Making Monte Carlo by Mark Braude

Author:Mark Braude
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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In the same July that left Cameronia ’s passengers so underwhelmed by Monte Carlo, the American painter Gerald Murphy and his wife, Sara, spent two weeks in Antibes with Gerald’s friend from Yale, Cole Porter, and Cole’s wife, Linda. Antibes at the time was a place where they turned off the phone service for two hours at noon so the operator could take her lunch, and then altogether after seven at night. The local movie house opened only once a week. Cap d’Antibes, the peninsula south of the main town, was more rustic still, undeveloped except for a few villas built on the leafy hills. The big attraction was the Hôtel du Cap, run by an Italian named Antoine Sella, though it closed each year for most of the spring and summer. This had been the arrangement for the more than thirty years that Sella had run the place.

Some travelers go out of their way to visit sites in their off-seasons, as it allows them to get away from the kinds of people who would presume to tell them exactly where to be and when to be there. The Murphys were such travelers, as were the Porters. Gerald said of Cole that he “always had great originality about finding new places.” That summer the Porters had rented a vine-covered villa not far from the shuttered Hôtel du Cap, even though, as Cole Porter put it, they were “considered crazy” for doing so.

From the villa a gravel road led down to a beach the locals called la Garoupe, after their name for the breed of olive shrub found in the area. A thick tangle of seaweed covered the beach, but underneath the Murphys and Porters saw sand, light brown and fine, a welcome relief from the pebbly shores usually found along the coast. They shared the beach only with a few fishermen tending their skiffs. For Americans used to seasides built up with boardwalks, hot dog stands, and rigged carnival games, a stretch of sand devoid of tourists would have been a thrilling sight. Gerald said he and Sara and the children “dug out a corner of the beach and bathed there and sat in the sun, and we decided this was where we wanted to be.”

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