DEAUVILLE

Joan Juliet Buck

"Deauville in August is like a Suzy column without the wit"

Deauville in August is the place for dour undemocratic pleasures based on the peaceful uses of wealth. It offers spectator sports where the pleasure is derived from owning the creatures exerting themselves on field or track, be they individual racehorses or entire polo teams. It offers indoor sports which require inherited skills and acquired assets such as ruthlessness, cash, charisma, endurance and selfconfidence.

For eleven months of the year Deauville is a place for Parisians to escape to, where they can commit discreet adultery, take naps, overeat, walk on windy beaches, and verify with a cursory glance that nature, here represented by the Channel, still exists.

In August it becomes a place to escape from, a combination of Paris, London and New York, where nature is represented by the cream, apples and fish that one eats in various combinations, and the local calvados and Pont l'Eveque that finish off every meal with a peasant burp.

This is not the place to wear anything that resembles the uniform of servants. One summer I made the mistake of wearing a white jacket to a Rothschild dinner party. "You are dressed like a waiter," said my host, with Deauville tact. (Another day I wore high heels with my jeans and the same man kindly pointed out that this was not done.) So: a dress code, and a behavior code. Left-wing ideas are received coolly here, and the voicing of any but the blandest opinion is greeted with icy disregard. Spend money, throw money away to show how very little it means to you, get it spent on you. And if it can still walk, fuck it. This is the place where the visit of an eighty-year-old American millionaire managed to throw every society hostess into the frenzied and heedless behavior of a teenager in heat.

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There are hotel guests and landowners here, two distinct breeds. The landowners also own racehorses and have a definite edge over the others. As Grandmama used to say, it is better to own than to rent. The owners are called Rothschild, Van Zuylen, Guinness, Niarchos. Deauville in August is like a Suzy column without the wit.

A Deauville day begins with a hangover and a beseeching glance at the bleak sky. One dons warm clothing in the nautical and summery combination of navy blue and white over an optimistic bathing suit. The racehorses are exercised inland, the polo ponies are marched through the surf, dogs take a turn on the beach while attendants put up the big bright umbrellas and kick sand over the turds. The ladies go to the hairdresser's before lunch.

This meal takes place at Ciro's on the boardwalk, a windswept seaside version of Maxim's, under the eagle eye of Mario Viale, the most polite man in Deauville. A few feet away is the Bar de la Mer, where the prices are lower, the food simpler, and the air even brisker as there are no hedges in tubs to break the wind.

Human exercise is taken after lunch: a brisk walk back to the hotel, past the common folks in deck chairs. There are three hotels: the Royal for those who like drafts, the Normandy for those who like cramped spaces, and the Golf up on the hill for those who like large doses of greenery. The afternoon's activity consists of a nap and a game of gin rummy, often pursued simultaneously.

On race days, the lungs are exercised by screaming at racehorses, preferably one s owrt, and later by screaming at people to get out of the way of the polo ponies in the matches that follow the last race. Race days provide the opportunity for gentlemen to sport cashmere jackets in racing combinations of brown, green, yellow and red, and to wear funny green hats.

Drinks are taken at the Royal, where polo players congregate after a match at the bar, smelling enticingly of mud and sweat. If this is a gala night the ladies return to the hairdresser's for grooming and repair. Aesthetes like to go to Honfleur to watch the sunset over the harbor, but tycoons know that the time difference makes this the ideal hour to call the broker and the lawyer in New York.

The biggest gala is the Gala des Courses, which features tiny stable boys in silks ("Look, there's mine"—the racing colors, not the child) and a video replay of every winning moment of every big race in the last year. A golden whip is given as the prize. The heaviest gambling in the casino follows the Gala des Courses, a function no doubt of the excitement caused by the spectacle of so many past victories and defeats.

The last drink, the drink of resignation and weary gossip, is taken in the lobby of the Royal, which may still provide some last-minute conjectures drawn from the couplings at the elevator doors.

Across a bridge is the humbler town of Trouville, where real fishermen can be seen heaving out at dawn and real dead fish litter the quai. An admirably down-to-earth restaurant called Les Vapeurs, on the port, attracts those beset with nostalgie du vrai. A cozy restaurant called Le Saint Jame's (the distance of the x from the Jame is deliberate, its reason obscure) provides excellent food and a sense of privacy. Not so La Regence, where the patrons are seated facing each other around a pretty room decorated in painted glass panels to look like Le Grand Vefour.

Unless one is buying yearlings, alligator bags, or emeralds, the best shopping is in Trouville. Those in the know go to La Petite Jeannette for sweaters. The aridity of Deauville life forces one into an exalted appreciation of the colors in the plaid cashmere mufflers, rather the way canaries used to affect the men on Alcatraz.

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Claude Lelouch's Club 13 outside Deauville constitutes an escape for those who like Californian comforts and can use a screening room. This is where the movie people stay, not quite banished from the gates of town, but, let it be said, more comfortable among their own kind. The fortunes of performing artists are too reliant on luck and public whim to make them viable members of a Deauville summer.

There are entertaining side trips one can make from Deauville: the Normandy beaches from which the Allies reconquered Europe; Cherbourg, where the QE2 docks; Lisieux, where St. Therese lived and died; the Allied cemetery in Tourgeville, where some Germans are buried. Irises grow on thatched roofs, and Maria Felix, the grand spitfire of Mexican movies, wears some neat ponchos. Deauville is full of subliminal surprises, and if one stays there long enough, one will be in a mood to enjoy them all. The resilience of the human spirit is a wonder to behold.