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Americans and the Making of the Riviera |
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Wednesday, 20 February 2008 |
Americans and the Making of the Riviera
By Michael Nelson
McFarland & Co., 2008: 222 p., softcover
Village Voice price €38, Your French News Price €36
Let our British readers be reassured. Their
American cousins did not “make” the
Riviera. Nor does the author of this lively
compendium of anecdotes, who has written
previously about Queen Victoria and the
Riviera, contend that they did. With the
exception of the US President Thomas
Jefferson, who noted the presence of an
English colony in Nice in 1787, theywere
relatively late on the scene and, as Yanks will,
they elbowed aside a few genteel proprieties.
To begin with, the first wave of Americans
in the Twenties went sunbathing and
swimming for sheer fun, not for their health.
They drove motorcars, their elegance was
flashy, their manners loud and they got up to
the same kind of naughtiness – drinking and
dalliance – as the British aristocrats whose
favourite watering holes they invaded. Only
they did it in summer, when the titled crowd
melted back into its northern mists.
The “beautiful people” who gave the
Riviera much of its glamour in the heady days
before the ’29 Wall Street crash – and left their
names on dozens of Riviera streets and
squares – are all here; millionaires, heiresses,
impecunious
geniuses who
swam like a
little shoal of
fish among the
rich.The
mythical
Murphies, Sara
and Gerald;
James Gordon
Bennet III, who
ran his paper, the Paris ‘Herald’, from the
deck of his 246-foot yacht; the extravagant,
promiscuous Isadora Duncan; the Clewes and
the Goulds; Cole Porter and Sydney Bechet;
the Scott-Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways –
they are all there, and Michael Nelson, a
former general manager of Reuters, tells their
glittery, sometimes tragic story with relish.
In many ways they shaped the Riviera of
today – certainly they created its summer
season. But one wonders what they would
have made of the twenty-first century herds of
tourists in their baseball caps and grunge
designer gear. The sight would perhaps have
made them feel positively aristocratic.
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