The influx of tourists and the tabloid hounding that followed the publication of Peter Mayle's 1989 book on his beloved Provence caused the author to leave the region - but now he's back living in France, with a new book and a film by Ridley Scott. He talks to Penelope Dening.
Whatever one's views about advertising, it certainly proved a fertile seedbed for writers and film-makers in the 1960s. "Commercials" they were called then and, before the days of channel-hopping, there was no option but to watch them or make a cup of tea. Although the products have long vanished into obscurity, the slogans - many of them by later-famous writers - have found a longer life. "Go to work on an egg" (Fay Weldon); "Naughty but nice" (Salman Rushdie); "Nice one, Cyril" (Peter Mayle).
While Rushdie found fame - if not fortune - fairly soon after his advertising stint, Peter Mayle was 50 before he was reinvented as Mr Provence, and while he never got death threats, he continues to be attacked by zealots who claim he single-handedly ruined the Luberon, that erstwhile unspoilt corner of southern France now identified forever as "Mayle country". To my shame, I used to be one of them.
I first followed the Durance river east from Avignon in the early 1970s. It was, indeed, unspoilt - a complete contrast to the cement and traffic-bound nightmare that the Côte d'Azur was already becoming - a place of abandoned villages, rocky outcrops and rough wine, although there was a sprinkling of Paris and Swiss number plates even then. My boyfriend and I rented a flat in an ancient village and stayed a month. For me, it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair. I now live there; not in the Luberon itself (too expensive and, to my taste, too full of expats) but a little way the other side of the Rhône. So it was with a certain trepidation that, on a baking day in August, I set out for my lunch date with Mayle, in the village he made famous.
When A Year in Provence came out in 1989 I refused to read it. I knew Peter Mayle as co-author of the Wicked Willie books, a series of cartoons featuring an anthropomorphic penis (sporting a pair of round glasses not unlike Mayle's own), subtitled Man's Best Friend. I had no intention of allowing my love of Provence to be sullied by that kind of smut.
Fifteen years on, in a restaurant only a boule's throw from the flat I rented all those years ago, I recount this pathetic tale to my host as our waiter pours the wine. Knowing I was to interview Mayle in relation to both a new book and a film, it seemed only fair to read the original, and I found it an utter delight, true and funny and wonderfully evocative of the Provençal hinterland as it was, and still largely is.
"I have to say in defence that I am only half responsible for Wicked Willie," says Mayle, looking both sheepish and guarded. "Gray Jolliffe, whose idea it was and who I knew from the advertising business, said 'I've got this idea but I can't get any newspaper to do it.' 'Of course not,' I said. 'There are laws against that kind of arrant vulgarity. But you could do books. There's no censorship in books.' So while Jolliffe did the drawings, Mayle did the text, and every autumn for next few years saw a new addition to the canon. It was not totally unfamiliar territory for Mayle. In the early 1980s, after giving up the advertising business, he wrote a number of how-to-cope children's books, including one about the onset of adolescence, What's Happening to Me?
Indeed, his own life had always been the most fertile source of inspiration, from advertising (Up the Agency) to parenthood (How to be a Pregnant Father and Baby Taming). It was the success of the Wicked Willie books that gave him the courage to move from England to France, that and being tired of living in a climate that seemed permanently November. And it seemed natural, once he arrived, to write about that first momentous year: from the joys of food and new friendships, to the trials of builders and French bureaucracy. His only mistake, he says now, was to name the village. But neither he nor anybody else involved had any idea what the future held.
"We had a publication party, which was essentially me and the publisher having lunch. And he said: 'I don't want you to get your hopes up. It's a nice little book and I have printed 3,000 copies, but there will be some left over at Christmas so if you want some as presents for your friends I'll let you have them at a reasonable price.' And then all of a sudden it started rolling. In fact, after about three weeks he rang me, rather irritated in fact, and said 'Do you know, we've sold out, and we're going to have to reprint. Another 1,500."
To date, A Year in Provence has sold "between five and six million copies". The vagueness of the figure is perhaps attributable to its longevity and huge global appeal; it has been translated into 28 languages and is particularly popular in China and Japan.
For a while the golden goose looked as if it had committed hara-kiri, as Mayle's corner of the map became a place of pilgrimage, with fans from all over the world literally coming in and sitting down in his kitchen. Then came the backlash: the book described initially in the Sunday Times bestseller list as a "witty, stylish account" became "ad-man's caricature" almost overnight. "For years people would write in the smarter papers, 'he doesn't know what he is talking about. The French think he's a joke. It's all a piece of crap.' These people who spend at most 10 days a year in Provence who obviously know all about it and say 'He's ruined Provence'."
In the end it became too much for him and his wife - the tourists, the hounding by British tabloids - so after two years they sold up and went to live by the sea in Amagansett, Long Island, a place "as different as I could get". Yet Provence still ran in his blood and the books continued, but now they were novels. The first, Hotel Pastis, puts paid to the notion that the French think he's a joke. Yves Rousset-Rouard, mayor of Ménerbes, wine-maker and film producer (the erotic Emmanuelle) bought the rights. A "very good" script was done by Dick Clements and Ian La Frenais (Porridge; Auf Wiedersehen, Pet) but nothing has so far happened, though Mayle remains optimistic that the Ricard empire, which owns Pastis, will come up with some money.
The rights to Anything Considered - about dodgy dealings in the world of truffles - went to Hollywood. Stanley Jaffe (Kramer vs Kramer, Fatal Attraction) told Mayle that he could "get this picture on the floor in six months". When Mayle declined the chance to write the script ("I told him, 'I don't want to go back over something I've written and get rid of bits of it and I rather liked it when I wrote it,' and anyway it's a different skill, a different art"), Jaffe parachuted in an American screenwriter who had never been to France. Mayle is a wonderful raconteur, particularly of disasters - and neighbouring tables on the terrace of our restaurant look up as his account of the nefarious attempts to get the screenplay written has me hysterical with laughter - including the idea that Alan Bennett should write it - right to the denouement: truffles, according to Jaffe, weren't understood in the mid-west. "So here's the thing, Peter, what if we make it diamonds?"
Five years on, enter Ridley Scott. Or rather re-enter, the pair having known each other for more than 30 years, since their days of working in commercials. Mayle, having moved from being a Madison Avenue copywriter to buying out the agency's London off-shoot, would regularly work with Scott, Adrian Lyne and Alan Parker, all of whom cut their teeth in early 1970s Soho.
A few years later, Scott bought a house not far from Mayle's in Provence. "Then one day a few years ago he called up, and said 'Let's have lunch'. He had with him a little clipping from a newspaper about a phenomenon in Bordeaux called garage wines, wines with no pedigree selling for serious money. 'I thought that might be interesting,' he said. 'I have always wanted to shoot down here because it is so beautiful. Have you got any ideas?' 'Well,' I thought, 'if ideas are what's required, I'll have some ideas.'
"So I sat down and thought about a story set in Provence with wine in it. And Ridley and I went back and forth two and three times over three months, and when we got something that we both liked we agreed I'd do the book and he'd do the film. We shook hands on it and it was all over."
The book, A Good Year, was published in 2004. The film is out this autumn, and Mayle is delighted. "It's a very nice film, I have to say. I am so relieved. No special effects, no violence, no gang rapes, no disembowelments. You come out of it thinking the world is not so bad after all, and Russell Crowe is very funny."
For the same reasons as before, he wanted nothing to do with the script, and his only contribution, he says, was going to the set a couple of times and nodding and smiling and generally telling everyone to carry on with the good work. "You know, Russell Crowe in the bottom of an empty swimming pool and me saying 'Nice to see you Russell, Keep it up.' It was a delight. There were no problems, no squabbles. Ridley finished the shooting ahead of time. All very unusual, I think, for Hollywood. And it looks so delightfully like Provence really looks. Ridley is like a painter. There's none of the usual histrionics and striding around saying 'cut' and 'action' and all that stuff. He just sits there and says, 'Get on'. He has it all worked out in his head before."
October threatens to be wall-to-wall Mayle: not only the film, but the re-issue of the book and a brand new title: Provence A-Z, further proof that the French, far from seeing him as a parasite, have taken him to their heart. Although Profile is publishing it in the UK, the idea actually originated from a French publisher, who approached him for another in a series of dictionaries they do. "They said they would like me to do the one on Provence. And I said: 'I'm not serious enough for that. I'm not a lexicographer.' It could be exactly as I wanted, they said. 'Can I really do what I like? Pick whatever subjects I like?' 'Yes.'
The result is classic Mayle: a mix of facts and fun that, if you know France, takes you straight back there, and if you don't, would make you want to pack your bags immediately. His dissection of the recent influx of expatriate foreigners shows the lancet is still in hair-slicing condition. He has come to the conclusion, he tells me as we enjoy our coffee, that he is "a dreadful snob about the English and I much prefer a book or a dog to a person these days". (He does a teeth-grinding impression of an Englishman buying eggs at a market.) The downside of the rise of the Luberon - at least in the summer months - is a never-ending circuit of dinner parties, "mainly English, with the occasional French part-time bit players", where Mayle's role is to be paraded out as the local exotic. He admits to being fairly brutal now about turning down such invitations.
Mayle is now back in Provence and he doesn't think he'll ever leave. "Because this is actually a most wonderfully civilised country. People bitch about the taxes and the French and the bureaucracy and the this, the that and the other. I personally quite like the French. As for the rest of it, well you just deal with it."
Fans are kept at arms length with the connivance of the local population. "Anyone asking for me is told that I am currently in Australia." Doesn't he feel he's done Provence now? Doesn't he feel like writing about somewhere else? "The difficulty for me is I don't want to go anywhere. I'm idle. I love Provence and I find it endlessly fascinating and I find it very difficult to resist writing about it because I am always finding things I like about it."
Provence A-Z will be published on October 12th by Profile Books, £16.99.
A Good Year, based on his novel of the same name, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe, is released on October 27th