“The light over the Cap is extraordinary this time of year,” the general manager of the Hotel du Cap, Philippe Perd, tells me. It’s a literal statement: The cool airs of spring have been swept away with the seasons, while the hot, heavy ones of summer have yet to set in. In May, the sun shines warm and sweet, its rays a gentle honeyed diffusion.

But it also feels like the light shines because of something that doesn’t have to do with seasons at all: the Cannes Film Festival.

Each May, movie stars and celebrities descend on the South of France for the international event, where high-profile films from the industry’s auteurs make their premiere. The best among them receive a standing ovation. The best of the best receives the Palme d’Or—and thus, most likely, a place on the short list for a best-picture Oscar nomination. And while they’re there, the biggest celebrities, directors, studio heads, and agents all stay at one place: the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc.

The Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc (not to be confused with the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat, a wonderful yet less mythologized property in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat) has been synonymous with the Cannes Film Festival since it began in 1946. By that time, the luxury property in Antibes, France—once a belle epoque mansion belonging to French newspaper owner Hippolyte de Villemessant—had already been in operation for 57 years. It developed quite the desirable reputation in the process.

A wealthy American couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy, once rented out the Hotel du Cap and its rocky cliffside peninsula overlooking the cerulean Mediterranean Sea during the summer. They invited a number of their glamorous friends to come stay, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. That fateful trip would later become the basis for Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel, Tender Is the Night. “On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel,” Fitzgerald wrote of his fictionalized Hotel du Cap, which he called Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers. He added that it was “a summer resort of notable and fashionable people.”

While World War II led to waning tourism in the Côte d’Azur, slowly but surely, the wealthy began to return after V-E Day. With the debut of the Cannes Film Festival in 1946, a whole new fabulous and moneyed cohort was set to arrive: Hollywood. And they all wanted to stay at the hotel they’d read about—even if Antibes was technically about a 25-minute drive away from the city of Cannes itself.