ST. TROPEZ: Now Is the Time to Enjoy the Sun

When I borrowed a Fiat two-door from a girlfriend in Paris a month or so ago and drove south, the traffic light at the entrance to St. Tropez on the seaside road was out of order. It was broken. It didn’t work. It wouldn’t show red.

“It’s exactly like on the summertime beaches,” said my longtime friend Pierre Taranowsky, Parisian-born but Mediterranean by adoption. “This damn traffic light, for weeks she’s been green. Always green. It can’t say stop.”

Taranowsky smiled happily. “Just like the girls on the summer beaches.”

That was a good-natured joke. Everybody jokes about the girls on the extensive, permissive summer beaches of St. Trop, the strips of sand called Plage de Tahiti and Plage des Salins.

My room-service waiter, for instance. When, at 7 o’clock on my first morning back in town, Alexandre the waiter appeared with my eggs, mango and black coffee, I said, “How’s the weather today, Alexandre?”

“You mean on the beaches?” he said. “One hour ago up on the hills where I live I could see snow on the mountains behind Nice--white icing on a blue cake; you know how it is in the Alps! Looks wintry up there, but down here in St. Trop it’s agreeable as cake or a cognac.

“You ought to get up, sir. Almost warm enough for a swim, if you’re hardy or a Scandinavian. Myself, I saw a Swedish nymph in the water last evening, out at Tahiti Plage. Bobbing about.”

For a very long time everybody has heard all about the St. Tropez topless amazons. They exist, all ages.

They arrive in July, in flocks like swallows, their twittering consorts curvetting close behind. Then, for a season, the St. Trop mating cry is the bellow of a Japanese motorbike, and ogling the beaches becomes an important spectator sport.

The year-round population of this French Mediterranean fishermen’s village is a mere 6,248. To most, St. Tropez is a synonym for Sybaritic beach-side seafood living in a climate of wildfire summer sun and languorous sea.

About 545 miles south and a little east of Paris, the town wears as badge or symbol a charmingly foolish (and expensive) straw hat, acquired--you’d guess--on Paris’ Left Bank.

People tend to encourage theatricality in St. Tropez during the droll season, and are inclined to wink at whatever comes along the wide harbor walkway. And yet the town offers so much more at any time of the year.

People say, locally, that St. Trop’s off-season cultivates the manners of a gentleman. In the tourist office at the Old Port you’ll be told that each season certainly holds something for everybody, rewards for the correct, rewards for the indiscreet. That’s why, locals say, this town flows along forever and forever, younger every year, every generation.

Too often in Paris, and in such competing Edens as Monte Carlo and Cannes, you hear the dire prediction that St. Tropez is declining, debased, soon dead.

“To which I say, ‘My eye,’ ” Maurice Reynaud said the other day. Reynaud paints witty canvases and hangs out at the Cafe de Paris.

The burden of his observation is that while Brigitte Bardot is remembered as a creature of beauty in the sun at La Madrague nearby, and while Prince Quelqu’un entertains lavishly at La Bonne Terrasse, and while prosperous young realtor Peter Dunham motor-skiffs around the Old Port, then, my dear friends, St. Tropez is dead like Mt. Etna is dead.

“Listen,” Reynaud said tartly. “Thirty years ago my grandfather said to me, ‘Maurice, St. Tropez is dead.’ You know what? It is my grandfather which is dead.”

He added: “Consider the yachts, I invite you. Berthing space is tighter this year than at any time since the Barbary pirates. Or maybe you want a room at the Hotel Residence de la Pinede for a weekend in July? Book a year ahead. Or go ask Yves Saint Laurent about the turnover of his beach shirts and fancy pants in St. Trop’s shops. Dead? We should all be so dead for the rest of our lives.”

I got into town on a Saturday and went to Sunday lunch at, of course, the lovely restaurant Lei Mouscardins at the far end of the Old Port. Everybody I’d ever known (or so it seemed) was cheerfully consuming the grilled lobster, the great cheeses, the heart-warming wines, sun pouring like a blessing through the wide windows, whitecaps stiff as meringue on the open sea. As I came through the doorway it was old friend Taranowsky who hailed me.

“Waiter!” he called. “A glass of red for monsieur! I hear,” he said, “you plan to create a newspaper story about this ancient place, so naturally you’ll want me to fill you in on the origins. Do order the bouillabaisse. Order another bottle of the Cassis rose. Then listen attentively.”

It is the morning of May 17, Taranowsky said, in the year AD 68. A rowboat drifts into the bay, that bay just outside the window, bearing the headless body of a Roman centurion named Torpes. Also in the rowboat are Torpes’ head--chopped off by the order of Nero--a dog and a rooster.

Body Set Adrift

Beheaded at Pisa because he had become a Christian, Torpes’ body had been set adrift from the mouth of the River Arno on April 29, 18 days before the landing here.

A few plain farmer folk on the shore--olive eaters, wine drinkers, then as now--haul up the rowboat and cry out “Miracle!” This is because Torpes’ exceedingly hungry hound had not, during 18 days at sea, eaten either Torpes or Torpes’ head. Or, for that matter, the rooster.

Such restraint could only be miraculous, so everybody on the shore instantly becomes Christian, and the martyr Torpes is installed as patron saint of the region. Torpes, Tropez--such minor confusion of nomenclature was (and is) second nature to Mediterranean wine drinkers.

In the early summer of 1954, 1,186 years later, movie director Vadim, accompanied by the lustrous Bardot and novelist Francoise Sagan landed in St. Trop, but not by rowboat. They came in Jaguars and such, and Bardot brought not a miraculous dog but a hazardous specimen of spotted cat, which she saucily posed with for photographers. Thus the era of the flashbulb dawns in St. Tropez.

De Maupassant Sunburned

Between AD 68 and 1954 most of the purple thunders of history passed unheard over St. Tropez. People fished serenely, seeming not to need escape hatches from their reality. The marvelous De Maupassant, an avid oarsman, rowed earnestly around the harbor and got his nose sunburned. Colette took a house for summer use and returned again and again.

Residents went right on fishing, though doubtless they stared with an unspoken question at painter Paul Signac and his somewhat eccentric paint-daubing friends Matisse, Bonnard, Camoin, Marquet and more, who sat about making odd-looking canvases of sea and shore, quite a few of which hang in the town’s gem-like Museum of the Annonciade.

Chaplin, Picasso and the Windsors came later. Audrey Hepburn came later, too. Some without houses of their own checked in at the Hotel Yaca, later Ya Ca, a quite lovely small establishment that opened its doors as the Aioli, which means garlic mayonnaise. Garbo and Gable registered, separately, among opening-week guests.

The Never-Was Village

Over the years, celebrities in all the arts (or merely the moneyed) have flocked to Residence de la Pinede, which features numerous shade trees and a practically private sea beach.

Pre-eminent is an eye-filling construction called Byblos, designed to resemble a never-was fishing village somewhere in ancient Lebanon, complete with white walls and dripping fresh water. The Byblos’ Braiserie restaurant provides a dramatic setting for prime meats and prime fish. Expensive, naturally.

I have already introduced Lei Mouscardins, the usually gracious, sometimes overcrowded restaurant where friend Taranowsky takes his daily ration of the fabulous rose , labeled Bellet, from the hills behind Nice. I hasten, here, to add another monument to la bonne table , Le Chabichou, where a considerable and varied menu has earned itself a Michelin star.

A few blocks inland an old-timer called the Auberge des Marues, with its rustic decor and Provence menu, seemingly offers all edible creatures that swim or crawl or merely bask in the nearby sea. For lunch I delight in Le Girelier’s terrace, which faces squarely on the Old Port (arrive early to beat the worst of the crush).

A Muscular Fish Soup

Next door, L’Escale is headquarters for a muscular fish soup; there, off-season, old-hand Tropeziens gather to eat, among much else, the cream pie specialty of the region, la tarte tropezienne .

Nobody comes to St. Tropez to economize. A double bedroom for two in the better hotels (such as Byblos or La Pinede) goes for $200 or $250 each night, and will be more next year. Less desirable places do cost somewhat less, but rarely under $100. And they seldom achieve applause.

A la carte dinner at Le Chabichou means about $75 per person, at Lei Mouscardins a little less, perhaps $50 each, and then there are the wine and the tips.

Memories--No Charge

Leading hoteliers and the restaurant fellows take the position that, in their establishments, you receive much more than a downy bed and heavenly food--you carry home glittering memories, valid for ages.

Memories? Well, yes. Each day, when day is done at St. Trop, I walk steeply uphill to the old Citadel, and the evening hangs like thin blue smoke over the Mediterranean. How very nice a town this is; so very many marks of distinction--the graceful design of a doorway, the unexpected elegance of a lintel.

“Sure it’s a corrida here in summer,” said the comely lady who sells choice ham and olives to picnickers at her shop in the Rue Allard. “But if I were sweet 17 again this summer or next, you know where I’d be? Right here, that’s where! We’ll all be old and cranky soon enough. Meanwhile, we’ve got Europe’s bluest sea around us.

“Something you may have noticed for yourself, monsieur,” she said reflectively. “A great many people love this old town.”

Count me among the lovers, dear lady.