by Amanda Vaill
Within the Quota tells the story of a fresh-faced, clueless innocent from Sweden who arrives in New York with only a satchel, a hobo’s bundle, and a landing card, and subsequently undergoes a series of picaresque adventures at the hands of a dramatis personae straight from central casting, circa 1923—a Jazz Baby, a Cowboy, a Millionairess, a Colored Gentleman, a Social Reformer, America’s Sweetheart. At the ballet’s end he is improbably transformed into a movie star by a cameraman who “films” the action on stage.
This sort of burlesque bore more than a passing resemblance to parodie sketches like Fred’s Maidstone Club triumph, Mrs. Clymer’s Regrets, or the undergraduate reviews Gerald had seen at Yale. But it also had impeccable avant-garde antecedents in Cocteau’s Parade, in which the characters are the Acrobats, the Managers, the Chinese Magician, and the Little American Girl, and he Boeuf sur le toit, with its Policeman, Barman, Negro Boxer, and Woman in a Low Cut Dress. Parade (the title refers to a sideshow or display) was a ballet about how the advertising image, the sideshow, comes to be more important than the real attraction inside the circus tent. Within the Quota was about how the image becomes the real attraction. For an artist who wanted to “represent” real objects as abstractions, the progression was obvious.
The power of the image was even emphasized in the costumes, most of which Sara had either designed or drawn, to Gerald’s specifications. The Hollywoodish cast of characters was dressed in clothes from a semiotician’s sign book: the Tom Mix-like cowboy wore furry chaps that might have been stolen from a grizzly bear and what looks like a twenty-gallon hat; the sheriff had a dinner plate-sized star for a badge; the gilt-haired Mary Pickford type was bedecked with roses, which Cocteau told Gerald were “the most powerful symbol in the world.” Fascinatingly, Sara’s sketch of the Millionairess, whom Gerald described as “a study of American women entering the Ritz,” and who is wearing a rope of golf-ball-sized pearls, an ostrich-plumed cape, and a tiara, looks exactly like Hoytie Wiborg.
Gerald also struck a personal note in the designs for the decor. On an obvious level he was making a point about popular journalism as entertainment: The set was planned as a simple black and white backdrop (the monochrome influence of hes Noces may have been hard to shake) that reproduced in dadaist pastiche the front page of an American newspaper. But although some of the headlines simply parodied their real-world counterparts—“RUM RAID LIQUOR BAN” and “MAMMOTH PLANE UP”—others made sly fun of the establishment that his and Sara’s families lived in and catered to.
“UNKNOWN BANKER BUYS ATLANTIC” screamed the main banner headline, in the best yellow-journalism tradition. Of course it was nonsense, but American millionaires had been buying everything else for the past few decades, and only a few months later J. Pierpont Morgan, Jr. (Gerald’s host at Camp Uncas) would “buy” France when he bailed out the country with the $200 million Dawes Plan. Then there was the box advertising a story on “Ex-Wife’s Heart-Balm Love-Tangle.” It imitated the weird poetry Gerald often discerned in signs and slogans, but it also echoed a currently notorious lawsuit (“DANCER RENEWS HEART-BALM CASE”) in which a showgirl, Evan Burrows Fontaine, was suing the Socially Registered New Yorker Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney for $1 million in compensation (“heart balm”) because he had jilted her to marry Marie Norton. (The marriage didn’t last. Some seven years later Marie Norton Whitney married Gerald’s Yale classmate, and Sara’s old dance partner, Averell Harriman.)
In a certain sense, Gerald used Within the Quota to settle some old scores. In the scenario the immigrant—or “the European,” as he is referred to—meets up with a slinky Millionairess with whom he dances a foxtrot, but she is frightened off by a Reformer. Then the European is diverted by the vaudeville dancing of the Colored Gentleman, who is driven away by a Prohibition agent. Finally “the Jazz Baby, who dances a shimmy in an enticing manner, is also quickly torn from him.” They’re all manifestations of the kind of patriarchal disapproval that had dogged Gerald in his youth and that, in part, had driven him from America. In the end the European overcomes that disapproval because he becomes a star. Perhaps Gerald hoped for the same thing.
It certainly seemed like a possibility at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on October 25, when “fashionable and artistic Paris,” according to the Herald, “made up a brilliant first-night audience, with Americans much in evidence.” Among those in the boxes were the Rudolph Valentinos, John Barrymore, and Elsie De Wolfe, along with her Anglo-Romanian diplomat husband, Sir Charles Mendl. As they leafed through their programs they must have admired Gerald’s cover collage of New York City photographs—the Hudson River waterfront, the Battery, the Flatiron Building, the Woolworth Building—which the paper-doll Immigrant, in Sara’s watercolor sketch, bestrode like a colossus. Only the most observant (and knowledgeable) among them would have noticed that the Mark Cross store on Fifth Avenue, with the company logo painted on the side of the building, had been planted between the Immigrant’s legs.
They got all the other jokes, though. Within the Quota—the title made reference to a tide of pending anti-immigration legislation in the U.S. and Europe—“awoke laughter and applause.” Reviews in both the French and U.S. press were unanimously enthusiastic. Gilbert Seldes praised it as “an American ballet, the first . . . in which popular American music exclusively has been used in connection with an American theme.”
In November the company took the ballet, along with the rest of its repertory, to the United States. But it was not performed at the invitation-only dress rehearsal at the Century Theatre (for which the publicist was the then underemployed critic Edmund Wilson). The audience, which included the sculptor and art collector Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney’s mother) and John Dos Passos, seemed so mystified by the cutting-edge modernism of Skating Rink and L’Homme et son désir that Don Stewart, now back in America, offered to come before the curtain and provide humorous explanatory commentary on the ballets about to be performed. This tactic, shamelessly copied from a popular parodie Robert Benchley monologue called “The Treasurer’s Report,” puzzled the public even more deeply, and it was discarded after one performance.
The Swedes’ prospects looked dim—but when Within the Quota joined the roster it received the equivalent of a hero’s welcome. It was enormously popular, and was performed throughout the company’s tour, from Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and Buffalo, to Allentown, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Altoona, Rochester, Batavia, Utica, Dayton, Lima, and Columbus. In fact, it was the only “modernist” ballet retained on the program, La Création du monde and the rest having been dropped. And, whether through influence or noncausal synchronicity, ghost images of Gerald’s striking design kept appearing long after the Ballets Suédois returned to France. There were John Dos Passos’s newspaper-headline chapter headings in Manhattan Transfer, the novel he was working on when he went to the Suédois programs in New York; Stuart Davis’s 1924 painting Lucky Strike, featuring a tobacco box, a packet of cigarette papers, and a pipe against the backdrop of an enormous newspaper; and nine years later Irving Berlin—who in the winter of 1923–24 was in New York supervising the early run of his Music Box Revue and would probably have attended at least one Ballets Suédois performance—created As Thousands Cheer, a musical entirely based on the concept and design of a newspaper come to life.
When he was interviewed by the New York Herald just before the premiere of Within the Quota, Gerald had said he believed that “Paris is bound to make a man either more or less American”—and the ambiguity was intentional. Although he had to be pleased by his American success, he had no desire to be a hometown boy who makes good; nor was he particularly interested in being lionized by the American community in Paris. At this moment, he had achieved considerable distinction as an American among Europeans, for which he was most proud.
But the balance was about to tip in the other direction, “RUSH OF TOURISTS BEGINS IN EARNEST,” the Paris Herald had declared, in type worthy of Within the Quota,
on May 19: “Twenty-three Liners Bringing Thousands Are Due During Next Few Days.” The Herald had interviewed one of them, a “Mr. Babbitt,” at the Gare St.-Lazare; “I’ve come to Europe for three months of rum and fun,” he said. You may print the fact that America is not dry, but it costs so much to get a glow over there that there isn’t any fun left.” At the other extreme, new American arrivals included the lawyer-turned-poet Archibald MacLeish, the returning expatriate newsman Ernest Hemingway, and the bestselling novelist Scott Fitzgerald. All of them were coming to Paris—not for the “rum and fun”—but because the favorable exchange rate allowed them to live on what Fitzgerald called “practically nothing a year,” and because, as Gertrude Stein wrote, “Paris was where the twentieth century was.” It wasn’t long before their paths converged on Gerald and Sara Murphy’s threshold.
12
“Very serious over trivialities and rather wise about art and life”
IN EARLY 1924, as Within the Quota was winding up its barnstorming tour of the minor cities of the Alleghenies, its designer and scenarist was making a sensation in Paris that rivaled the one created by the fictional hero in his ballet. On February 7, the day of the vernissage or installation for the 1924 Salon des Independents, four workmen walked into the Grand Palais carrying an enormous canvas stretched between two steel poles; more workmen followed, lugging an assortment of steel pipes and casing, which they began to build into a colossal frame. When the hanging committee for the Salon asked what was going on, they were told that this was the entry of M. Gerald Murphy, a painting eighteen feet tall by twelve feet wide entitled Boatdeck.
According to recent practice, work by Independents exhibitors was to be grouped by nationality; but the other paintings by American artists were hung in a room too small to accommodate the gigantic canvas. The only place for it was on the grand staircase leading to the American gallery in the Grand Palais’s rotunda; but once installed there the picture not only dwarfed the other works in size, it overwhelmed them pictorially. On a canvas the size of a small house, Gerald had painted a closely cropped view of the smokestacks, steam pipes, and rigging of an ocean liner. As he wrote later, he had been “struck by the look (especially with the floodlights at night) of the huge almost vertical red-lead-colored smoke-stacks against the sky and the wires of the radio-telegraph, at their base the squat conglomeration of rectangular, ships-white-with-black-trim officers cabins, dead-white mushrooming ventilators with black, gaping pure-circle mouths cut across with white rods spaced into six geometrical segments. Gray, white, black & red-lead: the whole.”
Although there may have been a personal subtext to the painting—this was, after all, the sort of liner that was bringing his countrymen to France by the thousands—there was nothing personal about its presentation. The dark circles of the steam-pipe mouths, the hard white and gray cubes of the officer’s quarters, were as abstract as any of the shapes that Gerald had drawn for Goncharova. In its monumentality, its vividness, its opaque, posterish simplicity, Boatdeck out-Légered Léger—and the polite little paintings by the other American artists chugging along in its wake seemed almost irrelevant.
Its hanging precipitated the kind of ritual crisis the French do so well: A contingent of disgruntled (and anonymous) artists claimed the painting’s size and placement were an affront; the only reason for Boatdeck’s prominent position, they claimed, was some kind of pernicious inside dealing, and they wanted it moved, or removed entirely. An emergency meeting of the executive committee of the Independents was called; but the committee elected to keep the picture where it was, whereupon the president, Paul Signac, and another member, Carlos Reymond, resigned in protest. However, cooler heads prevailed upon the outraged duo to reconsider, and the following day they withdrew their resignations. In the meantime Boatdeck had become the talk of the show: on opening day, reported the Herald, “It could scarcely be seen, so great was the crush around [it].”
The crowds hardly thinned as the week went on, and the painting’s creator got almost as much attention as his picture. He was photographed in front of it by the Herald, wearing a bowler, bow tie, and banker’s pinstripes; another photographer caught him on his balcony overlooking the Seine, this time in a tweed Norfolk jacket, striped four-in-hand, and soft hat. You couldn’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about Gerald Murphy and Boatdeck. It was just like the publicity campaign in Parade; and if the profiles and news items seemed to focus on the sideshow rather than the real spectacle, it wasn’t entirely the journalists’ fault. They had help.
“If they think my picture is too big,” Gerald told the Herald’s interviewer, with calculated grandiosity, “I think the other pictures are too small. After all, it is the Grand Palais.” To the journalist from L’Éclair (who seems not to have been aware how thoroughly his leg was being pulled) he declared he was “truly sorry to have caused such a bother with my little picture.” It was, after all, so much smaller than a real ocean liner—and smaller than the five huge billboards he said he had been commissioned to paint for a Pittsburgh freight terminal. Perhaps it was a good thing that Sara was nowhere in evidence for this interview; she could never have kept a straight face.
Even after the Independents exhibit was over and Boatdeck had been rolled up and put in storage, the sideshow continued. In the spring, when the Murphys went to Etienne de Beaumont’s benefit gala, an “automotive ball” held at the Théâtre de la Cigale in Montmartre, Man Ray photographed them in their costumes: Sara in chauffeur’s goggles and a dress of clinging silver foil, with her pearls wound around her neck three times; Gerald in tights and a metallic tunic that he had to be welded into, with a speakerphone fastened to the shoulder, and a towering headpiece bristling with hubcaps or headlamps. This double portrait had an emblematic significance: “To be done by Man Ray,” said Sylvia Beach, the owner of the bookstore and expatriate headquarters Shakespeare and Company, “meant that you rated as somebody.”
By now Gerald’s celebrity had begun to resonate, not just within the world of the Parisian avant-garde, but in the growing expatriate American artistic community; he had, after all, already arrived where many of them aspired to go. Harry Crosby, cofounder with his wife of the Black Sun Press, met the Murphys through a mutual friend named Ben Kittredge at Ciro’s—the nightclub of the moment—and was impressed by Gerald’s reputation and Sara’s indefinable allure. “Mr. and Mrs. [Gerald] Murphy were with us,” he wrote to his mother, “he I liked a lot—very serious over trivialities and rather wise about art and life. You know he paints. . . . His wife very sphinx-like but knowing—particularly when she danced.”
Crosby, the young, Harvard-educated nephew of J. P. Morgan, Jr., had stunned his Boston family by throwing over his job with the family bank in order to devote himself to the pursuit of culture and pleasure in Paris. Although he burned with a harder flame than the Murphys felt comfortable with—one of his parties featured a skeleton, with a black-bordered condom for a tongue, standing by the door like a butler—both Gerald and Sara liked him very much. He was dazzlingly handsome and vulnerable, in a Back Bay Byronic way, and the Murphys thought his eccentricities charming. Once they came to the Crosbys’ tiny house near the Cimetière du Montparnasse to get a reference for a governess who had cared for Harry’s stepchildren, and found him drinking champagne on the roof. It seemed the most natural thing in the world just to scramble up and join him. (They cared less for his wife, the self-named Caresse, whom they had known when she was Polly Jacob: “we always thought of her as a poseuse,” Gerald told a friend, “affected and downright phony, tho’ she was clever enough to go down with many people.”)
Not all their new acquaintances were as congenial as Harry Crosby. Robert McAlmon, the writer and publisher of Contact Editions (which brought out Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans as well as books by William Carlos Williams, H.D., Mina Loy, and the newcomer Ernest Hemingway), thought the Murphys “chic (which was unpardonable).” So he would try to horrify them by sprinkling h
is conversation with four-letter words, confiding intimate details of his sex life in mixed company, or shouting, “Where’s the wotter clozit?!” in their quai des Grands-Augustins living room.
Sometime in May 1924 the Murphys met someone else who could, on occasion, be as maladroit as McAlmon, but who seemed to them infinitely more sympathetic. Scott Fitzgerald had made a reputation in America as the author of two novels, This Side of Paradise—the book that had defined the Jazz Age—and The Beautiful and Damned. His short stories, which appeared in all the glossy magazines, had established the stereotype of the flapper. He had married Zelda Sayre, “the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia” (as he described her to Dorothy Parker), and the two of them had been painting New York City pink for the past several years. Their wading expeditions in the fountain in front of New York’s Plaza Hotel—or was it the fountain in Washington Square Park?—were already the stuff of legend, but bootleg booze and night-long parties had taken a toll both on their finances and on Fitzgerald’s creative output. So they had come to France to live more austerely while he tried to finish the novel that was to become The Great Gatsby.
In New York they had been friends of Gilbert Seldes and John Dos Passos and Esther Murphy—all of whom they invited to Christmas dinner in 1923 along with Edmund Wilson, a mentor of Fitzgerald’s from Princeton. So when they arrived in Paris to live it was natural that they should seek out Gerald and Sara, who were so well established and well connected, and so much fun besides.
