Celebrity secrets of the Hotel du Cap It comes straight from the reddest of Hollywood carpets. And here they are, seen for the first time, legends from the Cinemascope pantheon distilled to a few flourishes of flamboyant ink. But it is ink uniquely applied to surfaces stroked by stellar hands, the thrilling, if vicarious, intimacy of the autograph. Collected in what the hotel calls its Golden Book are contributions from a list of straight As. Clint Eastwood rubs signatures with Sharon Stone; Jennifer Lopez with Colin Firth. Turn the page on Ralph Fiennes and there is Mick Jagger. The "book" is a collection of sheets of fine vellum that will eventually be preserved between covers. So Dustin Hoffman and Jim Belushi will one day be bound with Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush; Mel Gibson will share a stiff jacket with Celine Dion, Bruce Willis with Audrey Tautou, Andy Garcia with Grace Jones. Gordon Gekko, James Bond and Sherlock Holmes have signed as their alter egos of Michael Douglas, Pierce Brosnan and Robert Downey Junior. In the hotel's first Golden Book, now locked away in Paris, there are doodles by Chagall and Picasso. Here we must content ourselves with a deft caricature by Johnny Depp - of Johnny Depp - and quick-fire sketches by the likes of Tom Hanks, Tim Burton and Karl Lagerfeld. Tom Hanks (left) and Karl Lagerfeld signed the guest book Every spring the stars arrive in their constellations for the Cannes Film Festival. The Hôtel du Cap is close enough to nip across to the Croisette by speedboat, far enough away for film folk to laze in their own oh-so-special firmament. It's where Elizabeth Taylor's luggage arrived by truck considerably in advance of Elizabeth Taylor, and where Tom Cruise is preceded by his instructions for making salad, a melange involving green beans, artichoke, tomatoes and leaves of arugula and spinach - accompanied with a glass of sheep's milk. It's where Lars von Trier turned up in a camper van and Bill Cosby stood to attention in a small launch, sailor's cap and T-shirt, and took the salute of passing yachts. Every day, Eddie Murphy ate a turkeyburger here, John Travolta ordered vegetable quiches - one at 8am, another at 2am - and Kevin Costner's cheeseburgers combined Charolais beef with Emmenthal cheese. It was a previous general manager who summed up the secret of the hotel as its simplicity. "When on vacation, the rich like to pay maharajah prices to live like boy scouts," he explained. The house rules are made of exceptions: Monica Belluci was allowed to spend a night in one of the beach cabanas; Mel Gibson booked a table for 30 and turned up with a party of 300. To adapt an exchange in Tender is the Night, "Do they like it here - this place?" Came the response: "They have to like it. They invented it. Johnny Depp left a self portrait In his book on the hotel, journalist François Simon tells how Sharon Stone, "in a moment of inspiration," first requested a harpist dressed in an Irish costume, then a Nebuchadnezzar of champagne. Or maybe it was the other way round. Simon was the Riviera correspondent for Le Figaro, which is appropriate because it was the newspaper's founder who in 1870 opened the first hotel on the site, in the handsome Napoleon III building. He supposedly intended it for writers with a creative block. Writers who are creating are not the most promising of business propositions; writers who aren't spell disaster. The hotel foundered until, in 1889, it was reopened by a brave Piedmontese, Antoine Sella. As Simon tells it, "The hotel was occupied by only two old Englishwomen. They each paid 12 francs per day even though Sella had a 40-person staff, five horses for the coaches and a small omnibus that went to the train station every day to greet potential guests - who never came. Everyone predicted a new failure. Everyone was wrong. The business was saved by James Gordon Bennett, owner of the New York Herald, who wanted somewhere quiet for his recently widowed sister to stay. Objecting to weekly bills, he put down 40,000 francs and asked to be informed when the money ran out. Hotel du Cap was now attracting custom of the aristocratic and the rich, who in those days were one and the same. Then it opened in winter and closed in summer; now it is the other way round. But if the clientele was fashionable, the facilities were not. In 1903, Sella was taking Lord Onslow, a regular guest, to the station. Sella remarked that the hotel was in need of central heating, private baths and a lift, if only he could afford them. His lordship reached for his chequebook and wrote out a sum sufficient not merely to modernise the place but to buy it. "We can settle the mortgage at a later date" was his wafted comment as he boarded his train. Tim Burton signed off in typical style In 1970, history nearly repeated itself when André Sella, Antoine's son, decided to sell. On the recommendation of a member of the Boch family, as in Villeroy & Boch, Rudolf Oetker, the German foodstuff billionaire, bought it despite having never visited. The hotel - now part of the Oetker Collection that includes Le Bristol in Paris - is owned by his wife, Maja. It was she who oversaw the massive restoration completed last spring. It cost €45 million (about £37.5 million) and took four years. The key word is restoration because all those euros seem to have been spent not just on reviving the original spirit of the place, but in a way that no one would notice. It's the first instance in my experience of anyone spending so many millions to disguise the fact that they have. The greatest risk in the whole exercise was that anyone should think the hotel had changed. In the words of French writer Anatole France, engraved on a plaque in the hotel garden: Ce qui sera, c'est ce qui fut. What will be, is what was. Hotel du Cap regulars, which is to say eight out of 10 guests, will notice some major differences. They could hardly miss the reconstructed swimming pool and the new terrace restaurant, which is reminiscent of the deck of an ocean liner berthed at the very tip of Cap d'Antibes, the hotel's rocky and exclusive point. Grace Jones left her mark In the guest rooms, now fewer and larger, the changes are more subtle. There is new lighting round the bathroom mirrors in hand-blown bubbles of glass, and there are televisions. Ah, the televisions. I loved the hotel. I loved the unpretentiousness of the staff, immaculate in creaseless cream jackets; I loved the space and the light and the fantasy of having emigrated to some gorgeous realm totally disconnected from the anguished century in which I live. I loved the cushioned pathways, on either side of a sweep of grey gravel, that descend through the garden to the sea. I loved the silence but for the soft pop of tennis balls being hit. I loved the pines, palms and lawns and the designer gulls that patrol them. But the televisions... The screen in my room had an aggressive black frame, totally at odds with the rest of the decor, as pale and pure as Keira Knightley's complexion, splashed with Colefax and Fowler fabrics. In fairness, the screen surrounds were supposed to be white but they were never going to be hidden. "Mrs Oetker is completely against television cabinets," said Philippe Perd, the hotel's managing director. Actually, she is completely against television. They didn't have televisions in the rooms before, or hair-driers, or private bars. They didn't take credit cards either. They do now, though the private bars, one senses, were adopted reluctantly. "If you want a glass of champagne in a luxury hotel, there should be someone to pour it," insisted Monsieur Perd. The only demand placed on guests is that they should have some grounding in the nuances and potential of these heights of service. In addition to room service, the call buttons in the bedrooms give you the option to summon either a valet de chambre and/or a femme de chambre. The guests of the 19th century would have understood the distinction. The Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc (00 334 93 61 39 01, hotel-du-cap-eden-roc.com) has rooms from 495 euros (about £400) per night and suites from 1,130 euros (about £930) per night. Rates are roughly a third higher during the Cannes Film Festival (festival-cannes.fr), which this year takes place from May 16-27.