Barry Dierks had received a thorough education in architecture at Pittsburgh, and finished his training in Paris. He was a modernist, an early practitioner of what would become the art deco movement, and his style – which typified the late Twenties and early Thirties, with its structured clean lines – was described by Noël Coward as ‘impossibly beautiful’. In 1925 Dierks designed and built a villa on an isolated rocky peninsula with a small private beach at Theoule-sur-Mer, about six miles west of Cannes. It would be his studio, and also his home with his partner Colonel Eric Sawyer. This extremely elegant and charming couple were regarded as the darlings of the Riviera, and Dierks was well placed to attract commissions from rich incomers who were beginning to want residences in the region. His own house proved his ability. Built into the steep hillside, entry was via some thirty steps down from street level, which gave on to the top floor with seven bedrooms and five bathrooms. More stairs led downwards to the reception floor where the generous open-plan living and entertainment areas provided stunning sea views from every window and the large terraces. With its kidney-shaped pool set into the rocks and a stairway down to the tiny beach, the gleaming white Villa le Trident was as up to date as it was possible to get.
Maugham’s commission in 1927 gave Dierks all the cachet he needed and spread his name far and wide. Soon he had embarked upon a series of art deco houses which have easily withstood time and changing fashions.
In 1930, after seeing the villa Dierks had built for himself on an inhospitable site, Maxine gave him the commission to build her a house. It was to be called the Château de l’Horizon, she said. And she knew precisely what she wanted.
* Churchill was opposed to women having the vote.
† Gertrude was now Lady Forbes-Robertson, since her husband had been knighted in 1913. Gertrude gave birth to a fourth daughter while Maxine was in England that Christmas: Diana, but always called Dinah in the family because it was the name of a barge dog Maxine had just acquired for the Julia.
‡ Sir Archibald Sinclair, Bt (Archie Sinclair) was a politician and, later, leader of the Liberal Party. He served in the army during the First World War, rising to the rank of major in a Guards machine-gun regiment. He was second in command to Churchill when the latter commanded the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers at Ploegsteert Wood (known as ‘Plugstreet’) on the Western Front in 1916. They formed a lasting friendship, which would become a significant political alliance in later decades. The much-decorated Major-General Sir Edward Louis Spears, Bt. Senior liaison officer between the British and French armies in the First World War, he and Churchill were firm friends. Churchill trusted Spears and would rely heavily on him in the Second World War. Born in Passy, France to a British father, Charles Spiers, and an Irish mother, he grew up bilingual. He changed the spelling of his surname by deed poll in 1918 as he claimed it was always being mispronounced, but more probably it was regarded as too Germanic.
§ Churchill liked to disparage this service by claiming he preferred to serve with his men because the officers’ mess at HQ was teetotal.
¶ Maxine’s relief work was never forgotten by the Belgian people, and after the war the King of the Belgians appointed her a Knight of the Order of the Crown. Also, at Maxine’s urging, the King rewarded Kathleen Drogheda with a sapphire ring, and in England Kathleen was invested with the CMG.
# Following her divorce from George Cornwallis-West at the start of the war, Jennie reverted to her former title, Lady Randolph Churchill, which she used even after she married for a third time. Jennie had divorced Cornwallis-West for his adultery with the infamous Mrs Patrick Campbell (‘Mrs Pat’), a leading actress of the day who had a number of adulterous affairs (including, before Gertrude married him, Forbie – who was almost suicidal when Mrs Pat terminated the affair). Her most famous relationship was with George Bernard Shaw, who was obsessed and wrote Pygmalion for her. She was known for her wit, and is credited with the remark, on hearing that two male friends were lovers: ‘My dear, I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.’ Mrs Pat married Cornwallis-West, but the marriage was not a success.
** Like many of Maxine’s friends, Millicent, Kathleen and Olive had all driven ambulances in the First World War.
†† Olive Winn, better known as Lady Baillie, the millionaire owner of Leeds Castle in Kent.
‡‡ These two women were so discreet that even Elsa’s biographer found it impossible to say for sure that they were actually lovers. If so, Dickie was bisexual for she also had a number of liaisons with men, including an eight-year affair with the Duke of Elba, which she discussed with the biographer Hugo Vickers in hours of interviews, yet never spoke of any sexual element in her relationship with Elsa. Furthermore, Elsa swore to Lady Colebrooke that she and Dickie were not lesbians. Elsa appeared to accept Dickie’s heterosexual relationships with equanimity, though there is no ambivalence about Elsa’s sexual orientation: in her autobiography she wrote how she knew in her teens, when kissed by her fiancé, that she could never make love to a man.
§§ In ‘Harlem On My Mind’ by Irving Berlin the lyrics mention the ‘high-falutin’ flat that Lady Mendl designed’. (Elsie had married Sir Charles Mendl in 1926.) Cole Porter’s song ‘That Black and White Baby of Mine’ includes the lines ‘All she thinks is black and white / She even drinks black and white’) about her black and white decor phase. In ‘Anything Goes’, he wrote the lines ‘When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up / Now turns a handspring, landing up / On her toes / Anything goes!’
¶¶ Formerly Winnaretta ‘Winnie’ Singer, a daughter of the American sewing machine magnate. A well-known lesbian and famous patron of the arts, ‘Princess Winnie’ became one of Elsa’s best friends. She married the homosexual Prince Edmond de Polignac in 1893 in a ‘lavender marriage’, for the title, but they hated each other and had long ago separated. Fully aware that she was regarded as nouveau riche by the Parisan Le Gratin, Winnie nevertheless had the confidence of the super-rich. When a duchess attempted to squash her by saying haughtily ‘My name is better than yours,’ Winnie retorted, ‘Not at the bottom of a cheque it’s not.’
## British ambassador to Germany, 1920—5.
*** Distilled from ten thousand jasmine flowers and around four hundred roses, as well as small amounts of tuberose, ylang-ylang and michelia per ounce, when launched in the mid-Twenties it sold for forty dollars an ounce, and it was indeed the world’s most expensive perfume. In 2000 it was voted the perfume of the century, beating Chanel No. 5 into second place, and it has not lost its allure. A modern variation, Joy Forever, costs about a hundred pounds for an ounce of eau de parfum.
††† Ethyl Cox, Mrs George Esslemont Gordon Leith. Leith was a prize-winning South African architect who had worked with Edwin Lutyens in the design of New Delhi.
‡‡‡ Bendor, from the family armorial ‘azure with a bend dor’. His grandfather, the first Duke, owned the 1880 Derby winner Bend Or, and Hugh’s red hair was a similar colour.
§§§ In this incestuous society Coco had been assisted in starting her company by her lover Etienne Balsan, the playboy brother-in-law of Consuelo Balsan.
¶¶¶ A Catholic bishop, and personal confessor to King Leopold II of Belgium.
### Although homosexual, in 1915 Maugham had an adulterous relationship with Syrie Wellcome, wife of Henry Wellcome the pharmaceutical tycoon, and they had a daughter Mary (usually called Liza). After the Wellcomes divorced in 1917 Maugham and Syrie married, although he had already begun his long relationship with the real love of his life, Frederick Haxton. Syrie eventually felt unable to tolerate the ménage à trois and divorced Maugham in 1929. Maugham was recommended to put the villa in his daughter’s name to avoid death duties; he replied, ‘Thank you, I have read King Lear! Haxton died in 1944, and Maugham in 1965. The villa was inherited by Maugham’s last partner, Allan Searle.
PART TWO
5
Courtesans and Assignations
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br /> The Château de l’Horizon was in a sense Maxine Elliott’s last love affair. She moved into the small workman’s cottage on the site in order to monitor every detail of the construction.
A bridge, wide enough to take her Daimler, was built from the main road across the railway tracks, giving access onto the building site behind a six-metre-high wall built to provide the property with total privacy. To this day no one in Cannes can explain how Maxine persuaded the municipal authorities to grant permission for the bridge, and there must have been difficulties, too, during the building of the structure because of the frequent train services between Nice and Cannes.* It is said locally that there were internecine difficulties resembling those of a civil war when trains were sometimes stopped by builders.† The jewel of a house which emerged was the result of Barry Dierks’s genius, Maxine’s passionate interest and many heated exchanges. Maxine was a woman used to getting her own way and she thought nothing of ordering a whole day’s work to be ripped out if it failed to meet her expectations. In the main, though, she deferred to the thoroughbred-looking Dierks because she recognised him as something special.
The gleaming low white villa was set into the rocks behind it, as though it belonged there, and guests who glanced out of the windows or stepped onto the private balcony of their bedroom would get the impression that it was almost hanging over the blue sea. The swimming pool, considered the best on the Riviera, was housed in a basin blasted out of the rocks and featured a water-chute so that bathers could slide down into the sea below and swim to a raft tethered just offshore. The huge terrace between the house and pool was the centre for most of the entertainment, and at each end a curved stone staircase descended to the pool. Retractable sun awnings were installed, and card tables beneath provided shaded places for guests to drink and play card games – bridge, six-pack bezique – or backgammon. Any guest willing to play cards with Maxine for the whole day was one to be treasured and was sure to be re-invited.
She had gained weight since she gave up the stage almost a decade earlier, having decided that enjoying life was more important than her body shape. There is a story of how, during the build, Dierks one day persuaded Maxine to bend over to look at some detail of the swimming pool while behind them his partner Eric Sawyer surreptitiously stretched out a tape measure in a tactful attempt to ensure that the water-chute was built wide enough to accommodate her.
Maxine began entertaining at the villa before it was even half-finished, with a fancy-dress drinks party (but most of the women wore the newly popular flowing beach pyjamas). Several hundred guests attended; familiar names from the London and Paris crowd, who swarmed to parties wherever they happened to settle – Cecil Beaton, Doris Castlerosse, Sylvia Ashley, Beatrice Guinness and her daughters Theresa ‘Baby’ Jungman and Zita Jungman‡ among them, as well as Cimmie Mosley and her sister Irene Curzon. There was no formal meal, just hors d’oeuvres and endless servings of champagne and cocktails.
Cimmie, who had just conceived her third child, crashed her car on a hairpin of the Corniche, after falling asleep at the wheel on the drive back to Monte Carlo at 5 a.m. Tom Mosley had returned to the UK the previous day having heard news of a change of government, but before he left the couple had quarrelled noisily and publicly in the bar at Eden Roc§ over his latest extra-marital affair, with Diana Mitford. Maxine was always convinced that Cimmie had drunk too much deliberately, to forget her marital miseries, but maybe she had simply attended too many parties which ended at dawn. Fortunately, although the car was wrecked Cimmie was only bruised and she continued on a sort of frantic round of the cocktail parties, lunches, casinos, beach club parties and nightclubs – a never-ending hedonism that would provide her with a road to self-destruction. Maxine went to many of these parties, without – now she was middle-aged – involving herself in the wilder excesses. She still had her own close group of friends from the old days; the younger set provided the fireworks and buzz, which she was content to watch.
By the late summer of 1932, although the villa was still incomplete (works would go on for another year), it was ready for limited occupation. As soon as the kitchen was in working order Maxine could wait no longer and threw her first luncheon party on the pool terrace. Fifty people sat down to eat while workmen sat on the scaffolding, watching and cheerfully serenading the guests with Provençal songs. From that day, there was a never-ending stream of visitors to the villa, from England, from America, from the length of the Côte d’Azur and beyond, while Maxine happily pulled her white mini-palace together. The villa was seldom empty as she hosted swimming parties, luncheon parties, dinner parties, bridge parties, cocktail parties; any kind of event that would give pleasure. She loved the Château de l’Horizon and never tired of showing it off to those who lived or holidayed on the Riviera.
Sunlight reflecting off the sea flooded the spacious white rooms, rippling on the ceilings and walls. The classic furnishings for an English country house, originally chosen for Hartsbourne and stored for years, were finally shipped in: huge squashy sofas, chairs, tables, side tables, sofa tables, sideboards, a grand piano, photographs of the King (Edward VII) and Maxine’s closest friends – many now dead – in silver frames, crystal vases and lamps, gilded-frame pictures. Barry Dierks burst into tears when he saw it all, for he had visualised an uncluttered minimalist interior for his beautiful pièce de résistance. After the initial shock he came to accept that it was Maxine’s world, her house, not his, and in later years he would give her much credit for the things he learned about providing elegant comfort as well as beauty.
Guests were driven across the narrow bridge and down the short, steep hill to arrive at the entrance door. They were invariably received by Maxine in the central hall, and several visitors wrote about the striking imagery which was possibly deliberate: she had allowed her hair to go naturally white now, and she usually dressed in white and waited for them at the foot of the sweeping pale marble staircase. To one side of the stairway was an immense salon, large enough to garage a hundred cars.1 It had a vast marble fireplace and glass doors which opened onto the tree-shaded terrace looking over the pool. Beyond the salon was a small dining room, used only in the winter, and then two small rooms – a morning room used for card games and a library overlooking the sea. The kitchens and usual offices such as the flower room and housekeeper’s room faced a small side garden, as did some ground-floor rooms for the staff of guests such as secretaries and maids or valets. Fresh flowers were everywhere; mostly great arrangements of white lilies, sometimes with their throats sprayed pink, or gold, or blue with food colouring to match the colour scheme of the table setting. Minutes before a guest arrived Maxine’s maid would whisk through the hall and salon wafting an incense burner – Maxine knew a thing or two about staging and settings.
The first floor housed the bedrooms and Maxine’s own suite. There were a dozen or so guest suites and bedrooms (even regular guests weren’t sure of the number), all overlooking the sea and each with its own wedge-shaped bathroom. This was Maxine’s clever idea: the thin end contained a high window for light and formed a wall to provide the balcony with privacy. As soon as the main guest suite was completed she invited her beloved sister Gertrude and Forbie, who was by now almost eighty, and recovering from pneumonia, a much-feared illness in those pre-antibiotic days. Maxine provided everything for his comfort and visualised him relaxing on the terraces, convalescing in the gentle warmth of the winter sunshine. Unfortunately, it was one of those occasional winters on the Riviera when the sun did not shine. Instead, residents suffered one of the biggest storms ever known, which bent iron girders on building sites, removed entire roofs and flooded villages. The storm was followed by weeks of cold winds and driving rain, with a grey and heaving sea as an outlook. In a house designed for a warm climate Forbie was thoroughly miserable. A local doctor, Dr Brès – who would become a lifelong and sympathetic friend of Maxine’s – came to visit Forbie daily to cheer him up and generally look after him.
; That winter Maxine built a small staff of devoted retainers, some of whom had been with her through the war and afterwards, and these ‘permanents’ were augmented by local people. At last, her stage was set. From May to October the Château de l’Horizon was to be a second Hartsbourne, and since the smart set had by now ‘discovered’ the Riviera for summer holidays there was a steady influx of visitors from New York, London, and Paris all year, roaming the Riviera in a relentless search for pleasure. Maxine rarely had more than ten house-guests at a time, but many travelled with staff – maids, chauffeurs, valets or secretaries – so there was often a large household to cater for and some favoured guests stayed for a week or more.
The Riviera Set Page 8
