Antibes
The poule de luxe stalked through the lobby on six-inch spike heels. In her wake shambled a small son and broken wallet of a husband. She held a selfie stick aloft to film every second of herself storming to her lunch reservation, single-minded in her search for prime social media content scraped from the best hotel in the world: the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Boulevard John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Antibes.
She had an expression that reminded me of Hitler’s smirk on the occasion of his pilgrimage to Napoleon’s tomb on his first and only trip to Paris in June 1940. It was one of glazed triumph that she had got there and wanted it all recorded for posterity.
As this scene unfolded, several crack troops of the hotel’s staff (580 for 118 rooms, and four villas including a magnificent private Schloss called La Guettière, yours for €65,000 a night) monitored her, presumably working out how to stage a discreet intervention before she made it to her lunch table at Louroc, hard by a pop star and a real New York real estate billionaire, i.e. not Donald Trump.
For once, I am writing what I know: I am not only your columnist, I am also the hotel reviewer for the Sunday Times, and I’m reporting from my eighth (ninth?) visit to the hotel, which goes into hibernation next week.
Everyone who is anyone has stayed here. The Kennedys. Marlene Dietrich. Cole Porter. Picasso and Chagall. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Churchill, de Gaulle. But now everyone has an iPhone, Instagram and TikTok accounts. And this explains why Madame is under surveillance, as she is in breach of the Hôtel du Cap’s strict and widely advertised House Rules.
When you check in, you are reminded of them in person. A card listing the rules in black and white is also left on every desk in every room.
No wandering round in towels, Harvey Weinstein-style fluffy white bathrobes, or beachwear, as Kate Moss did in a bikini, earning herself a stern ticking-off, which did not go down well with the supermodel. Men have to be in ‘closed shoes’ to dine, for which we must all give thanks, and ‘long’ trousers and shirts. No phone calls or photography are allowed at the pool, a turquoise Matisse cut-out blasted from the basalt cliff.
As Sophie Volant, hotel manager, tells me, the rules are popular with the devoted clientele. Indeed, ‘aimables clients’ would prefer them to be even stricter, as social media lays waste to everything precious in its path – privacy, living in the moment, personal space and, therefore, the perfection of place.
Volant says the ‘soul of the property’ – ironically the most photographed hotel in the world – is under continuous assault from the scourge of influencers who have ‘no respect for the Grande Dame’. They arrive with suitcases of clothes and their photo-graphers, book a table in the Roof Bar for a Diet Coke or the Grill for a quick lunch, and then spend an entire day doing an elaborate shoot, with many changes of outfit, on the Grande Allée, or even poolside. The problem is how to stop them.
The worst offenders are women from what we shall call the Soviet bloc in ‘fishnet dresses’
The hotel has banned all cameras and photographers apart from iPhones, roped off the Grande Allée and placed two sentries, Hassan and Mohammed, to stop influencers using the grounds as sets for their shoots. You have to give a room number to sit by the pool, which means only echt guests can pretend they are Hollywood starlets in a Gatsby novel (it’s Hôtel des Étrangers in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night).
Clearly, not everyone has got the memo, and this is a perpetual headache for Philippe Perd, the suave and debonair MD. ‘I am the guardian of elegance,’ he says. ‘But it’s a daily battle.’ He recently had to kick out a high roller who paid €5,000 for a personal photographer to document her stay – ‘even though we have a wonderful in-house photographer, Loïc Bisoli – and installed him in her room’.
Then Perd gives me the real skinny. ‘I don’t want to say this,’ he sighs, over a delicious dinner of beef wellington and vintage Burgundy at La Guettière, ‘but around 95 per cent of the guests with iPhones are women. I never see a man taking the pictures, the selfies.’ The worst offenders are women from what we shall call the Soviet bloc in ‘fishnet dresses’ that ‘show every-thing’. They are politely asked to leave. ‘Trash always takes itself out!’ I nod.
P.S. Later, waiting in Nice airport, I post a carousel of images on my @racheljohnsonpublic Instagram account, tagging @hotelducapedenroc, thanking them for having me at the glorious annual ‘Cup-du-Cap’ tennis tournament at the house of endless summer. The Golden Years of glamour are long gone, the age of narcissism is upon us.
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