You do something to me.
Something that simply mystifies me.
Tell me, why should it be
You have the power to hypnotize me?
Let me live ‘neath your spell.
Do do that voodoo that you do so well.
For you do something to me
That nobody else could do.
—Cole Porter
There was something about her on the beach that summer in France, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his 1934 novel, Tender is the Night. Perhaps it was her “hard and lovely and pitiful” face. Or, it could have been the way “her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back,” her ruddy skin set off by a long string of creamy pearls that she wore backward to prevent unflattering tan lines on her décolletage. Although Fitzgerald was describing a fictional character named Nicole Diver in these passages, his work was inspired by someone who was all too real and captivating: American socialite Sara Murphy, who at the time was living on the French Riviera with her husband Gerald (Fitzgerald’s model for Dick Diver) and their three children.
The Murphys were a golden couple that quickly surrounded themselves with icons of post-World War I art, performance and literature, from Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes, to Gertrude Stein, to Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Fitzgerald. But it was Sara who made her mark as unwitting muse to her talented circle of friends. It wasn’t just the pearls and the tan that found their way into Fitzgerald’s fiction. It was the way she looked, the clothes she wore, the way she carried herself, the topics she talked about and the way she talked.
In short: She was unapologetically herself and men responded to that.
Are all muses unapologetically themselves? Some are. Others have to find their way there through a bit of trial and error. Former New York City Ballet star Wendy Whelan struggled in the shadows of George Balanchine muses Maria Tallchief and Suzanne Farrell, trying to dance as if she were them early in her career. In the 1990s she was even coached through one dance by Tallchief herself, who told her, “Where my eyelashes should be at every moment, and it was so rich with color, ideas, thoughts, memories.” The next day she was told to disregard the legendary Tallchief and simply be herself. “I never forgot that,” she told one reporter. Through that act of self-discovery and awareness, Whelan became muse to choreographers such as William Forsythe, Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky.
But what are muses, anyway?
Their origins involve sex and Greek mythology. One story holds that Zeus seduced the golden-haired titan Mnemosyne, who bore him nine daughters blessed with gifts of song, dance and joy. The girls—known as the muses—became the toast of Mount Olympus, entertaining the guests by singing of their father’s greatness, but also of Greek heroes and the creation of heaven and Earth. In another story, the winged horse Pegasus touched his hooves to the ground, producing sacred springs that created four muses in the guise of water nymphs. Whatever the tale and no matter the number, a muse is typically someone of extraordinary beauty, grace and allure, whose knowledge and talent inspire men to do great things.
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