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

by Amanda Vaill

  But Sara still fretted over Ernest’s well-being. Since he was now in Valencia among the falling bombs, far from the bistros of Paris, she and Dorothy Parker sent him a food hamper containing tins of roast chicken, ham, salmon, preserved goose, Welsh rabbit, antipasto, and tripe a la mode de Caen, as well as bouillon cubes, sugar, and malted milk. With it went a chatty note adjuring him to wear warm clothes and enclosing news from home. The mask of nurturing good cheer slipped only slightly at the end, where she noted poignantly: “Baoth would have gone to college this autumn.”

  Back in New York that fall, Sara went through all the motions: dinners and cocktails and lunches with the Barrys and Myerses, the MacLeishes and the Stephen Vincent Benéts, or new friends like Dorothy Parker’s publisher Harold Guinzburg and his wife; concerts and plays, including Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which, with its theme of death and reconciliation, must have been a painful evening; a croquet party for her birthday in November. But Gerald was careful never to leave her alone in the evenings; she was still too fragile.

  Grateful for the supporting presence of cherished friends, she and Gerald continued to make them a steady stream of gifts: furniture and clothes to the Dos Passoses; a car for the Myerses, and an annuity in honor of Baoth; rent checks to Stella Campbell, who had “given up being a jackanapes in Hollywood” and was now ensconced in the Hotel Sevillia on 58th Street. Truth to tell, Stella hadn’t been able to make it in Hollywood. She was too old, too dumpy, and too imperious, and she had not endeared herself to MGM’s supremely important Irving Thalberg, who was married to the actress Norma Shearer, when she approached him at a party and said throatily, “Dear Mr. Thalberg, how is your lovely, lovely wife with the tiny, tiny eyes?” Now she nominally repaid the Murphys’ generosity by giving acting lessons to Honoria, who was trying to launch herself in a career on the stage and had got a job with the French Theatre of New York; and she introduced the starry-eyed girl to John Gielgud when he came to Broadway with his celebrated production of Hamlet.

  Sara had hoped that perhaps Gerald could leave his post at Mark Cross that winter and they could go take a flat in London, where the only ghosts were those of her parents and sisters and herself as a girl. But it never happened. Instead they threw themselves into a new construction project, moving an old dairy barn on the Wiborg estate to the edge of Hook Pond and remodeling it for their use. Hook Pond Cottage belonged to the old life, the life of Patrick and Baoth, and they needed a new place.

  Swan Cove, as the new house was called, was named for the swans that glided over the waters of the saltwater pond next to the house. A rambling, gracious building walled in faded pink stucco, it had a garden room verdant with tropical plants and an enormous living room lit by seven windows and full of rococo furniture and objets the Murphys had found in Czechoslovakia the previous summer. The gardens and flagged terrace had a European formality. There was classical statuary set among the flowers and vines and an allée of ailanthus trees going down to the water. Katy Dos Passos called it an “Arabian Nights house.” Perhaps she didn’t intend the allusion to Scheherazade, who kept death at bay with her thousand-and-one nights’ tales; but when the house and garden were completed Gerald described them as “an oasis of comfort” for Sara, and “the spectacle of her enjoyment for the first time” since the boys’ deaths affected him powerfully. “I had not thought she could forget for a moment what haunts her continually,” he confided to the house’s designers, Hale Walker and Harold Heller, who had also worked on Villa America. But even at Swan Cove, he realized, she “is—and always will be—inconsolable. As time goes on she feels her bereavement more and more and understands less why the boys were taken away,—both of them.”

  At Christmastime Gerald and Sara heard from Scott Fitzgerald, who had been living in Hollywood and trying to make enough writing for the movies to keep Scottie in college and pay Zelda’s medical expenses. He had recently become involved with Sheilah Graham, the syndicated Hollywood columnist for the North American Newspaper Alliance, who was making a trip to New York in late January; he very much hoped that the Murphys would welcome her—he himself was taking Zelda to Miami—but Sara simply could not face it. It was the anniversary of Patrick’s death and “her mind [was] far afield,” Gerald explained. But she was also fiercely loyal to Zelda and might have felt that seeing Graham would be a betrayal of her friend. As Ellen Barry had noticed, “Sara had a sense of austerity about these things.” It was one thing to countenance Léger’s mistresses—Jeanne Léger knew about them too, and had lovers of her own; it was another thing to have Scott’s girlfriend to tea when Zelda not only didn’t know anything about it, but was confined to a lunatic asylum. In the end Gerald asked Sheilah Graham to cocktails at the New Weston with Honoria—Graham drank cocoa—and commented tactfully to Scott on her beauty and charm. Thanking him, Fitzgerald wrote that “you were awfully damn kind, in any case, and as a friend, you have never failed me.”

  In May, after a farewell visit to the boys’ graves in the little East Hampton churchyard, Sara left with Honoria for another European summer. There were dinners and lunches with Léger and his girlfriend Simone Herman or with Marcelle Meyer, Stravinsky concerts, evenings at the ballet and the theater. Everywhere there was a sense that this might be the last such trip for many years. The Nazis had taken over Austria and were making noises about annexing Czechoslovakia, Europe was moving closer and closer to war, and—as Katy Dos Passos had commented to Sara earlier—“Pears like nobody gits to carry out his plans but that ole Hitler.”

  Gerald arrived in June, and in July the Dos Passoses joined the Murphys for a cruise in the Weatherbird around Sicily and the Italian coast. It was not an unalloyed delight. Sara’s health was shaky—she was briefly admitted to the American Hospital in Paris with gallbladder problems—and Gerald, despite having had his tonsils out, was suffering from a painful and persistent sore throat, and seemed distracted. The ruins at Paestum and the frescoes at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii were splendid; the whirlpools at the site of the Homeric Scylla and Charybdis were awe-inspiring; and their simple picnic lunches of wine, bread, cheese, tomatoes, and a little friture were as delicious as ever. But there were other sights, like the ominous nationalistic “MARE NOSTRUM” graffiti they saw scrawled on a wall, and the occasional unfriendly knot of onlookers they encountered, that were less pleasant.

  At Siracusa the Dos Passoses disembarked, and at Messina, Gerald, who had been suffering with his throat and was mysteriously “out till late” one evening in Sicily, decided to leave the boat to attend to business in Florence and elsewhere. Sara rather forlornly saw him off, and she, Honoria, Honoria’s friend Louise Dowdney, and the little Pekingese Puppy continued on, returning to Naples on August 18. There was a bittersweet parting from Vladimir, the crew, and the Weatherbird: “Very sad leaving boat. Champagne. Bed early,” wrote Sara.

  Returning to New York in September, Gerald and Sara left Honoria behind until Christmas to study French theater with Madame Darius Milhaud, but they took Scottie Fitzgerald home in her stead. Scottie was met at the dock by Zelda, who had been allowed by her doctors to make a supervised visit to New York for the purpose. Zelda hadn’t seen the Murphys since before the boys died, and she found them “very engaging; age and the ages leave them untroubled and, perhaps, as impervious as possible.” With allowances for Zelda’s peculiarly overdecorated diction, and the Murphys’ self-abnegating good manners, this observation seems almost willfully unperceptive. She was closer to the mark a few weeks later when, in a letter to Scott, she mused wistfully that “It fill[s] me with dread to witness the passage of so much time . . . Do you suppose [one] still cook[s] automobiles at Antibes, and still sip[s] the twilight at Kaux, and I wonder if Paris is pink in the late sun and latent with happiness already had.”

  The Murphys must have wondered how much of their own happiness was “already had” that fall. In Paris, before they sailed for New York, Sara had taken Honoria and Fanny Myers to lunch at the Brasserie Lipp (
Gerald had made a quick trip to London on business). They were seated at a table in the center of the room when Fanny noticed Picasso at a table along the wall, facing them. “Look,” she said to Sara, whose back was to him, “there’s Picasso.” Sara paid no attention; and Picasso gave no sign that he had recognized the woman he had loved and painted in sand so many years ago in Antibes. They left without speaking to each other.

  Now, returning to Swan Cove, the Murphys found the house exquisite, the gardens blooming with tuberoses, heliotrope, nicotiana, bamboo, and elephant ear, and lit with fairy lanterns for their homecoming the way that Villa America’s garden used to be for “dinner-flowers-gala.” Sara bustled happily from room to room, laying out swatches of brocades she’d bought in Europe and folding away in her cupboards the antique lace and linens she’d found on the trip. Eleven days later a hurricane struck Long Island, leaving two to five feet of water in the house and five-inch bass flopping helplessly in the orchard. “Hurricane—garden gone,” Sara noted bleakly in her trip log.

  So they started over yet again. Sara had a quiet birthday in East Hampton with Alice Lee, Pauline Hemingway (who had taken her own apartment at the New Weston while Ernest was in Spain), and Pauline’s sister Jinny; two days later there was a larger, braver party in their New Weston penthouse for which Gerald ordered a cake made to look like a telegram. It read “SARA PENTHOUSE 34 EAST 50TH STREET NEW YORK NY BEST OF HEALTH AND VERY MUCH LOVE FROM EVERYONE.” The Barrys were there, and Pauline and Jinny, and Ada MacLeish (Archie had just been asked to direct the Nieman Fellowship journalism program at Harvard and couldn’t join them) and Léger and Simone Herman and the art critic James Johnson Sweeney and his wife, and the novelist Dawn Powell. They all had champagne and danced to the Murphys’ records, and everyone felt brilliant and amusing, for a few hours at least.

  In February, Gerald and Sara went to Baltimore with Dottie Parker and Alan Campbell for the out-of-town tryout of Lillian Hellman’s new play, The Little Foxes, which starred Tallulah Bankhead; they stayed in the same hotel with the company and came to Bankhead’s party after the opening. It was a pretty dreadful evening, the kind of thing Dick Diver had in mind in Tender Is the Night when he said he wanted to give “a really bad party . . . where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette.” Tallulah quickly got drunk and began arguing with Dashiell Hammett (Hellman’s lover of nine years) and Gerald about her drug habits. “I’m not going to listen to you about cocaine,” she said. “I’ve used it all my life and it is not habit forming”—a statement that caused Gerald to roar with laughter. Then she made a pass at the waiter—who, being black, might have gotten into trouble with Maryland’s antimiscegenation laws if he had responded—and protested when Hammett spirited him out of the room. Then she had a drunken lovers’ quarrel with her female secretary. In the meantime her father, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, began to serenade the guests loudly and unstoppably, until Gerald managed to quiet him by suggesting, soothingly, “Mr. Speaker, why don’t you rest your beautiful voice?” Hellman, and Hellman’s play, were unfortunately not the center of attention, and after a time she went to bed; the next day she and the Murphys hid from everybody else in the hotel dining room, “ordering endless dishes from the kitchen in order to mix them together, or to add to them what we thought would be of interest.”

  Perhaps it was these concoctions that proved to be Sara’s downfall, for shortly after she got back from Baltimore she went into the hospital for gallbladder surgery. Dick Myers wrote a charming piece of doggerel to speed her recovery:

  I’ve got a favorite lady

  Whose familiar name is Sadie

  And whose talents have excited many blurbs.

  She’s not so very staid-y

  And sings songs a little shady

  And her plats du jour are full of fancy herbs.

  And so on for six verses, which were not, perhaps, as elegant as Archie MacLeish’s “Portrait of Mme. G——M——,” but more affectionate.

  Pauline Hemingway invited her to come to Key West to convalesce. Although Pauline would never have admitted it, she and Ernest had reached that point in a marriage’s endgame when neither party can stand being alone with the other and relies on old mutual friends to keep conversation going. Ernest had spent the month of February in Cuba, but he did intend to stay on in Key West long enough to see Sara before he returned to Cuba, where Martha Gellhorn was waiting for him.

  Sara drove down with Jinny Pfeiffer and Honoria—who had returned to New York at Christmastime—on April 1; they stayed three weeks. After Sara and Ernest had both gone, Ernest wrote her a letter whose tone of slightly inebriated melancholy veers perilously close to elegy. “Dearest Sara,” he began, “How are you and how goes everything and all of it? Here it’s blowing a huge storm—close to a hurricane—and the royal palms are bent over in it.” Then he began again: “Dear Sara how are you and how is everything? It must be lovely there now and where are you and Honoria and how do you feel and how is everybody?” He told her how hard he was working, how he had gone to the cove where they’d picnicked together, how to recover from working so hard he had partied hard too: “It was a fine party and many times and all the time I wish you were here for the fine good jolly times. I never did thank you for the lovely records and I never could thank you for how loyal and lovely and also beautiful and attractive and lovely you have been always ever since always. . . . I wish we were killing this rainy afternoon together. It is a beautiful storm. I love you always and please always count on it.”

  Six months later, when he and Pauline were finally separated and he was planning to marry Martha Gellhorn, he bade Sara what seems like a final farewell. He had been alone with his son Patrick in Havana for Christmas; they’d had suckling pig at the Ambos Mundos, and “I had that orchestra play No Hubo Barrera en el Mundo for you,” Sara’s signature tune from her visit to him in Cuba. And now he was saying good-bye. “Much love always,” he wrote, “from your old friend who will be your good and old friend as long as he lives and afterwards will think of you with considerable affection, good kind beautiful lovely Sara.”

  Ten years later, in one of those boys-together letters he used to write to one friend about another, he confided to Archie MacLeish: “I liked Gerald and appreciated his leather and his chromium and his semi-impeccable taste but always felt about him the way people who do not like cats feel about cats.” But, he told Archie, “I love Sara.”

  22

  “Enough to make the angels weep”

  WHEN SARA RECEIVED Ernest’s June letter she had fled with Honoria to Europe again. Everyone suspected that war was coming, and the mood in Paris was expectant and valedictory, perhaps nowhere more so than in an exhibit at the Louvre of the décors and costumes of the Ballets Russes, some of which Gerald and Sara had painted at Diaghilev’s Belleville atelier. Noel Murphy’s companion Janet Flanner, writing in The New Yorker under her pseudonym of Genêt, sounded the right elegiac note:

  A list of the painters who made curtains or costumes during the Ballet’s twenty years’ utilization of the talents of all Europe contains what are now the most famous, and were then some of the least-known, names on earth. . . . More than any other spectacle, Diaghilev’s Ballet has come to symbolize what are now called les beaux jours, the days of civilized, uncensored pleasures, of new musicians and artists . . .—the days of the early nineteen-twenties, when politicians as well as hedonists thought a permanent, peaceful age had been born.

  With such memories in mind, it’s not strange that balletomanes were saddened by the show. It was enough to make the angels weep.

  Sara didn’t stay in Paris long: Fanny Myers had engineered invitations for herself and Honoria to the commencement ball at University College, Oxford; so after outfitting both girls with organza evening dresses from her vendeuse at Nicole Groult, Sara accompanied them to England.

  The two young men who were
to escort the girls, Lloyd Bowers and his friend Alan Jarvis, earned Sara’s approval at once. Bowers, an American and Yale graduate “with Manners,” was a “nice, well-brought-up boy.” Jarvis, a “very tall blond, nice-looking” Canadian who “sculps and likes the stage,” was, Sara reported to Gerald, “very attractive and no feathers anywhere.” Although there was lots of wild partying in students’ rooms—during which Bowers, “momentarily maddened by her appearance and champagne,” bit Honoria on the arm so passionately that, he left a sizeable bruise—Sara turned a tolerant, even amused eye on the proceedings. (“I told her she must consider it a compliment,” she said, adding—a little ruefully?—“No one ever bit me, even in my heyday.”)