Patriarch's Wedding

By the time they got the bottles swept up in Antibes and Juan-les-Pins last week, it was magnificently evident: the marriage of Sidney Bechet, Negro patriarch of New Orleans jazz, to his new white wife had turned into the gaudiest rout on the Riviera since Rita Hayworth married Aly Khan.

Bechet ("I think I'm 60") and his bride, German-born Elizabeth Ziegler, 43, took their vows at the Antibes town hall. Then, while crowds along the way cheered and jitterbugged in the street, they rode in slow procession in an open carriage to Juan-les-Pins, two miles away, for the reception. Ten blaring jazz bands serenaded them along the way. After them came 400 wedding guests, including Music Hall Star Mistinguett and U.S. Vice Consul William Bates. Other celebrators: French army Senegalese, local fishermen, long-haired existentialists from Paris, two men carrying a twelve-foot clarinet, cagefuls of doves that had been let loose to flap overhead. Consumption of the 400 guests at the reception: 300 bottles of champagne, 100 bottles of aperitifs, 50 gallons of wine.

The Riviera saw it all as an occasion of profound sentiment: Bechet and his new wife had been engaged before (in 1928); they had married others, been divorced, met again recently in Algiers, decided to keep their old engagement.

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