Word: riviera
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...CURTAIN RISES and reveals an opulent set: the pool behind a sprawling Riviera mansion. The characters include the host, a Grand Old Man of English Letters, and his guest, the fashionable, wealthy, titled, or ornamental, who gossip and munch on scones. As the drama begins, it reveals a game of ambitious, but subtle, manipulation which some characters play at a leisurely pace, others with greater determination. Curiously, as the intrigue unfolds, the audience begins to recognize itself on stage. In horror, or delight, spectators watch the dissection of the characters' worst sides--their own. The Grand...
...most entertaining sections of the book, Morgan explores Maugham's life at Mauresque, his Riviera home--invitiations to which were highly sought after among the British and French as well as American jet-set. Maugham received hundreds of visitors there during his life, mostly men, later using many of them as material for his books and plays. Here, Morgan's style becomes lighter and slightly disjointed as he skips from one anecdote to another. Visitors included Noel Coward, Jean Cocteau, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Gladys Stern, whom Morgan describes as "bursting fat." Morgan looks back to Maugham...
...record show that the book does not provide the neatest of plots. But its tangled cast is instantly credible and permanently delightful. From the opening wisecrack, Kennedy and his world seem so real that when, at novel's end, the lawyer finally relaxes on the "Irish Riviera," readers may feel a slight sense of resentment. The fault is Higgins' for providing so much merriment in so brief a space. His readers should demand the same treatment as Kennedy's crooked clients: after all, one good term deserves another...
...year after W.S.M.'s death, this fact became popularly known when Robin Maugham, a favored nephew, hastily published Somerset and All the Maughams. Those familiar magazine photos of the leathery legend haughtily observing the world from Villa Mauresque, his home on the French Riviera, could now be openly read as the image of an old iguana sniffing the Mediterranean air for young sailors...
When he and Syrie divorced in 1929, Maugham had already established residence on the Riviera with his secretary-lover. Gerald Haxton was a sociable charmer, but he was also unscrupulous, a gambler and a drunk. "Their relationship," writes Morgan, "had a dark, unpleasant side in which the roles of master and servant were interchanged and each tried to make the other suffer." When Haxton died in 1944, his place was taken by Alan Searle, a lower-keyed companion who enjoyed reading muscle magazines...