Gerald Murphy

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Gerald Clery Murphy, born in Boston, Massachusetts on March 25, 1888, was heir to the family who owned Mark Cross Company, sellers of fine leather goods. Gerald himself was president of Mark Cross Company for a time.

Educated at Yale, Murphy befriended a young freshman named Cole Porter and brought him into his fraternity and introduced him around to his friends, propelling Porter into writing music for Yale musicals. Murphy's daughter, Honoria Murphy Donnelly, participated in a retrospective of Cole Porter's life on public television in 1992.

With his wife Sara, he moved to the French Riviera in the early 20th century, where they became the center of a large social circle of artists and writers of later fame in the 20th century. Gerald was also a Precisionist artist in his own right. Gerald died October 17, 1964 in East Hampton, New York.

Calvin Tomkins's biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy Living Well Is the Best Revenge was published in 1971. Amanda Vaill's biography of the couple, Everybody Was So Young, was published in 1998. Nicole and Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald) are widely recognized as based on the Murphys. Ernest Hemingway's couple in The Garden of Eden is not explicitly based on this pair, but given the similarities and the setting (Nice), there is clearly some basis for such an assumption. Interestingly, guests of the Murphys would often swim at Eden Roc, an event emulated in The Garden of Eden.

[edit] Works by Gerald Murphy

• Watch
• Razor