Ad man who quit the rat race – and made Brits fall in love with France
But Year In Provence author Peter Mayle – who’s died at 78 – created so many fans (and enemies) he had to flee the land he loved . . .
At the height of the first Gulf War, a Fleet Street photographer captured one of those superb images which requires no accompanying words. It showed an RAF tornado ready for action on a desert runway. Inside his baking oven of a cockpit was the pilot, with nothing to do but sit and wait for the next life-or-death mission over enemy territory. Not that he looked remotely apprehensive. he was clearly miles away, deep in a lavender-scented idyll of boules, wild boar, bottles of red wine and grumpy French bartenders. For there, in the pilot’s hands, was a well-thumbed copy of A Year In Provence by Peter Mayle.
For a whole generation of Brits — even those about to go into combat — Mayle was the master of genteel escapism. he lived the ultimate middleclass dream: abandoning the rat race for a place in the sun, doing up an enchanting ruin and making a success of it.
In his case, that success would be stratospheric when his light-hearted account of a year’s expat building horrors in southern France became an international bestseller. It was translated into 20 languages and inspired a string of sequels which made him a multi-millionaire. Mayle’s books on Provencal life would become a television series, with John thaw playing the runaway former advertising executive. the whole point of going to Provence in the first place had been to write a novel, and several duly emerged. One would become a hollywood film.
Yet it was those autobiographical sketches of the balmy foothills of the Luberon and his broadbrush portraits of friends and neighbours for
‘He got in just as budget flights and foodie TV took off’
which he will chiefly be remembered, following his death this week at the age of 78.
People could immediately identify with an exasperated Brit in a half-finished home trying to deal with a plasterer who has decided to go skiing and a bricklayer who has just broken his arm playing football on a motorbike.
Mayle was equally scathing about thoughtless British friends who would come to stay. he noted down what he called the Sayings of August, phrases like ‘I feel terrible watching you slave away like that’ and ‘I didn’t realise you had to be so careful with a septic tank’.
Few authors have had their success begrudged quite so consistently, however. Mayle’s critics came at him on two fronts. First, there were the fellow expats outraged that he had the temerity to lift a lid on their part of France. they did not want it overrun by the masses, thanks very much. then there were all those other writers and would-be writers who were furious that Mayle had done what they had always dreamed of doing.
Mayle didn’t just do it very well. he spawned an entire genre. there had been plenty of earnest, high-brow accounts over the years of Brits starting their lives all over again in foreign parts, but Mayle’s style and his timing were spot on. he got in there just as budget flights and foodie television programmes were taking off, but before the market was saturated by the celebrity chef gang.
It was Mayle who pioneered what we might call gastro-DIY. We could all suddenly aspire to converting an old cowshed in the Dordogne or Umbria or the Auvergne while enjoying a plate of local sausage doused in truffle oil and a jug of robust red wine.
From Italy came Frances Mayes’s Italian Under the tuscan Sun. From Spain there was Chris Stewart’s Driving Over Lemons. Among many French variations was the Olive Farm: A Memoir Of Life, Love And Olive Oil In the South Of France by the actress Carol Drinkwater.
By the time some of these appeared, Peter Mayle had already fled Provence having overcooked his own soufflé. he had grown fed up with the moans of ‘ snotty’ expats. ‘they have such a proprietorial attitude about the place,’ he said after one media spat with another Brit. ‘they’re just glorified tourists, as I’m a glorified tourist.’
With readers and fans sniffing around his home and the chorus of grumbling neighbours, he and his wife sold up and moved to the U.S. for a while. Yet he could never quite shake off the region with which he will always be associated. Five years later, the Mayles bought a secluded house in another part of Provence and moved back. It was there that he died this week.
the son of a civil servant in the Colonial Office, Mayle was born in Sussex and educated at a local public school, Brighton College, which he did not enjoy. When his father was posted to Barbados, however, he discovered that he was particularly keen on sunshine, shorts and not wearing socks.
Armed with a few A-levels, Mayle started work at Shell where he gravitated towards marketing rather than oil exploration. having shown promise as a copywriter, he got a job in New York with the advertising guru David Ogilvy, from whom he learned the art of succinct writing.
he was a rising star in a fastmoving industry, achieving every adman’s dream of the immortal jingle. Just as the late Murray Walker dreamed up ‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’, Mayle will go down in the annals of the commercial break as the author of ‘Nice one, Cyril’.
It would be sung as a football chant and then a pop song long after anyone could remember the original product (Wonderloaf).
But the pressures of the job were taking a toll on Mayle’s family life. he was in his 30s, on his second marriage and a father of five when he met his third wife, Jennie, a producer of TV commercials. As he later admitted, many friends were appalled: ‘ Oh, God, the sucking of teeth and shaking of heads that went on.’
together, they abandoned advertising and moved to Devon where Mayle still had to find a way of paying for his wives and children. he began writing children’s books about the facts of life or, as he put it: ‘I just seemed to drift into private parts.’
having written Where Did I Come From?, he went on to write a guide to puberty called What’s happening to Me?’. together with the cartoonist Gray Joliffe, he also wrote the adventures of a talking
penis called Wicked Willie. As with ‘Nice one, Cyril’, it caught the mood of the moment, generating a cartoon series and a board game.
Mayle’s real ambition, however, was to write a novel. Having spent many happy summers in the Luberon area of Provence, he and Jennie took a gamble. In the late Eighties, they moved there after buying a traditional ‘mas’ or farmhouse in the village of Menerbes for £190,000.
According to the previous owner, a local builder, it was nothing like the wreck portrayed in either the book or the television series. The restoration work had all been done and the Mayles set about tinkering with the decor.
The novel continued to elude him. ‘My agent kept ringing me up to find out how it was going,’ he said a few years later. ‘I would say I hadn’t got very far because of this, that and the other.’ He would then describe yet another run-in with a plumber or odd-job man. Over time, the agent wondered whether all these excuses might not make for a better book.
‘I wrote my agent a 20-page letter and he took it to a publisher who liked it,’ said Mayle. ‘The publisher said I shouldn’t have too many expectations of the book, that he would print 3,000 copies and I would have a few left over for Christmas presents.’
A Year In Provence was duly published in 1989 and would soon demonstrate Mayle’s golden touch as never before. His publishers could barely keep up with the demand and, a year later, he produced a bestselling sequel, Toujours Provence. By then, the grapes had long turned sour on the neighbouring vines.
A fellow British writer accused him of ruining the area and exaggerating everything, from the dilapidated state of his house to the inefficiency of the local building trade.
And the number of unwanted visitors kept on growing. Sometimes the Mayles would return home to find complete strangers in their pool, including a group of Italians: ‘They had a video camera and told me to take off all my clothes and jump in.’
‘People who turned up at the house would always exclaim, “Aaaaah! Tracked you down!” as if I were hiding in a tent in the middle of the forest, but all you had to do was ask at the post office. I used to crouch under the windows and pretend not to be there. The locals considered the whole thing to be another example of peculiar English behaviour. They didn’t really know what it was about.’
He was accosted at book signings by people wanting advice with their boilers. By the time the second book came out, the first had already kicked off a tourist stampede to the area.
The 1993 BBC television series finally drove the Mayles to the conclusion that it was time to go. ‘We didn’t want to leave France in the first place. We left because we had become a minor sightseeing landmark,’ he said.
The Mayles put the house on the market for £625,000 and moved to the east coast of the U.S., renting a house in the chi-chi Hamptons area of Long Island. At least no one could complain that they had ‘ruined’ that. It had been a celebrity tourist trap since the days of The Great Gatsby.
Back in France, one of his former builders was threatening court action for loss of trade, claiming that Mayle’s demonisation of the family plumbing business had cost them £200,000.
‘No one wanting to do up a house would have anything to do with us,’ said Guy Menicucci. ‘He said we’re barbarians because we hunt. Here everybody hunts. He earned his money off us, and then he disappeared.’ Others queued up to denounce the ex-expat.
Mayle, meanwhile, had finally got round to writing his novel. Hotel Pastis tells the story of an advertising executive who buys an old gendarmerie in Provence and builds a luxury hotel. It appeared to include a spot of score-settling.
One character, an expat journalist not unlike Mayle’s chief tormentor back in Menerbes, ends up in a series of embarrassing pornographic photographs.
But he could not kick the Provence bug. In 1999, a further collection of Luberon tales appeared called ( inevitably) Encore Provence. In the same year, the couple bought a new home there and moved back.
Mayle had not lost his golden touch, either. His 2004 novel, A Good Year, concerning a British expat who inherits a French vineyard, became a Hollywood movie with Russell Crowe.
Further novels followed. ‘I don’t think I was put on this earth to make an enormous philosophical contribution,’ he said in 2001. ‘But that’s all right. As long as I’ve entertained some people, I am perfectly happy.’
For all the local moaning, the French nation was certainly appreciative. In 2002, the French government appointed him a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. But despite his literary success and the considerable revenues he generated for the publishing industry, Britain never saw fit to recognise him.
Even so, his legion of fans — including that brave RAF pilot — will still want to raise a large glass of Provencal rouge to the man who gave so many a chance to dream.