Club 55 – A Living Legend

From Bardot to Bono, this is the exclusive—but all-encompassing—place to be at the beach

- By Louise Fauvelle

Brigitte Bardot and her costar Christian Marquand painstakingly get out of the water and fall exhausted on the sand of the seemingly deserted beach. When she gets up, Bardot’s wet shirtdress is half-open, and after a few teasing invitations from her side, an erotic scene soon unfolds by a pine tree a little higher up the shore. The year is 1956 and the movie being shot is And God Created Woman (Et Dieu… créa la femme). Next to the film crew, led by the French director Roger Vadim, a bunch of curious locals are privileged enough to watch. Eight-year-old Patrice de Colmont is one of them. The vast Pampelonne beach in Ramatuelle, just south of Saint-Tropez, is his home and playground.

It was his father, the aristocratic ethnologist and explorer Bernard de Colmont, who fell in love with the place in the late 1940s when the beach was completely undeveloped. “We started spending the summers there and in 1954 my father bought a piece of land by the beach after inheriting some money. When my mother heard that, she first got angry. She thought we could have used them to buy pullovers or something else useful,” Patrice laughs. His father however felt that he had found “their promised land.”