Good for you, Clive, as in James, on your television criticism for the Telegraph. Not many people nowadays know how good a painter Gerald Murphy was. Richard E. Grant pointed this out in his programme The Riviera: A History in Pictures, and Clive praised him for it. Clive James is weak on health but very strong on intellect, and it’s good to read him and his pithy remarks in a paper of value.
Gerald Murphy was the model for Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. He was the owner of Mark Cross, a luxury goods store on 5th Avenue, back when luxury goods were beautiful and owned by people with good taste. Gerald and Sara Murphy invented the summer Riviera of the Twenties. Their villa America near Antibes was the social centre for expatriate American writers, musicians and artists. Sara was blonde and beautiful and supposedly had an affair with Picasso. I think it was just gossip by those who couldn’t get her into their beds. No matter how much she might have admired Picasso’s crappy art, upper-class American ladies did not sleep with dirty Spanish painters back then. Not even now, although there is no more upper class left in America, alas. The new plutocrat poseurs-billionaires pretend to be old money, but they’re crude and still have to think for a split second before picking up their forks and knives.
The Murphys were tragic heroes. They lost both their beautiful sons to sickness, and slowly saw their fortune disappear. Gerald Murphy lived in genteel poverty in Easthampton until his late seventies, I believe, uncomplaining and a gentleman to the last. Sara died 11 years later. Gerald burned most of his wonderful paintings, although I think four survived.
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