Everybody Was So Young (56 page)

Although Honoria stood in the receiving line at the exhibition opening, looking more and more like her mother, with the same slanting blue eyes and merry smile, Sara was not able to attend. That year she had become too frail and forgetful to be left on her own, and she had moved to Virginia to live with the Donnellys. By then her mind often wandered far afield, and she spent much of her time cutting out photographs from magazines and pasting them into scrapbooks. What the images meant to her, what she kept them for, no one knew. She had grown her hair long again, as it had been in her youth, and at night, preparing for bed, she would brush it out, to her granddaughter’s delight, for minutes at a time, the way the beautiful Wiborg girls had done in the duchess of Rutland’s boudoir at Belvoir.

When she caught pneumonia in the fall of 1975 it was clear that this would be the end. Like Baoth and Patrick and Gerald, she would go with her family around her. On October 9, Honoria was holding her mother’s hand when Sara began to sing. “Here comes the bride,” she quavered in her husky contralto—it was Wagner’s wedding march from Lohengrin, which the musicians had played for her marriage to Gerald sixty years before. “She was going to Dowdow,” Honoria said.

A week later her ashes were laid beside Gerald’s—and Patrick’s and Baoth’s—in the South End Cemetery in East Hampton. It had been a long journey, from the New World to the Old and back again, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth—and neither of them would have undertaken it alone. Almost from the beginning their adventure had been a shared enterprise, a relationship that, as Gerald had hoped, let loose the imagination—for themselves and for those they loved. “Don’t let’s ever separate again,” Sara had written to Gerald after they had been apart during World War I; now they wouldn’t have to.

Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

I met Gerald and Sara Murphy on a wintry afternoon when I was a little girl of (I think) eight or nine. My parents, who were friends of Honoria’s, took me to tea at a maisonette that the Murphys had rented for a month or so in the East Fifties or Sixties. As childhood memories often are, this one is oddly disembodied: I remember books and firelight, tea in fragile little cups and cucumber sandwiches on a flowered plate, but I cannot summon up the house itself. I can hear the Murphys’ voices, see their faces, but I have no recollection of what they were wearing or, curiously, how old they seemed to me.

I had brought my set of Chinese checkers with me as a hedge against the boredom of adult conversation, fully expecting to spend the afternoon playing a kind of invented solitaire by myself in a corner. But Gerald asked if he might join me and we sat by the window and played with great seriousness, the colored marbles making a satisfying thunk as we skipped them across the board. I don’t remember who won. I was given extra sugar lumps with my tea, and Sara plied me with questions about my school (which she and Honoria had both attended), my activities, my friends, my opinion on interesting things to do in the city. I was made to feel as if I were the most fascinating person in the world.

When we left, Gerald gave me a keepsake: a little crocheted Moroccan cap, the sort Muslim boys wear on their shaved heads and which he himself wore as a protection against sunburn. I have it still, wrapped in tissue paper in my bureau drawer; sewn on the inside is a blue and white nametape that says “Gerald Murphy.” Tender Is the Night’s Rosemary Hoyt, leaving the Divers’ Villa Diana with the yellow evening bag that Nicole Diver has pressed on her because “I think things ought to belong to the people that like them,” could not have felt more special than I with my crocheted cap on that winter afternoon.

Years later, when I came to read the novel that Scott Fitzgerald had dedicated “to Gerald and Sara—many fetes,” I was to remember that feeling, and to wonder whether it accounted for the way their names cropped up, again and again, in so many tales of the era in which they’d lived. What I discovered was inevitably more complex than that, and the truth was often hard to discern under the layers of embroidery, error, and contradiction that settle onto legends like the Murphys. At the heart of all the complexity, however, lay the gift that Gerald and Sara Murphy indisputably gave to each other and to all their friends, a sense of specialness and delight in a century when those qualities have come to seem rare. I hope that its spirit is somewhere perceptible in these pages.

I could not have written this book without the generosity, kindness, and support of Honoria Murphy Donnelly. She gave me unconditional access to all her family’s papers, photographs, tapes, and films, furnished lists of contacts’ names and addresses, entrusted me with information and anecdotes, allowed me to question her endlessly and repetitively in person and on the telephone, and, most notably, made me welcome in true Murphy fashion on my numerous visits to her house in East Hampton. Although she has not always agreed with my interpretations, she has always supported my efforts. There is no way that I can adequately thank her, but I would like to tell her, in Scott Fitzgerald’s and Cole Porter’s phrase, “how great you are.”

I’m also ineffably indebted to Frances Myers Brennan for her unstinting help, wonderful memory, and wise counsel. By making available to me her father’s engagement diaries, as well as her parents’ letters (now on deposit at Yale University), she enabled me to date certain events with a precision any biographer would envy. And her tact and perceptiveness, her encyclopedic knowledge of the world in which the Murphys lived, and her awareness of when it was time to ask me questions, rather than the other way around, were invaluable.

Many others contributed recollections to my portrait of the Murphys. Geraid and Sara Murphy’s grandchildren, John, Sherman, and Laura Donnelly, shared both memories and feelings with me, and put up good-naturedly with my intrusions into their family. The late Ellen Barry spoke with me at length, and her son, Philip Barry, Jr., his wife, Patricia, and their daughter Miranda were helpful as well. Calvin Tomkins, whose legendary Living Well Is the Best Revenge was both an inspiration and a formidable challenge to me, was generous with his memories of both Murphys as well as his sympathetic understanding; in addition, he gave me permission to use his own interview tapes, notes, and correspondence. I am also grateful to William Astor Chanler, Edward T. Chase, Roderick Coupe, James Douglas, Diane Fish, Frederic Franklin, Martha Gellhorn, Charles Getchell, Mimi MacLeish Grimm, Richard Hare, John Hemingway, the late Lincoln Kirstein, Jacques Livet, the late Yvonne Roussel Luff, William MacLeish, Mrs. John McCarthy, Mrs. Paul Mellon, David Pickman, Stewart Preston, Frances Ring, the late Vittorio Rieti, and Marian Seldes.

Much of my research was inevitably archival in nature: most of the individual actors in my story were gone, but fortunately they had left behind a rich record of letters, diaries, and other papers, and many people helped me to mine it. My warmest thanks for this go to Wayne Furman, overseer of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library; the librarians of the Periodical Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, and the Bibliothèque d’Art et Archéologie, Université de Paris; Dr. Howard Gotlieb, director of special collections at the Mugar Library, Boston University; Judy Malone of the Cincinnati Historical Society; Jean Ashton and Bernard Crystal of the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Tim Page, donor of the Dawn Powell papers; Dorothy Kosinski, curator of the Douglas Cooper Collection; Madeline Nichols, curator of the Dance Collection, New York Public Library, and her staff, particularly Monica Moseley; Erik Naslund, director of the Dansmuseet in Stockholm; Ornella Volta, curator of the Fondation Erik Satie; Susan Sinclair of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; George Barringer and the staff of the Special Collections department at the Lauinger Library, Georgetown University; Margaret Howland, curator of the Archibald MacLeish collection at Greenfield Community College; Laura Snowden, registrar of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; Leslie Morris, curator of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and his associate Mark Kille; Teresa Odean of the Hotchkiss School; Megan Desnoyers, former curator of the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, and its present curator, Steven Plotkin; the staff of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; James LaForce of LaForce and Stevens and Andrea Mathewson and Stephanie Sarka of Mark Cross; Gérard Regnier, director, and Sylvie Fresnault, Anne Baldassari, and Yvon de Monbison of the Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso; William Joyce, associate university librarian, and Margaret M. Sherry, reference librarian and archivist, Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University; Ned Comstock and Steve Hansen of the Cinema-Television Library of the University of Southern California; Dr. Thomas Staley, Kathy Henderson, and Rich Oram of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas; Edna Hajnal of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto; Greg Johnson of the Special Collections department at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia; John Maeske, registrar of Yale College; Judith Schiff and Bill Massa of the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; and Patricia Willis, curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, and her colleagues Ellen Cordes and Ken Crilly.

Many scholars, writers, and critics contributed information or insight to my understanding of the times and figures I was writing about, and any list of them is bound to contain omissions. Nonetheless I wish to mention in particular Linda Patterson Miller, whose anthology of the letters among the Murphys and their circle was one of the inspirations for this book and a continuing resource for it, as well as Nancy Van Norman Baer, Matthew Bruccoli, Jackson Bryer, Pierre Cabanne, Mary Dearborn, Scott Donaldson, Ann Douglas, Elizabeth Garrity Ellis, Kristen Erickson, the late Robert Fizdale, Judi Freeman, Joe Haldeman, Brigitte Hedel-Samson, Diane Johnson, Bernice Kert, Robert Kimball, Eleanor Lanahan, Carolyn Lanchner, Nelly Maillard, William McBrien, Marion Meade, the late James Mellow, Nancy Milford, Bernard Minoret, Robert Murdock, Ronald Pisano, George Plimpton, Michael Reynolds, John Richardson, William Rubin, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Robert Westbrook.

I’m also grateful to all those who pointed me in the direction of illuminating material or useful sources, or helped in other material ways, including Compte Henri de Beaumont and Gaia de Beaumont; Mrs. Nathaniel Benchley; Lucy Dos Passos Coggin; Fereshteh Daftari of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art; James R. Gaines; David Goddard; Sandra Aerey, the assessor for Harrietstown, New York; Edna Finn, the town historian; and Margaret Haig, the town clerk; the Honorable Jan H. Plumadore; Joan Schenkor; Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville; James Lord; Melissa de Medeiros of the Knoedler Gallery, John Reed, and Helen Miranda Wilson.

A network of friends sustained me, emotionally, artistically, and materially, at various points during the writing of this book. A list of all of them would fill its pages, but special mention must go to Paul Alexander, Gwendolyn Chabrier, Carol Easton, Terry Fox and Susan Lerner, Dan Greenberg, Lindy Hess, John and Chris Jerome, Louise Levathes, Charles Lockwood, Michael Lloyd, Honor Moore, Suzanne O’Malley, Leonora Prowell, Constance Sayre, Stacy Schiff, Michele Slung, William Stadiem, and Parmelee Welles Tolkan.

Special thanks are due to my agent, Kristine Dahl, who made an enormous leap of faith when she took me on as a client; to Dorothea Herrey and Kim Kanner of International Creative Management; to Laura Morris of the Abner Stein Agency; to the deft, perceptive, and ever understanding Jayne Yaffe; to Anne Chalmers for her inspired design; as well as Heidi Pitlor, Liz Vitale, Becky Saikia-Wilson—all of Houghton Mifflin; and to Houghton Mifflin’s editorial director, Janet Silver, who somehow combines in one person the patience of Penelope, the wisdom of Athena, and the tact of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves.

Finally, I could not have undertaken or continued this project without the inspiration, love, and support of my family. My father, John Vaill, has given me advice and encouragement, and an invaluable sense of the context of my story. My husband, Tom Stewart, and our children, Pamela and Patrick, have gracefully put up with temper tantrums, crises of confidence, late meals, wrinkled laundry, long-winded anecdotes about people they’ve never heard of, and general dysfunction; more important, they have provided a center for my cosmos. My mother, the late Patricia Schepps Vaill, to whom this book is dedicated, is really its “onlie begetter”: it was she who told me stories of her childhood in Paris and Cannes in the twenties, taught me French, and introduced me to the novels of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the poetry of Archibald MacLeish, the music of Cole Porter. Because of her, the world Gerald and Sara Murphy created and lived in was always a reality to me, not something intangible and fantastic. For a gift like this, mere gratitude seems paltry.

Notes

Abbreviations for frequently cited sources

ESB
Ellen Barry

PB Philip Barry

RB Robert Benchley

BU Mugar Library, Boston University

FMB
Frances Myers Brennan/Frances Myers Brennan archives

CUL
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

DC/
NYPL
Dance Collection/New York Public Library, Lincoln Center

HMD
Honoria Murphy Donnelly/Honoria Murphy Donnelly archives

JDP
John Dos Passos

KDP
Katy Dos Passos

FSF
F. Scott Fitzgerald

AJ Alan Jarvis

FL Fernand Léger

GUL
Lauinger Library, Georgetown University

HU Houghton Library, Harvard University

EH Ernest Hemingway

PH Pauline Hemingway

JFK
Ernest Hemingway collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library