Free All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen Page A

lack. You have, for all that it is to some extent caught up and turned back upon yourself, an exuberance of spirit—you are one of your own examples of the…magnificent American Extravagance of type—that is to me immensely satisfying.” He also expected to be able to continue his affair with Celia Simpson.
    To an ex-girlfriend, the French journalist Yvette Fouque, he wrote,
    I’m going to marry a girl called Esther Murphy—New Yorker, Irish descent, extremely intelligent, not pretty, 6 feet tall, 30 years old, with some money and a very, very good person indeed. She, I think, loves me very much. This, my dearest Yvette, is if you will believe me, not foolishness, not mere lachété , or resignation to the lure of the dollar, but a deeply felt, and absolutely necessary, development of my life. Of course , the fact that she has money is vitally important to me—ah, you know me well enough to know that—but please, please believe that I have not foolishly rushed at the money, sacrificing too much for it. She is a deeply civilized, deeply and passionately intellectual person, to whom the cultural heritage of man is life itself. She knows French literature and history, I really believe, as well as you do, and English literature and history far better than I do. She is the only other woman I have ever met whose intellectual equality I could never question. She knows England very little, but France very well. (She goes to France every year.) I know that this marriage will inevitably strengthen and help my life. It will give me the objective ability to go in wholly for politics and also a certain inner strength to do so.
    He did not write to Celia Simpson, who learned of his engagement through a newspaper announcement. When he contacted her on his return to London, in late January 1929, as he began his run for Parliament, she told him she would never see him again.
    In New York that spring, an epic series of parties preceded Esther’s departure for London. “Last night…at James Leopold’s,” Max Ewing reported,
    Esther Murphy was said farewell to by about fifty people for about five hours. Tonight she will be said farewell to in two places: (1) at dinner at Mary French’s, where Mary, Esther, Muriel, Joseph Brewer, and probably Alice De La Mar and a few others will be at table and (2) later at a party at the Sheldons, to which forty are coming to bid farewell to Esther Murphy. Saturday night Esther Murphy is inviting hundreds of people to say farewell to her in her own quarters in Park Avenue. On the following nights it will be the same hundreds saying the same thing at Sarah King’s, at Muriel Draper’s, and elsewhere.
    A week later, Ewing wrote, “You would think Esther Murphy were going to a nunnery in Siam and never to be seen again in this world. Whereas as a matter of fact everyone she knows will see her in Europe this summer and back here in New York next winter!” The engagement was announced and these parties duly noted in the columns of gossip writer Cholly Knickerbocker, and a hundred people saw Esther off at the pier when she and her father sailed on March 16.
    On shipboard, and then from London, she telegraphed Muriel Draper: “ THINKING OF YOU CONSTANTLY .” The wedding, front-page news in New York, took place on April 24, 1929, at the Catholic church of St. Mary’s, in Chelsea. Patrick and Anna Murphy were there, as were Noel and Gerald; Amy Strachey, John’s mother; his sister Amabel Williams-Ellis with her family; and a couple of Esther’s friends. (Draper and Mercedes de Acosta had planned to attend but were unable to.) Oswald Mosley was the best man. In a photograph taken outside the reception at the Carlton hotel, Esther is flanked by her husband, while her father looks on. Her face is largely obscured by her cloche hat, but she is smiling broadly—not at either man or at the photographer, but at one of the women in the group, who beams back at her.
    Immediately afterward, she was