FRANCE: On the Beach

It was the most crowded August yet in the 100-year history of the French Riviera, a place which in Queen Victoria’s day thought itself a winter resort. From Menton on the Italian border all along the beautifully indented 165-mile coast to La Ciotat outside Marseille, the sunlit Côte d’Azur was jammed with a half-million vacationing Frenchmen and hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists.

Stifled Yawn. Greta Garbo slipped into a royal blue bikini and plunged into the Mediterranean from her Cap d’Ail villa. Sir Winston Churchill and Maria Callas, the prima of prima donnas, cruised offshore in the yacht of Greek Shipowner Aristotle Onassis. The young Aga Khan, fresh from Harvard, kept happy a chateauful of guests, including pretty Tracy Pelissier. Belgium’s King Baudouin holidayed solemnly at Cabassol with his sister Princess Joséphine-Charlotte and her husband, Prince Jean of Luxembourg. The week before, Adlai Stevenson had been playing tennis at St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Moviemaker Darryl F. Zanuck and his good friend, Chanteuse Juliette Greco, were at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes, where footfalls sink into deep carpets and almost no one goes into the water. Spain’s Prince Juan Carlos handled a sailboat off Cannes; and a $215,000 jewel theft last week from the Cap-d’Antibes villa of a British textile millionaire proved the season a social success.

But numbers not names made the season what it was, jamming the beaches, the bistros, the boulevards. Among the regulars, a social historian might have noted an evolutionary decline in the Riviera male. His feet are no longer used for walking, but only to depress accelerators or shuffle through the cha cha cha. Long hours spent in low sports cars seemed to have given him a spinal slump. His flaccid hands may seem barely strong enough to steady a highball glass or stifle a yawn.

In contrast, the Riviera female is in the throes of full, Amazonian development. Her brightly painted toes flicker through the nimble measures of the Charleston; her wrists grow strong beneath the weight of jangling bracelets; her long thighs are shaped to glued-on toreador slacks. She carries blithely a large basket laden with spare sets of false eyelashes, spare bandannas, waterproof mascara, lipstick brushes, eyelid pencils, bobby pins, suntan oils, combs, tweezers, compacts, cigarettes, stray hairs left by the cat. Atop her head is a brimmed straw-hat pulled over a voile scarf tied babushka-style, and she turns on the world the blind stare of dark glasses. She strides along confidently, her breasts thrown forward.

Raucous Jungle. The natural habitat of the Riviera male and female is either a hillside villa, a gleaming yacht or a huge hotel. Who could be a snob and not stay at the Carlton in Cannes? One guest kept three Chihuahuas on leash, another rushed in and out with a live leopard in his arms, and neither attracted much attention. Monte Carlo’s sprawling Hotel de Paris had its rooms filled with idle maharajas, well-to-do Americans, lost Frenchmen. Nice’s Hôtel Negresco welcomed financiers who kept the switchboard busy with their calls to brokers in Paris, London and New York.

Juan-les-Pins was a raucous jungle every night with nightclub inanities broadcast through the streets by loudspeakers. The six miles of beach at Le Lavandou were body-covered; the bodies were oil-covered; the oil, sand-covered. At bohemian St.-Tropez, with fewer than 1,000 guest rooms, some 20,000 tourists nevertheless found shelter. Françoise Sagan left for the relative calm of Normandy; Brigitte Bardot was pregnant. Saint-Trop has nearly as many candlelit cellar clubs as the Left Bank, and the vogue has spread along the coast as far as Nice, where the Gorilla Club boasts of stereophonic sound. At Whisky à Gogo in Cannes the doors were locked after midnight, because there was room for no more customers. In Monte Carlo the gambling casino complained about the lack of players; in Juan-les-Pins the complaint was that the players were too canny and the casino was losing money.

Fumed Minutes. Everybody complained about the flood of campers who this season surged into the Riviera like a horde of Goths. They crowded together in vast enclosures, with their tents squeezed close to each other, and paid from 4¢ to 30¢ per night for the privilege of bedding down. As the sleek cars sped by, campers stood at the edge of the road washing themselves—when there was water. For all the tourists this season the Riviera seemed cramped, and the resort towns are blending into each other to form an endless Côte d’Azur city. At no place is the coast wider than ten miles between mountains and sea, and the roads are inadequate. It took 90 fume-choked minutes to traverse the Croisette in Cannes; six hours to drive the 35 miles from Fréjus to Nice.

This week, with the coming of September, the hotels and pensions, camp grounds and cellars are emptying as tourists make their exhausted way north to factory and office. French railroads put on extra trains; airlines had to refuse tearful pleas. Route Nationale No. 7, which loops its way up the Rhone Valley to Paris, was bumper to bumper with homeward-bound cars. Many tourists swore they would never return, but might well change their minds by next summer, especially if they listen to the men of vision on the Riviera who are talking excitedly of building artificial islands off the Côte d’Azur, inaugurating helicopter service, and even of building Plexiglas tunnels to newer, better and dimmer cellars.