Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill Page A

Certainly this work was more nourishing than another “artistic” venture she was involved in that January: an evening of tableaux vivants in Mrs. Orme Wilson’s ballroom, in which she posed as a portrait by Romney, wearing dull blue with a rose at her bosom, for a charity audience that included such social lights as Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan.
    Her whole life was beginning to feel like an interminable tableau vivant. She was clearly under stress, suffering from a recurrent eye infection and quarreling with her family (“lunch in family and all fought” was only one such entry in her diary), even lashing out at nice Fred Murphy on at least one occasion (although she made it up with him later).
    Whatever her feelings for Gerard Lambert, he was a less frequent presence in her life that winter, and it was Fred who was her nearly constant companion. But when the Wiborgs sailed at midnight on March 4 for their annual trip to Europe, Gerald was the one who saw them off. He was working, without much enthusiasm, at Mark Cross, and participating—without much more enthusiasm—in the social round expected of an eligible young bachelor. He too was increasingly beleaguered by the emptiness of his own family life. Anna was subject to deeper and deeper depressions; Esther worried so about her that she offered to come home from boarding school and take care of her. Fred’s health was frail. And Patrick was frequently absent either physically or emotionally. Sara’s departure clearly shook Gerald, and he looked so bereft at the prospect of parting that Sara remarked on it: “I shall see your saddened face to my dying day,” she wrote him from shipboard. “Such an unwholesome feeling the whole thing had—sickly lights and anoemic confusion and cold relentless machinery. Wasn’t it awful?” She signed the letter “Sal,” which (quoting, perhaps, from a popular song?) had become “pretty Sal” by her next note to him.
    After their usual London diet of theater, couture fittings, and parties, the Wiborgs moved on to Paris and then to Italy. Having dispatched Frank to New York to look after business, Adeline swept the girls off to the baths at Terme to recruit their strength for the rigors of the season to come, and then returned to Paris to outfit them at Poiret.
    Sara tried briefly to assert her independence by going to study with the fashionable painter Walter Sickert when the Wiborgs returned to London, but it wasn’t a good experience. For Sickert was a notorious ladies’ man as well as a successful artist, and although Sara took the precaution of having her friend Ruby Peto accompany her to Sickert’s Hampstead studio, her second session with the master was a “Dreadful day.” As she recorded in her diary: “Hate man not going back.” Perhaps, as he was known to do with other alluring young women, he chased her around an easel. To judge from her outraged syntax, not to mention her appearance and direct, vivacious manner, the possibility isn’t unlikely.
    For the remainder of the summer Sara resigned herself to being one of Mrs. Wiborg’s Three Beautiful Daughters, and playing a supporting role in Adeline’s triumphant season’s finale, a “Vegetable Ball” held at the Ritz Hotel in London on July 24. This party was a kind of high-water mark for American social aspirations in London: among the chic and the aristocratic who joined “the preliminary scrimmage for invitations” (as one newspaper described it) were the duchess of Rutland, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Princess Jane de San Faustino, Lady Cunard (mother of the soon-to-be-infamous Nancy), the Russian basso and society sensation Fyodor Chaliapin, and the duchess of Westminster. Everyone came encrusted with diamonds and draped in pearls, but when it was time for the cotillion, a pseudo rusticity prevailed: Olga and Prince Colonna took the floor, followed by a servant in blackface pushing a