I Smell Ya

The sense of smell is stronger than any of my senses, I think. I just caught a whiff of Roger Gallet room spray and was instantly transported back to France vividly remembering the first time I smelled the exact smell in my oceanfront room at the Majestic. What a time that was. Jeffrey Miles had cajoled whoever was the editor of The Hollywood Reporter at the time into letting me go to cover the Marche de Disques et Editions Musicals, better known as MIDEM and off I went, bright and bold and very excited. I didn't know one word of French. When I got to the airport in Nice, got my luggage into the car whose driver had held up my name on a card, I was feeling a little uncertain about how this trip was going to turn out. The driver struck out for Cannes at breakneck speed down the all but pitchblack stretch of road and suddenly I knew I was going to die that night in the South of France. Sadly I was sure, after the headlong plunge off the side of one of the cliffs, I wouldn't even be able to tell them where it hurt because they wouldn't understand my English. That first trip set the stage for the 20 or so that followed and every time I loved every minute of it. The Majestic Hotel (oh, how I love how it rolled off their tongues Ma=jest=tique. At the time, it was way down the Croissette from the Palais before they built the new one, but I didn't mind walking. There were sights to see that simply didn't exist in Hollywood, although people often call Cannes, Hollywood on the Riviera. Nobody is bathing topless on the beach in January, but they were that year in Cannes and I gasped, but quickly recovered. I couldn't let anybody see that I was a bumpkin. Later on, hanging out with Julio and others, topless would come to mean nothing to me and in fact, I dove into it myself on a farflung beach or two. But this magic time in Cannes, made even more magic by the fact that the exchange rate was five FF to the USD, was a blur of images and events that I scrambled to figure out. This was before the days of easy Internet access and sending copy back from your laptop. I had to type my articles on a selectric typewriter, take it to the Post Office where the man there who didn't speak English at all, would send it via Telex back to the Reporter. Looking back it seems a miracle that anything ever got filed, but it did and for the most part, it was amazing. I have just made myself want to go to France again. We will see where January 2010 finds Ruth Adkins Robinson.