1 · Position
She first came to Capri after reading Norman Douglas's *South Wind*, and spent a fortnight at Il Fortino, an old British fort on Marina Piccola. She said that if one small blade of grass on the island could belong to her she would be the happiest woman alive. In 1933 the family that owned that very house put it up for sale and she paid £11,000 for it. The lido followed in the 1950s: bathing huts around a pool shaped like the island of Capri and filled with sea water, on terraces over the bay with the Faraglioni in view.
2 · ⚑ Read against Café del Mar
Two beach clubs, thirty years apart, opposite in every respect. Ibiza sold its atmosphere to nine million people who had never been there. Capri sold the opposite — a place you had to arrive at, where the point was who else was on the terrace. The 1950s and 60s jet set gathered here, and Fields herself sometimes gave cabaret in the restaurant late in the decade, of which fragments of recordings survive. The Library holds both in one group so the two theories of the beach club sit beside each other.
3 · Candour
⚑ The Library records the ownership succession only as far as the sources establish it: her husband Monty died before the project was finished and Boris completed it, adding the pool lighting and chalets that are now hotel rooms. What became of the property afterwards is not established here. The suites are named for Bardot, Taylor, Loren, Fields and Jacqueline Kennedy, which is the club selling its own past — a different way of packaging atmosphere from Ibiza's, and no more modest.