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

by Amanda Vaill

  The snow in the valley was uneven so the Hemingways, Murphys, and Dos Passos took the little electric train up the mountain to the Hotel Zum Rossle-Post at Gaschurn, where the Hemingways had stayed in January with Pauline Pfeiffer, and Ernest proceeded to give the beginners skiing lessons. There were no lifts or tows in those days, nor any fancy boots and bindings: you just strapped heavy wooden skis to your feet and added sealskins on the bottom to give yourself traction, climbed up the slope, took off the skins, and skied downhill. Gerald “spent two days doggedly practicing and falling down, and learning the elements of the stem Christiana and the Telemark,” but, he said, “Dos didn’t bother . . . because his eyesight was so bad he knew it was no use.” Still Gerald felt himself somewhat at a disadvantage: “Dos has always had hugely powerful legs and tremendous restless energy, and Ernest was an expert climber,” he recalled. But the same spirit with which he had conquered the elements in the Picaflor asserted itself:

  I struggled along, trying to keep up with them, and felt terribly ashamed that I was holding them up. . . . Ernest always gave you the sense of being put to the test, and he was an absolutely superb skier. . . . When we started down, Dos just decided to go straight and sit down whenever he saw a tree, with the result that his pants were not only torn to shreds but his backside had all the skin taken off it. I managed to get down the first part without falling. Then in the second part, we had to go through a forest. I managed that pretty well too, falling only once or twice. Ernest would stop every twenty yards or so to make sure we were all right, and when we got to the bottom, about half an hour later, he asked me if I had been scared. I said, yes, I guess I had. He said then he knew what courage was, it was grace under pressure. It was childish of me, but I felt absolutely elated.

  The elation lasted all the way down the mountain to Gaschurn, where, in the evening, all five of them sat by the hotel’s porcelain stove and ate forellen im blau and drank kirsch and told stories. Ernest got out the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises and read some of the parts he had revised, and Gerald and Sara said how much they would like to go to Pamplona and Ernest urged them to join him the next summer. Dos couldn’t promise to be there, but Hadley’s friend Pauline was coming. Why not Gerald and Sara as well? He showed them photographs of the bullfights—Gerald was so struck by the look of the dark bull’s head that he made a note to use it as the “nucleus” of a painting. So they made their plans, and drank more kirsch, and slept under feather quilts while the stars shone on the snow.

  One day they posed for a photograph, the five of them—Dos, the Hemingways, the Murphys—standing in the cold slanting sunlight, bundled in woolen caps and thick sweaters. Their faces were merry and brown; their bodies, as they stood touching one another easily, were relaxed. It was, said Dos Passos later, “the last unalloyed good time” they all had together.

  That spring Gerald had two pictures in the Salon des Independents, Laboratoire and a still life—a third painting, meant to have been exhibited as well, never made it past the registration stage and must have been either withdrawn or damaged. Laboratoire was almost certainly the painting described in his art notebook as a “group of chemical retorts,—diaphanous, white line profile shapes, tender colors, sure, graceful forms, ghosted. On glass, transparent paint with colored papers background, laboratory table as setting.” The Nature Morte might have been the painting also referred to as Roulement a Billes (Ball Bearing), now lost, which showed the sculptural machine part Gerald had so admired and placed on his piano like a work of art. Or it might have been any of a number of pictures outlined on the ruled pages of Gerald’s notebook: a view of a drugstore window; a collection of sewing implements—needles, thread, scissors; a still life of batterie de cuisine with rattan rug beaters hung on the wall behind; a view of Gerald’s black-and-white marble bureau top with a bunch of violets in a vase; “a table with real objects (glass) in foreground in front of a ‘nature morte’ of real objects in false perspective (treated).”

  By any measure, Gerald had been prodigiously busy in the preceding months, the images crowding both his brain and the pages of his notebook. And he hadn’t limited himself to images: the notebook also held, in addition to a meditation on the difference between “‘painting’ forms and ‘mechanical’ forms,” an idea for a play about a family breeding farm where “the regular life of ‘sire-dam-service’ talk” plays “against a running obbligato of prudery in human relations.” What would happen, Gerald wondered, if a family devoted to an honest, animal expression of sex suddenly came across someone who used sex dishonestly, sophisticatedly, as a tool or weapon? “Is there dramatic material,” he asked Philip Barry in a letter, “in the fact that intelligent people, taking a frank interest in the workings of sex and its results in animals, are at a loss and unable to see or act clearly as regards sex in the case of human beings”? There’s no record of Barry’s reply, if there was one. But soon Gerald got another kind of answer.

  The spring of 1926 was cold and rainy in the north of France, and Sara and Gerald, mindful of how drafty and cramped the Hemingways found their Paris flat, were determined to bring them down to stay at the Villa America. Ernest wanted to go to Madrid to write and see the San Ysidro bullfights in May, and so Gerald and Sara proposed that Hadley leave little Bumby with them and join Ernest in Spain; then they could return to Antibes until Pauline Pfeiffer joined the party and all five of them went to Pamplona in July.

  But Ernest and Hadley (unbeknownst to Gerald and Sara) had quarreled about Ernest’s increasingly apparent partiality for Pauline. Under Hadley’s questioning, he stoutly denied it, but in fact he and Hadley’s friend had become lovers that winter in Paris, when he stopped over on his way back from New York. Now he went off to Spain by himself in a cloud of self-righteous indignation, leaving Hadley and Bumby, who had come down with a persistent cough, in Paris.

  The Murphys persuaded Hadley to come with Bumby to Antibes anyway; it would cheer her up, they felt, and the MacLeishes and the Fitzgeralds were settled nearby, which would make things lively. Unfortunately, as soon as Hadley and Bumby arrived, the boy’s croup was diagnosed as whooping cough and it was advised that he be quarantined. The Fitzgeralds were in the process of moving from their villa—the lease was up in June—to a larger one they’d taken for the remainder of the summer, so they offered the empty villa to Hadley, and Gerald summoned (and paid for) the Murphys’ British doctor to care for Bumby. He wrote immediately to reassure Ernest: “Hadley seemed so tired when she arrived . . . [but] she’s in great form now and resting finely. There’s no doubt that Bumby’s better off. We have the best doctor we’ve ever known: an Englishman. Hadley likes him. It’s one of those crazy train of incidents which seems to lead to a situation somehow good. Don’t worry—you.”

  That, to Gerald and to Sara, was the most important thing—that Ernest not worry, that he be able to do his work in peace. What they didn’t tell Ernest (but Hadley later confessed) was that they were also paying for Hadley’s grocery bills and other expenses, which galled Hemingway, who was both anxious and prickly about money and who resented (even while he accepted) the paternal role Gerald so often played in their relationship. As he did so often, Hemingway now used his fiction to get back at the object of his resentment: revising The Sun Also Rises, he put Gerald into the latest version as the rich dilettante hopelessly in love with, and ultimately humiliated by, the fallen angel who became Lady Brett Ashley. In his original draft, entitled Fiesta, the character has the same name as his real-life counterpart, Harold Loeb; in the final version he is Robert Cohn. But for a brief period Hemingway’s classic portrait of a patsy—a man whose money the other characters spend, and insult him for the privilege—was called Gerald Cohn.

  Neither Gerald nor Sara knew this, of course. They were busy planning a celebration for when Ernest rejoined his family and friends: they would give a party at the little Juan-les-Pins casino, which would help the casino’s owner and make a fiesta for Ernest. And now, while they waited for Bumby
to get better and Ernest to come back from Spain, they tried to keep Hadley amused. At “yardarm time” they would enlist the Fitzgeralds and Ada MacLeish (Archie was in Persia with the League of Nations Opium Commission until June) and drive over to the Villa Paquita, where they’d park just beyond the fence for a quarantined cocktail party—Hadley on one side, the Murphys and company on the other. “By the time we left,” remembered Hadley, “that fence was covered with glass bottles artfully arranged. It was great fun.”

  The only one who didn’t find it much fun was Scott Fitzgerald, who was beginning to feel a kind of free-floating hostility that he expressed in a variety of ways as the summer progressed. For the first time in a while he had no financial worries—a successful dramatization of The Great Gatsby and some healthy magazine sales had brought in money—and, as he later remembered it, “I made one of those mistakes literary men make—I thought I was a ‘man of the world’—that everybody liked me and admired me for myself but I only liked a few people like Ernest and Charlie McArthur [the playwright Charles MacArthur, coauthor of The Front Page and husband of Helen Hayes] and Gerald and Sara who were my peers.” But his feelings of self-confidence were undercut by uneasiness about Zelda, who had been acting strangely, and by a nagging jealousy about Hemingway, his friend and sometime protégé. Why were the Murphys, who had been his friends first, so crazy about Ernest? Why did they rave so about his writing, when they were so diffident about his own?

  As often happens with insecure people, Scott transmuted his feelings of anxiety into belligerence, and when the drink was on him he got nasty. He ragged Gerald for the very thing that made him so irresistible to his friends: “I suppose you have some special plan for us today,” he sneered when he met Gerald at the beach one morning. And he grew more and more demanding of Sara. A scene in the draft of the novel he was writing is telling: One of the characters, a promising composer ruined by drink, is talking to the beautiful Dinah Roreback, a woman so closely modeled on Sara that in this version of the manuscript the name “Sarah” is crossed out and replaced with “Dinah.” “I’ve been in love with you for several years,” says the composer. “In my imagination I sleep with you every night.”

  His infatuation has made him dislike her husband, Seth (originally called “Gerald” in this version); but she won’t let him tell her why: “I can’t discuss Seth with you,” she says. Just as Sara, in a tart note written to Scott that summer, said, “It’s hardly likely that I should explain Gerald,—or Gerald me—to you.” Years later Gerald implied to a friend that Fitzgerald’s portrait of a marriage in Tender Is the Night—not a “cooled relation,” but “active love . . . more complicated than I can tell you”—was true of himself and Sara too. Whatever complications might have been caused by Gerald’s own self-doubts, at this time the connection between himself and Sara was physical, and sexual, as well as emotional. But at this point Scott, perhaps willfully, could only sense the complications.

  Hemingway’s arrival in Antibes, welcomed by Gerald and Sara with champagne and caviar, made things worse. Fitzgerald wasn’t a professionally envious man—his unstinting editorial and tactical support of Hemingway is proof of that—but he had fierce personal jealousies. And what he saw at the Juan-les-Pins casino made him deeply unhappy. It wasn’t the grim minuet of Hadley, Ernest, and Pauline that caught his attention, though; it was the way in which Gerald and Sara—particularly Sara—hung on Ernest’s every word. And perhaps there was something else. As Ellen Barry, who was there with her husband, Philip, later pointed out, Fitzgerald wasn’t the only man at the party who was attracted to Sara. “So was Ernest,” she recalled. Identifying with Gerald, as he often did, Fitzgerald had to feel uneasy about the danger Hemingway might pose to him. Anxious, hurt, and jealous, Scott proceeded to make a fool of himself and a shambles of the party with his behavior to Gerald and his moans that “Sara’s being mean to me.”

  The Murphys were either ignorant of all these fault lines or chose to ignore them, as if they could ward off disaster with gaiety. When Archie MacLeish landed in Marseille on June 16 after his three-month trip to Persia, they made an occasion of it, bribing an officer of an ocean liner moored in the harbor to let the two of them and Ada watch his arrival from the liner’s bridge, and then performing an Indian war dance on the pier. They organized morning beach outings for their friends and guests, all carefully chronicled in Sara’s photograph albums: Scott and Zelda and little Scottie wading in the azure water and squinting in the sunlight; Ernest, tall and brown in striped bathing trunks, grinning at the camera, with Bumby on his shoulders; Hadley, fully dressed, kneeling by her son in the sand; “Ada of the Flying Fingers,” as Gerald called her, knitting under a checked beach umbrella, with Sara beside her, glancing seductively over her shoulder at the camera, her pearls looping over her bare back.

  There is another photograph, from July in Pamplona, the Fiesta of San Fermín. Sara and Gerald are sitting at a café table with Ernest, Pauline, and Hadley. On the table there are glasses and a soda siphon. It is hot; the sun glares in the foreground. Gerald is squinting beneath the brim of his cap;

  Sara, with a cigarette smoldering between rigid fingers, eyes the photographer distrustfully. Ernest sits between Pauline and Hadley, wearing tweeds and a tie and black beret, smiling slightly at the camera. He looks, paradoxically, both uncomfortable and self-satisfied. Hadley, seated next to Ernest, is looking across at Gerald; she seems tired. Pauline, a slight, dark, crop-haired figure in the center of the group, sits with eyes cast down at her lap. She is smiling to herself.

  They had arrived some days earlier, having left Bumby in Antibes with his French nurse. They had found the town filled with farmers and pilgrims who had come for the fiesta—many of them, unable to find lodgings, sleeping in the streets. Strange music played all day long and through the night—brass bands and men with drums and a plaintive reed pipe, like a short recorder—and itinerant vendors sold wine in wineskins, which they squirted into your mouth from a foot away. There were processions with banners and effigies and giants and dwarfs, and of course the legendary running of the bulls, who thundered through the streets on the first day of the fiesta with the young men of Pamplona racing alongside them. It was all strange, earthy, and exhilarating, but there was a peculiar undercurrent of tension.

  The Hemingway party stayed in the bullfighters’ hotel, the Quintana, on the main square, with two of the most prominent matadors at the fiesta, Villalta and Nino de la Palma, just across the corridor. Gerald was particularly struck by seeing them lying on their cots in the afternoon before the corrida, looking like effigies, their bullion-encrusted suits of lights draped across the chairs at their feet. Later he tried to put his reaction into words: “these men, living, as it seems to me in a region between art and life, . . . make you feel that you are as you find most other people—half-alive . . . They are a religion for which I could have been trained.”

  In fact, in Pamplona, Gerald felt very much the religious novice to Hemingway’s father superior. Although he could still call Hadley and Ernest “you two children” and sign a postcard to them “dow dow,” the balance in the relationship between the two men had begun to shift. Before they went to Spain, Gerald, who admired Pauline’s gamine chic and her wit, had begun calling her “Daughter,” his nickname for any young girl he liked; in Pamplona, Hemingway started doing it, too, and seemed annoyed when Gerald wouldn’t relinquish the habit. And Ernest had started calling himself “Papa.”

  Gerald felt insecure enough to start worrying about what to wear, he with his unerring clothes sense and gift for disguise. Finally he settled on a pearl gray gabardine suit and an old golf cap of his father’s—“I didn’t want to wear a Panama hat,” he recalled—and, to his relief, won Ernest’s approval. The cap, Ernest told him, was just right: “it looks tough,” he said. And, he reported to Gerald, the suit was a success with the townspeople: “They say you’re called the man in the silver suit,” Hemingway said. “Do they approve?” Gerald asked an
xiously, and Ernest replied, “Yes, they think it’s fine.”

  There was a tradition in Pamplona that in the mornings local aficionados could try their hands with the young bulls; it was at one of these sessions that Don Stewart had been tossed the year before. This time, with Hadley, Pauline, and Sara watching, Ernest put Gerald up to going into the bullring. Gerald had begged off running with the bulls—he hadn’t wanted “to look or feel a fool”—but Sara had said, “I’m sorry you didn’t run. It would have been a great feeling afterwards.” So later he promised Ernest that next year he would run, “and I’ll do it well, Papa.” And now he took up Ernest’s challenge in the ring. “He was watching me all the time out of the corner of his eye . . . to see how I would take it,” Gerald recalled. When he saw Gerald execute an impromptu (and terrified) veronica with his raincoat, standing to one side as the bull brushed past, Ernest inevitably went him one better. With nothing in his hands to distract the bull, he waited until the animal charged him, then vaulted over its horns onto its back. His weight brought the animal to its knees, and, said Sara, “everybody yelled ‘Ole.’”

  Afterward, although he was already caught in a triangle with Hadley and Pauline, Ernest seemed compelled to flirt with Sara. Why did she never wear her diamond jewelry in the daytime, he asked; her diamonds would look so wonderful in the sunlight. Think how she would look at the bullfights with her jewelry blazing in the sun. So that afternoon, when they all went to the corrida, Sara put on “a little silk dress” and “all my diamonds” to sit beside Ernest in the barrera seats (paid for by Gerald), as close to the ring as possible. But when the corrida began, the slaughter of the picadors’ horses by the bulls sickened and enraged her, and, she said in a recorded interview many years later, “I stamped out and walked back to the hotel,” diamonds and all. “I wonder if anybody noticed,” she mused. In the tape recording her husky voice, with its soft southern Ohio drawl, is regretful, almost plaintive. “I don’t think Ernest ever knew that I’d left, did he?” she said. “He didn’t notice.”