Living Well Is The Best Revenge

My recent column commemorating the mind-blowing time best friend Gene Mercy and I spent in Pamplona in 1959 with Ernest Hemingway rekindled my early lust for the literary and cultural ephemera of the Roaring Twenties. Above is a photo of Gerald Murphy, wife Sarah Murphy, and Cole and Linda Porter, panoplies of the era’s golden times.

My fascination with the Yale variant of the scene, propounded by growing up in New Haven, even with the Princeton presence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, brought me back to those heady days of yore.

“” Living Well Is the Best Revenge” is Calvin Tomkins' now-classic account of the lives of Gerald and Sara Murphy, two epic American expatriates who formed an extraordinary circle of friends in France during the 1920s.

First in Paris where Murphy studied and partook a career as an artist moving to the seaside town of Antibes hosting a cast of many of the most memorable artists and writers of the era including Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Ernest Hemingway and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald once told Murphy his book “Tender Is The Night” was inspired by him and Sarah and the way they lived.

Gerald Murphy was an aesthete from his childhood. He was never comfortable in the boardrooms and clubs for which his father was grooming him. He failed the entrance exams at Yale University three times before matriculating, but he performed respectably there. He joined Delta Kappa Epsilon and the Skull and Bones society. He befriended a young freshman named Cole Porter (Yale class of 1913) who brought him into Delta Kappa Epsilon introducing him to his friends propelling him into writing music for Yale musicals.

Murphy was voted Best Dressed Man in the Class of 1911. He was assisted in this endeavor by my grandfather, Jacobi Press, who had also befriended Cole Porter at the neighboring DKE house on York Street. My dad, Paul Press, gleefully recounted to me this little-known fact of J. Press history when I told him of my enthusiasm reading Fitzgerald for my favorite college lit course.

After several family tragedies together with the impact of the depression, Gerald Murphy returned from Europe in the early 1930s again leading the family business, Mark Cross, the legendary leather goods emporium that embodied classic Fifth Avenue chic. He rejuvenated the then foundering business, eventually selling it at its height and retiring in 1956. A man for all seasons, an artist turned merchant. His artwork developed a style of its own and began attracting attention in the early 1920s. At his death in 1964, his paintings were represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Living well was indeed the best revenge.

RICHARD PRESS