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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NPR REVIEW OF THE BETTENCOURT AFFAIR

One of my favorite reviews so far! NPR's Nina Martyris really did her homework and really "got" it. 

A former Time Paris bureau chief, Tom Sancton is perfectly placed to document this extraordinary story and the haute Parisian power milieu in which it is embedded. 

By Nina Martyris
August 12, 2017


Liliane Bettencourt, the beautiful heiress to the L'Oréal cosmetics empire and richest

woman in the world, had everything. But she was also bored stiff. Enter François- Marie Banier, a handsome, talented, brazen, witty, gay novelist and photographer, an aesthete known to have a way with older women.

Emotionally and fiscally, their interests dovetailed: Banier opened up the stimulating art world to Bettencourt by escorting her to galleries, introducing her to his bohemian friends, reading aloud to her from Stendhal's Charterhouse, and being thrillingly irreverent in denouncing the giant Monet in her mansion as "hideous." Entranced, she lavished him with money and gifts, including paintings by Picasso and Matisse, apartments, and millions in life-insurance policies. For 25 years, Bettencourt played the generous Galatea to Banier's Pygmalion, with the total of her largesse teetering to an incredible one billion euros.

In 2007, Bettencourt's only child, her daughter Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, filed a criminal suit against Banier for abus de faiblesse (abuse of weakness), claiming that this "Rasputin" had ruthlessly exploited her then 84-year-old mother's oncoming dementia. Meyers, a quiet woman described by a friend as "an austere Carmelite nun," says her hand was forced when an eavesdropping chambermaid told her she had heard Banier asking to be adopted by Bettencourt.

The scandal, which electrified France for a decade, came to be known as the Bettencourt Affair.

The Bettencourt Affair is also the title of Tom Sancton's riveting page-turner chronicling this sweeping Tolstoyan saga. What started as a deeply personal mother- daughter drama spiraled into a colossal political scandal — L'Oréal is, after all, one of France's corporate crown jewels — that consumed and destroyed the presidency of "bling bling" Nicolas Sarkozy. In an unforeseen twist, secret tape recordings made by the Bettencourt butler – who hated Banier – revealed damaging conversations about illegal donations in the tens of thousands made by the Bettencourts to Sarkozy's campaign. As the scandal billowed and the Bettencourts' secret Swiss bank accounts and influence peddling came to light, detractors dug up the company's ugly past: how its founder, Bettencourt's father, had prospered under Nazi occupation, and how Bettencourt's husband André had authored several virulent anti-Semitic articles during the war.
 As Sancton dryly observes, "There was no dye that could hide the family's dark roots."

A former Time Paris bureau chief, Sancton is perfectly placed to document this extraordinary story and the haute Parisian power milieu in which it is embedded. In gripping but unsensational prose, he brings the debacle alive in its many dimensions, recreating not merely the lurid courtroom drama, but capturing "the ineffable sadness at its heart." He has an unerring journalistic eye for the telling vignette, evident in moments like Bettencourt happily showing off her tango footwork at a pastry salon in Buenos Aires, where she had travelled to visit an exhibition of Banier's work. Yes, she had bankrolled the exhibition, but in that carefree tango moment, she was a long way from the airless corporate world of L'Oreal. "I don't like blandness," she said in a rare interview. "I like salt." Banier was that salt.

Judiciously, Sancton doesn't take sides, restricting himself to perceptive observations about the Freudian motivations driving the dramatis personae of this family battle. Bettencourt comes across as a willful and lonely billionaire, but Sancton takes care to point out that profligate though her gift-giving might seem, she was, at least in the initial years of the friendship, hardly a batty old woman being preyed on by a sophisticated wolf. She had taken care to guard the family legacy by setting up a trust whereby her daughter and grandsons would receive almost all her L'Oréal stock upon her death. The rest of her money, she said fiercely, was hers to do with as she pleased.

Sancton describes Meyers as the awkward, studious, homebody daughter (she has written books on the Bible and Greek mythology) who has a frosty relationship with her mother and resents the dynamic interloper Banier. Of the three, she is the most inscrutable. Banier, whom Sancton interviews at length, is as brash and magnetic as "a character out of a Balzac novel." The child of an abusive father and utterly indifferent mother, he has spent his whole adult life forming deep and needy relationships with famous people like Salvador Dali, Vladimir Horowitz and Johnny Depp.

Today, Bettencourt, 94, is in the grips of Alzheimer's. Banier, found guilty, continues to work but is a "broken and wounded man." Meyers emerged victorious but faces serious charges of bribing a witness. In any case, as Sancton points out, years of mud-slinging, bitterness and airing of tawdry political secrets has ensured there are no winners. The Bettencourt affair has effectively made nonsense of the family's cherished motto, "live happy, live hidden."

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INTERVIEW ON PARIS-EXPAT.COM

Paris maven Terrance Gelenter recently interviewed me for his popular literary/cultural blog paris-expat.com:

 

TG: Discuss the origins of L’Orèal and Eugene Schueller

Eugène Schueller at the helm of his yacht

TS: Eugène Schueller, son of a baker and a domestic servant, was kind of a Horatio Alger figure who transcended his humble roots to attain a position of enormous wealth and power in France. Armed with a degree in chemistry, in invented a synthetic hair dye that gave birth to L’Oréal in 1909. The company prospered, expanded overseas, and eventually became the world’s number one cosmetics group. In addition to his brilliance as a chemist and entrepreneur, though, Schueller nursed far-right political views and financed one of the most notorious pro-fascist movements, La Cagoule, in the 1930s. He continued to support pro-German groups during Word War II, and actively collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. His wealth and connections allowed him to escape conviction in the post-war “épuration” trials, but as I document in my book, Schueller was not just an economic collaborator but a political supporter and informant of German security officials. After the war, he recruited a number of French collaborators and Nazi sympathizers into the ranks of L’Oréal, a fact that caused the company great embarrassment with it was revealed in the 1990s.

TG: What is the significance of L’Orèal and other marquee brands to France’s image and economy?

TS: L’Oréal is considered a “fleuron” of French industry—that is, a kind of flagship company that is important not just economically but also in terms of national prestige. L’Oréal is not only a major employer and tax contributor, but an emblem of France’s image as a fount of luxury, elegance, refinement, and glamour. This is also true of the big couture houses—YSL, Chanel, Dior, Cardin—and purveyors of luxury goods like LVMH. But L’Oréal’s position as the world’s number one cosmetics firm gives it an especially lofty status as a symbol of French prestige.

TG: You explore several issues in your book that need to be explained to American audiences.

• French political campaign financing and the way that politicians circumvent it

• French inheritance laws and the legal system that applies-no trial by jury

TS: French laws governing political financing are much more restrictive than U.S. laws. In the U.S, the existence of PACs and the Citizens United decision means, in effect, that there are no real limits on political funding. This is why the U.S. has the most expensive political campaigns in the world, and why major donors like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers have an obscenely disproportionate weight in our electoral system. In France, individual contributions to political campaigns are currently limited to €7,500 ($8,800) per candidate per election, and companies are forbidden to make political donations. To circumvent these limits, French parties and politicians have historically resorted to a variety of illegal methods, including kickbacks on public works contracts, channeling money through cutout companies, and undeclared cash payments by donors like André Bettencourt. Bettencourt was a well-known and much solicited source of illegal political financing, which explains why he was given numerous cabinet positions over the years.

As for the French inheritance laws, they are still rooted in the Napoleonic Code. French law requires parents to leave an incompressible proportion of their estate to their children. In the case of an only child like Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, that portion is 50%. The remainder of the estate, known as the quotité disponible, may be left to anyone. In fact, Liliane Bettencourt had already bequeathed 92% of her estate to her daughter in 1992, so there was no legal barrier to her giving the rest to François-Marie Banier if she so chose. The daughter’s legal challenge was not based on inheritance laws but on her claim that Banier had taken advantage of Liliane’s declining mental powers. The suit was tried before a panel of three judges, since jury trials are only used in the case of violent crimes in France.

TG: Discuss the young Liliane, her marriage to André Bettencourt, her relationship with her daughter Françoise Bettencourt Myers and ultimately her relationship with François-Marie Banier.

Liliane, André, Françoise, 1988

TS: Liliane’s mother died when she was five. She was raised by her father, Eugène Schueller, whom she idolized almost to the point of obsession. In 1950, she married André Bettencourt, scion of a respected family from Normandy. Schueller had actively encouraged the marriage, but it was far from a perfect match for Liliane. A closet homosexual, and a mediocre man with no diplomas of any kind, André busied himself with a political career funded by his wife’s money. Meanwhile, Liliane had a difficult relationship with her introverted daughter, Françoise, more interested in her books and her piano than the active social life Liliane wanted her to lead. For all her wealth, Liliane was bored, lonely, and depressed. When Banier entered her life in 1987, he opened the doors to a whole new, exciting world of art exhibits, theater, museums, witty conversation, glittering company. She fell in love with him—though it was a platonic affair given Banier’s sexual orientation and the 25-year age gap between them. As their relationship developed, she began to shower him with artworks, cash, real estate, life insurance policies totaling, on paper at least, nearly a billion euros. She justified all this as patronage meant to fund Banier’s artistic career as a photographer, writer, and painter.

François-Marie Banier and Liliane Bettencourt 

Banier encouraged and accepted her extraordinary largesse, but he also had a genuine affection for her. Theirs was a complex relationship, but it would be mistake to reduce the whole thing to a cynical manipulation by a self-serving gigolo. Did Banier take advantage of their relationship for material gain? Undoubtedly. But I’m convinced that Liliane was a willing and knowing benefactor. The amounts involved seem mind-boggling to ordinary folk—myself included. But bear in mind that what she gave Banier was a tiny fraction of her overall fortune, and a fraction of the company stock she has already willed to her daughter.

TG: At the end of the day, although the alleged witness tampering by Françoise is yet to be adjudicated, what is the impact of L’Affaire Bettencourt?

TS: The scandal has definitely tarnished the image of the Bettencourt family in public opinion. Before it erupted, the Bettencourts lived discreetly, scrupulously avoiding the media spotlight. The suit launched by Liliane’s daughter in 2007 suddenly exposed the whole family to the harsh glare of public scrutiny. All the dirty laundry came out in the press—Liliane’s father’s murky past as a suspected Nazi collaborator, L’Oréal’s postwar infiltration by ex-Nazi sympathizers, André Bettencourt’s anti-Semitic wartime articles, Liliane’s health problems and creeping dementia, Françoise’s jealousy of Banier and resentment of her mother, secret Swiss bank accounts and tax evasion schemes, and of course the torrent of L’Oréal dividends that Liliane showered on Banier. Today, André is dead, Liliane lives in the fog of senility, and Françoise is under investigation for allegedly bribing a witness. Not much glory in all that for the once proud Bettencourts.

As for Banier, it is true that he will face no prison time and, on appeal, managed to avoid a ruinous fine. But he must live with the fact that he was found guilty in court of abusing the weakness of Liliane Bettencourt—he is a convicted felon. The case poisoned ten years of his life, cost him millions in legal fees, and gravely damaged his reputation. Today, 70 years old, he continues to work and enjoy a comfortable material life, thanks to Liliane’s millions. But he is in many ways a wounded, disgraced, and broken man.

Ex-Presdent Nicolas Sarkozy

Another victim of the Bettencourt Affair, at least indirectly, is Nicolas Sarkozy. At one point, he was put under formal investigation for allegedly accepting illegal campaign funds from the Bettencourts. Though those charges were dropped, the former president remains under investigation in a related case. Along with numerous other legal and political embroilments, the Bettencourt Affair contributed to his failed re-election bid in 2012 and his unsuccessful comeback attempt this year.

If there is a lesson in all this, perhaps it’s that we should not envy the super-wealthy. Their riches often bring more problems than they solve. This affair always reminds me of the opening line to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

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