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

by Amanda Vaill

  When he had started painting in Goncharova’s atelier, Gerald had wanted to represent real objects as abstractions; but what had begun as an exercise in formalism had become a means to put distance between himself and images that carried a heavy load of personal connotation. Watch, Razor, Bibiliothèque, Cocktail, Portrait—all these successfully transformed a personal iconography into shapes and patterns that are pleasurable in the abstract. Wasp and Pear is much more disturbing. Gerald later claimed that the images in the picture derived from “the large technically-drawn and coloured charts of fruits, vegetables, horses, cattle, insects (pests)” he had seen as a cadet at Ohio State University. But the painting has none of the blandness of such art. Its vision is closer to that of one of Archie MacLeish’s favorite poets, William Blake, who wrote of a rose whose “bed of crimson joy” has been attacked by an “invisible worm.” Like Gerald’s wasp, the parasite destroys its prey with a “dark secret love”—battening it, clenched, in a sickening parody of procreation.

  Shortly before the Benchleys and Dottie Parker arrived at Villa America, Gerald had had to cut short his June Cannes-Barcelona race: Sara wired him that Patrick wasn’t well and that “it was his duty to come back and be with his children.” Always a delicate child, Patrick had had some kind of intestinal complaint in May and now seemed listless and feverish. But the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong, and Sara and Gerald made plans to go to Venice with the Benchleys in August, and to Spain to visit the Hemingways in early September. They never got there: on September 4 Hemingway wrote Scott Fitzgerald that “a wire from Gerald yesterday says Sara has had to go to the mountains with Patrick . . . believe their Spanish trip off.”

  The doctors in Antibes had concluded that Patrick was suffering from bronchitis, and Sara had taken him to Villard-de-Lans in the Cevennes massif of southern France—a place, Gerald reported to Hoytie and her father in New York, “at an altitude of 1,050 metres and surrounded by glaciers,” where the air was thin and pure and the boy would regain his strength. “The food is not very good,” said Gerald, “but Sara is able to scout through the country with the car and forage for milk, cream, fruits, etc.” After three weeks of fresh air and trout fishing, however, Patrick had not improved. After returning to Antibes to welcome Pauline Hemingway’s sister Jinny Pfeiffer, Sara and Gerald took the boy to Paris to see the specialist Armand De Lille.

  The diagnosis was devastating: On October 10 they learned that Patrick had tuberculosis, which he had probably contracted from their Los Angeles chauffeur—they remembered now that he had had a persistent cough. The disease was firmly entrenched and had severely compromised one lung; Patrick would have to begin painful pneumothorax treatments and enter a sanatorium immediately if he were to have any hope of survival.

  “He’s taking the injections of gas like that brick,” Gerald told the Hemingways: “He gets 300 cub. centimetres of it each time through a thick needle under his arm between the ribs. It surrounds and collapses the lung, immobilizes it, stops the spread. He’s living on the good lung. They hope to keep it good. Altitude and sun treatment will help. Injections—one every 15 days to keep up the gas pressure,—for two years.” On October 18, Gerald and Patrick left by train for Montana-Vermala, a health resort in the Swiss Alps one thousand meters above sea level on the Plaine Morte glacier, where the Murphys planned to remain indefinitely. It was Patrick’s ninth birthday.

  Sara stayed behind briefly in Paris to take Honoria, whom Jinny Pfeiffer was bringing up from Antibes on the Train Bleu, to the doctor as well, because her “bronchials showed speckly” when she was given a precautionary X-ray. De Lille could not say for certain whether she, too, was infected—she was running a fever and the X-rays were problematical, although she had no trace of TB bacilli—so he advised that she be given three months’ bed rest. Numb with shock, Sara took her back to Villa America to pack up the family for the journey to Switzerland. The Hemingways offered to have Baoth come to them, but Sara could not bear to part with him: “My mother wants me to stay with her this winter,” wrote Baoth, “but I’d like very much if you invite me some other time for she says that time I shall go with you to America.”

  It was at this point that Dottie Parker, who had gone to Paris herself on business, returned to discover that the walls had come crashing in on the Murphys’ paradise. Sara, uncharacteristically thinking of herself first, begged her to help close up the villa and then come with them to Montana. But Parker, who had gone to Paris to talk about her progress, or lack of it, with her publisher, needed desperately to work on her novel. She cabled Bob Benchley for advice; when he didn’t respond, she acceded. It was, her biographer said later, the worst decision she could have made; it was also the kindest.

  “Sometime you must try that trip up from the Midi with three dogs, two of them in high heat, and the baggage the Murphys left behind, which consisted of eleven trunks and seventeen handpieces,” she told Benchley later. It was a horrendous journey, including three changes of train, the last to a funicular which led from Sierre to Crans, a mile to the east of Montana, “as long as it takes to get to Stamford, going absolutely vertical, with nothing between you and your Maker but a length of frayed cable!” But as bad as the trip was, closing Villa America was even worse, “because what is more horrible than a dismantled house where people have once been gay?”

  In Montana the Murphy entourage settled, with Patrick, into a suite of six rooms opening off a balcony on the second floor of the Palace Hotel, which in those days functioned as a kind of residential sanatorium housing the tubercular and their families. Doctors—most of whom were also tuberculosis sufferers—and nurses scurried about the halls, which were kept antiseptically clean. Because the only known cure for tuberculosis involved rest, sun, and fresh air, the “guests” had to observe quiet hours from two to five in the afternoon and after eight at night, and the hotel was well ventilated with chill Alpine breezes. As Parker described it, only half hyperbolically, “what you wear for dinner is a tweed suit, a coat over it, a woollen muffler tied tight around your neck, a knitted cap, and galoshes. When you go outdoors, you take off either the coat or the muffler.”

  Ernestine, Yvonne Roussel, and Clement the chauffeur had accompanied the family to Switzerland. Ernestine took care of the household tasks, Miss Roussel tried to keep up all three children’s lessons, and, because the Murphys’ Chrysler was next to useless on Montana’s narrow, twisting roads, Clement helped to amuse Baoth during the day. Sara had already transformed their dreary suite of rooms with touches of Swiss kitsch (which in her hands wasn’t kitschy at all), but Gerald “isolated himself” with Patrick, serving his meals, taking his temperature, giving him medicine, changing bedpans. “He works every minute,” Parker said; “[A]ll the energy that used to go into compounding drinks and devising costumes and sweeping out the bath houses and sifting the sand on the plage has been put into inventing and running complicated Heath-Robinson sick-room appliances, and he is simply pouring his energy into Patrick, in the endeavor to make him not sick.”

  In an effort at gaiety—“they are so damn brave, and they are trying so hard to get a little gaiety into this, and it just kills you,” Parker continued—Gerald and Sara had fixed up the salon as a Glühwein parlor, where they mixed hot mulled wine for their little party before they all went to bed at nine each evening. They kept on their mufflers and woollies against the cold, and they had to whisper so as not to disturb Patrick or Honoria or the other, sicker patients coughing in rooms farther down the hall, but they drank their Glühwein and toasted absent friends with their thick hospital tumblers. “Their families, of course,” Parker went on, in a long epistle to Benchley which must rank as some of her best work, if not as one of the best letters ever written,

  have been of enormous assistance. Mrs. Murphy [Gerald’s mother] writes that all they have to do is act and think as if Patrick were twice as ill as he really is, and then everything will be all right with God’s help. (Gerald got that letter just as he was about t
o stagger out of the room with four laden trays piled one on another. “With God’s help,” he kept saying, when he resumed his burden. “With God’s help. Oh, my God! with God’s help.” Mr. Wiborg points out that this doubtless would never have occurred if the children had not been brought up like little Frenchmen. And Hoytie, good old Hoytie, cabled: “Dont be forlorn I will be over after Christmas”. When he heard that one, Dow-Dow’s face lit up just like the Mammoth Cave.

  Back in New York, on October 29, the stock market had imploded like a quasar. In Venice, in August, Serge Diaghilev had died of the complications of diabetes, and the Ballets Russes was disbanded. In December, Harry Crosby, who had just arranged to publish Archie MacLeish’s Einstein for his Black Sun Press, shot himself in a suicide pact with his lover, Josephine Rotch Bigelow, in New York. Up on their “God damn alp,” the Murphys and Dorothy Parker knew hardly any of this—magazines and newspapers were hard to come by in the Palace Hotel. But on Sara’s birthday, November 7, they had a party. “Everybody gave everybody presents—not just Sara. Even the dogs—the complete five are here—and the canaries and the parrot had things. We had a cake, and Honoria was carried into Patrick’s room for the event. . . . And we had champagne, and when Sara’s health was drunk, Gerald kissed her, and they twined their arms around—you know—and drank that way. . . .

  “Poor Gerald,” commented Parker, “(and those lights are out in the Hippodrome, Mr. Benchley, when you think of Gerald Murphy as ‘poor Gerald’).” But she did, and they were.

  17

  “The invented part, for me, is what has meaning”

  THE MURPHYS KEPT TRYING. At Christmas they invited the Hemingways and Jinny Pfeiffer to Montana, along with John Dos Passos and his new wife, Katy Smith, the sister of Ernest’s old friend Bill Smith and also a long-ago girlfriend of Ernest’s; they had met in Key West and had been married in August. Katy was a slender, green-eyed woman with a mobile, rather simian face and a sharp wit—and she and Pauline and Jinny and Dorothy Parker, who was still in residence, kept up enough fast talk to fill the painful silences. Everyone pretended to be having a marvelous time eating fondue and drinking local Riesling and skiing and “laughing our heads off,” as Dos Passos later described it. For Christmas dinner Ernest, almost too predictably, shot a goose, and Sara roasted it and made chestnut puree and flaming plum pudding with a holly sprig stuck on top, and they all sang Christmas carols.

  The spirit of forced gaiety began to tell on Parker, however, and when the Hemingways and Dos Passoses left after Christmas she went with them, returning to New York for some rest and relaxation. But Sara and Gerald and the children were never far from her thoughts: when she met the MacLeishes at a “big arty rout” thrown by Hoytie Wiborg, it was the Murphys they talked about. In the meantime Bob Benchley, probably under the influence of her lengthy and tearstained account of the Murphys’ tribulations (and possibly also motivated by guilt over the huissier contretemps), had sent Sara a check for $320. She promptly sent it back with the words “an impossible sort of cheque” scrawled across the face of it. “Don’t be mad at us,” she implored. “Can’t you—with this horrid bit of paper, buy a nightclub evening,—a grandfather clock—a Saks bill or an ocean voyage? . . .. Any time you feel you could come over & join us—(with a stout cane & a pr of galoshes) a lot of people at least 3—or 6—would give you a warm welcome—& we could have great fun in the eternal snows.”

  Although Patrick had had a slight relapse just before Christmas, by February, under a cure regime that emphasized nutrition, rest, and exposure to fresh air and sunlight, he seemed to be slowly improving. He would sit for hours in his “cure chair” on the balcony, bundled up in steamer rug, coat, cap, and muffler, and work at etching, which had become a passion, or talk with Sara or Miss Roussel or Gerald. Honoria had been pronounced healthy and was allowed to resume normal activities around Christmas, and in February she went with Gerald, Sara, and Baoth on a flying visit to Antibes so that Gerald could appear before the Nice Correctional Court. Gerald cabled the outcome to Benchley: “DEUX CENTS FRANCS D’AMENDE [TWO HUNDRED FRANCS FINE] AND LAST WALTZ OF THE EVENING WITH THE JUDGE SARA LOOKED LOVELY IN BLACK LACE BAOTH WAS MY MATRON OF HONOR . . . WE MISS YOU STILL, MURPHYS.”

  Later in the spring Gerald and Sara went briefly to Paris to revisit old friends and old haunts, but it was a disturbing trip. During their anxious fall and winter they had heard next to nothing from the Fitzgeralds, who had been undergoing difficulties of their own. Zelda was volatile, Scott persistently drunk and seemingly unable to work. A trip to North Africa, meant as a restorative, had done nothing for either of them. And they had returned to Paris in a kind of armed truce, interrupted every now and then by Scott’s disparagement of Zelda’s obsession with ballet, and Zelda’s suspicions (fueled by a canard put about by the expatriate litterateur Robert McAlmon) that Scott was a closeted homosexual who was having an affair with Ernest Hemingway.

  Although Gerald and Sara knew nothing of these developments, they could see at once that something was very wrong. One day they made arrangements to take Zelda to an art exhibit, and arrived at the Fitzgeralds’ apartment to find her, Scott, and John Peale Bishop standing on the pavement outside. The three of them had been having lunch, and inexplicably Zelda had been overtaken by some kind of paranoid frenzy. Now, although she barely spoke to the Murphys, which was most unlike her, she turned on Scott and Bishop. “Were you talking about me?” she demanded suspiciously. Gerald was stunned: how could they have been talking about her without her knowledge? “I mean, she was sitting right there with them!”

  Deeply concerned for Zelda, they returned to Switzerland; it wasn’t until later that they heard she had had a breakdown on April 23, and had been admitted to the Malmaison Clinic outside of Paris. By the time they learned all this, Zelda had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and had come to Switzerland herself, to Dr. Oscar Forel’s asylum at Prangins, on the shores of Lake Geneva.

  Meanwhile the Murphys, desperate to move from the gloomy confines of the Palace Hotel, had leased a large chalet, called La Bruyère, on the winding road from Montana to Vermala. It was a tall, half-timbered stucco building, four stories high, perched on a steep incline with a spectacular view of the forested slopes above, the Rhone valley below, and the cold majesty of Mont Blanc in the distance. Patrick, who preferred the fragrant Aleppo pines and mimosa and blue seascapes of his beloved Antibes, pronounced it “melancholly skenery”; but Honoria quite liked it, reporting cheerfully to Yvonne Roussel, who had returned to Antibes, that “there is no more snow here, some little flowers are coming out.”

  The renewing force of springtime was elusive, however. Just as the Murphys were preparing to move into their new house, Sara was summoned to New York: Frank Wiborg had come down with pneumonia and was not expected to recover. She took Baoth with her, but they were too late. Frank died on May 12, and Sara and Baoth stayed only long enough to go to the funeral and hear the will read before returning to Switzerland. Rather surprisingly, Frank had named Gerald as coexecutor of his estate along with Hoytie.

  When Sara and Baoth sailed back to Europe they brought Dorothy Parker with them to help the family get settled in La Bruyère. In addition, they had a new project, one that sounds as if it had been cooked up over Christmas with the Dos Passoses and Hemingways: they took over a house in the village and turned it into “Harry’s Bar,” naming it after the famous watering hole at the Ritz in Paris. It was a real bar, with mirrors and rattan furniture and red-and-white-striped awnings and printed matchbooks and tiny morocco-bound pocket diaries as giveaways, and Sara had hired a first-rate chef and got a Munich dance band to come and liven up the Alpine evenings. Sometimes, at the end of a set, she and Gerald would sit down at the piano and sing. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in Montana-Vermala, Honoria noted proudly: “My father holds a bar now called ‘Harry’s Bar,’ and he has great success.” There were family visits from Hoytie and Frank Wiborg’s Cincinnati sister Mary (Aunt Mame).
In July, Robert Benchley came to see them—Sara had tried to send him passage money, but he refused it—and, fortified by Cinzanos at Harry’s Bar, Dottie drove down to Sierre to meet him at the train. Because of the potency of strong liquor at high altitudes, she had really tried to stay on the wagon in Montana; but the presence of her old Algonquin crony proved too much for her, and the two of them stayed up late drinking at Harry’s Bar almost every night. Then they’d lurch home through the silent streets, with Benchley bellowing “With the Crimson in Triumph Flashing” in case some lonely tubercular Harvard men needed bucking up—and the next day they’d repair to Harry’s for a dose of hair of the dog.

  Patrick was steadily improving, as Honoria breathlessly reported to Yvonne Roussel: “I have a great surprise to tell you, guess what? Patrick gets up now! he goes and plays in the fields (for there are beautiful fields in front of our house) and he goes out for walks. . . . In about a month we are going on a trip with Patrick, we are going to a place called bushy [Bussy], near Lausane it is just on the lake Leman, so you can imagine how well he is to take trips now! Patrick eats at table now too with us. We are all very happy that he is well.”

  While not recovered, he was indeed well enough for Sara and Gerald to get away together, with Benchley and Parker, for what was meant to be a real holiday—to Venice for coffee at Florian’s and the Titians in the Accademia, and trips to the Lido and the Murano glass factories. From Venice they went on to Munich, where they saw a film that electrified Sara and Gerald, Der Blaue Engel, featuring the then unknown Marlene Dietrich in her elegant drag. Gerald spent the rest of their visit scouring the record shops for her recordings; and Parker bought a dachshund puppy whom she named Robinson, as in Swiss Family Robinson—a nod to Gerald and Sara and the children, whom she had dubbed “The Swiss Family Murphy.”