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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
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| 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:
I've just finished the first couple of chapters, and it's indeed a ripping read.
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