Advertisement

Basking in France's ultimate celebrity resort

The Sixties one-hit-wonderful Peter Sarstedt had recently died. Respect required a trip to Juan-les-Pins. You will remember that the lavishly mustachioed Sarstedt soared to fame in 1969 with Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? This chronicled the uber-chic existence of an airhead Euro-chick which took her, inter alia, to Juan. I was going anyway. The Sarstedt demise put the tin hat in plans. 

Everyone went there. Still does. I have before me the guest-book of a Juan five-star hotel. It reads like the cast list of the 20th and 21st centuries. From Churchill and Valentino through Ray Charles, the Aga Khan, and more royals than I can easily count, to George Clooney, Mick Jagger and Barbara Cartland (not together, apparently)… headliners have swept through in waves.

And there’s more. Victor Hugo, Jules Verne and Monet visited. The “lost generation” of interwar US bathers and boozers headquartered there. Graham Greene, too. And Picasso. Roman Abramovich still has a seaside estate up the coast. Billionaires cluster. Sarstedt may have had only one song, but it was bang on. So I returned to honour him. Also because many of these prominent people visited in winter. It was winter. I’m prominent, in my own life. Destiny decided.

And you’d better believe it was beautiful. The Riviera didn’t become the planet’s most coveted coast by accident. The sun spangled the sea, creating a path of light blinding enough for saviours to walk upon. Crisp early-year clarity had the blues of Med and high sky as distinct as colours on a flag.

The crinkle-cut shoreline both beckoned and warned while, behind, snow-topped Southern Alps rose, uplifting the landscape. But, cry the clueless, it’s all so built-up. Well, for a start, it isn’t and, for second, what’s the point of a wonderful world if we can’t live on it? The key element of the Côte d’Azur is that it has generated a cool human story.

The villas, bars and beaches tell tales of money and mindlessness, excess and talent. The sun and beauty come with a riveting plot. That’s why we go.

I parked at the hotel and walked 20 minutes from Juan to its parent town, Antibes. As I should have mentioned already, Juan-les-Pins, though seemingly separate, is an offshoot district of Antibes. It’s the unruly wild-child which barely existed a century ago. Antibes itself, by contrast, has been going for two millennia, so has the requisite ramparts, squeeze of streets, wrought-iron market and cafés whose customers hail one another in decibel-driven camaraderie.

Above, overseeing the sea, the medieval castle long defied Saracens and, in retirement, hosts the Picasso Museum. Picasso worked there for six months in 1946, renewing with the Med and its mythology as the world renewed with peace. The result is a voluptuous flourish of centaurs, fawns, satyrs and sea urchins, generally around the nude dancing body of Françoise Gilot, his then-companion. (She’s 95, lives in New York and recently described Picasso as “amusing, playful, intelligent and unbearable”.) All Picasso’s Antibes work – 23 paintings, 44 drawings – are here. It was good to wander among them – Joie-de-Vivre really is a joy – but, when Antibes insists I pick a work for my home, it won’t be a Picasso. It will be Le Grand Concert, the last painting by Nicolas de Staël before – full of booze, barbiturates and blighted love for a local lass – he chucked himself from the window of his Antibes flat just along from the château in March 1955. It’s a cracking picture, with grand piano and double bass against the most vibrant red background. I’ll need to raise our ceiling, mind. As art goes, it’s gigantic.

I wandered onto the seafront. It’s built on the old city walls, from where the prospect across the Bay of Angels to Nice and the Alps is the stuff of arias. I don’t know any, so hummed Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? and filled up with goodwill to all men, notably those also strolling the front in the afternoon sun: conspiratorial couples and families with kids on scooters, power walkers, old fellows with improbable hats and old ladies with shades, fur coats and dogs the size of mobile phones. I smiled. They mainly smiled back.

The best hotels in France

I dodged into the crammed old town to a street the width of a baguette where Jean-Paul Veziano’s family had been baking since 1924. The shop’s little changed in 30 years: your standard neighbourhood bakery, except it’s known everywhere. Even when apparently local, Antibes resonates worldwide.

Veziano has baked for Alain Ducasse and Nobu and fallen out in Chicago with the late Charlie Trotter. His breads were served at the 2011 Monaco royal wedding. He’s 57, small and round – looks as if he’s never been beyond the end of the street – emotive and brilliant. “Bread’s the first thing that comes to the table. It sets the scene,” he said. “It must be beautiful.”

Then he gave me a morsel of his pissaladière, the Riviera’s onion pizza. I’ll need nothing else the next time I go to Antibes.

Nearby, a little square celebrated Nikos Kazantzaki, of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation. He lived out his exile right here. And Greene? He holed up in Antibes from 1966 to 1990, lunching daily at the Félix Café, just inside the city walls from the port. The café was still there, but shut. Later, Greene would return to his one-bedroom flat in the featureless Résidence des Fleurs to turn out The Human Factor etc. A plaque at 26 rue du Pasteur records his stay, but doesn’t say who he was. I had a look, but seeing a block of flats didn’t add much to my appreciation of Greene’s oeuvre, which has never been intense.

Meanwhile, the port boasted an enormous tonnage of luxury yachts. They lined the quays looking, face on, like schools of killer whales fixing to attack the poor. Most were registered in Britain, including the splendidly named “Rehab” (from Littlehampton). Weekend strollers strolled by, eyeing up the wealth. The Riviera needs all these strands: the rich, the retired, the clever devils working up the road at the Sophia Antipolis Science and Technology Park, the strollers, shopkeepers and football players, bakers, artists and cleaners and everyone else. They weave together to create the whole.

The best tours of Europe

And then a good percentage of them swarm off to jog and cycle around the Cap d’Antibes. These days, the Riviera favours fitness as well as finesse.

The Cap is the rugged peninsula thrusting between Antibes and Juan-les-Pins, and coated in absurdly expensive real estate. If £10 million sounds a lot of money, you’re not going to buy here. Or even rent. You might, though, trot around the edges or walk the coastal path, past creeks, beaches and shores of rock, and grey-green greenery lush against stiff odds. I did. The pleasure was as intense as a Sunday stride offers. Immediately back from the sea, the Cap then entices you in to keep you out.

Poorly kept lanes sneak up and down between vast gates, walls and fences protecting villas on estates as extensive as small kingdoms. Trees burst forth. Great classical piles, cream and/or apricot, Palladian columns and then some, are half-glimpsed. Dullness and distress are distant. Talk about sex appeal. Secrecy enhances glamour. Uncountable wealth fascinates.

Abramovich’s Château de la Croë was once base to Stavros Niarchos and, pre-war, to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The Château de la Garoupe was seized recently in legal proceedings associated with Russian plutocrat Boris Berezovsky. The Riviera’s backstory goes on, skulduggery and all.

You don’t get that in Lytham St Annes (or perhaps you do, but no one tells me).

Here, too, other strands were interwoven. Up top of the Cap, by the lighthouse, the Garoupe chapel packed in (essentially maritime) ex-votos along its walls. One was from a prisoner grateful to the Virgin for his escape from Toulon jail. Elsewhere, thanks for being saved from peril were balanced by memorials to those who perished. “I wonder how the Virgin chooses?” I said, aloud. A lady nearby looked aghast. I moved on, past the Château de la Garoupe again. Just as well. It needed a second mention, as a seminal point for Jazz Age junketry – and the establishment of Juan-les-Pins itself.

In the early Twenties, the astonishingly extravagant Cole Porter rented the Garoupe château. Bostonians Gerald and Sara Murphy visited. They were smitten, built their own villa and acted as a hub around which subsequently swirled the starriest squad of literary US hedonists. Until then, the Riviera season had been winter. High-born Britons couldn’t stand the summer heat. Anyway, they had to be in Henley in July. But Yanks revelled in summer. As John Dos Passos wrote: “… for us Americans, the temperature was ideal, the water delicious and Antibes was the little virgin port we dreamt of discovering.” The Riviera as a summer spot was being born.

Even more virginal was Juan-les-Pins, which scarcely existed until another American, railroad heir Frank Jay Gould, rolled in to create hotels and a casino and render Juan-les-Pins barely virginal at all. Most famously, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, moneyed on sales of The Great Gatsby, rented the Villa St Louis at Juan. They drank, fought and drank again. Scott favoured gin because “it worked fast”. Zelda went midnight dipping in her knickers. She, and other US women, looked lovely by day in white or bright colours, thus alarming local ladies, often war widows in black. No one around here had seen the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Robert Benchley before. They had swimsuits. They had gramophones and jazz. They had scotch and gin and champagne, and time. Tender Is the Night tells the story, but took Fitzgerald eight years to write.

Here, in the partying Twenties, they laid the foundations for the fun and top-end, topless frolics noted by Sarstedt. The possibilities had, however, been noted much earlier, by Boma Epstein. He was a 22-year-old Russian Jewish exile heading for Marseille, then the US. Waiting at a bus stop between Cannes and Antibes, he met a young woman of similarly exotic roots. He had nowhere to stay. She, Simone, invited him to the home of her hotelier parents. He never made the US. The youngsters married.

The first colour photographs of France

Shortly after – after the Fitzgeralds left (Zelda mad, Scott broke) – Boma took over the Villa St Louis and expanded it into the seafront Belles Rives hotel. It opened in 1929, survived the crash and the war (the family name changing to Estène) and remains prosperous, a Riviera point of reference and in the same family’s ownership. Granddaughter Marianne Estène-Chauvin now runs both the Belles Rives and the nearby Juana, an art deco mini-palace bought in 2006.

Mme Estène-Chauvin told me the story, and much more, over dinner at the Juana. Eating with us was Pascal Bruckner, a leading French philosopher.

“Great writers still come,” said Marianne. Then I wandered out for Fitzgerald’s “soft-pawed night and the ghostly wash of the Mediterranean” though, in truth, it was nippy. In truth, also, Juan-les-Pins has recently developed in not always distinguished fashion. But, then, so have I, so I’m badly placed to comment. Recall, though, that there is beauty all around, sea and sunlight, a profound past along in Antibes, jingle-jangle stories from Juan. And, in Marianne Estène-Chauvin, the most admirable woman I’ve met in ages. (“Outside the family, I mean,” he said, ducking.)

Getting there

The nearest airport to Juan-les-Pins is Nice – see skyscanner.net for an overview of flights available from London and regional airports. 

Staying there

The Belles Rives hotel is closed for refurbishment works; doubles at the Juana cost from £104, much higher in peak season (hotel-juana.com). 

The guide

Anthony Peregrine’s guide to Provence and the Côte d’Azur is at telegraph.co.uk/tt-provence.