The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  Born in Iowa and raised in San Francisco, Elsa had made her way to Europe in 1909, where she met Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon – always known as Dickie – who became her lifelong friend.§§ Dickie was rich enough to fund even Elsa’s idea of a good party, and the two set about having a life of fun, Elsa throwing lavish parties, playing and singing in the theatre, in top nightclubs, or at other people’s parties and simply enjoying life. She had first made her name as a big-time party thrower in Paris in 1919, when she met Maxine’s friend Elsie de Wolfe. Elsa was then thirty-eight and according to her memoir had still not decided what she wanted to be when she grew up. She boasted that she owned nothing; no property, no furniture. She travelled light. Of course she stayed in the world’s top hotels while travelling light, and she was leaving the Ritz one day when a woman tapped her on the shoulder and asked, ‘Aren’t you the woman who sings those risqué songs?’ She then proceeded to ask if Elsa was available on the following day to help her entertain some important delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference, including Arthur Balfour, the dour former British Prime Minister who was now Foreign Secretary.

  Elsa initially described her accoster as ‘chic and elderly’, but the impression of age was one soon lost. Elsie de Wolfe was a fifty-four-year-old human dynamo; an aesthete who exercised slavishly, standing on her head for thirty minutes a day, turning cartwheels and walking on her hands until the day she died aged eighty-five. She was probably the only woman who could match Elsa for boundless energy. American by birth but raised and educated in Scotland, she had started in the theatre, in a similar, though not so successful, way as Maxine Elliott. She gave up the stage in 1904 to take up interior design at the suggestion of her long-term partner and lover Elisabeth ‘Bessy’ Marbury, a theatrical agent – possibly the first woman theatre agent – whose portfolio of famous clients included Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and other Victorian notables. In 1905 Elsie secured a commission to decorate the Colony Club (of which Bessy Marbury was a founder), a leading women’s club in New York, and when it opened in 1907 her design, incorporating freshness, light pastel colours, delicate writing desks, English chintz and French ,5 launched her career. The club proved a shop window for her designs and the rich society women who patronised the club were Elsie’s target market.

  After a series of prestigious projects upon which she had worked were featured in contemporary magazines her order books were always filled. Within five years an entire floor of a Fifth Avenue office building was needed to house her staff of assistants, secretaries, artists and accountants. She not only charged fees, but earned commission on every piece of furniture she purchased to fill the rooms she designed, so that by the time the First World War broke out she had become a very rich and successful woman, and was an international celebrity in her field. Following voluntary service as an auxiliary nurse during the war, she transferred the main sphere of her interior design operations to Paris, where she bought the Villa Trianon at Versailles, which had formerly been a royal residence.

  Elsa Maxwell wrote that it was difficult to describe the exhilarating atmosphere of post-war Paris, when ‘Every day was like a sparkling holiday ... The city echoed to the music of bands welcoming returning soldiers. Shops, theatres and cafés were jammed ... ’ Because of its location the Villa Trianon’s neighbours included many English diplomats based at the Paris Embassy and Elsie soon became a leading socialite, being described by newspapers as the best-dressed woman in the world, and even began to appear in popular songs.¶¶

  Elsa Maxwell undoubtedly knew exactly who Elsie de Wolfe was when she introduced herself on the steps of the Ritz in 1919 and asked Elsie to sing and play at Villa Trianon. They may not have met, but they were both friends of Maxine Elliott.

  For Elsa Maxwell the occasion would prove to be her springboard to international fame, just as the Colony Club had been Elsie’s. Elsie de Wolfe’s parties were formal, amusing, chic and discreet – an extension of herself. Elsa Maxwell’s parties were also an extension of herself, but were more like romps that often seemed to have just happened. In fact, Elsa had a formula; she claimed that no one ever remembered her parties for what they ate and drank but for the fun they had, and that it had been the monotony of other people’s parties which led her to invent her own unique style of entertainment.

  Those who dined with Elsie and Elsa that evening in June 1919 never forgot it. Elsa was already acquainted with the guest of honour, Arthur Balfour, for they had met once at Hartsbourne before the war. Other notable guests were Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief of the Army at Gallipoli; Consuelo, the Duchess of Marlborough; and Oswald Mosley. It was ‘a trifle stifled’, Elsa recalled, ‘until I played and sang some of Cole Porters “secret” songs’.6 Elsa and Cole Porter were good friends (she always called him Coley, and was the only person allowed to do so) and Balfour’s eyebrows met his hairline when Elsa began singing the irreverent ‘private’ lyrics. Soon, though, he was roaring with laughter along with the others and afterwards he complimented Elsa, saying it had been a first-rate evening and that he would enjoy seeing her again. ‘How about dinner a week tonight at the Ritz?’ she asked, surprising even herself. And through something of a haze she heard him say ‘I should be charmed.’

  Elsa’s heart dropped because, as she wrote in her autobiography, she could not even afford an omelette at the Ritz, let alone host and pay for a dinner party there. Over breakfast next day she explained the matter to Lady Colebrooke, another Hartsbourne contact, with whom Elsa was staying. Alex Colebrooke was amused and told her not to worry about the expense; she would cover it. She also laughed off the problem of whom to invite to keep the great man entertained, jotting down a list of names she would rope in: Mrs George Keppel; the Princess Edmond de Polignac;## Lord D’Abernon;*** Grand Duke Alexander of Russia; and Sir Ronald Storrs. ‘That,’ she told Elsa kindly, ‘should balance your table quite nicely.’ The guests enjoyed the dinner so much that nobody wanted to leave and Balfour, having confided that he hated the thought of going back to his miserable hotel room, happily accepted Elsa’s suggestion that she take them all on to a Parisian nightclub. After four hours Balfour chuckled like a schoolboy as he told Elsa it was the ‘most delightful and degrading evening’ he had ever spent.

  News of this party with the social lion Balfour, reputedly so difficult to entertain, spread like wildfire in Paris and soon Elsa was deluged with requests to organise parties and with invitations to play at other parties, not as a paid entertainer but as a guest who played and sang simply because she enjoyed it. She had no competition because once she heard a song she could play it by ear – all the latest jazz songs that people wanted to dance to, some of which were simply not available yet as phonograph recordings or even sheet music.

  After that Elsa’s parties became internationally famous: in Paris, in London, in Cannes, in Venice. It was she who began the craze for scavenger hunts, which stopped traffic as guests raced each other in automobiles around the city in search of items with which they must return to base: in London it might be a policeman’s helmet, in Paris the list included ‘a slipper taken from Mistinguett on the stage of the Casino de Paris; a black swan from the lake in the Bois de Boulogne ... three hairs plucked from a redheaded woman ... a pompon off the cap of a French sailor; a work animal; and a handkerchief from the Baron Maurice de Rothschild’s house.’7 By the end of the evening Elsa’s apartment building was inundated with a donkey, chickens, several crabs, a bucket of fish, and a baby crocodile. No one managed to capture a black swan, for the swans attacked violently in self-defence. The landlady was outraged and took a great deal of pacifying.

  Another huge success which had the whole of Paris and London talking was a murder party in which only two of the guests at a large dinner were in on the scheme. One was the ‘victim’, who played dead, and the other was an accomplice to help things along, calling for the police and so forth and advising the guests that they must stay put. Eventually, a ‘detective’ arrived and sifted through the
evidence – all planted well in advance, including advertisements placed in the personal columns of newspapers for several days with the initial ‘M’. It all pointed at the Duke of Marlborough being the killer, and the other guests, especially the Duke, were genuinely horrified, having no idea that the police were actors and that the whole thing was not really happening.

  A year or more passed before Elsa next saw Maxine Elliott, in 1922 at Abbey Road. She saw at once that Maxine was depressed and was shocked to see the difference in her friend’s demeanour. She bullied Maxine into making several trips to Paris, but it took her another two years to lure Maxine to Paris to live.

  If ever the Twenties really ‘roared’ it was in Paris in the middle years of the decade. The horror of the Great War had waned and as young people were released from the hardship and sacrifice of five years (including the months after the Armistice when the Spanish Flu epidemic killed more than in the slaughterhouse of the trenches), old class barriers tumbled. Jazz music mirrored a new age; art deco triumphed aesthetically, and newly enfranchised womanhood shingled its hair, raised its skirts and discarded chaperones. Paris in 1924 was the Paris of Cole Porter, Noël Coward, Isadora Duncan, Somerset Maugham, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and the fashion designer Jean Patou. Not all were rich: young Hemingway’s success as a writer lay in the future and he and his wife Hadley lived on fresh air and the kind invitations of well-off friends enthralled by his promise. Elsa Maxwell was friends with them all, of course. She had chummed up with Patou to their mutual advantage: his signature perfume Joy – discovered while he was visiting a parfumerie in Grasse with Elsa – was marketed at her suggestion, and with huge success, as ‘the most expensive perfume in the world’.†††

  Maxine came back to life in Paris. With the encouragement of Elsa and Elsie de Wolfe, she joined in what was on offer, knowing that when she got tired of being cheerful there was bridge, for Noël Coward, the actor Clifton Webb and Elsa Maxwell could always be relied upon to make up a congenial foursome. So she bought a luxurious apartment in Avenue Saint-Honoré-d’Eylau and enjoyed the task of decorating it with Elsie’s helpful contributions. Even so, as Gertrude told her daughters, Aunt Maxine in Paris during those days was just ‘a ghost compared to the old Dettie ... if only you’d seen her then – the sparkle, the gaiety’.8 Only once Maxine showed something of her old self when, on a visit to London, she met the world heavyweight champion boxer Gene Tunney. Gertrude went home thrilled because she had watched her older sister revert to her youth, and exert herself to charm and captivate this shy man of the hour in order to persuade him to give a demonstration of his training exercises for dinner guests. But at least Maxine’s life was cheerful again. She spent her winters in Paris and St Moritz, summers in Cannes and Antibes, and travelled almost annually to New York, usually in the autumn, to review her investments.

  She spent a year in 1928-9 in Cannes, sharing with a friend‡‡‡ the massive pink Villa Corne d’Or, which overlooks the Croisette. Here, on one of the earliest and best courts on the Riviera, she played tennis, and golf on the nearby links. She did not lack companionship: half of English society spent some part of the winter in the South of France and more and more of them were beginning to spend time there during the summer months. Winston always loved the Riviera, and in the winter of 1922—3 had rented a similar property, the Villa Rêve d’Or, when the Coalition collapsed and he came round after emergency surgery to find himself out of Parliament without, he famously quipped, ‘office, seat, party or appendix’. Clementine enjoyed the climate and the competitive tennis, but more and more she came to consider the company too raffish. She also disliked the fact that Winston enjoyed gambling at the Casino and it was not unknown for him to lose more than she felt they could afford. Increasingly Winston travelled to the Côte d’Azur alone, but his friend Consuelo – having divorced the Duke of Marlborough and been happily remarried to Jacques Balsan – was often there, and there were others of the old Hartsbourne set for company.

  The new people that Maxine met in post-war Paris with Elsa Maxwell were also on hand when they visited the tiny seaside village of Antibes. There in 1922 Gerald and Sara Murphy had prevailed upon the owners of the small Hôtel Cap d’Antibes to remain open through the summer. This was essentially the world of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the backdrop to Tender is the Night, and the family-orientated but champagne-fuelled beach parties of the Murphys where anyone from Pablo Picasso, to Charlie Chaplin, or Coco Chanel and the Duke of Westminster was likely to turn up.

  Initially introduced to the Murphys’ circle of friends by Elsa, Maxine discovered in Antibes during the summer months a different, more carefree Riviera lifestyle than the one she had found living in the Cannes mansion, and she liked it. She enjoyed the eclectic conversation and gossip. That year the gossip was all about Hugh Grosvenor and Coco Chanel.

  In 1923 Hugh Grosvenor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, widely described in newspapers as ‘the richest man in the world’ and known as Bendor§§§ to everyone who knew him, was introduced to Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel at a party on the Riviera. He was coming to the end of his second marriage; the first (to Jennie Churchill’s sister-in-law Shelagh Cornwallis-West) had ended when he sent his wife a curt note telling her he could no longer live with her and she must leave the house. His second wife, Violet Nelson, could not take her husband’s marital infidelities and had begun divorce proceedings.

  Coco Chanel, then aged forty, was a successful businesswoman¶¶¶ and had expanded her already thriving fashion house when she launched her signature perfume Chanel No. 5. The forty-four-year-old Duke fell hard for Coco, but he had a rival. Another man also desired Coco, and not even the Duke could ignore him, for it was Edward, the Prince of Wales. For the next year Coco was involved with both of them, and there is nothing like a bit of honest rivalry to stimulate desire, especially to a man who had never been denied anything in his life. The Prince visited Coco’s Paris apartment a few times, allowed her to call him David, a name reserved for his closest intimates, and, according to Vogue, a passionate affair took place. Bendor tried harder: he pursued her constantly and showered her with gifts, including a huge uncut emerald concealed within a crate of vegetables that he had delivered to her apartment (though it is hard to envisage Coco Chanel unpacking her own vegetables). On another occasion he pretended to be a member of staff from a famous florist, delivering a gigantic bouquet. He was evidently fairly successful since Chanel’s secretary offered him a tip. Among the many gifts Bendor gave Coco was a parcel of land at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where she would build an exquisite white marble villa called La Pausa. The pair were lovers for over a decade, during which time the Duke remarried. When asked about this Coco shrugged insouciantly; ‘There are many Duchesses of Westminster,’ she replied, ‘but there is only one Coco Chanel.’

  In those early days of Riviera summer holidays it was still fashionable to be pale and interesting. Women still sat in deep shadow, protecting, their white skins with parasols or by covering up when in the sun. But after Bendor and Coco returned from a cruise of the Adriatic on the Duke’s yacht in 1924, tongues began to wag furiously, and it was not because the pair could hardly keep their hands off each other – that was fairly normal behaviour on the Riviera – but because Coco was as ‘brown as a sailor’. She had allowed herself to tan all over, and Coco was nothing if not a trend setter. A new fashion sprang up which – like Chanel No. 5 – has prevailed ever since.

  Gradually Maxine Elliott found that the time she spent on the Riviera during the Twenties rejuvenated her. Feeling younger and fitter at every visit, she came to the decision to move there permanently. Unlike many of her friends the terrible financial crash of 1929 did not hurt her greatly; she was such a smart and shrewd investor that although some of her stocks temporarily reduced in value she was hardly damaged. She looked at the villas that were for sale but nothing suited her. She missed her old friends of the English house-party scene �
� and those who survived were, like her, growing noticeably older now – and she had the urge and the means to entertain them again. She hankered to recreate something of those heady pre-war days at Hartsbourne on the Riviera. Maybe a little less formal than Hartsbourne, but where she could choose her company and recreate a similar tone.

  After a year of searching along the coast, failing to find the right house in the right location, Maxine came to the conclusion that there was only one solution. She would have to build a villa to her own requirements. Her chief priority was that the site must be directly on the sea. There were plenty of beautiful houses in the sunny hills behind Cannes where Picasso built his villa Californie – a name which has since lent itself to the entire area – but that was not what she wanted. Having lived for a year in the Villa Corne d’Or, she discounted Cannes too. It was too busy; she wanted tranquillity, preferably in the Golfe Juan, the huge bay which lies between Antibes and Cannes. None of the available properties suited her, and because the main road ran – and still runs – along the seafront for most of the eight miles of the gulf, sites for a villa were extremely limited. She was offered a long twenty-metre-wide strip of rocks lying between the sea and a stretch where the railway line and main highway ran next to each other. It looked unpromising, yet on the credit side it was halfway between Antibes and Cannes, the sea lapped the rocks, and as there was no appreciable beach it was unlikely to be bothered with uninvited trippers. But even if a villa could be built on the rocks there, how would she gain access from the road across the railway line? A level crossing, perhaps?

  A quite exceptional architect was required, but Maxine had already met the right man. One of the houses she had often visited during the year she lived in Cannes was the Villa Mauresque, which was some miles to the east on Cap Ferrat and belonged to Willie Somerset Maugham. He had bought this property cheaply because the pseudo-Moorish and Renaissance extensions installed by the previous owner### were considered ugly, and the very large garden was derelict, so it had been assumed that anyone who bought it would knock it down and rebuild. Maugham purchased the villa in 1926 when he was among the top-earning writers in the world and though he disliked the original architecture he did not demolish it. Instead he employed a young American architect, Barry Dierks, who was part of Maugham’s intimate circle of gay men, to change the façade and modernise the interior. Lawns were laid in the gardens, and other areas were planted with pines, mimosas, aloes, oleanders and camellias – almost anything that flowered found a home there, as well as the native hillside plants of thyme and rosemary. A swimming pool was added, near a natural rock cave in the hillside which would provide shade for bathers. Maugham would spend the following forty years there, and the Villa Mauresque became known for its lavish hospitality, an obligatory stop for visiting celebrities, as well as attracting numerous artists and men from the Riviera’s sizeable gay community.