THE WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEWS "THE BETTENCOURT AFFAIR"

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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

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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NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF "BETTENCOURT"

BOOKS

‘The Bettencourt Affair,’ a Buffet for Scandal Aficionados

Books of The Times

By JANET MASLIN AUG. 23, 2017

THE BETTENCOURT AFFAIR: The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris 

By Tom Sancton 

396 pages. Dutton. $28.

The labyrinthine mess known as the Bettencourt affair has been the stuff of scandal aficionado dreams. It has turned up repeatedly in Vanity Fair, which would have had to make it up if it hadn’t happened. Here is Liliane Bettencourt, the L’Oréal cosmetics heiress and richest woman in Europe, surrounded by the onetime “Golden Boy of Paris,” eavesdropping servants, bilkers of every stripe, vicious family warfare, fabulous ostentation, alleged Nazis in the family tree and political corruption at France’s highest levels. Celebrities, artists, estates, jewels, sailboats and one private island dot the perimeter of her story.

The intrigue and implications that arose from Bettencourt’s relationship with a younger man created a publicity nightmare for nearly a decade. Coincidentally or not, L’Oréal’s business has improved during that period of time.

“The Bettencourt Affair” is a chronicle by the journalist Tom Sancton, who covered the story for Vanity Fair. Sancton is no Dominick Dunne, who would have found the beating heart of this thing, if there was one. (Questionable.) He’s more the type to call it “‘Dallas,’ ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘House of Cards’ rolled into one.”

So Sancton lacks a gift for dish. But he is an excellent straight-up reporter, and he has dug deeply into the many, many elements that complicate this story. One lawyer involved even needs a lawyer by the time it’s over. This book gives him the space to go beyond the Bettencourt-for-Beginners version, which is this: To the ultimate dismay of Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, her only child, Liliane Bettencourt became infatuated with François-Marie Banier, a man 25 years her junior. Banier had been a pretty, skilled charmer of older people since he was the teenage darling of Salvador Dalí.

Over time, Bettencourt expressed her affection by giving her platonic friend upward of a billion dollars’ worth of assets. She made him the beneficiary of four separate life insurance policies. Bettencourt-Meyers cried foul when she learned that her mother planned to adopt Banier and make him an heir. At that point, the once-discreet family lawyered up and went very public, with Bettencourt’s competence questioned and Banier accused of “abuse of weakness” in a 2007 lawsuit. The mother-daughter loathing, a long-held secret, came out in the open. “The mother massacred the daughter, then the daughter massacred the mother,” one of the many lawyers in this multidefendant story told Sancton.

From the butler who spent one year secretly taping how Bettencourt was manipulated to the daughter’s efforts to make witnesses her friends, there’s a lot to pursue here. One of the most interesting parts of Sancton’s book is its history of L’Oréal, which began as the first French company to produce hair dye that did not contain lead. The formula was invented by Bettencourt’s father, Eugène Schueller, who also had gifts for manufacturing and marketing. In 1909, he founded the French Company of Inoffensive Hair Dyes (the translations here can be wonderful), which he soon renamed L’Oréal.

Later came the buildup to World War II, and a part of the family’s history that lay buried for years. L’Oréal’s sales nearly quadrupled during the war, and Schueller was involved with a company that sold paint and varnish — which were more necessary in Germany than in occupied France. (“No tank rolls without paint,” Sancton writes.) Schueller’s Vichy-friendly politics and alleged collaboration would come back to bite L’Oréal decades later. Bettencourt’s husband, André, wrote expressly pro-Nazi articles before joining the resistance.

In Sancton’s telling, there are no sympathetic figures in this family. Bettencourt’s only appeal for others appears to be her money, and she seems to have been an ice-cold parent. As to how she could sound, here she is in a 1987 interview: “A rich woman, the term itself is disagreeable. It’s an ugly word. I prefer fortune.”

The book’s portrait of Banier is much more confusing. Nothing about his self-justifying has much credence. According to him, Bettencourt first began sponsoring him when she visited his apartment and said: “François-Marie, you need more space. You like fine things; me too. I have the means to suit your tastes.” She then bought him the first of assorted apartments that would be followed by a laundry list of other valuables, including an island in the Seychelles that he claimed to disdain — and that she forgot about as her mind grew foggier. He says he accepted all this only to make her happy.

For most of the book, Sancton makes Banier sound like a pure social climber. But suddenly, near the end, he begins to celebrate the man’s protean talents. Banier has appeared in films by Eric Rohmer and Robert Bresson. He has written a number of novels and published many photography books, though most were sponsored by L’Oréal. He was a skilled celebrity photographer who knew everybody who was anybody, and is certainly good at dropping their names. “Princess Caroline told me this is the most beautiful house in the South of France,” he told Sancton, when the author visited him in Provence.

Sancton’s account leaves Banier in 2016, through with his ordeal and not too much the worse for wear. He was sentenced to four years in prison, but got out of serving any time in a follow-up judgment. He likes fame, though he insists otherwise. This book may give him another shot at it.

 A version of this review appears in print on August 24, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Scandal Buffet For Aficionados. © 2017 The New York Times Company

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AMAZON NAMES BETTENCOURT AFFAIR #1 HISTORY PICK FOR AUGUST!

I never thought of myself as a historian, but I'll take it!

The Best History Books of August

Chris Schluep

August 9, 2017

NUMBER 1

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The Bettencourt Affair could stand as fiction. But it's real. And this is not some faraway scandal from another time--it's a story and a trial that has kept the French public rapt. The affair involves 94-year-old Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the nearly forty-billion-dollar L’Oréal fortune. She's the world’s richest woman and the fourteenth wealthiest person. And she has a past that involves an expensive infatuation with a man who is not her husband, a tangled web of hidden secrets, divided loyalties, frayed relationships, and fractured families. All set in Paris.

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2017/08/the-best-history-books-august-amazon-book-review.html?linkId=40783293

DAY-ONE FOR THE BETTENCOURT AFFAIR

Today is the launch-date for The Bettencourt Affair, an exciting moment for me after two and a half years' work on the project. Pre-publication reviews have been positive, even enthusiastic, so I am optimistic about the book's life after birth. I am now in France casting about for a new book topic. I have a few ideas but have not settled on anything yet. It is not a choice to be taken lightly: researching and writing a book is a multi-year commitment. Erik Larson, one of my favorite nonfiction writers, says he spends two years on research and two years writing. That sounds about right, though I did Bettencourt in half that time and finished Death of a Princess in about eight weeks (granted I had a co-author, Scott MacLeod, but still). By those standards, four years sounds like a welcome luxury. Stay tuned...

Meanwhile, I have been gratified by the attention a number of literary bloggers have given to my new book. One of them, Deborah Kalb, just published this Q&A today to mark the launch date. Enjoy:

Photo © Sylvaine Sancton

Tom Sancton is the author of the new book The Bettencourt Affair: The World's Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris. His other books include Death of a Princess and Song for My Fathers. A longtime Paris bureau chief for Time magazine, he also has written for publications including Fortune and Reader's Digest. He is a research professor at Tulane University.

Q: You note that you've been intrigued by this story since 2010. What first interested you about it, and at what point did you realize you'd be writing a book about it?

A: I spent the summer of 2010 in France, at a time when the Bettencourt Affair exploded into the headlines. I became fascinated by this story of the L’Oréal heiress and the fortune she gave to this photographer and writer, Banier, whom I had never heard of at the time.

The daughter’s elder-abuse suit against Banier had triggered a major legal battle whose repercussions went far beyond her original intent, and eventually ensnared the then President Nicolas Sarkozy in what the press was calling a “French Watergate.”

When Liliane Bettencourt’s butler taped her secret conversations with her financial advisers, the leaked recordings revealed a Pandora’s box of secrets—illegal Swiss bank accounts, tax evasion schemes, influence peddling by a French minister, the threat of a takeover of L’Oréal by its Swiss minority shareholder Nestlé, and on and on.

Then there was the fascinating character of Banier, this charming rogue of an artist who had written bestselling novels and befriended the likes of Salvador Dalì, Johnny Depp, and Yves Saint Laurent before linking up with Liliane.

I just said to myself, what a great yarn this is. I proposed an article to Vanity Fair, which was published in the fall of 2010. After that, I followed the mother-daughter legal battle from afar as it wended its way through the courts.

When it finally went to trial in early 2015, my agent, Katherine Flynn, suggested that I propose a book for the U.S. market. I thought the subject might be too “French” for American readers, but Katherine’s instincts were right on the money: she eventually had six publishers bidding on it.

Q: How did you research the book, and was there anything that particularly surprised you in the course of your research?

A: The research was extensive and varied. There were thousands of articles in the French press, and as of 2010 a half dozen French books on the subject.

I delved into the French national archives for documents on Eugène Schueller, Liliane’s father, and the founder of L’Oréal, who had been investigated as a Nazi collaborator after World War II.

Thanks to his money and influence, Schueller escaped conviction, but I found compromising documents showing he had actively collaborated as an informant for the German security services.

I did more than 60 interviews with principals in the case, their friends and associates, lawyers and judges, and fellow journalists who covered the story.

One of my greatest coups was getting my hands on the entire investigative file, not a public source by any means, and thus gaining access to literally thousands of depositions, documents, medical reports and legal briefs related to the case.

Included in that trove was an extensive correspondence between Liliane Bettencourt and François-Marie Banier, which gave me a privileged insight into their unusual friendship.

Finally, I was able to do extensive interviews with Banier and his close friends, which allowed me to see the “human face,” so to speak, of the multi-faceted character that many simply dismissed as a blood-sucking exploiter. There were many surprises along the way, but I was particularly struck by the complexity of Liliane’s relationship with Banier.

Q: How would you describe Liliane Bettencourt, and how would you characterize her relationships with her protege, Banier, and her daughter, Francoise?

A: Liliane was a woman whose childhood was shaped by her mother’s death when she was five, and by the domination of her father, whom she adored and admired to the point of obsession.

At her father’s urging, she married a man she didn’t love, André Bettencourt, a closet homosexual who devoted himself to a political career funded by Liliane’s money.

She had a fraught relationship with her only child, Françoise, a timid introvert more interested in her books and her piano than in the active social life Liliane wanted her to pursue.

As Liliane advanced in age, she was increasingly lonely, unfulfilled, and depressed—until she met François-Marie Banier.

This exuberant and seductive artist opened the doors onto a whole new life, charming her with his witty conversation, taking her to art galleries, museums, the theater, introducing her to all kinds of interesting people she never encountered in her conventional bourgeois world.

Liliane was smitten by him and by the exciting life he offered her. She showed her gratitude by showering money on him—always presented in terms of patronage to further his artistic career. There was apparently no physical intimacy between them—given Banier’s homosexuality and the 25-year age gap between them—but I would call their relationship a platonic love affair.

Those who imagined that Banier was just a cynical gigolo pumping money out of a batty old dame understand nothing about the relationship. He was hardly devoid of greed and self-interest, but he also had a genuine affection for Liliane.

To some extent she was a replacement for his own mother, who had neglected and mistreated him as a child. As I said, it was a complicated relationship—but fascinating.

Q: What impact has this saga had on France?

A: It certainly tarnished the image of the Bettencourts. Before the affair erupted, they lived discreetly and avoided publicity. The lawsuit exposed all their dirty laundry to the harsh glare of public opinion—Schueller’s collaboration, André’s wartime anti-Semitic articles, the family’s tax-evasion schemes, the illegal political payments, Liliane’s declining physical and mental health, Françoise’s blind jealousy of her mother.

And let’s not forget that Françoise herself is now under investigation for witness tampering. Not much glory in that for the once-proud Bettencourts.

The case also affected the political fortunes of Nicolas Sarkozy, whose 2012 re-election bid was compromised by the Bettencourt Affair and other legal embroilments.

Interestingly, though, the affair had no effect on L’Oréal’s fortunes, despite the negative publicity and the fears of a Swiss takeover. The company continued to post double-digit growth in spite of the 10-year legal battle that threatened to tear apart the founding family.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m still casting around for the subject of my next book. I suspect it will be based on another scandalous French “affair.” French, because I live in France now and have spend most of my adult life here—including more than 10 years as a TIME correspondent. And the French are so good at producing scandals.

 I am currently delving into a long-unsolved murder case, but I’d rather not say too much about the subject until I decide whether or not to pursue it. Stay tuned…

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Yes. I’m also a jazz clarinetist. But doing this book was so much fun that I plan to spend more time writing than playing music in the foreseeable future. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Posted by Deborah Kalb at 8:37 AM. 

https://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.fr/2017/08/q-with-tom-sancton.html