by Susan Ronald
She was right to persevere in more ways than one. The presence of infinite possibilities on the horizon of opportunists like Frank and Florence needed careful planning, particularly if they were to set up a business on the Riviera (as Florence had been urging her husband to do), evidently thinking of those empty twenty-three hours. Besides, she longed to settle where they could make an indelible mark—even change history. Much had been done already on the French Riviera, but she was convinced that there was more to do, and with a shake of her pretty head and her radiant smile, she told Frank they were just the people to do it. The burning question was where.…
While they were initially impressed with Cannes, the resort was essentially a British invention. In 1834, Lord Henry Brougham, former lord chancellor of England, was the first foreigner to build himself a villa on a western hill high above the city in the old Suquet quarter. He regaled readers with his description of the region in his otherwise dry Dialogues upon Republican and Monarchial Government, claiming to be “enjoying the delightful climate … its clear sky and refreshing breezes, while the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean lay stretched before us; the orange groves and cassia plantations perfumed the air around us, and the forests behind, crowned with pines and evergreen oaks, and ending in the Alps, protected … by their eternal granite, from the cold winds of the north.”1
While Brougham “invented Cannes,” and its subsequent hivernants, or snowbirds, fleeing the damp northern winters, earlier seasonal migrant had been traveling to the French Riviera, or the Côte d’Azur as the French call it, for over a century. A hundred years before Brougham, Tobias Smollett published his Travels Through France and Italy in 1766. Shortly after, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy appeared in print. Sterne happened to be Thomas Jefferson’s favorite novelist, and so when the prospect arose, Jefferson traveled south to Nice and beyond in 1787. Though Jefferson, as American ambassador to France, stated his purpose was to recover from a poorly healing dislocated wrist, the possibility of learning the secrets of the Italian rice industry, to take back to the Carolinas in the hope of improving their rice crop, proved an exceptional enticement, too.
* * *
The French Rivera had long been thought to heal whatever ailed you. Menton, the most Italian in feel of all French cities on the Riviera, was known as the region’s sanatorium by the nineteenth century. Yet, it had been “discovered” long before by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri in the early fourteenth century, after he was exiled from Florence. His travels there were inspirational, a balm to his wounded soul, and he set his experiences down in his epic poems, most notably, in The Divine Comedy, completed in 1320.
When the English doctor and Menton resident James Henry Bennet published an article on July 7, 1860, in the British medical journal The Lancet and claimed that the climate of Menton was warmer than in “any part of the northern or central parts of Italy” or the French Riviera, and was thus ideal for anyone with respiratory illnesses, Menton’s fate was sealed. Its cultural windfall of sculptors, writers, and musicians of all nationalities flocked there in droves: the Italian composer Niccolò Paganini, the Polish-American pianist Arthur Rubinstein, the English author and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, Frenchmen Henri Matisse and Guy de Maupassant, Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, the German nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Scots writers Thomas Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, Irish greats Laurence Sterne and W. B. Yeats, and New Zealander writer Katherine Mansfield.2 All sought cures where none could be found.
The “Comté de Nice,” as the region was known in Jefferson’s day, was ruled from Turin by the kings of Sardinia of the royal House of Savoy, as a part of Piedmont. It became part of France in 1860. Before long, Americans began to settle there. Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, stayed in Nice and set part of her novel on the Promenade des Anglais. Edith Wharton’s father died in Cannes in 1882, and while Edith and her mother returned to America, she felt happiest in her villa at Hyères on the westernmost reaches of the Riviera. James Gordon Bennett Jr., the eccentric American newspaperman who owned the New York Herald and later founded the Paris Herald, fled scandal in New York to relax in the quiet village of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, where he hosted, among others, the likes of Lady Randolph Churchill and her young son, Winston. While Isadora Duncan spent much of her life in Paris, Nice became her final spiritual home. She died there in a spectacular car accident on the Promenade des Anglais when her scarf became entangled in the spokes of her speeding Bugatti, instantly strangling her.
The closed world of the aristocracy residing on the Riviera for centuries never mingled with either the beau monde or new immigrants, including Frank and Florence Gould.3 Their loss was the Goulds’ gain. Throughout their visits in the winter season of 1923–1924, it became one of those unique experiences for the Goulds to rub shoulders with real royalty. The success of the Bolshevik’s October 1917 Revolution meant that the numerous Romanov clan who hadn’t been hunted down, imprisoned, or killed fled Russia. Many became exiles in France. Czar Nicholas II’s uncle, Grand Duke Michel Mikhailovich, headed a cast of “who was who” in exiled Russian aristocracy living on the Riviera. The drop-dead handsome Grand Duke Dmitri, once the lover of Czar Nicholas’s morganatic sister-in-law Natasha and later Coco Chanel, sponged off his wealthier relatives—and played on Florence’s unbounded sympathies, and more than likely, in her bed. The Romanovs’ supporters were forced to escape, too, with whatever wealth they could—which, in some instances, was larger than the gross national product of many small European countries. One such oligarch was a railroad robber baron named Paul von Derwies and his wife, the Russian version of the Goulds. Understandably, Frank and Florence became close friends with them, and remained so long after the von Derwies’ fortune evaporated. Gone were the days of envying the Russians.
Maharajahs, kings, queens, princesses, and their councilors visited regularly, as part of the French winter circuit of luxury, leisure, and health pursuits between Aix-les-Bains, Pau, Biarritz, Nice, Cannes, and Menton. Frank played tennis with the Maharajah of Pudukota, and dined with the flamboyant Indian captain of cricket, Maharajah Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, who allegedly returned to India with a dancer from Maxim’s in Cannes tucked neatly inside one of his trunks.4 American millionaires and those who were wealthy but of lesser fortunes, began to flock southward, too. The popularity of the Riviera had grown so much that Cunard Lines linked the French Riviera, via Cannes, to the United Kingdom and United States in 1921, with the first sailing of the steamship Coronia.5
The Parisian beau monde wintered in the season and were changing fashions apace. Florence’s preferred designer and friend, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, was the new czarina of fashion, elbowing aside Paul Poiret, just as Poiret had done to Jeanne Paquin after the war. When Chanel disembarked from the yacht The Flying Cloud belonging to her lover Bendor—the nickname of Hugh Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster—“as brown as a cabin boy” in the winter season of 1923–1924 to join in the fun, the last of the Victorian taboos was shattered. Without any forethought, Chanel had created the most lasting of her fashions—the suntan. What had once been the trademark of fishermen, peasants, stonemasons, bricklayers, and the poor forced to work in the sun became chic, beautiful, and sensual in the summer of 1923.6
It might be said that Florence was quite like Chanel, since she had only two real loves: herself and money. Everything else was a passion of the moment, weakness, or adventure with or without calculation.7 There were of course other differences, too, not the least of which was Chanel’s rabid and enduring anti-Semitism, explained away by many as an unfortunate by-product of her convent education. Still, the main difference between the two women was that Florence could literally afford sexual escapades, inscribed into her unwritten marriage contract, where Chanel could not. Her fashion house was her love. Her lover Bendor, however, could—and did—open doors with money and his personal power.
The wife of the Spanish painter José Maria Sert (Ma
rie Godebska Natanson Edwards Sert), or Misia, as everyone called Chanel’s inseparable friend, tagged along too. Yet to think that Misia was some sort of groupie would be to underestimate her significance. Misia was an artist’s model, muse, trendsetter, and painter in her own right. While she was a friend and patron of Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and painters other than her husband, she was pointedly the object of the affections of Sara Murphy’s sister, Mary Hoyt Wiborg, or Hoytie.* It was Misia who introduced the Murphy set to the “Party King of Paris,” Étienne de Beaumont, and others who were also friends with the Goulds.8 Misia would flit in and out of all their lives like a butterfly, but always remained faithful to her Coco.
* * *
There was a foreboding that the new beau monde of exiles, expatriates, and the fashionable French were making the world a smaller place. In 1925, Donald Ogden Stewart, author of the side-splittingly funny Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad about the misadventures of Americans in France, recognized the ominous signs of things to come. “The Hôtel du Cap was now more than half full of wealthy vacationers,” Stewart lamented, “and the small exclusive beach on which the Murphy children and Dos [Passos] and I had run wild was now shared with a Mr. and Mrs. Pierpont Morgan Hamilton and assorted guests.”9
As expected, the two camps did not acknowledge the other’s existence. Florence and Frank preferred mingling during their stay at Hôtel du Cap with the Murphy, Dos, and Stewart clan, rather than the Pierpont Morgan Hamiltons, perhaps to Florence’s chagrin. Frank’s vivid memories of how his family had been shunned by the Four Hundred would never wash away with the years. Still, Florence was never a good joiner-in at other people’s parties, always preferring the role of hostess as the star of her own show. Unless they could rival the Hôtel du Cap in some way, Florence, certainly, sensed her place on center stage was under threat.
Once they were back in Paris, any thoughts the Goulds considered for their Riviera future were interrupted by an unforeseen and unwelcome interlude. Frank began complaining of stomach cramps. Sometimes he would have memory lapses of recent events, or be unable to recall what he’d just said, then return to normal. Uncharacteristically, he became lethargic, not wanting to go out or even get out of bed. Occasionally, too, he’d have fits of anger, which he quite naturally blamed on his stomach pain. When Frank began vomiting, Florence called in specialists, but no apparent causes could be found, other than surmising that Frank was suffering from some long-term consequences of his alcohol abuse. Perhaps a change of diet might reduce the symptoms?
Finally, months later, Frank began to spit blood. He was rushed to the private clinic near their Paris home. By the time he arrived, blood was oozing from his mouth. The surgeons advised Florence that Frank needed an emergency operation. They thought he had a stomach abscess, and there was no time to hesitate. Florence swiftly agreed to the surgery.
Given Frank’s perceived importance in international society, Florence felt it her duty to notify the press of his hospitalization. The Chicago Tribune reported on November 18, 1924, that “Mr. Gould had been in ill health for some time and had tried various diets and then an X-ray revealed a large abscess … the patient is as well as can be expected after coming out of the anesthetic.” In the days before antibiotics, Frank’s recovery was anything but certain.
Amusingly, at the end of the article, a little tidbit was added: “He is 47 years old. Florence La Caze, whom he married in 1923, is his third wife.”10 The separation of Florence’s maiden name into this grander, even aristocratic form of “La Caze” may have been an error. Then again, it might have been at her own instigation, since it was repeated time and again in newsprint from that date forward. Just as she had told the American press when she married Henry Heynemann that her father was an important banker in France, it suggests that, for Florence, it was no accident, but rather an enhancement of her ancestry.
No details of Frank’s operation or recovery were made public, but given the severity of the abscess, he most likely had a partial gastrectomy.11 He was incredibly lucky to ward off septicemia, too, since the abscess was the result of a violent infection. It took several months before Frank was fit enough to think about the future, but throughout that winter of 1924–25 in Paris, he dreamed of a home bathed in the warmth of the sun-kissed Mediterannean. Florence had to curse her luck and wonder between gritted teeth if she would merely be a young nurse to her invalid millionaire husband.
Finally, with the spring of 1925, Frank’s health improved. He wanted to travel south again to explore their options in the leisure property market. While neither had experience of operating casinos or hotels, as artful gamblers it was a business that attracted them, and they wanted to find out more.
From Florence’s perspective, finding a home and things to do for Frank on the Riviera would kill two birds at once: he’d be happy to remain there while she could flit between both their Riviera and Parisian lifestyles. Though they had already owned Semiramis in Cannes for two years, both had agreed back in 1923 that it was not the right place for them. Besides, given the success of the Ambassadeurs Casino under the iron fist of the aging Eugène Cornuché, along with plans by the consummate casino operator Henri Ruhl to open a second casino, the Goulds reasoned that Cannes wasn’t the place where they could immediately make their mark.12 To become viable competitors to such formidable opponents, both craved something new and unspoiled.
Frank and Florence stayed at Hôtel du Cap at Antibes in the winter season of 1923–1924 and loved it. Crossing and uncrossing her legs at the bar, a bottle of champagne within easy reach, a cigarette poised at her lips, Florence silently plotted, while fully aware of most men’s eyes drinking in her beauty. The quiet fishing village of Juan-les-Pins attracted her. An easy car ride along the coast road from Cannes to Nice, it was ideally situated for their purposes. Located on a small peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean that also sheltered the ancient fishing village of Antibes, one and a quarter miles distant from Hôtel du Cap, she immediately understood that this was their idyll.
Later, sharing her vision with Frank, their Bugatti stopped to allow them to absorb the unspoiled vistas across the pleasant arc of sea at Juan-les-Pins, redolent of the Bay of Angels (La Baie des Anges) that embraced Nice. Antibes lay behind them, some two miles eastward. Cannes stretched out about four miles in front of them. Frank already had a substantial acquaintance with the northern summer resorts at Deauville and Dinard, and knew instinctively that this little jewel he called “Juan” represented his next gold mine. They could build a resort to their own liking here, Frank and Florence agreed. Naturally, it would be a money spinner, too.
Florence might have seen that they could be big fish in a very small pond at Juan, which could suit her aspirations for Frank. Then, the more he shared his vision with her, the more convinced Florence became that Juan was the remedy they both desired. They knew from their stay at Hôtel du Cap that the multitalented Cole Porter had rented the Château de la Garoupe from Lord and Lady Aberconway not even a mile away in 1923. Porter also invited those elegant Americans, the Murphys, to stay back then. Now the Murphys were building their new home, Villa America, within plain sight.* Florence also knew that Gerald Murphy was a talented avant-garde artist and had an enviable affiliation—from a beau monde perspective—with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
* * *
Of course, everyone gossiped about the Murphys’ American literary friends, the Scott Fitzgeralds. Picasso and his Russian former Diaghilev ballerina wife, Olga, were at Juan, and were also great friends of the Murphy set. Ernest Hemingway, still a fine journalist coming to grips with the leap to becoming a great novelist, but always a “man’s man,” joined in, too, with his first wife, Hadley. The Murphys’ great friend and witty New York columnist, Dorothy Parker, was extolling the virtues of Antibes back home. All of them frequently stayed at the Hôtel du Cap or rented villas nearby.
Florence saw that by the summer of 1925, the coast of the French Riviera was an artistic and literary paradise,
and saw herself as the future Queen of the Riviera. Scott Fitzgerald’s most enduring book and masterpiece of life in the “Roaring Twenties,” The Great Gatsby, had just been published by Scribner’s to a lukewarm response. Few realize that it had to be rewritten in 1924 at the request of his editor, Maxwell Perkins, to “add believability” to his characters. So, in an enduring alcoholic haze, Fitzgerald knuckled down at Villa Saint-Louis in Juan-les-Pins and wrote about what he so keenly observed.† He saw how the rich and not-so-famous American “exiles” with pretensions to social status and in possession of great wealth lived on the Riviera. Then he transported them back to his previously imagined north shore of Long Island’s fictional towns of West Egg and its aristocratic counterpart, East Egg. Fitzgerald wrote about how these society types were in love with money and had become “careless people”; how they “smashed up things and creatures … and let others clean up the mess they made.”13
The Riviera’s careless world of fast cars and fast people, gambling with life, drunk on their own search for pleasure in the microcosm of Juan-les-Pins, became the canvas to paint into his novel. The essence of the Goulds’ selfish world became that of the characters of Fitzgerald’s greatest work. Naturally, the Juan exiles, like Florence and Frank, could not recognize themselves in the well-disguised mélange created from Fitzgerald’s flat Long Island characters of his original story, as fully paid-up members of their crowd, throbbing with life through The Great Gatsby’s pages.
Back in America, it was the age of Prohibition, of gangsters and racketeers making fortunes and plowing their illicit money into various cash businesses. They grew richer, too, like Frank, by avoiding paying taxes. Gatsby himself was a bootlegger who had an ill-gotten, showy wealth, all to impress the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan. But Fitzgerald would not portray his Gatsby as an Al Capone, king of the Chicago racketeers and bootleggers. Gatsby had class, and belonged in the glitzy reflection of Juan-les-Pins that echoed soon enough, too, in the pages of Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald began writing and rewriting that novel as well from the Villa Saint-Louis near the Juan-les-Pins casino.