This is an open-ended blog ranging from news about my latest gigs and publications
to ruminations about politics, world affairs, culture and whatever piques my interest—or ire.
Contact: tomsancton@yahoo.com

Friday, December 15, 2017

INTERVIEW IN ART+DESIGN DECEMBER ISSUE

Artful Author

By Laurie Fisher


AUTHOR TOM SANCTON UNPACKS ONE OF THE GREATEST SCANDALS IN MODERN MEMORY

THE BETTENCOURT AFFAIR is a multi­-generational family saga thatl has unfolded piecemeal in international newspapers and magazines over the past decade. The  story revolves around a mother, the late French billionaire heiress lo the L’Oréal cosmetics fortune Liliane Bellencourt; the mother’s much younger  male companion, artist François-Marie Banier; and Bttlencourt’s disgruntled daughter, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, who set the drama in  motion with a lawsuit contending that Banier had sweet-talked his way into huge chunks of the family fortune. It’s a complex, winding scandal involving Nazi collaborators, snooping butlers, corrupt politicians, at least three suicides, and tons of money. Thankfully Tom Sancton, New Orleans native, naturalized French citizen, and former Paris Bureau Chief for TIME, has firmed up this soapy saga with extensive research and interviews in his terrific new book, THE BETTENCOURT AFFAIR: THE WORLD’S RICHEST WOMAN AND THE SCANDAL THAT ROCKED PARIS (DUTTON). Here, we ask Sancton about the particulars.


LAURIE FISHER: You include an excerpt from F Scott Fitzgerald at the beginning of your book: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." How do you think the conflicts between Bettencourt, Banier, and Bettencourt-Meyers would have played out if such a vast amount of money were not involved?

TOM SANCTON: It's hard to imagine a scenario involving these characters that does not revolve around the immense Bettencourt fortune. Without it, I don't think Liliane would have had an important position in society—she had no particular talents or skills. I doubt that Banier would have been attracted to her because the thing that jump­ started their friendship was her decision to finance his artistic career. As for Françoise, she seems not to have been comfortable growing up in an ultra-wealthy milieu. As a mature woman Françoise became obsessed with protecting the family fortune when she felt it was threatened by Banier.  That's what triggered her suit and gave birth to the whole Bettencourt affair.

IF: Regardless of wealth or status, we all experience the inherent stress of complex relationships. What do you think the average person could learn from how the wealthy and influential handle this common human experience?

TS: Wealth was a complicating factor in these relationships, but I think the fundamental problems were not limited to the rich. The main thing the average person can take away from all this is that honesty and frankness are essential in all successful relationships. Liliane's problems with her daughter, going back to Françoise's teen years, could have been eased with some straight talk between them. As for Liliane and Banier, they talked constantly and exchanged thousands of letters over the years. I'm not sure how much frankness was involved—based on the correspondence there was a lot of coquetry. Still they managed to keep their intense relationship going for a quarter-century That says something about the value of communication.

LF: You have described it as"Dallas Downton Abbey, and House of Cards rolled into one." Would you please consider a screenplay for The Bettencourt Affair? It would be the next big thing everyone is binge-watching!

TS: Funny you should mention that. I wouldn't attempt a screenplay myself because I'm not a screenwriter. But my agent is shopping around the idea of a movie or TV series and there are actually a couple of nibbles Stay tuned…














Tuesday, November 21, 2017

AMERICAN LIBRARY OF PARIS PRESENTATION

Photo courtesy Christopher S. Dickey
On November 15, 2017, I had the honor and privilege of presenting my book The Bettencourt Affair at the American library of Paris. The turnout was good, about 50 book lovers, including Chris Dickey, former Newsweek Bureau Chief in Paris while I was TIME's Bureau Chief. Our old institutional rivalry notwithstanding, we have been good friends for many years. (Chris threatened to heckle me before the program started, but instead snapped this picture to immortalize the occasion.)

The audience was knowledgable about the "affair," and asked excellent questions after sitting through my 45-minute talk and a short reading. On site book sales were handled by Shakespeare & Co., possibly the most famous bookstore in Paris. (Shakespeare's Sylvia Beach published Joyce's Ulysses when nobody else would touch it.) Library patron Leslie de Galbert, a fellow New Orleanian, hosted a reception afterward in her high-rise apartment with a breathtaking view of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. Leslie has been a Parisienne since the 1970s, but we had a great time comparing New Orleans memories over champagne and canapés. For those who missed the occasion, I can't do anything about the champagne, but here is a transcript of my talk if anyone is curious. (Not required reading by any means, and there will be no quiz):



Most of you are probably famiar with the Bettencourt Affair. For those who are not, it’s a French scandal involving the world’s richest woman, L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, her much younger gay protégé, François-Marie Banier, to whom she gave several hundred million euros over 20 years, and Liliane’s daughter Françoise, who in 2007 sued Banier for exploiting her elderly mother and thus launched a decade-long legal battle.

But I tried to tell a much broader story, not in 2007, but in 1870 with the Franco-Prussian war. Don’t worry, I only spent a page on that. But the story as I saw it was far more complex and richer than the legal battle. I called it “Dallas, Downton Abbey, and House of Cards rolled into one.”

In fact it is many intertwined stories that tell us a lot more about modern French history, society, business, and politics than an account of the litigation itself. It’s part corporate history; partly a story about the creation and transmission of one of the world’s biggest fortunes ; partly the saga of a remarkable family over three generations—a family marked by great achievements and haunted by dark secrets. It’s partly a Greek tragedy about a conflicted mother-daughter relationship and a family torn by jealousy and vengeance; partly a political intrigue that contributed to the downfall of a president.

Most of all, it’s a story about people. From the beginning, what attracted me to this subject was not just the enormous amount of money involved but the intriguing characters at the heart of this drama and the interplay between them. With the characters as a centerpiece, I tried to construct my narrative in a novelistic way. It’s all factual and meticulously documented, but in the telling I tried to give it a novelistic feel, with character development, dialogue, description, scene-setting, a sense of place, applying the literary devices of fiction to a work of nonfiction—a technique that Truman Capote called the “nonfiction novel” when he published IN COLD BLOOD in 1966.

So let's take a look at the main characters.There is, first of all, Eugène Schueller, the son of an Alsatian baker and a domestic servant, who became a chemist and invented the synthetic hair-dye that was the origin of L’Oréal. Schueller was a brilliant inventor and businessman, a Horatio Alger-like figure who started L’Oréal in a kitchen laboratory and built it into the world’s number one cosmetics firm.

Schueller was a workaholic who called himself the “6,000-hour man,” because he worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week. But he had a serious flaw: a penchant for fascist ideology that led him to fund one of the most notorious far-right groups of the 1930s—La Cagoule—and, during the war, led him to actively collaborate with the Nazis. In his public speeches and radio chats, he called for a revolution to rid France of Republicanism, free-masonry and Jews. He openly praised Hitler’s “dynamism” and denounced what he called “the childish concepts of liberty, equality, and even fraternity.”

Schueller’s collaboration went far beyond his rhetorical support for national socialism. He was an informant of Helmut Knochen, the notorious head of the SS security police in France, a key figure behind the deportations of Jews, and executions of thousands of resistance fighters and hostages. In one document I unearthed in the Archives Nationales, Schueller urged young Frenchmen to join the Légion des Volontaires Français, which fought on the eastern front alongside the Waffen-SS.

Collaboration was also good for Schueller’s bottom line: L’Oréal’s sales quadrupled during the war, Schueller’s personal income increased tenfold, and a paint and varnish company he controlled, Valentine, sold as much of 90% of its wartime production to the German navy.

Like many collaborators, Schueller was caught up in the net of the postwar purge, known as the épuration. He was indicted and investigated, but avoided conviction because of his money and contacts—including a General who swore that Schueller had financed the Resistance, and two young men who had belatedly joined the Resistance: future president François Mitterrand, and Schueller’s future son-in-law André Bettencourt.

Schueller’s narrow escape did not prevent him in subsequent years from welcoming a number of ex-Nazi sympathizers into the ranks of L’Oréal. Among them was a notorious killer named Jacques Corrèze, who had fought with the Waffen-SS and swore allegiance to Hitler. Hired by Schueller in 1950, Corrèze went on to head L’Oréal’s U.S. subsidiary. Another postwar recruit was Jean Filliol, who had carried out more than a hundred assassinations and helped the Waffen-SS prepare their infamous 1944 massacre of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane.

Schueller was never seriously called to task for recycling these and other war criminals, though a spectacular exposé in 1991, years after the founder’s death, created a public relations disaster for L’Oréal and the Bettencourt family.

Another central character in this saga is, of course, Schueller’s heir and only child. Born in 1922, Liliane lost her mother when she was five and grew up under the influence of her father’s domineering personality and manic work-ethic. One of her lawyers, Georges Kiejman, once told me: “You will never understand Liliane’s story unless you realize that she was the adored daughter of a father she adored.” Indeed, she was enamored of her father and lived and breathed L’Oréal business from childhood.

But she was also a lonely girl, raised by an English nanny she did not like—and who eventually married the widowed Schueller. Liliane was packed off to a Catholic boarding school run by Dominican nuns. During her school vacations, she was forced by her father to work as an apprentice at L’Oréal, gluing labels on shampoo bottles and other low-level tasks.

There was never any thought in Schueller’s mind that his daughter would one day run the company. He believed women belonged in the home, keeping house and raising families. When it came time for Liliane to marry, Schueller had a hand-picked candidate in mind: André Bettencourt, the young Vichy supporter-turned Resistance member who had vouched for him during the postwar investigation.

Bettencourt was the son of a prominent provincial family from Normandy. His devoutly Catholic father was a lawyer, and his mother’s family had some aristocratic blood. André Bettencourt was tall, handsome, elegant in manner and speech. To Schueller, the nouveau-riche son of a baker and a domestic servant, Liliane’s marriage to Bettencourt would give her the social status he lacked. And André was more than willing to marry the heiress to the L’Oréal fortune.

But Liliane long resisted André. When she was 20, she fell madly in love with the son of a Moroccan pasha; it was only after that affair broke off that she accepted to marry André on the rebound. And when they chose the ring, she said told the jeweler, “above all, not too tight.” She later told an interviewer, “I detest all the conventions of marriage.” In fact, theirs was a marriage of convenience, not of passion. André had an active private life that didn’t involve women. And Liliane also enjoyed her personal freedom. But it was Liliane who wore the pants and controlled the purse. It was her money that bought André’s handmade suits and Havana cigars and financed his political career.


He held numerous, mostly low-level, cabinet positions after the war, but without his illicit political contributions, he never would have been invited to join a government. He was in fact a mediocre man, who quit school before the baccalaureat, somehow escaped military service in spite of the mobilisation générale, and throughout his long political career, did not leave his name on a single piece of legislation or political initiative. Nor, despite his high-sounding Vice-President’s title at L’Oréal, did he play an important role at the family firm.

His one moment in the spotlight came in 1995, when Le Monde revealed that he had written anti-Semitic diatribes for a pro-German paper in 1941 and 42, before he switched sides and belatedly joined the Resistance. In disgrace, he resigned from L’Oréal and declined to run for re-election to the Senate. It was an inglorious end to an undistinguished career.


Long before that, back in the 1980s, Liliane had gone through a deep depression. All her life she had been the “daughter of” or the “wife of,” but she felt unfulfilled in her personal life, bored with her marriage and dissatisfied with her daughter Françoise, with whom she had a fraught relationship.

She occupied herself with L’Oréal meetings, social events and dinner parties, but in reality she was bored with her codified bourgeois existence and longed for something more exciting. As she told an interviewer for the magazine Egoiste in 1987, “I don’t like blandness, I like salt.” Salt came into her life in the person of François-Marie Banier, who had been assigned to photograph her on that occasion.

Banier is a character out of a Balzac novel—a Rastignac or a Lucien de Rubempré—a relentless social climber intent on conquering le tout Paris. The battered child of a Hungarian immigrant father and an ego-centric French mother, he grew up seeking in others the affection and approval that were lacking in his family. After leaving home at age 16, he struck up intimate friendships with a succession of famous people, including Salvador Dalí, Louis Aragon, Vladimir Horowitz, YSL, François Mitterrand and many others.

But he was no mere celebrity stalker. Charming, seductive, and physically beautiful in his youth, he attracted attention with his witty conversation and his precocious talents as a writer. Aragon even compared him to Stendahl and Turgeniev. The praise was certainly excessive, but Banier had in fact written three successful novels by age 25. A talented dilettante, he also took up painting and photography—which led him to that fateful photo session with Liliane Bettencourt in 1987.

Banier immediately caught her attention that day. Unlike the fawning attitude most people adopted with the heiress, Banier began bossing her around. He didn’t like her hairdo, made her change her clothes, told her where to sit, how to pose. Instead of kicking him out, Liliane fell under his spell. It was the beginning of an intense 25-year relationship. Banier swept Liliane off her feet, taking her to the theater, art galleries, auction houses, introducing her to fascinating writers, artists and actors. As she put it “Banier made me live again.”

So she repaid him the only way she knew how: with money, hundreds of millions, always couched in terms of art patronage. Banier certainly cajoled and manipulated Liliane and encouraged her largesse, but from the beginning, she made it clear that she acted willingly and knowingly to finance his art career.

Liliane’s daughter Françoise, the other main character, of course looked on all this with a jaundiced eye. Less than a month after her father died in 2007, she sued Banier for abus de faiblesse and thus launched the famous legal battle that only ended last year. Françoise claimed to be protecting her ageing mother from Banier’s exploitation, but her motives were more complex. Liliane and Françoise had a terrible relationship. Liliane was elegant, social, passionately interested in the family business; Françoise was dowdy, withdrawn, more interested in her books and piano than the glittering social life of her parents. In Liliane’s eyes, her daughter just never lived up to her expectations. “Françoise was always one lap behind me,” she told one interviewer.

It didn’t help matters when Françoise decided to marry the grandson of a rabbi who died at Auschwitz, and to raise her two sons as Jews. Some have seen this as an act of atonement for her grandfather’s anti-Semitism and wartime collaboration. But it did not sit well with her staunchly Catholic parents. When Banier came into the picture, Françoise was naturally jealous of this brash interloper who usurped her place in her mother’s affections. She called him a ghuru and a Rasputin. Though her suit officially targeted Banier, Liliane took it as a treacherous attack on her. And she never forgave Françoise.

Those are the main protagonists, but there are dozens of secondary figures who are no less intriguing. In fact, Charles Dickens could not have invented a more interesting set of characters or a more convoluted plot. Among them was Olivier Metzner, the legendary criminal lawyer who filed the initial suit but wound up committing suicide before it was over; then there was Pascal Bonnefoy, the handsome butler who secretly recorded Liliane’s conversations with her advisers and broke the case wide open; and Claire Thibout, the accountant, who initially blew the whistle on Banier and wound up being investigated for false testimony; and let's not forget Patrice de Maistre, the smarmy financial adviser who sweet-talked Liliane out of € 12 million and famously begged her to buy him “the boat of his dreams.”

The scandal spilled over into the political arena when Eric Woerth, President Sarkozy’s cabinet minister and campaign treasurer was indicted for collecting illegal donations from the Bettencourts—not to mention conflicts of interest involving a Legion d’Honneur decoration and a cushy job for his wife.

Then there is Sarkozy himself, an endlessly fascinating character for his frenetic energy, ruthless ambition, and ethical lapses that embroiled him in a number of scandals. Prominent among them was the Bettencourt Affair. Early on, Sarkozy offered to mediate between mother and daughter. Then he allegedly urged the prosecutor Philippe Courroy, a personal friend, to quash the case. Finally, Sarkozy found himself under investigation for allegedly soliciting illegal campaign contributions from the Bettencourts.

At the time, the affair did not bring down the president, but it was one of the scandals that contributed to his re-election defeat in 2012 and scuttled his comeback attempt last year. And he’s not done with it yet: in October, the Paris prosecutor ordered him to stand trial in the so-called wiretap affair, involving his attempts to obtain protected judicial information on the Bettencourt investigation.

So those are some of the characters that give a novelistic flavor to this story. I’m not going to walk you through all the twists and turns of the 10-year legal battle—for that you have to read the book. But most of you probably know that outcome: at the appeal trial last year, Banier was convicted of abus de faiblesse and sentenced to four years in prison—but the sentence was entirely suspended, so no jail time. He was fined €375,000 euros—a pittance for him—but the €158 million in damages assessed at the original trial was rescinded. So Banier got off with a relative wrist tap. But at age 70, he is in many ways a broken man. He is a convicted felon, his reputation tarnished, his life tormented by the 10-year legal battle.

Liliane’s last decade was also poisoned by the affair. Lost in the fog of Alzheimers, she finished her days under the guardianship of her daughter—exactly the fate she always dreaded.

The big winner was Françoise. She not only won her suit against Banier, she also inherited her mother’s 33% share of L’Oréal, worth more than $45 billion at last count. And she recently got our from under a legal cloud of her own. For the past year, Françoise was under formal investigation for allegedly bribing her star witness. But in August the Paris prosecutor called for dropping the charges pending final judicial approval. So for all intents and purposes, the legal phase of the Bettencourt Affair is over.

A lot of people have asked me how I first got interested in this subject and chose to do a book on it. Actually the subject chose me in a way. I was in France during the summer of 2010, at a time when the Bettencourt Affair exploded into the headlines. The butler’s tapes had just been leaked and the media were talking about Sarkozy’s involvement and calling it a French Watergate. I emailed Graydon Carter at VF and told him it would make a great piece. He said, “You’re right. Why don’t you do it?” I hadn’t intended to write it myself, but I said okay. In for a penny out for a pound. The piece came out in October 2010.

Two months later, Françoise and Banier signed an agreement that supposedly put an end to the suit. But the pact unraveled and the investigation continued. When it finally went to trial in 2015, my literary agent read a piece about the affair in the NYT and thought it would make a great book for the US market. She called me and suggested I put together a proposal. Well I wasn’t at all sure it would appeal to US readers, but I said, Okay, why not. Again, in for a penny, out for a pound. My agent’s instincts were right: she eventually had six US publishers bidding on the book. We signed with Dutton in May 2015. I delivered the manuscript eighteen months later, and the rest is history as they say.

There’s lots more to say about this multifaceted story, but I’d like to stop here to read a short section from the book. It’s from a chapter called “The Christmas Visitor," describing a dramatic confrontation between one of Liliane's financial advisers and François-Marie Banier...

Thursday, September 21, 2017

R.I.P. LILIANE BETTENCOURT, 1922-2017

I just learned of the death today of L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, 94, the world's richest woman. According to her daughter, she "went peacefully." But the last 10 years of her life were anything but peaceful as she found herself at the center of an epic legal battle triggered by her daughter's 2007 suit against Liliane's protégé, artist François-Marie Banier, accused and eventually convicted of swindling the heiress out of part of her $40 billion fortune. A sad end to a long and eventful life. But also a liberation from the fog of Alzheimers and from the grip of her daughter's guardianship, which in effect held Liliane a prisoner in her gilded cage, forbidden to see even her closest friends. Proof, once again, that wealth does not guarantee happiness.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEWS "THE BETTENCOURT AFFAIR"







ARTS | BOOKS | BOOKSHELF

How to Spend a Billion Dollars

‘There was a language I created with her that was expressed through this money that she wanted to give me,’ Banier explained. Tobias Grey reviews ‘The Bettencourt Affair’ by Tom Sancton.



THE BETTENCOURT AFFAIR
By Tom Sancton: Dutton, 396 pages, $28

François-Marie Banier and Liliane Bettencourt in 1992. SYGMA/GETTY IMAGES
By Tobias Grey. 
Updated Aug. 24, 2017 7:29 p.m. ET
The affair involved a prominent French family at war with itself. It featured collusion between private business interests and powerful politicians. Two people connected with the affair committed suicide; several reputations were ruined. As Tom Sancton, former Paris bureau chief for Time magazine, described the saga, it was “Dallas, Downton Abbey and House of Cards rolled into one.” In the case of “The Bettencourt Affair”—Mr. Sancton’s chronicle of the nearly decade- long legal drama surrounding the family behind the L’Oréal empire— the hype is justified. The story centers on how an aging and ailing Liliane Bettencourt, the cosmetics-company heiress, gifted a billion dollars’ worth of artwork, real estate, cash, and life-insurance policies to portrait photographer François-Marie Banier. The matter came to public attention when Ms. Bettencourt’s daughter filed suit against Mr. Banier for allegedly swindling her enfeebled mother out of a fortune. Over the years that followed, Mr. Sancton covered the episode’s many twists and turns closely for Vanity Fair magazine, and the book that has emerged from his reporting on the case is surely the definitive account.
One of the book’s recurring questions is what moved Ms. Bettencourt —according to Forbes, the world’s richest woman, worth nearly $40 billion—to such generosity toward the eccentric Mr. Banier. Their relationship was not sexual: Mr. Banier is gay. According to Mr. Sancton, however, the bond between the friends was nonetheless deep. An only child, hearing-impaired, distant from her only daughter, and locked in a marriage drained of passion, Ms. Bettencourt felt she led a life starved of affection, excitement and beauty. She also lacked the sort of soulful connection she had enjoyed with her beloved father, Eugène Schueller—the ambitious son of a baker who founded L’Oréal in 1909 and built an immense fortune from scratch.
In 1987, Mr. Banier—who has a history of befriending older women— first began cultivating his friendship with Liliane and her husband, politician André Bettencourt. “She gave me the possibility of doing things I could never have done without her,” Mr. Banier has said. “There was a language I created with her that was expressed through this money that she wanted to give me.” Mr. Banier’s “crazy” streak reminded Ms. Bettencourt of her father; she was also, Mr. Sancton reports, flattered by Mr. Banier’s attentions, “and delighted to be introduced into his glittering world of artistic and cultural connections.” Ms. Bettencourt and Mr. Banier’s platonic love affair continued unabated for some 25 years. Many have wondered why the heiress’s husband never intervened. But the couple’s lavish lifestyle, as well as his own political career, were financed by his wife’s vast wealth, and he maintained it was her right to do whatever she pleased with her own money.

Things finally came to a head in November 2007, not long after André Bettencourt’s death, when a family employee told the Bettencourts’ daughter, Françoise Meyers, that she had overheard Mr. Banier trying to persuade Ms. Bettencourt to legally adopt him as a son. A month later, Françoise filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Banier for abus de faiblesse (abuse of weakness) of her mother. The accusations and evidence surfaced (and re-surfaced) during the court drama that followed provide some of the most explosive details in Mr. Sancton’s reporting. At many points, these revelations implicate French government officials, widening the scandal’s reach. For example, Mr. Bettencourt’s personal valet, Pascal Bonnefoy, made secret recordings of the Bettencourt family’s business dealings, which allegedly included illegal financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s successful 2007 presidential campaign. The affair also dredged up Eugène Schueller’s unsavory wartime history, which included ties to the Nazis and significant involvement with the French fascist group La Cagoule. During the épuration that followed the collapse of the Vichy regime, Schueller was spared imprisonment and the loss of his company thanks in large part to the interventions of François Mitterrand, the longest-serving president of France.
While Mr. Sancton deserves credit for the depth of his investigation— he interviewed some 60 people, including lawyers, politicians, celebrities, and servants—the Bettencourt affair is treacherous territory, even for a veteran journalist. Mr. Sancton’s account is a bit too taken with idle gossip. Mr. Sancton also seems at times to have fallen under the charming spell of Mr. Banier, noting that, “despite his media image as a dandy and jet-setter, he is in fact an obsessed workaholic and a serious artist.” (Exactly when this “workaholic” found time for the daily expenditures funded by Ms. Bettencourt— which the Meyers’s lawyers assessed at roughly $30,000—is not explained.) Mr. Sancton’s account also suffers from the silence of Ms. Meyer and Ms. Bettencourt, both of whom turned down his requests for interviews. Ms. Bettencourt is now 94 and reportedly afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease, so it is likely that her last words on the subject will be those issued in January 2012. Questioned by a French judge about whether Mr. Banier abused her, she said: “Surely a bit, but I don’t care . . . . I accept the consequences of my mistakes.”
Perhaps the greatest of those mistakes was to shatter the convention whereby France’s super-rich are expected to keep a very low profile. “For certain French people, gaining money is worse than pedophilia,” says one attorney involved in the case. Liliane Bettencourt’s largesse brought this taboo topic into the open in spectacular fashion. Readers curious to see where that dangerous foray led will have to find the rest in Mr. Sancton’s riveting, if somewhat tawdry, telling.

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To buy THE BETTENCOURT AFFAIR:




            OCTAVIA BOOKS-NEW ORLEANS


Saturday, August 26, 2017

20 YEARS AFTER DIANA'S DEATH, THE PAPARAZZI CONTINUE TO STALK



Plus ça change! 

Despite the uproar following Diana’s death, France’s paparazzi continue to stalk the rich and famous


By Tom Sancton
Paris, August 26, 2017


No one can forget the night of August 31, 1997. Pursued at high speed by a relentless pack of paparazzi, the black Mercedes bearing Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed struck the 13th pillar of Paris’s Alma tunnel and crashed into a concrete wall. Fayed was killed instantly. Diana, despite a heroic effort to save her life, died on the operating table four hours later. Blame focused immediately on the paparazzi who had chased the couple on motorcycles then crawled all over their smashed vehicle snapping photos and jostling one another for position. Ten photojournalists were arrested that night and later charged with manslaughter and failing to aid persons in danger.
            But another factor soon emerged:  an autopsy of the Mercedes’s deceased driver, Ritz Hotel security chief Henri Paul, revealed that he was drunk and under the influence of prescription drugs at the time of the crash.  If that fact relieved the photographers of the legal responsibility for the accident—all charges against them were eventually dropped—it did little to change the public perception that these camera-slinging cowboys had hounded the Princess to her death.
            Despite widespread calls to rein in the reckless methods of the paparazzi, little has changed in the intervening 20 years. The French celebrity press—magazines like Paris Match, Voici, Gala, and VSD—continue to thrive on stolen images of the rich and famous, and daredevil photographers keep shooting them. “The paparazzi calmed down for six months after the accident, then they started back up again,” says Alain Toucas, Diana’s former lawyer, who currently represents the royal family of Monaco.  “We hoped the situation would improve, but in fact it’s gotten worse.”
Even before the death of the Princess, France had one of the Europe’s strongest laws against invasion of privacy. The French civil code states that “everyone has a right to respect of their private life” and accords to each individual the right to control his or her own image. The problem is that the celebrity magazines continue to publish paparazzi photos and, when they are sued, simply pay the fines and make up for the cost through boosted sales. Though the law is strict on paper, it has little deterrent effect. “I continue to pursue all those who violate the private lives of my clients,” says Toucas. “But our efforts have little success. We receive minimal damage payments, but we have failed to put an end to these abuses.”
Bruno Mouron, one of France’s best-known paparazzi, agrees that the celebrity stalking continues unabated but laments that the business has changed since he started working in the 1970s. For one thing, it is nowhere as lucrative as it was in the pre-Diana days when a single photo could fetch six figures. “The prices are ten percent of what they were 20 years ago,” he says. “Now you’re lucky if you can get $5,000 for a photo.”
Mouron attributes that precipitous drop to a number of causes. “With Instagram and Smartphones, everyone can be a paparazzi. Celebrity photos are all over the Internet.” Another factor is that the so-called “people” magazines increasingly organize their own photo shoots, often with the express or tacit cooperation of the subject. Then there is the precarious state of print journalism in general: more and more publications are closing down and there is less money to spend on photos and reporting. Finally there is the competition of young, hungry photojournalists attracted by the adventure and willing to work cheap. “You don’t need a diploma to be a photographer,” Mouron grumbles. “With today’s digital cameras, the photos take themselves.”
Mouron waxes nostalgic about the old days. “It used to be a princely profession,” he says. “Travel, grand hotels, fancy restaurants. To photograph celebrities, we had to go to the same places they did. Now it’s a profession for bums—kids riding around on motor scooters and eating fast food. If I was 20 years old today, I’d never choose this profession. It no longer makes one dream.”
Alain Toucas is unmoved by such complaints: “Maybe it is less lucrative for the paparazzi—that’s not my problem—but it is just as bothersome to the people they stalk. And I am afraid that, one day, we will be confronted by another tragedy like Diana’s.”

***************

Tom Sancton and Scott MacLeod's 1998 bestseller is now available in an updated 20th anniversary edition.


 “Sancton and MacLeod…serve as textbook models of methodical reporting.”
             —Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

 “A solid piece of work…Every eyewitness is interviewed; every lead followed up; every theory is explored.”
              —Roy Greenslade, The Guardian

“The definitive book on those final moments, days, hours, minutes and seconds of Diana’s life.”
               —Cindy Adams, New York Post

“[The authors] have done more in-depth reporting on this than just about anyone else.”
                                                           —Anderson Cooper, CNN


TO BUY DEATH OF A PRINCESS:
                                                    AMAZON
                                                    iTUNES
                                                    BARNES & NOBLE