The Bettencourt Affair Read online

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  Copyright © 2017 by Thomas A. Sancton

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  Version_1

  For Maya Jane Sancton,

  who came into the world while this book was gestating, and brightens every day

  Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz”

  Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

  —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

  Do you think I’m going to go to court and plead against my mother, to add a public scandal to a private one?

  —Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

  CONTENTS

  Map of Paris

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author's Note

  Prologue: Lost in the Fog

  PART ONE

  Life Before Banier

  1. The Founder

  2. The Heiress and the Consort

  3. Poor Little Rich Girl

  PART TWO

  Banier Enters the Scene

  4. Portrait of the Artist

  5. Such Good Friends

  6. Dark Roots

  7. A Generous Man

  8. The Christmas Visitor

  9. The Ambitious Monsieur Sarkozy

  10. The Whistle-blower

  PART THREE

  The Bettencourt Affair

  11. The Opening Salvo

  12. Sibling Rivals

  13. Sarkozy Joins the Fray

  14. Metzner’s End Run

  PART FOUR

  The Net Spreads Wider

  15. The Butler Did It

  16. Behind Closed Doors

  17. The Woerth Affair

  18. Filthy Rich

  19. Banier’s Année Terrible

  20. The Fixer

  PART FIVE

  The Endgame

  21. Bordeaux

  22. Hardball

  23. A President in the Crosshairs

  24. Banier Strikes Back

  25. Life and Death

  26. The Reckoning

  27. The Eye of the Beholder

  28. The Wheels of Justice

  29. Farewell to Paradise?

  30. The Verdict

  Epilogue: Wings

  Cast of Characters

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A French friend of mine, a cultivated man passionate about theater and literature, asked why I wanted to write a book about “those people.” By that, he meant the fabulously wealthy Bettencourt family, the brash artist who enchanted Madame Bettencourt and made off with a fortune, and the jealous daughter who tried to stop him. For nearly a decade, “those people” were fodder for a French media frenzy that often focused on gossip and scandal. The Bettencourt Affair is not a gossip book. It is an in-depth look at an intriguing set of characters whose intense relationships and clashing motives played out against the backdrop of wars, fortune, politics, and the arts—until the law intervened and led to one of the most dramatic court cases in recent French history. It is above all a rich human drama about money, class, seduction, and betrayal, very French in its forms but universal in its themes. In the end, “those people” might just tell us something about ourselves.

  I have followed the Bettencourt Affair since it first erupted into the French headlines in 2010. As a former Paris bureau chief for Time magazine and a longtime resident of France, I had covered hundreds of stories about French politics, business, culture, and society. But I had never witnessed a drama quite like this—it was Dallas, Downton Abbey, and House of Cards rolled into one. I proposed a piece to Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, a friend and colleague from my days at Time, and got an immediate go-ahead. My 6,000-word article, entitled “Dangerous Liaisons,” ran in the magazine’s November 2010 edition. My interest in the case perked up again in January 2015 when it finally went to trial in Bordeaux. It was at that point that the idea of doing a book took shape—a book not just on the legal case but on the whole Bettencourt saga, from the founding of the L’Oréal cosmetics empire in 1909 to the bitter battle that tore the family apart and even threatened a president a century later.

  A vast amount of research material existed already—including literally thousands of articles in the French press and at least a half dozen French books on the affair. Digging into the past of L’Oréal founder Eugène Schueller took me to the French National Archives, where the files on his alleged Nazi collaboration are housed. In addition to the written sources, I conducted more than sixty interviews.

  Attentive readers will note that I gained direct access to François-Marie Banier and people close to him, including his partner Martin d’Orgeval and former partner Pascal Greggory. Despite numerous requests, however, I was unable to speak directly to Françoise Bettencourt Meyers or her husband, Jean-Pierre Meyers. This is deeply regrettable, but it was their choice. In the absence of face-to-face contact, I was able to talk to sources close to the Meyerses, including their lawyers, friends, and communications advisers. The five published interviews by Françoise Meyers between 2009 and 2012 gave me a good idea of her motivations and point of view.

  As for the central figure in this drama, Liliane Bettencourt, my request to interview her for Vanity Fair in 2010 fell through at the last minute. Now it’s too late: The ninety-four-year-old heiress is closeted in her mansion under the control of her daughter, deep into Alzheimer’s, and obviously inaccessible. I was able to talk to a number of people close to her, including her guardian for legal matters, Olivier Pelat, a lifelong friend of the Bettencourts. In addition to a half dozen published interviews dating back to 1987, and two televised interviews, I was able to consult Liliane Bettencourt’s prolific correspondence with François-Marie Banier between 1989 and 2010, two volumes of which are included in the court record.

  One of the most useful resources was the thirty-five-volume investigative dossier. In addition to police reports and judicial documents, these files contain hundreds of depositions by witnesses ranging from principals in the case—Banier, Liliane Bettencourt, and Françoise Meyers—to the Bettencourts’ domestic employees, advisers, family friends, medical experts, and the other defendants.

  In pursuing the legal aspects, I carried out lengthy interviews with former prosecutor Philippe Courroye, who headed up the initial investigation, and Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez, who took over the case when Courroye closed his own probe in September 2009. I also met with a dozen lawyers representing the various parties, including one, Pascal Wilhelm, who ultimately found himself on the defendants’ bench. Several lawyers also made their court briefs available to me.

  On the political angle, I was unable to speak directly with ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy or his former campaign treasurer and cabinet minister Éric Woerth. But their depositions, published interviews, and, in Woerth’s case, a whole book on the affair, provided useful insights. Interviews with two of Sarkozy’s closest aides, former judicial adviser Patrick Ouart, and former chief of staff Claude Guéant, gave me a fascinating inside view of the case as seen from the Élysée Palace.

  I am deeply grateful to all the above-named sources for their cooperation and assistance.

  —

  A note on monetary values: In general I have kept euro amounts in euros to avoid confusion. A euro is worth slightly more than a US dollar ($1.05 as of January 1, 2017). Rather than working out the precise conversion, readers may find it easier just to think of the euro as a “fat” dollar. I have converted the values of the French franc, predecessor to the euro, into dollars at their historic exchange rate.

  —Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, January 2017

  PROLOGUE: LOST IN THE FOG

  Is it because she has no memory that she is so serene? Is it memory that causes pain?

  —François-Marie Banier, Balthazar, fils de famille

  She is the world’s richest woman, worth $36.1 billion at last count, but no one could envy her. Liliane Bettencourt vegetates in an armchair in her Art Deco mansion near Paris, surrounded b y her servants, dogs, and caregivers. She is deaf and lost in the fog of senility. Medical experts have diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease. One can only wonder what goes on in the old woman’s head. Does she harken back to her childhood as the daughter of Eugène Schueller, multibillionaire founder of the cosmetics giant L’Oréal? Does she call to mind her late husband, André Bettencourt, and his illustrious career as a government minister, deputy, and senator? Does she think of Françoise, her only child, the serious-minded intellectual who preferred her books and piano to the grand dinner parties and receptions given by her parents? Does Liliane even remember François-Marie Banier, the seductive photographer, artist, and writer who became her closest friend and, according to Françoise, sweet-talked her out of hundreds of millions of euros? And does she know that her daughter’s 2007 lawsuit against Banier triggered a judicial-financial-political earthquake whose aftershocks continue to reverberate?

  It would be best for Liliane Bettencourt if she did forget that episode. For it poisoned her twilight years and exposed her private life, her extravagant finances, her free-spirited friendships, and her encroaching infirmities to relentless public scrutiny—which she denounced in her more lucid days as “the odious accusations that I read each morning.” That was in 2010, the year the Bettencourt Affair exploded onto the front pages and even threatened to engulf French president Nicolas Sarkozy in what the press referred to as a “French Watergate.” But long before it achieved such public notoriety, the conflict between mother and daughter and an audacious interloper was slowly brewing.

  —

  Perhaps it all started on a balmy July day in 1993. The scene was the Pointe de l’Arcouest, a promontory on the rocky, windswept northern coast of Brittany, where Eugène Schueller had built a grandiose vacation home in 1926. Liliane and her husband, André, loved to entertain there—presidents, ministers, movie actors, and famous writers had all enjoyed the Bettencourts’ hospitality over the years. But on this day, the luncheon was a more intimate affair. Seated around a granite table in the front dining room, whose large windows offered a panoramic view of the English Channel, André and Liliane were joined by their daughter, Françoise; her husband, Jean-Pierre Meyers; and their two young sons. Also at their table that day was a somewhat eccentric houseguest.

  François-Marie Banier, then forty-six, seemed to know everybody who was anybody. His conversation was peppered with the names of celebrities with whom he claimed to have intimate friendships—Salvador Dalí, Vladimir Horowitz, Samuel Beckett, Isabelle Adjani, Johnny Depp, President François Mitterrand, and on and on. With his loud voice and explosive laugh, Banier was impossible to ignore. He was witty, cultivated, amusing, seductive. But he also had a gift for getting on people’s nerves. He often behaved like a child who was starved for attention—and he usually got it. Liliane Bettencourt, seventy years old and Banier’s elder by a quarter century, was clearly fascinated by him.

  As seagulls circled and cried outside the open windows, Françoise, who had just turned forty, gazed at Banier through her heavy-framed glasses and watched her mother hang on his every word. Liliane, who suffered from progressive deafness since childhood, was all the more attentive in her effort to read Banier’s lips. All her life, Françoise had craved, but rarely received, the kind of attention that Liliane was lavishing on this invasive stranger. He spoke, Liliane laughed. He smiled, she melted. He bragged about his latest photo exhibition, she gushed praise for his work.

  As for poor André, seventy-four, a silver-haired senator and former cabinet minister, he had long since learned to put up with his wife’s whims and caprices. Liliane was the heiress, the one who held the purse strings, bought his elegant suits and cigars, and financed his political career. If Banier made his wife happy, André had nothing to say. Besides, he also found this gay artist amusing. A persistent rumor had it that André had actually encountered and befriended Banier earlier, in a very different milieu, and that he was the one who introduced the photographer to his wife. Banier always denied it.

  Jean-Pierre Meyers, forty-four, a bland-faced man with receding hair and arching eyebrows, observed the tense scene but said little. He was used to holding his tongue at these family gatherings. A practicing Jew, he well knew that the staunchly Catholic Bettencourts had not favored his marriage to Françoise, even though they brought him into the family firm. Someday, once his wife inherited the principal share of L’Oréal, he would be in a commanding position. Until then, he could afford to bide his time. But Banier’s presence doubtless made him uncomfortable. Between the two men there were not six degrees of separation but three: Meyers had formerly lived with the sister of Banier’s ex-partner, actor Pascal Greggory. Meyers’s breakup with the woman had been followed almost immediately by his marriage to the future L’Oréal heiress. Excellent career move, but rather messy in human terms. Banier was a loose cannon, liable to bring up the awkward subject in the presence of Meyers’s wife, his children, and his in-laws.

  Banier did lash out that day—but Meyers was not his target. “He started speaking to my father with mocking, scornful and humiliating words,” Françoise later recalled. “Right in front of him and in front of our children! I found his behavior completely odious.” Françoise has never revealed the subject of Banier’s tirade, but another witness claims to remember the scene quite well. Serving at the table that day was Pascal Bonnefoy, André’s personal valet, a man so devoted to his employer that years later, after André’s death, he would shed tears at the mere mention of his name. According to Bonnefoy, “Banier addressed Monsieur with irony, almost aggressiveness. He reproached him for the articles he’d published during the war in a collaborationist [that is, pro-German] newspaper. It was not a frontal attack but it was intended to wound. Monsieur was embarrassed. Madame didn’t react. At times like that, she knows how to play on her deafness. Only her daughter tried to intervene. The others had their noses in their plates. The luncheon was ruined.” (Banier remembers the scene quite differently, as an argument about musical preferences.)

  The articles Bonnefoy referred to were anti-Semitic diatribes that André Bettencourt had written for a German-backed paper in 1941 and 1942, before he switched sides and belatedly joined the Resistance. Raising the subject on that occasion was doubly embarrassing, for Françoise’s husband was the grandson of a famous rabbi who had died at Auschwitz, and the couple were raising their two sons as Jews. Lurking in the background of all this was an even bigger family scandal: Eugène Schueller, the revered founder of L’Oréal, had financed notorious pro-Fascist movements and was investigated for Nazi collaboration after the war.

  Following the luncheon incident, Françoise told her parents she no longer wished to be in Banier’s presence. But André and Liliane did not share her sentiments. The artist had been cultivating their friendship since 1987, and the Bettencourts, especially Liliane, welcomed his company. Flattered by Banier’s attentions, and delighted to be introduced into his glittering world of artistic and cultural connections, she began to lavish extravagant gifts on him. Gifts that, on paper at least, totaled nearly a billion euros at one point—a staggering amount even for one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

  But it was not just the money. As Françoise tells it, Banier so dominated Liliane’s time that she found it increasingly difficult even to see her mother—though she lives across the street from the Bettencourt mansion in the posh Paris suburb of Neuilly. It seemed, she said, as if Liliane had been “pulled into a sect” by a “guru who cut me off from my family.” Françoise looked on Banier as a sort of sibling rival, who attempted to insert himself into the family as a surrogate son and drive a wedge into the already troubled relationship between mother and daughter.

  Things came to a head for Françoise shortly after André’s death in November 2007, when one of the Bettencourt employees gave her some stunning news: She claimed to have overheard a conversation in which Banier insisted that Liliane legally adopt him as her son. “That was too much,” Françoise recalled. “This man had denigrated my father, manipulated my mother, and shattered our family.” On December 19, 2007, she filed a criminal complaint against Banier for abus de faiblesse, or exploiting the weakness of her aged mother.