The Center of the Storm

As wealthy American expatriates in Paris during the 1920s, Sara and Gerald Murphy attended all the glamorous parties and dined at the best restaurants. They championed the American cocktail, jazz music, and avant-garde art, and their circle of friends reads like a who’s who of 20th-century creative juggernauts, counting Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, and Cole Porter. They took private art lessons from Natalia Goncharova and painted sets for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Their summer pilgrimages to a house on the beach at Antibes, aptly named Villa America, spearheaded the fad for vacationing on the French Riviera. What the Murphys were after was nothing less than the transformation of the act of living into a refined art form, a goal that inspired Fitzgerald to model the characters of Dick and Nicole Diver in “Tender Is the Night” after them. In the process, their lives became the very template of the elegant simplicity that would come to define the new modernist American aesthetic.