It was hot and sunny, bad weather for bookshops, as I joined the traffic crawling into town. Bright new signs on the lampposts announced that Cannes was twinned with Beverly Hills, and I could imagine the mayors finding endless excuses to exchange visits in the cause of municipal friendship and the shared interest of taking free holidays.
Outside the Palais des Festivals, what seemed to be the entire Cannes police force, equipped with revolvers, walkie-talkies, and sunglasses, was busy creating a series of traffic jams and making sure Clint Eastwood didn’t get kidnapped. With the skill that comes from many years of practice, they directed cars into snarling knots and then whistled at them furiously, sending the drivers off to the next snarling knot with irritated jerks of the head. It took me 10 minutes to cover 50 yards. When I finally reached the vast underground car park, I saw that an earlier victim of the chaos had scrawled on the wall: “Cannes is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to spend the day here.”
I went to a café on the Croisette to have breakfast and look for stars. Everyone else was doing the same thing. Never have so many unknowns inspected each other so carefully. All the girls were wearing pouts and trying to look bored. All the men carried listings of the films to be shown that day and made important notes in the margins. One or two cordless phones were placed with casual prominence next to the croissants, and everyone displayed plastic delegates’ badges and the obligatory Festival bag, with Le Film Français/Cannes 90 printed on it. There was no mention of Le Film Américain or Le Film Anglais, but I suppose that’s one of the advantages of being the host on these occasions; you get to choose the bags.
The Croisette was planted with a forest of posters carrying the names of actors, directors, producers, and, for all I knew, hairdressers. They were positioned directly opposite the big hotels, presumably so that the hero of each poster could see his name every morning from his bedroom window before having the traditional Cannes breakfast of ham and ego. A feeling of hustle was in the air, of big deals and big bucks, and the groups of hustlers walking along the Croisette were oblivious to the old beggar sitting on the pavement outside the Hotel Majestic with a lonely 20-centime piece in his upturned, tattered hat.
Fortified by my dose of glamour, I left the moguls to it and went down the narrow Rue Bivouac-Napoleon to the English Bookshop, preparing for the odd experience of sitting in a shop window hoping for someone—anyone—to ask me to sign a book. I’d done one or two signings before. They were unnerving occasions when I had been stared at from a safe distance by people who were unwilling to venture within talking range. Perhaps they thought I’d bite. Little did they know the relief authors feel when a brave spirit approaches the table. After a few minutes of sitting on your own, you’re ready to clutch at any straw and sign anything from books and photographs to old copies of Nice-Matin and checks.
Fortunately, Wally Storer and his wife had anticipated author’s funk and had stocked the shop with friends and customers. What inducements they had used to drag them off the beach I didn’t know, but I was grateful to be kept busy, and I even started to wish I’d brought Monsieur Menicucci along. He could have answered much better than I why French drains behave and smell the way they do, which I found to be a topic of common curiosity among English expatriates. Isn’t it strange, they said, that the French are so good at sophisticated technology like high-speed trains and electronic telephone systems and the Concorde, and yet revert to the 18th century in their bathrooms. Only the other day, an elderly lady informed me, she had flushed her toilet and the remains of a mixed salad had surfaced in the bowl. Really, it was too bad. That sort of thing would never happen in Cheltenham.
The signing came to an end, and we went round the corner to a bar. Americans and English outnumbered the natives, but natives in Cannes are few and far between. Even many of the police, I was told, are imported from Corsica.
They were still patrolling the Croisette when I left, toying with the traffic and eyeing the girls who sauntered by in varying stages of undress. The old beggar hadn’t moved from his pitch in front of the Majestic, and his 20-centime piece was as lonely as ever. I dropped some coins in his hat and he told me, in English, to have a nice day. I wondered if he was practicing for Beverly Hills.
Boy
My wife first saw him on the road into Ménerbes. He was walking along beside a man whose neat, clean clothes contrasted sharply with his own disreputable appearance, a filthy rug hung over a framework of bones. And yet, despite the matted coat and burr-encrusted head, it was obvious that this dog was one of a breed peculiar to France, a species of rough-haired pointer known officially as the Griffon Korthals. Beneath that shabby exterior lurked a chien de race.