Page 306 - Livre Beau Rivage Palace

Fig. 1

AN AMERICAN AT

THE BEAU-RIVAGE: HELEN McCANN

Evelyne LÜTHI-GRAF, Philippe VISSON

In the past there used to be three types of guest in a luxury payers!’ This was the time when F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest
hotel: ‘migrant’ guests who whiled away their time selecting the Hemingway were travelling around Europe, searching for their
locations best suited to their various activities; seasonal guests, literary and journalistic identities. In those days, the world of
who came back year after year, arranging to meet friends from the Beau-Rivage was every bit as hedonistic as that of the Great
one place to the next; and residents, who transformed their rooms Gatsby (figs 2 and 3).
into fixed abodes, with their own idiosyncrasies, who put down The McCanns’ first stay at the Beau-Rivage Palace in
roots and became part of the hotel’s cultural landscape. Francis Ouchy was no more than a stopover on a long peregrination
and Jane McCann, together with their two daughters Helen and through various fashionable European resorts. But Francis and
Frances, came under this third heading (fig. 1). Jane fell in love with the Lake Geneva landscape, and it became
The us-born McCanns arrived at the Beau-Rivage Palace the family’s principal residence. They divided their time between
at the end of the 1920s. From an Irish Catholic family, they lived their apartment in Rome’s Circus Maximus and suite 400 at the
the affluent lifestyle afforded to them by the fortune that Jane, née Beau-Rivage. Francis was a keen photographer; his favourite
Miller, had inherited from her Scottish parents. At the time, during pastime allowed him to give free rein to his whims, which found
the Prohibition era, American high society lived in a country expression in his many ‘ghost’ portraits (fig. 4).
essentially dominated by the Protestant families descended from Helen, born in 1918, and her sister Frances who was two
the first settlers. Despite their independent wealth, the McCanns years her junior, arrived before reaching school age and were
remained on the fringes of society and were only able to form supervised by tutors whose task it was to teach them arithmetic or
friendships with other Americans on neutral territory, preferably grammar, but it was the Beau-Rivage that served as their ‘school’.
at the bar of a luxury hotel. The expatriates mingled with the The unique universe of a luxury hotel provided an ideal terrain for
visitors meeting over a cigar and a glass of whiskey, pampered by knowledge and learning. It was a microcosm formed, on the one
barmen with an eye for the leisure traveller seeking a haven where hand, of the well-to-do, brought up by governesses and butlers
pleasure and idleness were the unspoken laws. Francis McCann in a luxury setting, protected from society’s basely mercenary
would greet the latest arrivals with a jovial, ‘Welcome American tax preoccupations, and, on the other, peopled by a horde of more

Francis McCann next to the wireless set in his room at the Beau-Rivage. Fig. 2
Undated photograph. Francis McCann with his daughters Helen and Frances,
cut-out paper silhouettes mounted on wood, c.1932.

306