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

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

The following summer, back at the Villa America, was one of the happiest the Murphys had spent, full of gaiety and good friends. The Benchleys came down to visit with their two boys, and so did Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ellen and Philip Barry, and several others. Honoria Murphy, then twelve, remembers looking down at the terrace from her bedroom window, seeing the flowers and the lovely food and the ladies in their beaded dresses, and thinking “how it all blended in, and how you just wanted it to last forever.” The Fitzgeralds were back again, too, like ghosts at the banquet. Torn and hounded by their personal furies, they would have been difficult company under any circumstances. But now another strain had been put on their relationship with the Murphys. Scott had decided to use Sara and Gerald as the central characters in his novel, and he was “studying” them openly. His methods were anything but subtle. “He questioned us constantly in a really intrusive and irritating way,” Murphy said. “He kept asking things like what our income really was, and how I had got into Skull and Bones, and whether Sara and I had lived together before we were married. I just couldn't take seriously the idea that he was going to write about us—somehow I couldn’t believe that anything would come of questions like that. But I certainly recall his peering at me with a sort of thin-lipped, supercilious scrutiny, as though he were trying to decide what made me tick. His questions irritated Sara a good deal. Usually, she would give him some ridiculous answer just to shut him up, but eventually the whole business became intolerable. In the middle of a dinner party one night, Sara had all she could take. ‘Scott,’ she said, ‘you think if you just ask enough questions you’ll get to know what people are like, but you won’t. You don’t really know anything at all about people.’ Scott practically turned green. He got up from the table and pointed his finger at her and said that nobody had ever dared say that to him, whereupon Sara asked if he would like her to repeat it, and she did.”

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

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

That July, the Hemingways visited the Murphys at Antibes, and from there the four of them went down to Pamplona for the July fiesta, accompanied by Hadley Hemingway’s friend Pauline Pfeiffer, a Vogue editor who would shortly become the second Mrs. Hemingway. They stayed in the Quintana Hotel, right across the corridor from the matadors Villalta and Niño de la Palma. Hemingway was well known from his previous visits to Pamplona, and because of that, and also because they were the only Americans in town, they found themselves a constant center of friendly attention. “We drank the very dry sherry and ate roasted almonds,” Murphy said, “and every time we sat down anywhere we would be surrounded by Spaniards who shot wine into Ernest’s mouth from their wineskins. One evening a whole crowd of people suddenly began pointing at Sara and me and shouting, ‘Dansa Charles-ton! Dansa Charles-ton!’ Ernest had put them up to it. The Charleston was all the rage in America then, but it hadn’t really spread to Europe as yet; Sara and I had just learned it that summer, from a traveling dance team that appeared at the casino in Juan-les-Pins—we invited them for lunch, and they taught the steps to the children and to us. And so right there in the middle of the square in Pamplona, with a little brass band playing some sort of imitation jazz and the crowd just going wild, we got up and demonstrated.”

Hemingway also obliged Gerald to make an appearance in the bull ring. “When you were with Ernest, and he suggested that you try something, you didn’t refuse,” Gerald recalled dryly. “He suggested that I test my nerve in the ring with the yearlings. I took along my raincoat and shook it about, and all of a sudden this animal—it was just a yearling and the horns were padded, but it looked about the size of a locomotive to me—came right for me, at top speed. Evidently, I was so terrified that I just stood there holding the coat in front of me. Ernest, who had been watching very carefully to see that I didn’t get into trouble, yelled, ‘Hold it to the side!’ And miraculously, at the last moment, I moved the coat to my left and the bull veered toward it and went by me. Ernest was delighted. He said I’d made a veronica. Ernest himself, meanwhile, was waiting for some of the larger bulls, and a lot of people were watching him. Finally he caught the attention of the bull he wanted, and it came toward him. He had absolutely nothing in his hands. Just as the bull reached him, he threw himself over the horns and landed on the animal’s back, and stayed there, facing the tail. The bull staggered on a few steps and then collapsed under Ernest’s great weight. After that, to my great relief, we went back to our seats.”

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.”