For a twice-married and emotionally profligate millionairess, remembered by posterity for her construction of a house on the French Riviera, Maxine Elliott (1868-1940) is a curiously representative figure. What she turns out to represent, this patchwork chronicle of her life confirms, is a small but highly significant part of the early 20th century demographic made up of wealthy American women, often from comparatively humble backgrounds, who by luck or pertinacity contrived to establish themselves as high-level social figures on the Atlantic’s eastern side.
Like the legendary Laura Corrigan (to whom Mary S Lovell allows a walk-on part), a farmer’s daughter from Wisconsin who married a steel magnate, Mrs Elliott – real name Jessie Dermot – hailed from a locale that the kind of people she so lavishly wined and dined would have thought well beyond the frontiers of polite society. The daughter of a New England sea captain, brought up in what her biographer calls “a strict, no-frills ethos”, she was married at 16, separated at 19, and, by her mid-20s, steaming along a path to Broadway celebrity that looks as if it were borrowed from a novel by Theodore Dreiser.
All the traditional rewards of theatrical acclaim quickly followed: a trip to England, a second marriage to the comedian Nat Goodwin, the purchase of some highly desirable real estate and a position as a society hostess that enabled her to entertain everybody from Britain's King Edward VII to the former Liberal prime minister Lord Rosebery. Goodwin was eventually jettisoned for the four-times Wimbledon singles champion Tony Wilding – killed in the Great War – after which Maxine transferred her attentions to the south of France, fell in with an architect named Barry Dierks and had him design a palatial pile between Cannes and Antibes christened the Château de l’Horizon.
The attractions of the French Riviera to English expats at this time are neatly summarised in a letter from Harold Nicolson, written while staying at Somerset Maugham’s nearby Villa Mauresque: “It really is the perfect holiday. I mean, the heat is intense, the garden lovely, the chair long and cool, the lime-juice at hand, a bathing-pool there if one wishes to splash, scenery, books, gramophones, pretty people…”
The "pretty people" entertained at Maxine's luncheons for 50 may have included such period flibbertigibbets as Daisy Fellowes and Doris Castlerosse (nee Delevingne and great-aunt of Cara), but they also ran to Winston Churchill, whom his hostess revered and encouraged to come on working holidays. But it would be wrong to say that Churchill acts as the pivot on which The Riviera Set turns – the material assembled here is a bit too diffuse for that. On the other hand, the best chapters tend to be those in which vacationing dignitaries arrive at the Chateau to carouse and cabal. There is, for example, an excruciating account, courtesy of the left-wing American journalist Vincent Sheehan, of the newly exiled Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, laying down the law about conditions in the British mining industry to an audience consisting of his wife, the Duchess, Churchill and the elderly David Lloyd George.
As heydays go, Maxine’s was all-too fleeting. The storm-clouds were gathering by the later 1930s, most of the expatriates left in a hurry in 1939, and by 1940 the châtelaine was dead: her last words, according to her doctor, expressed the hope Winston would become prime minister.
Requisitioned by invading Nazis, and then used as a bolthole by the Resistance, the Château fell into disrepair until its post-war purchase by the fast-living son of the Aga Khan, Prince Ali Khan. He was later to marry the actress Rita Hayworth and die in a car crash at the age of 48.
Although a certain amount of stress is laid on Maxine’s charitable activities, notably her work for the Belgian refugees in 1914-18, a modern observer could be forgiven for taking serious umbrage at these pageants of upper-class dissipation and ancient gossip (was Winston seduced by Lady Castlerosse? Should one curtsy to the Duchess of Windsor?)
In the end, though, Mary Lovell redeems herself by the sheer guilelessness of her tone. As in her study of the Mitford sisters, so convinced is she that Doris, Daisy and the others are figures of paralysing importance, that the reader almost forgives them their detachment from their time, while the Château itself seems like a lost Xanadu, on whose ghostly terrace some exceptionally well-dressed phantoms gibber and fret.
DJ Taylor is a novelist and critic who also writes for The Independent on Sunday and The Guardian.
