Everybody Was So Young (44 page)

Honoria’s wedding to John Shelton left the Murphys’ nest definitively vacant.

John Dos Passos in the 1950s

Dawn Powell

“Dear Mrs. Puss”—Sara in the 1940s

Gerald at East Hampton in the 1950s, still raking the beach

21

“Not on the same course, nor for the same port”

“
THERE
IS
SOMETHING
about being struck twice by lightning in the same place,” Gerald said many years afterward to a friend, the writer Calvin Tomkins. “The ship foundered, was refloated, set sail again, but not on the same course, nor for the same port.” He knew, and Sara knew, that Scott Fitzgerald had been wrong to say that there were no second acts in American lives: the audience and the critics might leave the theater, and the actors had no choice but to play out the drama until the final curtain was rung down.

There was a memorial service for Patrick in the nearly empty Church of St. Luke, the Beloved Physician, in Saranac Lake; afterward Alice Lee Myers helped pack Patrick’s belongings, and at Sara’s request she sent his gun racks and stuffed animal heads to the Hemingways. Sara simply gave away Camp Adeline, deeding it to the Kip’s Bay Boys Club of New York, which she hoped would use it as a summer camp for inner-city boys. Gerald had a more delicate task to perform: sending to Scott Fitzgerald the cross that had been given him, years ago, in Switzerland, by Eduardo Velasquez. “Dear Scott,” Gerald wrote, “This cross was given to me against my will by Eduardo Velasquez—under very painful circumstances. It belonged to his mother. She should have it. Can you get it back to him or her,—for me? He should not—nor has not for years—hear from me. Aff’y, Gerald.” Whatever the purpose of Velasquez’s talisman, its usefulness was over now.

Sara and Gerald moved back to New York. They rented an apartment at the New Weston, a penthouse with sweeping views of the city, including the rooftops of St. Patrick’s, where archiepiscopal laundry—“choir-boys’ gowns, lace chasubles, priests’ cassocks and surplices”—danced incongruously on the washline. It was a chic urban flat for the chic urban couple they had to be now; but, Archie MacLeish noticed, “Gerald threw everything out of his room but the bed and the chair—white plaster walls, a white bed and chair.” It was a monk’s cell, a sensory deprivation chamber. “He was a painter,” says Archie’s son (and Gerald’s godson) William MacLeish. “And what he was doing was forcing himself to live in something in which there’s a total absence of color. Now that’s torture—it takes a real masochist to do that.” He took to wearing only gray and black, lit by touches of white.

Honoria became a day student at Spence so she could live with her parents, but no sooner had they reestablished themselves as a family than there was more sad family news: Sara’s beloved little sister Olga was dying of cancer in California. Sara flew to be with her but had to be taken off the plane with acute and immobilizing neck spasms; and when she was able to travel again she arrived too late, landing in San Francisco the day Olga died.

For some of the Murphys’ contemporaries in the grim 1930s, political action became a means of self-assertion in the face of despair and difficulty; but Sara’s early advocacy of Mary McLeod Bethune notwithstanding, neither she nor Gerald had ever been particularly engagé politically. The protests surrounding the execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 had interested them far less than Charles Lindbergh’s landing at Le Bourget the same year (“It tightens the main-spring,” Gerald had said of Lindy’s accomplishment.)

But while they had been preoccupied with their personal tragedies, the Nazis had taken over Germany and marched into the Rhineland, war had broken out between the Loyalists and the fascist Nationalists in Spain, and these conflicts, as well as the continuing effects of the Depression, had stimulated the American left to act. Soon, after their fashion, the Murphys followed.

For not only that old Marxist Dos Passos but Dottie Parker and Don Stewart and even Ernest Hemingway and Archie MacLeish were expressing their consciences in public ways. Don Stewart, whose wife, Bea, had recently left him for Count Ilya Tolstoy (grandson of the novelist), had gone so far as to get romantically involved with Ella Steffens, the “grimly socio-politico-economic” widow (as Gerald described her) of the celebrated muckraker Lincoln Steffens. Such politicization had begun to drive a wedge between some of the Murphys’ circle: Dottie Parker, in particular, had stopped speaking to Bob Benchley over “some labor issue,” although she claimed it was because “I told her not to make those ingenue eyes at me as she was no longer [an] ingenue,” Benchley reported to the Murphys. Benchley wasn’t the only one to feel the chilling effect of Parker’s cold shoulder. She cut Adèle Lovett and made jokes about her other rich friends—but (writes her biographer) “she never joked about the Murphys, because she loved them.”

During 1936 Dos Passos and MacLeish had decided to make a motion picture about the Spanish civil war which would give Americans a “clear, objective statement of the facts” about the origins of the conflict; they’d enlisted the services of the rising young playwright Lillian Hellman to collaborate on the screenplay, and a prizewinning Dutch filmmaker, Joris Ivens, to film it. In February 1937 Hemingway joined the group, which had now incorporated under the name Contemporary Historians, and went to Spain with Ivens and Dos Passos to shoot footage. In the meantime Gerald was persuaded to pitch in as well, investing a substantial amount of money and—as he had for Archie’s Union Pacific ballet—his musical expertise in the movie they were now calling The Spanish Earth.

The film was to have a score by Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson, but the composers were having difficulty coming up with authentic music for background. Dos Passos remembered that Sara and Gerald had a fine collection of traditional Spanish records that they’d amassed on their trips along the coast. So Thomson came up to the New Weston one afternoon (no strawberries this time) and listened to sardanas on the Murphys’ phonograph, and went away with his arms full of records, many of which found their way into the score for The Spanish Earth.

Despite his contributions to the film and his devotion to its principles, Gerald’s diffidence kept him from becoming very deeply enmeshed in political activism. He had been mistrustful of groups since his Yale days, and had resisted being a part of any “isms” in Paris in the twenties. Don Stewart and Dottie Parker could join the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; Archie and Ernest could speak at the League of American Writers Congress in New York, with American Communist party secretary Earl Browder on the platform with them; but even though Gerald was searching for a new direction to sail in, this was not to be the one. He did, however, go to the League of American Writers meeting that spring, as did Sara. They heard and applauded Ernest’s speech—“if there was a fascist hair in the hall it must not only have whitened, but singed as well,” wrote Sara to Pauline Hemingway—and felt it “was a terribly interesting meeting, & a most intelligent audience.”

Shortly after this Sara and Honoria set off for Europe. It was not the gay trip that Sara had dreamed of the autumn before Patrick died; it was a journey made without definite plans other than to get away. “The future,” Sara remarked to Pauline, “is a clear jelly, & about as interesting. However I persist in believing . . . that all will seem better in the deceptive light of Europe. Lights
OUGHT
to be deceptive, and by god, mine shall be.” Holding herself together with difficulty—Dick and Alice Lee Myers agreed that she was “pitiful,” and seemingly “dissatisfied] at everything”—she forced herself to go from Paris to London, then for a cure in Karlsbad, at which Gerald joined her, Honoria having gone on a graduation trip around Europe with Alice Lee Myers, Fanny, and Scottie Fitzgerald. “We get up at seven, drink at the fountain ½ mile away, walking up and down under arbors of clematis for an hour,” reported Gerald to Honoria:

then Kaffee, Milch und Schlagobers, ein Grahambrot, ½ Butter und Honig. A rest then at ten exercises in the Gymnasium for all parts of the body—on special machines—then massage, electric treatments, steam or mud baths and rest then luncheon. Delicious food, only graham starch, grape-sugar, no alcohol (two small glasses red wine at night). Sometimes we walk up the mountain to breakfast, orchestras start at 9:30 (very good), in the P.M. rest, walk to tea (fruit-juice or Yogourt) in the evening to the fountain to drink, dinner outdoors, orchestra too, walk, bed at 10 P.M.

Sara submitted only reluctantly to the tyranny of the Kur regimen. “I know that it doesn’t seem very important in the face of what’s happened whether we take care of ourselves or not,” Gerald told her. “But as long as we must live we might as well feel as well as we can. It probably helps to give others a better time.”

Returning to Paris in August, they managed to avoid Hoytie, who was ensconced in her Paris flat; friends reported sighting her at various haut monde parties “with fantastic hats and looking like something pulled out of a scrap-bag.” They did, however, rendezvous with Ernest Hemingway, who was on his way to Spain to cover the civil war for the North American Newspaper Alliance, as well as Dottie Parker and Alan Campbell and Lillian Hellman, who had sailed with the Campbells on the Normandie. According to Hellman, Archie MacLeish had urged her to become acquainted with the Murphys; “they now need new people around them,” she recalled him saying to her. “You’re young and they’ll like you.” Like many of Hellman’s memories, this one seems designed for maximum self-promotion: charming, energetic Lilly lighting up the lives of a sad old couple. In fact, the shoe was somewhat on the other foot. Hellman was on her own in Paris and knew no one, and the Murphys and Campbells introduced her to Hemingway, Fernand Léger, and other friends.

Hemingway (although he was careful to disguise the fact around family friends) was engaged in a new liaison with the journalist Martha Gellhorn, who had met him in Key West and attached herself as firmly to the Hemingway ménage as Pauline had once attached herself to Ernest and Hadley. She had been to Spain with Ernest in the spring and had come to his Writers Congress speech—where a friend of Dos Passos’s, the novelist Dawn Powell, described her as Hemingway’s “private blonde . . . who had been through hell in Spain and came shivering on in a silver fox cape chin-up.” Although Gellhorn was not on display in Paris (she doesn’t recall ever meeting the Murphys), her influence had bred animosity between Hemingway and many of his old friends, or so he later implied when reminiscing about “my great 37–38 epoch when alienated all my friends (who I miss like hell).” He was feuding with both Archie and Dos—with the former he quarreled over repayment of money he had lent to Contemporary Historians to make The Spanish Earth, and the latter he had savagely satirized as the sexually impotent phony-radical Richard Gordon in To Have and Have Not. These quarrels upset Sara, who wanted all her old shipmates to be easy with one another, and she begged Gerald, when he returned to New York in early September, to try to make peace among them. “Never having been in his field (as Archie and Dos have been—are . . . ),” responded Gerald, “he has never done anything violent to me (and tho’ I’ve been terribly critical and think that at times he’s been pretty nearly a cheap sport) I find it easy to revive my affection for him. Don’t worry about what I’ll say about him to Dos and Archie. I’d like to try (as I did with E.) to fan the embers of an old affection even if it comes to nothing.”

But Sara still fretted over Ernest’s well-being. Since he was now in Valencia among the falling bombs, far from the bistros of Paris, she and Dorothy Parker sent him a food hamper containing tins of roast chicken, ham, salmon, preserved goose, Welsh rabbit, antipasto, and tripe a la mode de Caen, as well as bouillon cubes, sugar, and malted milk. With it went a chatty note adjuring him to wear warm clothes and enclosing news from home. The mask of nurturing good cheer slipped only slightly at the end, where she noted poignantly: “Baoth would have gone to college this autumn.”

Back in New York that fall, Sara went through all the motions: dinners and cocktails and lunches with the Barrys and Myerses, the MacLeishes and the Stephen Vincent Benéts, or new friends like Dorothy Parker’s publisher Harold Guinzburg and his wife; concerts and plays, including Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which, with its theme of death and reconciliation, must have been a painful evening; a croquet party for her birthday in November. But Gerald was careful never to leave her alone in the evenings; she was still too fragile.

Grateful for the supporting presence of cherished friends, she and Gerald continued to make them a steady stream of gifts: furniture and clothes to the Dos Passoses; a car for the Myerses, and an annuity in honor of Baoth; rent checks to Stella Campbell, who had “given up being a jackanapes in Hollywood” and was now ensconced in the Hotel Sevillia on 58th Street. Truth to tell, Stella hadn’t been able to make it in Hollywood. She was too old, too dumpy, and too imperious, and she had not endeared herself to MGM’s supremely important Irving Thalberg, who was married to the actress Norma Shearer, when she approached him at a party and said throatily, “Dear Mr. Thalberg, how is your lovely, lovely wife with the tiny, tiny eyes?” Now she nominally repaid the Murphys’ generosity by giving acting lessons to Honoria, who was trying to launch herself in a career on the stage and had got a job with the French Theatre of New York; and she introduced the starry-eyed girl to John Gielgud when he came to Broadway with his celebrated production of Hamlet.

Sara had hoped that perhaps Gerald could leave his post at Mark Cross that winter and they could go take a flat in London, where the only ghosts were those of her parents and sisters and herself as a girl. But it never happened. Instead they threw themselves into a new construction project, moving an old dairy barn on the Wiborg estate to the edge of Hook Pond and remodeling it for their use. Hook Pond Cottage belonged to the old life, the life of Patrick and Baoth, and they needed a new place.

Swan Cove, as the new house was called, was named for the swans that glided over the waters of the saltwater pond next to the house. A rambling, gracious building walled in faded pink stucco, it had a garden room verdant with tropical plants and an enormous living room lit by seven windows and full of rococo furniture and objets the Murphys had found in Czechoslovakia the previous summer. The gardens and flagged terrace had a European formality. There was classical statuary set among the flowers and vines and an allée of ailanthus trees going down to the water. Katy Dos Passos called it an “Arabian Nights house.” Perhaps she didn’t intend the allusion to Scheherazade, who kept death at bay with her thousand-and-one nights’ tales; but when the house and garden were completed Gerald described them as “an oasis of comfort” for Sara, and “the spectacle of her enjoyment for the first time” since the boys’ deaths affected him powerfully. “I had not thought she could forget for a moment what haunts her continually,” he confided to the house’s designers, Hale Walker and Harold Heller, who had also worked on Villa America. But even at Swan Cove, he realized, she “is—and always will be—inconsolable. As time goes on she feels her bereavement more and more and understands less why the boys were taken away,—both of them.”