F Scott Fitzgerald in Provence - A Guide

Walking with Writers F. S C OT T F I T Z G E R A L D

IN PROVENCE: A GUIDE

Sainted Media

TABLE OF CONTENTS Chronology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Hyères. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Saint Raphaël and Frejus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Villa Marie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Frejus Beach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Hotel Continental. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 La Librarie Parisienne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Grand Hotel /Beau Rivage, Saint Raphaël . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Cannes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Villa Fleur de bois. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Juan-les-Pins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Casino de Juan-les-Pins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

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Villa La Paquita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Hotel Belles Rives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Villa Vigie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Villa America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Hotel du Cap Eden-Roc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Hotel du Cap Eden-Roc Diving Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Plage de la Garoupe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 La Garoupe Lighthouse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Villa Eilenroc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 La Colombe d’Or Saint-Paul de Vence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Hotel Beau Rivage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Villefranche-sur-Mer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Hotel Paris Casino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Fitzgerald Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Cast of Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

CHRONOLOGY 24 September 1896 - Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald born at 481 Laurel Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota.

26 March 1920 - Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, published by Scribner’s.

3 April 1920 - Fitzgerald marries Zelda Sayre at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

26 October 1921 - Birth of Scottie Fitzgerald, the Fitzgeralds’ only child.

10 April 1925 - Publication of The Great Gatsby.

May 1925 - Fitzgerald meets Ernest Hemingway in Dingo Bar, Paris.

January 1927 - The Fitzgeralds go to Hollywood, where Scott works on the unproduced film ‘Lipstick’.

April 1930 - Zelda experiences her first psychological breakdown in Paris.

November 1931 - Fitzgerald’s second spell in Hollywood, this time to work on Red-Headed Woman for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

12 April 1934 - Publication of Tender Is the Night.

July 1937 - Fitzgeralds returns to Hollywood for the third time, working for MGM at $1000 per week. He moves into an apartment at the Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard.

July 1937 - Fitzgerald meets Sheilah Graham, who becomes his partner.

April 1938 - Fitzgerald rents a bungalow at Malibu Beach, California.

October 1938 - Fitzgerald relocates to a cottage at ‘Belly Acres’, Encino.

May 1940 – Fitzgerald moves to 1403 North Laurel Avenue, Hollywood.

21 December 1940 – Fitzgerald dies of heart attack at Sheilah Graham’s apartment, 1443 North Hayworth Avenue, Hollywood.

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MAP OF PROVENCE LOCATIONS

1. Hyères

6. Juan-les-Pins

2. Fréjus

7. Hôtel Belle-Rives 8. Nice 9. Villefranche-sur-Mer 10. Monaco

3. Saint-Raphaël 4. Cannes 5. Nice

To view the map click: Here:

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FITZGERALD IN PROVENCE There was no one in Antibes this summer except me, Zelda, the Valentinos, the Murphys, Mistinguets, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the MacLeishes, Charlie Brackett, Maude Kahn. Ester Murphy, Marguerite Namara, E Phillips Oppenheim, Mannes, Floyd Dell, Max and Crystal Eastman, ex Premier Orlando, Etienne de Beaumont... The Hemingways Extract of a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald sent to John Bishop, from Juan-les-Pins, summer 1926

The Fitzgeralds left 1920s America to escape their noisy social lives, their extravagantly expensive lifestyle, and prohibition. France in the '20s was a place of refuge for ‘the lost generation’ of young people touched by the First World War, who had decided to live for the moment and did not know how to find a quiet equilibrium. Artists, writers, poets and their rich benefactors came to Paris and later the Riviera for inspiration, relaxation and fun.

France had paid an enormous human price in the First World War. Of the eight million non-professional men who were mobilised, over half were killed or wounded. More than a third of the soldiers aged between nineteen and twenty died, leaving more than 700,000 widows and one million orphans. The entire country was in mourning. At the same time however, the Parisian cafes, bars and nightclubs were filled with young, exuberant party-loving exiles, refugees from an uptight America and other countries where they felt creatively stifled.

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Soon the Côte d'Azur would be discovered by an artistic expat elite and the summer season on the Mediterranean would begin.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were aged just 27 and 23 when they arrived in the south of France with their two year old daughter Frances Scott, known as Scottie, in 1924. Fitzgerald was commanding huge sums for his short stories and his and Zelda’s crazy exploits were reported across the globe. They were, in their own words ‘excitement eaters’, hungry for adventure and more than able to pay for it.

Despite his partying Fitzgerald could still deliver a surprising number of successful short stories. He kept a ledger recording his work and income; from 1919-1925, Fitzgerald managed to produce around 50 short stories, three novels and numerous articles. Several Hollywood movies had also been developed from Fitzgerald’s stories: The Chorus Girl’s Romance, based on Head and Shoulders, The Husband Hunter based on Myra Meets his Family, The Offshore Pirate, and of course The Beautiful and Damned.

Though Fitzgerald was commercially successful he yearned for critical recognition as a novelist. He decided to relocate to the south of France with his wife, young daughter and an English nanny to concentrate on the novel he had started working on earlier in the year, The Great Gatsby.

The Fitzgeralds had been living some way beyond their means in the USA; in 1923 they spent $36,000 at Great Neck whilst earning just under $29,000. This income included a $3,939 advance for The Great Gatsby. Always able to draw on his own experience, Fitzgerald wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post: How to live on $36,000 a year. The family had come to France to live well on the cheap, as he explained in follow-up article for the Post: How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year.

Henry James partially set The Ambassadors on the Riviera and Edith Wharton wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence at a villa outside Hyères. Fitzgerald’s time in the south of France also influenced his fiction; as well as providing material for several short stories, it was here that Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby and began Tender Is the Night, a novel largely set on the beautiful sun-kissed beaches, hotels and villas of the Côte d'Azur. Zelda’s semi-autobiographic novel Save Me the Waltz was also inspired by their time on the Riviera.

Up until the1920s, the Mediterranean had been a winter destination frequented by upper class Brits and Russians. Any self-respecting Brit wouldn’t be seen dead in the Mediterranean in summer, as it would signal banishment from the summer season in London, which included Wimbledon, Ascot and Presentation at Court for young ladies of the upper class.

After the Russian Revolution, the formerly rich elite who had owned villas along the Côte d'Azur returned to find jobs as doormen and servants in the hotels, villas and casinos they had once owned and frequented. Fitzgerald drew on these stories for passages in Tender Is the Night and the short story Love in the Night.

America in the '20s was booming and the exchange rate for the mighty US dollar was extremely high and so some intrepid Americans, lead initially by Cole Porter, came to the Riviera in search of a warm sun, cool breezes and entertainment.

Tender Is the Night is dedicated to Sara and Gerald Murphy, a wealthy American couple who

devoted themselves to the arts and a gracious style of living. Gerald was the elder brother of the Fitzgeralds' New York friend Ester Murphy. Sara and Gerald had apartments in Paris, as well as the Villa America at Cap d’Antibes, and counted Picasso, Stravinsky, Hemingway, Fernand Léger, Cole Porter, Donald Ogden Stewart and John Dos Passos among their friends.

Sara and Gerald Murphy first came to the Riviera in the early 1920s as guests of Gerald’s friend from his Yale days, Cole Porter, who had rented a chateau on the Cap d’Antibes for the summer. The Murphys were immediately taken with the Côte d’Azur, so much so that they came back every summer, buying and renovating a villa, the renowned Villa America. They persuaded the Fitzgeralds to spend a few months on the Côte d’Azur; believing the quiet charms of the coast would be the perfect place for Scott to finish his novel. Despite being more than a decade older than their guests - Sara was 41 and Gerald 37 - the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds were to become great friends

We four communicate by our presence rather than by any means…

Currents race between us regardless: Scott will uncover for me values in Sara, just as Sara has known them in Zelda through her affection for Scott.

- Gerald Murphy, quoted in Amanda Vaill, Everybody Was So Young

Throughout the 1920s the Fitzgeralds stayed in several charming villas on the Côte d’Azur, as well as obligatory stays at the now famous Hotel du Cap Eden Roc. They socialised with a host of famous friends, mainly fellow expats, and mostly garnered through their association with Sara and Gerald Murphy.

In the spring of 1924 the Fitzgeralds took the train to the south and stayed first of all in Hyères.

They had hoped to meet Edith Wharton but they just missed her, as she had headed back to Paris for the summer. Edith Wharton’s winter residence was Le Castel Sainte Claire, built within the ruins of a convent. The beautiful botanic gardens that surround the castle that were planted by Wharton are open to the public.

The Fitzgeralds spent a couple of weeks in Hyères in a spa hotel that Zelda described as being filled with retirees who ate lamb for dinner every evening. Looking for a villa to rent, they travelled the length and breadth of the coast trying to find the perfect place for Scott to write, but the villas in Cannes, Sainte Maxime, Antibes and Nice were either too small, too hot, too dirty or too sad.

They eventually found an opulent villa in Saint-Raphaël, the Villa Marie, a Belle Époque villa surrounded by parasol pines with a terraced garden on a hillside overlooking the town.

Fitzgerald wrote to a friend claiming that the South of France was more beautiful than anywhere he had visited before, including Princeton, Oxford and Venice. He playfully declared he had set himself the task of writing the greatest novel produced by an American, before the end of summer. The novel he was working on that summer was The Great Gatsby.

The Villa Marie came complete with domestic staff and the gardener, Fitzgerald reported, took to calling him “M’lord”. Zelda swam everyday at the beautiful sandy beaches of Saint-Raphaël and the neighbouring Fréjus while Fitzgerald worked.

Zelda bought a copy of the Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, a bestselling scandalous novel centring on a story of adultery. The author had died the year before aged only 20. Determined to improve her French and be entertained, Zelda also bought a French dictionary from the local bookstore.

One evening in the dusty beach bar on Plage Fréjus, Zelda and Scott befriended a group of aviators from the naval base. Zelda became very fond of one of the young handsome men, Edouard Jozan.

They would picnic together on the beach and dance in the evening. Much to Zelda’s delight Jozan would sometimes ‘buzz’ the Villa Marie in his plane by making a low fly-by over the property. Fitzgerald encouraged the friendship as he was glad Zelda had a companion, however he wasn't expecting Zelda to fall madly in love with the aviator and ask him for a divorce. The affair that summer brought the Fitzgeralds’ marriage to the point of collapse and though they later reconciled, their relationship was permanently undermined by Zelda’s suddenly serious flirtations.

As a writer, the summer of 1924 was a success for Fitzgerald. He delivered the typescript of The Great Gatsby to Max Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, in October. As well as writing the majority

of the novel on the Riviera, Fitzgerald’s time at Saint-Raphaël affected the work in other ways.

Fitzgerald claimed that the novel was written under the influence of his sense of tarnished idealism, in part brought about by the Jozan affair which had eroded his belief in the perfection of his marriage to Zelda. These feelings are reflected in the frustrated romantic ambitions of Jay Gatsby, in his idolisation of a woman who does not fully reciprocate his feelings, and remains beyond his attainment After spending the winter revising The Great Gatsby in Rome, Scott and Zelda relocated to Paris in April 1925. In August, they enjoyed an emotional reunion with Sara and Gerald Murphy at Cap d’Antibes. After the Fitzgeralds’ departure, Gerald wrote to the couple: ‘Most people are dull and without value […] you two belong to the race of people who are valuable. As yet in this world we have found only four.’ Murphy was referring here to the quartet made up when the Fitzgeralds joined the Murphys – a huge compliment considering the many remarkable figures the Murphys counted among their friends.

In March 1926, the Fitzgeralds once more set up residence on the Riviera, moving to the Villa Paquita at Juan-les-Pins. Having made $25,000 (a fortune at the time) on the sale of the movie and theatre rights for The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald, temporarily free from the need to write commercial fiction, hoped for a repeat of the productive summer of 1924. As well as the Murphys, the Fitzgeralds were joined by the Hemingways and their friend Pauline Pfeiffer. Pauline and Hemingway had fallen in love and Hemingway would soon leave his first wife Hadley to marry Pauline. When the Fitzgeralds upgraded their accommodation to the Villa St. Louis, they offered the Villa Paquita to the Hemingways until the lease expired.

Surrounded by friends neither author accomplished much writing. Hemingway did however receive valuable advice from Fitzgerald. Upon reading the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald advised editing out the biographical character descriptions that made up the first two chapters, a suggestion Hemingway complied with, giving the novel a more immediate beginning.

Fitzgerald’s somewhat unruly behaviour was beginning to strain his relationship with the Murphys during the summer 1926, to the extent that he was temporarily barred from the Villa America after throwing some of their treasured Venetian glassware into the garden during a dinner party.

Fitzgerald was to further compound these transgressions by adapting Sara and Gerald into characters in the novel he was developing, which would eventually be published as Tender Is the Night in 1934. He took to quizzing the Murphys as a form of research for his novel and they

disliked his rather blunt cross-examination. The Fitzgeralds quarrelled more frequently. Their madcap adventures, which included hair raising night-time drives and competitive cliff-diving into the Mediterranean became increasingly self-destructive.

In 1929, the Fitzgeralds returned to the Riviera, staying in Nice during March at the Hotel Beau Rivage. Having spent the intervening months in Paris, the Fitzgeralds once more made Provence their home in June, taking a lease at the Villa Fleur des Bois in Cannes until September.

In addition to his partying and continued need to write popular magazine fiction to support himself, Fitzgerald’s work on his novel was further hampered by Zelda’s medical needs. Obsessively working towards her ambitious dream of becoming a professional dancer, Zelda suffered her first psychological breakdown in April 1930.

A young Zelda Sayre

Zelda underwent treatment at Prangins clinic in Switzerland from June 1930 to September 1931, which Fitzgerald financed with stories he sold to The Saturday Evening Post.

Following Zelda’s discharge from Prangins, the Fitzgeralds returned to America, where Scott worked for a time as a scriptwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood. The death of Zelda’s father in late 1931 brought on a second breakdown, and she entered Phipps Psychiatric clinic in Baltimore. Fitzgerald rented ‘La Paix’, a large house outside Baltimore, and reconceived the long-gestating Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald had always planned for the work to include Riviera settings, but initially conceived a completely different plot for his novel, which was to follow matricide carried out by a central male character, Francis Malarky. Zelda’s treatment at psychiatric institutions was one factor that steered the novel towards its final state. Published in 1934, Tender Is the Night was not the commercial or critical success Fitzgerald had hoped for. The novel received generally favourable reviews, which nevertheless expressed disappointment that Fitzgerald had not produced a greater work following a gap of nine years since his last novel.

Tender Is the Night opens in 1925 on the French Riviera. A young actress named Rosemary Hoyt encounters a glamorous couple, fellow-Americans Dick and Nicole Diver, who are based in part on Gerald and Sara Murphy. Dick has taken a break from a promising career as a psychiatrist, having married Nicole Warren, who carries psychological damage inflicted by an incestuous relationship with her father. The Warren wealth affords the Divers a luxurious lifestyle, while Dick balances the roles of Nicole’s husband and carer. Within the Divers’ circle of friends is a mercenary named Tommy Barban (a character based on Edouard Jozan) who is in love with Nicole. Meanwhile, Dick and Rosemary begin to fall in love and eventually consummate their affair. Following a failed attempt to work as a partner in a Swiss psychiatric institution – in part attributed to his drinking – Dick sinks further into dissipation, loses Nicole to Tommy Barban, and returns to American where he struggles on as a provincial doctor.

As well as the Jozan affair, several aspects of the Fitzgeralds’ life on the Riviera were assimilated into the novel. Dick Diver rakes the seaweed and carefully removes stones from the beach beside Gausse’s hotel in the novel, just as Gerald Murphy did on Plage de la Garoupe at Cap d'Antibes. The character of Abe North, a lapsed musician and mischievous alcoholic, was based on the playwright Charles McArthur, who accompanied Fitzgerald in drunken high-jinks during their 1926 stay on the Riviera. Like Abe North, McArthur once jokingly proposed cutting a waiter in half with a musical saw.

Most prominently, however, Fitzgerald drew on Sara and Gerald Murphy, a debt he freely admitted. To Sara, Fitzgerald confessed he had tried to capture the psychological effect of her presence on men.

Fitzgerald also channelled Gerald’s poise and social grace into Dick Diver, while the Murphys’ Villa America became the basis for the Divers’ Villa Diana. The Murphys are perhaps most in evidence in the dinner party scene in Book One. Here the skill and compassion with which the Divers play their role as hosts causes their guests, enchanted with the harmonious exchange of conversation and the beauty of their surroundings, to experience an almost transcendental pleasure.

Sara Murphy

The natural grandeur of the Riviera, enhanced by the moneyed luxury enjoyed by the rich who visit there, works to emphasise the extent of Dick Diver’s fall from grace. There is also a sense in which the choreographed extravagance of the Divers’ Riviera lifestyle symbolises the apparent order and comfort of their existence. Under this glamorous veneer, however, lurk more sinister issues that threaten their happiness.

Yet the idyllic family life of Sara and Gerald was to end in tragedy when they lost their two sons to illness in the 1930s. Gerald wrote to Fitzgerald in 1935 after death of his eldest son:

I know now that what you wrote in Tender Is the Night is true. Only the invented part of our life - the unreal part - has had any scheme, any beauty... Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred and destroyed. How ugly and blasting it can be and how idly ruthless.

<Sara Murphy and children

As well as being their home intermittently for several years throughout the 1920s, the Riviera directly influenced, Zelda’s semi-autobiography, several of Fitzgerald’s short stories and his most important works. Today, Fitzgerald’s reputation largely rests on The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. The former was composed on the Riviera, while the latter was set and

developed there.

Our tour progresses along France’s Mediterranean coast from Hyères, where Fitzgerald first visited the Riviera, in a north-easterly direction, encompassing all the main Riviera locations that enriched the life and art of one of the twentieth-century’s most important writers.

HYÈRES Hyères is the oldest resort on the Riviera. Catherine de Medici wintered here in 1564. Its fame grew in the 19th century when the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy had villas here.

Hyères was particularly popular with the English, some seeking a cure for TB, others following in the illustrious footsteps of Queen Victoria, who stayed in the town. Victoria loved the Riviera, and as she was the most famous woman in the world at the time, the Riviera loved her back. The monarch would arrive on holiday with a staff of over 100 and would enjoy the company of her royal relatives, her Indian attendant Abdul Karim and, it has been reported, Sarah Bernhardt. It was in Hyères that, after hearing a risqué story, the Queen is said to have uttered the famous line: “We are not amused.”

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were here when the modernist party house, Villa de Noailles was being designed. The building was completed in1925 for Charles et Marie-Laure de Noailles, patrons of the arts and financiers of surrealist films. Guests at the villa were the Fitzgeralds' friends and contemporaries; among them Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Salvador Dali.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were here when the modernist party house, Villa de Noailles, was being designed. The building was completed in1925 for Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, patrons of the arts and financiers of surrealist films. Guests at the villa were the Fitzgeralds' friends and contemporaries; among them Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Salvador Dali.

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The Fitzgeralds used Hyères as a base from which to find longer term accommodation. The social life in Hyeres in the 1920s centred on Le Café de l'Univers. Scott and Zelda wrote enthusiastic postcards from the cafe terrace when they first arrived. They described being drunk with happiness, and a little tipsy after a few glasses of Provencal Rose. The Fitzgeralds and Nanny took up residence in The Park Hotel, a neoclassical building with beautiful gardens with palm trees, yuccas, and bougainvillea. The hotel building has been owned by the town since 1934, and today houses an arts academy. Initially enthusiastic about their first few days in the Riviera, the Fitzgeralds soon found Hyères to be too hot and with too many retired English visitors.

During their time in Hyères, the Fitzgeralds were pleased to be close to another American literary heavyweight, Edith Wharton, who spent the winter months nearby in the Castel Saint-Claire.

Although they didn't meet Wharton during their stay, they did visit the lovely botanical gardens on the hillside that encompasses Wharton’s Castel as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s little house, La Solitude. They visited the Vieux Chateau - from where you can see the Mediterranean sea.

Zelda described the Mediterranean as being the colour of amethyst with the quality of opal, and the Îles d’ Hyères as truly golden.

SAINT-RAPHAËL AND FRÉJUS

Fréjus was the first Roman town of Gaul, founded in 49 BC by Julius Cesar, who wanted a naval port to rival Greek Marseilles. The river Argens has long since silted up, leaving the former Roman harbour a mile from the shore. The ships that defeated Anthony and Cleopatra were built here.

From the 1920s to its decommissioning in 1995 Fréjus was France’s largest naval air base.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Fréjus played a major role in testing new aircraft. Land, sea and carrier aircraft types were tested for the French Naval Aviation. Edouard Jouzan, the young aviator who Zelda fell in love with, was stationed at the naval base in Fréjus.

Saint Raphaël borders Fréjus. The town was bombed during WWII and very little remains of the mediaeval centre and Belle Époque architecture that the Fitzgeralds would have enjoyed.

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VILLA MARIE

This is an impressive Belle Epoch villa hidden amidst the pine trees that cling to the hillside in the residential district of Valescure above Saint-RaphaĂŤl town. It has balconies with sea views and a vast garden built over several terraces, filled with palm trees, olives trees, lemon trees and wild petunias.

Whilst staying here in the summer of 1924, Zelda wrote that they were very clever to have managed to escape the forces that had tried to destroy them in Great Neck. Fitzgerald wrote to friends commenting on the idyllic beauty of the Riviera and the restorative effects of the sea air on his health.

Here Fitzgerald spent the summer working on The Great Gatsby and wrote enthusiastically to friends and his editor about the progress of the novel. He firmly believed whilst in the midst of creation that he was writing something truly great - the novel he wrote that summer has sold over 27 million copies to date.

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Fitzgerald acquired a little blue Renault as a family run-around. The car had no petrol gage or speedometer and the brakes were faulty but it had an open-top roof. When the Fitzgeralds' friends, the writer Ring Lardner and his wife Ellis, came to visit they noticed that as Fitzgerald drove around the sharpest pin bends to the villa, Zelda would choose that moment to ask Fitzgerald for a cigarette and a light, frightening their passengers in the back, as Fitzgerald could barely keep the car on the road.

Later when the Fitzgeralds asked Lardner if heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to go for a drive, he suggested that they hire a car and a chauffeur.

Lardner was Fitzgerald’s partner in crime from Great Neck. When author Joseph Conrad came to stay in a villa in Great Neck, Ring and Fitzgerald apparently danced a jig on his lawn with the aim of attracting Conrad’s attention, so that he would join them and they’d all become friends.

Unfortunately they were thrown off the lawn and never met with their hero. Fitzgerald, always generous to other writing talent, was instrumental in getting Ring accepted by his publishing house Scribner’s. There was also an enormous affection between the writers and their wives.

Here are extracts from two poems Ring Lardner wrote for Zelda:

Of all the girls for whom I care, And there are quite a number, None can compare with Zelda Sayre, Now wedded to a plumber.

So here's my Christmas wish for you: I worship Leon Errol, But the funniest girl I ever knew Is Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald.

Zelda (Sayre) Fitzgerald

The character Owl Eyes in The Great Gatsby is based on Lardner. Owl Eyes speaks Gatsby's obituary: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The poor son of a bitchâ&#x20AC;?. And Fitzgerald dedicated his 1926 volume; All the Sad Young Men to Ring and Ellis Lardner. When Ring died in 1933 aged just 48, Fitzgerald wrote an

elegy for The New Republic:

A great and good American is dead. Let us not obscure him by flowers but walk up and look at that fine medallion, all abraded by sorrows that perhaps we are not equipped to understand. Ring made no enemies, because he was kind, and to many millions he gave release and delight.

The Fitzgeralds by all accounts started the summer of 1924 happy. The Murphys came to visit with their three children and in the terraced garden of Villa Marie, Zelda created a magic cardboard world of castles for the children, complete with drawbridges and moats.

Scott set to work on The Great Gatsby, but Zelda soon grew bored, as she recounts in passages of Save me the Waltz.

I luxuriate in this voluptuous air and grow fat on bananas and Chablis while he grows clever.

BEACH AT FRÉJUS Fréjus Plage Zelda spent her days on the beach with Nanny and Scottie, and after a full day of work Fitzgerald would join them at Veillat or Fréjus-Plage. In the evening the Fitzgeralds would come into town and have cocktails on the terrace of the Hotel Continental before heading to the Casino-Palace dance floor or the dancehall in a pavilion on the beach.

<Fitzgerald, Scottie, Zelda

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Several weeks after first meeting the aviator Edouard Jozan on the beach a Frejus, Zelda asked Scott for a divorce. In an interview years later, reported in Nancy Mitfordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s biography of Zelda, Jozan plays down their attachment and said Zelda was feeling neglected as Scott was so absorbed in his work. He believed the Fitzgeralds created the drama for the sake of it - but really there wasn't much more than a flirtation between himself and Zelda.

Scott alluded to the affair as just one of the things in a list to his editor Max Perkins. Later he was to write about that summer, I knew that something irreparable had happened.

Zelda claimed that Scott demanded that there be a meeting with Jozan so that he could tell Scott himself that he was in love with Zelda and that she was going to divorce him. The confrontation with Jozan never took place, however the imagined confrontation may well have fuelled Scottâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creativity.

Your wife doesn't love you, she loves me.

- The Great Gatsby

At the end of the summer Scott noted in his ledger that the difficulty had past.

The dashing young aviator Jozan later enjoyed a long and distinguished career, rising to the rank of Vice Admiral.

HOTEL CONTINENTAL 101 Promenade René Coty, 83700, Saint-Raphaël

The Fitzgeralds moved into the Hotel Continental in November 1924. The original hotel was built in 1882 – in guidebooks of the time it was described as having: the best position in SaintRaphaël, south facing, overlooking the sea, fantastic views of the Gulf of Fréjus and the Esterel mountains ... highly recommended to English and American clientele.

Although he was confident about the quality of the novel he had just completed, Fitzgerald was much less sure about naming The Great Gatsby. In a letter to Perkins written from the hotel, he contemplated possible titles; ‘Trimalchio in West Egg’, ‘Gold-Hatted Gatsby’ and ‘The High-bouncing Lover’.

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Whilst staying at the hotel Fitzgerald wrote the short story Love in the Night for the Sunday Evening Post. It's the tale of a young Russian Prince looking for love, and is mostly set in

Cannes. Over the summer several of his stories were published: Absolution serves as a prologue to Gatsby’s life, Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les is a romantic lark, and The Sensible Thing is a rags-to-riches story of love and loss. Le Grand Hôtel Continental et

des Bains of Fitzgerald’s time was demolished and replaced with an apartment building with the 4 star Hotel Continental found on the first floor. The hotel, casino and pavilions can still be found in St Raphaël - although not quite as they were in 1924.

Nights after dinner David and Alabama drove into St-Raphaël. They bought a little Renault. The village band played Faust and merry-go-round waltzes in a pavilion by the sea.

- Zelda Fitzgerald, Save me the Waltz

LA LIBRAIRIE PARISIENNE Rue Charles Gounod, St-Raphaël

Zelda bought a copy of the scandalous novel Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel and a French dictionary in the La Librarie Parisienne in St-Raphaël.

I’m learning French so that I can love France more articulately.

- Zelda Fitzgerald, Save me the Waltz

Zelda and Fitzgerald were both fans of the novel Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel. In a letter written to his editor

that summer, Fitzgerald urged him to publish the novel, saying it would be a hit in English and enthusing that the preface was written by the Dadaist, Jean Cocteau.

In 1928, three years after the publication of The Great Gatsby Jean Cocteau wrote to Victor Llona,

the French translator of Gatsby le Magnifique, telling him the book was ‘heavenly’. Victor lamented that if only they had had this endorsement from Cocteau when the book came out the sales would have gone up by 200-300%.

Zelda Fitzgerald> 28

GRAND HOTEL When the Fitzgeralds returned to the Riviera in the summer of 1929, they stopped off at the Grand Hotel. The recently-opened modernist hotel that Fitzgerald described as a barren structure was built right on Fréjus Plage. The couple remembered with pleasure that they had been among the first visitors to have discovered Fréjus Plage as a summer destination back in 1924.

(The Grand Hotel no longer exists)

BEAU RIVAGE, SAINT- RAPHAËL In October 1929, on the same night as the stock market crash, the Fitzgeralds stayed in the Beau Rivage on their way back to Paris.

They were given a room their friend and fellow writer Ring Lardner had stayed in a few years earlier. Whilst staying here Fitzgerald wrote about his sadness at his present situation, and his warm memories of the past. (The Beau Rivage no longer exists) 29

CANNES When the Fitzgeralds came to Cannes in May of 1924 looking for a villa for the summer, the taxi driver who took them on a tour of the town looked like Ivan the Terrible. He claimed to be a former Russian Tzar who have lost everything after the revolution. The estate agent in Cannes told them that the town was full of Russians who had once had been princes and were now taxi drivers, maitre dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and doormen, their wives and daughters chamber maids in the hotels and casinos where they were once guests.

Fitzgerald wrote the short story Love in the Night, inspired by the stories of the

fallen Russian aristocracy scratching a living on the CĂ´te d'Azur.

In 1924 there was no summer season in Cannes. The Carlton was closed, The Majestic not yet built.

When the

Fitzgeralds returned in 1929, La Croisette had changed beyond all recognition, the grand hotels and the casinos on the front; The Majestic, The Martinez, The Miramar, Palm Beach, had all recently been built and Cannes had become an important all year round resort.

Roger Broders (1883-1953). Tender is the Night book cover (1935) was based on this illustration

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VILLA FLEUR DES BOIS 12 Boulevard Eugene Gazagnaire, Cannes

In 1929 the Fitzgeralds' lives had taken a darker turn. They stayed in a modest villa far from the La Croisette but overlooking the sea. The Fitzgeralds stayed in the Villa Fleur des Bois from July to September in 1929. Fitzgerald was struggling with the editing of his fourth novel Tender Is the Night, and his artistic difficulties were compounded by his partying.

From here he wrote to Ernest Hemingway, speculating that the frenzied period of writing which took place in his early career from 1919-1924, when he produced three novels, approximately fifty stories, and various articles had robbed him of the creative energy he badly needed to complete his fourth novel. Ironically, he noted, his stories commanded higher fees than ever. The Saturday Evening Post now paid him $4,000 per story, making Fitzgerald one of the highest-paid story writers in the world.

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Fitzgerald wrote the short story The Swimmers whilst in Cannes in 1929. His agent Harold Ober praised it as ‘the ablest and most thoughtful story you have ever done.’

Many of the themes in The Swimmers appear again in Tender Is the Night - the novel he was working on at the time. The story is regarded as an important precursor to the novel.

Fitzgerald may sometimes have downplayed in public the work that went into creating his short stories but in a personal notebook he wrote that he’d asked a lot of himself and of his emotions in the creation of his 120 stories - and that the price was high

Fitzgerald labored over his drafts. He worked so hard, including on Tender, it went through many revisions as desperate as he was to get it out and to have it published, he held himself to a very high standard with it, I do think it is uneven but parts of its power are its unevenness. He’s chronicling these lives and there are very bad patches in the lives and the text becomes uneven almost to correspond with them.

Anne Margaret Daniel interview 2017

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JUAN-LES-PINS

In the summer of 1926, Fitzgerald, free of debt and flush with cash from the sale of the movie rights to Gatsby, rented two different villas in the town and partied with a host of famous American expats. He wrote to Hemingway about his joy at being back on the Cote d’Azur, telling him that he was happier than he’d been for years. Fitzgerald also wrote to his editor joyfully informing him that his summer residence, the Villa St. Louis, was just 100 yards along the shore from the Casino.

The original Casino was built by Edouard Baudoin, who was so inspired by a film about Miami he decided to try and recreate it in the South of France. He found the best natural beach on the Riviera in the sleepy settlement of Juan-les-Pins, and opened a restaurant and casino. A few years later an American investor Frank Jay Gould bought Baudoin out and built one of the world’s grandest hotels, Le Provençal.

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CASINO DE JUAN-LES-PINS 15 – 17 Boulevard Edouard Baudoin, Juan-les-Pins

The Casino Juan-les-Pins is now part of the same complex as the Hotel Garden Beach and looks nothing like the quaint beach casino of the 1920s. Sara and Gerald Murphy hosted a champagne-and-caviar welcome party for Ernest Hemingway at the Juan-les-Pins Casino in the summer 1926. The caviar was flown in from the Caspian Sea by an enterprising importer. At the party to celebrate Hemingway’s arrival in the summer playground of the artistic set, Fitzgerald, a little drunk and somewhat resentful of the attention Hemingway was receiving from Sara Murphy, reacted petulantly by throwing ashtrays off the hotel terrace into the sea. This was to mark the start of a series of bizarre incidents that culminated in Fitzgerald being banned (for two weeks) from parties at Sara and Gerald Murphy’s villa.

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VILLA LA PAQUITA 6 Avenue des Pins Parasols

The Fitzgeralds stayed at this modest villa from March-May 1926.

The Great Gatsby had been optioned

and produced as a play and was running on Broadway - Fitzgerald was more content than he had been in a long time and was delighted to be back in his beloved Riviera.

Hadley Hemingway (the first wife of Ernest Hemingway) with infant son Jack arrived that summer too. They had just returned from a skiing holiday in Austria with bad colds, Hemingway had gone to Spain alone to work on his breakout novel, The Sun Also Rises. A doctor diagnosed Jack with whooping cough. The Murphys, anxious about their own children, asked that the Hadley and Jack stay away from the Villa America until it was safe. As the Fitzgeralds were relocating to a larger villa, they offered the Hadley the Villa Paquita. Hemingway was to arrive later in the summer as was Hadley’s friend and Hemingway’s mistress, Pauline Pfeiffer.

This lovely villa in Juan-les-Pins has the peculiar claim to having housed two of the twentieth-century’s most talented American writers as well as two of Hemingway’s wives, Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer. In 1926 Hadley and Hemingway were married - they separated at the end of that summer. Pauline and Hemingway married the following year in the May of1927. Fitzgerald was later to remark that Hemingway needed a new wife for each big novel that he wrote.

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HOTEL BELLES RIVES (FORMER VILLA ST. LOUIS) 33 Boulevard Edouard Baudoin

The Fitzgeralds stayed in the Villa St Louis from May or June to December 1926. While staying here Fitzgerald advised Hemingway about the editing of his first novel The Sun Also Rises.

Fitzgerald also wrote optimistically of his progress on his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night, which he anticipated being ready for publication by January the next year. Fitzgerald’s Riviera masterpiece wasn’t published until 1934.

Since 1929, the villa has been a hotel run by descendants of the original owners, Boma and Simone Esténe. Today the Hotel Belle Rives celebrates its Fitzgerald heritage with a beautiful Fitzgerald Piano Bar. Here you can order a variety of fabulous cocktails: a ‘Fitzgerald’ champagne cocktail, a ‘Zelda and Scott’ (Gin and limes), a ‘Hemingway’ (very dry Martini), and a ‘Dorothy Parker’. The hotel runs the prestigious Prix Fitzgerald (annually) and Prix Gatsby (every 5 years) for literature. As well as a monetary prize the Prix Fitzgerald winner gets to spend the night in the Fitzgeralds’ bedroom - a lovely room with a balcony overlooking the sea.

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VILLA VIGIE 37 Boulevard Edouard Baudoin Pablo Picasso and his first wife Olga and young son Pablo stayed in this villa in 1924. Picasso painted several pictures of the Villa Vigie from a studio he installed in a borrowed garage across the street. Picasso was a friend of the Murphys and enjoyed the society of their circle, such as John Dos Passos and his wife, as well as Archibald and Ada MacLeish. Picasso was quite a bit older than the American crowd and claimed to have found the Fitzgeralds' antics a little tiresome, and seemed to have been bemused by Zelda.

This villa was later bought by Frank Jay Gould and his third wife Florence, who played a major part in inventing Juan-les-Pins as a holiday resort. They built hotels, restaurants, casinos, invented waterskiing and the beach-pyjamas fashion craze and also entertained extensively. They were patrons of the arts and their home was a gathering place for writers and artists. Florence Gould founded a series of literary and artistic prizes.

A few years later Picasso rented the Villa Chêne Roc, just across the street. Picasso created several paintings of the Villa Chêne Roc. ( Chêne Roc was demolished in 2017).

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VILLA AMERICA Formerly : Chemin des Mougins

Sara and Gerald Murphy bought this property in 1924. The previous owner, a French army officer with a love of gardening, had planted exotic specimens in the villa grounds. The plot offered spectacular views of the Mediterranean and Juan-les-Pins to the north. The Murphys however, were keen to make their own mark and engaged the services of architects to remodel the property, which they renamed ‘Villa America’. They added a third story and more windows to lighten the interior and take advantage of the Villa’s surroundings. The Villa had a minimalist aesthetic of white walls and black floor tiles, offset by colourful linens, glassware and flowers. Sara and Gerald's self-styled aestheticism, which found its fullest expression in the Villa America, was an important influence on Fitzgerald’s depiction of the refined-opulence of the Divers’ lifestyle in Tender Is the Night.

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The Murphys hosted many intimate dinner parties for 6-8 people. The invitations read: Dinner Flowers - Gala. The evening would begin with Gerald’s famous cocktails on the terrace.

Prepared with a ritualistic intensity, the cocktails consisted of what Gerald called ‘just the juice of a few flowers.’ Guests were offered just two cocktails before dinner. During the cocktail hour the Murphy children entertained the guests by dancing and singing. Thereafter dinner would be served under the stars.

Fond as I was of [the Murphys]….I could stand it for about four days.

It was like trying to live in heaven. I had to get back down to earth.

John Dos Passos writing about his stay at the Villa America:

HĂ&#x201D;TEL DU CAP-EDEN-ROC Boulevard J. F. Kennedy, 06601

The HĂ´tel du Cap-Eden-Roc was originally intended a retreat for retired writers. The Villa Soleil was built by the owner of the Figaro newspaper, Auguste de Villemessant. The villa had been forgotten and abandoned for many years when it was discovered by Antoine Sella, a young hotelier in 1887. Sella renovated it over two years and had a swimming pool blasted out of the rocks. The hotel was only open for the winter season until the summer of 1923 when Sara and Gerald Murphy asked Sella to keep part of the hotel open for the summer. Left with a skeleton staff to run the hotel, the Murphys entertained their guests here, that first summer their guests included; the Picassos and Gertrude Stein.

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The Scottish artist J. D. Fergusson, a friend and contemporary of Picasso’s, was staying nearby. Fergusson’s wife, a modern dance teacher, had 20 of her pupils staying in the empty cottages on the Hotel du Cap grounds. The dancers gave dance recitals on the terrace outside the hotel in the evenings. They inspired Picasso’s drawings of girls on the beach although he claimed they were better swimmers than they were dancers. Picasso’s mother also came to visit that summer. Photographs taken at a beach fancy dress party show her dressed in widow’s black whilst everyone else larks around in fancy-dress costumes.

The Murphys returned again in 1924, staying here whilst renovations were carried out at the Villa America. Over the next few summers a procession of the Murphys' friends and their families came to the Cap d’Antibes, many of them staying at the Hotel du Cap. The Murphy’s friends and included; The Fitzgeralds, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Gilbert Seldes, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Barrys, Robert Benchleys, and Dorothy Parker.

Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night opens with a description of the Hôtel des Etrangers modelled on the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc: On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera ... stands a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed facade... Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people.

- Tender is the Night

The hotel has attracted a series of illustrious patrons since the Fitzgeralds’ time here, including John F. Kennedy, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Winston Churchill, and Marc Chagall.

HÔTEL DU CAP-EDEN-ROC DIVING PLATFORM

One evening at a dinner party given here, Zelda bored by the conversation decided to strip and dive from the rocks into the dark sea - thirty five feet below. Reluctant to appear to be lacking his wife’s courage, Fitzgerald was compelled to follow her. When Sara Murphy tried to tell Zelda that it was dangerous to dive in the dark, she just replied: ‘Why Sara didn’t you know we don’t believe in conservation’.

Archibald MacLeish a writer and member of the Murphys’ circle, seriously injured his back while diving from here in the daylight. Today a diving board and attentive concierges make diving from Eden Roc a much safer and more enjoyable experience.

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PLAGE DE LA GAROUPE

This little beach was discovered by the Murphys when they came to the Cap d’Antibes as guests of Cole Porter. Fitzgerald describes the beach in Tender is the Night as a ‘bright tan prayer rug’ where Dick Diver religiously rakes away the gravel - although this beach is not to be found in front of the Hotel du Cap but a little way along the coast. On this beach Nicole Diver wears her string of creamy pearls down her brown back just as Sara Murphy used to wear hers.

The young actress in the novel Rosemary Hoyt, who on the first day of her holiday; swims, sunbathes, falls asleep in the sun and chats to Dick Diver - and then decides when she gets back to her room that she has fallen in love.

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The Murphys and their guests would spend the morning on the beach. While the children played in the shallows, the adults had an aperitif of dry sherry and ate little biscuits known as ‘sables’. They would then retire to the Villa America for lunch.

The Murphys also organised fancy dress beach parties for their friends and treasure hunts for the children. Just like Dick Diver’s beach which becomes swamped with tourists by the close of the novel, the Plage da la Garoupe is a popular spot for tourists.

Today this glorious little beach is now almost entirely taken up with private beach clubs - there are just two small areas reserved for the public. However from October to April the private clubs close and the beach is entirely open to whoever wishes to claim it.

Once upon a time there was a prince and a princess: that's exactly how a description of the Murphys should begin. They were both rich; he was handsome; she was beautiful; they had three golden children. They loved each other, they enjoyed their own company, and they had the gift of making life enchantingly pleasurable for those who were fortunate enough to be their friends.

Donald Ogden Stewart quoted in Brooke Allen’s, ‘What a Swell Party It Was’, The New Yorker

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LA GAROUPE LIGHTHOUSE

Phare de la Garoupe is the old lighthouse of Antibes.

There are panoramic views of the French Riviera and beyond from here. To the west are the bays of Juan-les-Pins, Iles de Lérins and Cannes with the Estérel Mountains inland. Ahead lies Antibes; to the east are sweeping views of Villeneuve-Loubet, Nice, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Italy and the snow-capped Pre-Alps in the far distance. There is a small church, located next to the lighthouse with colourful offerings placed there by local fishermen. You’ll also find a little cafe, with a terrace, between the lighthouse and the church.

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Gerard Murphy brought young Scottie Fitzgerald here on an adventure - recounted in Liza Klaussmann fictional novel Villa America:

“Would you like to hear about the lighthouse again...? Some people say that they are girl fairies who have fallen in love with sailors and every night they turn the light on hoping their beloveds will return to them...”

When he pulled the car up next to the stone lighthouse, he cut the engine and looked at Scottie. The white beacon circled, lighting up their faces in flashes as it swept by.

The air was cloistered by pins martimes, which spread themselves around an old chapel off to the side.

“Are you ready to go see the fairies?”…

He carried Scottie over to the wall and they sat, hand in hand, and watched the beacon sweep like clockwork across them, across the car, across the chapel, the pins, the hills of Cap d’Antibes, the Baie des Anges, all the way into the empty bedroom of a small child.

VILLA EILENROC Villa Eilenroc was built in 1867 and designed by architect Charles Garnier, who also designed the Paris and Monte Carlo opera houses. In 1927 it was bought

by Louis Dudley Beaumont and his wife, opera singer Hélène Thomas, who turned it into a modernist masterpiece.

The Beaumonts hosted amazing parties that would carry on down to the shore. Greta Garbot, Rudolph Valentino, Scott and Zelda Fitzgeralds were among many of the salubrious guests who attended parties here. Rudolph Valentino’s father-in-law owned the Chateau de Juan les Pins (known as Castle of the Crouton) and the Valentinos used to spend their summers on the coast. There was also a film studio in Nice that attracted a host of Hollywood stars. The Villa Eilenroc and grounds were featured in the Woody Allen movie Magic in the Moonlight.

Open to the public: Every Wednesday from 2pm-5pm, First and Third Saturday of the month 2pm to 5pm Entrance is €2 (free between 1st October and 31st March)

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The Beaumonts donated Eilenroc to the City of Antibes. The property sits in an 11-hectare estate. The grounds and wonderful rose garden, filled with roses native to the Cap D’Antibes, are open to the public. The neighbouring villa, Chateau de la Croë, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor once resided, is now owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.

Visitors can also join the coastal footpath, which loops from the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc past Eilenroc, to the Abramovich mansion. Another footpath of 3.7km starts at Eilenroc and ends at Plage de la Garoupe.

At the shore in front of the villa you’ll find a bar carved into the rocks and a swimming area.

Parties at the villa would continue down to the shore, with guest stripping off and diving in.

LA COLOMBE D'OR 1 Place du Général de Gaulle, Saint-Paul de Vence

The Fitzgeralds dined here with the Murphys on a troubled evening in 1925. Also present was the great American dancer Isadora Duncan, who with her performing years behind her, was known for leading a somewhat dissolute lifestyle. Zelda was totally unimpressed by the faded star, however Fitzgerald knelt at her feet and let Duncan stroke his hair. Disgusted at this display, Zelda threw herself off the restaurant terrace and into the darkness below. She appeared a little later with skinned knees and after the initial collective shock had past, the party continued. La Colombe D’Or is a world famous ‘art hotel’, works by Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Miro adorn the walls.

Overlooking the neighouring town of Vence, you’ll find Château Saint-Martin & Spa - part of the Oetker Collection which includes among others, the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc. Château Saint-Martin have a splendid cocktail bar and terrace, Le Rossini which is perfect for indulging in cocktails and canapés - whilst enjoying wonderful views of the Côte d’Azur.

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HOTEL BEAU RIVAGE 24 Rue Saint-François de Paule, Nice

The Fitzgeralds stayed here in March 1929 - they remembered Nice as being bitterly cold along the Promenade des Anglais. Here Fitzgerald wrote his short story, The Rough Crossing.

In this work a playwright, Adrian Smith, and his wife, Eva, sail to Europe in the hope that their sojourn will energise Adrian’s flagging creative energies. On the boat he puts strain on their marriage by entering into a flirtation with a young woman – a theme that will recur in Tender Is the Night, which this story in part anticipates. On a previous trip in 1924, the Fitzgeralds stayed

at the Hotel Ruhl (demolished in 1970) and entertained themselves in the Casino des Varietes, Casino Municpales, and the nightclubs like Maxim’s and le Perroquet.

In Nice, we decided that our room would not be facing the sea….during dinner on the terrace the stars fell into our plates.

Fitzgerald, Driving Mr and Mrs F to No.

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VILLEFRANCHE-SUR-MER

Fitzgerald wrote about driving all the way to Villefranche for salade nicoise and a very special bouillabaisse. Villefanche is famous for its association with the artist Jean Cocteau, a contemporary and acquaintance of the Fitzgeralds. Cocteau often stayed at The Hotel Welcome on the seafront from the 1920s onwards. His pictures adorn the bar, and there is a statue of him in front of the hotel. The tiny 14th-century chapel, Chapelle St-Pierre, that he decorated is just along from the Villefranche. The hotel in which the characters Nicole Diver and Tommy Barbani consummate their affair in Tender Is the Night is most certainly based on the Hotel Welcome.

A review of the hotel in the Telegraph reads: Art lovers and the traditionally minded will appreciate the understated, old-school elegance of this historic hotel in a picturesque fishing village on the French Riviera.

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HOTEL DE PARIS Place du Casino, Monte Carlo

The Fitzgeralds stayed here in 1924, where they were fussed over by the hotelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s officious staff, and gambled in the casino. In his essay Early Success, Fitzgerald recalled driving toward Monte Carlo at twilight. Fitzgerald was so moved by the scene that he stopped his car, and reflected on how far he had come since his poverty as an aspiring writer in New York. In this moment, Fitzgerald recalled, his current and former selves seemed to blend into one, giving him the exquisite feeling of living in a dream:

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise, ed. James L. W. West III (1920; rep. Cambridge: Cambridgeâ&#x20AC;¨

University Press, 2012) Flappers and Philosophers (1920; rep. London: Alma Classics, 2014) The Beautiful and Damned (1922; rep. London: Penguin, 1994) Tales of the Jazz Age (1922; rep. London: Penguin Classics, 2011) The Great Gatsby, ed. by Matthew Bruccoli (1925; rep. Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1991) All the Sad Young Men (1926; rep. London, Alma Classics, 2013) Tender Is the Night, ed. James L. W. West III (1934; rep. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2012) Taps at Reveille, ed. by James L. W. West III (1935; rep. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2014) The Love of the Last Tycoon, ed. by Matthew Bruccoli (1941; rep. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2014) The Crack-Up, ed. by Edmund Wilson (1945; rep. New York, NY: New Directions

Books, 2009) The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. by Andrew Turnbull (London: The Bodley Head,

1963)

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THE PEOPLE OF FITZGERALD’S PROVENCE Frances Scott “Scottie” Fitzgerald (1921-1986) - Fitzgerald’s daughter and only child. Scottie had an irregular childhood, moving with her parents as they changed residences, including spells in Paris and Antibes. When she attended the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut, her father’s literary agent Harold Ober and his wife Annie became her surrogate parents. After graduating from Vassar College in 1942 Scottie became a journalist and active member of the Democratic Party.

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948) - American novelist, painter, and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda was part of the American expatriate set of Paris in the 1920s. Known as ‘the first American Flapper’. Zelda and Fitzgerald’s friend Hemingway did not get along well.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - American novelist, short story writer and journalist, he won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, followed by the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway (1895-1951) - American journalist who worked for Paris Vogue, she was Hemingway’s second wife. They had two children, Patrick and Gregory.

Elizabeth Hadley Richardson Hemingway (1891-1979) - Pianist and Hemingway’s first wife. They had one son, John Hadley Nicanor (“Jack” or “Bumby”) Hemingway.

Archibald “Archie” MacLeish (1892-1982) - American poet and writer who became a close friend of Hemingway while the two were part of the expatriate crowd in Paris in the 1920s.

Gerald & Sara (nee Wiborg) Murphy (1888-1964 & 1883-1975) - Gerald Murphy was an American painter who moved to Paris with his wife Sara in 1921. Gerald painted from 1921 to 1929 and is known for inventing his own movement known as Precisionism. The Murphys hosted many artistic luminaries of the age including Hemingway, Picasso, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – at their home, the Villa America on the French Riviera.

Louis Morgan (1909-1990) - Fitzgerald met Morgan during his first writing assignment in Hollywood in 1927. His infatuation with the seventeen-year-old actress led to difficulties in his relationship with Zelda. Morgan served as the inspiration for the young actress Rosemary Hoyt whom Dick Diver embarks on an affair with in Fitzgerald’s third novel, Tender Is the Night.

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Harold Ober (1881-1959) - Ober served as Fitzgerald’s literary agent from 1919 to 1939. Ober negotiated Fitzgerald’s literary contracts, including the fee of $4,000 per-story which the Saturday Evening Post paid Fitzgerald at the height of his career.

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) - American poet, writer, critic, satirist, and screenwriter, Parker wrote for The New Yorker and was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. She went to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting, and was nominated for two Academy Awards, but her career there ended when she was placed on the Hollywood blacklist for her involvement in left-wing politics. Parker was a lifelong admirer of Hemingway and his works.

John Dos Passos (1896-1970) - American novelist and artist. He and Hemingway met as ambulance drivers in Italy during the First World War and were close friends until their falling out during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

William Maxwell Evarts Perkins (1884-1947) - American journalist and book editor for Charles Scribner’s Sons. Perkins joined Scribner’s in 1910 working closely with his new writers on the revisions of their work.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) - Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist. Picasso co-founded the Cubist movement with Georges Braque. Picasso was a regular at the salons Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas hosted in their apartment on rue de Fleurus, where he met Hemingway in March of 1922.

Charles Scribner II (1854-1930) - American publisher whose father, Charles Scribner I, founded the publishing house, Baker & Scribner, with Isaac D. Baker in 1846.

IMAGE AND ILLUSTRATION CREDITS Location illustrations: Agata Urbanska.

The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Published by University of South Carolina (2003).

Photographs adapted into illustrations by Agata Urbanska.

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Fitzgerald Trails and Quizzes App Follow in the footsteps of F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and learn more about their lives, their love and their work. Relive the enjoyment of his work by answering quiz questions based on Fitzgerald’s novels and short stories.

The Fitzgerald Trails and Quiz App has interactive clue-driven treasure hunt style trails in London, Paris, Juan-les-Pins, Cap d’Antibes, New York, LA, Long Island and book quizzes of your favourite novels and short stories with more locations and book quizzes being added all the time. Collect rewards at the end of the trails and quizzes.

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Written by: Frances Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neill, David Alan Rennie Illustrations by: Agata Urbanska Designed by: Eleanor Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neill

A Sainted Media production. www.walkingwithwriters.com

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