This book is a natural follow-up to Michael Nelson’s Queen Victoria & the Discovery of the Riviera (an extract from which can be read on this website). That book explained how the queen was among a number of wealthy 19th century Britons who, in a latter-day version of the Grand Tours popular with their 18th century equivalents, came to the south of France, discovered its attractions and established it as a fashionable area for winter holidays.
At that time, it was widely believed that the climate would be unbearably hot and even unhealthy – it was feared that babies might succumb to cholera there – in the summertime. Quite how a people, many of whom had experiences life in colonial India, should find a climate that was sub-tropical at most so terrifying is hard to understand, but their prejudices continued to hold sway well into the 20th century. Michael Nelson says that it was noticing a number of streets and squares in Juan-les-Pins named after famous Americans that prompted him to research this book and, as it turned out to identify some 60 or so other similar namings in the area, duly listed in an appendix. His principal discovery, however, was the role of individual Americans in breaking the taboo and popularising the notion of the Riviera as a summer resort. Although a number of people claimed the credit for this, including the author Ernest Hemingway, Nelson makes it clear that it was the songwriter Cole Porter who in the ‘20s was the first to spend summer holidays there (only twice and on the Cap d’Antibes), closely followed by the artist Gerald Murphy and his family who actually persuaded a hotel to stay open through the months following the normal closing-down at the end of April. Even before this, however, Americans in large numbers had visited the Riviera. They were the US servicemen for whom the area was used for rest and relaxation after the First World War. A further generation was to do the same after 1945.
Once the notion of summer on the Riviera had been conceived it was not long before the pioneers were inviting their friends to share the experience. These people were not only rich by most standards, they were doubly so in a Europe whose currencies had yet to recover from a costly war. The Americans were able to buy property cheaply, whether to live in, to extend or to demolish and rebuild. They could also buy land cheaply and commission architects to build their own concepts of luxury, ranging from exotic fantasies through simply bigger versions of local designs to the wilder extremes of hideousness and vulgarity.
As the Riviera became more fashionable, there were those Americans who broke away from the popular coastline around Cannes and Nice and established a counter settlement in Hyères. Among the growing tide of Americans who spent chunks of their time in the Riviera were the millionaire sons and daughters of industrial tycoons, or at least those of them whose artistic pretensions rendered them unsuitable to continue the business their fathers had founded. One of these was the railway heir Frank Jay Gould who took it upon himself to make a fashionable resort of the village of Juan-les-Pins, now linked to Antibes. He built magnificent hotels and casinos and gave the council loans and grants for the restoration of the beaches and parts damaged in the Second World War. His second wife, Florence, also made an impact on the Riviera, establishing the sport of water ski-ing as well as pioneering such fashions as lounging pyjamas.
The cast of characters of Americans on the Riviera in the ‘20s and ‘30s is a reflection of the glitterati of New York in the Prohibition era, familiar fro many novels of the period – at least some of which were written in the new French colony. They were writers, artists of all kinds as well as what might be described as all-purpose socialites. They were mostly rich and they enjoyed the freedom of being distant from the inhibitions of US life – ‘In the ‘30s everyone slept with everyone,’ recalled Florence Gould. ‘It was amusing. It was practical.’ Some even transgressed the fairly relaxed conventions of the group: the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda succeeded in alienating most of their friends by their appalling behaviour.
A problem with any book on this subject is that the subject matter is fairly slight: the Riviera summer season was created, it took off and attracted more and more people. As a result, the thread of this development tends to get buried beneath a mountain of people, many of them celebrities in that time and since, others perhaps commemorated more on the street signs of the Riviera than anywhere else, others again grotesquely larger than life. There are times when the book reads like an anthology of stories from the gossip columns of yesteryear.
That said, this is a story that deserves to be told and it is recounted clearly and with a light touch by a writer well-equipped to disentangle the interlocking lives and life-styles of a large cast. Michael Nelson joined Reuters news agency group from Oxford as a journalist and went on to be general manager when he retired. His interest as an historian combines with his journalist’s eye for a good story to make a brisk and enjoyable account of a period whose traces are still to be found in these parts.
Published by McFarland & Co, ISBN 978-0786431601, 232 pages. £23.95
