Parking in the town of Cannes during these fifteen days of the film festival is a nightmare. The Croisette, the internationally famous lido that borders the seafront, is cordoned off. All general traffic must make circuitous detours and sit snarled up for hours on end in narrow lanes and back streets. Only official film-festival cars have access to the Palais, where they disgorge stars and filmmakers of every nationality who pose for the paparazzi while climbing the red-carpeted stairs, watched by thousands of attendant stargazers, eyes agog, alongside the old port. During these days in May, Cannes metamorphoses into a beargarden, and, frankly, the only way to negotiate it is on foot.
But how to get from our farm in the hills to the coast without finding ourselves lumbered with a vehicle that we cannot arrive in or park? Michel has come up with a rather natty solution. We don our evening clothes and fly down the hills on a scooter he has bought for me, but which I don’t dare use without him, because the first time I took it out I drove it slap-bang into our neighbour’s wall, buckling the front mudguard and smacking my nose so hard I was left with a bruise the colour of winter pansies. I have been behind the wheel of cars since I was sixteen – it is illegal to drive in England at sixteen, but that’s another story – yet when it comes to two-wheelers I seem to lack the aptitude. I have no sense of balance and I fear the exposure; I have grown used to the security of the metal carapace of a car and believe myself to be protected, but on a bike I panic and wobble all over the place, like someone’s granny after several whiskys. Still, for the festival, the scooter is the ticket. We park and lock it up in one of the back lanes of the old town and from there we stroll to the Palais, our coveted film invitations at the ready. At this time of the evening the back streets of the vieille ville are relatively quiet; the action is taking place around the Palais, known to the local Cannois population and those who work in the film and television industries as ‘the bunker’ due its consummate ugliness and desultory ergonomic values.
Arriving on foot rather than in a chauffeured limo provided by the festival for official guests of the festival – this honour is reserved for those who have a film in competition – means that we must push and shove our way through the crush of crowds as plentiful as spectators at a Premier League football match. What an assault to our senses after the tranquillity of Appassionata and our day out in the mountains with the shy beekeeper, M. Manneron. As we approach the glaring lights, music – as usual a well-known film score – blasts from the humungous loudspeakers while the glitterati shove and kick like fishwives to get to the front of the queue, for once inside the huge cinema, the seats are not numbered; it is a first-come, first-served affair. Everywhere people are begging for spare invitations, hopefuls in makeshift evening dress whose dream it is to walk those red-carpeted steps and maybe, just maybe, have their photograph taken by one of the paparazzi who flank that stairway to fame. Between street level and entrance to the Palais, there are twenty-four steps and then, if you are up in the grand circle and not at auditorium level, which we are, another eleven to climb. I know because I count them regularly – it gives me something to concentrate on, helps me feel less shy. The attention of the world is spotlighted here: every television station, every international newspaper and magazine have sent representatives. Each May, approximately 25,000 people converge upon this coastal resort, amphitheatred by its deluxe hotels, to partake of the mayhem and madness that is this festival.
Cannes is about this moment. Ever since 1946, when the first film festival was inaugurated here to celebrate the town’s liberation after the Second World War, it has become its raison d’être. Every other festival, every other season, is a pale reflection of this glitz. The buzz, the hype and, it has to be said, the tackiness. Spot the celebrity. The photographers are everywhere, pointing lenses, flashing cameras at well-known faces, sequinned, fishtail frocks, backless gowns and plunging cleavages, any trick in the book or fashion accessory to grab the attention of the thousands of snappers congregating the length of these hallowed steps. Stunning women hanging from the shoulders of drop-dead gorgeous men pose and pout before the strobe of flashbulbs and the blinking, adoring crowds.
As we negotiate our way through the scrum of overexcited people, Michel wraps a protective arm about me. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Fine,’ I smile.
‘Ready?’
I nod.
He takes my hand and we begin the ascent.
It is important to look cool, composed and, above all, to smile. It is no good concentrating on one’s feet in an attempt not to trip or hitching up one’s frock or frowning like a sourpuss. Smiling and swanning are all part of the show, the parade, the masquerade. The music is ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’. Up we climb, arm in arm. No selfconscious rictus grin this evening; I have the best reason to be gleeful and I am sailing up the stairs, savouring every minute of it. I turn my head and glimpse my husband, the father-to-be of my child, at my side. Flashes explode around us. I barely notice them; I am fathoms deep in my own happiness, our happiness. Michel squeezes my wrist, a tiny recognition of the swell of joy within me. The paparazzi always snap him, not because they recognise him – they don’t – but because he looks magnificent in his black waistcoat and white smoking, which enhance his imposing, Prussian good looks and that long curly hair of his, and I am chuffed to be the woman on his arm.
Once up the stairs, we are jostled inside, huddled and shuffling like a colony of emperor penguins, and directed to vacant rows of seats by one of a dozen uniformed girls. Tonight, just as we are about to take our places, someone yells out Michel’s name, bawling it across the rows of chairbacks. Coiffured heads turn. We spin around to see who it might be and catch sight of an eager, middle-aged man elbowing his way through the shimmering crowds to reach us, all the while shouting and waving. He seems to know us well and is almost jumping for joy to find us here. His stomach is straining in his outdated dinner jacket, he is flushed and perspiring, but he seems thrilled to see us, if the huge smile animating his shiny-complexioned face is anything to go by. I know we know him, but I cannot place him.
‘Who is he? Have we worked with him?’
Is he a business associate of Michel’s from Paris? But his accent is Provençal. He presents his chunky wife, who is clearly overcome to meet us both, particularly me. ‘Now I can put a name to that English accent, madame,’ she teases. ‘And we love that television series of yours.’
And then it dawns on me. We are in the company of M. Di Luzio, our sooty plumber-cum-chimney sweep, and his wife. Tonight, as spruced and scrubbed as a newborn baby, he is quite unrecognisable. What is clear, though, is that he and his wife still insist on believing that I am Emma Peel from The Avengers – a series in which I have never played so much as a guest role. Even here, amid the madness of industry posturing, M. Di Luzio slaps his thigh like a principal boy in a pantomime, wiggles his hips and winks at me triumphantly. Then he turns his head and, through the assembling crowds, roars to another couple, friends of theirs, apparently, seated high up at the back of the upper auditorium. ‘It’s her!’ he bellows in his thick, Provençal twang. ‘Her off the telly!’
Later, after the screening and before going for supper, Michel and I stroll the Croisette arm in arm. It’s fun to gaze, to miss as little as possible and to bear in mind that as far back as the late nineteenth century this famous lido has played host to the rich, the royal and the famous. Along its waterside arena an astonishing aggregate of destinies has become interwoven.
Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, the youngest son of Queen Victoria, died here in 1894 after an accident at the Villa Nevada. Her Royal Majesty, his mother, paid a visit to Cannes three years later, with an entourage of over a hundred, to mourn her son and to visit the church of St George which had been built in his memory. However, much as she loved the French Riviera – the name was bestowed on the place by the visiting British – and was a regular visitor to these shores, she quit Cannes after only four days, declaring that she strongly disapproved of the immoral carryings-on here.
‘I would be fascinated to hear her opinion today,’ I say to Michel as we weave our way through blasting horns and autograph-hunters.
In 1949, the glorious, flame-haired film star Rita Hayworth married the Aga Khan here and lived out most of the rest of her sad and lost life in a villa in Le Cannet, which overlooks this renowned bay. It was the management of the Cannes Carlton Hotel who suggested to that same, now deceased, Aga Khan, head of the Ismaili Muslims, that they would be happy to bottle his bathwater to sell to his faithful as an elixir of life. In 1953, a seventeen-year-old nubile French girl, the daughter of bourgeois parents, posed on these golden sands (the sand is imported) for the paparazzi and caused such a sensation that from that day onwards her rise to fame as world sex kitten was assured. Brigitte Bardot. In some ways, she did as much for the perception of women in the fifties as her feisty suffragette predecessors, because of the new attitude she displayed to sex. BB was portrayed as a woman with carnal values who cared more for her own pleasures than for the men who partnered her. These days she is pretty much dismissed by the French. Though reaching sixty is not a setback – in France, women d’un certain âge are revered – she has not aged with the grace or poise of Catherine Deneuve. Pictures show her looking plump, wrinkled and rather vulgar, and I suspect that her marriage to a senior assistant of Le Pen, the leader of this nation’s extreme right, has been the final nail in the coffin of her image.
In 1955, just a couple of years after BB’s explosion on to the world scene, a very different breed of woman, the American model-cum-actress Grace Kelly, met Prince Rainier of Monaco here and, in marrying him a year later, renounced film-star status for that of Beautiful Princess endowed with Kingdom and Untold Riches – the ultimate escapist fantasy.
And that, it seems to me, is what Cannes is about. This fringe of Provençal littoral remains the land of make-believe, but what fascinates me is, at what cost?
Occasionally, a fellow producer from Paris or London, some industry person, waves to us, or a harassed American executive, here for the market rather than the festival, stops to say hi to Michel and to enquire, ‘How’s business?’
While they exchange news, I take the opportunity to drink in the scene.
Although it is almost eleven at night – the second competition screening starts somewhere between 10 and 11pm – this famous beachfront drag is jam-packed with people. All along it, folk are sitting in cafés or restaurants or at tables on the pavements doing business, a few rather too ostentatiously. Others are acting chic, being famous, spending money, while others still are talking serious film. Many are sporting black tie. These tend to be the professionals who, like us, have just attended a screening or are about to sit through the later performance, for smoking, evening dress, is de rigueur here during the festival. You cannot climb those renowned red steps after 6.30pm unless you are attired in evening dress. Michel and I both rather enjoy this custom. These days it’s about the only occasion I drag out the glad rags, and it adds a certain elegance to proceedings which, after all, purport to be about the celebration of filmmaking.
Beyond this nucleus, looking keenly and hungrily about them, are surges of star-spotters, wannabes, tourists, and make-believers and, to keep these motley swarms controlled, there are police at every corner, lining the streets, whistling at and redirecting the noisy streams of traffic.
This evening the weather is perfect. Balmy with a lilac sky as clear as a bell. Constellations of stars light up the night. Yes, it’s the season for stars, but the terrestrial ones won’t be spotted here. No, they are to be found hanging out in heavily guarded villas, attending exclusive parties in châteaux hired by distribution companies desperate to promote their latest multimillion-dollar extravaganza, or they are staying at the Hôtel du Cap, where the management refuse to accept payment by cheque or credit card, where attendance at one breakfast meeting at least is essential if you are to be hailed as a member of that most exclusive of all clubs, the A list, and where you can lose yourself in the sumptuous grounds, le parc, play langorous tennis in diamond-studded baskets (plimsolls, to those of my generation) and where, it has to be said, the view from that strand of the Cap d’Antibes out over the Mediterranean is truly breathtaking. But we are not members of that A list, and nor do we particularly wish to be. Well, if I am honest, I have hankered after that fame – I began composing that dreamed-of Oscar speech when I was ten years old – but not Michel: he is far more grounded, far less Hollywood-oriented. Or, as the French might say, ‘pas très ’ollywoodien’.
So here we are, strolling contentedly along the Croisette, hand in hand, enjoying the brush of palm trees soughing lazily in the hint of breeze – palms, by the way, were yet another British legacy to this coast. They imported them here in the nineteenth century along with the fluffy, sweet-smelling golden mimosas that are today celebrated at dozens of Provençal mimosa festivals in late January – when, suddenly, from out of the huggermugger of people, looms an unshaven, scruffily dressed journalist. He calls my name and I try to recall his. Jacob. Yes, that’s it. I became acquainted with him in Madras, India, when I was a guest at the annual film festival there. I introduce him to Michel, and without further ado he gets straight to the point. He is here with his girlfriend, he explains, covering the festival for a German magazine, but the girlfriend, Barbara, of whom he spoke frequently in India, is at a loose end and not feeling well. He asks for our phone number and enquires whether she could come up to the house, use the garden and pool, hang out with us?
‘Where we are staying is pretty grotty,’ he moans, ‘as well as being horrendously expensive, but it’s in a good position for me. Still, Barbara can’t sit in all day and she hasn’t managed to find tickets to any films because she doesn’t have any accreditation. Any chance that you guys could dig up a festival badge and a few tickets? Or if you have a spare room, maybe we could move up to your place?’
Before I can open my mouth, Michel tells him, ‘Desolé, it’s not possible.’
We say our goodnights and he hurries away. I turn and glance after him. I am remembering an occasion several festivals back when I went into my bank and witnessed a scene that quite distressed me. A youngish but balding Englishman with an air of down-at-heel desperation was at the front of a rather long queue attempting to cash a cheque for the princely sum of £30. The teller refused him. He became loud and upset and an assistant manager was called to the scene. He begged her for the money, regaling her with his hopes for his first film, while the rest of us waited patiently. Eventually, the assistant agreed to telephone his branch in London, but while she was away making the call, he turned on his heels and fled like a hunted rabbit.
I recount this tale to Michel and then reflect on the fact that, whoever you are and no matter what your reason for being in Cannes during these fifteen glittering days in May, there is one thing you can bet your life on: it’s costing the individual or the corporates an arm and a leg.
‘The town of Cannes must be so rich,’ I say.
‘I am not at all sure about that,’ replies Michel. ‘In fact, there are whispers of financial problems.’
‘Really?’
Smiling, he leads me off the Croisette into a side street. We are making for a friendly, family-run Italian restaurant he favours.
‘I’m starving,’ he says. ‘Let’s eat. What do you fancy?’
‘Stuffed tomatoes. I’m dying to know what you’ve heard.’
‘Didn’t you have tomatoes for lunch?’
‘Yes, and breakfast.’