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

by Amanda Vaill

  She went back to the arena the next day, though, and the next, and sat through enough to tell Ernest that “no one has anything on me about liking bullfights—, even if I don’t like seeing bowels—But that is just a woman’s whimsey and does not count.”

  In the end she and Gerald were both disturbed and attracted by Pamplona’s elemental quality. Perhaps it was the strangeness, or the sense of danger and sexual excitement. Whatever it was, Gerald told Ernest that their time there “kept unearthing and over-topping the best we’ve known together since we’ve known each other.” They pillaged Pamplona’s shops for gifts and memories—a guitar for Baoth, a drum for Sara herself—and they all ate the olives and wonderful roasted almonds and drank the very dry sherry. And one night there was a fireworks display and dancing in the plaza, and they all did the sardana and then a crowd of people, put up to it by Hadley or Ernest, surrounded the Murphys, clapping and calling out “Dansa Charles-ton! Dansa Charles-ton!” And Gerald and Sara, who had got a professional troupe from the Cannes casino to come to the Villa America and teach them the steps to the hot new dance craze from the U.S., rose and danced for the whistling, cheering crowd.

  The Murphys arrived back in Antibes to find summer in full swing. Monty Woolley, who was teaching drama at Yale and had yet to make his celebrated appearance as The Man Who Came to Dinner, came to visit, and he and Gerald devised a sort of vaudeville routine, called “stomach touch,” a parody of two old Yale alumni literally bumping into each other in a bar, full of hearty Bulldog banter. They also became fascinated with a visitor to the Hotel du Cap, the Romanian-British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl. Sir Charles’s impenetrable (and acquired) British accent—he pronounced “fire” as “fahhh”—entranced them, so they kept striking up conversations with him just to hear what he would say. One day Gerald asked him for his definition of a cad: Sir Charles struggled with the subtleties of this for some moments, then blurted out, to Woolley’s and Gerald’s intense delight, “Oh, hang it! A cad is someone who makes you go all crinkly-toes!” The expression became a byword in the Murphy family, and Scott Fitzgerald drew heavily on Sir Charles for his portrait of the Englishman Campion in Tender Is the Night.

  There were other visitors as well: Picasso brought Man Ray, who photographed Honoria in a harlequin suit with a matador’s bicorne hat beside her (the same costume Paulo Picasso had worn in his father’s 1924 portrait) and Sara and Gerald, separately, each dressed in white against the lush tangle of the garden, with the three children. The humorist Robert Benchley, a friend of Don Stewart’s, came to stay, bringing his two sons and his wife, Gertrude, a Massachusetts girl whose Yankee vowels Gerald loved (he always spelled, and pronounced, her name “Gaytrûd”); Alexander Woollcott also visited; and eventually Don Stewart himself, newly married, with his bride, Beatrice. The Murphys greeted them at the station with Baoth’s guitar and Sara’s drum, and planned a party to welcome the newlyweds. They invited the Hemingways, who had just returned from Spain, and the Picassos, who were in Juan-les-Pins again; but Bea Stewart fell victim to what Sara tactfully referred to as a crise de foie and the party had to be postponed. “Brides, I find, just aren’t as sturdy as they used to be,” complained Sara to Picasso. “What is it they all seem to have??”

  Suddenly there was a pervasive feeling of malaise in the air. Scott Fitzgerald, it was clear, was drinking more than ever; and although Zelda was in better physical health since an appendectomy in June, her behavior was exceedingly peculiar. Late one evening when the Murphys had joined the Fitzgeralds at the casino in Juan-les-Pins, all four of them were sitting at their table when Zelda suddenly got up and, lifting the skirt of her evening dress above her waist, began, slowly, hypnotically, like a dervish, to dance. “She was dancing for herself,” Gerald remembered, “she didn’t look left or right, or catch anyone’s eyes. She looked at no one, not once, not even at Scott. I saw a mass of lace ruffles as she whirled—I’ll never forget it. We were frozen.”

  Typically, neither Gerald nor Sara found this behavior reprehensible; they didn’t judge Zelda, only appreciated her. “She had this tremendous natural dignity,” said Gerald. “She was so self-possessed, so absorbed in her dance. Somehow she was incapable of doing anything unladylike.” Not even when she hurled herself over a parapet at a restaurant in St.-Paul-de-Vence, a picturesque medieval village in the hills behind Antibes, where Gerald and Sara had taken the Fitzgeralds to dinner to escape the crowds now increasingly prevalent on the coast. La Colombe d’Or was a rustic inn, much beloved of the artists like Picasso, Léger, Signac, and Bonnard, who sometimes paid for their meals with drawings; the Murphys had reserved a table on the stone terrace overlooking the Loup valley, two hundred feet straight below, with Antibes and the Esterel visible in the distance. At the end of their meal, when the other diners had left, they were fascinated to discover Isadora Duncan seated at a neighboring table with three admirers. Although she was hugely fat and middle-aged and henna-haired, she still had enough of her old star power that Fitzgerald—when Gerald and Sara told him who she was—went to sit at her feet. Duncan was entranced by this blond, boyish acolyte and began running her hands through his hair and calling him her “centurion.” That was when Zelda, without warning, stood up on her chair and leaped over the table—and over Gerald, who was seated with his back to the view—into the darkness beyond the parapet.

  “I was sure she was dead,” remembered Gerald, but moments later Zelda reappeared. She had fallen onto a stone staircase that ran down from the terrace, and now she stood at the top, her knees and dress bloody, but otherwise unharmed. Sara flew to her and tried to wipe away the blood with her napkin; as for Gerald, his first thought was “that it had not been ugly. I said that to myself over and over again.”

  To Fitzgerald, the contrast between his own fraying marriage and the Murphys’ seemingly durable one had to be painful, and—as he worried at the manuscript he had begun, which was currently entitled World’s Fair—he tried to analyze what it was that made them somehow different. One evening, when the Murphys had given a party for the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, and the MacLeishes, Fitzgerald started quizzing Gerald about his and Sara’s relationship: Why did they seem so formal with each other? When they told each other jokes, he said, it seemed as if they were telling them to strangers. Had they slept together before they were married? Did they still sleep together? Sara was outraged. “Scott, you just think if you ask enough questions you’ll know all about people,” she said. “But you don’t know anything about people.” Goaded to repeat this remark by Fitzgerald, who was almost sick with fury, she did. And the evening, like others, ended badly. “Dear Scott,” wrote Sara, with her usual haphazard punctuation, the next day,

  I’ve generally said what I thought. And it seems another of those moments.

  We consider ourselves your friends. . . . But you can’t expect anyone to like or stand a Continual feeling of analysis & subanalysis, & criticism—on the whole unfriendly—Such as we have felt for quite awhile. . . . It certainly detracts from any gathering,—& Gerald, for one, simply curls up at the edges & becomes someone else in that sort of atmosphere. . . . [L]ast night you even said “that you had never seen Gerald so silly & rude”. . . .—and if Gerald was “rude” in getting up & leaving a party that had gotten quite bad, then he was rude to the Hemingways and MacLeishes too. No, it is hardly likely that you would stick at a thing like manners—it is more probably some theory you have,—(it may be something to do with the book),—But you ought to know at your age that you Can’t have Theories about friends.

  Although Scott wrote her an apology he couldn’t seem to stop himself from making more and uglier scenes: getting drunk and pitching three of Sara’s prized Venetian wineglasses out onto the driveway, one by one, so that Gerald banished him from the Villa America for three weeks; following two young Frenchmen around the dance floor at the casino and asking them, over and over, if they were “fairies,” to the intense embarrassment of Ada MacLeish, who was dancing with on
e of them. Possibly the ugliest scene was the last: The Murphys were going to New York in October, and to celebrate the end of the summer they put on a “Dinner-Flowers-Gala” with a vengeance, inviting not only their American literary friends but all the gratin of the coast, including an aristocratic French neighbor, the Princesse de Poix, and her houseguest, the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay. Some time after the Fitzgeralds arrived Scott accosted another guest, a young, openly homosexual writer and pianist named Eugene McGowan, whom the Murphys liked because he was witty and charming. “Are you a homosexual?” Scott asked baldly, and—when McGowan said that he was—“What do you people do, anyway?” After this Fitzgerald subsided for a time, but when dessert was served he found his form again: plucking a ripe fig from a bowl of pineapple sorbet, he pitched it right between the bare, blue-blooded shoulder blades of the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay, who was seated at the next table. With impeccable sangfroid she pretended not to notice, but Gerald did, and asked Archie MacLeish to try and restrain Fitzgerald. Archie took Scott to the bastide and proceeded to give him a tongue-lashing, but Scott threw a punch at him and—as Gerald remembered it anyway—“Archie knocked him cold.”

  Things were patched up between them. As Fitzgerald rather churlishly put it in a note to Hemingway, who had returned to Paris at the end of August, “We saw the Murphys before they left, got stewed with them at their party—that is we got stewed—and I believe there was some sort of mawkish reconciliation. However they’ve grown dim to me and I don’t like them much any more.” The fact that the Murphys had lent the vacated Villa America to the Fitzgeralds for the remainder of the autumn seemed not to have abashed Fitzgerald in the slightest. He was much more interested in the news that Ernest had confided to him, and to Sara and Gerald before their departure: he and Hadley had decided to separate.

  Fitzgerald said he was “depressed and . . . baffled”; on their side, Gerald and Sara were stunned. It was only weeks ago that they had written to the Hemingways as one person, literally: the letter began “Dear Hadern.” But, although the Murphys had proclaimed Hadley and Ernest, together, to be “close to what’s elemental,” with their “values hitched up to the universe,” when the crunch came it was with Ernest that their sympathies lay. Aware that Hadley had a private income but that Ernest was now living on $200 installments of his publisher’s advance, Gerald quietly deposited $400 in Hemingway’s Paris bank account. “When life gets bumpy,” he wrote to Ernest afterward, “you get through to the truth sooner if you are not hand-tied by the lack of a little money. I preferred not to ask you: so Sara said just deposit and talk about it after.” (Ernest had guessed they would do something of the sort, and even told Hadley not to worry about his finances as a result.) He and Sara both felt, Gerald went on, that “Hadley and you . . . are after two different kinds of truth in life . . . I hold in very sacred respect the thing that Hadley and you have enjoyed between you [but] your heart will never be at peace to live, work and enjoy unless you clean up and cut through.”

  Gerald offered Ernest the loan of his studio at 69 rue Froidevaux, as a temporary residence, and Ernest moved in there on his return to Paris. He didn’t tell them that he was divorcing Hadley to marry Pauline, or that Hadley had made his divorce contingent on a hundred-day separation from her rival, who had returned to America. Perhaps he was afraid they would respond as his parents did when he finally announced his divorce and remarriage. His father attacked him with a harangue against “Love Pirates” and “persons who break up your home etc.,” to which Ernest rather pathetically replied, “You would be so much happier and I would too, if you could have confidence in me. . . . You could if you wanted be proud of me sometimes—not for what I do for I have not had much success in doing good—but for my work.”

  Contrast Clarence Hemingway’s reaction with the note Gerald wrote Ernest after an evening the Murphys spent with him at the end of September, just before they sailed for their autumn visit to America: “We said to each other last night and we say to you now that: we love you, we believe in you and all your parts, we believe in what you’re doing, in the way you’re doing it. Anything we’ve got is yours: somehow we are your father and mother, by what we feel for you.” Sara’s contribution, sealed in the same envelope, was less reasoned but no less emphatic: “Dear gros Patron [Big Boss, her nickname for Hemingway], We certainly believe in you as Gerald says—Thank you for talking to us—and don’t think you were the only one helped by it! In the end you will probably save us all,—by refusing (among other things) to accept any second-rate things places ideas or human natures—Bless you & don’t ever budge—”

  15

  “How can a wise man have two countries?”

  “EVERYONE IN AMERICA is discontented, unhappy, or complaining,” reported Gerald to Ernest Hemingway when the Murphys arrived in New York in 1926; but somehow he and Sara managed to insulate themselves from the prevailing angst. On a piece of hotel stationery Gerald copied out a verse from Genesis: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

  They couldn’t leave their fathers and mothers totally: New Year’s was spent with Frank Wiborg, or “grang pere,” as eleven-year-old Honoria called her grandfather. In her usual phonetic French, in her diary, she also wrote, “mais ma tent n’etait pas la.” Hoytie evidently had other things to do. When Pauline Pfeiffer turned up in New York during her hundred-day separation from Ernest, Gerald and Sara took her to the senior Murphys’ for Patrick’s bootleg cocktails. Pauline’s smart mouth and short haircut shone in the Murphys’ drawing room like a good deed in a naughty world—and afterward the three of them went up to Harlem to listen to jazz in “three nigger hives,” as Pauline described them. The Murphys, she told Ernest, were “adorable.” Don Stewart, who was in between trips to the West Coast in search of film work, gave a party for the adorable Murphys, and for the Barrys and Dorothy Parker—the Algonquin Round Table’s muse and Gerald’s long-ago schoolmate at Blessed Sacrament Academy. The climax of this affair was a talk, given by Robert Benchley in his best ladies-club-lecture manner, on wildflowers, including his newest discoveries, “drovers wet lace or false goatsbeard.”

  Jazz and bootleg booze and snappy conversation weren’t their only defense against gloom. For Gerald at least, there was work. Rocketing along Third Avenue on the elevated train, he saw his old city with a painter’s eye.

  Picture [he wrote in his notebook]:—

  (1) from 3rd Av. El down into shops, lighted windows dressed, eggs in crates, kitchen utensils, drug store,—across at sills and windows, up at roof cornices: 3 perspectives

  (2) electric signs (green gold yellow) topping buildings (in silhouette) against a sky darker than signs and lighter than buildings: use lighted windows

  Everywhere he went that fall in New York, pictures suggested themselves: a view down the darkened canyon of Madison Avenue toward the golden space of Madison Square with the Metropolitan Life Insurance tower lit by the afternoon sun; viaducts and derricks and cranes slicing the Manhattan skyline; the rhythmic procession of rooftop water tanks, like miniature silos or Monet grain stacks, silhouetted against the sky. Unlike the tight close-up perspective of such paintings as Watch, Razor, and the recently completed Roulement a Billes, these notebook images have a kind of cinematic architectural grandeur, as if the artist were shooting them in long focus, then zooming in. Gerald even used the word shot in describing them.

  Both architecture and film had begun to play a part in his artistic thinking, as if he were looking for new ways of saying the things he wanted to say with paint. During the last year he’d finished a painting entitled Doves: “Capital, ionic, corinthian, in large scale, with deep shadows (constructive),—with one or more pigeons clustered flat on it,” was how he sketched it verbally in his notebook. It was a large (48 5/8 inches by 36 inches) canvas in muted tones of slate, silver, rose, beige, and brown, in which
segmented views of a variety of classical columns and cornices were intercut with three stylized images of a pigeon—in close-up, reversed in medium range, and in long shot. Gerald hated pigeons—a friend later recalled that he recoiled from their fluttering and cooing—but by distancing himself as if with a camera’s lens he was able to make something almost beautiful out of them.

  At the end of January the Murphys returned to Antibes—the children with newly acquired cowboy and Indian costumes, the better to disguise themselves for lightning raids on the kitchen. In mid-February, having hired a charming and sensible young woman named Yvonne Roussel to act as the children’s tutor, Gerald and Sara set off on a two-week tour through eastern Europe with the MacLeishes. Sara and Gerald wanted to take their friends to Moscow to see what was going on in experimental theater—they hadn’t forgotten the excitement they’d felt at the Kamerny’s Paris performances—and they thought they would be able to float the trip with the rubles the Kamerny’s director had borrowed from them four years previously. But by the time they secured their Russian visas, “the theatres had closed,” said Sara, and “the snow started to melt not to mention the season for Executions.” They consoled themselves with Sacher torte in Vienna and a trip to Berlin, where Gerald was electrified by Fritz Lang’s Gothic expressionist film Metropolis, a moving embodiment of the picture proposals he had sketched in his notebook in New York. He was also intrigued by “a new opera (half revue half film—ballet—& moving abstract scenery, stern light etc.) by a guy 27 yrs,” which sounds as if it might have been Bertholt Brecht’s first experiment in “epic theater,” Mann ist Mann.