That damned Mussolini RUINED our holiday!
The rich and titled gathered on the Riviera to worship the sun and sleep with each other in their gilded mansions — until WWII spoiled their fun
DURING the early Twenties, scores of aristocrats, film stars, millionaires and deposed heads of state decided that the south of France was the nearest they were likely to come to heaven on Earth.
Piling into Bugattis and Lagondas, they headed for the Cote d’Azur to drink champagne cocktails by the bucketful, soak up the sun and have sex with one another. ‘Everyone slept with everyone,’ one of the early settlers proclaimed. ‘it was amusing, it was practical.’
Maybe so, but there were other practicalities to be attended to as well. These new settlers needed places to live. A lot of them turned to a rather strange gay couple to help realise their dreams of paradise.
Barry Dierks was a wavy-haired twentysomething from Pennsylvania whose alumnae yearbook from the Carnegie institute of Technology noted presciently: ‘Women bore him.’
Eric sawyer, ten years older, came from Aldershot, had served in the Army during World War i and, on the surface at least, looked like the picture of crusty conformity — he even insisted on being referred to as ‘The Colonel’.
in Britain, homosexuality remained illegal until 1967. in America, it was legal — just about — but classed as a ‘clinical mental disorder’. France, though, had a much more enlightened attitude: napoleon had decriminalised homosexuality more than a century earlier. no wonder, then, that so many gay men chose to settle there.
HAVING recouped the fruits of some shrewd investments, the unromantically named Barry and Eric set about cornering the market in bespoke villas. Barry came up with the designs while Eric, a qualified engineer, took care of the construction side of things.
The first house they built was their own. For 3,000 francs, they bought a 6,000 sq m peninsula west of Cannes where they put a white, quasi-baronial mansion overlooking the sea.
The writer somerset Maugham then engaged Barry and Eric to build him a house nearby — they ended up transforming the house that was already on the site, adding vaulted ceilings, black tiled floors and shady courtyards.
The notoriously grumpy Maugham was so thrilled with the result that he promptly invited friends and acquaintances to go and spend their summers there.
As Maureen Emerson puts it: ‘Beautiful but obscure young men were part of the scenery.’
While Barry was the charming extrovert, Eric was more withdrawn and dour — although he could be ‘a fount of risque jokes’ if the occasion was right. But both were brilliant at buttering up potential clients and pandering to their vanity.
When the American socialite Maxine Elliott announced that she, too, wanted a house on the Cote d’Azur, she was adamant there should be a 30 m slide from the house down to the sea. There was just one snag: in her youth, Elliott had been a slim beauty, but in middle age she’d filled out to an alarming degree. it would be disastrous if Elliott were too large to fit into the slide, or — even worse — if she became stuck half-way down.
Barry and Eric sprang smoothly into action. While Barry engaged her in conversation, Eric whipped out his tape measure and surreptitiously measured her backside. The result was a perfectly fitting slide down which a shrieking Maxine Elliott would plunge into the sea,
often accompanied by her pet lemur, Kiki.
Soon the area became so popular that there was barely a rocky outcrop that didn’t have one of Barry and Eric’s white mansions perched on top of it. The only thing the new owners had to do was find suitably glamorous house guests to come and stay.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Errol Flynn, Noel Coward, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor...they drift through these pages, cocktails in hand, stepping down to a secluded cove for another afternoon of sun-worshipping.
There’s a photograph here of Lord and Lady Cholmondeley lying on their inflatable sun-beds, both of them so tanned they look as if they’ve been dipped in gravy browning.
Given the amount that everyone drank, and Provence’s notoriously twisty-turny roads, it’s hardly surprising that car crashes feature prominently in Riviera Dreaming. One evening, Barry and Eric were driving home from a dinner in Cannes in their huge Chevrolet when they narrowly missed hitting an oncoming car.
After Eric told him to be careful, Barry replied: ‘Good God, am I driving? I thought you were.’
But all the time, war clouds were gathering. When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1935, Wallis Simpson took it as a personal affront.
‘You would think Mussolini had planned this mess just to break up our yachting trip,’ she complained to one of the few people in the South of France who she hadn’t already alienated with her peevish high-handedness.
FIVE years later, after the Nazis had taken control of France, they tried to smarten up people’s morals as well as their dress sense. Another American socialite, Beatrice Cartwright, wrote in agonised tones to a friend: ‘Pyjamas and shorts are now forbidden in public.’ However, she soon perked up, adding: ‘The weather is divine.’
As their owners fled or were imprisoned — homosexuals were rounded up and put in the same detention camp as prostitutes — villas were abandoned. In the final entry in their visitor’s book, Eric and Barry wrote: ‘End of an Epoch — exeunt Eric and Barry.’
Eric escaped over the Pyrenees. However, Barry decided to stay put and, at considerable personal risk, started helping the then fledgling French Resistance.
After the war was over, they tried to take up where they had left off, but it wasn’t the same. The smart set had flown; their onceimmaculate white mansions had been looted and smashed. It wasn’t long before the couple traded in their mighty Chevrolet for — of all things — a vauxhall viva.
Having lived in Provence for 25 years, Maureen Emerson plainly knows her stuff. While her cast of characters may not be the most sympathetic bunch — most of them were as shallow as they were snobbish — she has a forgiving eye for their foibles and adroitly conjures up the milieu they moved in.
Barry Dierks died in 1960, while Eric Sawyer soldiered on for another 25 years. Aptly enough, he was driving home in his vauxhall viva from yet another party when he crashed into a metal barrier and died a few days later.
Now the two of them lie together in the same grave dramatically sited high above the Mediterranean. Even in death, they never lost their eye for a picturesque spot.