Delivered by A.K. Carey at Noonday December 2008
It all started in the early 1900’s in Cincinnati with a self made millionaire and his three daughters, who were, by all accounts, the epitome of Gibson Girl beauty, grace and poise . This is especially the story of Sara, the eldest, who in the 20’s charmed and inspired the avant-guard of Paris: Picasso, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Braque and Satie, and of her husband, Gerald, a painter of some merit and a high priest of style in a very stylish world. They and their children lived a golden life in Paris and the Riviera until……
But let’s start at the beginning –in Cincinnati in the late 1800’s.
The 2nd half of the 19th century was good to Cincinnati. It grew to be one of the largest cities in America as its products expanded from meat packing and transportation, to soap making, printing ink, and machine tools. For several years, it boasted the tallest building in the US outside of New York City, and it still prides itself on the Roebling suspension bridge.
One of the men contributing to these boom times was Frank Wiborg, the son of Norwegian immigrants, left fatherless in 1866 at age ten, but who worked selling newspapers and clerking at the Grand Hotel to educate himself.
In 1878, at age 23, he had joined Levi Ault, another enterprising young man, and together they built the Ault and Wiborg Company, producers of high quality printing inks , valued by lithographers world over. The business grew splendidly and by 1900 Frank Wiborg was a successful and very wealthy man with a wife, the well-born Adelaide Sherman, 3 daughters and houses- not to say mansions- in Cincinnati, New York City, and East Hampton.
In 1905, the eldest daughter, Sara, was 19 and came out at an elaborate dance at the Cincinnati Country Club, entering the ballroom born aloft in a sedan chair. But as glamorous as that sounds, Cincinnati was not the world she inhabited. Since 1900, she, her mother and two sisters had traveled the world learning French, German, and Italian, riding horses and bicycles, taking singing lessons, attending theater and opera, and dancing at parties in palaces, embassies, and manor houses nearly every night. . By the time she was 18, Sara and her sisters had been celebrated in magazines and newspaper columns for their beauty, musical abilities, wit, and charm. The Cincinnati Country Club must have seemed rather tame, even from the height of a sedan chair. Quite a beginning for our Cincinnati-bred, Sara.
Education certainly took a back seat in her life. But she loved to draw and was good at it, and through her teenage years, she worked diligently at developing her artistic talents, taking classes at the Art Students League in NYC and filling hundreds of pages with sketches, still lifes, and portraits.
By the time Sara was 20, the glamour of travel, clothes and parties were wearing very thin. But there was really nothing else for her to do. She was independent minded and adventuresome, yet stymied by Victorian convention that forced her to live the life of a well groomed “showpiece” whose primary job was to capture an aristocratic husband. There were offers aplenty for a rich, beautiful American, but she refused them all– to her mother’s consternation.
By her early 20’s, her home base in the US had shifted from Cincinnati to the family’s 5th Ave house and their East Hampton estate, the Dunes, a 30 room mansion on 80 acres which included a working farm, stables, a dairy, fruit orchards and a sunken Italian garden. Here she met young Gerald Murphy, five years her junior, when she was in her early twenties and he, a 16 year old at Hotchkiss. Through the early years of their acquaintance, Gerald was incorporated into her life of swimming, riding, sailing, golfing as a younger cousin might have been, a friend with whom she could tease, play, be herself and occasionally reveal in her letters to him, her increasing feelings of emptiness and frustration. As she approached 30, her sense of emptiness and depression increased. She often feels, she writes “frightfully depressed, “rottenly,” and “low”.
World War I ended Sara’s travels, and in 1914, she and Gerald met as adults, Gerald by this time having graduated from Yale where, he had his own fears and confusion to bear. His father was the president of Mark Cross, an acceptably successful business man, but Irish Catholic in a time when that was a social stigma that had to be overlaid by a high born Anglo Saxon Protestant veneer. In addition to this social disguise, Gerald writes of what he called “his defect,” which he fought all his life to conceal. Years later, he writes to Archibald MacLeish that during all of his high school and college years, he engaged in a “too willing distortion of myself into the likeness of popularity and success” He goes on to say that “ I was left with little confidence in the shell that I inhabited as another person” (Rothschild, 23). Most writers speculate that his “defect” was a sexual ambivalence, an attraction to both men and women.
But he fell hard for Sara in the midst of East Hampton’s familiar summer activities. Increasingly each recognized in the other a kindred soul— in their shared sense of fun, style and independence. But also in their recognition that the lives they were leading were trivial and unsatisfying. When they were apart, they wrote daily, he now miserable, working for Mark Cross in New York. In his letters he confides to her his struggle to rid himself of his ‘defect” as well as his passionate desire for her. They are drawn together not only by their creativity, imagination and independence but also by their frustration with the limits and restrictions of late Victorian beliefs and behavior.
By March of 1915 they were engaged, and though both parents disapproved, they were married in December at a small wedding at the 5th Ave home of the Wiborgs. A year later, Gerald volunteered for the military and was sent to flight school in Columbus Ohio. The letters from those first years of their marriage show a husband who expresses his devoted and ardent love at the same time lamenting his “weakness” which he calls “some cursed thing in me,” and which he longs to have “taken some other form” (Rothschild 26). Her letters to him when he was in the military, are full of the joy and delight with her new role as mother to Honoria, their first child, born in 1917. Gerald, too, was completely transported by his role as parent, and at the end of the war, he was strengthen enough by their determination to create a family life different from that they had known, to leave Mark Cross and enroll in Harvard’s school of Landscape Architecture in 1919.
This new endeavor took him to Boston, and forced him to leave Sara and their now 2 children at The Dunes for the summer. But for us, it was a fortuitous separation since through their correspondence we can see the life they were imagining. It was life with Sara as an equal partner working together and sharing work and children. He says “Think what that means!! To be able to work together over the same thing. What husbands and wives can do this?! Think of being able to add to all that we already share—the very work of our hands and brains” (Rothschild, 27).
But doing things their way did not include courses at Harvard for Sara, or a new profession for Gerald. In fact, he does not seem to have thrived in the Harvard program which was oriented toward city planning and required a heavy dose of mathematics. His second year was spent trying to complete his 1st year courses, and he seems to have received no marks from either year. So unsatisfactory was Gerald’s experience at Harvard that they decided to take the next year off and visit the gardens of Europe. They knew they wanted to get away, but they had no real plans for where they would go or how long they would stay.
The European gardens failed to enthrall them, too formal, stately and stiff. They drifted to Paris in 1921 where they found Gerald’s friend from Yale, Cole Porter and his wife Linda. But they found more than that. They found an environment in which American style was seen, as exciting, modern, and innovative. And the Murphys embodied that style with their taste, informality, and openness.
Sara Murphy was modern and sophisticated. She knew the social mores, but “she had also been smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol in mixed company, driving cars, and speaking her mind since well before 1920. Gerald’s talent as tastemaker, with his unerring sense of the scene, and knowledge of modern gadgets (they were apparently the first people in France to have a waffle iron). contributed to the impression that the couple exemplified a quintessential American modernity” (Rothschild, 30), and that was intoxicating to the expatriates and Europeans who flooded Paris in the 20’s.
Paris was really beginning to roar. The War was over, Europe was cheap, and Paris was wide open. It was a Mecca for writers, musicians, painters, dancers, artists of every kind, but also, socialites, adventurers, shysters, the young and the modern from every part of the world. Though it hardly seems the ideal stage for a young family with 3 children and no apparent talents, the Murphys were soon fully embraced by the intellectual and artistic luminaries. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Murphys embraced the artists of Paris, for their great gift was creating an environment that was warm and comfortable but also, stimulating, exciting, colorful, surprising, and just plain fun. And the artistic moths of the Paris avant-guard succumbed, drawn to the bright light of the Murphy lamp.
Their apartment was certainly unpretentious, nothing more than a tenement walk-up in a down-at-the heels neighborhood. But it was decorated by Sara in a severe and imaginative ultramodern style, the parquet floors painted black, the walls white and the only “art” on display a ball bearing, 18” in diameter, mounted on a black pedestal so that it could rotate. This on top of the black ebony piano.
The unexpected was everywhere. Sara lined the window sills with mirrors, placed celery in vases in addition to flowers, and covered the modern furniture with men’s suiting material. But instead of being harsh and overly contrived, those who visited always commented on how homey and comfortable it was. Ellen Barry said “She had a wonderful way of making the places they lived special … a marvelous atmosphere with wonderful food and drink, loads of flowers… the gramophone playing the latest music, and a menagerie of animals”
(Rothschild, 39). Compare this to the heavy velvet-covered, knick-knack bestrewn drawing rooms of Sara’s family. In Paris, Sara and Gerald had managed to jettison the stuffy heaviness of their childhood homes to achieve a sleek, ultramodern style that was trendsetting.
Their personal styles were equally carefully conceived and modern. Gerald wore monochromatic clothes and carried his belongings in a little sack of brightly colored fabric so as not to disarrange the strict line of his clothing. Sara wore her long string of pearls for all occasions, even sunbathing and wore ankle-length, flowing dresses when the style of the 20’s was skimpy and short.
Sara and Gerald threw themselves into the heady activities of the painters, writers, and musicians living and working in Paris: Jean Cocteau, Philip Barry, Dorothy Parker, Archibald MacLeish, Fernand Leger, John Dos Passos, and later Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. The warmth and ingenuity of the Murphys drew people to them so that their “tenement” apartment became a salon where the artistic community met, drank, listened to jazz, talked, argued, and fought.
But Sara and Gerald did more than entertain. When they encountered the experimentation of Russian ballet, at the time, the epitome of modernism, they apprenticed themselves to Natalia Gonsharova, set designer and artist for the Ballets Russes. Under her guidance, they painted sets for Diagalev’s Ballets Russe, attended all rehearsals, and talked, talked, talked as the production took shape. They were invited to work again with Goncharova on the sets of Nijinska’s Les Noces, after which they gave one of their iconic parties, an all night affair on a restaurant barge on the Seine … that quickly assumed the aura of a legend (Viall, 124). The guests included Picasso, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Jean Cocteau.
Even more spectacular than their famous all-night boat party was the 1923 Grand Ball des Artistes, a 4-day charity event for exiled Russian artists, for which Gerald was commissioned to decorate several of the large booths or boxes set up for luminaries. It was apparently a splendid event attended by the Picasso, Derain, Braque, Matisse, Brancusi, Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound, Eric Satie, Stravinski, Prokofiev, Braque, and Juan Gris. Leger came disguised as a locomotive and the Japanese artist Foujita was carried in a golden cage, naked and painted blue. There was a jazz band, dancing, singing, poetry and much, much more. The doors had to be closed and locked after more than a thousand people filled the hall. This was the avant-guard of Paris, the circle of friends the Murphys worked with, partied with, and supported.
As a result of the success of Les Noces, Gerald was asked to create sets, costumes and a scenario for a one act ballet. He suggested that the music be written by his old Yale friend Cole Porter. And so Within the Quota, the story of a young Swedish immigrant to America who overcomes obstacles to become a star, came to be created. The music was modern and jazzy, the characters: the policeman, the colored gentleman, the heiress, stylized, and the story rather sophomoric, but it was a huge success in both Paris and New York. It established Gerald’s reputation as an artist and helped launch his career as a painter
During the time that he and Sara were working on sets with Goronshova, he saw in a gallery window the cubist paintings of Braque, Picasso and Juan Gris. This chance encounter proved and epiphany for him. He said to Sara, “If that’s painting, it’s what I want to do” (Miller, 143). And so he did, renting, himself a studio and setting to work.
His first paintings are now lost, but he showed 4 works at the1923 Salon des Independents, 2 oil paintings, titled Turbines and Engine Room, a water color titled Taxi, and a pencil drawing titled Crystals. No images survive of the drawing and the water color, but the two painting were reviewed by art magazines, and we know that they were cubist studies of the power of machinery and were a great success.
Gerald immediately set to work on his most well known painting Boatdeck, “a giant depiction of the smokestacks and funnels of an ocean liner’ (Rothschild 32). It was 18’high and 12’wide and it was a sensation at the 1924 Salon des Independents, dwarfing the other paintings, drawing large crowds and generating a great deal of press coverage. That is why we have a record of it today as the painting itself has been lost. But The New York Herald Tribune published a picture of Gerald standing in front of the painting, and other journals carried reviews and accounts of its monumental form and pared-down style.
In all, Gerald painted only 14 works. He stopped painting in 1929 and treated his paintings so carelessly that 7 of them are lost, including Boatdeck. But to understand how or why this might have happened, we must turn away from Gerald as the graphic artist and turn to Sara, their children, and the environment that they created which proved so nurturing for the artists of the day. As becomes apparent, for both of them, life was their canvass and the art of living their discipline. Sara was an artist of people. She had the gift of wit, warmth and
wisdom. A somewhat comic poem written to her by her friend Richard Meyers describes her wonderfully (Rothschild, 40).
And the place where she shone, even more than in Paris, where they made “pleasure an art” for themselves and the peripatetic writers and painters of the day (Rothschild, 47) was on the French Riviera at Cap d’Antibes.
They went there first in 1922 as guests of the Porters. At that time, the French Riviera was a popular watering hole for upper class French and English, but only in the winter. It was deserted in the summer. John Dos Passos writes, “the upper class French and British would not be seen dead on the Riviera in summer,,, but for the Americans the temperature was ideal, the water delicious and Antibes was a sort of virgin port we dreamed of discovering.” (Rothschild 47).
The resort hotel closed in May and no one approached the “little tiny beach covered with a bed of seaweed that must have been …three of four feet thick” (Rothschild, 47). But Sara and Gerald were not deterred. They persuaded the “large, proud, rose-colored hotel,” as Fitzgerald called it in Tender is the Night (which he dedicated to them), to remain open for them and their friends through the summer months. Soon the summer season was more popular than the winter season, and credit is given to the Murphys for “inventing” Cap d’Antibes as the summer resort of choice for the artists and upper class families of the day.
Actually, the Murphys didn’t invent the life at Antibes as much as they transposed it from the beach lifestyle that they had enjoyed at East Hampton. In addition to slowly clearing away the seaweed at La Garoupe Beach, Gerald swam for miles every day, and with the 3 children he and Sara danced on the beach, performed calisthenics and gymnastics, played in the surf, sailed, did yoga, as well as playing golf and tennis, Sara always wearing her pearls and Gerald in his innovative beach wear which ranged from nothing at all to a raffish pirate ensemble complete with stripped shirt and head bandana.
As in Paris, their lives were shared by artists. They were visited by Daighilev and Cocteau who reproduced their lives there in a ballet that showcase the acrobatic talent of their new dancer Anton Dolin. The resulting work, Le Train Bleu, is about the summer exodus from Paris to the Cote D’Azur and the cult of physical fitness practiced there” (Rothschild, 49). The sets by Picasso pictured the portable cabana the Murphys had installed at the beach, and Coco Chanel based her costumes on Gerald’s outrageous beach wear.
And this is something that I would like to get at about the Murphys. That they –without being patrons of art (they collected almost nothing) or of artists and without being recognized artists themselves–, stimulated and inspired art in others, and the others were the greatest artists of the day, Picasso, Fitzgerald, Leger, Hemingway. Their activities, music, conversation, appearance, clothes, surroundings added up to a lifestyle that was little less than a muse for the avant-guard of the period.
Let’s take Picasso as an example. Picasso and his wife visited the Murphys at Antibes in 1923. A note from Sara to Olga Picasso is still extant. In it Sara arranges a play date for the children. “Chere Madame Picasso, Our children are going to the beach at 9:45 and will return at 11:30 (they eat lunch at 12:00). We would be so happy if your baby could accompany them, with his nurse. Would you and Mr. Picasso want to go bathing with us later? The beach is really very nice and we have an American canoe” (quoted in Rothschild, 49).
As the summer progressed, the 2 families spent more and more time together with dinners, play dates, and picnics. Back in Paris, Sara invites the time Picassos to dinner “Can it be Sunday night? We’ll drink; we’ll dance and be crazy.
There are many snapshots in Sara’s photo album of the Picasssos and Murphys on the beach with their children. In many of them Picasso stands off to the side, observing. But these commonplace scenes from this summer are transformed by Picasso in his drawings and paintings “into idealized images of classical figures on a generalized shore. Among them are images of the Murphys and their friends exercising on the beach” (Rothschild 51), some of them on Hotel du Cap d’Antibes stationery. One photograph shows Sara and 2 other women on the beach, their arms linked around each other. Their arrangement is echoed in the more than 20 sketches of the Three Graces that Picasso made during this period“at the beach” (Rothschild, 51).
Picasso’s studies for Woman in White link the woman to Sara through the long rope of pearls she wears in a tiny drawing in his notebook of sketches done that summer. Critics argue that while the woman (and others of the same period) do not have Sara’s face, “they do seem to have something of her –a tenderness, calm, and self possession that images of Picasso’s wife and the classical types he drew before 1923 do not in general share” (Rothschild, 52). Fitzgerald sees much the same thing as he describes Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night: “She gave the impression of repose that was at once static and evocative.” (53) In a note to Sara, he wrote “I used you again and again in Tender…I tried to evoke not you but the effect you produce upon men “(Rothschild, 54).
The Murphys were so enamored of Antibes, that in 1923, they bought a small, unpretentious chalet that they named Villa America. They remodeled it according to their minimalist aesthetic but with the most up-to-date, American innovations: screen doors, gadgets like electric fans and waffle irons, a flat roof used for a sun deck (which Le Corbusier praises), and stainless steel bathroom fixtures. In the interior, the floors were painted black and covered with zebra skins; there were lots of mirrors and bowls filled with flowers from their garden, a small dairy so the children could have fresh milk, vegetable gardens , a citrus orchard and olive trees. “Fitzgerald evoked the magic of the place in Tender is the Night and Philip Barry used it for a setting in his play Hotel Universe” (Rothschild, 58). And Fitzgerald again echoes the Murphys in the name he uses for his protagonist’s daughter in Babylon Revisited. He names her Honoria).
Artist guests not withstanding, while at Villa America, Gerald and Sara’s life centered on the children. The Murphy’s were devoted parents who spared no effort to make their children’s lives and surroundings as rich and interesting as their own. They organized elaborate Easter egg hunts with maps and “buried Pirate’s jewels,” art exhibitions—Le Salon de Jeuness—judged by Picasso – led them in exercises on the beach, and instructed them in the usual seaside pleasures of sailing, tennis and swimming, but also some unusual ones such as gymnastics, yoga, canoeing, and dancing.
And although their guests were the stars of their firmaments, when at Villa America, artists and children alike were embraced into the family routine, “grounded in familial love and friendship” (Saccoccia, 4). Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Philip Barry and Cole Porter, Jean Cocteau and Coco Chanel, Fernand Leger, Lillian Hellman, and Dorothy Parker all entered deeply into the lives of Gerald and Sara, but also into those of Patrick, Boath and Honoria. Children’s art and activities were everywhere. “There is a photograph by Man Ray from that period, of the oldest child, Honoria, dressed in the Harlequin costume worn by Paulo Picasso in his father’s famous painting from 1924. Other photos in their albums show them all on the beach cavorting with Picasso, and Leger. Truly, the lives of the 3 Murphy children were as full of beauty, innovation, and new ideas and pursuits, as their parents could make them.
For grown ups and children alike life at Villa American was full of art, wonderful food, conversation, creative people, and all the newest gadgets and music. American jazz was enormously popular with the international set, and Gerald always had the latest recordings of the artist of the moment. The latest dance or song, the most recent film could always be experienced at the Murphy’s gatherings.
But they were not collectors or patrons in the usual sense of those words. They collected only American folk art, and though generous with their artist friends when they were in great need, the Murphys did not offer them ongoing financial support either by buying their works or by giving them money. They expressed themselves through their decorative flair, intelligence and wit. Rothschild writes that Gerald “meticulously planned, intellectualized, and expended great effort to make each moment a beautiful event. Philip Barry said that the sight of Gerald making cocktails reminded him of a priest celebrating Mass” (Saccoccia, 3).
Gerald continued to paint during this period, and as in his burnishing of ordinary daily activities into gleaming perfection, his paintings “elevate the commonplace to high-art status” (Rothschild, 59). He takes humble, everyday objects as his subject—watches, razors, fountain pens, match boxes– and transforms these images from everyday life (though they are all American consumer products) “into art of iconic power. Anticipating pop art, Gerald’s paintings break the boundary between everyday objects as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns would do decades later” (Saccoccia, 3).
That Gerald suffered a poor self-image is certainly amply illustrated in his letters. In 1931, he wrote to Archibald MacLeisch “I have never been able to feel sure that anyone was fond of me because it would seem too much to claim, knowing what I did about myself” (Rothschild, 67). But how or if these feelings play out in his art, I leave to others. His painting certainly made him happy and his work was noticed and praised by the art establishment. Yet he stopped painting in 1929 as the foundations of their idyll began to crumble.
The disasters began in 1928 when their son, Patrick, became ill with TB. A few months later, the stock market crash greatly reduced their income which had never been as princely as many imagined. They had lived comfortably, even lavishly, on Sara’s annuity of $20,000 a year. But the crash reduced this, and the favorable exchange rate that they had in France dropped also. Because of Patrick’s illness they closed up Villa America in 1928 and moved to Switzerland so that he could take the prescribed 2-year cure. Gerald put away his paints forever
Still cheerful, Sara set about making their lives there as pleasant as possible. Of course, that involved friends. Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, the Hemingway family, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, , Dos Passos, Fernand Leger, all visited, some staying for months. They even opened a night club, Harry’s Bar, with a chef and a band. But it was not fun and games, in fact, Dorothy Parker left because it was so cold and depressing. Patrick was very ill, and Zelda Fitzgerald was descending into madness at a clinic on Lake Geneva. Scott and Gerald met many times there where Gerald, too, saw a psychiatrist and wrote later “At one point I had a problem and went to see a shrink in Basel and got rid of the problem” (Rothschild, 69).
But more troubles awaited them. Gerald’s father died in 1931 and Gerald was required to return to the U.S to take over the floundering Mark Cross which was on the verge of bankruptcy. Financial considerations were making life in Europe untenable, and they all returned to the United States in 1934 to nurse Patrick and to set to work earning a living. Sara stayed with Patrick at Saranac Lake for another cure while Gerald worked in New York, Boath and Honoria both being away at school.
Imagine their horror and despair when in 1935, their athletic, healthy son Boath died from complications from meningitides. He was not quite 16. Patrick died 2 years later after 7 years if pain and struggle with TB. At 16 he weighed only 60 pounds. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to them “the golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now” (Rothschild, 74).
Their friends did not desert them. The Murphy’s talents for cultivating and maintaining deep friendships lasted through out their lives. But the glory days were over. The “most stylish people I ever met in my life” as Lillian Hellman called them, settled into a grayer but still luminous life in East Hampton. They burned down the mansion and built themselves a smaller house on the estate. Their marriage survived the tragedies of their losses and over time, Gerald rebuilt Mark Cross “with flair but little relish” (Viall in MIN, 127). He died in East Hampton in 1964 and Sara died 11 years later.
Materially, they left behind very little, really, not much more than the rest of us do or will. But in the end, they had lived lives that mattered. They had supported and inspired some of the 20th century’s most important artists and writers. And by their efforts and creativity had accomplished Gerald’s goal to turn the most everyday activities and enterprises into art, “to make daily living beautiful and perfect” (Rothschild, 59). It was an ephemeral art, but an art, none the less. As a guest , Peg MacLeish, described it: “An artist can do this with his painting, a poet with his poem—that capturing of the essence of the moment—but somehow, Dow’s (Gerald’s) special gift seems to have been in the very doing itself, so that the record is left not in any concrete form that can be examined by others, as a painting or poem can be, but is simply held in the minds of those who were present the moment of creation” (Rothschild,59). The golden bowl may have been broken, but it was indeed golden.
And, oh, before he died, Gerald had the satisfaction of knowing that his painting Wasp and Pear had been added to “the permanent collection of that temple of modernism, the Museum of Modern Art “ (Viall in MIN,130).
Notes
1 Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Babylon Revisited.” In The American Ttradition in Literature. eds. George Perkins, Sculley Bradley, Richmond Beatty, E. Hudson Long. ( McGraw-Hill: New York, 1990), pp.1434-1447
Bibliography
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Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. Charles Scribner and Sons. New York: 1934.
Miller,Linda Patterson. “Gerald Murphy in Letters, Literature and Life.” In Making it New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy. ed. Deborah Rothschild. (U of California Press: Berkley. 2008) pp. 143-165.
Price, Kathryn and Deborah Rothschild. “The Making of it New” The Magazine Antiques. 11/1/2007.http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-171582271.html.
Rothschild, Deborah, ed. Making it New: the Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy. University of California Press: Berkley. 2007.
Rothschild, Deborah. “Masters of the Art of Living.” In Making it New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy. ed. Deborah Rothschild. (U of California Press: Berkley. 2008). pp. 11-87.
Schjeldahl, Peter. “Modren Love: Gerald amd Sara Murphy at Work and Play.” The New Yorker. August 6, 2007. pp74-75.
Saccoccia, Susan. Life as Art: Friendship among the Avant-Guard.” www.neh.gov/news/humanities.2007-07/Life-as-Art.htm
Viall, Amanda. Everybody was so Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, a Lost Generation Love Story. Houghton Mifflin, Boston: 1998.
Viall, Amanda. “ Concealment of Realities: Gerald Murphy in the Theater.”” in Making it New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy. ed. Deborah Rothschild. (U of California Press: Berkley. 2008). Pp. 119-133