Everybody Was So Young (47 page)

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 arrangements. 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.

Although later critical reaction was mixed, the ballet scored an enormous hit with the audience. There was tumultuous applause: Rodgers and Platt came on stage to take six curtain calls. Gerald, however, was left in his seat. He and Platt, who left the Ballet Russe soon after for a career on Broadway, continued their friendship into the 1940s; but Gerald never tried his hand at the ballet, or indeed at any art form, again.

In September, shortly after Honoria and Sara returned from Paris, Gerald received a disturbing telegram: “
WAS
TAKEN
ILL
OUT
HERE
LAST
APRIL
AND
CONFINED
TO
BED
FIVE
MONTHS
AND
NOW
UP
AND
WORKING
BUT
COMPLETELY
CLEANED
OUT
FINANCIALLY
WANT
DESPERATELY
TO
CONTINUE
DAUGHTER
AT
VASSAR
CAN
YOU
LEND
360
DOLLARS
FOR
ONE
MONTH
IF
THIS
IS
POSSIBLE
PLEASE
WIRE
ME 5521
AMESTOY
AVENUE
ENCINO
CALIF
=
SCOTT
FITZGERALD
.”

Naturally the answer was yes; and Fitzgerald’s gratitude, when he was able to write, was profound, if slightly less than candid. “What a strange thing that after asking every other concievable [sic] favor of you at one time or another I should be driven to turn to you for money!” he said. “The story is too foolish, too dreary to go into.” Or, he didn’t say, too embarrassing. His screenwriting contract at
MGM
had been terminated the previous December, and when Walter Wanger hired him to write a script about the Dartmouth Winter Carnival with Budd Schulberg, he had gone on a week-long bender while on location in New Hampshire: so he was fired from that job, too. He had been unable to find work and although he told his agent Harold Ober and his editor Maxwell Perkins that he had a number of fiction projects in mind, the entire year had passed in a haze of alcohol—which in his letter to the Murphys was described as “a temperature of 102°”—and no novels or saleable stories resulted. Finally Ober had refused to advance him any more money, and Fitzgerald had been desperate. Gerald’s loan, he said, “saved me—Scottie and me—in spite of our small deserts. I don’t think I could have asked anyone else & kept what pride it is necessary to keep.”

Gerald never knew—and probably wouldn’t have cared—that Scott did ask someone else: his old Minnesota friend C. O. Kalman, in a telegram that duplicated the wording in Gerald’s. Kalman was in the hospital, though, and couldn’t reply, as Gerald did: “Please don’t keep us ignorant ever again. Please take care of yourself. Please don’t worry about the money. If you knew how fond we are of you I think you’d believe this. One is fond of so few people.” Although he suspected Fitzgerald was dramatizing his ailments and covering up for his drinking—“I do not like to feel that you consider yrself ill. I can’t believe you are,” he said later—it didn’t really matter. As Sara had told Scott in 1935, “I don’t think the world is a very nice place—And all there seems to be left to do is to make the best of it while we are here, & be
VERY
grateful for one’s friends—because they are the best there is, & make up for many another thing that is lacking.”

The friends were widely scattered now, many battered by the events of the past few years. In May 1939 Archie MacLeish had been offered the post of Librarian of Congress. Because it would seriously interfere with his poetry, wrote Gerald to Woollcott, “He was against accepting so were we his doing so.” But President Roosevelt persuaded him to say yes. Commented Gerald: “4,000 volumes! (and all sons of bitches) He’ll never get thro’ his dusting mornings.” Gerald had traveled with the Dos Passoses to Conway for a farewell clambake while Sara was in Europe, an occasion that imprinted itself indelibly on the memory of his godson Peter, now rechristened William. It was an enormous alfresco feast, with bonfires and music and laughter, and Gerald had brought a red, white, and blue beribboned jeroboam of champagne. Even the children partook. “We ate a very great deal,” says William MacLeish, “and I remember going to sleep with my head on my pa’s chest, and he went to sleep, and we all just snored for about an hour.”

In October, Sara and Gerald went with Dottie Parker and Alan Campbell to see the opening of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, in which an arrogant, acid-tongued, but perversely lovable world-famous lecturer named Sheridan Whiteside—who seemed to Gerald only a pale simulacrum of Alec Woollcott—is stranded by a broken leg in the home of his small-town Ohio hosts. Monty Woolley, playing Whiteside in only his third Broadway appearance, made a huge personal triumph; but the somewhat collegiate humor that had amused Gerald in the days when he and Woolley played “stomach touch” in Antibes no longer seemed terribly funny. “The play depressed me,” he wrote to Woollcott afterward; “it doesn’t even succeed in being incisive. . . . I wonder if any of all those people you know know what you’re like. I’m not saying I do,—but I am saying that the play showed me (by what it lacks essentially) how fond I am of you.”

Woollcott didn’t seem to share Gerald’s rather dour opinion, and in the spring consented to star (as “himself”) in the West Coast touring company of the play. But during one performance he suffered a severe heart attack; after spending time in a California hospital he returned to Neshobe, where he recovered slowly. This latest intimation of mortality, along with the death of Sara’s adored Puppy (“the last tie to the boys”), shook Gerald badly. In his dreams, night after night, the boys were dying over and over again, first Baoth, then Patrick. “Will one’s heart never touch bottom?” he asked Woollcott. “Is there a point beyond which impotent rage can carry you? By noon of every day the brain has reached saturation.” He could no longer share these feelings with Sara; she was too wounded herself to bear his losses too. And so he turned to Woollcott. “I probably shouldn’t have written this letter,” he said, “but I wanted to talk to you.”

He and Sara were both concerned with helping Pauline Hemingway weather the irretrievable wreck of her marriage. During the previous autumn, when she was living in New York, Gerald had done his best to act as a surrogate father to her boys, buying Patrick and Gregory the puppy they craved and taking Bumby, who was now at boarding school, to grown-up treats like lunch at Gallagher’s Steak House or the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis, followed by a matinee—John Hemingway remembers a performance of the musical extravaganza Hellzapoppin with particular enthusiasm. Back in Key West that spring of 1940, though, Pauline seemed, Gerald reported to Scott Fitzgerald, “forlorn. . . . I guess women who really love have always been.”

She sent up an
SOS
to the Murphys—“would like to be a little bitter about the way you haven’t come down here,” was how she put it—and so he and Sara traveled to Florida with the Dos Passoses in the spring. After stopping on the way to see Bea Tolstoy (formerly Stewart) and the Barrys, they took Pauline with them on a tour of the back country that included a moment that only the Murphys could have devised. Their trip coincided with a solar eclipse, and near Kissimmee they stopped to watch it: pulling over to the side of the road, they poured cocktails from a thermos and tuned in the car radio to Carnegie Hall, where the New York Philharmonic was playing Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps. Gravely sipping their drinks to Stravinsky’s throbbing dissonances, they stared upward as darkness covered the earth.

That summer Pauline went to San Francisco to live, and Sara, trying to hold together the threads of all their old friendships, asked Ernest to come and stay in East Hampton. She signed her letter “Yr old shipmate, Sara.” But she never heard from him. It wasn’t until the following December—after he had married Martha Gellhorn and they had honeymooned in New York without seeing the Murphys—that he replied. “I felt sort of strange about the honeymoon business,” he wrote: “So I didn’t go to see Ruth Allen nor you nor other oldest friends (I have no closer friend than you) because it seemed sort of vulgar. . . . I didn’t want to strain your loyalties although I always marry good wives as you know. But I think you and me felt about the same and I love you the same as always.”

By the time she got this letter, Sara and Gerald were coping with another loss. In September, Scott Fitzgerald had repaid $150 of the $360 they had sent him to cover Scotties Vassar tuition. He’d been writing a series of stories for Esquire about a failing alcoholic screenwriter called Pat Hobby, and he had sold his long-ago short story “Babylon Revisited,” in which the little-girl heroine is named Honoria, to the movies. His secretary, Frances Kroll, recalled later that he wanted to repay out of first moneys “the people he spoke of most warmly.” Gerald remonstrated with him that “Yr cheque gave me a turn somehow. I wish we could feel that we’d done you a service instead of making you feel some kind of torment. Please dismiss the thought.” It was their last communication: On December 21 Fitzgerald suffered a fatal heart attack at Sheilah Graham’s apartment in Los Angeles.

“How cruelly the world needs the beauty of his mind,” lamented Gerald to Woollcott. But only thirty people, including Gerald and Sara and Maxwell Perkins and Harold Ober, came to stand in the rain at his graveside on December 27. Because the Catholic Church considered his books immoral, and he had not received last rites, Fitzgerald was denied a Catholic burial in St. Marys Cemetery alongside his Maryland ancestors; the interment was held at Rockville Union Cemetery with an Episcopal priest officiating. Zelda wasn’t allowed to attend, but her letter to the Murphys afterward was a poignant farewell to the four-pointed star that their friendship had been since 1925: “Those tragicly ecstatic years when the pockets of the world were filled with pleasant surprizes and people still thought of life in terms of their right to a good time are now about to wane,” she wrote. “That he wont be there to arrange nice things and tell us what to do is grievous to envisage.”

“Poor Scott,” said Ernest to Sara. “No one could ever help Scott but you and Gerald did more than anyone.”

23

“One’s very Life seems at stake”

“
WHAT
SAD
DAYS
,” wrote Gerald to Archibald MacLeish in August 1940, when German soldiers were goose-stepping down the Champs-Elysées and sitting in the Deux Magots, putting an end definitively to the world the Murphys and their friends had loved. Now, with the same energy with which they had then painted backdrops for Diaghilev, Gerald and Sara threw themselves into war work: William Allen White’s Emergency Rescue Mission, an organization devoted to obtaining U.S. visas for European artists and intellectuals, “take[s] all our time & $,” Gerald wrote Archie. In addition Sara was acting as a virtual one-woman aid mission, procuring and shipping to Europe nine tons of powdered milk, and she was raising additional money for war relief. Said Gerald: “One’s very Life seems at stake: all one cares for, finally.”