Page 16 - Livre Beau Rivage Palace

Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8

Palace’s site, which was directly next to the public promenade, did at the Beau-Rivage Palace for over a quarter of a century, and her picture the hotel from the same few conventional angles, and never Jacques-Michel Pittier and Gabriel Jardin and the portraits also
not have space for a proper garden. The terrace above the gallery eccentric life at the hotel is traced by Evelyne Lüthi and Philippe look beyond the main formal rooms (e.g. the lobby and dining bring alive these ‘supporting actors’.
(now the brasserie) was a worthy substitute, with its flower beds Visson. The McCann family arrived in Ouchy in the 1930s with room). One Beau-Rivage Palace guest wrote the following to Lake Geneva becomes a vast inkwell in Cordula Seger’s
bordered by a balustrade. During the course of the twentieth their two daughters and a dog: over time the girls grew up, the her friend who was staying at the Grand Hôtel Olt in Marienbad: article, which describes the work of authors inspired by passion
century the hotel grounds underwent a series of ad hoc alterations dog was replaced, the parents died and the elder daughter, Helen, ‘Ouchy, 23 August 2009. I realised after posting my letter yesterday that I and love, particularly when set against the scenic backdrop of the
which unfortunately never formed part of a comprehensive finally moved out in 1959, to a villa whose rooms were not unlike had forgotten to tell you about the renovation work they have carried out on hotels dotted along the shoreline. The memory of Hans Christian
redesign plan: the two garden areas, once separate, now form an those of Suite 450 which she occupied for all of those years. the Beau-Rivage, my dear friend: the building now rivals any of the luxury Anderson, evoked by Pierre and Aase Goy-Hovgaard, also appears
almost indistinguishable homogenous whole, resulting in a loss of Hotels, much like the theatre, provide an excellent setting hotels we know of. To give you an idea, I am sending you five postcards like a guiding force, as does the signature of others. On a lighter
character. There has been a loss, too, of memories, which along for the imagination to run wild: all is not what it seems, and which show the hotel’s main rooms and facade.’ note, the Beau-Rivage Palace provides the setting for Alfred
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with the gaps in the archives has led to the creation of numerous cases of mistaken identity, chance and coincidence abound. In There are only a few, rare images of the rear of the hotel, Savoir’s three-act comedy whose tone and slapstick pace are in
apocryphal tales and hearsay on the subject of the grounds. The Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest, the secret which assumes a mysterious, vulnerable quality, like a figure in the best Parisian vaudeville tradition and for a comic. (fig. 11)
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supposed intervention of the famous landscape architect Achille agent George Kaplan is a fictitious character invented by the a Caspar David Friedrich painting; and one elliptical poster of The play, whose stage directions open with ‘The lobby of a luxury
Duchêne has gone undocumented, and no one remembers who American Secret Service to deflect attention from a dangerous 1938, which advertises the hotel by depicting the view from one hotel in Ouchy, Switzerland’, was also adapted for the cinema, in
started the rumour that Coco Chanel’s dog was buried in the pet spy, and only exists in the hotels he has visited: ‘On June sixteenth, of its balconies (figs 8 and 9). 1926 (directed by Malcolm St Clair), and in 1934 (renamed
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cemetery to the east of the park. The lack of documentary evidence you checked into the Sherwyn Hotel in Pittsburgh as Mr George Kaplan Léon-Paul Fargue tells of a little girl who kept watch at the Here is my Heart and directed by Frank Tuttle). Vicki Baum’s novel
shrouds the gardens in an air of mystery which contributes to the of Berkeley, California. A week later you registered at the Benjamin Hôtel Meurice in Paris to see if any of the monarchs there looked Grand Hotel also refers to the film medium: ‘In Room No. 68 a
spirit of nostalgia and austerity enveloping hotel buildings of the Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia as Mr George Kaplan of Pittsburgh. On like the portraits in her stamp collection. Denis Bertholet picks typewriter rattled on without mercy. The representative of an American
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belle époque nowadays. Yet the minutes of the board meetings are August eleventh you stayed at the Statler in Boston. On August twenty- over the guestbooks of the Beau-Rivage Palace with a fine-tooth film company had taken up his quarters there, and on the brass bedstead
full of comments which suggest that the directors cared as much ninth George Kaplan of Boston registered at the Whittier in Detroit. At comb in the hope of finding a few of the characters who so […] strips of celluloid lay in heaps. The American examined them while
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about the garden as they did about the hotel itself: ‘Like relatives present, you are registered in Room seven ninety-six at the Plaza Hotel delighted the young philatelist. Starting from the present day and he cleared off his business letters.’ Literature and film are natural
who have just suffered a bereavement, the board cannot accept the death in New York as Mr George Kaplan of Detroit […]. In two days, you are its busy movers and shakers, he turns the clock back, evoking the bedfellows, as Bruno Corthésy points out in a study which looks
of the cedars in the garden: the central one with its bouquet of trunks, the due at the Ambassador East in Chicago […]. And then at the Sheraton- elite guests of yesteryear, the belle époque and its cosmopolitan at hotels and the films they are associated with, giving a special
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majestic one at the entrance and the three others to the east. We will ask Mr Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota.’ society, late nineteenth-century British holidaymakers, artists mention to Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film of the
Barbey the forest ranger if all hope is truly lost, before we call in, with the Francis McCann, who lived at the Beau-Rivage Palace for and politicians, aristocrats and sports stars, singers and hangers- 1912 novella by Thomas Mann.
heaviest of hearts, the tree fellers.’ 10 several years, flitted nimbly (if, perhaps, involuntarily) between on. Archibald Olson Barnabooth distributed presents with gay There is no history without memory, and this book would
We could have included a whole chapter on the subject of the visible and invisible, turning his room into a theatre of illusion abandon to the staff of the Florence Carlton, and George Orwell not have been possible without all of the documentary evidence
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dogs at the hotel (fig. 6). Given that dogs are a leitmotif in ‘hotel’ where the photographer, subject and viewer were all engaged in slaved away in the kitchens of a Parisian grand hotel. In short, as provided by the hotel’s accounts books, cost breakdowns, balance
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literature and films, and that the Beau-Rivage Palace has its own a kind of game of appearances (fig. 7). The theme is developed in well as being graced by the presence of the ‘rich and famous’, the sheets, ledgers, building estimates, newspapers, statements,
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pet burial ground, it is not surprising that dogs are mentioned in the short story by Christophe Gallaz, where the elusive quality Beau-Rivage Palace welcomed a host of other guests, who were mortgage contracts, petty cash registers, summaries, reports,
the correspondence of the general manager himself: ‘I was in the of the luxury hotel provides a setting for the most penetrating less well known yet equally as important: people who brought minutes, daybooks, notary deeds and wine cellar inventories.
kitchen when the waiter took the order for “Mr Dog of Room 162”, ontological questions. life to it and ensured its success from 1861 onwards (fig. 10), an These exceptional archives represent not only an unhoped-for
whose master, according to the waiter, had requested a double hamburger See-sawing between the contradictory logic of ostentation unbroken chain of passing visitors, symbolised by the revolving and indispensable resource for researchers; they are also the core
with fresh vegetables after the dog had refused to eat the food we normally (it must advertise and sell itself) and discretion (it must respect the entrance door, the long corridor and its doors constantly opening of the hotel’s ‘memory bank’ and form a part of its corporate
serve to the numerous pooches residing at the hotel […]’. The demise privacy of its guests), the hotel is, from all points of view, a place and shutting, and terse notes such as: ‘[…] in Room No. 68 [the culture, as Bertrand Müller explains. In a digital age where audio-
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of Helen McCann’s poodle is even noted in the minutes of the that both shows and hides. This is borne out by the hundreds of chambermaid] came back with fresh linen – still damp from the iron – for visual time-based media produces and circulates unprecedented
board meeting of 9 April 1957. Helen McCann made her home documents studied during the compilation of this book, which the next occupant […].’ The personal memories, the articles by quantities of documentary material, the hotel archives allow us to
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Dogs on a bench outside the Savoy Room, taken by Helen McCann in the 1950s. Ghost self-portrait of Francis McCann, c.1935. The hotel is seen here from an unusual angle, leaning over the lake like Fig. 9 >
On the pedestal table, Laddie, the Scottish terrier immortalised a washerwoman over a tub in a Charles-François Landry novel, c.1875. This 1938 advertising poster is brief and to the point.
by the sculptor Edouard-Marcel Sandoz.

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