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

by Amanda Vaill

  “Now don’t sit down and defend all this,” Gerald admonished Dos Passos. “It would be all right if they weren’t so smug. That combined with their ignorance. Their ignorance combined with their prosperity. The wealth of it all takes the heart out of you.”

  Gerald’s view of things was possibly jaundiced by the permutations Hallelujah! was undergoing at the hands of the studio executives at MGM. The studio had always been skittish about Vidor’s plans for a real all-black musical, but had green-lighted the project when Vidor agreed to underwrite it with his own money. The director proceeded to cast the movie under difficult conditions: although he hired some actors and singers from African American revues, such as Nina Mae McKinney from Blackbirds of 1929, he plucked others from the streets or from church choirs, or found them waiting on tables or carrying bags. In Chicago he had to rent an entire hotel for auditions because Jim Crow laws made it illegal for blacks to enter “white” hotel dining rooms in that city. But despite the fact that Vidor had as much invested in the film as the studio did, MGM’s legendary Irving Thalberg kept Vidor on a short leash during the casting. One of his nearly daily telegrams to the director second-guessed Vidor’s choice of an actress named Honey Brown for the part of the temptress, Chick: “SINCERELY HOPE THIS CAN BE ONE OF THE VERY FEW TIMES IN WHICH YOU ARE RIGHT. . . . MY CHIEF OBJECTION TO HONEY BROWN IS CERTAIN UGLINESS PARTICULARLY AROUND HER MOUTH HER FLAT CHESTEDNESS AND HER UPPER LIP HAS VERY OUTSTANDING HAIR LINE BEST REGARDS.”

  Thalberg’s hand also weighed heavily on the choice of music for the film, one of the areas where Vidor, with Gerald’s help, had hoped to maintain a certain authenticity. In the earliest stages the studio had not been entirely convinced that Hallelujah! should have sound, and even after the movie was cast and had gone into rehearsal the question had not been resolved. By the time it was, Gerald and Vidor might have wished it hadn’t been. The first script, based on Vidor’s conversations with Gerald, laid the movie’s opening scene on “the small Johnson plantation” somewhere in the South, where the Johnson family is picking cotton to a voice-over of a spiritual called “Chilly Water.” Close-ups of family members, with identifying subtitles, were to be synched with the verses of the song. By the time the project had become “Production # 394 Directed by King Vidor . . . Story by King Vidor, Continuity by Wanda Tuchok. Okayed by Mr. Thalberg Sept 25/28,” however, some changes had taken place.

  The opening was now to include “six typical scenes of picturesque cotton picking. The pickers are all . . . typical Southern negroes.” The action was to be threaded through with songs that, the script said, “can easily be synchronized after the picture is finished. EXAMPLE: 'Old Black Joe’—‘Carry Me Back to Ole Virginie’—‘My Old Kentucky Home’—‘Swanee River’—‘In the Evening by the Moonlight’.” Somehow Stephen Foster had replaced the authentic race music that Vidor and Gerald had envisioned, and worse was to come.

  Possibly the penultimate straw was the comic bit of business involving a watermelon that was added for three little boys called Sears, Roebuck, and Coe; or the dialogue between a parson and two characters named, improbably, Adam and Eve (Parson, after Adam and Eve have asked him to marry them: “Ain’t these kids yourn?” Adam: “That’s jes it—we think it’s bout time to make it permanent”). Whatever the cause, Gerald was disgusted. “[I]n two weeks,” he recalled, “they had it so full of scenes around the cabin door, with talk of chittlin’s and corn-pone and banjoes a-strummin’, that it was about as negro as Lew Dockstader’s Minstrels.”

  Then, in early December, after location shooting in Memphis, Tennessee, and more filming on the MGM lot, the studio began recording the sound sequences—which, since portable sound equipment had yet to be invented, had to be produced on the lot and synchronized with the existing footage. When Thalberg heard the sound track, he was not pleased: it was too depressing, it was too strange; the audiences that had packed theaters for The Jazz Singer would stay away from this picture in droves. To lighten things up a little, Thalberg added two songs by Irving Berlin to the score, “The Swanee Shuffle,” for which a whole scene involving singing waiters was created, and “Waiting at the End of the Road,” an uplifting finale. And—for Gerald, the coup de grâce—Thalberg hired “LIONEL BARRYMORE to coach these negroes in the use of dialect.” Gerald resigned. As he reported it to Dos Passos, “to see what I have seen, hear what I have heard. Zowie.”

  Despite their feelings about California, the Murphys stayed on after Gerald left Hallelujah! Vladimir, however, whose role as production assistant had now evaporated, departed for France almost immediately. Henriette Géron had developed a crush on him, which made him horribly uncomfortable, so Gerald deputed him to go to Paris and supervise the installation of his show at Galerie Georges Bernheim, which opened on January 15. After his departure Sara, Gerald, and the children went to Carmel briefly to visit Olga and Sidney Fish. Sidney had been very ill with pneumonia and had been advised to leave New York for a more temperate climate, so he and Olga had just bought the Palo Corona ranch outside Carmel and planned to move there permanently. It was still quite wild—there was only a cabin on the property, not a proper ranch house—but the Murphy children adored it, and when they weren’t doing perfunctory lessons with Mam’zelle they spent all day riding and picnicking.

  Possibly as a result of conversations about Sidney’s illness, Sara determined to have all three children’s tonsils removed while they were still in California. “It seems the most favorable time—in a mild climate like this,” reported Sara to her father, “and it’s really most necessary—They have glands and things—which would only make trouble later.” All three spent the night in the hospital and were driven home to Angelo Drive afterward by the chauffeur, who carried each child tenderly from car to house. Although there was an anxious moment when Honoria suffered a postoperative hemorrhage, the children quickly recuperated, and were soon ready to travel eastward. Sara wanted to discuss some financial matters with her father—she was eager to take more control over her money, and hoped to persuade him to relinquish his power of attorney over her investments. Rather than “letting everything lie” in the hands of the Guaranty Trust she wanted to get into the market with a more aggressive broker, as Olga had done, and couldn’t understand why Frank Wiborg had been carefully getting out, selling some of her shares in addition to his own. Every day, it seemed, the stock market posted ever higher gains, and only a few people like Frank Wiborg understood that there was a reckoning ahead. But by the time it happened, in October, Sara and Gerald would have other things on their minds.

  Photographs taken before a cataclysmic event have a strange power: the viewer scans them, looking for clues to the events that will soon overtake the subject, but fate rarely shows its hand that way. When it does, the viewer wonders how much of what is visible is only hindsight. What, for example, can be read in the photograph of the Murphys on shipboard as they were on their way back to France in March 1929? All are bundled against the cold, the children in identical brass-buttoned, double-breasted navy peacoats and dark berets, Gerald in a sleek dark overcoat and jaunty cap, Sara in leopard with a turned-up collar, her beret pulled vampishly down to her eyebrows. Gerald looks both dreamy and withdrawn, as he often does in photographs; Honoria pensive. Baoth, already taller than his older sister, grins into the sunlight, his chin thrust out confidently; at his side, Patrick smiles shyly, his features delicate beneath his thatch of white blond hair. Behind him, Sara is also smiling, but only barely. She looks wary, slightly mistrustful, as if she were waiting for something to happen.

  Shortly after the Murphys arrived home at Villa America, the Fitzgeralds—frayed by their attempts to make a life in the United States—joined them briefly. They were on their way to Paris, where they planned to settle indefinitely, and they were not the best of company: Scott was frustrated and guilty about his lack of progress on his novel, and hoped to get back on track in France; and Zelda could think only of returning to her ballet studies with Egorova.
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  The Hemingways were back in France, also, with their baby, whom they had named Patrick; when Gerald heard the news he had written tetchily to Dos Passos that “Ireland is doomed if that name is going to take on literary values. . . . I thought it was foolproof.” Apparently he felt that Ernest was straying onto his turf: for although Sara remained as fond of both Hemingways as before, and although Gerald liked Pauline enormously, relations between him and Ernest had taken on the chancy quality of March weather, promising one day, frosty the next. They weren’t helped by the suicide, in December, of Ernest’s father, for whom Ernest had long felt the greatest ambivalence. In the winter before he and Pauline married—when he was writing his father that “You would be so much happier and I would too, if you could have confidence in me”—he was also symbolically destroying his father’s most treasured possessions. In a story called “Now I Lay Me,” the protagonist, named “Ernie” in the first draft, helps burn his father’s collection of Indian arrowheads. Later, in another story, “Fathers and Sons,” Hemingway acted out a symbolic parricide in which his protagonist sits in the woodshed cradling a rifle, looking out at his father, who is on a porch a few yards away, and thinking, “I can blow him to hell. I can kill him.”

  Gerald Murphy, of course, had been playing father to Hemingway ever since they had met: writing letters to “My Dear Boy” from “daow-daow—(french spelling)”; giving Ernest money; paying his son’s doctor bills; admiring his work; supporting his divorce and remarriage. Ernest’s real father had done none of these things; and after his death Ernest could barely bring himself to acknowledge how he felt about that. Writing to Dos Passos from Key West, he maintained a dismissive flippancy: “Every other day we shoot snipe for the day after. My old man shot himself on the other hand (not in the other hand. In the head) as you may have read in the paper.” But Archie MacLeish understood what was going on in Hemingway’s mind; in a condolence letter he sent that December, which Hemingway never opened, he wrote: “I know how the death of your father changes him in your mind . . . You must not let your mind work over and over the way it happened. I know the way your mind works round and round your pain like a dog in cover going over and over the same track.”

  Working around and around, it was inevitable that Ernest would manage to displace much of the pain and resentment he felt about Clarence Hemingway to his surrogate father, Gerald. How else could he use those feelings in his fiction? So when Gerald asked Ernest to join him in another Course Croisière that summer, from Cannes to Barcelona by way of Marseille and Majorca, Ernest excused himself. He was going to Spain, and said that the proofs of his new novel, A Farewell to Arms, would keep him too busy to join Honoria’s crew.

  Despite Hemingway’s defection, the Murphys had a full house. At the end of April, Gerald’s sister Esther had surprised everyone by suddenly marrying John Strachey, an English economist and recently elected member of Parliament. Strachey came from a distinguished Bloomsbury family (Lytton Strachey was his cousin, as was James Strachey, the psychiatrist and translator of Freud) and had political ambitions without the funds to implement them. On his insistence, the elder Patrick Murphy paid him a handsome dowry. After their wedding, at which Oswald Mosley, not yet a Fascist, was best man, the Stracheys came to France on holiday and stayed at Villa America. The visit was not entirely pleasurable: Strachey was already confiding to an old girlfriend that the marriage “is not going well,” and he seemed to regard all Americans as bad-mannered parvenus. Esther, possibly under provocation, was polishing off a bottle of gin a day by herself.

  In June, Robert Benchley and his family drove down from Paris accompanied by Dorothy Parker, who had been working on a novel and was recovering from a failed romance with a New York banker named John Garrett. They all arrived hot and cross: both Benchley boys, Nat and Bub, had quarreled energetically throughout the journey; Parker’s dog Timothy had kept up a migraine-inducing continuo of yapping from Paris to Antibes; little Bub had been stung by nettles when he got out to relieve himself by the side of the road; and Bob and Gertrude Benchley were barely speaking to each other, much less to Parker. The Murphys set everything to rights at once: they put the Benchleys in the Ferme des Orangers (which Benchley referred to as “La Ferme Dérangée”) and gave Parker the bastide so she would have a quiet place to work. But, although the little stone cottage was exquisitely decorated and idyllically peaceful, it was surrounded by fig trees and, Parker said, “I hate figs in any form.” Still in mourning for her affair with Garrett, she spent much of her time smoking solitary cigarettes in the garden, where the children’s tutor, Yvonne Roussel, found her sitting with a “lost” look on her gamine countenance. In an effort to cheer her up Gerald and Sara took her to the beach and got her to swim, with Gerald, two kilometers a day, which did wonders for her sometimes overly voluptuous figure, and the children begged her to join their games. Baoth went so far as to name his pet hen after her; when it was later discovered that Dorothy the hen was, in fact, a rooster, he was unfazed. “What is that of difference?” he asked, in the children’s translated-from-the-French patois. As Scott Fitzgerald reported to Ernest Hemingway, “the Murphys have given their whole performance for her this summer and I think, tho she’d be the last to admit it, she’s had the time of her life.”

  Trying to touch the sources of their old magic, the Fitzgeralds had also come south for the summer, but so far the magic seemed to have eluded them. From their rented villa in Cannes they made forays to La Garoupe or the casino or Villa America, Scott unearthly pale and given to drunken displays of maudlinity, Zelda more and more distant. She seemed to care only about her dancing—and although he privately despaired of her chances Gerald, at least, did what he could to help her, trying to get her together with Diaghilev’s prima ballerina Vera Nemchinova, who was staying in Antibes that summer. One day the Fitzgeralds and Murphys took their children to the poky little movie theater in Antibes to see a documentary about underwater life, and Zelda became terrified by the sight of an octopus moving diagonally across the screen. “What is it? What is it!” she screamed, burying her head in Gerald’s chest and clinging to him like a drowning victim.

  “It’s been gay here,” commented Scott with unintentional irony to Hemingway, “but we are, thank God, desperately unpopular and not invited anywhere.” The only people willing to put up with them for any length of time were the Murphys, whom they saw “once a week or so,” he said. “Gerald is older, less gay, more social, but not so changed as many people in five years.”

  Although old friends like Don and Bea Stewart came to stay, the Riviera that summer was overrun with showbiz types and international millionaires: Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Rosie Dolly, one of the famous Dolly sisters; the matinee idol John Gilbert and his bride, Ina Claire; “Laddie” Sanford, the polo-playing, horse-racing heir to a carpet fortune; assorted playboys and minor royalty; the duke of Westminster and Coco Chanel. Bob Benchley literally bumped into a former mistress on the street in Cannes, where only two years previously it would have been rare to find an English-speaking person in summertime; he was so unnerved by the experience that he made Dottie Parker come out with him that afternoon and get “absolutely blotto.” Another day, driving in Nice, he collided with the chauffeur-driven limousine of a Georgian prince; but he thought the prince had agreed there was no harm done, and was furious when a huissier—a court bailiff—arrived at the Villa America to impound his car. Gerald, most unusually, lost control: he went into a towering rage and threw the bailiff out, calling him a sale voleur (dirty thief). Whether, as he later claimed, he thought the bailiff was just one of the prince’s minions trying a touch of extortion, or whether he was infuriated to find himself, unfamiliarly, on the wrong side of French bureaucracy, Gerald was convicted of “outrageous conduct to a public official” by the Criminal Court of Nice and sentenced to fifteen days’ imprisonment. He remained free on appeal, and by the time the matter was resolved other circumstances had claimed his attention. But more and more it must h
ave seemed to Gerald as if their formerly Edenic garden was full of the thing he had so decried in Hollywood: “Green fruit softening in the sun off the tree but no ripeness yet.”

  During those summer mornings, before gathering the Benchleys and Parker for their noontime forays to La Garoupe, where he would rake the sand and sweep out the cabanas as usual, Gerald went to his studio to paint green fruit. He called the picture Wasp and Pear, a composition he had outlined, in his notebook, as “hornet (colossal) on a pear, (marks on skin, leaf veins, etc.) (battening on the fruit, clenched).” In the margin he sketched two pears, one in profile, the other in seeming cross section, seen from below. If the language he used to describe it seemed predatory, the finished picture itself was more so: the wasp “battening” on the pear is terrifying. Enormous, its hooked proboscis poised over the pear like a weapon, its horny leg shown in microscopic enlargement that reveals its cruel spikes, it is a paradigm—almost a parody—of male sexual aggressiveness. And the swelling shape of the pear, with its curved waist and round bottom that recall Man Ray’s (and Ingres’s) odalisques, its womblike cross section revealing a tiny seed, is lushly, almost embarrassingly female. It is as if—in this painting that uses Sara’s green, Patrick’s yellow, and his own browns, grays, and blacks—Gerald were depicting the corruption of all that is fruitful in desire.