The Riviera Set

Once upon a time there was a beautiful captain’s daughter from Maine called Jessie Dermot. Rather than running off to sea like the men in her family, she skipped away from some messy personal matters and went on the stage, changing her name to Maxine Elliott. In due course she would use her sex appeal and savvy business sense to reach the pinnacle of the social ladder and the ultimate prize of a dalliance with King Edward VII.
 
When Maxine decided to retire in the early 1930s, and using the skills of renowned architect Barry Dierks, she built herself a striking confection of a house known as Chateau de l’Horizon near Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera. She began inviting the glitterati of the age to come and keep her company. And what a roll-call of names it was: politicians, royalty, movie stars, artistes. There were the notorious good-time girls of the English upper classes being the three “D’s”, Daisy Fellowes, Doris Castlerosse and Diana Cooper. Noel Coward played the piano. Winston Churchill rode the slippery water slide into the Mediterranean. Edward and Mrs Simpson, later to be Duke and Duchess of Windsor, found it a refuge from the storm around the abdication crisis.
 
Maxine’s reign ended early in World War II when the house was trashed due to the tramping in and out of various armies, and its next incarnation was under the ownership of Prince Aly Khan, playboy religious leader, whose infamous womanising antics dominated the gossip sheets throughout the 1950s. When he married Rita Hayworth in 1949, the lavish reception at Chateau de l’Horizon demonstrated an excess that had a world still recovering from trauma all agog. The house is now under the ownership of the Saudi royal family and the story of the Chateau is far from over yet.
 
There is a strange kind of compulsion in reading about these people with their brilliance, beauty and high achievement mixed with hedonism, immorality and irresponsibility. With so many of them doomed to tragic ends it is all too easy to demonstrate your own inverted snobbery about their shallowness while secretly, of course, you must be a little envious.
 
Mary S. Lovell always writes excellent biographies and although this particular work contains too broad a compass to explore any of the individuals in depth, it is still a most enjoyable way of curling up and idling away your own hours immersed in an era when “the worst possible behaviour was to be boring” and when wit and sophistication, glamour and style were at their peak.
 
4.5 stars.
 
(With many thanks to Hachette Australia for sending me an advance reader’s copy.)

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