Famous names and historical forces collide on the Riviera

In the summer of 1922 Gerald Murphy, an American artist and collaborator with Sergei Diaghilev on the Ballet Russes, was invited to visit Cole Porter, an old friend from Yale, in the south of France. The following year, having enjoyed the deserted beaches, Murphy, his wife Sara and their three children booked into a hotel which had, unusually, stayed open for the summer season. Only two other families were there, one of which was Pablo Picasso’s. Sara and Picasso probably had an affair; soon afterwards another friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, used the Murphys as the model for the fraught marriage of Dick and Nicole Diver in his novel “Tender is the Night”.