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.
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