Tom Sancton | The Bettencourt Affair: The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris / 2017

pandora’s box

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Sancton The Bettencourt Affair: The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris (New York: Dutton, 2017)

 

Tom Sancton’s new book, The Bettencourt Affair, covers a long and protracted scandal and trial that may not be well known to US audiences, but shook the country of France from about 2007 to its final court-room decisions just this past year. Elements of the court fights have still to be settled.

       Sancton carefully takes us through the long, sometimes silly and ultimately sad tale from the moment when Liliane Schueller Bettencourt—as the heir of more than 32 billion dollars, the world’s wealthiest woman—met François-Marie Banier, then a young handsome photographer, writer, painter, playwright, and sometimes actor.

    Banier began his career by publishing his first fiction, Les Résidences Secondaires in 1969 and performed in several important films beginning in the 1980s, including Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (an interesting coincidence since money would become the central factor of his life), three films by Éric Rohmer, and a film by Olivier Assayas as late as 2008. Gay, impulsive, erudite, and somewhat of a clown, Banier clearly brought out something in the L’Oreal heiress that her previously ordered life had never before permitted, and, as Sancton puts it, she literally fell in love with him—if not in the sexual sense, clearly in a spiritual one.

      Together the pair dined in famous Parisian restaurants, attended art galleries, shopped, and, as she later insisted, met far more interesting people that her usual social set had ever permitted. Some of her friends suggested, to describe their relationship, the fact that despite her money and Art Deco mansion, Liliane had never done anything creative in her life; Banier was a workaholic artist, if a bit of a dilettante, charming her and everyone around her. One need only to think back to Gregory La Cava’s 1936 film My Man Godfrey to comprehend that for Liliane, Banier represented a protégé similar to what the wealthy women of that film both sought.

      Banier, who had close relationships with other celebrities such as Salvador Dalí, Vladimir Horowitz, Samuel Beckett, Isabelle Adjani, and Johnny Depp, gave her time, laughter, long letters, and access to a large community of interesting notables, even accompanying her with Liliane’s husband André, at times, to their other houses and her island. He visited her and/or they dined together nearly every day.

      In return, she began by giving him the apartment across from his own, valuable artworks by Picasso, Monet, and others; she gave him large insurance policies worth millions, even offering him her island, and, cash outlays, and not only to him but to his current lover, Martin Le Barrois d’Orgeval, nephew of his former lover, Pascal Greggory. In all, some estimates suggest that Liliane, over the years, paid nearly 1 billion euros to Banier and his associates.

     Things might have gone along quite swimmingly, with Banier providing the intellectual entertainment for the elderly heiress, and she paying what for her, quite obviously, as a small remuneration for his efforts, had it not been that in 2006 she had a light coma and severe dehydration, after which she became over-medicated, and mentally confused, on some days not even knowing where she was in her own home. At moments she would return to complete lucidity, but both staff members and some of the L’Oreal officers quickly became concerned about her mental health.

      It appears that only the accountant at L’Oreal, Claire Thibout, knew the exact amounts that Liliane was paying Banier and others, and she was worried and angry about what she knew,  presuming, as would many others soon after, that the handsome protégé was taking advantage of the heiress and her increasing confusion, demanding payments for all sorts of things that went beyond Liliane’s eagerness to support his photographic exhibitions and catalogues. One day, quite by accident, she met up with Liliane’s daughter, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, and the two went for coffee, Thibout pouring out the entire story and her long-time worries.

    Françoise, who had a cold relationship with her mother, had long hated Banier and, perhaps in her mind, saw him as a purposeful displacement of her in her mother’s heart. What Sancton does make clear is that Liliane did not enjoy the company of her daughter, her husband, and one of their sons. Clearly, they had none the joie de vivre and wit that Banier possessed. And it was for that reason and others, despite her own wealth, that Françoise determined to cut her mother off from Banier and get back some of the money she had given him.

     What she couldn’t know is that in filing her suit against François-Marie Banier she would open up a real-life Pandora’s Box that would reveal that Liliane’s father, the founder and genius behind L’Oreal, was a Nazi collaborator; that André, Liliane’s husband, had been a member of La Cagoule, a violent French fascist-leaning and anti-communist group, and had written several articles for a Nazi propaganda organ; that her parents had secret Swiss Bank accounts, and had failed to report taxes concerning the purchase of their island; and that her suit against Banier would sweep up governmental figures from then French-President Nicolas Sarkozy (the affair virtually ended his political career), his Budget and Labor Minister, Eric Woerth, Liliane’s former financier, Patrice de Maistre, André’s loyal valet, and Pascal Bonnefoy, who had secretly taped many conversations between Liliane and others; and would bring about the testimony of many of Bettencourt maids, creating a kind of upstairs-downstairs stir of gossip. Two people involved in the scandal and trials, including Françoise’s attorney, Olivier Metzner and Commissaire Noël Robin, who supervised some of the Bettencourt investigations, committed suicide before the trials were over. Alain Thurin, Liliane’s trusted nurse, one of the defendants, attempted to hang himself in a forest near Brétigny-sur-Orge; he lay in coma for days, but eventually recovered. One of the early judges was also brought to trial for possibly collaborating with the Sarkozy administration. And by the end, Françoise, herself would be under investigation for bribing Claire Thibout.

      Accusations about a plot to have Lilianne adopt Banier and the discovery that she had left her entire estate to him upon her death added spice to the already stew of speculations. The public couldn’t get enough.

     In the end, Banier was found guilty, but suspended from serving any time in prison, while being fined 375,000 euros. The state took away one of his apartments and his 140-million-euro insurance policy, but wiped out the 158 million euro in civil damages. D’Orgeval’s prison sentence was also suspended and was fined 150,000 euros.

     Both sides proclaimed to have won, but neither actually did, with Banier, despite retaining most of his wealth, shunned by friends as a gigolo, a guru, and worse names.  Françoise, who now controls her mother’s wealth and her visitors, was surely now seen as a petty mean-spirited daughter. The case against her is still to be decided.

     And Liliane, now well into full Alzheimer’s does not even have her once pleasant memories of her time with Banier, having forgotten the names of nearly everyone she ever knew. When asked by the judge Jean-Michel Gentil, did she recall Banier, her answer was: “I don’t walk to talk about him.” When Gentil asked did he abuse her, she responded: “Surely a bit, but I don’t care. I’m not going to get sick over it. I don’t have time to lose over that. I don’t deny his faults, but I was a victim of my own enthusiasms. He took money from me, I don’t give a damn. I accept the consequences of my mistakes. I’m not going to cry about it.”

      Liliane is now what daughter describes as “serene,” having lost touch today with nearly everyone, her family included as well as her memories. She is kept under close scrutiny, a situation she dreaded during most of her life, by her unloved daughter.

     Although Sancton pulls no punches when it comes to Banier’s inability to say no to Liliane’s lavish gifts—he is described by many of his friends as a 5-year-old in a grown man’s body—it is clear that the figure he most admires in this sad family tragedy is François-Marie, now at age 70, sitting in his palatial retreat, Le Patron, in the south of France, with memories of his continued admiration for his real-life patron, maybe, in fact, her very last lover.

 

Los Angeles, August 31, 2017

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Winter 2017)

James Agee | A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text (ed. by Michael A. Lofaro) / 2007

invention serves remembrance

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Agee A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text, edited by Michael A. Lofaro (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007)

 

In a year (2008) in which I had determined, after writing about my father's death in 2002, to read James Agee's A Death in the Family, it seemed that I was fated to read the newly released "restored" edition of that book. I admit that I was not completely enthused by the idea, particularly after having read, in March, the review of the "restoration" in the Los Angeles Times Book Review which argued that David McDowell's editing of the original publication of the Agee work in 1957 was "superior" to the Lofaro text:

 

“Lofaro conjectures that McDowell ‘changed the novel to suit the popular tastes of the 1950s and increase the book’s marketability’; he does not consider that McDowell might have made his decisions for a simpler reason: to create the best possible book. The new chapters, while interesting, don’t add much to our understanding of Jay or Mary or young Rufus. In fact, everything that needs to be established – the tenderness and conflict within the marriage, Jay’s drinking and tendency to drive too fast, Rufus’ deep sensitivity and his near-worshipful relationship with his father – is handled perfectly, and more economically, in the original version.”

 

     The critic goes on to argue that Lofaro's "most egregious" decision was to remove the "Knoxville: Summer 1915" section, replacing it with a nightmare sequence, which, "with its graphic violence and religious symbolism, is heavy-handed and not nearly as effective."

     In short, he concludes, "Lofaro has made a mess of it."

     My own intuition, moreover, was that what Lofaro argued was Agee's intention of a straight-forward, chronologically-ordered narrative seemed far less interesting than the flashbacks and other modernist narrative devices introduced by McDowell. The sheer size and heft of the "restored" edition, along with these reservations, led me to put off reading the Lofaro edition until late in the year.

      Fortunately, the time in early December in which I came to the fiction also allowed me to slow down the pace of the reading and to more carefully consider Lofaro's voluminous series of notes and annotations—nearly as long as the work itself.

      I have now come to feel that the restored version, contrary to the reviewer's insistence, is far superior: clearer, more emotionally engaging, and, most importantly, in concert with the author's desires.

      Agee, it is apparent, never intended his beautiful set piece, "Knoxville: Summer, 1915," first published in Partisan Review in 1938, to be included in A Death in the Family. And the situation he describes in that prose poem, although it may remind one of the poetic tone and certain incidents in the fiction, makes it seem as if the young boy's uncle and aunt, "living at home," were residing within his own house. Emma, his sister, appears nowhere in that short piece. And the poem ends with a dilemma of self-identity that is not at all an issue in A Death in the Family.

     Lofaro admits that there is no way of definitively knowing that Agee intended to begin his work with the horrifying dream sequence about a John the Baptist-like being, killed by the mobs of the city; but it is also clear that there is no other place for it in the work, despite it being contained in the original manuscripts.

      The dream episode seems quite obviously that of an older man, still haunted by the death of his father; and Agee's own analysis at the end of that dream that the corpse was the father and his recognition that "He [the narrator]

 

      should go back into those years. As far as he could remember; and

      everything he could remember; nothing he had learned or done since;

      nothing except (so well as he could remember) what his father had been

      as far as he had known him, and what he had been as he had known

      himself, and what he had seen with his own eyes, and supposed with

      his own mind....

 

all seem to point to the very beginning of the imaginative voyage upon which the rest of the work will take the reader. As Agee wrote in 1948 to his dead father:

 

      Let me explain what I am trying to do here [in this work].

      I have lived, now, a year longer than you were given to live. I feel

      very heavy in the sense of life and death, and very heavy in my

      sense of uncertainty and of failure in my life so far.... My way of

      trying to handle these things is to try to recall and understand

      my life, as well as I can, and to try to write it down as clearly and

      as well as I can.

 

As Agee wrote his mother:

 

     I am trying to write a short book, a novel, beginning with the first things

     I can remember, and ending with my father's burial. The whole closing

     section is to be as clear an account as I can make of everything I can

     remember, from the morning I woke up and learned that he had died

     the night before, through to the end of the afternoon of the funeral.

 

He notes elsewhere that he is trying to write a narrative that is as chronologically correct and clear as he can make it. "In most novels, properly enough, remembrance serves invention. In this volume," Agee proclaims, "invention has served remembrance."

    More importantly, Lofaro shows us that Agee saw this work less as "a novel"—even though he himself, as I have noted above, refers to the work as "a novel"—than as an autobiography, a work, had he lived longer, that might have been embedded within other writings about his ancestors, his mother and father's relationship, and his own later education and writing experiences.

     The Lofaro edition adds ten chapters and restores versions of three other chapters, as well as bringing parts of the text together which were previously divided. The newly-found chapters that Lofaro includes slow down the work and draw the reader into the detail of Agee's world. Indeed, it is this series of details wherein this work has its deepest meaning. As I have written elsewhere, A Death in the Family virtually has no plot. We know from the outset what the major event of the work entails: the father's death. And anyone who has experienced the death of a family member can imagine the effects on a family. What is remarkable about his writing is how Agee makes his family members (Lofaro restores the actual family names, Agee and Tyler, to his text) so immediate and real: the way they cook, shop, worry for and about each other, and share and disagree with each other regarding viewpoints on various issues such as sexuality and religion. The familial details of life are at the heart of Agee's work, and Lofaro's version not only enhances these, but allows the reader to better understand the relationship of husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, and brother and sister.

      Had the original editor, McDowell, more transparently admitted his radical editorial changes, I think no one might blame him for his decisions; I agree with Lofaro's analysis that "he changed the novel to suit the popular tastes of the 1950s and increase the book's marketability." The decision to produce a shorter work, the various flashbacks in time and space are quite understandable in a decade in which readers were assimilating Faulkner's great experiments and reading new works by Nabokov, Salinger, Bellow and others. Within this context, Agee's work, as he intended it, does seem somewhat "old-fashioned."

     But McDowell felt it necessary to disavow any major changes, insisting in his "A Note on This Book":

 

            There has been no re-writing, and nothing has been eliminated except

            for a few cases of first-draft material which he later re-worked at

            greater length, and one section of seven-odd pages which the editors

            were unable satisfactorily to fit into the body of the novel [apparently

            the prologue of Lofaro's edition].

 

      If nothing else, however, Lofaro definitively shows just how extensive McDowell's changes were, revealing in many respects how different this book is from the original publication and, just as importantly I would argue, how different is a novel from an autobiography.

     Admittedly, there are a few problems with this "restoration." Agee did not title any of his sections or chapters; Lofaro has chosen to title sections, some with words from the text that seem, within the context of Agee's poetical writing, rather awkward, such as "This little boy you live in," "Perceptions c. 1911-1912" and "Enter the Ford: Travel, 1913-1916." Lofaro also occasionally explains some of Agee's dialect word choices, placing them in brackets within the text, while I feel this might have been better handled through a discrete asterisk with a same-page note. But these are minor quibbles in what has clearly been a long labor of love. 

      Rather than "making a mess of it," I would argue, Lofaro has utterly clarified Agee's intentions and revealed an astounding contribution to American autobiographical writing.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2008

Reprinted from Rain Taxi, XIV (Spring 2009).