Everybody Was So Young (3 page)

In the late autumn of 1902, Frank Wiborg was asked to accompany his brother-in-law General Miles, who was commander in chief of the army, on a round-the-world fact-finding trip. Their party planned a stopover in Peking, where only two years previously rebellious anti-Western Chinese soldiers had held the entire foreign colony hostage, killing 234 of the 480 defenders, for fifty-five days during the Boxer Rebellion—but no such incidents marred this trip. After an audience with the dowager empress, Hu-Tsi, Frank and the general boarded the Trans-Siberian Railroad for St. Petersburg in January 1903, and didn’t return to the U.S. until the spring. Adeline and the girls, however, missed the opportunity to kiss the hands of the empress, or the czar and czarina. They were left at home, and Sara, who at nineteen might have expected her leash to be let out a little, was instead enrolled at Miss Spence’s School, an elite academy for young ladies on West 48th Street, where the rather advanced curriculum included French and Latin, literature, history, chemistry, art history, psychology, and—Frank Wiborg was doubtless delighted to discover—practical mathematics and household accounting.

She wasn’t entirely happy there: she thought many of her schoolmates snobbish, and was appalled by their gossipy, boy-crazy conversation—“so harmful at that impressionable age,” she said later. Although lively and clever, Sara wasn’t as serious a student as some in her class. She didn’t elect to pursue the preparatory course that Clara Spence offered to a few college-bound girls, and at her graduation in 1904 she was awarded a certificate rather than the diploma given for meeting Miss Spence’s stringent academic standards. But she was now, at last, officially out of the schoolroom; she could wear her long blond hair up and her skirts down to the ground. Although her parents might not have felt ready to let her go, she was ripe for adventure.

She soon got it, in a limited form. That June, Adeline Wiborg took her two elder daughters and their cousin Sara Sherman on a trip to Europe. And in France, accompanied by a Cleveland friend of the girls, Mary Groesbeck, as well as one of Adeline’s own cronies, a poker-faced Edwardian dowager named Dickson and her son, Roland, they toured the château country by automobile, a dashing, very modern thing to do.

The trip started out badly: in Paris it took them four tries before they could find rooms in the Continental, which (wrote Sara in her travel journal) was “a horrid place.” Not that they stayed there long. By the next day Adeline had moved them to the Hôtel Campbell, on the avenue de Friedland near the Arc de Triomphe, and shortly afterward they moved yet again to a furnished apartment just up the street from the Opéra. Considering the number of trunks and valises involved in each relocation, the family’s first few days in Paris must have been a nightmare of logistics and tipping.

Then there were the cars. Automobiles in the first decade of this century were still little more than horseless carriages—they had open passenger compartments with convertible accordion tops, far from watertight, and shock absorbers were still just a gleam in some automotive engineer’s eye. The Wiborg party engaged two automobiles, with two chauffeurs, Georges and Eugène, as well as two “mécaniciens”; thus accompanied, and swathed in long dusters and motoring veils, they set off for Chartres, only to be soaked by rain. In the downpour the chauffeurs lost their way; next, the car containing Sara, Mary Groesbeck, Mrs. Dickson, and her son developed motor trouble; then it got stuck in the mud. Sara, showing the sense of the absurd with which she frequently undercut her surroundings, dissolved into helpless giggles. Mrs. Dickson was not amused: “Don’t laugh, girls!” she kept saying. “It isn’t at all a laughing matter!” Finally Sara and Mary got out—it had stopped raining by this time—and helped the chauffeur and mécanicien push the car out of its rut. What with more tire trouble, a fresh downpour, and bad roads, the little party didn’t reach Tours until 3:30 A.M., soaked to the skin after seventeen hours on the road.

Sara was undaunted by this unpromising start, and by the time the weather cleared and “Grouchy George” and Eugène had been replaced, she was pronouncing the tour “perfect.” She was an enthusiastic traveler, shuddering deliciously over the chamber at Blois where the Duc de Guise was murdered by his perfidious cousin, and musing about why Queen Catherine de Medici would have forced her rival, the king’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers, to swap châteaux. “Catherine certainly was a cat,” pronounced Sara, “& I can’t help being on Diane’s side, though I suppose C. was in the right on this one occasion.” (What Adeline Wiborg thought of her daughter’s sympathy for the Other Woman isn’t recorded.) Not that Sara saw everything uncritically: she thought the château at Blois garishly restored—“too fresh and burnished-looking . . . the general effect is horrid. . . . As Henry James says in A Little Tour in France, it looks like ‘an expensive set in the opera.’” But she was continually delighted by unexpected details: the squalor of a “dirty picturesque village”; the “old wrinkled bent women of 80, carrying huge bundles on their backs that no Frenchman, however young or strong, would think of lifting”; “the beaming face of an American youth who . . . helped us find other automobiles at Tours, [who] had such a remarkable way of whistling out of one side of his mouth that Mary and I had to Kodak him on the top of the tower at Loches, unbeknownst to him, however.”

Adeline Wiborg could successfully keep the young man off-limits—“We didn’t meet him, or know his name, or anything,” lamented Sara—but she couldn’t repress her eldest daughter’s evident and growing individuality. And it was this quality, more than her blond beauty or her melodious singing voice or her skill with a sailboat, that entranced a sixteen-year-old schoolboy she did meet at the end of the summer, at a party in East Hampton, Long Island.

In 1895 the village of East Hampton, on Long Island’s eastern tip, was a peaceful backwater full of clapboard or shingle houses strung out along a grassy, elm-shaded main street that sported a seventeenth-century windmill, formerly used for grinding grain, at each end. After the Civil War the village had become a summer haven for numerous New York and Brooklyn ministers; a number of New York-based artists, among them Winslow Homer and Childe Hassam, had begun spending the summer months there as well, attracted by the flat expanses of the surrounding farmland, with their great vault of sky, the pristine beaches, and the opalescent light.

The artists had to hire carriages, or trudge on foot, from neighboring Bridgehampton, for the railroad from New York, which bore Gilded Age vacationers to the new resorts of Long Island’s South Shore, didn’t extend as far as East Hampton—it came to Bridgehampton, a few miles to the west, and then swerved north to the old whaling village of Sag Harbor. Progress and fashion seemed to have passed East Hampton by, literally as well as figuratively. Certainly it was an unlikely magnet for a worldly man of affairs like Frank Wiborg.

Although Frank’s involvement with Ault and Wiborg meant that a permanent move from Cincinnati was out of the question, the increasing amounts of time that his wife and daughters and even he himself were spending in New York made their Gotham Hotel pied-à-terre seem inadequate. In fact, a summer retreat near the city—away from the sometimes oppressive heat and humidity of the Ohio valley—looked like a good idea. And Frank was nothing if not a savvy entrepreneur with an eye for emerging markets.

In 1895 Frank Wiborg began buying a substantial amount of property in East Hampton, including the first parcels of what would eventually become a six-hundred-acre tract of land that lay between the ocean and a large saltwater inlet called Hook Pond. There was a gambrel-roofed farmhouse on the property that belonged to the previous owners, a family named Pell, but it was insufficiently grand for the future that Frank Wiborg had in mind for himself and his family, and he commissioned Grosvenor Atterbury—one of the architects of New York’s City Hall and of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing—to add onto it. The result was a thirty-room mansion called the Dunes, which grew out of and ultimately subsumed the original house. When it was finished, it boasted eleven “master’s bedrooms” with five baths, nine servants’ rooms with three baths, a ground-floor shower and changing room for swimmers, and a huge living room that was forty-two feet wide and seventy feet long. Its walls were covered in Currier and Ives prints, marine paintings, and seventeenth-century Beauvais tapestries, its floors by enormous bear rugs with open mouths, sharp teeth, and lolling red felt tongues, its rooms filled with enormous dark mahogany furniture. It had stables and pastures and a dairy, Italian gardens and flagged terraces and shady porches. It was one of the first great summer houses in East Hampton, and it was prophetic: in 1896, the year after Frank acquired the Dunes property, the railroad was extended to East Hampton, and the town emerged as a fashionable summer resort. (Not so coincidentally, Frank Wiborg’s real estate investments had an exponential increase in value.)

The Wiborgs began spending their summers—and increasingly their autumns, winters, and springs—in East Hampton, in the sprawling stucco house overlooking the ocean, where the sound of the surf resonated in every room. They swam in the ocean regularly—“in bathing” is a frequent comment in both Frank’s and his daughter’s diaries; they rode on the beaches; they played golf on seaside links; they learned to sail. Adeline and her daughters worked in the garden—she was an enthusiastic horticulturalist—and served tea on the porch with its view of the flower beds and the sea.

Although East Hampton was becoming a watering place for the wealthy, with vast shingled “cottages” arising along its windblown dunes and tranquil saltwater ponds, the vacationing artists had given it a distinctive flavor. An anonymous chronicler of the 1920s described East Hampton society as “based on a community of intellectual tastes rather than a feverish craving for display and excitement,” unlike neighboring Southampton, which this authority depicted as “ruled by the fading remnant of the once all-powerful New York society.”

Intellectual it may or may not have been, but East Hampton was relaxed, entertaining, and gay. The daughter of one of Sara’s closest friends remembers it as bathed in a kind of perpetual summer light, like a William Merritt Chase painting: “the women all had tiny waists and beautiful shoes, and they wore long fluttering eyelet dresses, and veils on their hats—chiffon veils that tied under the chin—and there was always a breeze.” There were golf games and amateur theatricals at the Maidstone Club, horse shows and dog shows in neighbors’ paddocks, parties on friends’ porches and sloping lawns—and it was at one of these that Sara Wiborg met a boy named Gerald Murphy. He was nearly five years younger than she, Olga’s contemporary more than hers, a brown-haired lower middle former from the Hotchkiss School with a square jaw and diffident manner. Although, or because, he was so clearly not beau material, she was nice to him, drawing him out about school (he was a rather indifferent student), travel (he had been to Europe once as a small boy and longed to go again), his interests (plays, pictures, golf, music), dogs (he loved them but didn’t own any).

Somehow they hit it off. For Sara, the intense, curious, and admiring boy made an audience at once stimulating and uncritical; for Gerald, the wealthy, well-traveled, beautiful Sara was like a glamorous older sister with whom he could share both his thoughts and his dreams. Soon he was a regular visitor to the Dunes, and even Adeline Wiborg saw nothing to object to about him. He was just a schoolboy, after all, and he had impeccable manners. The girls called him Cousin, and when Sara lectured him about his studies she told him to think of her as “a wise old Aunt.” If she found herself daydreaming about anyone, it was about Gerald’s older brother, Fred, a tall, red-haired, amusing young man who had just graduated from Hotchkiss and would start Yale in the fall. For his part, Gerald spent at least as much time with Hoytie as with Sara—she was, after all, closer in age, and much more possessive.

Things would change, but so slowly neither of them would know the precise moment when the wind shifted. He knew it first, though. And he set his course, very firmly, on this new tack.

2

“Gerald’s besetting sin is inattention”

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GERALD
MURPHY’S
PARENTS
, like Frank Wiborg, came of immigrant stock—but there the resemblance ended. His father, Patrick Francis Murphy, was born in Boston in 1858, the eldest of thirteen children. He attended Boston Latin School, the city’s toughest and most prestigious public school; and when he graduated in 1875, at the age of seventeen, he talked himself into a job with an up-market saddler and harness maker, Mark W. Cross, whose shop on Summer Street was the only one boasting a brick facade. His stated position was salesman, but soon he was forming, and expressing, opinions about the stock: why, he asked Cross, didn’t they try to adapt fine-quality saddle leather, as well as the hand-stitching methods used for harnesses, to smaller personal items like wallets, cases, and belts? Cross took a gamble on his young salesman’s idea, and the result was a trendsetting success.

When Cross died without heirs, Patrick Murphy bought the company for $6,000, which he borrowed from his father (at 6 percent interest), and relocated it to Tremont Street, then Boston’s most fashionable shopping venue. At about the same time, he met and married a strong-willed, devoutly Catholic young woman named Anna Ryan and was soon the father of a son, Frederic, born in 1885. When Frederic was joined by another son, Gerald Cleary, on March 26, 1888, Anna Murphy, elevating piety over accuracy, changed the little boy’s birth date in her family Bible to March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, and always celebrated his birthday on that date.

The Murphys didn’t stay in Boston for long. By the last decade of the nineteenth century the self-styled Hub of the Universe had become “a stagnant community” (as Gerald Murphy would later describe it)—a place where “even the [trolley] conductors speak with an educated mispronunciation.” It was also a city deeply divided between the Yankee descendants of the English Puritan settlers and the more recently immigrant Irish, many of whom were peasants fleeing the harsh economic and political conditions of their native land. The Yankees looked down at the Irish: the “Help Wanted” notices in windows and newspapers often bore the line “No Irish Need Apply.” Irish boys didn’t go to Harvard; Irish girls didn’t leave their calling cards in Back Bay drawing rooms. For Patrick Murphy, Boston was not only a small and stagnant pond, it was a restrictive one, and he determined to move to New York.