The Villas of the Riviera [antikvár]

muIntroductionIn 1921 Universal Pictures was panicking over its grand Holljwood studio production of Fo/ie de femmes in which director Erich von Stroheim and his decorator Richard Day recreated, in the minutest of details, an imaginar}' French Riviera. The film reconstituted the lavish Belle Epoque casino of Monte Carlo, the Hőtel de Paris, an enchanting setting of exotic plants and trees, balmy temperatures, twilight skies, and a dazzling Mediterranean sea.There were balustrade terraces at moonlight, glittering chandeliers, grand staircases enveloping beautiful and elegant women, and smart-looking men in white dinner jackets. The project had run way over budget and then a publicity man got a bright idea. He installed a gigantic illuminated billboard on Times Square in New York announcing that the film was the first ever made for over a million dollars. Needless to say, Folie de femmes was a big success and launched for posterity the myths of decadent pleasure in the south of France.Stroheim's images of grandeur are still what many people like to think of when they think of the French Riviera. And, last we looked, the park in front of architect Charles Garnier's florid casino in Monte Carlo hasn't moved. Yet, go across town or take one of the hilly east-west roads edging the world's most famous coastline, and high hopes of splendor fade into a claustrophobic jungle of concrete and stone that recalls one of the more recent movies by Francois Truffaut.High-rise ofiices, postmodern hotels, real-estate agencies, fast-food restaurants, local food markets, shopping-and-gardening centers, and superhighways saturate most of the hundred-mile stretch of rocky and pebble-stone beaches, jam-packed seaports from Hyeres to Menton on the Italian frontier. Today's ideas of show-off lean more to talk of topless sunbathing, wondering how big the boats are, or what a nightmare it is to be in a Testa Rossa stuck in between a couple of fat tourist buses from eastern Europe, in the worst of summer heat.The exclusive finger-like green capes such as Cap Ferrat, Cap d'Antibes, and Cap Martin haven't disappeared. Yet, there are high stone walls, locked gates with television monitors, and signposts warning 'chiens mechants."lx's hard to know if anyone's at home in this long famous playground of the rich and famous, even harder to imagine that a hundred years ago British royals, Russian czars, German princes, and American millionaires came in winter for the sun, sports, and gambling. And, it seems pure fantasy now to think that the Lost Generation had the Riviera all to itself in summertime, and F Scott Fitzgerald said this was where he wanted "to live and to die."Have we landed in the wrong place? There are vestiges of ancient Greek seaside settlements, Saracen strongholds, and Roman fortresses perched up high. But, one is clueless to know where start or stop the glitzy Belle Epoque seaside resorts of Nice, Cannes, and Monte Carlo, or the jet-set summer mecca, once a sleepy litrie fishing viUage, St. Tropez. Most big Belle Epoque villas today are cut up, changed, developed, modified, transformed into hospitals, schools, museums, libraries, hotels, and apartments.It's comforting to know we still have the old movies from HolljTvood, and also the ones from the legendary Victorine studios in Nice, and the old maps and photographs. But to have an idea of what went wrong with the Riviera, our best bet is to go to the memories of elderly people like ninety-year-old André Cane, a native of Nice and a builder by profession who once had as a client Somerset Maugham.Mr. Cane is also well known as a ranking local historian, treating snippets of the past as enthusiastically as if they were this morning's news headlines. "You know, in the vjjos, the English were already coming to Nice," he reflects, sitting intently behind his desk in his office at home on Cap Ferrat, surrounded by many of his own first-edition books. "They used to take donkeys and go and picnic at Beaulieu, under the olive trees."