Before I saw the film De-Lovely, a biopic on composer Cole Porter, I did not know anything about Gerald and Sara Murphy or their past as part of the “Lost Generation” of ex-pat Americans in France in the 1920s. They were friends of Porter as well as with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (among other writes and artists), and the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. Fortunately, both De-Lovely and Calvin Tomkins brief biography depict the Murphys more as they really were—not as Fitzgerald’s troubled husband and wife who eventually split up, but rather as a stable, loving couple who spent a decade in France, then returned to the United States to live out their lives together. The Murphys were wealthy, but not frivolous or nearly as excessive as many of their friends in terms of alcohol consumption and raucous behavior. The Murphys had an apartment in Paris and an elegant home and garden in Antibes on the Mediterranean that they dubbed “Villa America,” where they also entertained Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Archibald MacLeish, and many others. Tomkins quotes a friend of the couple: “A party at the Murphys had its own rhythm, and there was never a jarring note. Both of them had a passion for entertaining and for other people” (110). Tomkins continues, “If Fitzgerald had drawn a great many details, conversations, and incidents from life, he had somehow managed to leave out most of the elements of the Murphys’ experience in Europe that mattered most to them: the excitement of the modern movement in Paris, the good friends, the sensuous joy of living at Cap d’Antibes” (140). In fact, before Tender is the Night was completed and published in 1934, Fitzgerald had begun to base his protagonist more upon himself than upon Gerald Murphy. “Whether or not Scott fully understood Zelda’s illness, he saw pretty clearly what was happening to him and with his writer’s honesty, he faced up to it squarely in his portrait of Dick Diver” (135). The Murphys were also devoted parents to three adorable children, and the great tragedy of their lives was losing both of their young sons, one within months of the other, from different illnesses. (Their daughter lived to adulthood and made them grandparents). Gerald was also a talented and innovative, if not very prolific, painter. Tomkins’s biography, a full third of which consists of photographs of the family and their friends, includes pictures of most of Gerald’s 15 paintings, including some of the eight that have been lost to the ages. The book cover features his surviving painting “Cocktail” (1927), and the book also has a photo of “Wasp and Pear” (1929), which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Calvin Tomkins’s sensitivity to Gerald Murphy’s artistic talent is as interesting as his perspective on the lives and contributions of a fascinating couple.