Each May, Hollywood glitterati descend upon Cannes for its annual Film Festival, which features — along with actors, directors and models — the Hotel Martinez at the center of the opulent affair.
Film festival jury members snag luxurious rooms and suites within this historic Art Deco palace, the crown jewel of the French Riviera, which overlooks the glittering Mediterranean Sea.
Since opening in 1929, the Martinez has played host to some of the world’s most-celebrated actors — from Rita Hayworth and Charlie Chaplin to Sophia Loren, Liz Taylor and Sean Connery.
But beneath its cinematic glitz lies a harrowing history that haunts the Hotel Martinez to this day.
Its founder, Emmanuel Michel Martinez, a courageous activist in the French Resistance movement, helped Jews, refugees and spies escape Nazi terror during World War II — all while oblivious German officers were stationed mere floors away.
“The story has never been told — it’s a saga that runs 100 years,” Danny Rosner, filmmaker and co-author of Phillip M. Kenny’s new book, “The Hotel Martinez,” out now, told The Post.
“The drama started the day it opened its doors in 1929 when the Hotel Martinez ran into financial difficulties compounded by the stock market crash,” Rosner said.
Palermo-born Martinez, the son of a Sicilian harbor master, worked his way up the hotel trade across France before saving enough francs to finance his dream of becoming a hotelier.
When he opened the Hotel Martinez in 1929 it instantly became one of the poshest vacation spots along the Côte d’Azur — embodying the spirit of the artsy Années folles, the “crazy years” — amid the roaring 20’s in Europe.
Then, six months after its debut, the US stock market crashed, decimating tourism.
Martinez clamored to keep his hotel afloat, ensuring his staff remained employed despite the financial strain. He juggled paying his creditors and managed, somehow, to avoid the auction block that befell many other French hotels.
Then the Holocaust and World War II broke out, with France among the first nations to surrender to the Nazis in June 1940. Several of the floors at the Hotel Martinez were taken over by German SS and Italian Military Command officers as they ruthlessly ruled the country.
Martinez, like other hoteliers throughout France during the German occupation, had no choice but to comply.
But Martinez’s experienced an unexpected political awakening, sparked by the fiancé of his daughter, Micheline — a Canadian intelligence officer named Tom Kenny, who helped British pilots and spies escape Vichy France.
Sensing an opportunity to be of service, Martinez sprung to action for the French resistance, secretly supporting Kenny as he helped hundreds of Jews, refugees and spies.
Many hid out on the lower level floors of the hotel as they plotted a route to safety.
Meanwhile, the Italian and German officers were quartered mere floors above.
Days after his wedding, Kenny — a distant relation of Theodore Roosevelt — was arrested by the Gestapo and jailed on espionage charges.
Martinez worked tirelessly to have his son-in-law released, connecting with Kenny’s family in Canada, who had strong ties to the international banking industry as founders of the Royal Bank of Canada.
Micheline, who became pregnant with their first child, exchanged prison letters with Kenny, who underwent four agonizing months of interrogation by his Nazi captors.
Ultimately, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt intervened, sending a letter to the “American Ambassador in Vichy . . . asking him to obtain a special favor from the French military authorities that the investigation of his ‘cousin’ Thomas Kenny . . . be brought to more reasonable dimensions,” Kenny, who is the son of Thomas Kenny, writes in the book.
Upon his release, Kenny continued to fight against the Nazi regime as a spy, eventually escaping under cover of night to Gibraltar at the end of December 1942, and then making his way to Spain in early 1943.
Around that time, French businessman and Nazi collaborator Mendel Skolnikoff lent Martinez 19 million Francs, which the hotelier repaid two months later.
Skolnikoff, however, was kidnapped in June 1945 and violently assassinated under the orders of the French secret services for collaborating with the Nazis.
The French government then accused Martinez of selling the hotel to Skolnikoff, whom they saw as a black marketer, and collaborating with the Italian and German occupiers, leading them to seize his hotel in 1944.
“All of his properties and valuables were confiscated and his estate now owed the French government billions of francs,” Rosner recounted to The Post.
The French government held on to the Martinez until 1982, when it was sold to new owners, the Concorde Group.
Martinez never saw a franc of the money from his beloved hotel before he died in Italy in 1973.
The legal battle for compensation is still being waged today.
Despite the murky finances, the Hotel Martinez continues to dazzle stars and A-listers, hosting the Cannes Film Festival’s opening ceremony — its fabled sun deck the site for prime people watching location on the La Croisette.
As for Martinez, his legacy — and name — live on, with the Hotel Martinez sign lit up over the five-star retreat in all of its cinematic splendor.
