Charm Read online

  A faded French aristocrat named the Prince de Faucigny-Lucinge claimed that the Murphys invented the Riviera as the great summer watering place. Certainly they made beach-going into an art. They would come down from Villa America, where they had no fewer than eight servants, with umbrellas and cocktail shakers, amusing beach hats, dogs, and their three beautiful children and lots of bright friends, and luxuriate in the sand along the Mediterranean. In their stylish opulence, they and such friends as happened to be with them—and they were seldom without friends—gave the phrase “the leisure class” palpable meaning.

  The writer Donald Ogden Stewart referred to the Murphys as “the two people who had been our models for the Happy Life.” None of this would have been possible, of course, without the cushioning of their money. But many people with lots of money don’t find much happiness in life. The Murphys were never among the super-rich, yet, as Archibald MacLeish noted, “They always spent money as if they were, having a blithe contempt for money as such—a healthy conviction that money should be used for the purposes of life, the living of life, the defeat of illness and death.” They were a stellar example of the charming rich.

  Innumerable were the occasions when the Murphys helped out friends with money. Fitzgerald came to them to help him get his daughter through Vassar; Fernand Leger asked them for money to escape the Nazis; the novelist Dawn Powell, raising a child with serious mental problems, was another of the recipients of their generosity. When Dashiell Hammett, in poor health, needed to raise bail after being jailed for failing to turn in the names of Communists convicted of anti-government activity under the Smith Act, Gerald came up with $10,000 to help him out.

  The Murphys bought and revamped houses and apartments with an impressive casualness. They seemed never to have lived anywhere that didn’t provide beautiful views—of the Seine, of the Hudson, of Swiss Alps, of Mediterranean beaches, of lush countrysides. They dressed beautifully, not fashionably, but stylishly. They ate sublimely well, drank champagne with the same regularity that other people drink orange juice. They were unfailingly kind to and inventive at entertaining children. Charming, the Murphys were, in every way.

  The curtain rang down on that immitigably happy life when in 1929 the Murphys’ nine-year-old son Patrick was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Soon thereafter Gerald gave up his quietly but seriously flourishing career as a painter. Not long after, he underwent a Jungian analysis in Switzerland, where Patrick had earlier undergone treatment. He began confessing to friends—to Archibald MacLeish, to F. Scott Fitzgerald—that there had always been an emptiness at the center of his life, a detachment that made real friendship impossible. He claimed that he had no taste for life’s realities—sadness, illness, death—that only the unreality he was able to create at Villa America and elsewhere in his life sustained him. “The invented part, for me, is what has meaning,” he said.

  Within two years the Murphys lost two sons: Baoth in 1935 to meningitis, Patrick in 1937 to tuberculosis. Sara went into a deep depression; Gerald took to wearing only black and gray for the rest of his days. They carried on, kept up the show, but now to their friends they became tragic figures. Gerald’s painting had a revival, when the Dallas Museum of Modern Art did an exhibition of his work. When biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald began to be published, the Murphys came in for more publicity. They became part of the great mythos of the American expat generation of the 1920s.

  After the death of their two sons, there was something a bit hollow about the Murphys’ lives. As Sara wrote to Scott Fitzgerald: “I don’t think the world is a very nice place—And all there seems to be left to do is to make the best of it while we are here, & be VERY grateful for one’s friends—because they are the best there is, & make up for many another thing that is lacking.”

  Their surviving child, Honoria, gave the Murphys three grandchildren, for which they were grateful and on whom they lavished their generous attention. Sara did volunteer charity work. Gerald worked on a ballet with Richard Rodgers for which he received very little credit. Their biographer Amanda Vaill suggests that insufficiently repressed homosexuality was at the heart of Gerald’s feeling of emptiness, but if he did have strong homosexual feelings he never, so far as is known, acted on them. Nor, so far as is known, did Sara ever have a love affair with Hemingway, who used to send her passionate letters. If Gerald and Sara tended to pull apart in later years, in the end they stayed together, each loyal to the other, each recognizing that it was only in combination, as a couple, as the eminently charming Murphys, that they were the extraordinary people they were.

  Gerald Murphy died of intestinal cancer in 1964, at the age of seventy-six. Sara lived on, under a fog of dementia, until 1975, dying at ninety-two. After Gerald’s death, Sara held a quietly elegant funeral party for a small number of remaining friends. Dawn Powell, who was among those invited, remarked that “it was a lesson in courage disguised as taste.” To their last days, the Murphys never let down the side. They lived stylishly until the end. They were the Murphys, outwardly that most generous and charming of all charmed couples. What they were inwardly was nobody’s business other than their own.

  In 1962 a New Yorker writer named Calvin Tomkins wrote a lengthy profile, later published as a book, about the Murphys called Living Well Is the Best Revenge; they agreed to allow him to interview them for it, with the understanding that Gerald’s paintings and the death of their sons would not be up for discussion. Tomkins’ title, it is now evident, was a great misfit. The Murphys may have lived well, but there was no one against whom to take revenge for the great sadnesses visited upon them by the fates.

  More than Hemingway, Picasso, or any of the other figures at the Murphys’ Villa America, F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed to have the best shot at the charmed life. Handsome, talented, with a beautiful wife and early literary success, he appeared to be among the favorites of the gods. The representative figure in what came to be known as the Jazz Age, he is sometimes thought to have invented the phrase. When one thinks of Princeton, one thinks first of F. Scott Fitzgerald, even though he was an entirely uninterested student while there and left without a degree. The name Scott, given to so many young boys by parents swept away by Fitzgerald’s allure—an allure built on the combination of talent allied to elegance—is another sign of his unending attraction to people who can never have met him yet took him, owing to his writing, for a man of the greatest charm.

  Such has been the attraction of Fitzgerald’s reputation as a figure of charm that it may well exceed his accomplishments as a writer, though those accomplishments were considerable. No one was thought more stylish than he. His literary style was imbued with charm; he wrote sentences of such lilting elegance that they seemed to heighten life and fill it with lovely possibilities in the way that only charm itself at its best can do.

  In fact, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was a great sad botch. He himself hadn’t any doubt about it, and he said as much to his daughter Scottie, reporting his wish that he hadn’t allowed so many distractions to get him off the track of serious literary production. (He also said it publicly in his one work of nonfiction, The Crack-Up.) But, owing to high and careless living, alcoholism, and social envy, he had gotten off that track. Snobbery, self-pity, and thwarted ambition, all to be sure attractively set out in his writing, were among the key themes in his life. A great chasm existed between the genuine elegance of his writing and the no less genuine squalor of his life.

  Fitzgerald’s alcoholism made him precisely the sort of guest you wouldn’t want at your party. He and his Zelda’s idea of a good bit of fun was to take everyone’s watches and jewelry at a party and boil them in a can or pan over the stove. They would destroy furniture, ruin meals, insult other guests, get in punch-ups. Booze made them, the very reverse of charming, boorish in the extreme.

  But for his alcoholism, but for his wife’s insanity, but for his unrealistic nature, F. Scott Fitzgerald might have been a candidate for
one of the most charming of American lives. He had an early success with his novel This Side of Paradise, he’d won the girl of his ardent dreams, and in later years, recalling the happiness all this brought him, he wrote: “I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky. I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

  Although he would write a better novel—a splendid novel, in fact, The Great Gatsby—he would never really be happy again. He felt in a permanent state of inferiority touching on masochism to such lesser writers as Ernest Hemingway and Edmund Wilson, both of whom put him down resoundingly after his death. He blew vast sums of money on stylish but finally empty frivolity. He went out to Hollywood in the hope of paying the expenses of private schools for his daughter and expensive mental institutions for his wife, but was too much the true artist to succeed there. “As soon as I feel I am writing to a cheap specification,” he wrote, “my pen freezes and my talent vanishes over the hill.” He did write the core of a brilliant but unfinished novel about Hollywood called The Last Tycoon.

  In 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald died, of a heart attack, his books out of print, feeling himself entirely out of luck, at the age of forty-four. In the end his unedifying life was preponderantly, incontestably, immitigably sad and much closer to damned than charmed. Yet he is important to the story of charm, at least in its American version, because he so yearned for the elegant, the orderly, the charmed life, and fell so sadly far short of it.

  Are there any truly charmed lives? Are there people who go through all their days unmarked by life’s darker vicissitudes: mistaken marriages, children who don’t turn out, the death of loved ones, untimely and possibly painful deaths of their own by an arbitrary disease or (more arbitrary still) accidents?

  F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” When it comes to charmed lives, the way this might work is to hope for such a life for oneself and for one’s children, all the while understanding that its attainment isn’t very likely.

  And yet charming people continue to turn up, some to flourish. As for charm itself, it remains the heightened pleasure that a small number of socially gifted people, of both sexes and differing social classes, bestow upon the rest of us, convincing us, while in the company of those with this gift, that the world, despite much evidence to the contrary, is still a delight-filled, gorgeous, altogether splendid place.

  Chapter VII

  Charming Rogues

  Consider the charming rogue. The charming rogue never expends his charm without a motive; he puts his charm to gainful purposes; he has agendas, generally hidden. In the movies, the charming rogue has sometimes been played by Clark Gable, sometimes by Errol Flynn, more recently to comic effect by George Clooney. In the movies of the 1930s and ’40s, George Saunders and Adolphe Menjou and George Macready played variants on the charming rogue, the well-spoken backguard, with the accent falling on the second word. Dashing, risk-taking, immensely confident, the charming rogue is sometimes a con man, often a seducer, always an operator.

  I have encountered a few charming rogues in my life, but the first was a then-twenty-year-old named Jack Libby. His mother and mine grew up together on Chicago’s west side, and remained friends. Jack was dark, nice looking, a gambler, a man with a good laugh. At the University of Illinois, where he was a business major, he began each autumn semester in September by having a fraternity brother hide his books and promise not to return them until November. He had a bookie in Urbana. Women with a taste for adventure were drawn to him.

  Easily bored, Jack was in need of regular action. We used to play in poker games together, on one occasion in a shed in the old Fulton Street produce market in Chicago with several suspicious and mildly menacing characters around the table. He once suggested that we go in partnership in our respective fraternities in getting together bets against the University of Illinois basketball team for an important upcoming game with Iowa. We gave a slightly false point spread, took Iowa, then laid all these bets off, betting on Illinois with the true point spread with Jack’s bookie in Urbana. The hope here was to get in between the false and the true point spread. Between us, we got up roughly $500 in bets—a significant sum in those days—which Jack duly laid off. Iowa won, but by too many points for us to collect both ways, a sum of $1,000, which was the plan and would have constituted a fine little coup. But everyone in both fraternities thought we won, and at Jack’s fraternity they threw him in the shower with his clothes on.

  We lost touch. I had heard that Jack had married a girl from Memphis and moved down there. His wife’s family supposedly had a large and successful furniture store, but, the report was, that was too conventional and dull for Jack, so he started a borax operation of some kind, selling home improvements through a bank of phones in a basement—a true boiler-room operation. Eight or so years later, on a flight from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Chicago that stopped in Memphis, I called him. When he asked me what I was doing, I said that I was working for the government as the director of the anti-Poverty Program in Little Rock. “I’m working for the government, too,” he said. “They have a $100,000 lien on my business.” That was the last I heard of him. Life was never dull around Jack, and I hope over the years he found enough escapades to keep boredom at bay.

  Some charming rogues operate on a larger scale than others. The greatest charming rogue of all time, beyond doubt, was the Athenian Alcibiades (c.450–404 BC). His handsomeness was legendary; he was said to look as one might imagine Achilles to have looked. He had a lisp, but even this impediment was thought attractive, and many contemporaries even tried to imitate it. His lineage was aristocratic. When his father died at the battle of Coronea (447 BC), Pericles, the greatest of Athenian leaders, and his brother, Ariphron, became Alcibiades’ guardians. Nothing of Pericles’ principled leadership, high virtue, or ascetic habits rubbed off on Alcibiades—another case in which nature once again soundly drubbed nurture.

  Alcibiades’ teacher was Socrates, who recognized his extraordinary qualities—and to whom Alcibiades offered himself physically, or so it is recorded in Plato’s Symposium. Here, too, Alcibiades, who much admired Socrates, came through uninfluenced by the great philosopher’s wisdom. Ambitious, vain, keen for glory, with time out only for roistering and seduction, he was always in business exclusively for himself.

  No matter how egregious Alcibiades’ behavior, the people of Athens seem never to have grown tired of him. “As a boy, as a youth, as a man,” his biographer E. F. Benson writes of him, “he had a unique charm and distinction which continually earned him forgiveness for the most outrageous escapades. Athens always pardoned him and yearned for him even when he had brought on her storms of ruin and disaster.” Benson adds: “Vicious, insolent, adorable, detestable, brilliant and fickle, with the face and body of a god and the wit of Aristophanes, he was the very incarnation of the spirit of Athens . . . The whole town was in love with him. Never had Athens seen a boy of such amazing beauty. He had wit and charm, high breeding (for all his escapades) and wealth, and Athens was mad about him, and did her utmost, with conspicuous success, to spoil him.”

  Alcibiades was known for erratic acts of behavior: showing off for companions, boxing the ears of a dignified citizen (his future father-in-law, as it happened), cutting off the tail of his own large dog. He attracted and throve on attention. He married well, acquiring a large dowry, which didn’t stop him from keeping regular company with courtesans and roisterers. He spent lavishly. He sent seven chariots to the Olympic games, and won three of the top four prizes. Euripides and Thucydides differ about whether he won first, second, and third, or first, second, and fourth prize in the chariot race, an unprecedented result in either case.

  While still young, Alcibiades fought in the battle of Potidaea, where he was w
ounded, and Socrates, fighting by his side, is said to have saved his life. His military record, along with his personal wealth and noble birth, eased his way into the always chancy political life of Athens. He had great oratorical skills, with, as Plutarch notes, “the highest capacity for inventing, for discerning what was the right thing to be said for any purpose, and on any occasion; but aiming not only at saying what was required, but also saying it well, in respect, that is, of words and phrases.” Nor, one might add, was he ever inconvenienced by the need to adhere to true sentiment or made in the least hesitant by the pull of conscience.

  Alcibiades was envious of one thing only—glory won by others, for he wanted it all for himself. Nicias, an older general, said to have ended the war with Sparta through his statesmanship, was a particular target for Alcibiades’ envy. Through his deceptions, he was able to put down Nicias, depriving him of the credit he had earned through what was known as the Peace of Nicias, and in effect restarting the war of the Peloponnesus, with himself now one of the leading Athenian generals.

  Dressed extravagantly in long purple robes, Alcibiades had the figure of Cupid holding aloft a thunderbolt in his hand emblazoned on his shield, ate heartily, drank copiously, and went in for dissolution in a serious way and quite without regard for public opinion. Aristophanes noted of the Athenians reaction to him: “They love, and hate, and cannot do without him.” Plutarch filled this out when he wrote: “The truth is, [Alcibiades’] liberalities, his public shows, and other munificence to the people, which were such as nothing could exceed; and the glory of his ancestors, the force of his eloquence, the grace of his person, his strength of body, joined with his great courage and knowledge in military affairs prevailed upon the Athenians to endure patiently his excesses, to indulge his faults, attributing them to youth and good nature.”