Entering the bougainvillea-covered entrance to Club 55 at lunchtime last July 4, I was looking forward to the annual American Independence Day celebration that was always held at this iconic restaurant.

As usual, the whole of the outdoor venue was a riot of stars and stripes. American flags fluttered from the rafters and waved from the middle of each table.

Then I noticed something was not quite right. In place of Patrice de Colmont, the energetic and good-looking host who could normally be seen greeting and seating the day’s patrons, was his sister Veronique.

‘Where’s Patrice?’ I asked her.

‘He’s not too well,’ she replied, ‘He’s in the back of the restaurant – you can see him. We don’t tell many, but he would love to see you.’

I went back and what I encountered took me by surprise. Patrice had always been a dynamic and powerful personality, with a lion’s mane of hair and that genuine perma-tan that one only gets by being a true outdoors man.

What sat in his place was a frail old man who was struggling to stand up. Yet his magnetism and his beautiful smile remained undimmed as we greeted each other.

And so, when I heard he had died last week at the age of 77, the memories flooded back, not only of celebrating Independence Day, but of all the lunches I had enjoyed at 55.

It all began when the de Colmont family cooked lunch every day in their tiny beach hut for Brigitte Bardot and Roger Vadim’s film unit when they turned up to make the film And God Created Woman on what would end up as the most famous of all the Riviera’s beaches.

After the film crew left, the de Colmont family decided to keep making lunch but invite only those they knew, and so Bernard de Colmont created Le Club 55.

It was called 55 because it all happened in 1955, and ‘Club’ because de Colmont only wanted to serve people he liked.

Club 55 not only became the trendiest go-to place for lunch on the whole of the Cote d’Azur but the most sophisticated, yet effortlessly glamorous, beach club in the world, hosting heads of state and the global elite, without ever losing its unpretentious – almost primitive – allure.

It is a Mecca, not only for the denizens of Saint Tropez, but for the summer season’s visitors.

Today the hoi polloi fight to get reservations, yet Patrice de Colmont, son of the patriarch, followed his father’s example in being very choosy about whom he allowed in to sample the delicious food and the heady ambience of his little bit of heaven.

To give you an example of how difficult it was to get a table, one morning I received a call from a Hollywood superstar asking us if we were free for lunch the following day. When we said yes, he asked sheepishly: ‘Shall we

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Decades of decadence at the world’s most glamorous beach club: JOAN COLLINS recalls Roger Moore being handbagged by his wife for flirting… and the Hollywood star who couldn’t get a table