Ugly Beauty

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Ugly Beauty Page 25

by Ruth Brandon


  Banier has thus achieved an intimacy denied to anyone else. But where Patrick O’Higgins’ attachment to Helena Rubinstein was independent of what she paid him (never, in any case, more than a very moderate salary), Banier’s relationship with Madame Bettencourt appears to be rather different.

  The two first met in 1969, at the home of the journalists Pierre and Hélène Lazareff, Neuilly neighbors of the Bettencourts. Madame Bettencourt was then in her forties—as Banier remembered, “the most sought-after woman in society—very impressive and extraordinarily beautiful.”16 But they did not become close at that time. That happened eighteen years later, in 1987, when Bettencourt was sixty-five and Banier thirty-nine. He was assigned to photograph her for the Egoïste interview, they became friends, and the friendship flourished. Banier quickly became a habitué of the Bettencourt mansion; inevitably, Madame Bettencourt was at home much more than her busy husband. Soon he was not just her friend but her principal friend.

  Ironically, during that interview, one of the questions was about whether she wasn’t afraid of being loved just for her money. “How would one like to be loved, then?” she said. “Does one have to be ugly and undersized and fat before one can know that one’s loved for oneself?”

  That she loves Banier for himself is beyond doubt. And she is not alone in doing so. As he himself put it, “Wherever I go, I make waves” (“Il y a toujours eu de vacarme derrière moi”).17 Louis Aragon was besotted by him; he charmed François Mitterrand, Samuel Beckett, and Vladimir Horowitz. When he wanted to be an actor, Robert Bresson and Eric Rohmer gave him parts in their films. His novels—three published before he was twenty-five—were the talk of Paris. Diane von Furstenberg prefers his photographs to anyone else’s; Johnny Depp insists Banier’s portraits of him are unique and made Banier godfather to his daughter Lily-Rose.

  Banier approaches all social encounters with the same all-consuming concentration. “Not many people are really interested in others. But I’m genuinely fascinated by everyone I meet, whether it’s someone I know or a passer-by in the street. I speak to them with my real voice. . . .”18 It could almost be a definition of how charm works. The photographs, the books, the films, are all secondary: his real metier is to enchant. It is compulsive—and the compulsive is by definition compelling.

  Banier’s particular specialism, however, is wealthy and well-connected old ladies, whose pursuit appears to have been the first of his many careers. He embarked upon it at the age of nineteen, when he got to know Marie-Laure de Noailles, the maecenas of the Paris avant-garde, then sixty-four. “Didn’t you have anything better to do at the age of nineteen?” asked an interviewer; to which Banier responded, “It’s as though you asked me why I bothered to visit Leonardo da Vinci.”19

  Well, up to a point. Unlike Leonardo, wealth, not talent, had been Madame de Noailles’s entrée into the artistic world. Banier, on the other hand, was poor: his father worked at the Citroën factory.20 Both father and son, however, rejected the fact of poverty. Banier père hid his real life even from his family, pretending he was the bourgeois he dreamed of being; and his son, whom he ill-treated and who hated him, inherited this dream and singlemindedly fulfilled it. François-Marie followed the old precept: if you want to be rich, go where the money is. And it worked.

  In 1971, when he was twenty-four, Banier published a novel, Le Passé composé (The Perfect Tense), which is in some ways transparently autobiographical. The hero, also called François (but whose surname, de Chevigny, implies membership of a class to which Banier did not, yet, belong), is poor but would like to be rich. He latches on to a rich girl from Neuilly, Cécile, and before their first date wanders through the Bois de Boulogne near her house, clutching a record he will give her as a present. “One day this boy, wandering around with a record in his hand, will have a big house with a big garden. People will say, ‘Did you see? That’s François de Chevigny! He’s got lots of money. He has a house full of beautiful things, and a huge garden with enormous trees.’ ”21 Now Banier, too, has all that. When speaking of his elderly lady friends, he never mentions their wealth. But it appears to have been the central fact of these relationships.

  Of course, there were other attractions. Madame de Noailles knew everyone, and introduced Banier to her world. He repaid her with devoted attention. When she died of pneumonia in 1970, it was Banier who heard her last words. By then he had already made another conquest—Madeleine Castaing, the “diva of decorators.” Castaing owned a smart shop on the corner of rue Jacob and rue Bonaparte and was famous, among other things, for her collection of paintings by Chaim Soutine, whom she had known in the 1920s. (When Banier’s fictional François is courting Cécile, one of his lures is a promise to introduce her to Madeleine Castaing and show her the famous collecton of Soutines.22) When Castaing’s husband of fifty years died in 1969, the young Banier obtained an introduction and stepped in to console her;23 the friendship lasted until her death in 1992, at the age of ninety-eight. The photographs he took of her in extreme old age, nightgowned and wigless on her staircase, became famous. Her family detested them—saw them, indeed, as a form of abuse—but according to Banier it was she who initiated this photo shoot.24 “You’ve got a nerve,” he says Castaing said when she saw the photographs. “But that’s fine: It’s me.”25 They were exhibited everywhere, and launched Banier’s photographic career.

  Asked whether Banier “tried to use the friendship for material profit,” Castaing’s grandson said that thefts of family property had been a constant topic of conversation between his parents for as long as he could remember. A Soutine, he said, had disappeared during the 1930s, probably stolen by the famously light-fingered writer Maurice Sachs; another went—who knows where?—during the 1980s, along with his grandparents’ letters from Picasso, Satie, and Cocteau. “And as it happens, I know that my grandmother gave François-Marie Banier a place with a conservatory in rue Visconti, in the 6th arrondissment of Paris. Things were just like that . . .”26

  By 1987, when Banier met Liliane Bettencourt for the second time, Madeleine Castaing was already ninety-three. Clearly, this source of support could not last much longer. So it was a happy chance that, at the crucial moment, another generous friend should present herself. Pressed as to whether he didn’t sometimes think his penchant for elderly ladies a little strange, Banier replied, “The young have fewer secrets than the old. It isn’t just that they’re old, they’re loners. Also I find a person more beautiful at 108 than at eight years old. But I photograph young people too.”27

  What he did not add was that the old people who seemed most to interest him were also rich. Immaterial as this may be to Banier (“I don’t take from people, I let them blossom, because I love and respect them,”28) this financial nexus is what the world chiefly sees. And in the case of Liliane Bettencourt, the pickings have been unimaginably huge. Beginning in 1996, there were regular outings when her chauffeur, under oath to tell no one, “particularly not M. Bettencourt,” would drive Liliane the short distance from Neuilly to the Trocadero, where Banier would be waiting. Together they would continue to the nearby avenue Georges Mandel, where Banier’s notary had his office; there she would make over money to Banier, and the notary would check the paperwork.29

  As the years went on, the gifts got larger. In 2002, $14 million (€11 million) was handed over; in 2003, $315 million (€250 million), mostly in the form of a life insurance contract of which he is the beneficiary; in 2004, $7.6 million (€6 million); in 2005,
$71 million (€56 million); in 2006, $315 million (€250 million); in 2007, $2.5 million (€2 million). Nine paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and Leger have been signed over to Banier: they remain in Neuilly, but he will possess them after Bettencourt’s death.30 According to one account, he no sooner admired a Matisse painting hanging in one of her houses—its blue, he remarked, was “the color of our friendship”—than she said, “It’s yours, François-Marie!” The Bettencourt Schueller Foundation, which supports both artistic activities, such as painting and filmmaking, and science, in particular medical research, has an annual budget of $160 million. That is a lot of money. But it is dwarfed by the untold wealth that has been lavished on Banier.1

  “There have never been quarrels in the Bettencourt family, particularly not about money or power,” admiringly declared their chronicler in 2002.31 But this happy state of affairs was soon overtaken by events. If André Bettencourt remained unaware how attached his wife had become to Banier, as her instructions to the chauffeur would seem to indicate, their daughter Françoise both suspected what was afoot and was deeply disturbed by it. A few days after M. Bettencourt’s death in November, 2007, Banier allegedly tried to get the new widow to adopt him as a son, which would give him the right to half her estate. A month later, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers launched a criminal complaint accusing him of abus de faiblesse, arguing that her increasingly frail mother was no longer capable of withstanding emotional pressure, and producing copious evidence from Madame Bettencourt’s staff showing that Banier had bullied her.

  Liliane Bettencourt indignantly denies that she is vulnerable. She argues, reasonably enough, that she is entitled to do whatever she likes with her own money. When the case first came to court there were rumors that she had even called in President Sarkozy, another Neuilly neighbor, to get it thrown out—a maneuver, if that is what it was, that failed (and which she denied, asserting, accurately enough, that Sarkozy “has other things to think about”).2

  And although it is unarguable that Banier has made a profitable career out of befriending rich elderly ladies, a habit some might find distasteful, the ladies themselves have not appeared to object. Why would they? Few old ladies are courted and made much of by glamorous younger men, and many might enjoy the experience. From their standpoint, Banier provided, and provides, the one thing money can’t buy. Who can put a price on friendship? “I make Liliane rich, Banier makes her live,” Lindsay Owen-Jones is reported as saying.32 “He’s an artist, that’s what I like,” Madame Bettencourt explained in 2008, after the friendship had become a matter of scandal. “Artists see things differently. Times change, everything’s moving, you’ve got to stay in the swim . . . I was with him just a few days ago in the United States. We met some most interesting people. A big family, very artistic, with ten children. It’s not much fun only seeing people like oneself, is it?”33

  An interesting light has recently been shed on Bettencourt-Meyers’ motivation in bringing this case. She is, after all, already unimaginably rich: Liliane Bettencourt has made over a large part of her estate to her daughter. Why, in those circumstances, would any daughter want to cause her aged mother such anguish, dragging her through the courts and making the family a focus for public prurience? In a similar situation Castaing’s family drew back from this path. “As far as I’m concerned these aren’t legal matters, they’re about something else altogether,” her grandson remarked.34

  The answer, rumor has it, is business: the business in which neither Liliane nor Françoise Bettencourt, being female, play an active part. However, Jean-Pierre Meyers, Françoise’s husband, is both a L’Oréal board member and (more significantly) a member of its management committee. He is also on the board of Nestlé; and there are hints that he “would like to do Nestlé a favour.”35 Nestlé owns 30 percent of L’Oréal, the Bettencourts, 31 percent; in 2004 Liliane Bettencourt signed an agreement freezing these holdings until six months after her death. It is common knowledge that Nestlé has for years wanted to acquire L’Oréal. If it can be proved that Madame Bettencourt was not competent when she signed that agreement, it is nullified, and Nestlé is free to move.3

  Between Banier and Meyers, Liliane Bettencourt seems to be at other people’s mercy. Or rather, at the mercy of the men in her life, starting with her father, whom she revered and could never contradict. Schueller brought up his daughter to do what he thought women were made for—to embellish the lives of her menfolk. And it has been the pattern of her life ever since.

  Helena Rubinstein was no one’s patsy: the self-effacing do not become captains of industry. Insufferable, selfish, bullying, crass, she did the exploiting, if any. For Schueller, this was the very reason why women should not aspire to the workplace. But Rubinstein showed, by example, and in a way that no woman had ever done before, that Schueller’s prescription for the female sex was not just patronizing: it was—for those with ambitions beyond the home such as his own daughter might have nourished—actively cruel.

  Rubinstein’s astonishing self-confidence resounds through every word ever written about her. It was what enabled her to create the life she desired, and the fact of having achieved that life constantly reinforced it. And here, surely, is the core of the matter. For self-confidence is what the beauty business has always been about, has always been its true commodity. The creams, the paints, the injections, the operations, are merely routes to that all-important end. Self-confidence was what the Victorians wanted to deny their womenfolk. It was what Helena Rubinstein and her customers aimed to achieve through cosmetics. Selling it gave Eugène Schueller the riches to buy power. But in a nice irony, the company he used as a cash-cow now arguably wields more real power—trading, as it does, in self-confidence—than any political party, any economist, ever has or ever will.

  The Banier affair, though it aroused a good deal of attention, seemed relatively trivial—if not to those concerned, at least to the world at large. But in the summer of 2010 it suddenly acquired a new and scandalous political dimension. Liliane Bettencourt’s staff were already outraged by what they saw as Banier’s bullying of their employer—the more so when he reacted to their criticisms by having several of them sacked after years of faithful service. Now the increasingly deaf and infirm Madame Bettencourt was, it seemed to them, being mercilessly manipulated by yet another interested party—her financial adviser, Patrice de Maistre. So her butler decided to take matters into his own hands and acquire proof of what was going on. He did so by bugging his cocktail tray—an item, in his experience, always central to these conversations. He then passed the memory card containing the recordings to Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, who transferred them to twenty-eight CDs that she delivered, three weeks later, to the police.

  What emerged was dynamite. The recorded conversations between Madame Bettencourt and de Maistre showed that Banier had not been the only one allegedly benefiting from the L’Oréal heiress’s open purse. There had also, it seemed, been sub-rosa cash subventions to politicians, including the minister responsible for taxation, whose helpful inattention would of course have been highly advantageous to the Bettencourt interests, and whose wife was conveniently employed by de Maistre in the Bettencourt office. And although the legal limit for individual contributions to French political campaigns was €7,500, the election campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president (and a member of André Bettencourt’s old party), appeared to have benefited to the tune of €150,000. It also transpired that André Bettencourt, while he w
as alive, had kept a chest full of cash conveniently at hand, cash that he doled out every election season to members of his political party, the UMP (Union pour un mouvement populaire), in unmarked envelopes.

  There were other recordings, too, of telephone discussions between de Maistre and Fabrice Goguel, a tax lawyer and onetime official adviser to Madame Bettencourt on tax affairs. These conversations gave rise to allegations that Goguel was still involved with the estate—not advising on tax avoidance, which of course is legal, but on tax evasion and money laundering, which very much are not. Tens of millions had been stashed away in a Swiss bank account; other conversations seemed to show that de Maistre, worried about Switzerland’s new openness on such matters, was anxious to transfer this money to Singapore, where it could be more securely hidden. There was also an island in the Seychelles that had never been declared to the tax authorities. Bettencourt’s people asserted that the island no longer belonged to her and had been given to Banier, but Banier denied this: He had no use for it; there were too many sharks and mosquitoes. . . . Twenty years after the Frydman revelations, L’Oréal’s owners were once again enveloped in controversy.

  The parallels between the Nazi scandal of 1989–1995 and the affaire Bettencourt that began in 2007 (and which continues to fill the headlines at the time of this writing in summer 2010) are striking. In both cases, what began as something relatively banal expanded and metamorphosed into a huge political scandal. In 1989, the spark was a disagreement over a board meeting that may or may not have taken place and in 2007, a family quarrel over money. In both cases, the event that moved the affair onto a new, hotly political plane was a wholly unpredictable chance event. If L’Oréal’s François Dalle had not decided to bring his old friend Jean Frydman into the business at what turned out to be exactly the wrong moment, Eugène Schueller’s Nazi past, with all its ramifications, would have remained conveniently forgotten, as so many similar pasts were forgotten. And if Liliane Bettencourt’s butler had not conceived the wholly baroque notion of bugging his cocktail tray, the affaire Bettencourt would have remained the comparatively innocuous affaire Banier.

 

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