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Can the Haute Bohemian Villa of Santo Sospir Survive the Influx of Billionaires on the Cote D'Azure?

Photo credit: Filippo Bamberghi
Photo credit: Filippo Bamberghi

From Town & Country

Santo Sospir is, and was, neither mansion nor palace. Nestled at the tip of Cap Ferrat, between Nice and Monaco, the villa merely seems one among many large houses on the peninsula-not the kind that was ever meant to be photographed.

For more than 50 years it was the retreat of the socialite Francine Weisweiller, a petite blonde who knew more or less everyone worth knowing: Marie-Laure de Noailles, her neighbor in Paris; Yves Saint Laurent, who considered her a muse so important that he often dressed her for free; Gianni and Marella Agnelli, who were frequent visitors to the house. But without question Weisweiller’s most important acquaintance-in many respects her soul mate-was Jean Cocteau.

Photo credit: Filippo Bamberghi
Photo credit: Filippo Bamberghi

Invited for a week, the artist arrived at Santo Sospir in May 1950 along with Edouard Dermit, his adopted son, known en famille as Doudou. They stayed, on and off, for more than 10 years. 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.

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.”

After 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.

The place had the slightest touch of Grey Gardens to it, though without the unapologetic embrace of entropy. Instead, Santo Sospir seemed eternally in medias res, and to walk through it was to walk through the unscripted lives of those who had inhabited it. This was art that was lived in and, in a sense, the art of life. “When you are with people who love you, everything looks normal,” says Carole, now 76. “We were going very often to see Picasso in those days. It was all normal. It was only afterward that it seemed extraordinary.”

Photo credit: Photo12/Alamay
Photo credit: Photo12/Alamay

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 $14 million to the Russian real estate developer Ilia Melia, who lives in Monaco.

The tchotchkes were still on the tables, the clothes hanging in the closets, the decades of yellowed paperbacks rotting on the shelves. “I wanted everything to stay as it was in the days of Cocteau,” she says. Melia, who collects bronzes by Claude and Francois-Xavier ­Lalanne, 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, where his mother will likely spend several months every year. But it will also continue to allow visitors by appointment, as it has since Francine’s death.

Photo credit: Marina Melia
Photo credit: Marina Melia

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.”

Yet to refurbish a space like Santo Sospir is already to change it entirely. The tattoos will stay, restored for posterity, but the dirty dishes will go. Indeed, they already have.

The celebrity horticulturist Madison Cox, the partner of the late Pierre Bergé­ (who was a friend of Francine Weisweiller’s and the longtime companion of her beloved Saint Laurent), has taken on the project of overhauling the gardens. “It’s so odd for me to have gone there for lunch in the summer of 1979 and then to go back a year and a half ago,” Cox says, recalling the first time he met Weisweiller. “The books were all still there. There was a doctor’s prescription for Edouard Dermit.”

The plan, Cox says, is to be faithful to the order of things the way they were. For him this is the crucial point: “This is not a grand Côte d’Azur villa. This is a relatively modest house.”

Photo credit: Stellene Volandes
Photo credit: Stellene Volandes

But Santo Sospir now exists in a world where modesty is almost unwelcome. The villa is currently closed to visitors-unless you happen to be staying at the new Four Seasons hotel in Cap Ferrat, which is less than 10 minutes on foot from Santo Sospir. For a fee of $4,850 for two people (plus $330 for each additional guest and $175 for every child under 12), one can now “Dine in a Work of Art by Jean Cocteau.” The evening begins, according to the hotel, with a guided tour of the property, and by all accounts it is envisaged as an allegory of the Cocteau cave: You sip the artist’s favorite cocktail, La Suze, on the terrace, and later on you can sample his favorite foods, which apparently included roasted veal with girolle mushrooms as well as lobster fricasseed with black garlic.

“Perhaps the food is better now,” says Eric Marteau, who 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.”

Born in 1916, Francine Weisweiller was the product of a world that was soon destroyed before her eyes. Originally from Brazil, she came of age in a rarefied, glittering Paris on the cusp of radical transformation: the First World War, the Great Depression, and the revolution in social mores that both inspired. John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, described her 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.

Photo credit: Eric Duliere/Zuma Press
Photo credit: Eric Duliere/Zuma Press

But Francine Weisweiller, née Worms, was born into a ­decidedly Jewish world at a moment defined by rising anti-Semitism. Regardless of the friends Jews made and the aristocratic neighbors they had, theirs was a milieu in which people lived their private lives among themselves, marrying into a tightly knit community that was as much about security as solidarity.

Through her next marriage Francine herself represented the intersection of multiple Franco-Jewish dynasties. Her mother-in-law was a Deutsch-de-la-Meurthe, the family that had brought gasoline pumps to France; her second husband was Alec Weisweiller, the scion of a prominent banking family related to the Rothschilds. Francine Worms and Alec Weisweiller were married in 1941, the year after Nazi Germany invaded France. Alec’s mother Betty refused to attend the wedding of her son to a divorcée.

Photo credit: Filippo Bamberghi
Photo credit: Filippo Bamberghi

But 1941 was the first year of occupation, and there was little time for pettiness. To flee the Germans, Francine’s parents returned to São Paulo. But despite the roundups of Jews and the anti-Semitic persecutions throughout France, the newlyweds remained, departing instead for the south and settling in Cannes. At the time the region around Nice was controlled by the Italian army, which was far more tolerant of Jews than either Germany or France’s own Vichy government, which controlled most of the country’s southern half.

By all accounts the couple lived lavishly, at least for a while, free of the social restrictions that had governed their life in Paris. Carole, born in 1942, claims that she was conceived on the beach at Cap d’Antibes.

Even so, they felt the need to hide their Jewish identity. They lived under the name Lelestrier, which Carole says was a re-reworking of Weisweiller that would not be too difficult to remember. One day, Carole recalls, an Italian soldier approached her blond, fair mother on the beach and said, “If you know any Jews, tell them to leave now.” That proved a prescient warning. After the Allied forces landed in North Africa in November 1942, the Germans took over the whole of France, including the lush corner near the Italian border.

Photo credit: Marina Melia
Photo credit: Marina Melia

Suddenly Francine, Alec, and Carole were Jews in territory controlled by the Third Reich. They fled to Pau, in the Pyrenees, where a peasant family had agreed to hide them. But not all of those in their circle believed-or perhaps accepted-the reality of the threat. Betty Weisweiller, who had refused to accompany them, was arrested in her home in nearby Antibes.

Records show that she was deported to Auschwitz on October 7, 1943, on convoy 60. It remains unknown how, exactly, she died, but, as a woman of 55, she was likely gassed immediately upon arrival. “If we somehow survive the Holocaust, I’ll buy you a house,” Carole remembers her father saying to her mother. He kept his promise. This was Santo Sospir.

It is hard to imagine France’s Mediterranean coast before it became what it is today. At the beginning of the last century the region was known for rampant poverty, a place where farmers used human excrement as fertilizer. What transformed the ailing backwater was Europe’s burgeoning leisure class, whose members arrived on vacation, seeking the healthful climate and affordable places to stay during the winter.

The so-called rentiers-men and women who, like Francine Weisweiller, lived on unearned incomes-were the designers of a new landscape of desire, and the Côte d’Azur was their canvas. Nice, Cannes, and a string of small fishing towns-St.-Tropez, Antibes, Cagnes-sur-Mer-became stage sets. This is the world that appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night, with characters based on the glittering social set of Gerald and Sara Murphy, a cadre of elite expats also immortalized in the photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartigue.

Then the artists arrived. Decidedly less elite than the rentiers, they were attracted not by the potential to spend disposable income but by the natural canvas the region presented. Henri Matisse moved to Nice in 1917 and was followed by many others during and after the First World War: Pierre Bonnard, Francis Picabia, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Picasso, and, of course, Cocteau.

In the words of the art historian Kenneth Silver, what these artists created in tandem with the rentiers was “a dream space for the 20th century.” It is often forgotten that many of the rentiers who transformed the Côte d’Azur were Jews from the same social circle as Francine. A generation before her time, France’s elite typically favored the age-old resorts of Deauville in Normandy and Biarritz on the Atlantic coast. Though elite Jews were present in those places, many were ultimately attracted by an undeveloped area they could cultivate themselves. Nowhere was this more evident than in Cap Ferrat.

Photo credit: Filippo Bamberghi
Photo credit: Filippo Bamberghi

A short walk up the road from Santo Sospir, the eccentric heiress Béatrice de Rothschild, estranged from her husband, the banker Maurice Ephrussi, built the massive rose-colored Villa Ile-de-France, a pastiche of Veronese marble, Louis XV furniture, and thousands and thousands of Sèvres tureens. Across the bay Théodore Reinach, the politician and scholar, conceived of the inimitable Villa Kerylos, a painstaking reconstruction of an ancient Greek villa built on Delos in the second century BC.

Both of these villas were seen by their owners as celebrations of French aesthetic grandeur, and both were ultimately bequeathed to the French state: Villa Kerylos in 1928, Villa Ile-de-France in 1934. The same state, under the rule of the collaborationist Vichy government, would later participate in systematically liquidating the world of Beatrice Ephrussi and Théodore Reinach, whose children and grandchildren also died at Auschwitz.

In that sense Francine Weisweiller was one of the last representatives of a way of life that had vanished almost entirely. In the disheveled elegance of Santo Sospir, she was a kind of heir to the legacy her neighbors had worked to create.

Following the war, Francine sought a life of escape. Her marriage to Alec had collapsed, although they never saw any reason to divorce. He lived in Paris with his mistress, the actress Simone Simon, while Francine spent most of her time nestled in Santo Sospir. The arrival of Cocteau, then, was a watershed moment.

From that first invitation, the relationship between Francine and Cocteau became a marriage of its own. In the words of Frederick Brown, one of Cocteau’s biographers, he demanded of Francine “the undivided attention of a mother, the ready spirit of a playmate, and the devotion of a cultist”-which she provided, along with a seemingly bottomless fortune. In return Cocteau became a fixture of Francine and Carole’s world.

Photo credit: AGIP/Bridgeman Images
Photo credit: AGIP/Bridgeman Images

“He essentially adopted me as his daughter, as he had always wanted children,” Carole says. In her Paris home, she points out drawings Cocteau made of her in profile, her hair covered by a scarf. “I was afraid of the open air,” she says. She is proudest of the fact that he immortalized her in the Saint-Pierre Chapel he painted in Villefranche-sur-Mer, not far from Santo Sospir. She pulls a book about the chapel from a shelf. “That’s me,” she says, pointing at the page.

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. Not only did Cocteau adorn its walls, he used the house as a set for a number of films-in which Francine appeared. In Le Testament d’Orphée, the final ­installment in Cocteau’s Orpheus series, the artist, wounded by a bullet, awakens in a surreal province between present and future, and Francine, blond curls piled high in an ancien régime pouffe, suddenly appears, dressed in an elaborate Balenciaga gown that Cocteau had told the designer should evoke the style of Sarah Bernhardt. (Two renderings of Francine in costume now hang in Carole’s house-one by Cocteau and one by Picasso.)

Photo credit: Filippo Bamberghi
Photo credit: Filippo Bamberghi

Francine and Cocteau played themselves on- and offscreen for the better part of a decade. In 1955, when Cocteau was elected to the prestigious Académie Française, the two arrived at the ceremony in costumes that would have befitted any of Cocteau’s films. There is a traditional uniform for the Académie, but Cocteau’s was ordered from Lanvin, and Francine commissioned for him a special sword-from Cartier, no less-with a handle that was in the shape of a Greek profile and a hilt encrusted with his own signature in jewels.

Eventually, however, relations between the two of them cooled. Francine began a romance with the 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 moved out, deeply wounded by what he saw as a betrayal. “It was a terrible time for us all,” Carole says. “I suffered very much.”

They reconciled only in October 1963-as it happened, just days before Cocteau died. Francine came to visit him at his home in Villefranche-sur-Mer. “You bring death with you,” he told her, joking as he lay in his bed. Having separated from Viard, Francine was again alone.

Photo credit: FORGET Patrick/SAGAPHOTO.COM / Alamy Stock Photo
Photo credit: FORGET Patrick/SAGAPHOTO.COM / Alamy Stock Photo

In the years after Cocteau’s death she conducted her social life much as before. She was a constant feature at the Paris couture shows well into the 1980s; in her seventies, she would occasionally fall asleep-although somehow she never slouched even when unconscious, Madison Cox recalls. Marteau remembers her in much the same way. “There was something melancholic about her,” he says. With its faded vitality, there is something melancholic about Santo Sospir as well. This, after all, was the origin of its name: the villa of sighs, a reference to the rocky promontory where, ages before, the wives and girlfriends of local fishermen had stood and sighed, awaiting the return of their true loves, who might or might not come back.

In La Villa Santa Sospir, Cocteau’s 1952 film about the house, he provides a hypnotic narration. Toward the beginning the camera shows the gardens, a sprinkler churning on the grass, the Mediterranean tiles on the roof glistening. Cocteau explains the power of the camera to transform colors. “One must accept that it somehow creates something, like the interpretation of a painter. One must also accept the surprises,” he says. The chords of Bach play in the background as the artist explains his method. But as we watch the villa appear onscreen, it needs no explanation. Cocteau pauses, then continues to talk: “It’s another world, in which it is essential to forget the one where you live.”

Sixty-six years later, Cocteau’s words could not be more apt. Cap Ferrat has become the Billionaire’s Playground, a place where news about art is rarely in regards to making it or living it, but instead buying it-at record prices. For Santo Sospir to survive as “another world,” Ilia Melia, and all future owners of the villa, will have to somehow ignore the gaudy and glittering one that now surrounds it.


This story appears in the September 2018 issue of Town & Country.
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