Everybody Was So Young (25 page)

On this architectural canvas Gerald and Sara proceeded to lay down the elements of their personal style. In the main reception rooms they showed off the same modern panache they’d exhibited at the quai des Grands-Augustins, with mirrored fireplace surrounds, sculptural tables that looked as if Brancusi had designed them, white-upholstered, stainless-steel furniture—all of it slinkily elegant and minimalist. Whitewashed walls and waxed black tile floors completed the look, but Sara enlivened the deco black-and-white severity with the vibrant colors of the Côte d’Azur: table linens were blue or yellow, or both, or pink, or apple green; some of the china was green majolica, which looked like curly lettuce leaves, or pink and orange Provençal faience; and for dinner parties there were handblown Venetian goblets shot through with opalescent swirls. In the bedrooms and study some of the Murphys’ cherished nineteenth-century American pieces, sturdily crafted of curly maple, found a new home. Throughout the house huge glass vases were filled with flowers from the garden: peonies or roses or heliotrope or lilies, punctuated sometimes by sprigs of parsley that looked like green lace. And for the flagged terrace, which they would use as an outdoor living and dining room, Gerald had found what was then entirely original furniture: instead of the traditional wicker or wrought-iron froufrou, he had bought simple iron café chairs and tables, of the kind used in every little bistro on the Côte, from a restaurant supplier, and had painted them with silver radiator paint. It was all fresh, eclectic, unexpected, way ahead of its time.

The Murphys’ special touch extended to the land outside the villa, which ultimately covered almost seven acres of hillside. Around the house they restored and replanted a series of terraced gardens that resembled outdoor rooms full of fragrant nooks and crannies for reading, napping, or daydreaming. In July they purchased an additional parcel of land containing an old Provençal bastide or farmhouse—which they turned into a guest house—and put in vegetable gardens, giving each of the children an individual plot for whatever crops might suit their fancy. Honoria’s preference, copied from her mother’s, was for rows of pungent herbs. Sara wrote to her father’s clerk, Mr. Steinmetz, at Ault and Wiborg in New York and got him to send her American seed packets so she could plant sweet corn—something unheard of in France, where corn is only for cows, and tastes like it. She and Gerald put in a citrus orchard—there were already enough productive olive trees for an annual harvest—and a variety of nut trees; and they acquired two cows to provide the children with fresh milk (with her fear of germs where the children were concerned, Sara was distrustful of the commercially purchased variety). In the garden Sara constructed a playhouse for Honoria and furnished it with chairs, tables, beds, linens, and cooking utensils, all to scale; in the afternoons she would give Honoria cooking lessons, making miniature cakes and pots of cocoa, and when Ada MacLeish was visiting she taught Honoria how to make tiny baking powder biscuits, which they ate with honey and butter.

At the entrance to the villa, on the Chemin des Mougins, there were two cement gateposts, one topped by a glass-enclosed case in which the estate title could be displayed. For this Gerald created a fourteen-by-twenty-one-inch signboard that (anticipating Jasper Johns by several decades) was a fantasia on the Stars and Stripes in oil paint and gold leaf. The left-hand side of its bisected rectangle shows half of an enormous six-pointed gold star, with five smaller stars (for the five Murphys?) between its points, all on a field of intense cobalt blue. The right-hand side is composed of broad horizontal stripes of red and white. Across both star and stripes the words
VILLA
AMERICA
are emblazoned, one above the other, in block capitals. The letters on the starry left-hand side of the picture are white, with black shading, those on the striped right, black with white. The effect is striking visually, but also metaphorically: somehow the villa, like its owners, exists in two worlds at once—France and America, the real and the imagined.

To manage this real and imaginary kingdom the Murphys had help: there was an Italian gardener named Joseph Revello and his wife, Baptistine; a cook, Celestine; Ernestine Leray, nicknamed Titine, the bonne à tout faire; two under-gardeners; the farmer, Amilcar; and a chauffeur, Albert. (Sara had tried to learn how to drive her family’s car at the Dunes, but she kept swerving off the road into the high privet hedges that line East Hampton’s lanes, and finally she gave up trying.) And there was Vladimir Orloff, the aristocratic young Russian émigré whom the Murphys had met at Diaghilev’s atelier: he had originally come to work as Gerald’s studio assistant, but his skills as a conversationalist, cook, and storyteller had turned him into a kind of Lord Chamberlain, sometime chef, and children’s tutor as well. He kept Honoria, Baoth, and little Patrick spellbound with his account of his father’s death at the hands of the Bolsheviks (the elder Orloff, who had been the czarina’s banker, was shot before his cadet son’s horrified eyes), or his tales of a boy called Mowgli who had been raised by wolves. These he recited as a serial, one segment at a time, and made them so much his own that the little Murphys never knew they had originally been written by a Victorian Englishman called Kipling.

In the enchanted world of the Villa America, life ran according to the rules Sara and Gerald had set—it was, truly, a place where they could “do the things we want to do of our own accord . . . in our own way.” In the mornings they rose early: after breakfast, which might include the American muffins that were Sara’s specialty, Gerald went to paint in his studio; the children did lessons with Mademoiselle Géron or Vladimir (if he wasn’t helping Gerald prepare canvases or mix pigments); and Sara discussed the week’s menus with Celestine, went over the family accounts in her study, and walked through the gardens with Joseph to tell him what needed to be done.

Sometimes the mornings would be interrupted by the arrival of Monsieur Trasse, the barber from Antibes, who came to the villa on his bicycle every ten days to cut Gerald’s hair. He might also trim Sara’s—for that winter, after years of wearing her dark gold hair in modifications of the Gibson-girl style of her youth, she had given in to prevailing fashion and had it cut in a crisp, ear-length bob whose soft waves framed her face becomingly. (Stella Campbell, visiting the Murphys on one of her ever more frequent furloughs from the stage, was devastated: “Think,” she moaned stagily to Gerald, “all that tender weight, gone!”)

Shortly before noon Gerald would emerge from the studio, and everyone—the children, Mam’zelle, any guests staying in the bastide, and Gerald and Sara—would pile into cars or make their way on foot down the winding road to the little beach at La Garoupe. There the children did exercises with Gerald—head and leg lifts, yogic plows, and toe touches. Everyone sunbathed and swam. The water, clear enough for you to see your feet on the sandy bottom, was salty and just cold enough to be refreshing. The grownups chatted and drank dry sherry and nibbled on what John Dos Passos called “recondite hors d’oeuvres”—probably the delicious little crackers called sables that Honoria still remembers—and then after a while everyone went back to the villa for lunch. They ate at the big table on the terrace under the linden tree—an omelette and salad from the garden, or poached eggs on a bed of creamed corn with sautéed Provençal tomatoes on the side, or a plain dish of new potatoes, freshly dug, with butter from the villa’s cows and fresh parsley, and simple local wine to wash it all down. The sky would harden into an intense blue, the earth would give back the smell of bracken and eucalyptus, and the air would throb with the shrilling of cicadas.

The children would be set down for an hour’s siesta. They were allowed to choose where they napped and often took their folding cots into the garden. Once when the Picassos had come to lunch, little Paulo enlivened the children’s siesta hour by gravely instructing them on the different parts of the anatomy, with particular attention to the ways boys are different from girls. After their naps there would be some wonderful pastime, an expedition or a treasure hunt or a costume party. Or there might be a children’s art show, which the Murphys called the Salon de Jeunesse, for which Picasso served as organizer and judge. After one such exhibition, Honoria sent him a note in her charming, haphazardly phonetic French: “Chere mecie picaso,” she wrote, “vous vous lé que je vous décine une animal.” (“Dear Monsieur Picasso, would you like me to draw you an animal?”) At the bottom of the page is a hippopotamus-like horse with a rider on its back that comically prefigures the equine victims of Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica. Picasso reportedly adored it.

Late in the afternoon Gerald and Sara would often take the children to the Hotel du Cap to swim at Eden Roc, or watch Archie MacLeish—he and Ada had rented a villa in Antibes that summer—do showy dives from the highest point. Or they would drive to Cannes, to the flower market, for armfuls of fresh stock, stopping on the way to buy cheese wrapped in a grape leaf from the vendor near the railroad tracks. And later, back at the Villa America, the children would have baths and supper, and the grown-ups would dress for dinner.

Sara had a phrase, “Dinner-Flowers-Gala,” derived from the notation carried on ships’ menus for the captain’s dinner: it was Murphy language for any special occasion, and there were many. Not grand contrivances, like the de Beaumont’s balls or Linda Porter’s musical evenings—for Sara had grown to detest big parties and called them “holocausts”—but usually dinners for eight or ten. First there were Gerald’s special cocktails on the terrace, cocktails that he claimed contained “just the juice of a few flowers,” sometimes a concoction of brandy, liqueur, and lemon juice in stemmed glasses whose rims had been rubbed with lemon and dipped in coarse sugar, or something called a “Bailey,” which had also, Gerald said, been “invented by me as were a great many other good things.”

Gin (Booth’s House of Lords) ⅗ths

Grapefruit juice ⅕th

Lime juice (fresh) ⅕th

Mint (fresh) 1 sprig per person

Ice (a great deal)

The mint should be put in the shaker first. It should be torn up by hand as it steeps better. The gin should be added then and allowed to stand a minute or two. Then add the grapefruit juice and then the lime juice. Stir vigorously with ice and do not allow to dilute too much, but serve very cold, with a sprig of mint in each glass.

These Gerald mixed, Philip Barry said, like a priest preparing Mass, and he served them ritually: you were only allowed two cocktails, and you were not offered anything else to drink before dinner. During cocktails the children would come down in their bathrobes and sing a song, or dance (Honoria practiced for hours in her bedroom to a jazz recording sent by the drummer in Jimmy Durante’s band); afterward they would say good night and go up to bed. And then there would be dinner under the linden tree, by candlelight, the women in their beaded dresses and the men in their dinner jackets, with everyone so young and merry and clever.

This was the summer, Scott Fitzgerald reported, when “there was no one at Antibes . . . except me, Zelda, the Valentinos, the Murphys, Mistinguet [sic—his misspelling of the French cabaret singer who was Maurice Chevalier’s partner, lover, and mentor], Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the MacLeishes, Charlie Brackett, Maude Kahn, Esther Murphy, Marguerite Namara, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Mannes the violinist, Floyd Dell, Max and Chrystal Eastman, ex-premier Orlando, Etienne de Beaumont—just a real place to rough it, to escape from all the world.” Donald Ogden Stewart, newly arrived from another visit to Pamplona with the Hemingways, felt “ominous signs” that the Murphys’ undiscovered paradise was on the verge of being invaded: there were “wealthy vacationers” at the Hotel du Cap and on the Plage de la Garoupe. But Sara saw it differently: “Most of them (the intruders) were very dear friends,” she said many years later. Or if they weren’t at first, they became so, if they were interesting. And then the Murphys made sure they became friends of other interesting people they knew, because it gave them so much pleasure to bring such people together.

It was the Murphys who introduced the MacLeishes to the Fitzgeralds, and to the de Beaumonts; the Murphys who asked Picasso to bring his friend Manuel Ortiz de Zarate—a minor cubist painter but major avant-garde personality—to a soiree because he seemed so interesting; the Murphys who gave an enchanted dinner party for Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and the violinist David Mannes and his wife and daughter, Marya. That night, as the Mediterranean moon rose over Gerald and Sara’s fragrant garden, Marya Mannes, responding to a “sense of glowing peace,” turned to Fitzgerald, her dinner partner, and said, simply, how happy she was to be there. In thanks for that evening, she wrote her hosts a poem; David Mannes said the only way he and his wife could repay the Murphys was to give them a private concert of Bach’s four-hand piano pieces the next day. “I’ve never been so moved,” Gerald said, remembering it years later.

The parties weren’t always for the adults: there were costume parties for the children at the screenwriter and movie producer Charles Brackett’s house, and Scott and Zelda staged a memorable battle of tin soldiers in front of a fairy castle in their garden that was guarded by a “dragon,” a large beetle in a wooden cricket cage, who was allowed to run away when the good soldiers won. Perhaps most magical of all was the excursion to the Antibes lighthouse that Gerald planned for Scottie Fitzgerald. He had told her that the lighthouse was populated by fairies who made the light turn round and round, and one evening, dressed to the nines in spats, white Panama, and malacca cane, he took her there to see them. Scottie was afraid to approach the building, so Gerald said tactfully, “The fairies might be busy, so we’ll watch from close by.” The expedition was, of course, a complete success.

It all seems like fairyland now, like grown-ups playing children’s games. But there was a kind of purpose in it. One evening that summer, in the garden at Villa America, Sara and Gerald sat talking long after dinner with Phil and Ellen Barry and Archie and Ada MacLeish at the table under the linden tree. (“Life gets a little denser chemically during talks,” Gerald felt.) Their conversation, which was seemingly at odds with the ease and beauty of their surroundings, revolved around something John Peale Bishop had said about tragedy. Death wasn’t a tragedy, Bishop had said: “it is the horror of evil, of unexpected, sharply contrasted depravity, of helplessness before one’s own nature—not death, but life and its terrible possibilities.” At Villa America, life and its terrible possibilities seemed held at bay, at least for now.