The Riviera Set

Author: Lovell, Mary S.

France

Published on 6 July 2017 by Little, Brown Book Group (Abacus) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback / softback | 448 pages, 16pp colour photos
127 x 197 x 29 | 376g

‘I loved every word’ – Sarra Manning, Red'[A] blissful book – it’s like basking in the warm Med’ – Rachel Johnson, Mail on SundayThe Riviera Set is the story of the group of people who lived, partied, bed-hopped and politicked at the Chteau de l’Horizon near Cannes, over the course of forty years from the time when Coco Chanel made southern French tans fashionable in the twenties to the death of the playboy Prince Aly Khan in 1960. At the heart of this was the amazing Maxine Elliott, the daughter of a fisherman from Connecticut, who built the beautiful art deco Chteau and brought together the likes of Noel Coward, the Aga Khan, the Windsors and two very saucy courtesans, Doris Castlerosse and Daisy Fellowes, who set out to be dangerous distractions to Winston Churchill as he worked on his journalism and biographies during his ‘wilderness years’ in the thirties.

After the War the story continued as the Chteau changed hands and Prince Aly Khan used it to entertain the Hollywood set, as well as launch his seduction of and eventual marriage to Rita Hayworth.