ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ: Eden Roc beach club on the French Riviera John Kobler Cosmopolitan magazine February 1953 Θεάματα ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ

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Eden Roc beach club on the French Riviera John Kobler Cosmopolitan magazine February 1953 Θεάματα ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ

Eden Roc

Beach club on the French Riviera

By John Kobler

Cosmopolitan magazine February 1953

Θεάματα

ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ

Eden Roc

The swankiest beach club on the Riviera

boasts more noted names,

notable bank rolls,

and noticeable nudity

than any spot on earth

Of Europe’s fleshpots, few are fleshier than the tip of Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera. For here stand the Hétel du Cap d’Antibes and its famed seashore clubhouse, Eden Roc, which for generations has attracted some of the fattest wallets and the trimmest women in international society. From July to September, the high season at Eden Roc, it is scarcely possible to dive into the pool without splashing an American millionaire or a Far Eastern princeling, a Hollywood star or a professional Roman Beauty.

The parking lot frequently quarters a green Buick marked with silver letters an inch and a half high—THE DUKE OF WINDSOR. From a group of cabanas, screened by shrubbery from the vulgar gaze, may drift the fruity voice of Orson Welles raised in petulant argument with Noel Coward or Elsa Maxwell. Offshore, energetic souls like Aly Khan and Errol Flynn scud hither and yon on surfboards, in motorboats and yachts. For yachtsmen and seaplane pilots there is commodious anchorage. Until his recent death, Alberto Dodero, an Argentine shipping magnate, would arrive around the first of August with two yachts, two planes, and five cars.

WITH DIRECTION FROM THE DUCHESS, the Duke of Windsor photographs a group of their guests at Eden Roc. The Windsors’ patronage, beginning with their honeymoon, helped put the club on society’s map.

Although the cape is primarily a haunt of the wealthy, there are some pleasures that are quite inexpensive. The humblest, and to many the most rewarding, costs nothing. Anybody may sit on the wall overlooking the swimming pool and view the neo-Grecian spectacle below, once dubbed “the Naked Pit.” Strewn about the limestone rocks cape, on well-stuffed sun pads, are coveys of curvilinear females, clad in mere hints of bathing suits. They toil not, neither do they swim. They are present to be seen and admired.

Here the Bikini attains its boldest and most fashionable expression. “Quite natural.” says André Sella, the maitre d'hótel, “because the best bodies come to us.” A man with a nice sense of the fitness of things, he will no more tolerate fully dressed males around the pool than bathing-suited ones in the hotel dining room. “What could be uglier,” he says, “than dressed men among women?”

For the moderate sum of 500 francs (about $1.50), a visitor may descend into the Naked Pit itself and laze away the whole day. Food and drink are nearby. A luncheon menu priced at 1,500 francs ($4.50) offers as a starter a choice of some fifty hors d’oeuvres. After that most people are content to doze in the sun. Those desiring a total tan have recourse to one of two solaria known as “Adam’s” and “Eve’s.”

[ cabanas ]

For celebrities who crave a kind of privacy in public there are the cabanas, just sixteen of them. They rent at 30,000 francs ($90) a month and are in demand among the Hollywood contingent. In recent seasons Cabaña 501 has been graced by Rita Hayworth, 513 by Darryl Zanuck, 512 by André Kostelanetz [:orchestral music conductor and arranger] and his wife, Lily Pons.

Finally, there is the hotel. The rate for a double room runs around $30 a day. No two rooms are furnished alike. Many contain rare antiques. To honeymooners who occupy one of them, Sella issues a numbered card admitting them to Eden Roc gratis for life. The No. 1 card is held by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, in whose honor Sella instituted the custom.

It’s a Promising Hunting Ground

Appearances should deceive no one into assuming that all the charming creatures frequenting Eden Roc are necessarily idle. The place is a promising hunting ground for the unwed and the unkept, and many such busily hunt day and night. “Nice boy, that American you’re going around with,” one Eden Rockette was overheard recently to say to another in the ladies’ dressing room. “Is it true he wants to marry you?” The answer was enlightening. “It was true, but he’s all yours, if you want him. I just got a line on his bank account.”

The St. Peter of this terrestrial paradise is a subtle man of Italian antecedents, André Sella, who understands the idiosyncrasies of the rich and famous. Bald, olive-skinned, hawk-nosed, and suave as velvet, Sella has been variously compared to a Renaissance doge, a Middle European foreign minister, and Erich von Stroheim. A widower, he has four grown and comely daughters, whom he tries to discourage from mingling with the guests. He is a passionate Napoleonic scholar who collects relics of the emperor’s life in exile (Napoleon landed at nearby Juan-les-Pins, after he escaped from Elba, his first island-prison). He has a private museum on the grounds full of them, a building that stands in sharp contrast to the nonscholarly goings on in this fabulous Mediterranean resort.

The idea of creating a playground at Cap d’Antibes was originally conceived on a modest scale and in a spirit of altruism. Some ninety years ago, Auguste de Villemessant, editor of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, saw in the sun-drenched headland an ideal retreat for needy artists and writers. But he could not raise the sum required for such a philanthropy. But a group of Russian aristocrats to whom he had described the spot decided to exploit it. At a cost of almost six and a half million francs, then equivalent to $1,300,000, they built the Villa Soleil, later renamed the Hétel du Cap d’Antibes. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 bankrupted them.

Its First Six Owners Went Broke

The pleasure dome passed rapidly through various hands, ruining each investor in turn. In 1888 Antoine Sella, father of the present proprietor and in his native Italy a hotelkeeper of note, approached the new and seventh owners with an offer to manage it on a ten-percent-commission basis. They eagerly accepted.

“Poor devil!” muttered the coachman who met Sella at the station when he arrived to take over. The staff numbered twenty-five untrained local servitors and a one-eyed, retired English doctor who functioned as a greeter. None of them had been paid in weeks.

There were no guests at all that year. Then came two English spinsters. They took a room together at 22 franes ($4.20) a day, meals included. They drank no wine. Sella’s income during the week of their stay was 154 francs, or $29.40.

He was ready to go back to Italy, when a famous American infused life into the dying enterprise. He was James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald. Bennett happened to be visiting a minor German princeling who occupied a house near the hotel. Casting about for larger premises in which to give a banquet, the German settled on Villa Soleil. As the banquet got under way, Bennett received a cablegram from his sister, a millionairess, asking him to find rooms on the Riviera for her. Sella showed him his three plushiest suites. Bennett engaged them all, paying $2,000 in advance.

The Bennetts liked the place fine, and other rich Americans began patronizing it on their recommendation. As yet there was no electricity, no central heating, and no elevator. Nor was there a bathtub.

Although the hotel was losing money at the turn of the century, Sella felt sufficiently confident of its future to want to buy it. The owners were only too happy to sell it for some 80,000 francs ($16,000) — less than what an American tycoon might now spend there in a week or so. A satisfied guest, Lord Onslow, Governor General of New Zealand, lent the money to Sella, and he made the purchase.

Eden Roc was begun in 1911. Guile inspired its name. Nearby was a magnificent public flower garden called Eilen Roc, to which sightseers flocked from all over Europe. For his rival attraction, Sella chose the like-sounding name of Eden Roc, then let it be known among local coachmen that should they confuse the two and bring their fares to him, he would not be displeased. Eilen no longer exists.

Until World War I, when the hotel was requisitioned by the U.S. Army as a rest camp for Red Cross personnel, Eden Roc was primarily a winter resort. But one summer, after bevies of young American nurses and their admirers had frolicked on Eden Roc, Sella resolved to keep open most of the year. Now summer is the big season.

Sella had struck it rich. Salaries were paid regularly, though the employer determined the size of them by a somewhat whimsical system. The son, who was broken into the hotel business during his early teens, recalls: “On payday Father would order the staff to line up in the kitchen. He would then go up to the first with a huge bag of franc pieces and begin counting them out into the employee’s hand, looking him straight in the face all the while. He would continue until he detected an expression of satisfaction. Then he would proceed to the next employee.”

Among the celebrities who gave Eden Roc its distinctive flavor was the brilliant, lady-killing French novelist, Anatole France. During his declining years he liked to sit on a marble rock near the pool and contemplate the ladies in their Annette Kellermanns [:one-piece bathing costume named by Annette Kellermann].

Belgium's King Albert was so fond of the place that he decorated Sella with the Cross of the Order of Leopold II.

Fabulous Guests, Fabulous Parties

Marlene Dietrich made one of her first public appearances in trousers at Eden Roc. She was accompanied by another actress, who was trousered and tattooed to boot.

Zelda Fitzgerald and F. Scott Fitzgerald tossed a party in the hotel in honor of Alexander Woollcott, Grace Moore, and Miss Moore's fiancé of the moment, a Latin named Elizaga, which no one who attended is ever likely to forget. At the height of the festivities, Zelda Fitzgerald kicked off her lace panties and flung them at Elizaga. This moved him to leap into the sea. Not to be outdone, Woollcott stripped to the buff, donned a straw hat, lit a cigarette, asked for his keys at the desk, and, ignoring the gasps around him, marched grandly off to his room.

“Our guests do not behave quite so colorfully nowadays,” says André Sella, who inherited the resort on his father’s death in 1931.

But Eden Roc still abounds in characters whose behavior cannot be considered drab. There is Mrs. Norman K. Winston, for example, nee Rosita Halspenny, of Oklahoma. She has, by virtue of two prosperous marriages, had access to a couple of impressive American fortunes. Thus equipped, Rosita made her first big splash on the cape in 1947 when she rented the sumptuous Chateau de l’Horizon.

Rosita entertains highborn but impoverished Rivierians on a scale to which they have not been accustomed for many years. Thirty at dinner is routine in her lavish household. Rosita claims to be a Cherokee Indian, and to prove it she frequently emits some rather startling war whoops.

“Canine Situation Embarrassing”

To accommodate dog-loving guests, the senior Sella established a dog cemetery behind the hotel. One diamond-encrusted English dowager visits it every summer to place flowers on the grave of a poodle she lost two decades ago.

Entombed dogs are the only kind that André Sella will have around. He once cabled a Texas oilman who wanted to book a suite for his family and a dachshund: CANINE SITUATION MOST EMBARRASSING TO ME. INFINITELY REGRET BUT CANNOT MAKE AN EXCEPTION EVEN FOR YOUR LITTLE FELLOW WHO UNQUESTIONABLY MUST BE A REAL LITTLE GENTLEMAN.

Hygiene, not snobbishness, dictates this antidog policy. “The pine trees are full of ticks,” Sella explains. “The ticks get on the dogs, and the dogs might contaminate the guests.”

Sella’s solicitousness for the welfare of his guests borders on the paternal. Before her marriage to Aly Khan, Rita Hayworth once had a luncheon date at Eden Roc with the Shah of Persia. She never showed up. She lunched instead in her future husband’s villa. As the minutes crept by and the shah sat at his table in conspicuous solitude, his brow black with fury, Sella quietly maneuvered. The result of it was the sudden appearance before the shah of a resplendent young blonde, a beauty contestant who had just carried off the title of “Miss Riviera.” The shah’s gloom instantly changed to joy.

EDEN ROCKETTES are the most thoroughly tanned in the world, for here the Bikini bathing suit reaches its finest flower.

At the peak of the season Sella employs 160 servants, or 1.6 for every hotel guest. People who simply visit Eden Roc for the day — there are usually about 300 — have to pig it along with only 5 servants each.

Lest sportive guests should bruise their expensively nourished bodies, Sella has the rocks of Eden Roc trimmed to bluntness. From time to time they are also scrubbed with brushes dipped in ammonia. Every morning the sun pads are similarly sterilized.

In the heady atmosphere of Eden Roc, men tend to be particularly appreciative of women, a fact not overlooked by Sella when he allowed Van Cleef and Arpels, the international jewelers, to open a branch there. Between the bar and the pool, where Bikinied Venuses and their cavaliers continually pass to and fro, they display a king’s ransom in gems. Exactly how many dollars’ worth they sell a year is their and Sella’s secret, but the figure very probably runs into seven digits.

The Hótel du Cap has room for no more than a hundred guests, a minute fraction of the seasonal applicants. Sella can therefore afford the luxury of picking and choosing. In doing so, his paramount consideration is diversity. “Uniformity,” he says, “is a terrible thing.” Thus, should he find himself with a plethora of big business men on hand, he will give priority to, say, an actor or a novelist.

In a lifetime of catering to rich people, Sella has acquired a lighthearted view of capital. “It doesn’t disappear,” he maintains. “It just changes hands.”

The hotel register reflects some of the changes. The names of Russian grand dukes dominate its early pages, diminishing rapidly after the Red Revolution. Next come Spanish grandees and British peers, the first to vanish almost altogether during the Spanish Civil War, the second to thin to a trickle during England’s era of austerity.

A constant factor, however, has been the American millionaire. Without him, Sella is frank to admit, he could not operate today. It is appropriate that the most popular drink in the Eden Roc bar is called an Americano — vermouth, bitters, a twist of lemon rind, and cracked ice.

Back to the Russians?

In depressed moods, Sella sometimes wonders whether the property will not wind up as it started—in the hands of Russian aristocrats, but a new breed from Soviet Russia. After all, he reasons, the mayor of Antibes, like those of Juanles-Pins and Nice, is a Socialist. The municipal councils of all three are Communist-controlled.

“I should not be in the least surprised,” Sella told a visitor recently, “to find Stalin someday taking swimming lessons in the Eden Roc pool.”