Everybody Was So Young (38 page)

Gerald’s involvement didn’t end there. He also helped to put together the financing that made production possible. Nabokov had approached Colonel Vassily de Basil, a “white Russian crook” (as Archie described him) who had taken over the remnants of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, about mounting the ballet. As choreographer, Nabokov proposed Leonide Massine, later to achieve celluloid fame as the warped ballet master in the film The Red Shoes. But the wily de Basil took on no projects without backers: so Sara Murphy, Hoytie Wiborg, Lila Luce (the wife of MacLeish’s employer, Henry Luce), and several others wrote him checks for $1,000 apiece, with the promise of more money from solicitations by Esther Murphy Strachey. It felt a little as if the sweat-equity philanthropy of the old Diaghilev days had returned. In March, after a song recital by Ada MacLeish, Gerald and Sara celebrated by giving a dinner party to which they invited Nicholas Nabokov, the Barrys, the Myerses, the Stephen Vincent Benéts, Aaron Copland, and Virgil Thomson, who distinguished himself by speaking to no one, standing at the buffet table and devouring an entire serving bowl full of strawberries and cream, and leaving immediately afterward.

In early April the ballet, now called Union Pacific, opened at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia to huge acclaim, and it played to packed houses in New York, Chicago, Paris, and London that spring and summer. “What carried that ballet,” said Archie years afterward, “was not my idea and not the dancing of the ballerinas of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, it was Gerald’s music.” But Gerald’s name and contribution were nowhere noted on the program. Nor were Sara, Hoytie, Mrs. Luce, or the other investors ever repaid by de Basil, even though Hoytie, who still thought of herself as a businesswoman, had supposedly engineered an agreement that would have paid them out of the first night’s proceeds. The whole experience seems to have precipitated another of Gerald and Archie’s fallings-out. “Archie has hurt him very deeply,” commented Alice Lee Myers later, “and it seems too bad for that long devotion to be dissipated—however, Gerald’s reaction is based on emotion and no one can change that.” Archie, for his part, was aware of the alienation Gerald felt: “He’s a pretty lonely guy you know,” he wrote to a mutual friend that summer. “He knows it now.”

In April, though, Gerald was still wrapped up in the business of Union Pacific’s premiere, and so decided not to accompany Sara on the first of what would become nearly annual visits to the Hemingways in Key West. For obvious reasons Archie didn’t go, either, although Ada did. She and Sara stayed with John and Katy Dos Passos in their rented house on Waddell Avenue, thus earning the nickname the “Waddell Girls.”

The weather in Key West was bad, but the Waddell Girls made light of it: they went fishing with the Dosses and Ernest and Pauline and concocted lime juice cocktails and played Sara’s records. Ada and Sara and Ernest got tight and danced after dinner in the Hemingways’ living room, where the kudu and impala heads he had shot on his African safari that winter stared down at them. Afterward Ernest sent Gerald an oddly polite note enclosing some money he owed: “It was lovely having Sara here,” he said, “but we missed you very much. You would like it I think.” To Sara he wrote rather differently: “Dearest Sara,” he began: “I love you very much, Madam, not like in Scott’s Christmas tree ornament novels but the way it is on boats where Scott would be sea-sick.”

The “Christmas tree ornament novel” was Tender Is the Night, which had been appearing in Scribner’s Magazine in installments, the last of which came out while Sara was in Florida. The book itself was published in April, and Hemingway’s sideways shot at its author is an indication that it had been an item of table talk in Key West. Certainly Sara was both outraged and shaken by Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the Divers and their world: more than twenty-five years later she couldn’t speak of it without indignation. But was she angry because Fitzgerald had missed the mark—or because he had come too close?

There were obvious parallels between Fitzgerald’s characters and his friends, evident to anyone who knew the Murphys: the seductive figure of Nicole Diver on the beach with “her bathing suit . . . pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, [shining] in the sun”; the description of Dick Diver “mov[ing] gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel” from the beach; the picture of the villa and its spacious gardens; the conversations and witticisms that Fitzgerald had reproduced; the portrait of Baby Warren, Nicole’s sister, “a tall, fine-looking woman” with Hoytie Wiborg’s imperiousness. But none of this should have upset Sara. After all, she hadn’t been upset by Picasso’s pictures of her wearing nothing but her pearls on La Garoupe. What bothered her?

Ernest, who had told Gerald that “Scotts book, I’m sorry, is not good,” finally wrote to Scott in May to say, “I liked it and I didn’t like it.” The problem, he maintained, was that

It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald. . . . Then you started fooling with them, making them come from things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that, Scott . . . You can take you or me or Pauline or Hadley or Sara or Gerald but you have to keep them the same and you can only make them do what they would do. . . . You could write a fine book about Gerald and Sara for instance if you knew enough about them and they would not have any feeling, except passing, if it were true.

That they did have a feeling about it, Ernest believed, stemmed from Scott’s melding of Sara’s and Gerald’s histories with Zelda’s and his own—Nicole’s madness, Dick’s drinking and brawling. What he implied—and what later readers have generally believed—was that Fitzgerald used the Murphys as models only for the glamorous parts of Nicole and Dick; that the wounded or wayward aspects of them were inspired by Zelda and Scott himself. And that this combination of disparate characters violated the integrity of his novel.

But Sara knew, and Gerald knew, how much else came from their own lives—not only as they were, but as they might have been. It was this airing of truths she could barely admit, or possibilities she couldn’t bear to imagine, that frightened Sara. How could she stand to read about Nicole, who shared so many of her characteristics and secret thoughts, leaving her husband for a dark, swashbuckling man who, like Ernest, “look[s] like all the adventurers in the movies”? Sara loved Ernest, even felt the pull of his sexual attraction, but the idea that she would betray her husband with him would have both scared and repelled her. And how could she endure the novel’s ending, in which the ruined Dick, stripped of his vocation and his family, about to leave forever the world he was once so happy in, makes a papal cross over the beach the way Gerald used to “say Mass” over his cocktails? The implications were too much for her, and it was a long time before she could be civil to Scott again.

That spring she sent him the kind of epistolary dressing-down she so often let him have when she was angry:

Dear Scott:—

We were sorry not to see you again—but it seemed, under the circumstances better not to—

Please don’t think that Zelda’s condition is not very near to our hearts—. . . and that all your misfortunes are not, in part, ours too—. . . We have no doubts of the loyalty of your affections (& we hope you haven’t of ours)—but consideration for other people’s feelings, opinions or even time is Completely left out of your makeup—I have always told you you haven’t the faintest idea what anybody but yourself is like—. . . You don’t even know what Zelda or Scottie are like—in spite of your love for them. It seemed to us the other night (Gerald too)—that all you thought and felt about them was in terms of yourself—the same holds good of your feelings for your friends. . . .

Please, please let us know Zelda’s news. . . . I think of her all the time—. . .

When Sara wrote this letter Zelda was back in Baltimore, at the Sheppard-Pratt sanatorium. She had been getting more and more unstable all spring, possibly as a result of reading the serialization of Tender Is the Night, with its liberal borrowings from her own correspondence, and at the beginning of March had been admitted to the Craig House sanatorium in Beacon, New York. She seemed to be improving; then, in April, she had another breakdown and returned to Sheppard-Pratt.

While she was at Craig House, however, there was a one-woman show of her paintings at Cary Ross’s gallery in New York. Zelda had painted for years as an avocation—mainly drawings and elaborate paper dolls for Scottie—but since her illness she had produced a substantial number of works in oil and gouache. They were, for the most part, strange, distorted images of the human figure, painted in vivid colors, something like Reginald Marsh on acid, or floral still lifes reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe. But they had great expressive power, and Scott, hoping to encourage her, had arranged this exhibition. It was covered by Time and The New Yorker and the New York Post; but the tone of their notices had the dusty sound of history: “Jazz Age Priestess Brings Forth Paintings”; “Paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald.”

Just before Sara went to Key West she and Gerald went to see the pictures, and Sara bought one—the only oil, in fact, to sell. Time described Chinese Theatre as “a gnarled mass of acrobats with an indicated audience for background.” Sara paid $200 for it, the largest sum Cary Ross took in. Gerald seemed almost revolted by the picture: “Those monstrous, hideous men,” he said later, “all red with swollen, intertwining legs. They were obscene—I don’t mean sexually. . . . they were figures out of a nightmare, monstrous and morbid.” Anything further from his own cool precision, his covert, almost hermetic iconography, would have been hard to imagine—and Zelda, with that intuitive flash of sympathy that had so often characterized their friendship, understood. “I am going to paint a picture for the Murphys and they can choose,” she wrote to Scott, “as those acrobats seem, somehow, singularly inappropriate to them and I would like them to have one they liked. Maybe they aren’t like I think they are but I don’t see why they would like that Buddhistic suspension of mass and form and I will try to paint some mood that their garden has conveyed.”

There’s no evidence that she ever did offer them an alternative, but she painted a still life that might have been intended for one: Mediterranean Midi, an undated oil of two wineglasses, a decanter, and fruit on a white table, shaded by a huge tree, with a view of the sea in the background. The picture is both precise and luminous, suffused with the golden light of Provence (the Midi) at noon (midi). And the glasses, globular and iridescent, bear a certain resemblance to the Venetian goblets that Scott had pitched over the wall at Villa America a seeming lifetime ago.

During that spring of 1934 Gerald and Sara gave a small dinner party for Ernest Hemingway, who happened to be in town, at the apartment to which they’d recently moved at 1 Beekman Place, on the East River. The other guests were Dottie Parker and her new young man, a heart-stoppingly handsome actor and writer eleven years her junior named Alan Campbell, and John O’Hara, whose novel Appointment in Samarra was just then making a sensation for its brutally unpleasant portrait of contemporary American life.

O’Hara was a journalist and screenwriter who had been taken up by their friend Adèle Lovett, the wife of Averell Harriman’s partner and Archie MacLeish’s Harvard Law classmate Robert Lovett; and although he was eager to break into the circles the Lovetts and Murphys moved in, he was defensive about his lack of background. (The joke was that his friends were getting together a collection to send him to Princeton.) As a newcomer to the Murphys’, he felt prickly in their presence; the small talk and funny-names games that Gerald liked to play with Dottie, and which Alan Campbell so gladly fell in with, left him cold. Ernest was late, and Dottie had made the mistake of bringing with her her two new Bedlington terriers, replacements for the much mourned Robinson, who got as restless as O’Hara, with predictable results: “I had the pleasure,” O’Hara wrote to Ernest afterward, “of watching first one dog, then another taking a squirt on Mrs. Murphy’s expensive rugs.” Mrs. Murphy, of course, didn’t care. But somehow Mr. O’Hara never quite caught on with her.

Not long after this evening Gerald and Sara got good news: Patrick’s doctors felt him strong enough to go to France that summer, where the Murphys would stay at the villa and go cruising on the Weatherbird with the Myerses; if all continued well in the fall he could go off to the Harvey School in Hawthorne, where Baoth had transferred that year, and resume his interrupted life as a healthy boy. After nearly five years of holding their breath, the Murphys must suddenly have felt that they could exhale cautiously. The only difficulties bedeviling them at the moment were the struggles of the Mark Cross Company and Hoytie Wiborg’s recently announced conviction that Sara’s purchase of the Dunes had been only a loan, secured by the property, which she now wanted assurance of repossessing. However, as Mark Cross was in Miss Ramsgate’s hands and not Gerald’s, and as Hoytie would surely come to her senses after talking to the family’s lawyer, there didn’t seem much point in worrying about either of these problems.

So they said their good-byes and packed their innumerable trunks for a June 9 departure on the Conte di Savoia. Just before they sailed they received two telegrams. One was from Dottie Parker: “
THIS
IS TO
REPORT
ARRIVAL
IN
NEWCASTLE
(
PENNSYLVANIA
) OF
FIRST
BEDLINGTON
TERRIERS
TO
CROSS
CONTINENT
IN
OPEN
FORD
.
MANY
NATIVES
NOTE
RESEMBLANCES
TO
SHEEP
. COULDN’T
SAY
GOODBYE
AND
CAN’T
NOW
BUT
GOOD
LUCK
DARLING
MURPHYS
AND
PLEASE
HURRY
BACK
AND
ALL
LOVE
.”