Notable

SARA & GERALD by Honoria Murphy Donnelly with Richard N. Billings; 254 pages; Times Books; $17.95

They invented the summer season on the Riviera. The guest list at their 14-room Villa America near Antibes included Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. F. Scott Fitzgerald used the Murphys as models for Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. They were the subjects of Calvin Tomkins' 1971 bestseller Living Well Is the Best Revenge.

But Sara and Gerald Murphy were more than monuments of the jazz age. Honoria Murphy Donnelly, their daughter, repeats the familiar accounts of her parents' grand style and hospitality, but she also describes in poignant detail the twin tragedies that shattered their European idyl: the death of the Murphys' sons, Baoth in 1935 of a sudden attack of meningitis and Patrick in 1937 after a long fight with tuberculosis, each within months of his 16th birthday. "The golden bowl is broken indeed," Fitzgerald consoled his friends. "But it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now."

The deaths effectively finished the Murphys' careers as world-class salon keepers. Gerald abandoned painting, for which he had considerable talent, and as the Depression deepened, reluctantly took over the family business, Mark Cross, the Fifth Avenue leather goods emporium. Villa America was sold. Sara traveled abroad, did volunteer work at a Harlem day care center and tried unsuccessfully to adopt two young brothers enrolled there.

Though apart for much of their later years, the couple wrote tender notes to each other and continued to lend their diminishing funds to friends and artists in need. Gerald died in 1964; Sara survived him for eleven years. Previous accounts have characterized the Murphys as collectors of glittering objects and achievers. But the revelations of Sara & Gerald prove that they deserve a larger consideration. In the beginning they were admirers; at the end they were admirable.

NUREYEV by Clive Barnes Helene Obolensky; 240 pages; $35

Feline, flamboyant and faintly Oriental, Rudolf Nureyev has leaped across the stages of U.S. and European theaters for more than 20 years, capturing larger audiences for ballet than any other dancer in history.

Even in the stillness of photographs, Nureyev's animal vitality comes across in a rush of energy and sensuality. The dancer's fans will be bowled over by the 29 color and 146 black-and-white pictures, most of them previously unpublished, that illustrate this big, handsome book. Dance Critic Clive Barnes' chronicle charts the dancer's career back to its beginnings in the remote Bashkir Republic of the U.S.S.R., where, as a teenager, Rudi jumped and twirled in local folk dances. Battling the disapproval of his Tatar father, a Communist commissar, the youth made his way into Leningrad's celebrated Kirov company. Following his defection in Paris in 1961, he danced non-stop in virtually every Western company except the New York City Ballet. Now 45, he can still dance seven performances a week, apparently without tiring. Barnes insists that Nureyev can keep performing, albeit in increasingly less demanding roles, for 20 or 30 more years, though such endurance is rare among dancers. Certainly, the final color photo of Nureyev in this book seems emblematic of ambition. Dressed in a cocky fur cap and a shiny, blazing red raincoat, Nureyev is seen striding gracefully, and purposefully, forward. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.