Ugly Beauty (29 page)

Significantly, money played a relatively small part
in their relationship. When she first employed him they agreed on a salary of
$7,000 a year. To him, at the time, it seemed a fortune, though as the years
went on he realized that others who did considerably less than he were paid
considerably more. But although he often remarked on Madame’s habitual tightness
with money, O’Higgins never contemplated leaving her—or not on that account.
Their one serious contretemps was emotional, when she refused to admit he might
need to mourn the death of his mother. Her refusal was partly a jealous
reaction—she hated the thought of sharing him, even with the dead. And partly,
too, it reflected her horror of death and refusal to admit its existence. Her
invariable response to bereavement was to pretend it hadn’t happened, drowning
grief in perpetual motion. But O’Higgins was made of less stern (one might say,
more human) stuff, and her callousness brought on a nervous breakdown.

They were reunited in the end. Distraught at his
absence, she wrote him letters: “I want to forget our differences. I hope you
know that I love you
as a mother
. The mother you
lost!” For a while he was unmoved—particularly since those letters somehow never
enclosed promised checks. But eventually “I . . . realized that it was
impossible for me to leave Madame. I couldn’t escape from her. . . .
Her letters had touched me and I longed to be by her side.”
12
From then until the day she died, he was with
her.

Rubinstein spent her last year putting finishing
touches to her will. She left O’Higgins $5,000 in cash plus a yearly income of
$2,000 “so he won’t starve.” He calculated that, should he survive twenty years
(in fact he died thirteen years later, in 1980), this amount must represent a
capital outlay of between sixty and eighty thousand dollars. Might she not have
left him a larger sum outright? But then he recalled a conversation in which
she’d said, “If I was to leave you twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, what
would you do with it?” He’d replied, “Spend it! Have a lovely holiday!” at which
she’d nodded sagely—and acted accordingly, in what she saw as his best
interests.
13
Given his devotion and her
great wealth, the bequest was far from generous. But that did not affect the
love and respect he felt for her. They shine through the funny, affectionate
memoir he left of their life together, a testament to the humanity that lay
behind Rubinstein’s overbearing and egotistical façade.

Liliane Bettencourt’s young man was (and is) a
different matter. François-Marie Banier is a well-known photographer, novelist,
and all-round man-about-town twenty-five years her junior. As with O’Higgins and
Rubinstein, the relationship is quasi-filial, with no hint of sex. Banier,
unlike O’Higgins, is openly gay. “I see him with his partner, who is charming,
cultivated, and intelligent,” Bettencourt told the
Journal
du Dimanche
in 2008.
14

As with Rubinstein, too, the friendship is the more
significant in that Madame Bettencourt has evidently found close personal
relationships difficult. “I like to keep a distance between myself and other
people,” she told
Egoïste
. She had to be persuaded
into marriage, and does not seem to have felt wholly at ease even with her own
daughter, Françoise. “She was always rather an inscrutable child,” Bettencourt
told an interviewer in 2008, a year after her friendship with Banier had sparked
a public fight between the two. “She got on better with my husband.
Mother-daughter relations are very different from father-daughter
relations.”
15

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