100th anniversary: The 1923 party that made the decade roar

As a student of parties, I know all too well those ones that rest in the mausoleum of glamour.

The Black and White Ball, for one, hosted by Truman Capote, has never really stopped getting ink since 1966 — a soirée in honour of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, which drew everyone from Lee Radziwill to Frank Sinatra, shaping the imagination wherein lies the Plaza Hotel in New York. Another storied shindig came the following decade, with the so-called Surrealist Ball, when society hostess Marie-Hélène de Rothschild drew everyone from Salvador Dali to Audrey Hepburn at Château de Ferrières in 1972. Malcolm Forbes’ who’s-who-y 70th birthday bash in Morocco during the 1980s? You had to be there.

Emperor Nicholas II of Russia and Empress Alexandra! They remain forever entrenched in the entertaining annals for a much earlier OTT celebration held in 1903 on the cusp of a pending revolution — a party that was actually two parties: one night, a dinner, dance and concert in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg; two days later, a fancy dress ball. Spanning three days and 300 dishes centuries earlier, meanwhile: the thus-remembered Manchu-Han Imperial Feast, circa 1720. A marathon dinner (six different banquets!), it was ostensibly designed as a peace offering of sorts between the Manchu and Han Chinese people.

The flip of the calendar this year, however, has had me thinking about another mythic party: a social bloodbath held on the Seine in 1923. Indeed, it is its 100th anniversary. One that consistently shows up on any list of the Most Epic Parties of All Time, it was thrown in June of that year by Gerald and Sara Murphy, the quintessence of colourful expat life in Paris and the Riviera during that era (the Murphys famously inspiring the characters of Nicole and Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final, aching novel, “Tender Is the Night”).

Shortly after the new year, I happened to crack open again a wonderful 1999 biography I have of the couple titled “Everybody Was So Young” (best title!) by Amanda Vaill, and found myself revisiting that party, 100 years later. Roar, Twenties, Roar. (One way to beat the winter blahs, right?) Held the first night of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “Les Noces,” and because Gerald — a kind of dilettante painter — had helped with the sets, it was concocted to honour everyone involved.

Take a pair of wealthy madcaps — who would come to define the idea of the Lost Generation, and etch their places in history by carousing with the likes of Man Ray, Ernest Hemingway and, of course, the Fitzgeralds — and add a barge on the famous river that cuts through Paris and — presto — you’ve got one off-the-hook rager.

Since it was a Sunday and the florists closed, Sara famously decorated the banquet tables with pyramids of toys — fire engines, cars, dolls, clowns — that she had found in a Montparnasse bazaar, which pleased Picasso so much he later rearranged the toys into a traffic pileup. There were bucketloads of champagne and serenading galore and ballerinas dancing. Stravinsky had fun switching the place cards. Cocteau was big with the hijinks. As dawn broke, two men took down Sara’s gigantic laurel wreath, inscribed “Les Noces,” and held it like a hoop for Stravinsky to jump through. It was all a hoot, and carried none of the protocol and formality that attached itself to many high-society events of the previous decades. It announced the New.

The party is remembered now not only because of the party itself, but its hosts, who would go on to define the notion of an “It Couple” (think of Sara and Gerald as the “Beyoncé and Jay-Z” of 1920s Paris), and because of the way one party helped to officially launch and cement their social ascent (a strategy that still works). An instruction in schmooze! Were it not for the success of this party would everyone have followed the Murphys to the Riviera for the summer, shortly after? Maybe not. But they did — and helped to make the Riviera a “thing,” as historians of the beau monde will tell you.

The previous year, the Murphys had spent two weeks at Antibes with the Cole Porters, who had rented the Château de la Garoupe, next to the Hôtel du Cap, near the tip of Cap d’Antibes. This time they persuaded Antoine Sella, the proprietor of the hotel, who usually closed the place from May to September, to keep a few rooms open. The Murphys then asked Picasso to join them and, to their delight, he accepted and brought along his Russian wife, Olga, and two-year-old son, Paulo.

“They were amazed to find that they had launched a fashion that would revolutionize the world’s concept not only of the French Riviera but also of the Mediterranean, as the planet’s most popular playground,” as John Richardson put it in Vanity Fair in 2007, on the occasion of an exhibit called “Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy,” at the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts.

As Picasso later remarked, looking over the throng of sunbathers on the beach at La Garoupe — which Gerald had been the first to clear of seaweed — he and the Murphys had a lot to answer for.

There would be many more splashes, more carousing. Indeed, a famous article was published in the New Yorker about the couple by Calvin Tomkins in 1962: “Living Well Is the Best Revenge.” A title with at least a patina of irony. Because, of course, the party rarely lasts forever. Facing the inevitable headwinds that all lives face (losses on the stock market eventually curbed the Murphys’ lifestyle; they lost two sons, both in their teens), Sara, in particular, felt taken in by Fitzgerald — she’d spent hours with him, when he grilled her mercilessly about her life.

“She would be appalled 10 years later, when ‘Tender Is the Night’ came out, to discover the motive for his interrogations,” Richardson wrote. “Fitzgerald had cast the Murphys in his and (wife) Zelda’s image. To be perceived as spoiled expatriates at the nadir of the Depression would be a source of sorrow for Sara — retribution, perhaps, for having lived too well.”

Even 100 years later, however, the afterglow of one, dazzling party remains, as far as the Murphys go. They’ll always have Paris.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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