Pour attraper un maillot

“I intended to reach the 100 million (franc) mark, then settle down as an honest man and marry the girl I love”, said Dante Spada. Born in May 1929 in Codroipo, Italy, the elusive criminal drew a circus of intrigue, notably fuelled by newspapers that would, in the instance of the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune on August 24, 1952, use ‘Phantom of the Riviera’ as their headline for an article. The American mystery writer David Dodge compared him to the French film star Jean Marais, for his swashbuckling good looks. And it was Dodge whose decision, in the spring of 1950, to take a modest villa above Golf-Juan, near Cannes, would lead to arguably the most truthful and fascinating exposé of the unthinkable spiderweb of royalty, magnates, designers – and robbers. It is two of the latter, the aforementioned Spada and René ‘la Canne’ Girier, of whom more later, who have mesmerisingly ignited the formation of this network on the French Riviera.

The succession to the Monegasque throne has historically been riddled with complexities, not least when Prince Albert I of Monaco was to be lawfully succeeded by his son Louis. However, the future prince had no brothers or sisters, nor a wife or direct heirs. And so, for Monte Carlo and their staunch ally France, the latter due to their fractured relationship with their neighbour Germany, it was an unwished-for proposition that his first cousin, Wilhelm, the 2nd Duke of Urach, would become ruler and the mantle of the 600-year Grimaldi rule be carried forward by the Germans.

However, Louis, while volunteering to serve with the French Foreign Legion in Algeria between 1895 and 1899, fathered a daughter out of wedlock, whose mother was cabaret singer Marie Juliette Louvet. Unlike many overseas servicemen and fathers of illegitimate offspring, Louis moved Marie and their daughter Charlotte to his recently built Art Nouveau-style house in the north of Paris, aptly named Villa Charlotte. And it was in Paris in 1919 that, with fundamental diplomatic support from France, in the presence of French President Raymond Poincaré, Hereditary Prince Louis officially recognised Charlotte as a daughter, and her grandfather Albert granted her the title of Duchess of Valentinois, traditionally reserved for the heirs of the Principality.

Prince Albert I died on June 26^th, 1922, and his son Louis ascended the throne. A month later Charlotte was ordained as Hereditary Princess, thus affording her the full right to inherit the throne of Monaco. Even before such legislative jubilation, she had married Count Pierre de Polignac – a noble of artistic inclinations and an immaculately dressed squire – with whom she would have two children, Prince Rainier and Princess Antoinette, the former of whom since ascending the throne in 1949 (his mother having renounced her right of succession in 1944) has arguably transformed the fortunes of Monaco like no other. However, Charlotte, who largely shunned the Principality as a main residence, always retained some of her unconventional traits. In 1956, when she arrived at the wedding of her son Prince Rainier III and the glamorous American movie star Grace Kelly, her companion was the infamous jewel thief René Girier, better known as René la Canne because of his trademark walking stick.  

But there was a twist with the slippery burglar turning up – one that could only really take place on the Riviera. On the eve of the wedding, an American guest and one of the bridesmaids alerted the authorities that $58,000 worth of jewellery had been stolen from their rooms at the Hôtel de Paris, Monte-Carlo. Acting as Charlotte’s chauffeur, and on parole from a sentence for robbery, there was only ever one suspect – an incredibly newsworthy saga, and one that enraged Prince Rainier III.

But returning to the hills above Golf-Juan, Dodge’s villa, Noël Fleuri, shared a garden with Villa Le Roc next door, grander both in terms of architecture and the illustrious names who occupied it and frequented the smart soirées held there – one of which was given by New York property magnate Norman K. Winston and his wife, Rosita, who had taken the property for the season. On August 5, 1950, Dodge having incidentally left for Italy for a writing assignment given by Holiday Magazine, next door became a party citadel featuring a peerless list of bold-faced names, none less so than legendary hostess Elsa Maxwell.

While Maxwell’s own French Riviera house was a hacienda of gaiety, counting important and stylish figures such as the Duke of Windsor and Tyrone Power among its habitués, she was also widely recognised as the fame-maker who introduced Rita Hayworth to Ali Khan and Maria Callas to Aristotle Onassis. Given her unparalleled social connections, there’s little doubt that when the illusory funambulist Spada struck that night without leaving a trace, and stole rare jewels from the Who’s Who of society including Maxwell herself, her mere presence might have tempted Spade to undertake this most celebrated theft ever on the Cote d’Azur.

If the world had already been utterly enraptured by this heist, two weeks later another twist further widened the eyes of heist tale enthusiasts. Elsa Schiaparelli, the iconoclastic Italian fashion designer, was about to board an aeroplane bound for Tunis, North Africa, when plainclothes detectives appeared and detained her. Schiaparelli had been, in fact, a guest at Villa Le Roc on that fateful night. In her luggage authorities uncovered not only $1,485 in US dollars that she had failed to declare, but also some of the jewels she had reported stolen from the infamous party. She was fined for her undeclared dollars; however, arousing suspicion still to this day is her statement that she found the jewels on her dressing table and had already alerted guests to this supposed error.

In the past decade, as a fledgling writer, I decided to visit Tangier. I sensed it could be a destination where the stylistic extraordinary happens, thus increasing the likelihood of being presented with a story. And I was, incidentally, featuring a well-known male movie star and his suit; to this day, I doubt I’ll be presented with a tale as astonishing as that one again. However, even on the Riviera, nothing could possibly trump the storyline of Dodge’s mystery novel “To Catch a Thief”. In his 1962 travel memoir, The Rich Man’s Guide to the Riviera, he stated that once he had the story in his mind, it was “the easiest eighty thousand words ever put together. The book practically wrote itself.”

“Cary Grant is the only actor I ever loved in my whole life”, said Alfred Hitchcock. Prior to the release of Dodge’s thrilling novel in 1952, Grant had terrifically starred in Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946) and Strangers on a Train (1951) – all masterpieces by the aforementioned English film director. Given his height – a nudge over 6 feet – and handsome appearance, Grant already had a storied background as a travelling acrobatic performer. His career spanned Bristol, England (his city of birth), Colwyn Bay, Wales, and finally New York. When he joined the Bob Pender troupe, he primarily toured and performed at vaudeville theatres in Europe and North America, to which he owed a debt for his rise from hardship in Bristol to being in a position to risk all and follow his destiny as a star in motion pictures in Broadway and Hollywood. And it was in New York that he decided to stay after Pender’s final show; he’d not only planted his feet in a destination with the right career and social individuals, but he possessed the right attributes to see and be seen. Grant would later recount that being a tall, dark-blue-suited young bachelor would often earn him last-minute invitations to round out the guests at dinner tables at smart events.

It’s funny that prior to his acting career in Hollywood, his funambulist skills were perfected with expert tightrope and stilt walking stunts during his training in Pender’s troupe; there couldn’t be anyone more fitting to take the role of John Robie, a retired jewel thief known as “The Cat”, in Hitchcock’s adaptation of Dodge’s aforementioned novel.

Undoubtedly put on the pedestal of Hollywood greatness by a proportion of cinephiles is the salacious, flamboyant, yet visionary producer and studio chief Robert Evans. Paramount Pictures faced significant risk of falling behind the elite studios, but Evans brought them back to prominence in the late 1960s with iconic films such as Rosemary’s Baby. Paramount Pictures produced To Catch a Thief in 1955, but five years earlier, there were rumours swirling in Hollywood about a relationship with Kelly. However, the film maestro had an insatiable appetite for beautiful actresses, with whom he was likely involved, but the voluptuous Kelly was aptly cast for Hitchcock’s 1955 picture.

Hollywood is a beguiling swapping epicentre of vocation, romance, and, not to mention, costumes. Edith Head, the eight-time Academy Award winner for Best Costume Design, was duly selected. She’d sublimely dressed Kelly in pictures before, notably in Hitchcock’s film Rear Window, 1954, but Hitchcock adored Grant’s personal style so much that he allowed him the freedom to dress himself for the films. This was not achieved by hiring a costume designer to find the pieces he desired; instead, Grant would either use his own wardrobe or seek out ateliers, markets, or shops to find the outfits that best suited him and the film.

Even by reading a novel examining the preliminaries of a jewel thief on the French Riviera who is meticulous, agile, and incredibly tasteful in who and what he steals, it conveys a mysterious air of elegance, and this even before you have clamped your eyes on the image of either fiction or non-fiction that has been described.

And so in an early scene, when you witness John Robie arrive at Bertani’s Restaurant, the restaurant owned by Bertani (Charles Vanel)—an ex-thief associate—along with his staff— you see Robie striding between tables and glamorous diners on the terrace, probably filmed on the western edge of Port Hercules in Monaco on the Quai Antoine 1er; it is then, in all its splendour, that we witness Robie’s preeminent film outfit. Despite being blessed with a refined body line, Grant, aligning with his punctilious demeanour, was always self-conscious about his overly muscular neck – so he often wore a neckerchief to disguise his perceived defect.

The red with white polka dots cotton neckerchief is his choice in the aforementioned scene and for most of the film, and it’s the way it unites between his neck and one of the film’s most distinguished and well-remembered navy (with a thin white stripe cotton long-sleeve jersey with a reinforced crew neck, set in sleeves with ribbed cuffs).

“Hitch trusted me implicitly to select my wardrobe. If he wanted me to wear something very specific, he would tell me, but generally I wore simply tasteful clothes—the same kind of clothes I wear off screen,” said Grant. According to Ada Pirvu, the author of Classiq Journal, Grant sourced the jersey and neckerchief on the French Riviera. And the jersey or pullover comprises these alluring design details, ones that expose his grey flannel double forward-pleated trousers and feature slanted side pockets, jetted back pockets, and turn-ups. And in the unnerving reunion at Bertani’s where the police show up in search of Robie, because there is a copycat jewel thief and he is suspected, he loses his ivory socks, and you see him cocking his leg on Bertani’s desk, and there you get a close-up view of the tan leather apron-toe Venetian loafers with dark brown leather trim and beige outsoles, which, in sync with Grant’s propensity to dress in his style, he bought at Henry Maxwell shoemakers of Dover Street, London.

Every aspect of the clothing in To Catch a Thief transports us to the true elegance of the French Riviera, retaining a sense of attitude that should not be overlooked. And here we have Grant imparting this real, effortless aplomb.