Amanda Vaill

  A rich and aristocratic Swede, de Maré had set up the Ballets Suédois in 1920 as a Paris showcase for his male lover, a stocky blond dancer named Jean Bôrlin. Modeling his company on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, de Maré had sought out those artists and composers considered to be on the cutting edge of fashion. Because de Maré’s pockets were as deep as Diaghilev’s were shallow, he had been able to pay not only for designs and music, but for costumes by the couturière Jeanne Lanvin, scenery executed by the Opéra’s head scene painter, and the kind of full hundred-piece orchestra that Diaghilev could rarely afford. By 1923 he had seriously challenged Diaghilev’s hegemony and was commissioning scores from Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honneger, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy, and décors from Picabia, Bonnard, and Léger.

  De Maré had scheduled a new African-inspired ballet, to be entitled La Création du monde, from Léger and Milhaud, with a scenario by the novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars. His intention was to include the piece in the company’s winter 1923–24 American tour. But it was short, and he wanted an “American” ballet as a curtain-raiser, designed and composed by Americans, to give the box office a boost. Gerald’s skyscraper construction for the Bal des Artistes Russes made him an obvious candidate to provide the ballet’s décor, and his friendship with Léger, the artist on the other half of the proposed double bill, was a deciding factor. The commission was a considerable coup, and de Maré had done Gerald the additional honor of asking him to suggest a composer and outline the scenario.

  Gerald, in his turn, had proposed his old friend and sometime protégé, Cole Porter. Porter’s career had been languishing: after See America First, the show whose tryout Gerald had gone to see in New Haven in 1916, Cole had written only occasional songs, and Linda wanted him to concentrate on serious orchestral music. She had even asked Igor Stravinsky to come to Antibes the previous summer to teach him harmony and composition. (Stravinsky, after consulting with the Murphys, had declined.) But here was a chance for Cole to write an orchestral composition in the style of Milhaud’s jazzy Boeuf sur le toit, to use his strength with popular idiom to good effect in a “classical” piece. And if he found himself over his head trying to score the piece, de Maré could certainly afford a first-rate orchestrator. Porter got the commission, and Gerald and Sara made plans to visit him and Linda in their rented palazzo in Venice later in the summer so that the two collaborators could work on the ballet.

  In the meantime they luxuriated in the bright Provençal sun: Gerald raked seaweed from the deserted little Garoupe beach, the children splashed in the improbably blue water, and Sara—as had been her habit since East Hampton days—stretched out on a blanket in the sand, reading or writing or dreaming. Sometimes she wore some long white linen dress, sometimes a bathing suit, but always she wore her pearls, looped around her back like the duchess of Rutland’s, so they wouldn’t leave a white mark on her suntanned décolletage. She claimed the sun was good for them.

  One day, not long after their arrival, the Murphys came down to the beach to discover they had company: Pablo Picasso, his wife, Olga, their two-and-a-half-year-old son, Paulo, and Picasso’s mother, Señora Maria Ruiz, who had come to France for the first time in her life to meet her grandson. Picasso was no stranger to the area. The summer before Paulo’s birth Pablo had dragged the unwilling Olga, who would have preferred the chic of St. Raphaël, to a villa in unfashionable Juan-les-Pins, just on the other side of the peninsula, and he had wanted to come back ever since. When the Murphys told him of their own summer plans in Paris that spring, he needed little encouragement to follow them.

  Although Picasso ultimately rented a villa for his family in Juan-les-Pins, at first he and his household (including Paulo’s nounou, or baby nurse) installed themselves in the hotel, and the two families had their meals together in the cavernous, nearly empty dining room, the children at one table and the adults at another. Señora Ruiz, according to Sara, “didn’t speak a word of English,” nor of French, and she tried in vain to teach the Murphys Spanish. Despite their lack of a common language they got on famously. Olga was harder to get to know. She was very pretty, except for a rather weak chin and a tight, thin-lipped little mouth, but she was, as the Murphys noticed, “entirely prosaic” and had no gift for small talk.

  In the beginning the relationship between the couples was formal. “Chère Madame Picasso,” wrote Sara in French, “our children are going to the beach at 9:45 and will return at 11:30 (they eat lunch at 12). We would be so happy if your baby could accompany them, with his nurse. Would you and M. Picasso come swimming with us later, at eleven? The beach is really very nice and we have an American canoe.”

  Soon, however, they were on more playful footing; and when the de Beaumonts and the Barrys appeared at their respective villas in Cannes later in the month, they all gathered regularly on the Garoupe beach.

  Sometimes there were well-organized (if disorderly) diversions: The de Beaumonts planned a “concours et costume de bain” one Friday noon for which the invitees added fantastical elements to their usual swimming costumes. Count Etienne had a hat like a chefs toque trimmed at each temple with Aztec tassels, and the countess had a latticework of beads on her bathing suit and over her hair. Olga wore her ballerina’s tutu and toe shoes, and coiled a twisted black and white scarf around her head. Sara put on a huge white top hat with a ribboned cockade at the brim; and Picasso wore his trademark black homburg over his white shirt and trousers. Señora Ruiz retained her Andalusian widow’s black, and sat on the sand looking like a Buddha. They all clowned around and posed for photographs: Picasso supporting Olga en attitude, then stripping to his bathing suit and putting on Sara’s white hat, and finally joining the others for a mock Victorian group portrait in the Murphys’ canoe.

  On other days Sara’s Kodak captured just the four of them: Picasso and Gerald at the water’s edge, Gerald tall and slender in his rolled-up trunks and white fisherman’s cap, turning somewhat deferentially toward Picasso, who is wearing his homburg and standing on one foot, the other at his knee, like a ballerina’s in passé, grinning hugely at the camera. Picasso and Sara, arms linked, she wearing a turban, he holding his hat in his hand—a photograph that he kept until the end of his life. Picasso alone, with a huge fig leaf pinned on the front of his bathing trunks. And a set of two pictures, one of Gerald and Picasso, the other of Olga and Sara, each in profile gazing at the horizon. Picasso is the figure in the foreground in one, Sara the figure in the foreground in the other. Gerald and Olga are each shadowy and indistinct.

  Despite the air of tranquillity and holiday joie de vivre that pervades these photographs, all was not serene. Relations between Picasso and Olga had begun to cool imperceptibly by that summer. Olga’s tension and anxiety, particularly around little Paulo, contrasted strongly with Sara’s almost visceral delight in her children and her air of luxe, calme, et volupté. And increasingly, it seemed, Picasso was entranced by Sara. She had all the worldly and social experience that Olga only aspired to; but her directness and candor were the exact opposite of the flirtatiousness or politesse Picasso would have been accustomed to in European, and most American, women. (“She is never coy,” Gerald said of her.) Picasso loved her habit of wearing her rope of pearls to the beach, and he found her unconventional gaiety contagious. One day she was arranging a picnic cloth on the sand with brightly colored plates and a straw-covered Chianti bottle, around which she had wound a garland of ivy. As she placed a little pottery vase of fresh flowers in the center of the cloth, Picasso said, in his idiosyncratic French, “Sara est très festin.”

  Gerald was fascinated by Picasso, by his “sense of the grotesque” and the absurdist anarchism that made him say, observing a chauffeur-driven car brought to a screeching halt when a sleeping dog refused to move until shooed away by the chauffeur with a lap robe, “Moi, je voudrais être un chien” (“I’d like to be a dog”). And Picasso seemed to appreciate Gerald’s individual style. At the Opéra in Paris he had pointed out the younger man, wh
o was wearing a high-crush opera hat, to Etienne de Beaumont by saying, “There is American elegance!” They rarely talked about art, though; about the closest they came was Picasso telling Gerald that he “resembled very much in face and body El Greco’s model.”

  During those golden July weeks Picasso began working on a series of drawings and oils, done in the classical manner of Greek vase painting, of a fair-haired woman with slanting eyes. Many of the drawings show her seated on a beach that looks like La Garoupe. In three of the oils the paint is mixed with sand from the beach. Sometimes the woman is holding a child on her lap, her hair twisted lightly at the back of her head, as Sara’s often was, then streaming loosely down her back. In some sketches she is shown in one of the long, classically flowing dresses that Sara favored. In one she is wearing the turban Sara was photographed in with Picasso. In others she is naked except for a rope of pearls.

  Some of these pictures must have been openly drawn from life. Ellen Barry and Gerald both remembered that during their time in Antibes, Picasso had used Sara as a model or inspiration, and the painter’s French biographers took it as a given. But what about the nudes? After all, painting your friend’s wife is one thing, painting her naked with her trademark string of pearls is another. And scholars familiar with Picasso’s methods now believe these drawings, and the obsessiveness with which Picasso returned to the same subject, indicate that his involvement with Sara went deeper than mere admiration.

  “Picasso was in love with her,” says the noted art historian and Picasso scholar William Rubin, adding that, although “nobody really knows,” he believes Picasso and Sara might have had a “short-lived sexual adventure” that summer. John Richardson, the author of what is regarded as the definitive biography of the painter, concurs. “I would have thought that nothing was more likely,” he says. “Picasso was tremendously attractive and charismatic, and very physical, and it would have been hard for her to resist.” Rubin believes that the artist expressed his feelings for Sara by making her the subject of his neoclassical masterpiece The Woman in White, and by beginning a series of studies for a “mystic marriage” composition in which Sara assumed the role of Venus, and Picasso that of Venus’s virile consort, Mars. In several of these, a group of pale, misty pastels, Mars holds a mirror up to Venus to reveal to her her true beauty—a metaphor for the artist’s presentation of his subject—and he and Venus are flanked by a youth playing panpipes and a little Cupid holding a garland.

  Oddly, the panpipes show up in another of that summer’s creations, a play that Philip Barry was writing, but which he never produced or published. Called “The Man of Taste,” it tells the story of Adrian Terry, “thirty-five, tall, of youthful figure. His face is unusually fine and sensitive. A man of wealth, education, and, above all, taste.” A man, in other words, who was the same age as Gerald Murphy and looked very like him. Adrian’s wife, Lissa, who is known for her beauty and her legendary rope of pearls, was “born twenty-eight years ago with a silver spoon in her mouth”; despite the deaths of her parents on the Titanic she has enjoyed a privileged if oversupervised transatlantic upbringing and “a debut party of more than the usual gorgeousness.” Like Sara, she has married “a curiously tender, understanding [man with] a rare gift of enjoying life to the fullest and of making others enjoy it with him.” But the marriage is threatened when a former lover of Lissa’s, with whom she had a one-night affair during her engagement, shows up and plans to lure her into an elopement.

  The catch is that Adrian knows what’s happening, and he’s planned a May eve party, “a dinner with at least the suggestion of the fiesta about it,” for which the drawing and dining rooms will be transformed into “what is referred to as ‘a sylvan grove.’” (The echo of Gerald’s occasionally ornate speech is uncanny.) As entertainment during this “dinner fit for the gods, Pan and Bacchus,” he has engaged an Italian boy to play panpipes, the flutes of love. But Adrian won’t be there to hear them. He has arranged to be summoned away by a make-believe telegram, and he has also managed to turn away all the other guests by telling them the party has been canceled. Gambling on the principle that a move by the other man will offend and repel his wife, Adrian has stage-managed things so that Lissa will be alone at the feast with her tempter.

  The parallels between this play and Picasso’s picture, and between the play and life, are unsettling. But art is art, and life is life. What really happened that summer?

  In August the Murphys went to Venice, and Sara dashed off a farewell note to the “chers Picassos,” dating it with a little drawing of a train. She promised to send them some American ties Picasso had admired, along with a present for Olga, and she looked forward to seeing them again at the end of the month. After saying that the Murphy family sent best wishes, she added, “We love you very much, you know—Sara.”

  The Murphys spent two weeks together with the Porters in the Casa Papadopoli on the Grand Canal, where Gerald and Cole were meant to work on their ballet. But there were distractions: Venice was the place to be for the roving European smart set that Linda Porter ran with, and so there were grand parties and trips to the Lido to swim and be seen. They posed like tourists in the Piazza San Marco—Sara and Cole and Gerald and Ginny Carpenter, Cole striking an attitude with his arms linked in the women’s, Sara and Ginny smiling at the camera from beneath their hat brims, and Gerald, with his Panama hat and Norfolk suit and malacca cane, looking not at the camera but at Sara.

  Despite the gaiety there was a sense of strain in the visit. Sara felt that Linda Porter disapproved of her and of Gerald, perhaps for different reasons. And Cole and Linda had increasingly begun to go their separate ways; Cole had discovered the city’s homosexual netherworld and had begun seeking out gondoliers and other rough trade for pleasure. After two weeks Sara returned to Antibes, leaving Gerald to finish his work with Cole. The two of them went swimming at the Lido one day and Gerald swam far out past the buoys, causing the lifeguard to scream at him to come back—it was pericoloso. “So is love pericoloso,” shouted Gerald in return, and went on swimming.

  If Picasso and Sara had an affair, it would have happened then. In this version of that summer’s events, Sara would have been responding not only to Picasso’s animal magnetism but to her own frustration at being abandoned in favor of her husband’s homosexual friend. But such a scenario seems unlikely. As someone who was acquainted with them both pointed out, Cole was attracted to rather lowlife men, and Gerald was most emphatically not his type. More important was Sara’s “sense of austerity” (as Ellen Barry described it) about extramarital relationships. “Sara,” stated Hester Pickman’s mother, Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, “is incorruptible.” However attractive Picasso might have seemed, her unwavering integrity and her very real love for Gerald and her children made any long-term backdoor relationship impossible.

  Love might be perilous, but it seems as if Gerald’s gamble—if, like Adrian Terry, he was gambling—paid off. Some time after Sara returned alone to Antibes, Picasso painted over the composition he had been working on, the large oil we now know as The Pipes of Pan, eliminating the figures of Venus and Cupid, and leaving only the haunting, rather mournful image of two lonely men by the shore, one of them playing a double flute. Why? According to William Rubin, whose X-ray examinations of the picture revealed the ghost images beneath its painted surface, Picasso had planned The Pipes of Pan as a climax to his mystic marriage series, a way of consummating his love for Sara on canvas. When she put a halt to whatever was going on between them, he had to alter the painting.

  It’s difficult, as Gerald himself was later to acknowledge, to say what has gone in private between two people. But it appears that Sara had begun to master the art of balancing friendship and eros. In the years since her encounter with Walter Sickert she had learned to go beyond writing “Hate man not going back” in her diary. Whatever had or had not happened in Antibes, she managed to stay friendly with Picasso, but on her terms. “Will you come, both of you,” she wrote to him and
Olga in French later that year, “and have one of our orgies? We’ll dance, we’ll drink, we’ll go a little crazy . . . ?” This note is signed “With best wishes” (underlined twice), and the words “from Gerald and me” have been added, like an afterthought—or a reminder?—in the margin.

  This wasn’t coquetry. It was a kind of chaste sensuality that was as new to Picasso as it was to others who would encounter it, a spirit that was mirrored in the Garoupe drawings, the sand paintings, The Woman in White. It’s the spirit of unfulfilled desire and ineffable promise that has animated neoclassicism since Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” As paradoxical as it seems today, perhaps it was Sara’s withdrawal, rather than her surrender, that inspired the work Picasso did that summer.

  Gerald and Cole Porter’s ballet, entitled Within the Quota, received its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on October 25. The preopening buzz was considerable: The ballet had been originally planned as a curtain-raiser for Léger, Milhaud, and Cendrars’s startling African-inspired La Création du monde. But after seeing the rehearsals Léger asked Rolf de Maré to change the performance order because he feared the Americans’ ebullient jazz-inflected spoof would make the more serious pleasures of his piece seem like heavy going to the audience. On the day of the premiere there was a front-page story about the ballet in the Paris Herald, which of course would be read by all the members of the American colony in Paris and might very likely be picked up by the New York edition of the paper as well. The accompanying photograph was of Gerald, who told his interviewer that the ballet was “nothing but a translation on to the stage of the way America looks to me from over here. I put into the play all the things that come out of America to me, you see, as I get things into perspective and distance.” The composer seemed to agree: The score, which had been orchestrated by Charles Koechlin, blended Milhaudesque jazz and Stravinskyan syncopation with the obbligato of a silent-movie piano. And Porter explained, “It’s easier to write jazz over here than in New York . . . because you are too much under the influence of popular song in America, and jazz is better than that.”