by Amanda Vaill
She invited both young men to accompany her and the girls on a Weatherbird cruise to Corsica the next month, and although Jarvis had to beg off, Bowers came along, only once getting on Sara’s wrong side. While the Weatherbird was anchored at Monte Carlo, he accompanied Honoria and Fanny and a friend of his on a midnight reconnaissance of Juan-les-Pins and Antibes which kept them out until six in the morning. The young people had gone to the Juan-les-Pins casino, where their parents had once been so gay, and afterward had driven around Villa America in the dark, peering at the deserted buildings behind the garden walls. Arriving at the dock as the sun came up they found Sara in a fury of anxiety, which hardly abated when she found out where they had been. She could not bring herself to visit the villa, although it was only forty-five minutes’ drive away.
They left port a few days later and spent the next month cruising around Corsica and Elba—Sara compared the scenery to de Chirico paintings, or Picasso’s backdrops for Pulcinella. Despite some heavy weather they had a fine time: “The girls, I hope, are enjoying themselves,” Sara wrote to the Dos Passoses, whom she missed. “They chatter along & play the Victrola, & read endless movie magazines with some light manicuring in between,—so think they’ll be alright—although Honoria always wishes the boat were run more along the lines of the Ritz.” But Sara was concerned and “disappointed” that she had heard so very little that summer from Gerald, normally such a good correspondent.
He had been spending more and more time at Mark Cross during the past year; the economy had finally rebounded from the Depression and the store was often full of customers. At Christmas he had telephoned Sara to tell her that there were 3,300 people in the building at the time, “all milling.” He was working hard to stay ahead of the curve of fashion: from his second-story office windows he would “rake the Avenue with my aviation binoculars, learning how bags are carried and who wears gloves or no.” And he and Alice Lee Myers had made some delicious European purchases, from Czechoslovakian stemware to elegantly relaxed men’s shirts to French country plates decorated with hand-painted explications of the language of flowers. He had evolved a number of signature designs, too: There was a leather drawstring bag inspired by the feed bags used by the grooms at Longchamp racetrack. Robert Benchley, who had one of the first models, called it a “Noah” bag because you could put everything in it you would need on the ark, and the name stuck. And there was a smart, boxy purse like a small version of a man’s attaché case, which was such a symbol of elegance that Grace Kelly carried one in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Rear Window to show how chic she was.
But despite these items’ seemingly limitless cachet, the company still wasn’t making a sufficient profit; and loans from Gerald, Esther, and the landlord, Goelet, would soon have to be renegotiated if Mark Cross were to survive. In addition, and more pressingly, the Murphys’ investment adviser Copley Amory informed Gerald in July that—what with the expenses for Swan Cove’s reconstruction and the effects of their withdrawals for Patrick’s care—their personal capital had been reduced to a not very robust $201,000. They had never been as wealthy as Scott Fitzgerald thought, and now they were even less so.
But Gerald’s attention to work and finances played only a small part in his lack of communicativeness that summer. He had also become involved in a new project that—while it promised no financial remuneration—helped him to forget the anxious present and the anguished past, and to imagine himself in a time that preceded them. Back in February the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (now styled in the singular) had initiated plans for a new production with American music, choreography, and subject matter that the company’s current director, the Moscow-born banker who went under the name Serge Denham, hoped to make the centerpiece of his 1939 season. With Europe almost certainly about to be engulfed in war, it looked as if the Ballet Russe would make an extended visit to America, and Denham felt that the American box office would respond most enthusiastically to an American ballet on the lines of Eugene Loring’s recent and successful Billy the Kid.
He thought first of approaching Cole Porter to compose a score, but a check with Porter’s longtime friend and former Yale classmate Leonard Hanna revealed that Porter was in Havana, unreachable and uninterested. Denham’s next choice was the quintessentially American Irving Berlin, then in Hollywood working with Fred Astaire. Berlin was flattered, though ballet was “completely out of my field.” At the end of February he sent Denham a list of his songs that he thought could be orchestrated for dancing, arranged into the categories of “Ragtime,” “Production,” “Ballads,” and “Jazz”: among them were “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Always,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” “Everybody Step,” “Everybody’s Doin It,” “What’ll I Do,” “Easter Parade,” and “Top Hat.” This revue format, which George Balanchine so artfully used later in his Gershwin ballet, Who Cares? may not have seemed sufficiently surefire to Denham, and he was certainly made apprehensive by Berlin’s price and his near mania for creative control. So without telling Berlin, Denham quietly explored another option, that of using Lorenz Hart’s collaborator, Richard Rodgers, to write a full-length dramatic score. The person who suggested Rodgers was Gerald Murphy, who knew the composer and knew that he’d already done a ballet in miniature, the “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” number in the 1935 musical On Your Toes, choreographed by Diaghilev’s old ballet master, Balanchine.
Rodgers, as it happened, was interested, and Denham quickly signed a contract with him, waiting until that deal was done to wiggle tactfully out of his understanding with Berlin. Shortly thereafter Denham and his adviser, the Russian émigré-cum-café-society-fixture Baron Niki de Gunzbourg, tried to enlist John Dos Passos as librettist—their heads evidently turned by Dos’s recent appearance on the cover of Time magazine after the publication of The Big Money. They offered him a $250 flat fee and on March 22 sent their contract to him at the Murphys’ New Weston penthouse, where he often stayed while in New York.
For some reason—possibly disinclination to pursue the project, possibly a desire to involve his friend in something besides commerce—Dos seemingly passed this baton (though not, it appears, the check) to Gerald, who was already peripherally involved because of his nomination of Rodgers. And at the end of March the notoriously tightfisted Denham paid a week’s salary to one of his young dancers, an aspiring choreographer named Marc Platt, so he could come to New York and discuss the evolution of a ballet with a Western theme with Rodgers and with Gerald.
Platt had been a leading character dancer with the Ballet Russe for several seasons and, as was de rigueur in the ballet world at the time, had taken a Russian stage name, Marc Platoff. But he was a nice, red-haired American kid from Seattle with a winning smile and a big jump; “he was a very, very good dancer,” remembers Frederic Franklin, the English danseur noble who was to dance the lead in the ballet, and “very handsome. And he was the first American I met who had a sense of humor.” He charmed Gerald and the Murphys generally. “We all had crushes on him,” Honoria recalled. “He was so handsome—he said I had a sexy lower lip, and he liked Fanny’s looks, too. But he really wasn’t interested in us in that way.”
Honoria thought that possibly her father saw in Platt a kind of surrogate for his lost sons, as inevitably any young man must have seemed to him. If he saw anything more, there is no record of it, other than a puzzling postscript he added around this time to a letter to Woollcott, in which he quoted the lines from Milton’s Samson Agonistes which had haunted him from his youth: “O worst imprisonment—To be the dungeon of Thyself!” But certainly Platt was also a means to rediscover a world Gerald must have thought lost to him during the past decade. It was no accident that the scenario Gerald developed for Platt’s choreography was called Ghost Town, nor that it concerned the awakening of memories for an old miner, left behind by fortune and his sweetheart when the vein of ore he had been working was exhausted.
He threw himself into the project, lending his extensive collection of
“notes, records, books, and music” to Platt, Richard Rodgers, and the designer Raoul Pene DuBois, and drawing on his own knowledge of popular nineteenth-century culture to create a meticulously detailed scenario that mapped out characters, setting, costumes, action, even dances. It seemed to him at times that he was back in the golden days of Within the Quota: “it was so exciting,” remembers Honoria, “that my father had gotten involved in the arts again.” Honoria was so taken with Platt that she asked him to join the Weatherbird’s cruise that summer, which for some reason made Sara “furious.” She insisted that “he can stay for 3 days and that is all.” In the event he never went. But he did develop a close relationship with Gerald; it’s easy to picture the younger man listening, enthralled, to Gerald’s tales of Diaghilev and Stravinsky and Picasso in Paris in the twenties.
Annoyingly, however, Gerald couldn’t seem to achieve the same rapport with Denham or even Rodgers; when he asked to hear recordings of Ghost Town’s score he was told they’d been sent to Leonide Massine, the company’s Russian artistic director, in Monte Carlo, and were unavailable—even though Rodgers, and his music, were in New York, and Gerald could easily have been allowed to sight-read through the score himself. What he didn’t realize was that for reasons known only to themselves (but which may have had something to do with money and copyrights, areas where Denham was a notoriously sharp operator) Denham and company were energetically cutting him out of the picture.
First Denham seemed to attack the scenario. In Gerald’s script a diversion is created when a stagecoach full of historical characters—including the soprano Jenny Lind, the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (on tour in America), and the boxing champion “Benecia Boy” Heenan—arrive in town. The scene allows several corps numbers as well as solos for the Ballet Russe’s notoriously top-heavy company roster, but instead of being grateful Denham seized on it as an excuse to dump on his librettist. “The . . . story . . . is too overcrowded by useless incidental characters,” wrote the Russian Denham in English (and for the record?) to the Russian Massine in Monte Carlo: “I spoke to Rodgers about it and he feels the same way. Murphy, apparently a capable man in writing a story, does not visualize the imperative simplicity of a ballet and although he was of very great help to us with all his materials I still feel that we have to curtail some of the details and bring it into a much simpler form.”
The tactful tone didn’t last. Soon Denham was instructing Platt not to “complicate our work” by “unnecessary loose conversation” with the troublesome Mr. Murphy,
who . . . is inclined to consider himself a prominent figure in the whole matter, whereas his work, according to our judgment, was merely to restore the historical research data.
Please tell Platoff [this letter, also in English, was addressed to his Russian associate Jacques Rubinstein] that the less he writes to Murphy the better it is from all points of view, because I presume that with every letter the estimate of Mr. Murphy’s self-importance in the matter will be on the increase.
Denham’s snide dismissal of Gerald’s contribution to Ghost Town seems not only gratuitous but ludicrous on its face: for the Ballet Russe used Gerald’s scenario exactly as it came from the typewriter, reproducing it, verbatim, in the company program as well as in a popular ballet reference book. Despite Denham’s apparent objections to “overcrowding,” no characters were ever cut. The cast list Denham sent to Barbara Karinska, who designed and built the costumes, contains every name from Gerald’s original, with the name of a dancer beside it.
Whether Gerald was aware of this behind-the-scenes backstabbing, his preoccupation with Ghost Town was one reason he was such an indifferent correspondent that summer. Another was business—there were problems with overseas production for Mark Cross—and some tricky maneuvering he had to go through to avoid losing his driver’s license for a fourth speeding offense. And still another reason may have been the intensification that summer of his friendship with the unfathomable Alexander Woollcott, to whom he confided the persistent feelings of loss he could scarcely bring himself to mention to anyone else.
“Thanks for the film,” he wrote to Woollcott, referring to who knows what movie they had attended:
what shadows passed thro’ it . . . and what a strange reecho of a night years ago when an unguided voice said to me “What are you doing now?” . . . as I sat and waited for further news of Baoth . . . before starting out. From that moment on—as I’ve come to a corner—I’ve felt the thing which you give by your presence somewhere. In a world in which almost no communication between human creatures is possible it is strange to feel as I do—and to know—that I owe you so much,
Aff’y.
Gerald
Whatever corner Gerald felt he had come to at this point, he seemingly could discuss it only with Woollcott, this flamboyant but reclusive nonpracticing homosexual, and not with Sara, his confidant of so many years. She didn’t know this, not in so many words, but she felt the redirection of his attention.
In addition to his outings to the theater with Woollcott, Gerald had agreed to landscape his friend’s island retreat, Neshobe, on Lake Bomoseen in Vermont, an undertaking that would last through the succeeding winter and spring and consume a considerable amount of time. But despite his distractions he began to be concerned for Sara and the girls as the news from Europe worsened.
For during the course of that summer, Spain fell definitively to the fascists, Italy annexed Albania, and (Gerald exclaimed to Sara) “the English . . . sold China down the river to the Japanese!” By the time Sara and the girls landed at Monte Carlo on August 16 it seemed only a matter of days before Germany would make its next move, but, reluctant to leave behind their Mediterranean dream, they postponed their departure for a few more days, sailing to the îles des Lérins off Cannes, sleepy, pine-scented islands shimmering timelessly in the blue sea. “Very lovely,” wrote Sara in her log. “In bathing—cocktails, dinner—music on deck—all fell asleep.” The trip back to Paris provided a rude awakening.
Paris is on a wartime basis [wrote Dick Myers, who was in the city on business, to Alice Lee]—no telephones from hotels—only private houses—nobody is allowed to communicate—either by phone or mail inside the country except in French—all mail and cables censored. . . . Children are being evacuated—people are leaving—and of course at night the city is black. . . . Most of the younger men are mobilized—and older ones gradually going—and the cafés are crowded at night with people simply seeking the solace of one another’s society.
At Maxim’s for dinner—which in the blackout Sara said “looked like Prohibition days in N.Y.”—the first person they saw was Hoytie, to whom Sara had refused to speak since Patrick’s last illness. “Here she comes,” muttered Sara. “Let’s all behave perfectly normally.” Striding up to their table, Sara remembered, Hoytie “gave us advice in [a] strangled voice,” offering the loan of her apartment in case they couldn’t get out of Paris. Sara declined. The next day Noel Murphy sent Sara a hasty note, scrawled at the bank during an air-raid drill: “For heaven’s sake, get Honoria home. Go to Cannes and stand up on an Italian boat . . . Good luck and come back.” In fact Sara fully intended to do so: she’d conceived a wild notion of opening a soldiers’ canteen in Paris and running it for the duration of hostilities, and she was dissuaded only when Honoria refused to leave Paris without her mother.
War was declared on September 3, a “very angoissante day.” Everyone was rushing about trying to get luggage to escape points (Sara had twenty pieces, which Léger helped her transfer to the Gare St.-Lazare), make sailing reservations, or exchange money. The Guaranty Trust was a scene of pandemonium, with Leonide Massine trying in vain to persuade the bank to store a metal box full of irreplaceable Ballets Russes films (he ended by carting it around with him). Sara, Honoria, and the Myerses had long ago booked passage on the Normandie for September 6, but the Normandie was a French boat and would be fired on once hostilities began; so they tried to make alternative arrangeme
nts. Finally they managed to get passage on the United States ship George Washington, which left four days later. After lying low at the Normandy house of her cherished Madame Hélène, Sara, Dick Myers, and the girls got to Le Havre, from which the George Washington sailed on September 10, bound for Southampton and New York. To deter bomber pilots the deck had been painted with a huge Stars and Stripes, reminiscent of Gerald’s Villa America sign, which gave the ship an air of improbable, Murphyesque festivity. There were nearly two thousand people on board in space meant for half that number, and Dick Myers had to sleep in the (drained) swimming pool, but they made the trip safely. “I feel like sitting under a tree in the sun and holding someone’s thumb,” wrote Gerald, in relief, to John and Katy Dos Passos.
On November 12, Gerald, Sara, and Honoria attended the premiere of the Ballet Russes Ghost Town at the Metropolitan Opera House. Gerald hated first nights, in particular the audience’s “greedy sense of being included at the only spectacle worth going to,” and the stakes this evening were high. There had been considerable advance publicity for the production, including a photograph in the New York Times’s rotogravure section for Sunday, October 22: “Three young American members of the cast try on the voluminous frills they will wear in the new American ballet, ‘Ghost Town,’ which is patterned after a story by Mark Twain.” (Twain, of course, was safely dead, unlike Murphy, whose name was nowhere mentioned.) Gerald had attended only a few rehearsals, so this premiere was one of his first glimpses of what Rodgers, Platt, and Raoul Pene DuBois had done with his plot and characters. Opening the program, he could see that the young miner, Ralston, was played by Frederic Franklin; his sweetheart, Eilly Orum, was Mia Slavenska; the Mormon preacher Orson Hyde was Roland Guerard; Jenny Lind—in Karinska’s pleated pastel organza, with a wig of golden ringlets reminiscent of America’s Sweetheart in Within the Quota—was “the Danish-Javanese dance sensation” Nini Theilade, offstage a sultry-lipped brunette with a very luscious figure. But the scenario—which at one time Denham had grudgingly proposed should be credited to “Richard Rodgers, in collaboration with Gerald Murphy, who supplied the historical research”—was now listed as the work of Marc Platoff.
