One of the festival’s great ironies is that those who attend talk endlessly of escaping from its sapping intensity, while much of the world dreams of escaping to Cannes. Yet when you’re caught in the middle of all the action—racing from film to film, press conference to press conference, party to party—you feel you’re not really on the Côte d’Azur but being shot from place to place in some weird equivalent of a pneumatic tube. You may walk up the medieval streets to the old town, Le Suquet, gobble the best pizza in Cannes at La Pizza (invariably packed), or gawk at the Croisette’s plush Belle Epoque hotels—the Martinez, the Majestic, the great white hulk of the Carlton, with its twin towers shaped like Prussian helmets. But even after doing all this for years, you can still feel that you know almost nothing about the city. You’re trapped in an artificial reality.
Everyone who goes to the festival plays a role in creating the illusion that, for 12 days anyway, Cannes is the center of the universe, the place where everything is happening. To be there is exhilarating—fast, furious, and fun—but also more than a little disorienting. That’s why I decided to find out what the city was like when all the media people, myself included, had gone home.
For a start, it looks smaller without the crowds. I had the cabbie drive me along the Boulevard de la Croisette, named for the small cross at its eastern end, and checked out the famous hotels that stand across from the beach like so many stranded ocean liners. The Carlton looked naked without any of its huge 3-D advertisements for Disney, James Bond, or Godzilla. It was noon, an hour whose fierce light Matisse found magnificent but frightening, and the sidewalks were nearly empty; even the trinket sellers from Dakar were looking for shade. Off in the hazy distance, the 900-year-old Suquet Tower gazed down on the old port. For all its air of modernity, Cannes is no latecomer—it’s been around for more than 2,000 years. Settled by the Ligurians and colonized by the Romans, the city’s actually older than Paris or London.
For centuries, Cannes survived as a fishing village known for its mimosa trees. All that changed in 1834 when it was “discovered” by England’s Lord Brougham, who decided to build a villa in the area known as Croix des Gardes. He encouraged his titled friends to follow suit, and the hillside soon become a winter haven for English aristocrats. (The tsarist elite preferred Californie, a district on the other side of town.) Over the next years, this small village was transformed into a tourist mecca, a prize jewel on that mythologized diadem of pleasure known as the Riviera.
But if Cannes was initially made fashionable by genuine aristocrats, it became glamorous with the arrival of a new kind of elite—wealthy bohemians. In the years after World War I, the Riviera’s public image was created by Cole Porter dinner parties, paintings by Picasso and Matisse, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s paean to doomed romance, Tender Is the Night, which he wrote feverishly in Cannes. The world came to associate the Côte d’Azur with a Champagne-and-sun-drenched hedonism, a style of high living adorned with the cachet of high art.
But the Great Depression killed that Riviera (neither artists nor Americans could afford its splendid excesses), and with the launch of the film festival, Cannes became the world’s brightest showcase for another, less refined kind of aristocrat: Bogart and Hepburn, Mastroianni and Loren. The international film stars were mass culture’s version of royalty, public icons made larger than life by the big screen, then whittled down to size by the popular media. If the traditional elite was defined by what it could keep private (owning entire beaches, controlling the press), the new celebrity elite derived its power from what it did in public. Its authority rested on fame. Ostentation ruled—it was good PR. In this gaudy new Cannes, even crime took on the mythic quality of movies: In 1949, the Aga Khan and the Begum (a former Miss France) were robbed of $850,000 in jewelry on the Cannes–Nice road. (Six years later, Cary Grant and Grace Kelly were on the Riviera in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, a movie about stylish jewel thieves.)
That showy Cannes still persists today, both in the casinos, where high rollers come to flaunt their wealth, and in the flashy-hip outdoor restaurant Bâoli, with its aurora borealis lighting and black-clad doormen who seem to be impersonating martial arts ham Steven Seagal. Boating in from their yachts or hopping out of their Benzes, the children of Microsoft and Coca-Cola come here to revel in their postmodern versions of the kinds of parties once attended by Scott and Zelda. They dance on the tables and spray Champagne while disco remixes of Tom Jobim play in the background.
But while Maseratis and Lamborghinis roar through the streets with unnerving frequency, Cannes’s chic image masks a homelier truth: The city depends on money from middle-class tourism. “La Vie Est Un Festival,” is its official slogan, and it hosts more than 150 conventions a year, more than anywhere else in France except Paris. In the 50 weeks of the year when movie stars aren’t swanning into the Palais, the Bunker welcomes thousands upon thousands of dentists, cosmeticians, comic-book collectors, clean-water symposiasts, and Provence-besotted tourists hoping to bask in an aura of glamour they can only diminish.
One afternoon, I went for the luncheon buffet on the Carlton beach, a lovely place to nibble seafood, sip white wine, and watch whatever Onassis-size yachts happen to be sluicing by. During the festival, the restaurant is filled with elegant, graying, vulpine men accompanied by sleek young women with expressions as expensive and empty as a Baccarat ashtray. But today the men all looked like Art Buchwald, their wives like Leona Helmsley. To my left, four dazed souls sat wearing convention badges from Lifestyles, while to my right a bullish, sandy-haired Englishman guzzled a whole bottle of Champagne, his face growing redder and redder until it matched the hue of the crayfish on his plate.
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