Remembering Baoth

Sara Murphy was in Key West visiting the writer Ernest Hemingway and his wife Pauline when she received word from her husband, Gerald, that their eldest son, Baoth, was gravely ill.

A third-former at St. George’s, Baoth had contracted the measles and his condition had worsened so much that Headmaster J. Vaughan Merrick III made the urgent decision to rush him by ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston — even before he could reach the Murphys.

Sara’s sudden trip back to New England to be at Baoth’s bedside was reported in the New Herald Tribune newspaper. It was February 1935.

Throughout most of the 1920s, Gerald and Sara Murphy were the glamorous and charismatic couple at the heart of a vibrant expatriate community outside Paris. Calvin Tomkins wrote about their life in the New Yorker, articles that later became his book “Living Well Is the Best Revenge.”

The two met in 1904 in East Hampton, New York, where Sara’s parents, the Wiborgs, originally from Cincinnati, had built a 30-room mansion they called The Dunes and Gerald’s family had a summer home. Gerald attended Yale, becoming friends with Cole Porter, while Sara was educated in Germany, where the Wiborgs lived for a time, and at the Spence School.

They both grew up in immense privilege — Sara was five years older — although they confided in each other that their parents had been emotionally distant. They were both eager, it seems, to escape their families’ expectations.

Gerald and Sara were friendly companions until 1915, when Sara was 32 and Gerald 28, and they were engaged and eventually married in a modest ceremony at the Wiborg home on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Neither of their parents were particularly thrilled about the arrangement. Gerald had been born in Boston to an Irish family that owned the Mark Cross Co., a seller of luxury leather goods, while Sara’s father, Frank Wiborg, had become a millionaire by age 40 as a manufacturing chemist who co-founded a printing ink and varnish company.

Gerald and Sara moved to Paris in 1921 and later to the French Riviera. In France, the couple found not only liberation but a vibrant cultural and social life. “They studied painting and helped create scenery for Sergei Diaghilev’s popular Ballets Russes,” wrote Gioia Diliberto in her review of a 1998 book about the Murphys, “Everybody Was So Young,” by Amanda Vaill. “One day, while working on some stage sets, the Murphys met an intense young artist named Picasso. He introduced them to other figures of the avant-garde.”

The Murphys and their three children — daughter Honoria, Baoth, and younger son Patrick — spent long days on the beach in Cap d’Antibes. At night, the couple hosted parties at the Bohemian Mediterranean home they named Villa America, where “Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, Cole Porter, and Dorothy Parker listened to Louis Armstrong records and talked all night about art.” Fernand Léger paintings adorned their walls. The couple later served as the inspiration for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 “Tender Is the Night,” and Sara modeled for some of Picasso’s paintings. Gerald, ultimately known as a “brilliant and inventive” painter himself, created a body of work later exhibited at revered institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Until Baoth’s illness, the Murphys had mostly worried about the health of their younger son, Patrick, diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1929. For a time, the entire family,

including the boys and Honoria, moved to MontanaVermala, a health resort/hospital in the Swiss Alps.

In those years, as the family’s melancholy grew over Patrick’s health, perhaps Baoth saw his role as the one who could lighten his parents’ and his sister’s mood; he became known for his humorous, lighthearted nature. At that time, he was the lucky one.

Sara Murphy had two sisters, Olga and Mary. “Grandfather Wiborg had only daughters, and he felt sorely deprived of an heir to carry the Wiborg name,” Honoria wrote in her 1982 memoir, “Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After.” The discontent apparently lingered; years later, in 1926, Gerald and Sara agreed to legally change Baoth’s name to F. Baoth Wiborg. Frank Bestow Wiborg died four years later, in May 1930.

Baoth joined the third form on the Hilltop in 1934, Headmaster Merrick’s seventh year. Baoth was one of 17 third-formers to join the school, which had an overall enrollment of 168 that year, down from 183 in 19311932, in large part due to the Great Depression. The new students also included two whose names still reverberate on campus thanks to their generous and heartfelt philanthropic support of St. George’s: Lewis Madeira ’39, for whom Madeira Hall is named, and Albert Merck ’39, namesake of the Merck Center for Teaching.

By all accounts, Baoth was a crowd-pleaser from the start, often joking with his friends and family or making people smile when reading one of his letters. “Baoth was a comedian, a laughing child,” Honoria wrote. “He was very much like Mother, which is why she loved him so.”

When Baoth came to St. George’s, in 1934, he was “as robust and light-hearted as ever at age 15,” she said. “I just love this school,” he wrote to his mother the day after Gerald had dropped him off. “It’s ‘jus wunnerful.’”

Upon his arrival on the Hilltop, Baoth would’ve just begun getting used to school in the United States. Born in New York in 1919, he had spent much of his childhood homeschooled overseas.

Following the 1929 stock market crash, the Murphys returned to the United States. By 1934, Gerald officially took over the Mark Cross brand, expanding its offerings to include luggage, cigarette cases, and even jeweled evening bags. The company still includes in its publicity a clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rear Window,” in which Grace Kelly carries a Mark Cross overnight case. (The Murphy family eventually sold the company, although Gerald stayed on as president until his retirement in 1955.)

In the early 1930s, Baoth attended boarding school in Germany. However, when Sara and Gerald learned that Baoth was being forced to stand in the snow at 5:30 a.m. in his underwear to do “Heil Hitlers,” they deemed it time to pull him out, Honoria recalled in her memoir; she vividly remembered going to retrieve Baoth and her parents having “an angry discussion with the headmaster.”

“I went with Baoth to help him pack,” she wrote. “… Baoth told me of the way he intended to get revenge for what had been done to him at school. As the headmaster came strutting down the hallway after the meeting with our parents, Baoth and I sprang around the corner and stuck our tongues out at him. ‘Rude Americans,’ he sputtered, as we ran for the car, delighted.”

Somewhat trying years followed for the Murphys in the U.S., although the strong friendships they had forged continued to sustain them. Patrick, years into his diagnosis of tuberculosis, required constant care. Perhaps sensing their anxiety, in August 1932, Pauline and Ernest Hemingway — a celebrity since the publication of “The Sun Also Rises” (1926) and “A Farewell to Arms” (1929) — invited Sara, Gerald, Baoth, and Honoria to spend three weeks at the L-Bar-T Ranch with them in Wyoming.

“Every day at the ranch was a delight,” Honoria wrote. “Baoth and I would go with the cowboys at five in the morning to round up the horses. One cowboy was named Hal. … He taught Baoth and me every word of ‘Red River Valley,’ which was the first song of the American West I had ever heard.

“After supper, Ernest told stories of his adventures as a hunter.”

In the fall of 1934, Baoth joined the football team at St. George’s and enjoyed sailing, with which he was very

familiar, having spent much time on his family’s twomasted schooner Weatherbird in Antibes. He wrote to his parents on Oct. 7 that he had just gotten out of the infirmary with a cold. “I’m awfully sorry, but I was sailing in the bay and the boat capsized and I came home on the handlebars of my bicycle, another boy pedaling.”

According to Honoria, Sara and Gerald visited Baoth at St. George’s in late October, and they sent Patrick a postcard picturing the Newport mansion of Marion Graves Anthon Fish, Olga Wiborg’s mother-in-law.

In another postcard a few weeks later, Honoria reported, Baoth shared “the worst pun I ever heard” in an effort to boost Patrick’s spirits. That fall, Patrick had relapsed and was at a hospital in New York. “At a football game, I was standing in front of the bench on the sidelines, evidently obstructing someone’s view, because he said, ‘I know you’re a pain (pane), but you’re not a window.’”

Baoth was clearly happy at St. George’s, although Honoria sensed “he enjoyed his extracurriculars more than his classwork.” In November, she said, he had failing grades in history and math. “I’m sorry about my grades,” Baoth wrote to his parents on Nov. 24, “but it’s hard to settle down … I’ll try to keep my head. I’m having a very nice time. I take wrestling and swimming since football has stopped. I shall now turn over a new leaf.”

At Christmastime, Baoth and several classmates returned home to New York for the holiday break by ferry — the Fall River Line from Newport. The Murphys’ Manhattan apartment overlooked the East River, and as they came down the river, they saw a sheet hanging from a window, on which Sara Murphy had written, “Welcome home, Baoth.”

“Baoth was back in the St. George’s infirmary in January 1935, but his letter to our parents on the 29th was reassuring, not just for what he had to report, but because of his jocular tone as well,” Honoria recalled. “‘My ills are over,’ he wrote. ‘A slight cold mixed with a dash of hydrophobia made up my ailment.’ He was spoofing,” Honoria added. “Baoth loved to swim and had no fear of the water whatsoever.”

Baoth reported that he had been released from the infirmary on Saturday, Jan. 26. “The delay in the writing of this missive was caused by grievous arrears in Latin prose,” he wrote. “[However,] I think my grades are forging their way up. If their altitude is not sufficient, believe me, the pressure will be increased.”

He spoke fondly of his Christmas vacation in New York. Their parents, Honoria said, “always saw to it that the quality of our entertainment was of the best sort, and it often included Shakespeare plays. Back at school, Baoth boasted, ‘I am a walking encyclopedia of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.’”

“He obviously enjoyed being a clown, and he did a written imitation of a hillbilly accent. ‘Ah ain’t fergettin’ me pleasures daown thar in Noo Yawk.’ He signed the letter, ‘The leaning tower of Baoth.’”

It wasn’t long, however, after Baoth returned to the Hilltop from the break that he was back in the St. George’s infirmary.

The Murphys’ papers are held in the archives at Yale University. There, boxes of photographs —including family portraits taken by Man Ray — along with letters and personal effects, are housed, artifacts caught in time of lives lived well, yes, but not without tragedy.

Among the family mementos is a small manila card from the St. George’s infirmary, dated Feb. 15, 1935, 5 p.m. Written in pencil is “Name: Baoth Wiborg. Illness: measles with ear complications. Temperature: 99.4. Respiration: 24. Pulse: 84. Remarks: Left ear draining an occasional drop. Nauseated at intervals between 9:30 and 12:30 … No vomiting since this time. Slept between 2 and 4 p.m. Feeling better upon awakening. Has taken four ounces of orange juice and retained it.”

On the back of the small card is a message from Baoth, which the attending physician had transcribed and relayed to Gerald. “Much pleased that Mother got away for a much-earned rest [in Key West]. There isn’t anything I want. Much love to everybody.”

Baoth died at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, on March 17, 1935. He was 15.

On March 21, Sara and Gerald wired the Hemingways and Dos Passoses in Key West:

Baoth’s funeral took place at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton, New York, on Sunday, March 24, at 3 p.m. His grave is beside Frank Wiborg’s in South End Cemetery.

The memorial service for Baoth at St. George’s on May 26, 1935, was reported in the May 29, 1935, edition of the Red & White. Following the regular chapel service that morning, the choir led the congregation to a tree and bench donated by the Murphys in Baoth’s memory, which had been placed north of the tennis courts next to Main Drive. “Everyone sang the hymn, ‘The strife o’er, the battle done,’” the paper reported. Headmaster Merrick read commemorative prayers and faculty member Arthur S. Roberts, who taught from 1903 to 1946, read a section of the Old Testament. The choir sang “Ave Maria,” after which Archibald MacLeish, the longtime friend of the Murphys, read “Words to Be Spoken,” a poem he had written specifically for the occasion.

Later, MacLeish recalled being struck by emotion at the memorial service and having difficulty beginning the reading until another man, recognizing his predicament, came and stood quietly next to him. It was the famed poet Ogden Nash, St. George’s Class of 1920.

Headmaster Merrick reported Baoth’s death to the external St. George’s community in the Alumni Bulletin in June 1935. “Our winter term was very difficult,” he wrote. “Not for a good many years has there been so much interruption due to illness, nor so much anxiety arising from its form.”

A number of schools besides St. George’s were significantly impacted by the measles epidemic, and Merrick reported 27 students on the Hilltop had contracted the disease in February and March 1935, four of whom, like Baoth, had developed mastoiditis, a serious bacterial infection in the mastoid bone behind the ear.

“The end of the term was profoundly saddened by the death of Baoth Wiborg of the third form,” he added. “He came to us as a new boy last September, a boy of evident promise, cheerful and friendly, with a sunny nature that won him a place of liking before many days had passed.

“His character was so clearly fine, his ability so plain that his future was assuredly successful and the school knows that it has lost one too early who would have brought credit to himself.”

Merrick called the tree and bench a memorial “of unusual beauty … and we have always before us that symbol of a growing life that shall continue to remind us of him.”

Nearly two decades later, in October 1954, the Red & White reported that Gerald Murphy donated money to purchase a new tree and bench. “The ravages of time and weather had taken their toll on the original memorial and it was necessary to have them removed. It is to be hoped that the years will smile kindly on the new tree and bench in their location near the upper tennis courts.”

Less than a year after Baoth, Patrick Murphy succumbed to tuberculosis on Jan. 30, 1937, at age 16.

Gerald Murphy died at home in East Hampton in 1964. He was 76. There are no known paintings of Gerald’s created after his sons’ deaths.

Sara died in Arlington, Virginia, where she had moved to be with Honoria and her three grandchildren — two grandsons and a granddaughter — in 1975. She was 91.

Unfortunately, time and weather once again took their toll, and the second memorial tree also had to be removed. However, this spring, another tree, a hearty crab apple, was planted in the same area.

And we, too, hope the years will be kind to Baoth’s tree. 