Between the World Wars, the French Riviera became a playground for the rich and famous, with Coco Chanel and her villa, La Pausa, at the center of it all. De Courcy takes readers through this flashy era through the lens of the fashionista—including its ultimate demise when the Nazis swooped down, bringing the horrors of evacuation and the displacement of thousands of families during World War II.
In Chanel’s Riviera, Anne de Courcy has written a well-researched and compelling story. She maintains a remarkable balance between, on the one hand, Chanel and her world of the rich and famous and, on the other, the lives of ordinary people desperately struggling to survive in a country on the brink of annihilation. Drawing on an immense volume of material, she has succeeded not only in constructing an intriguing portrait of Chanel herself but also in expertly conjuring the two very different worlds that then existed side by side.
De Courcy juggles an immense cast of characters. In the book, aristocrats, politicians, artists, writers and movie stars show up for cameos on the Riviera and then depart. Except for the politicians and the artists, the participants in that extended bacchanalia are forgotten today, and De Courcy is generally unsuccessful in bringing them back to life ... This book is an odd account, not quite biography, not an in-depth discussion of fashion and not a comprehensive history of the place. Much of the material has been written about before. But De Courcy’s book is entertaining, and it satisfies the need for a peek, at once envious and satisfyingly censorious, at the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Anne de Courcy claims that her book Chanel’s Riviera is neither a biography of Coco Chanel nor a history of the Riviera, but it certainly reads like a biography of this glamorous part of the world that continues to capture the imagination ... De Courcy’s sparkling, anecdote-rich narrative takes a darker turn with the onset of war ... Drawing on fresh evidence, De Courcy, whose previous books include a biography of Diana Mosley, reveals testimony from Jews hidden from the Germans, sometimes at great personal cost. Chanel’s murky dealings with the Germans is deftly handled.
