Ugly Beauty (30 page)

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.

T
he
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 was
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
.

For the public, the
affaire
Bettencourt
’s chief scandalous revelation (perhaps less a revelation
than a confirmation of what we always suspect but can rarely prove) was the way
the very rich and very powerful casually assume that the laws governing everyone
else are, for them, purely optional. Taxes need be paid only by the
disorganized, limits on political contributions are routinely ignored, public
servants can always be bought, and the happy recipients of cash-stuffed
envelopes naturally do all they can to forward the interests of their
paymasters.

The tax aspect, at least, would not have shocked
Eugène Schueller. He was paranoid about taxation, ending his life as a supporter
of Pierre Poujade, the anti-tax, anti-intellectual small shopkeepers’ hero,
whose protectionist Union de Défense Commerçants et Artisans gained fifty-three
seats in the 1955 elections. In the perfect economic system, to which Schueller
devoted his intellectual energies for the last thirty years of his life,
taxation would be related not to income but to energy use. As for democratic
accountability, he regarded it with contempt. A self-proclaimed authoritarian,
Schueller thought government should be run in the same way as an efficient
company, by those who had proved their fitness to lead by rising to the top.
When political power was at the mercy of the popular vote—just as when a company
found itself at the mercy of the trade unions—weak, inefficient leadership would
invariably result. Few of today’s public figures would actually utter such
thoughts out loud. But one consequence of the
affaire
Bettencourt
has been to show that many public figures actually
conduct their lives upon such assumptions.

Both the
affaire
Bettencourt
and the
affaire Banier
from
which it sprang are about money—specifically, the huge fortune belonging to
Schueller’s daughter Liliane. But one can’t help noticing that the one person
who doesn’t really figure in the drama is Liliane herself. She is simply a huge
fountain of cash, which the various men in her life have tapped into in order to
fulfill their desires. First there was her husband, André Bettencourt, whose
political progress she financed and supported. Where did the cash come from,
which stuffed those envelopes he kept ready, each election season, for the
procession of political beggars? M. Bettencourt was a vice president of L’Oréal,
but it was his wife who owned the company—and the money. Then there was
François-Marie Banier, who befriended Liliane in 1987. Banier, a poor boy,
dreamed of becoming rich; she fulfilled his dream. And now her financial
adviser, Patrice de Maistre, appears to have his own ideas regarding her
money.

The striking thing about Madame Bettencourt is that
she seems to accept that this is simply how the world works. It is agreed by all
that she is, or was, “a brilliant woman.” Unlike other brilliant women, however,
and despite all her apparent advantages, she never had a career of her own, but
confined her role to furthering the careers of other people. The butler’s
recordings show a pitiful puppet whose strings are pulled alternately by Banier
and de Maistre. According to Bettencourt’s onetime nurse, emboldened by the
recordings to testify, Banier uses his emotional thrall to get his hands on yet
more of Madame Bettencourt’s money; de Maistre instructs her, word for word, on
what she must say when she meets the important politicians who are his friends,
and he makes out checks for her to sign, impatiently explaining how the benefits
they will buy are cheap at the price. For his pains, he has received the Légion
d’Honneur. But no conceivable benefit accrues to Liliane Bettencourt.

Anyone who knows about Eugène Schueller and his
ideas will recognize that this fate—to have all the money and none of the
power—might have been precisely, albeit unintentionally, designed by the father
Liliane idolized. Just as the Nazi scandal was a consequence of his politics, so
the
affaire Bettencourt
is a consequence of his
social theories. Schueller, as we have seen, had decided opinions on many
subjects, among them the place of women in society. Women, in his view, were
there to support men. They were for making homes and breeding children; they
should never compete in the man’s world of work. This is the mold in which
Liliane was cast, and she did not question it. First her widowed father’s
dutiful daughter, then her husband’s supportive wife, she now, it seems, exists
for the benefit of Banier, de Maistre, and their friends. It is for men to
dictate the program. Liliane, true daughter of her father, merely facilitates
it.

It is deeply ironic that the source of all this
money should be cosmetics, the same commodity that constituted Helena
Rubinstein’s escape route from a similar situation. For Rubinstein and her
clients, lipstick, powder, rouge, and the rest of the arsenal symbolized women’s
claims to an equal footing in public life. In this sense, the
affaire Bettencourt
is simply another episode in the
standoff between Helena Rubinstein and Eugène Schueller. More than half a
century after their deaths, it continues.