BOOKPAGE REVIEW OF THE BETTENCOURT AFFAIR

The following review appears in the August edition of BookPage:

By Tom Sancton
Dutton
$28, 416 pages
ISBN 9781101984475 eBook available

The butler did it (or at least, he lit the fire, by taping more than 20 hours of incriminating conversations). And that’s just the first of the many apt clichés about a scandal that has gripped France for a decade.

The story of this convoluted war of wills (pun intended), told with skill by former Time Paris bureau chief Tom Sancton in The Bettencourt Affair, features a cast of characters pulled straight from a Tolstoy novel: L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, the $40 billion-dollar woman; her only child, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, vying for control of her mother’s life (and her money); and the flamboyant, brash photographer François-Marie Banier who, over the course of a quarter-century, befriended the likes of Truman Capote and Salvador Dalí and then insinuated himself into hundreds of millions of the Bettencourt’s fortune.
Nearly deaf since childhood and married to a respectable but acquiescent diplomat, Liliane delighted in Banier’s theatrical manner and his artistic aspirations, lavishing upon him artworks by Picasso and Matisse, insurance policies and cash gifts; she even reportedly considered adopting him. But her family and staff believed he was taking advantage of her age and increasing mental frailty, which was the crux of her daughter’s lawsuit against Banier.
In the end, the lawsuit revealed political hand-offs, money laundering, Swiss and offshore accounts, as well as Fascist and Nazi collaboration. The entire ordeal is known in France as l’affaire Bettencourt, which culminated in years of prosecutorial expense, suicides and the downfall of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and several ministers and judges.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             —EVE ZIBART 


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DEATH OF PRINCESS DIANA REVISITED: HOW WE GOT THE STORY

On August 31, 1997, just after midnight, a black Mercedes bearing Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed struck the 13th pillar of Paris's Alma tunnel, spun around, and crashed into a concrete wall. Within minutes, I was awakened by an urgent call from TIME's news desk in New York. As the magazine's Paris Bureau Chief, I was responsible for our coverage of this stunning event.
     My fellow correspondent Scott MacLeod, who lived just across the Seine from the crash site, was already standing outside the blocked off Alma tunnel, notebook in hand, interviewing eyewitnesses even as French medics worked desperately to save Diana's life and extract her from the crumpled wreck. (It was already too late for Dodi and driver Henri Paul: both had died instantly.)
     Meanwhile, I worked the phones and followed live TV coverage from my suburban home in Le Vesinet. Like millions of people around the world, I was shocked and saddened by the news bulletin that Diana had died on an emergency room operating table at 4:00 a.m. Working well past dawn, Scott and I filed our reports to New York, caught a few hours sleep, then headed into the TIME bureau just off the Champs-Elysées to plan our continuing coverage of the event and its aftermath.
     The Diana story was our unique focus for the next three weeks, as the magazine probed the background of the accident, the role of the pursuing paparazzi, and the conspiracy theories that began to circulate almost immediately after the accident. Along with our colleagues in the U.K., and a team of writers and editors in New York, Scott and I contributed to no fewer than three successive cover stories on Diana's death. Circumstances had put us at the epicenter of this event and the reporting we accumulated over those three weeks had made us some of the most knowledgable observers outside the French police investigators.
     It was at that point that, with the encouragement of super-agent Andrew Wylie, Scott and I proposed to do a book on what was then the hottest subject in the news business. To our amazement, Andrew sold it in 14 countries within a week or so. That was the good news. The bad news was that the publishers wanted the first half of the book by the end of November and the rest by December 15. Less than two months from our signing date. We both took leaves of absence from TIME and plunged into what remains the most daunting assignment of our careers. The result was DEATH OF A PRINCESS, which became a New York Times and international bestseller.
     This year, for the 20th anniversary of Diana's tragic end, my publisher, Dutton, asked us to prepare a revised and updated edition. Again there was only a short time available for this job, but journalists live by deadlines and this one was more manageable than the week-to-week rhythm we'd had to deal with on the magazine. There was relatively little to change in the main body of the book, but bringing the story up to date meant delving into the results of the French investigation, and the subsequent British inquest, and tracing the lives of the various protagonists—Prince Charles and his sons, Mohamed al-Fayed, the paparazzi, et al.—in the years since 1997. The result is now available on Amazon and iBooks. Anyone interested in this dramatic and historic story should click on those links now: we don't plan to do a 40th anniversary edition!

To buy the e-book edition of Death of a Princess, click on the links below:

Amazon 

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