La vie en rose
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Stories and memories
Wonderful footage of the Page-Roberts family holiday in Cabris, near Grasse in 1976 including good times spent with Wyn and Francoise.
Meeting Francoise
In early 1958 Francoise Jeanne Chateaureynaud was working as a harbour girl in Marseille when Wyn pulled alongside the dock and threw her a line from the Southern Trail. She was a six-foot 27-year-old, sometime catwalk mannequin, he a slight 57-year-old adventurer and bon viveur with three marriages and a raging libido under his belt. Francoise liked the man but was above all, a self-proclaimed pragmatist and took life’s decision-making seriously. Having read somewhere that Shell Executives generally burned out straight after retirement and on average, shuffled off their mortal coil aged 63, she decided this charming, intelligent and of course wealthy Brit would make a most suitable first husband. Their lifestyle would be comfortable, and it was unlikely she would get too bored before he inevitably snuffed it.
Accompanied by many expressive hand gestures, her ubiquitous cigarette cutting through the air like a lit sparkler, Francoise spoke English with a Pepe Le Pew gallic accent, pronouncing Wyn as ‘Veen’. Her vocabulary, however, was excellent, honed by the hours and hours she devoted to playing Scrabble in English. But she didn’t like to lose! On occasion, Wyn’s great nieces and nephew were on the receiving end of a hissy fit when they began to beat her as they grew older. She’d proclaim: “C’est fini!” and stormed off in a monumental sulk.
Wyn’s French was also perfect but spoken entirely and completely deliberately with an overtly English accent. He knew many more long and unusual words in French than most native speakers. Listening to the two of them converse was comedic, especially on road trips when both swore like navvies at other road users. Along with smoking like a chimney she also drank like a fish, wine being her favourite tipple. Trips to the supermarket always involved trolley loads of alcohol being carted back to the house, and it would only last a week.
Chez Hewitt
The couple initially set up home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, just west of Nice airport. Wyn’s nephew Jim remembers it as a tall village house with several floors and wonderful views of the sea over the terracotta-tiled rooftops. There was a proper workshop cum garage at street level where Wyn spent hours tinkering with his prized cars, revving their engines all day as he tweaked the tuning. It drove his neighbours mad, but he didn’t give a damn.
After this, it was off to Cabris, a mountainous village to the west of Grasse where the perfumeries honed their centuries-old tradition of manufacturing some of the world’s finest fragrances. Their house – Le Mas Sainte Cecile – was enormous, beautiful and fairly remote, set high above the village up a rough track that needed a Land Rover to get up there but it was worth it, if only for the spectacular views over the treetops to the coast. It had an enormous kitchen for these two keen cooks to create wonderful meals in, a spacious sitting room and a separate bar decked out entirely in tartan. The dining room at Cabris was privately nicknamed ‘Mid-Surrey’ by Jim as it was full of depressing, dark and heavy Victorian furniture from England.
Jim's memories of Cabris
As an impoverished artist, Jim was always looking for a bit of holiday work. For a small stipend he occasionally house-sat and looked after the pets – a white bulldog called Brut, Francoise’s black poodle Pistache (who frequently bit the maid), and a couple of very entertaining parrots; an African Grey called Gerrard and another large Scarlet Macaw whose name is lost in the annals of time. They were kept outside on long, lightweight chains to stop them disappearing although they couldn’t fly properly as their wings were clipped. Nevertheless, Gerrard loved doing handheld aerobatics around the sitting room with Jim when he was in charge. The Macaw, however, was incurably vicious and had some of Wyn’s misogynistic tendencies; he bit any woman who came within striking distance. He’d then happily chirp Colonel Bogey’s march up to the point he lost the tune, before repeating what he did know ad infinitum. They were a motley crew who ran riot while the fastidious owner was away, enjoying the freedom from Wyn’s strict house rules. On one occasion, Jim was sitting in the kitchen having a companionable lunch with the maid when Wyn returned unexpectedly. His snobbery and subsequent fury erupted in a nanosecond - “How could you dally with the staff in this manner?” - and he ordered his nephew to pack his bags and leave immediately. Jim tells it that his choice of alternative emergency accommodation was either in the bosom of the delicious mistress of a local scent baron in Grasse who he’d already bedded, or with his friend Professor Edward Morgan (his life-long friend who taught early American history at Yale) who had a place nearby. No clarity about which door he knocked on was given.
Sarah Scott's memories of Wyn
Wyn's favourite nephew John Scott, wife Lora and children Simon and Sarah spent many summer holidays at La Mas Sainte Cecile when the kids were young. Sometimes on their own if their hosts had retreated to Brittany to avoid the searing Provencal sun, but otherwise living cheerfully alongside them in residence. As a young girl, Sarah loved being around the quirky couple. “Wyn set aside a wonderful ‘Music Hour’ in the evenings when he played opera or got Francoise to sing. She was very good. Anyone could join him in the sitting room for the music but you had to remain totally silent. That was the rule. He sent his mint condition collection of opera records to our daughter Lora when he got older, as he said they made him cry. Wyn loved to hear Francoise’s voice, especially in the car while he was driving as he thought French radio was terrible. We all heard his voice full volume when he was driving as he screamed “F***ing Frogs” at every other road user who got in his way as he careened around the mountain lanes. Soon Francoise was doing it too! She was hilarious. They sometimes came to stay with us in Edinburgh and in December ‘78 we went to the white tie New Club Ball. She just couldn’t get over the men in kilts, and all night long she gawped and muttered: “Zees men an zer nakid legs!” Wyn loved to try and shock me. I remember him telling me with a smirk how, when he was young and living in London, he would take his dates to brothels! Not to be part of the action, but to order champagne, sit in comfy chairs and watch the girls drape themselves all over potential clients before disappearing with them down a red-lit corridor. Brothels had an ‘At Home’ policy. Who knew? He was an avid letter writer and I have a pile of his chatty news spanning many years."
Gold bars
As his mother’s son, Wyn was obsessed with money. He converted about £2m cash into bearer bonds - he kept them under the floorboards - for easy access and to hide his assets from the tax man. He made it his life mission to get one over on ‘the man’. His main worries were being ripped off by the banks or the possibility of the financial markets crashing. As a precaution, he also purchased a couple of solid gold bars for ‘emergencies’ in Switzerland and smuggled them into France, hiding them within the bodywork of his car. He initially stashed the bullion in the roof space of Le Mas, only removing them when he and Francoise sold up as ‘they just couldn’t get the staff’ for such a huge house in so remote a location.
They were destined to be bricked up in the garage wall of the new dream house - Vine Lodge (named after Wyn's happy childhood home) - they were building in Mougins.
Vine Lodge pool saga
When Wyn and Francoise started building their forever home on the much sought after Chemin de Pigranel, there was enough land to put in a pool for Francoise's daily exercise. Wyn set about doing this immediately but hadn’t considered the severely limited water supply in the area and quickly found out he'd need permission from the local Mairie to fill it. The mayor turned his frivolous application down flat, but as ever, the king of problem solving wasn’t giving in that easily. He hired a couple of low-life PIs to investigate the mayor, and they unearthed a minor but shameful criminal offence for which he was jailed as a young man. Wyn hatched a plan. He invited the Mayor for dinner and casually brought the subject up. Blood drained from his face as he saw his cushy job evaporate before his eyes. Needless to say, the pool was full, cool and had Francoise swimming lengths in it within days.
A love of gardening
Nigel and his family visited often, with Geraldine, one of their four daughters, spending the most time with Wyn and Francoise. As a teenager she spent holidays with them on her own, alternately learning how to make mayonnaise and voluntarily weeding and dead heading their precious roses. Wyn was not easily impressed by any youngster’s abilities, but Geraldine was a natural (she went on to make it her career), and he grudgingly accepted, and then delighted in her green-fingered skills. He knew all the horticultural tricks of the trade and asked anyone travelling out from England to bring as many contraceptive pills as they could muster. He dug the hormones in with the new plants and had a mature garden in no time.
Picasso
Wyn: "Picasso lived a few minutes’ walk from Vine Lodge, and we were on friendly terms although he was very old by then. He’s been staying in Mougins since the late 30s when he and his famous pals - Léger definitely, and I believe Jean Cocteau and the dancer Isadora Duncan - used to stay at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon just as you came into the village. Not there anymore, sadly. A great story goes that one morning, the hotel’s owner discovered Picasso had covered an entire wall of his room with what he considered rather shocking drawings, so he had the whole room repainted immediately. Hindsight and all that eh? Americans would knock on his studio door, as brazen as you like, and ask directly for a quick sketch on the spot. If he was in the right mood, he’d wave his pen across some scrap of paper, sign it with a flourish, and charge them 250 Francs (£500 today) for the privilege! He thought this a lark for 30 second’s work, but I guess it was the yanks that ended up winning that one."