(Above: Madeleine “Bibi” Messager, wife of photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue. Restaurant d’Eden Roc in Cap d’Antibes. Photograph by Lartigue. 1920.)
First of all, I apologize for not posting missives from Antibes and the South of France while I was there the last several days but the internet access there for me was sketchy and, according to a barista in Antibes’ old town, “It’s a thing here not to have WiFi in cafes,” when I went searching each day for, well, a stronger connection. I couldn’t get into my emails nor many of the internet sites I needed in order to do research without turning on my data roaming on my iPhone with AT&T and that didn’t include solving the problem on my computer. Once I forgot I had turned the data roaming feature on during a trip to London and it ended up costing me many hundreds of dollars on my AT&T bill, so I am wary of it and use it sparsely only when I must.
But “not getting in” became the theme of the trip in a much deeper way in my now not-getting-in life. I tried to attend the Tom Cruise/Top Gun: Maverick screening at the Cannes Film Festival down the road so I could write about it for you, but even with the offered help of a show biz bigwig I wasn’t able to get in. Come to think of it, even when I was living a getting-in life, I was turned away from Clint Eastwood’s film, White Hunter, Black Heart, back in 1990 when I was in Cannes because I was wearing a black linen suit and not a tuxedo. I was haughtily dismissed at the door, denied entry, and had to slink back down the stairs. Later at a small dinner for Eastwood, he found the narrative of my not getting in not only funny (and helped me to see it in the same way) but also foundational in his instant opinion of me. “That officially makes you the coolest person in the room tonight,” he said. As a reward, he changed my seating card to put me next to biographer Hannah Pakula, director Alan Pakula’s wife, who also found my not getting in amusing since I had decided to go ahead that very night and, dammit, start dining out on it. She had just begun her research on her next book which was to focus on Empress Frederick, Queen Victoria’s first child, and was deep into reading the correspondence between “Vicky,” as she called the Empress who was ensconced magnificently but bewilderingly in her new Prussian and German courts, and her mother back in England. “Sometimes the only thing worse than not getting in,” said Hannah, “is needing to get out.”
I was conjuring memories of that earlier trip to Cannes when I was taking one of my long meditative walks in Antibes on the day I had decided to head to Hotel du Cap and maybe have a cup of coffee for a likely 20 Euros and stroll in its gardens. Plus, it had to have WiFi that worked with my discomfited computer. I walked along the Mediterranean on Boulevard de Bacon where I was staying with a gracious friend at her home overlooking the sea and when I got to Boulevard John F. Kennedy, I took a left. I thought, after taking it, I was perhaps getting lost but I suddenly remembered that Sylvester Stallone told me a bit of the history of the hotel and why this boulevard where it is finally all too finely situated was named for a man who was a president of the United States, the one who was assassinated in November of 1963, the year my mother in Mississippi was suffering through her first awful months of esophageal cancer. Heading on foot to Hotel du Cap, namedropping yet another movie star, a dying Mississippi mama. Yep, pretty much sums me up in a sentence that isn’t even a sentence in a Letter that isn’t really a letter. But it is a life, and continued to be one on that day in the South of France clouded only by my thoughts.
(Above: Joe Kennedy and his kids at their Hotel du Cap cabana. 1939.)
I trudged onward toward the hotel where an idea of myself awaited me somewhere inside its gates, its gardens, its golden light there on its promontory in which the prominent and the vulgar and the celebrated are saturated less by it than by their own ideas of self, the light’s discernment lost on them, this latest generation, jaunty, raffish, too easily ruffled, just jaundiced enough. “The squinted at and squinting,” is how Helmut Newton once described them to me, these just-jaundiced few attempting rather touchingly to waft during their stays through this waft-weary hotel, after he and I had taken Sylvester Stallone and his wife Jennifer out on a boat from the Hotel du Cap’s dock in order to photograph them for a cover story I was writing about Stallone for Vanity Fair, which had been the reason for my earlier visit to this region. That had been thirty-two years ago, almost as distant now yet ever-present as that memory of my mother who was to die in another November in 1964. My father had already died in a car accident that August in 1963 before the November when Kennedy was killed and my own shock and performative mourning for my father - “Look at the child trying not to cry,” I heard as the tears I conjured were misinterpreted as bravery - morphed in their way to the performative mourning of a whole country that was shocked by the suddenness of another man’s death, not as important to me as my father but important nonetheless. I had already been through it and was about to go through it again with my mother, so the greater narrative of a national tragedy seemed to me at seven years old but an echo of my own little life and, being one, helped me to survive the immensity of the trauma by giving it perspective and fitting its resultant and comparative tininess into a grander scale. That trauma was the first sense of grandness I had in my life so knowing there was something grander than it helped me diminish it as I have felt diminished by it, in turn, all my life. I have been fitting my sense of smallness into a grander scale ever since. Diminishment and grandeur are what trauma and grief became in my life. I can’t get away from them even on a vacation in Cap d’Antibes, or especially on one. In some ways, diminishment and grandeur are what drove Irish American Catholics Joe and Rose Kennedy in their early arriviste years of marriage between the two world wars to bring their children to summer here at the hotel where I was headed - Stallone told me that bit of hotel lore - just as it drove me to compare myself to them as I walked along a boulevard named for but one of their dead sons.
(Above: Sylvester Stallone photographed by Helmut Newton at Hotel du Cap. 1990.)
I checked my watch as I walked along hoping that my seeing the time would pull me from such a reverie and ground me in the moment I was in. But then I quickly remembered that I had decided to wear my vintage bubble-back Rolex self-winding watch from 1950 in case someone who is a gatekeeper at Hotel du Cap - a no-doubt no-nonsense handsome one with an earpiece presiding over one of the actual gates on the grounds, a host at a cafe or a bar area, the person who oversees its infinity pool, some random one holding a clipboard while commanding those beneath her with the clipped consonants that Jeanne Moreau might employ if she were playing a Marseilles madam by emphasizing the woman’s efficiency so the sybaritic aspect of her job would not be an affront to herself or others - might flash on it, the rare Rolex, and realize I was the kind of guy who wore such a watch which would then signify I was the kind of guy who belonged at such a hotel. I am embarrassed to confess that yet it was the reason I put on the Rolex instead of my dependable Tag Heuer I had bought right after that first trip to Cannes because Helmut Newton had been wearing the exact same one. The delicate Rolex had decided not to run correctly that day - its second hand kept stopping at the 4 - but I wore it anyway because it wasn’t on my wrist to tell me the time. It was there to signify I belonged. The fact that I put it on to signify that I did proved that I didn’t, although I have been in enough hotels like Hotel du Cap - hell, in Hotel du Cap itself - to know that they are built on signifiers and those able to read them not with keenness but with a ludicrously instinctive wile they have already utilized to conjure a life that can include a stay at Hotel du Cap either on their own dime or preferably on someone else’s. They are not so much well-bred as they are well-honed.
I was hoping to sit at a table somewhere on the hotel’s grounds, not to wile away the hours but to start writing this column framed by the memory of doing that cover story on Stallone which was mostly set here in Antibes and down the road in Cannes with a detour - a deviation - to his place in Malibu. Stallone, Jennifer, Helmut and I were all still a bit sea sick when we returned to Hotel du Cap that long ago day after the photo shoot on the boat and disembarked on the the hotel’s dock. Stallone and his wife excused themselves and went to their room, but Helmut and I decided we needed some ginger ales to settle our nausea. We hung out by the infinity pool and talked slyly of Sly, of my love life, of staying focused on the work (not the setting), and of Helmut’s own lovely wife, June. I had hoped to hang out a bit again by that pool after my walk to the hotel the other day in order to jog some memories, but I never made it past the two gates I tried to enter. Each guard at each gate stopped me before I could even ask to go inside. Yes, they wore earpieces. And, yes, they were no-nonsense and horribly handsome in the way the officious deny their own allure by issuing denials to others. I was abruptly turned away and felt for a moment - but only a moment - haunted by the haughtiness of that dismissal on the Cannes Film Festival steps three decades before. Maybe it is because this year’s Festival had started that very day and the hotel was packed with a newer breed of movie star. Or maybe I no longer belong there, if I ever really did. I walked back down John F. Kennedy. I felt no need to slink away - just shrugged - and left behind that idea of myself to waft through the place on its own.
(Above: Tilda Swinton and Timothée Chalamet at Cannes for their film, The French Dispatch. 1978.)
(Above: David Bowie at Cannes. 1978.)
My deepest identity other than being an orphan is being a writer. Hotel du Cap was, in fact, originally conceived to be a retreat for artists and writers. During his time as Editor-in-Chief of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter hosted many “swellegant” parties there - to use a term invented by Cole Porter who loved Antibes. Carter wrote in his lovely, informative introduction to Alexandra Campbell’s Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc: A Timeless Legend on the French Riviera: “Hippolyte de Villemessant, in addition to having a name that generally would be found only in fiction, is a man of two great destinies. In the middle of the 19th century, he bought Le Figaro from its founder and changed it from a satirical weekly into the conservative daily it is today. He then set his mind on creating an elegant retreat for burnt-out writers in search for inspiration—as if there were any other kind. It was to be called Villa Soleil—later renamed the Grand Hôtel du Cap and, in 1987, the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc.” When Stallone was regaling me with the hotel’s lore, he told me that Marlene Dietrich “fucked Joe Kennedy here” and later as Helmut and I sat recuperating from our nausea he insisted that Picasso and Gary Cooper set up a shooting range somewhere on the hotel’s 20 acres. I already knew F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Gerald and Sara Murphy’s roles in the narrative of the place and the coastline, and that Tender Is the Night was Fitzgerald’s take on it all. “It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood,” he wrote in the novel, “green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark.” And this: “Dick walked beside her, feeling her unhappiness, and wanting to drink the rain that touched her cheek.” I’ve always loved that image. I like to think of the hotel somewhere behind those well-guarded gates as a place where men drink rain water from the cheeks of unhappy women.
(Above: Picasso signed the Hotel du Cap’s guestbook in 1923)
(Above: Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Picasso’s wife, Olga Khokhlova in Antibes. 1926.)
Since I had been denied entry to such a place that day I decided, after stopping off at my friend’s home on her cliff overhanging the Mediterranean and taking off my Rolex and putting on the Tag Heuer in honor of Helmut’s memory, to visit the Musée Picasso on the other side of Antibes which had once been a castle belonging to the Grimaldi family of Monaco. After it was turned into a museum, its curator in 1946 offered Picasso a space to work within the museum itself. Picasso spent two months there and donated the work to the the museum which was later named for him. He donated many other works as well. During those two summer months in Antibes in 1946, he used only the paints he could find in the town, which were cans of the stuff used to refurbish boats. He also used paint brushes he found in hardware stores that fishermen used to paint those boats and their houses. Picasso was a man who loved the libertinism of glamour but he was also a man who dedicated himself to the idea of art as his life’s work. He worked. He produced. He took the materials of his life where he found himself in the moment and created his art. I think he and Balanchine - and maybe Ethel Merman who never, as far as I know, made it to Antibes - were the great instinctive geniuses of the 20th century. Part of the deep pleasure I had during my few days in Antibes was the gratitude I felt for the kindness of the friend who invited me to stay at her home which was a 20 minute walk from Hotel du Cap. But that deep pleasure deepened for the further gratitude I felt there in that museum - one that had once been a Grimaldi castle where leisure was the truest liege - for having been reminded of the wonder of work that goes into the transcendence of art. Because it can be rather grim work trying to conjure memories of an earlier self that has been transcended by an older one.
There is another passage from Tender Is the Night: “Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.” I gave up conjuring on my walk back to my friend’s place after my visit to the museum - I gave up trying to still time like a stopped second hand on a vintage Rolex - and my thoughts became more like the subsumed uncounted strokes of a clock in the midst of its striking. I touched the Tag Heuer that Helmut inspired me to buy after our time here together over 30 years ago. He and his wife June lived in Monaco and were friendly with the Grimaldi family, especially Princess Caroline. In fact, Helmut and I went to a luncheon by the pool at Jean Pigozzi’s place somewhere around Antibes and he introduced me to Caroline who was there with her then husband, Stefano Casiraghi. Helmut suggested I sit next to her while he went off to talk to Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. Michael Douglas was seated across the table with this then wife Diandra. Anjelica Huston, on the Cannes jury that year, was talking to her friend Joan Juliet Buck over on the chaises they lounged upon. Grace Jones was in the pool.
Casiraghi turned to me and asked me about myself, the only person there who was not famous and in possession of a known narrative. I told him, this man who would meet his own tragic death from a boating accident just a few months later, about the tragic deaths of my father and mother back in my Mississippi childhood. The combination of such tragedies - a car accident, a mother’s death, maybe a flicker of a premonition of a few months hence - not only caught the attention of Princess Caroline but also seemed to be the actual something caught in her eye that the discerning Mediterranean light glisteningly discovered as a conjured tear. She seemed to be trying not to cry. How brave of her, I thought, and nodded toward her as a way of nodding toward a memory of such a thing being said of me. I realized how performative her mourning had been for Princess Grace, her mother, during a funeral broadcast around the world and underscored with Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. That day that lone tear she privately brushed aside was accompanied by another Grace’s having grumbled from the pool that Pigozzi wasn’t playing any of her music on his sound system until suddenly an anthem of being a slave to the rhythm rose around us.
Helmut danced over our way and pulled out a little camera. “Watch this,” he whispered to us. Mick and Jerry had submerged themselves in the shallow end of the pool by then slavishly watching Grace glide rhythmically back and forth in the water. Helmut began to pose the couple very precisely as he discerned the discerning light’s best angle on their faces. He then aimed the camera at them which, it turned out, was not a camera at all, but a squirt gun disguised as one. He squirted ready water right in their readied faces. We all laughed, including Mick and Jerry. Having decided to finish up her gliding, gladdened now by the sound of her own voice, Grace joined in.
On yet another day there was yet another luncheon at a little nondescript rather decrepit-looking restaurant, but one that had a starry reputation for having the finest seafood for miles around. Vanity Fair was giving the lunch and Princess Caroline was again there. Again I was seated at her table, this time under a tented area that had been set up across from the restaurant and down the street a bit. At one point, she needed to go the bathroom and, whispering, asked me if I would accompany her. As she took my arm to head up the street, we talked of dead mothers. I helped her up the rickety stairs at the rear of the restaurant and sat outside on one of the wooden steps. I listened to her pee and realized that this was my life, sitting outside a bathroom listening to a princess pee and not letting anyone in. I was glamour’s sentinel. It was my unglamorous lot.
I sat on that step waiting for Caroline to finish peeing and to wash her hands and not letting anyone in and thought back about sitting by the pool at Hotel du Cap with Helmut only a few days before - just as I thought about it as I headed down the hill the other day thirty-two years later after having been turned away from the hotel’s gate. After we had finished our ginger ales and our discussion about our lives, Helmut turned to me. “Feeling better?” he asked. I was. We sat in silence and stared out at the Mediterranean past the pool that seemed to flow into it as if it each were the memory of the other. “They call that an infinity pool,” he finally said. “Funny, huh. It’s not. It’s finite. That’s what I see when I look at it: it’s finite.”