Everybody Was So Young (33 page)

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 have 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.

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 to 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.