Жан Кокто и хорошие времена в Санто-Соспире

Here, the joy practically jumps off the walls. “I didn’t have to dress the walls; I had to paint on their skin, that’s why I treated the frescoes linearly, with few colours that enhanced the tattoos. Santo Sospir is a tattooed villa.” – Жан Кокто

Heiress socialite Francine Weisweiller was one of the prettiest, wealthiest, and most stylish women in Paris. John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, described Francine as “an exquisitely dressed, excessively spoiled little beauty.” There was some truth in this: Much to the horror of her parents, Francine impulsively married a boyfriend at the age of 17, only to divorce him three months later. She was momentarily disowned; she supported herself as a makeup girl at Elizabeth Arden in the meantime.

In August 1943, one of Francine’s lovers, an Italian diplomat, warned her that the Germans were about to extend their occupation of France all the way to the Mediterranean. Francine, her husband Alec (both Jewish) and their infant daughter Carole fled to a farm near Pau, France. One day, during a raid by the Gestapo, Alec and Francine hid for hours in a ravine, covered with leaves. If they survived, Alec promised, he would buy Francine the house of her dreams.

The haute-bohemian villa Santo Sospir was built shortly after the war and was purchased by Alec and Francine in 1946. Following through on his promise, he bought it for her as a prize for surviving the war. Alex spent most of his time in Paris living with his mistress, the beautiful and temperamental actress Simone Simon, so Francine lived in the villa alone. After her marriage to Weisweiller, Francine had affairs with Prince Aly Khan, who left her for actress Rita Hayworth, and with her husband’s cousin, Guy de Rothschild. After Aly Khan left her for Hayworth, Francine banned her household from seeing Hayworth’s movies.

Пикассо and his wife Jacqueline visited Santo Sospir, and attended bullfights with Cocteau and Francine. Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo came to dinner. The conductor Herbert von Karajan met his wife Eliette, a model for Dior, on the Orpheus II, Francine’s black-hulled yacht with a white sail painted by Cocteau. Francine was dressed by the great couturiers – Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent (who considered her a muse so important that he often dressed her for free), Givenchy, and Balenciaga. They too visited the villa.

In the spring of 1950, she was introduced to the gay French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic, Жан Кокто. It happened during the shooting for the Enfants Terribles movie, based on his famous novel. Nicole de Rothschild, главная актриса фильма, познакомила их, и Франсин мгновенно влюбилась в Кокто. У них начался интенсивный период близкой дружбы и покровительства.

Right away, Francine invited Jean Cocteau to spend a week in her house in St. Jean Cap Ferrat, which was a flowering enclave and one of the loveliest seaside villas in Cap Ferrat. Cocteau and his young boyfriend arrived for what was to be a few days, and wound up staying there on and off for twelve years while he completed other commissions, including St. Pierre Chapel.

She lived there in a ménage-à-trois with Jean Cocteau and Cocteau’s handsome bisexual lover, Édouard Dermit. Кокто, Франсин и Эдуард были неразлучны. Кокто разработал кольцо Cartier с тремя цветами золота как символ их троицы. Они рисовали вместе в мастерской, которую Франсин построила в саду.

Их отношения были интенсивными. Кокто написал книгу о своей собственной опиумной зависимости. Благодаря Кокто, Франсин тоже стала зависимой. Милый, нежный Эдуард доставал для них опиум в ночных клубах. По словам Фредерика Брауна, одного из биографов Кокто, он требовал от Франсин «безраздельного внимания матери, готовности к игре товарища по играм и преданности культиста» — что она и обеспечивала, наряду с, казалось бы, бездонным состоянием.

Francine was a devotee of the Parisian decorator Madeleine Castaing, чьи штрихи повсюду: от мебели и стен из тростника до ковров с леопардовым принтом по всему дому. Достаточно причудлив, чтобы оставаться утонченным, с причудливыми акцентами повсюду — стул, чья деревянная рама украшена резными ландышами, керамическая жареная курица и другие эксцентричные штрихи.

Used as a holiday home, the walls of the villa had remained empty until Cocteau’s stay. A few days after his arrival, he said: “I’m tired of idleness, I wither here…”. The house was already a temple of sky-high but quirky Parisian style –think opium den meets tony beach cottage– but Cocteau was distressed by the sad white walls in such a riot of eclectic design. He asked Francine if he could draw the head of Apollo above the fireplace in the living room. Inch by inch, he tattooed all the walls of the house with frescoes.

В Санто-Соспире не было никаких ограничений для его творческого гения, никаких рыбаков, которых нужно было бы умилостивить, или религии, которой нужно было бы оказывать почтение, поэтому он позволил музам летать. Он рисовал с энтузиазмом, и стены являются триумфом его фирменных линейных рисунков, некоторые из которых имеют слова, прикрепленные его аккуратным почерком, что создает видимость анимированных историй.

As Cocteau explains in La Villa Santo Sospir, a 35-­minute montage film he made of the house in 1952, these were not frescoes but “tattoos.” Indeed, most of them are simple outlines, rendered in thick black lines. “It was not necessary to dress up the walls,” he says. “It was necessary to draw on their skin.”

Рисунки частично основаны на греческой мифологии, которая так увлекала его на протяжении большей части его карьеры. Над камином Аполлон с распущенными волосами смотрит на двух огромных жрецов солнца, которые оба носят типичные рыбацкие береты Вильфранша. Средиземное море, сразу за виллой, было его другим источником вдохновения, и здесь есть «яркие солнца, эхо расположенной деревни и простой обед рыбака».

Здесь есть боги, сатиры, единороги, а в комнате Франсин — история о том, как богиня Диана превратила Актеона в оленя, когда он случайно застал ее купающейся. Многолетний смотритель Эрик показывает гостям дом, заполненный фотографиями Франсин, ее дочери Кэрол, Пикассо и других выдающихся гостей, которым подавали коктейли с джином, приготовленные в зеркальном баре, заполненном биттерами Ангостура и Аперолем.

Cocteau was very inspired by two other artists in his social circle who had painted their ways across the Cote d’Azur, Matisse and Picasso, and his drawings offered the occasional homage. The vignette of the fisherman’s meal is of sea urchins and fougasse, which Cocteau coined “Picasso’s hands”, after a photograph by Robert Doisneau where the artist leans against a table set with fat doughy fingers of the cherished local bread. Picasso may have been just as genius, but Cocteau’s mark is equally indelible in the south of France.

Fueled by Francine’s money, the exploits of this unusual couple—their dinners, their travels, their friends—soon became legendary, and Santo Sospir was the center of the action. Cocteau used the house as a set for a number of films in which Francine appeared, and the two were the talk of France and beyond.

Eventually, however, relations between the two of them cooled. Francine began a romance with the young writer and screenwriter Henri Viard, which distracted her from her relationship with Cocteau. Viard detested the artist, who in turn labeled Weisweiller’s new lover “the mirliflore,” a term that came from the court of Louis XIV and described a pretentious dandy. When Viard moved into Santo Sospir in 1961, Cocteau was kicked out, and deeply wounded by what he saw as a betrayal. They reconciled only in October 1963 — as it happened, just hours before Cocteau died. Francine came to visit him at his home in Вильфранш-сюр-Мер. “You bring death with you,” he told her, joking as he lay in his bed.

By the time Cocteau died, in 1963, he had transformed the villa’s barren white walls into a veritable dream space, a psychedelic fantasia of Greek myths drawn and scrawled in special pigments he made with raw milk. An omnipotent Apollo scowls over the mantel; a hungover Bacchus sleeps off a bender in a bedroom downstairs.

After Francine Weisweiller died, in 2003, it was possible to visit Santo Sospir, but only if you wrote a letter to the foundation set up by her daughter Carole and pleaded your case. What you found on arrival, inevitably, was that the magic lay not just in the Cocteau tattoos themselves but in the fact that they were peeling as you stared at them, that there were dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, that some of the beds were unmade.

But that was then. Land in Cap Ferrat is now some of the most expensive per square foot on the planet. Eventually Carole could no longer afford the steep taxes, she says. In 2016 she sold Santo Sospir in its entirety for a reported €12 million to the Russian real estate developer Ilia Melia, who lives in Monaco.

The trinkets were still on the tables, the clothes hanging in the closets, the decades of yellowed paperbacks rotting on the shelves. Melia says he had long admired the work of Jean Cocteau but did not know the full story of this particular villa before he walked in the door for the first time. “I usually take forever to make decisions like that,” he says, referring to potential purchases. “But this one I made instantly.”

He says Santo Sospir is now in the throes of a complete restoration. On the one hand, it will remain a private villa, but it will also continue to allow visitors by appointment, as it has since Francine’s death. The house and its grounds have long since been classified as a Monument Historique, which means that the French government, in the interest of preserving the property’s authenticity, must approve any renovations. Melia’s project is intended to celebrate the history of the house, to host concerts, festivals, and exhibitions connected to Cocteau and the art of the Côte d’Azur at least two or three times per year, he says. “Truly, nothing about the history will be changed.”

Eric Marteau came to Santo Sospir more than 20 years ago to serve as Weisweiller’s caretaker as she struggled with age. The first time he met her, he recalls, she was smoking an opium pipe and brushed aside his formalities with a quick “Call me Francine.” After her death Marteau became the villa’s principal caretaker, looking after its subtle squalor and telling its story to the few who trickled in. Now 50, he has given tours of the house for years — lately for the guests from the Four Seasons. “We’re in the jetset now. Everything is very five-star. Back in the day it really was not like that.”

Подробнее о Жане Кокто

Продолжать Jean Cocteau’s Time in Villefranche or learn about Художественный музей Жана Кокто в Ментоне.

Вот список известных вилл, знаменитости, которым они принадлежали, и сумасшедшие вещи, которые там происходили.