{"id":3304,"date":"2015-07-01T10:57:31","date_gmt":"2015-07-01T17:57:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/?p=3304"},"modified":"2016-06-19T12:56:11","modified_gmt":"2016-06-19T19:56:11","slug":"lanny-budd-hero-for-a-lifetime-a-pilgrimage-to-juan-les-pins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/01\/lanny-budd-hero-for-a-lifetime-a-pilgrimage-to-juan-les-pins\/","title":{"rendered":"Lanny Budd, Hero for a Lifetime: a Pilgrimage to Juan-les-Pins"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Lanny<\/a>
Lanny Budd lived somewhere on this hill .<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He’s been part of my life for more than fifty years – dashing, smart, generous and\u00a0always on the side of the angels. \u00a0With him I wandered\u00a0through most of the 20th Century in the company of critical figures including playwright\u00a0George Bernard Shaw,\u00a0powerful arms dealer Basil Zaharoff,<\/a>\u00a0 Adolph Hitler and his brilliant propaganda director Joseph Goebbels,<\/a>\u00a0Leon Blum<\/a>, the first Socialist (and Jewish) Prime Minister of France and of course Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, as well as the infamous “modern\u00a0dance” pioneer Isadora Duncan<\/a>,\u00a0Chinese rebel leader Mao Tse Tung, and, among so many others, \u00a0Albert Einstein and of course, FDR, whom he served as a Secret Agent from before WWII to well after the war.<\/p>\n

When we met, he was 13\u00a0and I a couple of years older\u00a0and, much like the NYT’s Julie Salamon<\/a>, my mom introduced us and from our first meeting I knew that I would love him forever. \u00a0His remarkable life revolved around his home base of Juan-les-Pins<\/a>, \u00a0where he grew up, and to which he always returned.<\/p>\n

The house was built on the top of a rise, some way back, from the sea. It was of pink stucco with pale blue shutters and a low roof of red tiles. It was in the Spanish style, built around a lovely court with a fountain and flowers; there Lanny played when the mistral was blowing, as it sometimes did for a week on end.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Last week we went there, where Lanny\u00a0\u00a0lived,\u00a0with Beauty Budd, his artist model mother.\u00a0 Though she and his father Robbie Budd, a\u00a0New England arms dealer, never married, Robbie\u00a0visited often, struggling to transmit\u00a0his conservative capitalism to a young man living in dire danger of corruption among artists, journalists, socialists, communists and wealthy ladies, many of them an earlier version of trophy wives. \u00a0Their fierce conversations were a wonderful window on the conflicts of those times.<\/p>\n

Lanny is, of course, not real – at least not to everyone; he’s the hero of eleven novels<\/a> written by the prolific Upton Sinclair<\/a> (yes, he’s the one who wrote The Jungle<\/a>) tracing world history between 1913 and 1949. \u00a0 Best-sellers all when they appeared in the 40’s and early 50’s and translated into 16 languages in 20 countries, the books formed much of my political and historic perspective and I was hardly alone.<\/p>\n

When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to Upton Sinclair’s novels. — George Bernard Shaw<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As we walked through the village\u00a0I turned to my ever-tolerant husband with a catch in my voice, said – surprising myself with the depth of my emotion “I’ve known him almost longer than I’ve known anyone except my family.” \u00a0He and the saga that surrounded him felt, in so many ways,\u00a0just that real.<\/p>\n

One of Lanny’s childhood friends, Silesian, and bitter about the deprivation caused by enormous war reparations after WWI, became a Nazi; another, British and liberal, a fighter pilot and socialist.<\/p>\n

His first wife ended up hanging around with with the Nancy Astor and the pro-German “Cliveden Set<\/a>.” My world view was formed through their eyes and conversations and the events they faced as allies and sometime adversaries.<\/p>\n

The books, Lanny, and the characters who moved in and out of his life were, for\u00a0me – a very personal window on the horror and violence, courage and evil, glamour and idealism that was the first half of the 20th Century.<\/p>\n

Oh, and of course, it being the South of France, the literary folks hung around there too. \u00a0We had lunch at Scott Fitzgerald’s \u201cVilla Saint-Louis\u201d, just down the hill from Lanny’s neighborhood and now the\u00a0Hotel Belle Rives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Belle<\/a>
“With our being back in a nice villa on my beloved Riviera (between Cannes and Nice) I’m happier than I’ve been for years. It’s one of those strange, precious and all too transitory moments when everything in one’s life seems to be going well.” \u2028\u2014F. Scott Fitzgerald, March 15, 1926, Juan-les-Pins (Plaque outside the hotel that was his home on the Riviera)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Clinton confidante Lanny Davis<\/a> was named for Lanny Budd. \u00a0The late NBC News anchor John Chancellor<\/a> once told me he wanted to be<\/em> Lanny Budd. \u00a0 At 15, I wanted to marry him.<\/p>\n

Now, I wish I could have gone up the hill to the pink villa, rung the bell and just thanked him for all I learned from him, how much more available I am\u00a0to travel and political thought and my own role in the world because I’ve known him. \u00a0He may not be “real” but his impact on me, and so very many others, was profound.<\/p>\n

Indeed, thanks Lanny, and Upton Sinclair, and my long-suffering husband who tolerated a pilgrimage to a place where not so much happened in the “real world” but plenty happened to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He’s been part of my life for more than fifty years – dashing, smart, generous and\u00a0always on the side of the angels. \u00a0With him I wandered\u00a0through most of the 20th Century in the company of critical figures including playwright\u00a0George Bernard Shaw,\u00a0powerful arms dealer Basil Zaharoff,\u00a0 Adolph Hitler and his brilliant propaganda director Joseph Goebbels,\u00a0Leon Blum, … Continue reading Lanny Budd, Hero for a Lifetime: a Pilgrimage to Juan-les-Pins<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,6,27,42,9],"tags":[3339,3357,3345,3349,3350,3884,3358,914,2655,3348,3340,3338,3359,220,3351,3344,3336,3335,3352,3356,3355,1136,3346,3353,2654,3283,917,2621,2640,3282,3341,3311,3347,3337,3354],"class_list":["post-3304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-family","category-politics","tag-adolph-hitler","tag-albert-einstein","tag-antibes","tag-arms-dealer","tag-basil-zaharoff","tag-culture-book","tag-emily-samuels","tag-fdr","tag-france","tag-george-bernard-shaw","tag-goebbels","tag-isadora-duncan","tag-janet-samuels","tag-jewish","tag-joseph-goebbels","tag-juan-les-pins","tag-lanning-prescott-budd","tag-lanny-budd","tag-leon-blum","tag-mao-tse-tung","tag-modern-dance","tag-nazis","tag-oil","tag-prime-minister-of-france","tag-resistance","tag-riviera","tag-roosevelt","tag-seabourn","tag-seabourn-cruise","tag-seabourn-sojourn","tag-secret-agent","tag-socialist","tag-steel","tag-upton-sinclair","tag-winston-churchill"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-Ri","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3304"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3325,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions\/3325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}