Everybody Was So Young Page 3
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”
“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.
He rented premises for the Mark Cross Company (as he had renamed it) on Broadway’s Golden Mile, at Number 253, from Clarence Mackay, the mining millionaire who would later become Irving Berlin’s father-in-law. And he found a modest brownstone on lower Fifth Avenue, in a genteel part of town, to house his family. But Anna Murphy refused to go. Boston was where she lived, and Boston was where she, and her boys, would stay. Patrick Murphy called her bluff: he went anyway. Three weeks later Anna packed and followed.
Patrick Murphy was a distant, even chilly, father—in fact, recalled Gerald, he avoided all “close relationships, even family ones. He was solitary and managed, though he had a wife and children, to lead a detached life. I was never sure what his philosophy was, except that I recall it to have been disillusioned, if not cynical.” He seemed to think of himself more as a man of letters than a merchant, and he spent his evenings reading the classics—his special favorites were Macaulay and Pascal—alone in his paneled library, with its green-baize-topped table, its globe and bus
t of Emerson standing guard. Balding and thin-lipped, dressed in sober suits, he looked more like a conservative banker than a fashionable retailer. But he was known to cut loose on occasion. On weekends he was often to be found on the golf course, his pipe clutched between his teeth, a floppy hat protecting his bald pate from the sun; and afterward he liked to celebrate with a libation or two. Edmund Wilson recalled finding him and “some other gray-haired old gentleman,” both of them clearly feeling the effects of several cocktails, “bounding about on the lawn” at a Southampton country club, singing interminable choruses of “Sweet Adeline.” He also possessed an unsuspected talent for clog dancing and for standing on his hands on the arms of a chair.
During the week, however, he was all business. At Mark Cross, he supplied to America’s rich and nouveaux riches the luxury products enjoyed by the European upper classes: English capeskin driving gloves, Scottish golf clubs, Minton china, pigskin luggage, even the first demitasse and the first thermos bottle ever seen in the United States. He wrote all his own advertising copy: “A woman with a Cross bag wishes to be seen by two people,” went one advertisement, “the man she likes best and the woman she likes least.” A canny phrasemaker, he became a renowned after-dinner speaker at the numerous banquets, often seating up to two thousand captains of industry and commerce, which were a feature of New York’s business and social scene. His speaking style was aphoristic, even epigrammatic, like his ad copy: “Give a woman the luxuries of life, she will dispense with the necessities,” he would say; or “Choosing a husband is like choosing a mushroom. If it is a mushroom, you live, and if it is a toadstool, you die”; or “Youth has a faculty of laying up a luxuriant harvest of regrets.”
He worked at his speeches with at least the same devotion that he gave to Mark Cross. He filled hundreds of small leather-bound notebooks with his own pensées—stream-of-consciousness sequences of ideas and phrases that he would fish in, again and again, for his seemingly spontaneous remarks. “Impromptu speeches are, of course, the best,” he once said; “the great difficulty about them is the committing of them to memory.” He evolved a careful formula: he always insisted on being the final speaker on the roster; he never smiled, and always kept his hands clasped behind his back; he spoke as if to an imaginary (and rather deaf) elderly lady seated in one of the upper ballroom boxes at the old Waldorf-Astoria; and his speeches lasted for no more than seven minutes, with eight more minutes allotted for laughter and applause.
Clearly this was a man who liked to control his environment, if not dominate it. He “didn’t believe in being sick,” according to his granddaughter, Honoria Donnelly; what he did believe in was physical toughness. He disdained overcoats and the long underwear that made cold winters (and unheated houses) bearable, and he wore summer-weight suits the year round. He thought if you ran into adverse circumstances you should grit your teeth and keep going: one winter afternoon, he and Gerald, aged about ten, were walking by the lake in Central Park when Gerald fell through the ice. Patrick pulled the boy out and insisted that he soldier on, wet clothes and all, until the two of them had finished their walk.
Anna Murphy was hardly more nurturing. In later life Gerald recalled her as “devoted, possessive, ambitious, Calvinistic, superstitious, with a faulty sense of truth. She was hypercritical and . . . ultimately resigned from most of her friendships.” She was also, at this time, taken up with the care of a new baby, having given birth to a daughter, Esther, in 1898; and she had begun showing evidence of the deep depressions and anxiety attacks that increasingly gripped her as she grew older. Patrick Murphy was finding consolation elsewhere, and not always discreetly. When he took Fred to Atlantic City for some recuperative sea air after a spell of illness, the boy entered his father’s room in the morning only to be greeted by the senior Murphy and a “lady” in a state of some undress. “Oh, this is Miss So-and-So,” explained the patriarch. “We were just looking for her glove.”
With his parents otherwise occupied, Gerald, a solemn, rather wistful-looking child, was left to the company of his siblings and the ministrations of an elderly nurse who disliked him. His one comfort was a wirehaired fox terrier named Pitz who was his special friend. He used to smuggle Pitz into his bedroom and fall asleep with the little dog clasped in his arms; but Nurse hated dogs, and if, on her nightly inspections, she discovered Pitz in Gerald’s bed, she would snatch him away and lock him in the cellar.
One winter Pitz was exiled to the yard. Gerald made him a house out of a soapbox and surreptitiously threw towels and blankets out the window so the terrier could drag them into his lair to keep warm; but without human contact the little dog grew wild. In the spring Gerald was allowed to go out and play with him, and picked up a bone for him to chase, but Pitz, thinking the boy was taking it away, snapped at him. The next day Pitz was sent away forever.
Gerald had been attending Blessed Sacrament Academy, uptown on West 79th Street, where one of his younger schoolmates was Dorothy Rothschild (one day to be Dorothy Parker); but apparently his rebellious behavior over Pitz’s exile had been noticed, and his parents felt he needed a stricter environment. So Anna Murphy found him a Catholic boarding school near Dobbs Ferry, in the Hudson valley just north of New York City. Instead of a haven from the frosty atmosphere of home, however, it was more like a dress rehearsal for purgatory: the nuns, Gerald recalled, took him to the woodshed and flogged him with wooden laths for wetting his bed.
In the fall of 1903 Gerald followed Fred to Hotchkiss, a preparatory school in Lakeville, Connecticut, which was a kind of nursery for upper-class WASPs on their way to Yale or Harvard or Princeton. By this time the Murphys had moved uptown to 110 West 57th Street, just a few blocks away from the Wiborgs’ pied-à-terre at the Gotham Hotel, and Mark Cross itself had relocated to Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. They had come a long way from Irish Catholic Boston, far enough that Gerald now began to spell his middle name “Clery” instead of the more Irish “Cleary”—and there was more of an Edith Wharton gloss on their daily life. In the evenings, when Gerald was on vacation from school, he would be permitted to join the adults in the library, where his father’s drinks tray fascinated him, not because of the intoxicants it contained, but because of the alluring shapes of the bottles, glasses, and bar tools. And on Sundays his parents would take him to the Metropolitan Museum to admire their favorite paintings; years later he would recall with distaste “standing interminably in front of the enormous canvas of Washington Crossing the Delaware which finally destroyed for me for years all interest in painting.”
At Hotchkiss, Gerald tried to put some distance between himself and his parents’ expectations. He “rebelled and chose ‘Chapel’ rather than go to the village Roman Catholic Church,” and he failed to distinguish himself academically—mathematics was a particular bête noire—so that by his second year he was put on probation, with the possibility of being left behind a year if his work didn’t improve. Anna Murphy’s reaction to the news was denial. “I will not put up with Gerald being dropped a class,” she wrote to the headmaster, Huber Buehler. “I know he can get his lessons if he wants to apply himself.” She hinted that any demotion of her son would result in his withdrawal from the school, and felt that a combination of heavy tutoring and “sharp talking to’s” would do the trick.
Poor Gerald got both: summer sessions with a tutor while his parents took Esther to Lake George or Europe, and a series of jeremiads from Anna, who was anxious that he not replicate the “fiasco” of Fred’s last year at Hotchkiss. Patrick Murphy seems to have had little interest in his son’s progress, or lack of it. Letters sent by the school to his office went unanswered, and it was Anna who barraged the hapless Mr. Buehler with correspondence. The headmaster appeared to feel that stuffing remedial work into Gerald as if he were a Strasbourg goose was not the wisest course, but Anna was implacable. “Gerald’s besetting sin is inattention,” she maintained, and she grumbled that perhaps “some method other than the method at the Hotchkiss School must be brou
ght to bear upon” him.
In February 1906 Gerald contracted what looked to the school doctor to be scarlet fever—in those pre-antibiotic days an often serious, sometimes fatal streptococcal infection—and was confined to the infirmary. His parents, however, refused to be alarmed. Patrick was famously scornful of doctors and all the hocus-pocus of illness; and Anna (as so often) knew better. ‘You know I have insisted that Gerald did not have scarlet fever,” she wrote Mr. Buehler. Little Esther, she reported, had come down with what the family’s physician described as “a peculiar form of ‘Hives’ brought about by intellectual indigestion . . . perfectly harmless—and occurring in children of bilious temperament.” In her diagnosis, Gerald must be suffering from the same thing, and the remedy was to get him up and about as soon as possible. The school’s doctor was unconvinced, however, and sent the boy home for five weeks’ convalescence.
This interruption put Gerald behind again; and when, that spring, he took the preliminary entrance examinations for Yale (where Fred already was a student, and where Anna was determined to place Gerald in the fall of 1907), he failed to pass. Furthermore, there was some question of whether his academic standing would permit him to go on to his senior year with his Hotchkiss class. There followed more letters from Anna, more threats to remove him from the school entirely, more tutors. No wonder that in the few photographs that survive of Gerald during this period, he has such an uncomfortable expression on his handsome, square-jawed face.
He had, perhaps, an additional reason for unhappiness, one that he was reticent about to the end of his life, although he tried to explain it, obliquely, in a letter to a friend some twenty-five years later. It was at Hotchkiss that he first became aware of what he later called “a defect over which I have only had enough control to scotch it from time to time,” something which made his “subsequent life . . . a process of concealment of the personal realities.” What was this “defect”—and what was its manifestation, which so clearly impressed itself on Gerald that he dated his “subsequent life” from his sixteenth year? What could have made him “learn . . . to dread (and avoid) the responsibilities of friendship . . . believing, as I do, that I was incapable of a full one”? In the first three-quarters of this century, the term “defect” (or “defect of character”) was frequently applied to an attraction for the same sex; and although this might not be such an uncommon thing for an adolescent boy in an all-male environment like Hotchkiss, one can imagine how it would have horrified the senior Murphys if they had learned of it, and how it would have frightened their son if he had felt it.