 Leslie Caron greets me on the terrace of La Lucarne aux Chouettes, the hotel-restaurant she has lovingly restored on the banks of the Yonne river in northern Burgundy. For an ex-dancer, she seems surprisingly petite, with very blue eyes, high cheekbones and salt-and-pepper hair. She is discreetly dressed in a denim shirt and gray striped pants. Though there is nothing flashy about her, there is a star quality in her bearing and self-assurance. As soon as I pull out a camera to take a quick snapshot, she assumes a professional pose.
"You look like someone who has been in front of a camera before," I remark.
"A little bit," she replies, with only a trace of a smile. To movie stars, a lens is a serious thing.
She ushers me into the high-ceilinged dining room, with its massive wooden beams, stone-and-brick fireplace, antique terra-cotta floor tiles and thick walls of stone and mortar. It was originally a storage hangar for river barges before she bought it and two dilapidated neighboring structures and turned the ensemble into an elegant, rustic auberge just a 90-minute drive southeast of Paris. The four upstairs rooms, decorated by Caron herself and comfortably furnished with antiques, look out on the river and the 13th-century stone bridge that is probably the most recognizable landmark of Villeneuve-sur-l'Yonne.
It was the buildings themselves that first captured Caron's fancy. She owned a restored mill-house nearby and noticed that the corner house near the bridge was on sale for a "pittance." The local mayor wanted to tear it down and make a parking lot, but Caron and her son Christopher Hall, a London-based TV producer, had other ideas. "My son and I have a passion for old stone," she explains. "Maybe it's in our blood. My grandparents built a lot and I saw masons cutting stone from my earliest childhood. It is marvelous to save things. I don't like ruins." Caron and her son bought the first house in 1989 and, with some difficulty, acquired the two others within a year. They soon discovered that it would be prohibitively expensive to restore them as private homes, so finally decided to make the complex into a restaurant with a few hotel rooms.
Local French contractors provided "astronomical" estimates, so she imported two English artisans to do the bulk of the construction work and did much of the internal decorating herself. "You had to believe in it," she says. "It was terribly exciting. I'm actually rather pleased with myself."
The hotel bar is a sort of shrine to Leslie's movie career. The walls are lined with photos from her Hollywood days and large framed posters of her films: "Gigi," "An American in Paris," "Daddy Long Legs," "Lili," "Fanny," "Glory Alley." She's there to tell me about her beloved auberge, but doesn't protest when I ask her to pose in front of the movie posters. She well knows that her Hollywood fame has a lot to do with attracting customers. "Americans only come here because it's Leslie Caron's place," she says.
As Caron tells it, over a dinner of foie gras and lobster au Sauterne washed down by a white Burgundy, the physical restoration of the buildings was only the beginning of her complicated adventure. With no experience in the hotel or restaurant business, she was suddenly faced with responsibility for managing the place she had so lovingly built. She recalls having "terrible stage fright" when the restaurant opened in 1993. "You know, when you open a play, you say, 'Will the people come?' Then you say, 'Will they boo or applaud? Will they come back the next day?' I felt exactly like that when we first opened."
Despite her efforts to build up a local clientele, she says the townspeople of Villeneuve basically boycotted her place for the first year and a half; most of her early business came from other towns, from visiting Americans, or from Parisians headed to Switzerland or the south of France. "People aren't very open-minded here," she says. "Burgundy still hasn't opened up to tourism. Here, I was not the delicious little star whom everyone wants to please. People were suspicious of me."
Why?
"I'm a woman, an actress, and I have an American name."
Caron owes her very un-French first name to her American mother, a one-time ballet dancer from Seattle, who gave up her career to marry a French pharmacist. It was her mother, says Caron, who "pushed" her into a dancing career. Before she was 18, Caron was dancing lead parts with the famous Roland Petit ballet company. By chance, Gene Kelly saw her perform in Paris one night and immediately signed her up to go to Hollywood and co-star with him in "An American in Paris." "I didn't want to go to Hollywood," says Caron. "I was very happy where I was." But she went, largely at her mother's urging, and was an instant sensation. The 1951 movie won six Oscars, including best picture, and the young French dancer was signed to a nine-year contract with MGM. During that period, she appeared in 12 movies, eventually switching from dancing to straight acting.
As Caron's film career waned, she turned her attention to other interests. "In Hollywood, at a certain age, it's difficult to renew yourself," she says. "But I have to create, I like to work. So I threw myself into other things: writing — I have published a book of short stories — old stones, architecture." Which led her, eventually, to her hotel-restaurant project. "It was like a dare," she says, her blue eyes dancing with enthusiasm. "I didn't realize the challenge, the huge effort it would take. I was like a kid with a toy. When I see a house, I see all the possibilities. It's the work that interests me, the possibilities. I like all the arts. I can paint, write, do interior decoration. I throw myself into things with passion."
That much is obvious whenever she speaks of the Lucarne aux Chouettes. "Everything we do here, from the food to the rooms, is rustic and elegant, based on simple, authentic things. It has finally paid off and, last year, we began to turn a profit. That means that honesty, quality, something done with soul, can succeed after all."
At the same time, her film career has started to pick up again, with recent roles in "Funny Bones" (opposite Jerry Lewis), "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells," "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?", "The Cider House Rules" and "Chocolat" (with Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp). "Now," says Caron, "I have a second life. Because I am playing older parts and there are less and less actresses who do that." Though she has finally made a success with the Lucarne aux Chouettes, Caron admits that her renascent acting career is more important to her. "Building this place up is the hardest thing I ever had to do," she says with an engaging smile. "When I'm acting, I feel like I'm on vacation." In fact, Leslie Caron now enjoys the best of both worlds: restoration and revival, old stones and celluloid.
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