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Despite the fact that he knew most of the giants of modern art, Gerald never collected their pictures. He was in some ways very much his merchant father's son. Just as the elder Murphy introduced many appurtenances of upper-class European life to the U.S., Gerald acquainted his friends in France with such American contrivances as jazz records and waffle irons, portable bathhouses and inflatable rubber horses. Fitzgerald was so awed by Murphy's taste that he thought it must apply to everything and consulted him on literary matters. Gerald did not really respond to his friend's work. Indeed, it was only on rereading Tender Is the Night years later that he recognized that pages and pages of detail had been lifted intact from his life.
Crackup. Scott's antics exasperated him, once to the point where he banished him from Villa America for three weeks for tossing gold-flecked Venetian wine glasses over the garden wall at a dinner party. When Scott began ostentatiously "studying" the Murphys for his fiction, Sara wrote him: "If you can't take friends largely, and without suspicion, then they are not friends at all. The ability to know what another person feels in a given situation will make—or ruin—lives." But Gerald loved Scott at his best and "the region where his gift came from—when he'd tell you his real thoughts about people and lose himself in defining them."
For a while it looked as if the Murphys' world was truly charmed, but like so many other worlds, it fell apart in the early '30s. Gerald had to take over Mark Cross, which was a million dollars in debt. The Fitzgeralds' crack-up began in earnest; Hemingway began the drift from wife to wife. Then, in a terrible 18 months, both the Murphys' sons died, one of tuberculosis, the other of meningitis.
Gerald lived until 1964. He would have been delighted by Tomkins' book. A marvel of taste and economy, it manages to convey the originality and grace of the Murphys' life. But one suspects that what Gerald would admire most is the 43-page section of pictures, presented as modestly as a family album—no large format, no color, no glossy paper, every expense spared. The simplicity only enhances the subjects: Picasso preening on La Garoupe; Cole Porter mugging on the Piazza San Marco; Hemingway displaying a day's catch; the Murphys' two small sons, looking the picture of health, gazing at the camera from the protection of their parents' arms.