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

by Amanda Vaill

  In preparation for the Dallas exhibit, the paintings in the attic were taken out, unrolled, and framed, and Gerald made an effort to recover the paintings he knew he had left behind in France: Boatdeck, which had been stored at the artists’ supplier Lefebvre-Foinet in Paris, and the self-abstraction Portrait. To his and Sara’s dismay, neither could be found. Perhaps it was naive to expect that Boatdeck could have made it through the war unscathed in Paris; but the disappearance of Portrait was hard to fathom. Vladimir Orloff maintained that it had been destroyed when his hut in the hills was bombed during the war—but there were no bombardments on that part of the coast. It appeared that Vladimir was being less than truthful, and that hurt. Had he sold the painting, or bartered it during the war for food or fuel? Had he simply mislaid it? Resignedly, Gerald told Tomkins, “There’s nothing more to be done.”

  MacAgy’s show, “American Genius in Review,” opened in May 1960, and included—alongside work by four other artists, Tom Benrimo, John Covert, Morgan Russell, and Morton Schamberg—five canvases by Gerald Murphy: Watch, Razor, Wasp and Pear, Doves, and Cocktail. (Bibliothèque, rolled up in a corner of the attic, wasn’t even discovered until later.) The exhibit was warmly received, and Gerald was so grateful to have his work treated seriously at long last that he donated two of the pictures, Watch and Razor, to the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts. He was even more gratified by MacAgy’s determination, which predated the exhibition itself, to write a long critical appraisal of his oeuvre for the journal Art in America.

  This necessitated a series of exchanges between the two men about Gerald’s creative life in the 1920s—exchanges in which, for the first time in years, Gerald allowed himself to revisit his apprenticeship with Natalia Goncharova, his artistic method, and his aims and aesthetic. At the same time he and Sara were also recollecting, for Calvin Tomkins, their lives in Paris and Antibes and their friendships with Picasso and Léger, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. It was as if they had each turned a corner and suddenly come upon their old selves; and if they couldn’t or didn’t wish to be those old selves, at least they now accepted them. Gerald even considered, very cautiously and diffidently, whether it might be possible to pick up a brush once more: “O to be young again!” he told Tomkins, surveying the very American art being produced by Rauschenberg and Rosenquist. “And yet Ucello, a mathematician, started painting at 60!” He knew that Ucello had given up painting for mathematics, “but returned to painting after a long lapse.” Why couldn’t he do the same? Possibly he was toying with this idea when he took his young grandson, Sherman Donnelly, down to his ground-floor workroom at Sneden’s Landing to show him how he’d painted the cigar box label in Cocktail, which hung on the wall. Pointing out the label’s tiny train to the boy, he told him how hard it had been to get the smokestack right: “he had to keep scraping off that plume of smoke and painting it again, but he said the beauty of oil paint was that you could keep doing that, over and over, until you had it the way you wanted.”

  The following spring Gerald and Sara had news of Picasso, whom neither had seen since Sara’s nonencounter with him at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris before the war. Reinventing himself, as he often did, with a new woman, he had married Jacqueline Roque, his companion of the past few years, in March. Sara had a sudden impulse to write to him in congratulation. Her letter, though, has more of the ring of an elegy. “One remembers so well,” she mused—in French, with its useful impersonal pronoun—

  (and one is sure you remember also) the beautiful days we all had together back then at Antibes—on the beach at La Garoupe and also at the Hotel du Cap—with your wife, your mother (such a dear), and Paullo—Some people even think you and we, and our three children, started the summer season in the Midi! Alas, we lost our two sons, to our great sorrow—. . . How life changes!

  Please accept all our fondest memories, and all our wishes for happiness, and long life, and just being happy—which you deserve.

  The next year, a mutual acquaintance was traveling through Paris and stopped to give Picasso the Murphys’ regards. “Tell Sara and Gerald that I am well,” Picasso said, “but that I’m a millionaire and I’m all alone.”

  In September 1960 Life magazine published a two-part article by Ernest Hemingway, “The Dangerous Summer,” his chronicle of the bullfighting duel between the matadors Antonio Ordonez and Luis Miguel Dominguin—the latter the uncrowned king of Spanish bullfighters, the former the young prince vying to take the elder’s place. Gerald thought the piece “stunning.” It brought back with unexpected force his memories of his own dangerous summer with Ernest, in Pamplona in 1926. Hemingway had not been well recently: the injuries he had sustained in the two African plane crashes, along with the effects of too much alcohol and hard living, had resulted in headaches, kidney trouble, high blood pressure, mood swings, and depression. In addition he had begun to suffer from paranoid delusions that he was on the brink of financial ruin or that unidentified agents were out to kill him. Arriving in New York from Spain that autumn he went into seclusion at the apartment Mary Hemingway had taken there; he saw no one—certainly not the Murphys—and refused even to go out. By the end of November, when a return to his beloved ranch in Ketchum, Idaho, had done no good, he was hospitalized for a complete workup—and, finally, a course of electroshock therapy—at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where Gerald Murphy had brought Fred so many years ago.

  Inevitably the news got into the papers, although they merely repeated the official story, that Hemingway was being treated for high blood pressure. Sara, with her infallible instinct for the bogus, and her laserlike attentiveness to those she loved, sensed something was really wrong.

  Dear Ernest,—

  We read—too often, in the papers—about your being in the Mayo Clinic,—mentioning various ailments, and please write me a card, saying it isn’t so,—or at least that you are all recovered—It isn’t in character for you to be ill—I want to picture you—as always—as a burly bearded young man—with a gun or on a boat—Just a line, please—I always remember old times with the greatest pleasure—and that you were helpful to me at a time when I certainly needed it.

  Ten days after she wrote this, Ernest Hemingway crept downstairs at dawn to the gunroom in Ketchum, took his old double-barreled shotgun, and blew himself into oblivion.

  When she heard the news, Sara was devastated. It wasn’t just the loss, so terrible and final, of someone she loved. It was his failure to keep faith with her creed that “If you just won’t admit a thing it doesn’t exist (as much),” that even “rebelling, dragging one’s feet & fighting every inch of the way, one must admit one can’t control it—one has to take it.” His action was a rebuke to her, a refutation of all she had lived by. “Sara is repairing slowly,” said Gerald to Calvin Tomkins, “but it’s been a wretched business. Ernest’s death affected her deeply. . . . He always warned us he would terminate any such situation. Possibly one has the right. I don’t know. But what happens to ‘grace under pressure?’” Grace under pressure—that elusive quality that Ernest had descried in him on the slopes at Schruns and in the ring at Pamplona—was what Hemingway had most admired about him, and most despised. In the end, somehow, it marked the sad difference between them.

  In July 1962 The New Yorker published Calvin Tomkins’s profile of the two of them, entitled “Living Well Is the Best Revenge.” Although the piece eloquently evoked the life they had made in Paris and Antibes in the twenties, and portrayed them with affection and sensitivity, neither Gerald nor Sara felt entirely easy about it. Sara disliked the feeling of being transformed into a kind of secondary celebrity, someone famous for knowing famous people. And Gerald objected to the title. For one thing, the “living well” part of it sounded frivolous, as if he were a Lucius Beebe-like bon vivant; for another, he claimed, he had never wanted to have revenge on anyone, for anything. He had in fact mentioned the phrase to Tomkins himself, claiming it was a Spanish proverb, which may have been a typical Murphy improvisation to
cover a lapse of memory. For although it sounds like one of Patrick Murphy’s bon mots for a Mark Cross ad, the saying comes from a miscellany compiled by that wisest and most tender of the English metaphysical poets, George Herbert—a miscellany whose first entry reads: “Man Proposeth, God disposeth.”

  Earlier that year a film version of Tender Is the Night had appeared, starring Jason Robards as Dick Diver, Jennifer Jones as Nicole, and Joan Fontaine as Nicole’s sister, Baby Warren. The reviews of the film (most of them negative) revived Sara’s feelings of outrage about the book—“so shallow,” she had complained to Calvin Tomkins—and she refused to go see it. So Gerald went alone, to the little movie theater in Nyack. He was the only person in the audience, an experience which, he told Tomkins, “was oddly appropriate somehow to the unreality of the film.” For two hours he sat alone in the dark, watching scenes he had lived being reenacted, sometimes clumsily, by people who bore not the slightest resemblance to the people who had lived them. Increasingly, he must have felt, he and Sara were like ghosts at the feast.

  That autumn they had received news that Esther Murphy had died in Paris. She and Gerald had been on cordial if not intimate terms: intimacy, in their family, had always been something to be avoided at all costs, and matters were complicated by Esther’s personal life. There were the two unhappy marriages—Gerald had paid for her divorce, in France, from Chester Arthur, an expensive and complicated proposition—and the relationships with Natalie Barney, Muriel Draper, Mercedes de Acosta, and Sybille Bedford. For Gerald, who had carefully hidden, even from himself, any ghost of sexual ambiguity, her behavior was a rebuke. Then there was her rather manic, unfulfilled brilliance, so uncomfortably similar to, and yet vastly different from, his own unfulfilled painting career: the book, written out in longhand, on Madame de Maintenon, which she never even attempted to have published, although she knew more than anyone in the world about Louis XIV’s famous mistress; the other book, unwritten so far as anyone knew, on her friend Edith Wharton. There were her embarrassing personal habits, about which she remained cheerfully unembarrassed—wetting the bed at night (Sara always made up the guest room with rubber sheets for her), relieving herself, in fact, wherever she happened to be, because it was too much trouble to stop talking long enough to find the bathroom.

  She had been in straitened financial circumstances for some time, despite the income from a trust left by her mother and various loans and gifts from Gerald; and she frequently had to ask him for money. “I am sorry to be just another middle aged failure,” she had told him, pitifully, in one such request. Lamenting that “our relationship has ever been plagued by the question of money,” Gerald nonetheless always tried to help, though he insisted that money paid to Esther should come out of his funds, not Sara’s. Her death—alone, far from her family—filled him with regret. As he told Dawn Powell: “It was my irreparable loss not to have been able for reasons of difference in age, location, interests, friends . . . to share more in her life. As a proud older brother—proud of her—I urged her too much to write. She was no doubt not meant to,—but to share brilliantly with others the workings of her mind. I think she took satisfaction in this. I hope so.”

  When her ashes were shipped home from France for burial, Gerald paid her the best tribute he could think of, which was to design her memorial stone himself, and to have her laid to rest in the East Hampton churchyard next to Baoth and Patrick.

  In that bleak winter when Patrick died, Scott Fitzgerald had tried to comfort Sara and Gerald with his vision of “another generation growing up around Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward.” With mortality in the air again, the Murphys found enormous satisfaction in their grandchildren, John, Sherman, and Laura Sara, who had been born in 1954, as well as in the grandchildren of friends like the MacLeishes and Myerses. Sara’s relationship with them was serene and comforting, Gerald’s more stimulating: he made up games and virgin varieties of the house cocktail; and he opened their eyes and ears to new things. It was Gerald who, in the early autumn of 1963, called his grandchildren into the living room to show them a record album called “Meet the Beatles”—“grandchildren,” he said, “pay attention. These young men are going to be very, very important.” It was Gerald who read them books by Edward Gorey, Gerald who taught them to swim beyond the treacherous East Hampton breakers, Gerald who told his granddaughter—as she watched him shaving in the morning—never to brush her teeth with her eyes open because it was vain.

  Sometimes the games he concocted for them had an edge: on summer nights in East Hampton, Gerald would take the young ones for rides in his black 1955 Pontiac with the searchlight on the roof, telling them ghost stories while they shrieked with laughter and protested that he couldn’t scare them; then he would let them out by the side of the road and drive off. The children, who were dressed in their nightclothes, would laugh, then pretend to be bored, then begin to wonder where he was—and just as they were on the point of actual terror he would reappear as if by magic and they would all pile into the car again, claiming they knew he’d been fooling them.

  Usually the entertainments were more benign; if there were no treasure expeditions to deserted beaches, like the one Gerald and Sara had organized so long ago in Antibes, there were picnics on the beach at East Hampton, which Gerald would rake “like a Japanese garden,” says a grandson, or Easter egg hunts at Sneden’s Landing. “Dow was in charge,” remembers William MacLeish of one such party, “and he did everything”—he even made a garland of flowers, like the ones Honoria had worn as a child, for Laura Donnelly to wear in her hair. At the end of the party, when the young MacLeishes were taking their leave, he saluted them by going down on one knee, like a medieval courtier, “his arm out—like that—with that wonderful Mick face.” Says MacLeish now: “and I thought, Ah, Jesus, Murphy, I love you. God, what a man.”

  That Easter party was one of the last the Murphys gave at Cheer Hall; in the spring of 1963 they had decided to sell it. Gerald, who had stayed on as president of Mark Cross after the 1948 sale to the Drake America Corporation, had felt increasingly uncomfortable running somebody else’s business, and in 1955 he had decided to retire. So he lost his $35,000 a year salary, and the burden of carrying the mortgage on Cheer Hall was, under the circumstances, considerable. Sara found the house gloomy in the summer, too many shade trees, not enough sun, and they had both felt it had been “a little too much for the past year—slippery road, remoteness, little or no help, etc.” She added, in a letter to John and Betty Dos Passos, “We have always believed it good to leave a place before it leaves you.”

  In this case they left it with a farewell fireworks display: two parties for Gerald’s seventy-fifth birthday; in June, a farewell dinner for the Dos Passoses, their little daughter, Lucy, and the Lowndses; and a lunch party for Edmund Wilson, long a friend of Esther’s, intermittently a friend of Gerald’s and Sara’s, and Scott Fitzgerald’s mentor and informal literary executor. Dawn Powell, a particular favorite of Wilson’s, was invited as well, to provide “bufferage,” and someone—Powell? Elena Wilson?—made a caricature drawing to celebrate the occasion. Entitled “Great White Father and friend approach Sneden’s Landing,” it depicts a square-faced, strong-jawed, scowling bald man (Wilson) and a little henlike woman with bangs and a feathered hat (Powell) crossing the Hudson in a rowboat with an American flag on its stern, like Washington crossing the Delaware in Gerald’s least favorite picture.

  The menu (inscribed, Wilson noticed, on little porcelain tablets put before each place) was a throwback to another era:

  pâté et biscuits

  poisson

  selle d’agneau

  pommes de terre Paillason

  purée de petits pois

  brioche avec fraises en sirop, crème Chantilly

  fromage de Brie

  In addition, there were “lots of vins et liqueurs,” reported Sara proudly to Honoria. Unsure of whether they still had the ability to b
ring off such an occasion, they had hired a chef for the day to help with the cooking. Wilson was suitably impressed—“an incredible meal,” was how he described it—but Gerald worried that they had perhaps gone a bit over the top. “We’ve never done it before,” he reassured Powell anxiously: “and not knowing the W’s really well we didn’t want them to come all that distance for just-steak-and-a-baked-potato. . . . Tell them the whole thing was a ‘HOMMAGES A.M. ET MME. BONNIE VILSON.’ All through it I kept thinking of the inordinate pleasure I’d had in all the years I was reading his books—all of them. And that’s from the heart.”

  26

  “Only half a person without you”

  ALTHOUGH BOTH Gerald and Sara merrily claimed that leaving Cheer Hall made them feel “much more irresponsible than we did when we married in our late twenties,” they felt some ambivalence as well. Gerald joked darkly that he and Sara might just drown themselves in the Hudson so that, like Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, their bodies could be borne downstream to New York on a funeral barge. At least that way they’d avoid clearing out the attics where, he said, “I feel sure I’ll come across the skeletons of our two former selves.”

  Indeed there were skeletons aplenty: letters from Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and Katy Dos Passos; Gerald’s painting of the objects in his father’s library, Bibliothèque; table linens from Villa America; and cartons of photographs, which after 1929 Sara had not bothered to paste into albums. Exhuming them, and disposing of them—this piece of furniture to Honoria in McLean, Virginia, that box of photographs to East Hampton—seemed to bring a kind of conclusion. “Every once in a while,” Gerald told Archie MacLeish, “we pull out a drawer and go through our memories of things we did together—we four. What an age of innocence it was, and how beautiful and free!”