the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt six)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

The Fitzgeralds and the Murphys had seen a great deal of one another in Paris in the winter of 1925-26, during which time Sara and Gerald had assumed, more or less unwittingly, the role of friendly guardians. A decade older than the Fitzgeralds, they looked upon Scott and Zelda’s baroque exploits with a mixture of tolerant amusement and genuine concern, and the Fitzgeralds, for their part, often went out of their way to try to shock the Murphys. Scott could not bear to be ignored. If he felt that Sara was not paying enough attention to him, he would do something to upset her. One afternoon in Paris, while riding in a taxi with Sara and Zelda, he pulled out some filthy hundred-franc notes and began putting them in his mouth and chewing them. Sara, whose fear of germs was so intense that she always draped the railway compartments her family traveled in with her own clean sheets, was predictably horrified.

Even in the early days it was an unusual friendship. The two couples had almost nothing in common except their great affection for each other. Neither Scott nor Zelda seemed to have the slightest interest in the art, the music, the ballet, or even the literature of the period; Scott knew the American writers in Paris, and spent a large part of his time that winter getting Hemingway recognized, but he met few Europeans, and he never learned to speak more than a few words of French, which he made not the slightest effort to pronounce correctly. The simpler aspects of the Murphys’ life at Antibes—their cultivation of the life of the senses—never appealed to Fitzgerald at all. He scarcely noticed what he was eating or drinking. He stayed out of the sun as much as possible, and his skin never lost its dead-white pallor. When the others on the beach went in swimming, Scott would get up, take a flat running dive into the shallow water, and come right out again. He never showed any curiosity about Murphy’s painting, which he appeared to consider a mere diversion. Gerald, for his part, was not particularly impressed with Fitzgerald as a writer. He had not cared much for The Great Gatsby (Sara had), and neither of them read the Fitzgerald stories that were appearing—infrequently, just then—in the Saturday Evening Post. “The one we took seriously was Ernest, not Scott,” Murphy said. “I suppose it was because Ernest’s work seemed contemporary and new, and Scott’s didn’t.”

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt five)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

In the early twenties Antibes was still a sleepy provincial village. The telephone service shut down for two hours at noon and ceased altogether at seven p.m. The local movie house operated only once a week, and had a piano player who performed with a cigarette dangling from his lip; Léger loved the place, which he said “smelled of feet.” There was a new little casino in Juan-les-Pins, where the Murphys and their friends sometimes went in the evenings. The long, quiet days centered on the beach, the garden, and the port, where from 1925 on the Murphys kept a boat. They loved to cruise and had a succession of boats, beginning with a small sloop, the Picaflor, progressing through a somewhat larger one, named for Honoria, and culminating in the hundred-foot schooner Weatherbird, which was signed and built by a member of the Diaghilev ballet troupe, Vladimir Orloff, who had attached himself to the Murphy family in Paris and had come down to live in Antibes when they built the Villa America. Orloff, the son of a Russian nobleman who managed the private bank account of the Tsarina, had seen his father murdered by the Bolsheviks soon after the October Revolution; escaping from Russia, he had made his way to France, where, like so many of the young White Russian émigrés, he gravitated to Diaghilev. He worked for Diaghilev as a set designer, but his real métier, born of a childhood spent on his grandfather’s yachts on the Black Sea, was naval architecture. He designed the Weatherbird along the lines of the American clipper ships, which he considered the most beautiful vessels ever launched. The Weatherbird took its name from a Louis Armstrong record with that title, which the Murphys had sealed in its keel.

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt four)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

Later on, in August, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald arrived. The Murphys had met the Fitzgeralds in Paris that spring. Scott and Zelda had announced that they were fleeing the hectic social life on Long Island, and in June they settled in St.-Raphaël, where they planned to live on “practically nothing a year.” When they came over to visit the Murphys at the Hôtel du Cap, it was evident that the quiet life had so far eluded them. Zelda had fallen in love with a French aviator. Although Scott had found out about it and the affair had been broken off, both of them were on edge. One night, after everyone had gone to bed, the Murphys were awakened by Scott, who stood outside their door with a candle in his violently trembling hand. “Zelda’s sick,” he said; he added in a tense voice, as they hurried down the hall, “I don’t think she did it on purpose.” She had swallowed a large, but not fatal, quantity of sleeping pills, and they had to spend the rest of the night walking her up and down to keep her awake. For the Murphys, it was the first of many experiences with the Fitzgeralds’ urge toward self-destruction. Later in their stay, when Sara remonstrated them for their dangerous habit of coming back late from parties and then, on Zelda’s initiative, diving into the sea from thirty-five-foot rocks, Zelda turned her wide, penetrating eyes on her and said innocently, “But, Sara”—she pronounced it “Say-ra”—“didn’t you know? We don’t believe in conservation.”

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt three)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

The Murphy’s regular companions that summer were Picasso and his first wife, Olga; their young son, Paolo; and Picasso’s elderly mother, Señora Maria Ruiz. They had come down to visit the Murphys at the Hôtel du Cap and had liked the region so much that they took a villa in nearby Antilles. Olga had been a deuxième ballerina in the Diaghilev company. She was a pretty girl with a button mouth and a thin nose, who agreed with everything prosaic—qualities that Picasso appeared to relish at the time. (Later, when he had left her, she followed him around Paris for three days with a revolver; eventually she went mad.) Señora Ruiz spoke no French at all, only Spanish, but the Murphys got on splendidly with her.

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt two)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

Murphy loved to describe his first meeting with Cole Porter: “There was this barbaric custom of going around to the rooms of the sophomores, and talking with them to see which ones would be proper material for the fraternities. I remember going around with Gordon Hamilton, the handsomest and most sophisticated boy in our class, and seeing, two night running, a sign on one sophomore’s door saying, ‘Back at 10 p.m. Gone to football song practice.’ Hamilton was enormously irritated that anyone would have the gall to be out of his room on visiting night, and he decided not to call again on this particular sophomore. But one night as I was passing his room I saw a light and went in. I can still see that room—there was a single electric light bulb in the ceiling, and a piano with a box of caramels on it, and wicker furniture, which was considered a bad sign at Yale in 1911. And sitting at the piano was a little boy from Peru, Indiana, in a checked suit and a salmon tie, with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down, looking just like a Westerner all dressed up for the East. We had a long talk, about music, and composers—we were both crazy about Gilbert and Sullivan—and I found out that he lived on an enormous apple farm and that he had a cousin named Desdemona. He also told me that the song he had submitted for the football song competition had just been accepted. It was called ‘Bulldog,’ and of course it made him famous.

Famous, but not entirely accepted at Yale. Although he received the second largest personal allowance of any boy in his class (the largest was Leonard Hanna’s), Cole Porter did not fit easily into the social mold of a Yale man. At Murphy’s insistence, however, he was elected to DKE that year, and soon afterward Murphy persuaded the glee club, of which he was manager, to take Porter in as a sophomore—something that was never done—so that he could sing a new song he had written on the glee club’s tour that spring. The song was the hit of the show. It was a satire on the joys of owning an automobile, and Porter came out in front of the curtain to sing it in the next-to-closing spot, with his hands folded behind him, while the seniors and juniors behind him on the stage went “zoom, zoom, zoom.”

the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt one)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

By the time she was sixteen Sara Sherman Wiborg (she was named for General William Tecumseh Sherman, her mother’s favorite uncle) had learned to speak fluent French, German, and Italian. She was not in the slightest degree impressed by fashionable society, however, and she said just what she thought to everyone. “I love Sara,” Lady Diana said to Mrs. Wiborg. “She’s a cat who goes her own way.” Sara became a great favorite of her mother’s friend Stella Campbell (Mrs. Patrick Campbell), who used to insist that Sara accompany her when she went to buy clothes for one of her theatrical roles. “Sara, darling,” she would say, in her deep, Italianate voice, “does the dress walk? Or does it make me look just like a cigar?” Gerald Murphy said once that although he had known Sara for eleven years before they were married and could hardly relate an incident in his life in which she did not play a part, she had remained so essentially and naively original that “to this day I have no idea what she will do, say, or propose.”

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt eleven)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

We were discussing if Charlton Heston became a saint. “You idealize these people, Storey,” said Hobby. “They’re not so great. Just read the lives of the saints. You’ve find out they’re not so saintly.”

“But maybe they are so saintly.”

He looked at me sideways, askance, with those blue eyes. “You worry me. Look. Nine out of every ten people are crumbs.”