Traveling
in the South of France one recent summer I came upon the Hotel du Cap.
It is on a little peninsula of land that sticks out into the Mediterranean
Sea called Cap d'Antibes. I had stopped in the town of Antibes years earlier
and walked around just long enough to know that I wanted to come back.
It is this hotel on the French Riviera that made me start to think about
the artist's license to rearrange reality. If you are familiar with the
book,"Tender Is The Night" by Scott Fitzgerald, you might remember his
description of this very hotel from the opening pages...
"On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera,
about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large,
proud, rose colored hotel. ...The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug
of a beach were one."
In earlier days, the beginning of summer was the end of the season on
the Riviera. But in June, 1923 Gerald and Sara Murphy convinced the owner
to keep the Hotel du Cap open for themselves and their friends with a
minimum staff. Both the Murphys and the hotel were the models for Scott
Fitzgerald's novel. Picasso and his wife were also at the hotel that June.
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There is indeed a large "tan prayer rug" that stretches from the hotel,
but it is not a beach; the "prayer rug" is a wide brown gravel walkway
that leads down to the equally famous Eden Roc, a restaurant and hotel
complex. The "beach" is a solid rocky cliff and the only swimming nearby
is in the luscious pool of the Eden Roc. You can spring from a diving
board into the sea, if you like, and climb back up the cliff on a conveniently
placed ladder that is bolted to the rock. I watched as several kids from
the hotel dove into the Mediterranean. Swimming back, they would catch
the rhythm of the ocean; scurrying up the ladder when the sea was pushing
them, and holding on tight when the ocean sank back.
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It costs about a thousand dollars a day to stay at the Hotel du Cap --
at least it did when the U.S. dollar was strong. Now it would be perhaps
30% more. Many wealthy American fathers were anxiously booking their families
in for the next year as I studied the lobby. There is a beautiful antique
elevator of highly polished wood and glass whose rise to the elegant rooms
above is always in full view. The elevator is neatly placed in the curl
of a curving staircase that leads the more adventurous to the same place.
The hotel must have seemed a bargain to the son of the founder of the
famous New York based leather goods store, Mark Cross. Gerald Murphy might
best be described as the only man who could possibly have taught anything
stylish to his soon to be heralded Yale roommate, Cole Porter. The Murphys
had left the United States due to "an absence of cultural stimulation
in America". I found that I was on this trip for the same reason.
The Murphys were all about style and their life on the Riviera came to
haunt the characters in Fitzgerald's novel. I'd always admired the book
because it was so evocative of a certain American/French ambiance what
Gerald dubbed "a false mystery".
I poked around the hotel grounds and found a pet cemetery with little
stone grave markers carved with the names of favorite pets. The dates
were mostly before 1930. The Murphys were a family that not only remembered
their pets birthdays, but celebrated them.
As always, the intersection of fiction and reality is a surprising place.
The hotel in "Tender" is a composite of the Hotel du Cap and others. And
the beach that the novel's Dick Diver so carefully rakes of seaweed in
the early morning isn't at the hotel, but up the road a ways at La Garoupe,
today a tiny sandy beach. In fact there are more wooden decks than beach
there now.
Still it is a fascinating journey for any American brought up on the stories
of these expatriate artists and the legacy that they have left us. I'm
always as intrigued with seeing the inspiration for the art, as the art
itself.
The novel's intertwining of facts and fiction made my study of the hotel
and the surrounding area all the more fruitful. I had read a little about
the Murphys over the years, for instance in a book about them inspired
by their lifestyle called, "Living Well Is the Best Revenge". The more
I remembered, the more I wanted to see. Here had been a wealthy couple
inventing a life of manners and art among some of the most famous artists
of their time. Their friends included Fitzgerald, Dos Pasos, Picasso,
Leger, Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Valentino, Cole Porter, and other assorted
notables, all of whom were stopping by this hotel and later by their Villa
American regularly.
Besides starting the tradition of the Riviera summer season, Murphy is
said to have introduced American jazz to the French. And although his
output as a painter was small, he was no mere dilettante: he is actually
regarded by some as one of the most important American painters of the
twentieth century.
From 1923 until 1929 the Murphys created a kind of magic, only to see
it end tragically and dramatically with the death of their beloved young
son after a visit to, of all places, Hollywood, where he contracted tuberculosis
from his chauffeur. Such was the fertile ground from which their close
friend Scott Fitzgerald drew his novel about beautiful people who lose
their way and end badly.
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Not too far from the Hotel is a Picasso museum in an old stone fortress
once used as a residence. One of the galleries had been an early Picasso
apartment and it now contains some of his paintings and sculptures. There
is one painting in particular that caught my eye. It is an abstraction
but I recognized it anyway and confirmed my suspicions in a nearby description.
It is a colorful little painting of the Hotel du Cap looking like a face
with a big split tongue lapping out at the viewer, as if trying to woo
him and then trap him in it's grasp. There is both whimsy and the danger
of enticement in it, which now seems prophetic.
By 1937 the magic of the Riviera was long in the past for both families.
The Murphys had a second son die and the depression forced their return
to their New York business. Fitzgerald's career was in decline and his
wife was in a mental hospital.
In later years Fitzgerald wrote to the Murphys and famously said,"The
golden bowl is broken indeed, but it was golden." Having briefly brushed
up against this golden bowl in Antibes, I can attest to its allure.
