Beaulieu-sur-Mer's old-school Hollywood history

Before St Tropez, film stars and tycoons partied up the coast in Beaulieu, keeping cows on yachts and stripping outside antique shops. Today it’s a quieter story

By Lanie Goodman

10 October 2018

The French village of Beaulieu has been my adopted home town for the past seven years. A slow, 15-minute stroll takes you from one end of it to the other. But there’s always plenty going on. The revamped cinema behind the casino plays arthouse films and opera; the lovely clay-court tennis club where my son perfected his lefty backhand is also open to non-members. And these days, there are new starry chefs, brilliant bistros, wine bars and boutiques popping up all over the place. Even the renovation of the long-abandoned Hôtel Métropole is finally underway.

A Starbucks would be unthinkable in Beaulieu, and you won’t find any big-brand chains or cutesy stores selling lavender sachets and ceramic cicadas as in nearby Eze village. Everyone shops at the Saturday morning market on leafy little Place Marinoni. That’s where I scoop up cartons of fat blueberries, fresh, mustard-tangy rocket, gorgeous arlequin aubergines, soft, round pats of goat’s cheese, as well as irresistible linen dresses and even a striped cotton beach futon. No one leaves without queuing up at the
socca truck for a giant, paper-thin savoury pancake made of chickpea flour and olive oil, baked in a wood-burning oven.

A street in BeaulieuAlice Gao

With authenticity comes rituals; expect to find France’s sacred lunchtime hours staunchly upheld. Once the shops’ metallic curtains are pulled shut with a crash at 1pm, a hush descends on the village. And when you hear the swoosh-swoosh of a twig broom – the municipal sweeper gathering mounds of wilted flowers and overripe peaches from the closed market – it’s time for lunch.

There’s no shortage of restaurants with chalkboard prix-fixe menus; on a sunny day, locals head to the row of bistros at the mini-marina. Later in the afternoon, everyone drifts back to the Place Marinoni as the cafés reopen and set up tables under the towering plane trees. Young mothers gossip over tall glasses of emerald-green menthe à l’eau while their children tear around the square or play inside the old-fashioned kiosk. Before long, it’s apéro hour, and the festive lamps strung across the branches blink on.

Scattered across the hillside that rises above town are dozens of beautifully restored belle-époque villas with cream and petal-pink detailing like sculpted marzipan. And, although there are also a few unremarkable modern apartment buildings, this is one Riviera town that has resisted over-development. The three main streets are lined in citrus trees heavy with fruit; as a former New Yorker, I’m still astonished no one strips them bare.

Everywhere there’s a mix of French, English, Italian and Russian spoken, which is no surprise once you know about the handful of wealthy and thoroughly eccentric foreigners who helped build this place over a century ago.

Figs at Beaulieu marketAlice Gao

Midway between Nice and Monaco, in a curve protected by tall, grey slabs of the rocky foothills that hug the shoreline, Beaulieu-sur-Mer was once a tiny fishing port surrounded by terraced olive groves and flower farms producing violets and carnations. It separated from Villefranche-sur-Mer in 1891; seven years later, thanks to the newly launched railway Calais-Mediterranean Express and luxurious Wagons-Lits, Beaulieu became a favoured winter spot for royalty (Queen Victoria called it ‘a paradise of nature’), with no fewer than 82 hotels. Today, quite a few of those turn-of-the-century palaces, such as L’Hôtel des Anglais and Le Bristol, have been converted into apartment buildings.

Steve McQueen and Niel AdamsGetty Images

The Belgian King Leopold II bought a huge chunk of land overlooking the bay of Villefranche which would be called the Villa Leopolda estate, and Lord Salisbury, prime minister to Queen Victoria, seeking a gentle climate for his persistent flu, purchased a nearby plot in 1889. When he wasn’t pottering in the splendid gardens of his holiday home, La Bastide – a 10-bedroom, red-shuttered stone mansion hidden away in a forest of oaks, pines and olive groves – Salisbury would take his enormous tricycle and pedal down the hill to drop off his daughter or wife to go shopping. A servant always trailed after him. The statesman was also a generous contributor to the Anglican Church of St Michael, built for Beaulieu’s growing British community.

I happen to live at La Bastide, now a beautifully landscaped estate divided into apartments. There are private terraces and plunging views of the coast. Our car park, in front of the main house, is where the prime minister once drank cocktails. (Check out the photo in the Beaulieu museum – there he is, happily sipping wine at a little table draped with white linen as the valet looks on.) And on dark chilly nights when the wind kicks up, it’s easy to imagine the ghost of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the Third Marquess of Salisbury, flitting through the olive groves.

Rita Hayworth in BeaulieuGetty Images

Below the cliffs, Beaulieu’s easternmost border is the neighbourhood and palm-fringed strip of beach called La Petite Afrique, which has a toasty microclimate several degrees warmer than the rest of the coast. In F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Dick and Nicole Diver stop here to skinny-dip ‘in a roofless cavern of white moonlight formed by a circlet of pale boulders’ on their way home from the Monte-Carlo Casino. Little has changed. Should you contemplate shedding evening finery for a late-night splash in the sea, chances are no one will be watching. On the weekends, large families play pétanque and picnic on pans-bagnats in the shade of the parasol pines.

La Petite Afrique was also home to Beaulieu’s notorious benefactor, the wacky American James Gordon Bennett, founder of the Paris Herald. Bennett moved to France in the 1880s after scandalising New York society by urinating in the fireplace of his fiancée’s parents’ house during a reception. He instantly fell in love with poky little Beaulieu while cruising the Mediterranean and from here he ran his newspaper from various yachts or his seaside villa, Namouna Cottage, a kind of self-styled Xanadu. Everyone knew Bennett. Whenever his 2,000-ton yacht Lysistrata (which had a Turkish bath, a resident cow and a prow with luminescent owl eyes) arrived in Villefranche, it created quite a stir.

Gregory PeckGetty Images

And if you’ve ever wondered why, even today, the term ‘Gordon Bennett’ remains a general expletive, blame it on his over-the-top antics in Beaulieu. Bennett’s orchards were once the playground for his brood of diamond-collared Pekinese dogs and pet monkey. Riviera high-life dinners at Namouna Cottage were the talk of the town; once a half-naked ballerina was brought out as pudding on a giant silver platter carried by four sailors.
To his credit, Bennett contributed generously to local charities and shipyards; he paved roads at his own expense, launched car races and hosted fêtes. He also created a horse-drawn mail-coach service, which ran from the Herald’s office in Nice straight to La Réserve, his favourite fish restaurant on Beaulieu’s coastal road.

The pool at La Reserve hotelAlice Gao

La Réserve started out as a modest family business, but in the 1890s it was taken over by the owners of the adjacent Hôtel Métropole. First, they built an American-style oyster bar serving cocktails, then added a dining room where European royalty, industrials, artists and politicians feasted on lobster. Owned by the Delion family for the past 20 years, it is now an opulent, dusty-rose hotel with plenty of old-world charm. And after a major refurbishment in 2014, which coincided with the arrival of the talented chef Yannick Franques, La Réserve is buzzing again. The rooms – many with sweeping sea vistas – vary in size and shape, such as the curvy Tower Room, and are tricked out with Florentine-style antiques and marble bathrooms; the airy ground-floor suite is a separate pavilion where young Queen Victoria stayed with the Duchess of Kent in 1823 and 1830.

Signed vintage photographs hang in every room at La Réserve, capturing Beaulieu’s glamorous heyday; everyone from Liz Taylor and Rita Hayworth to Steve McQueen and Paul Newman breezed through its Gordon Bennett Bar. And anyone who grew up here in the 1960s is likely to remember Gregory Peck, Charlie Chaplin and David Niven, all of whom had holiday homes nearby.

David Niven, Hjordis Oftenberg and friendGetty Images

Along with Hollywood stars strolling freely down the streets and window-shopping, there were once as many as 24 antique shops on the main thoroughfare, Boulevard Maréchal Leclerc. ‘Back then, we’d get Greta Garbo and Henry Kissinger coming in to browse,’ says retired shop owner Pierre Androt. (His son, Sébastien, still runs Androt Antiquités, the only remaining antique shop on the block). Androt père also recalls the time John and Jackie Kennedy picked out an elegant 18th-century walnut table for the White House, and when John Wayne went wild for a miniature bronze stagecoach with galloping horses.

But nothing, he says, beats the time Gianni Agnelli, a guest at La Réserve, shuffled into the shop one morning, dressed in the hotel’s bathrobe and slippers. ‘He was thrilled to find his friend Marcello Mastroianni there too, so they sat down and began to shoot the breeze while my wife served them coffee.’ Then along came Italian actor Ugo Tognazzi (later known for his role in La Cage aux Folles), who spotted them inside. ‘To get their attention, he did a striptease in front of the window until he was down to his little black underpants. We were all roaring with laughter.’

Greta GarboGetty Images

‘In those days,’ recalls local artist Louis Cane, ‘the rich were more eccentric. You’d see the Grand Marnier heiress Sylvia Lapostolle zipping around in a Fiat convertible with her two pet cheetahs. But everyone mixed together; the kids of stars used to dance with us at our little nightclub on the beach.’

In tribute to Cane’s late historian uncle, André Cane, the town has a museum, Musée du Patrimoine Berlugan André Cane, with an exhibition of rare photographs of its famous residents, starting with Igor Stravinsky, who, in 1910, rented an apartment above a sweet shop and composed Petrouchka. Another was American dancer Isadora Duncan, who lived with her lover, Paris Singer (heir to the Singer sewing machines fortune), on the Cap Ferrat in the 1920s, and opened a studio in Beaulieu.

A villa in BeaulieuAlice Gao

But the town’s pride and joy is its national museum, Villa Kerylos, set back on a rocky point near the Baie des Fourmis beach. This dazzling-white building, a replica of an Athenian mansion, was originally built for wealthy German-born Grecophile Théodore Reinach. On the same little road, Reinach’s neighbour, Gustav Eiffel, spent winters at a rented villa conducting meteorological experiments and hosting fencing matches.
Follow the flower-lined seafront past the casino to the private beach bar Anao Plage. Here you’ll see the gym-toned beau monde draped on sun loungers, silver-haired couples feasting on octopus salad, and locals sipping strawberry Mojitos as a salsa band plays at the bar. ‘We’re not St Tropez and we don’t want to be,’ says the friendly young manager, grinning. ‘No bling!’

The vibe is more sophisticated at the Berlugan à la Plage by the seafront of L’Hôtel Métropole, which is scheduled to reopen in 2019. In the meantime, the grounds have been converted into an outdoor restaurant with giant day-beds and a restored pool.

It has been 100 years since James Gordon Bennett died at his villa in Beaulieu. You can’t help wishing that the old rogue could revisit his beloved turf and see how it has survived the new millennium. Chances are he’d still have a whale of a time.

Scroll down for more pictures of Beaulieu-sur-Mer...

Or now read:

The best restaurants in Beaulieu-sur-Mer