ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY

The will and grace with which they created and maintained this fantasy is what gives their story its magic, and its vulnerability is what gives it a tragic and even noble air. Both the fantasy and the ruin are balanced beautifully by Amanda Vaill in Everybody Was So Young, her new and tender evocation of the Murphys and their world. Ostensibly about beautiful people living and grieving in elegant places, it turns out also to be about things more basic: art, talent, and friendship; the power and limits of style and money; man’s quest to control his life and his anguish when he finds that he cannot.

Heirs to great commercial fortunes who, of course, disdained commerce, the Murphys saw themselves as partners in a new and special sort of enterprise in which life would be itself an artistic masterpiece. Married in 1915, they had three children and wandered through America and Europe in search of the proper setting, finding it at last almost by accident in France in 1921. There, on a Paris street, Gerald happened upon a gallery filled with modern art and had his own coup de foudre: always a dabbler in artistic byways, he was fired to study and paint. It was art and money together — the sensitivity and intelligence to attract talented people, and the funds to entertain them royally — that opened up a new world.

In short order, the Murphy’s had become friends with Fernand Leger and Pablo Picasso, with Archibald MacLeish and his wife, Ada; with Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley; with Scott Fitzgerald and his only wife, Zelda; with Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker; with Philip Barry, the playwright of the rich and mighty, who put the Murphyesque style on stage. Through these, the Murphys found their way into much of the art of the early twentieth century: Picasso’s sketches and Barry’s plays, Hemingway’s writing (sometimes malicious), and Fitzgerald’s elegiac Tender Is the Night.

In 1923, Cole Porter, whom Gerald had known since they were at Yale together, asked the Murphys to join him for a week’s vacation at Antibes on the south coast of France near the border of Italy, then all but deserted in the summer. Porter and Murphy raked the weeds off the beach, persuaded the hotelier to stay open in summer, and created a resort sensation. In 1924, the Murphys bought and redid a great house they called the Villa America that became the center of their personal universe. To this, they drew all of their friends from two continents and created an idyll that glimmers in retrospect: where beautiful people bathed in blue water, artists relaxed from their noble endeavors, and golden children tumbled in shining white sand. This was the apogee to which they were building. This was the height of their life-long ambition. This was as good as it got.

What the Murphys possessed was that indescribable thing known as personal magnetism. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Picasso were in love with Sara, a beauty whose presence was evoked by MacLeish in a poem as something that in a woman you would call / Her reticence, by which you’d mean her power / Of feeling what she had not put into words. She was the warm heart behind the endeavor; Gerald the discerning eye.

He was a surprisingly good painter, but Gerald’s real genius was his gift for orchestrating a setting and atmosphere. At Yale, Vaill writes, he devoted himself “to what his class historian referred to as the ‘aesthetic side’ of undergraduate life,” becoming known as someone with “a talent for arranging things.” What he was “arranging” was a small, perfect universe under a dome built of money and style, in which he and his circle could operate — a charmed life cemented with many small rituals: the formal rite of the mixing of cocktails, the mid-morning sherry and dry biscuits on the beach.

Those touched by his magic would never forget it. In his first notes for Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald wrote of his wish to capture a background “in which the leisure class is at its truly most brilliant and glamorous, such as the Murphys,” and added of Gerald: “His step was quick and alert as if he had just come from some great doing and was hurrying on toward others. Organizer of gaiety, master of richly incrusted esoteric happiness, . . . [he] thought what a good time everyone would have who was with him.”

And the good times were legion. But what no one seemed to notice was the grimness that lay beyond them, the dark things they were meant to avert. The world Gerald constructed had its own secret purpose: to force his own values on life. Prone to dark Celtic moods that his friends called his “Black Service,” he distrusted fate. “My terms with life have been simple,” he wrote MacLeish. “I have refused to meet it on the grounds of my own defects for the reason that I have bitterly resented those defects since I was fifteen years of age. . . . My subsequent life has been a process of concealment of the personal realities — at which I have been all too adept.”

These defects — involving an attraction to men, which he seems not to have acted upon — were enough to increase his suspicion that life was a thing not to be trusted. Thus the great need for invention and art, for the contrived and almost forced celebration, for the “festival” concept of life. What was a celebration for Sara was a defense for Gerald, created in a mood of despair and defiance. As he told Fitzgerald, “The invented part, for me, is what has meaning. . . . Only the invented part of life is satisfying; the unrealistic part.” The panoply of the Murphyesque was a defiance of life and a buffer against it: the decoration and ornament, the parties and treasure hunts, the inventive and elegant houses, the little rituals of the beach and the bar stool, the presents, the “richly incrusted esoteric happiness.”

The golden age of the Murphys lasted no more than six years. By 1928, vacationing crowds had begun to encroach on their Riviera paradise, professional and sexual tensions had begun to cause trouble, and the uninvented side of life — the part they could not control or regulate — had begun to intrude. Hemingway’s marriage ruptured, Zelda went crazy. In October 1929, the stock market crashed, putting an end to the easy free spending. And that same month, Patrick, the youngest and frailest of the three Murphy children, was found to have tuberculosis in one lung.

At once, the household moved to a mountain in Switzerland, in an attempt to recreate, in what now was a sickroom, the glowing ambiance it had achieved in Antibes. There were the witty friends (Dorothy Parker among them), the costumes and games, the drinks before dinner, the parties for children and animals, the flowers, the books, and the films. But it was, as Vaill writes, “almost a parody of the Villa America.”

Gerald stopped painting, his drives subsumed entirely in his son’s deadly struggle. “He works every minute,” said Dorothy Parker. “All the energy that used to go into compounding drinks and devising costumes and sweeping out the bath houses and shifting the sand on the plage has been put into inventing and running complicated . . . sick-room appliances, and he is simply pouring his energy into Patrick, in the endeavor to make him not sick.”

Eventually, the Murphys would sell the Villa America and return to New York. Gerald would take the job running Mark Cross that he had once rejected, and revive the company. And in March 1935, Baoth, the “healthy” son, caught measles in boarding school. It became meningitis. He died in two weeks. The brutal insolence of this second blow — a stunning, sudden death to match the slow death by inches — stunned everyone. Six months before Baoth’s funeral, the Murphys had learned that Patrick’s illness had spread to his good lung, and his death was now certain. It was doubtless this Sara was thinking of when she ran from the church out on to Park Avenue and, in a gesture that MacLeish would always remember, raised up her fist and cursed God.

They would never recover from this redundant disaster. “She is — and always will be — inconsolable,” Gerald wrote about Sara. For himself, he had nightmares in which both boys were dying, over and over. “Will one’s heart never touch bottom?” he demanded. For both the Murphys and their friends, it was the sad end to “those tragically ecstatic years,” as Zelda Fitzgerald described them, “when the pockets of the world were filled with pleasant surprises, and people still thought of life in terms of their right to a good time.”

For Gerald, it was a loss of a still more personal order: the end of his battle to conquer the forces of fate with style and impose his own order on life. Life won, checkmating order and beauty. “Life itself has stepped in now and blundered and scarred,” he wrote to Fitzgerald. “How ugly and blasting it can be — and how idly ruthless.” He now seemed only to want to endure, not prevail. To Sara, who was indifferent to a rest cure she had gone on, he wrote, “I know it doesn’t seem very important in the face of what happened whether we take care of ourselves or not. But as long as we must live, we might as well feel as well as we can. It will probably help to give others a better time.”

And a good time they continued to give other people, though of necessity less exuberant, shadowed by what Zelda would refer to as a sense of “happiness already had.” There were houses to buy and decorate, entertaining to do, friends to see, stands to take, and events to keep up with. In 1941, Gerald would shock other merchants by filling Mark Cross’s display win-dows with photographs of bombed British cities and exhortations for America to join the war. They took pleasure in their friends, their daughter Honoria, and her three children (a girl and two boys). Never did they lose their flair, or their instinct for the stylish gesture. In all her grief, Sara could not stop herself from making Gerald’s funeral into a perfect small social occasion. “What a lovely party,” people said.

Scott Fitzgerald had died in 1940, with his reputation at its nadir, and interest in the golden people of the 1920s at an all-time low. Then, in the 1950s, his revival began, and, thanks to the books about the Fitzgeralds, interest in the Murphys also grew. There was a New Yorker profile that became a small book. There were several shows of Gerald’s paintings. The biography Zelda, published in 1970, focused new light on the Murphys. When Sara died five years later, it was a major story in the New York Times. In 1982, their daughter Honoria co-wrote a book about them. Now there is Amanda Vaill’s Everybody Was So Young. And the flow seems unlikely to stop.

When the revival began, Sara expressed reservations about being known as someone who had known other people, but there seems to be more to it than that. Part of it is the attraction of style — the eternal pull of taste backed by money, which made a public obsession of Jacqueline Kennedy, and made Ralph Lauren a very rich man. (Ralph Lauren’s ads are all glittering pictures of the Murphyesque life.)

But the Murphys are in fact riddled with larger questions about style and spirit, class and money, inherited and inherent worth. “It was not just a glittering, shiny surface. It was a platonic ideal, a way of looking at the world, and a manner of living,” wrote Gerald Clarke in his 1988 biography of Truman Capote — another artist hung up upon manners and money. “Money could not buy it, but real style, the grand style he prized most, was nonetheless impossible unless it was watered daily from a deep well at a prominent bank.”

In a meritocracy, the Murphys are hard to admire, for their hallmark style was enabled by money they did not earn. On the other hand, they seemed to spend it with generosity and without ostentation: enlarging the horizons of themselves and others, bailing friends out of terrible trouble, financing the careers of a great many artists, trying to buy health for their sons. Not having worked for their wealth when they got it, they tried to earn it in retrospect, to deserve it by the ways it was spent.

In a sense, the Murphys’ lives are proof of just how much money buys. The more money you have, the more you can control your surroundings; the more beautiful you can make the settings around you, the more you can avoid the bleak and disturbing. The Murphys controlled almost everything they did. They always worked hard, but they chose what they worked at, and they could always choose where they were — which was invariably some choice piece of real estate: the French Riviera, the best parts of Paris, pleasant places on Long Island, the upper East Side of New York.

But in another sense, the Murphys’ lives are proof of the limits of money. At the heart of their effort was Gerald’s intention to take life, not at its “own tragic value” but at his. “Only the invented part of our life — the unreal part — has any scheme, any beauty,” he said to Fitzgerald. Scheme and beauty were what he wished to impose. It was a contest between his and life’s values. It was a war between Gerald and God.

It is this tragic sense that lifts them from the pages of House Beautiful and into the realm of high drama, of hubris and nemesis, of mortals who dared to fight fate. It is all too tempting to look at this book on this level as a second telling of the Fall: The Murphys concocted their insular idyll; reality, annoyed, reasserted its powers (in the only place, Gerald said, in which they were vulnerable); and reality, appeased by their unending grace under pressure, relented.

If the scenery is out of Town & Country, the plot is out of the Bible. It is no wonder that MacLeish based J.B., his play retelling the story of Job, on the trials of his friends and the moment at which Sara cursed God. Armed with all the best weapons that humans can muster — taste, money, intelligence, style, love, and a genius for friendship — the Murphys came to France determined to create a little Eden, based on the order and beauty they found lacking in life. For a brief, golden moment, they made it happen. But not, as it proved, long enough.

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery lives in Alexandria, Virginia.