The Riviera Set Read online

  This book is dedicated to

  my granddaughters Robyn and Imogen

  to thank them for bringing

  much joy into my life.

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  1. In the Beginning ... Jessie Dermot

  2. Miss Maxine Elliott

  3. Hartsbourne

  4. Maxine’s War

  PART TWO

  5. Courtesans and Assignations

  6. Winston

  7. A New King

  8. Final Fling

  9. The Lights Go Out Over Europe

  PART THREE

  10. War on the Riviera

  11. Return of Peace

  12. Prince Aly Khan

  13. Rita Hayworth

  14. ‘A Marriage has been Arranged’

  15. Wedding of the Century

  16. Marital Troubles

  17. Changes

  18. Causes and Effects

  19. End of an Era

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Source Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Illustration

  Index

  Credits

  Introduction

  The Château de l’Horizon

  I have been a biographer for over thirty years, but this book is less a biography of a person, more the story of a house and those who peopled it between the years 1930 and 1960.

  It was beautifully proportioned, an exquisite white art deco villa on the French Riviera which acted as a collecting point for a group of people who were often world-famous celebrities, many of whom were able to enjoy a lifestyle of almost unrelenting pleasure.

  First, it was the stylish brainchild of the American actress, society hostess, possibly royal mistress and certainly hugely successful investor Maxine Elliott. In 1930 she bought a piece of seaside real estate between Cannes and Juan-les-Pins, consisting of a narrow stretch of rocks with a small promontory. It was less expensive than many pieces of building land in this idyllic location, because there was no sandy beach. Indeed at first there seemed no obvious site for a house of any significant size since it was hemmed in by the parallel features of the main road between Cannes and Antibes and the main railway line between Marseilles and Nice.

  By 1932 a stunning dwelling had been constructed on the unpromising site by dynamiting the rocks to provide a flat foundation platform for a villa, as well as a deep depression to house a swimming pool.

  The villa was the Château de l’Horizon. Designed by a young American, Barry Dierks, who was to become one of the most famous architects of the art deco period on the Riviera, it would provide a secluded backdrop during the next three decades for an indulgent, glamorous, even decadent lifestyle which is arguably unsurpassed, and where one guest thought nothing of filling a bath with dozens of bottles of iced champagne to refresh her aching feet after an evening’s dancing in Cannes.

  Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, Cannes had been famous as a winter resort for British and Russian royalty and aristocracy, but it was considered far too hot in the summer months for civilised living. The area was only discovered as a summer holiday location in 1926, by New Yorkers Gerald and Sara Murphy – the inspiration for Dick and Nicole Diver in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. The Murphys attracted to their ménage an eclectic group of artists, writers and performers, the most famous of whom were Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, Jean Cocteau and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Those on the periphery of the Murphy set included Maxine Elliott, introduced by her friend Elsa Maxwell, and they were able to monopolise beaches empty of tourists before the secret leaked out and the Côte d’Azur became an all-year-round haven for the richest people on the planet, a place away from ‘home’ where hardly any whim or eccentricity was too outrageous to be acceptable. Maxine Elliott quickly spotted the trend – she was good at that – and she moved in ahead of the advancing tide of the Riviera’s burgeoning popularity.

  That popularity has never faded. While I was writing this Introduction, I happened to see a headline in a daily newspaper: ‘Average price of a five-bedroom house in the Côte d’Azur reaches £18 million ...’1 Today the newly superrich – mainly Russian oligarchs, oil-rich Arabs and Chinese super-entrepreneurs