"My father, of course, had wanted boys

"SARA SHERMAN WIBORG MURPHY was a figure of myth long before the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways and MacLeishes met her in France. Her father, Frank Bestow Wiborg, had been born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1855, the son of Henry Paulinus Wiborg, a Norwegian immigrant who was either a deckhand on a lake steamer (as family legend has it) or "one of the pioneer businessmen of Cleveland" (as the Centennial History of Cincinnati describes him). When Frank was about twelve, his father died; according to the deckhand legend, he contracted pneumonia while saving the victims of a boat accident, and his widow, Susan, remarried a man with whom young Frank could not get along. In the best Horatio Alger tradition, Frank Wiborg then reportedly left home to seek his fortune and found his way to Cincinnati, where he managed to gain admittance to the Chickering Institute, a select college preparatory academy emphasizing the classics and sciences.

He graduated in 1874 — in his family's account, he paid his way by peddling newspapers — and got work as a salesman for a producer of printer's ink, Levi Addison Ault, and so dazzled his employer that a mere four years later Ault offered him a partnership in the company. This was the great period of printmaking, when newspaper lithographs, sheet music, poetry broadsheets, glossy magazines, and posters were the predominant mode of graphic expression, and the new company of Ault and Wiborg, which manufactured and mixed its own dry color to produce high-quality lithographer's ink, found its product in great demand, not only in the United States but worldwide. Toulouse-Lautrec was just one of the artists who used Ault and Wiborg inks for his prints; and the company commissioned him to create an advertising poster, using as a model the beautiful Misia Natanson, patron and muse of Vuillard, Proust, Bonnard, Faure, and Ravel.

The engineer of this dynamic expansion, Frank Wiborg was the very model of the spirit of American enterprise. Young, handsome in a foursquare, mustachioed, Teddy Roosevelt kind of way, restless, dynamic, and smart, he was clearly a man on the way up. And he gave himself an immeasurable boost by marrying, in 1882, the daughter of one of Ohio's most illustrious families.

Adeline Moulton Sherman was willowy, dark-haired, and pretty, the daughter of Major Hoyt Sherman, a lawyer and banker who had served as United States paymaster during the Civil War and accumulated an enormous fortune in Iowa, his adopted state, which he represented as a state legislator for many years. One of his brothers was Senator John Sherman of Ohio, who gave the Sherman Anti-Trust Act its name; another was the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, who memorably marched through Georgia from Atlanta to the sea, burning and pillaging as he went, and remarked (from personal experience, no doubt) that "War is hell." Marrying Adeline transformed Frank Wiborg from up-and-coming to already-there; all that was needed was a son to set the seal on his happiness.

He was destined to be disappointed. The year after their marriage, Addie Wiborg gave birth to a daughter. "After an awful struggle," noted the new father in his diary for November 7, 1883, "at 7:15 [P.M.] a little girl baby arrives. I never experienced such great relief and we are all very happy over it." At the top of the page he wrote, in large round letters: "Sara Sherman Wiborg born." Sara was followed, four years later, by a second daughter, Mary Hoyt, and two years after that by a third, Olga Marie. "My father, of course, had wanted boys," said Sara many years afterward, "but he became resigned to girls later on and was always wonderful to his three daughters."

Certainly, in a material sense, he was. At the time of Sara's birth, Wiborg had already established his household outside of Cincinnati proper, in the country suburb of Clifton; soon he built a mansion for his growing family, complete with stables and a sunken garden, at the intersection of Clifton Avenue and Senator Place — the latter, almost inevitably, was named after another uncle of his wife's, Senator George H. Pendleton. The new house, which one reached by driving over a wooden bridge from Clifton Avenue, was a showplace, positively bristling with imported boiserie and fancy furniture. The lofty ceilings, towering mantels, and winding staircases were embellished with carved birds and garlands; the walls were hung with splendid tapestries; the floors were inlaid with rare woods; and in the large parlor, the drawing room, and the spacious hall, Venetian and French mirrors reflected back the glow of chandeliers. There was a library and music room, and just off the library — as one Cincinnati society reporter breathlessly noted — a little Turkish smoking room, "all the appointments of which were brought from Cairo by the Wiborgs, even to the carved jalousies through which the veiled daughters of the Turkish Beys see and remain unseen."

The Wiborg daughters, veiled or not, were emphatically not unseen. They attended Miss Ely's private school for girls in Cincinnati, to which they were driven each morning in a two-horse barouche. In winter, to protect them from the chill, the carriage was closed, causing what Sara referred to as "squeamish feelings," so that the girls arrived at school "sometimes pale and shaken." At Miss Ely's the girls worked hard: they learned French from a Madame Fredin as well as geography, arithmetic, composition, grammar, history, music, and drawing; but in the afternoons and on holidays they ran decorously wild through the woods and fields of Clifton, riding, "coasting" (sledding), and playing outdoors with the dogs — the Wiborgs kept dachshunds and wolfhounds — or picking wildflowers in the pasture.

Birthdays were celebrated with...