My mother is dead, but somehow I am still waiting for her, trying to see her face again.
—Liliane Bettencourt, 2005
At the heart of the Bettencourt Affair lies a tragedy whose roots go back to 1927. That was the year Liliane Bettencourt’s mother died. The girl was five years old. She never experienced a mother-daughter relationship as a child, and lacked the fiber of maternal instinct as an adult. Her only parental role model was the strong-willed father she adored to the point of obsession. What a mother was, or should be, she hadn’t any idea.
It would have been hard in any case for Françoise to forge a healthy relationship with such a mother, but her chances were skewed at the outset. Shortly after the birth of her daughter in 1953, Liliane suffered a relapse of the tuberculosis that had struck her and caused her deafness as a child. “She had to leave for a sanatorium and could not return to her daughter until she was three years old,” says Lucienne de Rozier, one of Liliane’s closest friends. “That can explain why she had trouble being close to her little girl, even though she adored her.”
When Liliane returned home after her cure, Françoise clung to her, as she puts it, like “a mussel on a rock.” But Liliane, smothered by her daughter’s emotional demands, could not reciprocate. “I think that the relationship with her mother was terrible because of that,” says Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez, who questioned Françoise in July 2010 regarding the Bettencourt Affair. “The child had an enormous need of love, which this woman, magnificent and terribly handicapped by her deafness, could not give her.” Even now, Françoise gives the impression of a wounded child. Said Prévost-Desprez, “She has the gaze of a child, the laugh of a child. She is very touching. . . . You can see that this is a woman who is not in possession of her body. There is something about her that is, not exactly cold, but a bit, I’d say, disincarnate. This is not a woman who is bubbling over with life.”
Not surprising: Her life was constrained from the beginning by the wealth and privilege that surrounded her. Every morning, a chauffeur took her to the Marymount School in Neuilly, a private Catholic establishment run by American nuns. She was constantly watched over by bodyguards because her parents feared that she might be kidnapped and ransomed by one of the far-left terrorist groups that were active in Europe in the 1960s and ’70s.
In fact, it was Liliane herself who nearly became a kidnapping target. According to Alain Caillol, former member of a criminal band that in 1978 kidnapped Baron Édouard Empain, a wealthy Belgian industrialist, they originally had their eyes on Madame Bettencourt and even staked out her home in Neuilly. In the end, they decided against kidnapping a woman, because they weren’t sure they could “manage her hygiene issues.” Caillol, who spent eleven years in prison for the Empain caper, now believes it was a mistake not to grab Liliane, because they would have “had more means to exert pressure” in view of her personal fortune and her critical importance to L’Oréal. Empain, who spent sixty-three days sequestered in an underground tunnel and had his left little finger sliced off, was finally released without the 80-million-franc ($17 million) ransom payment the gang had demanded. “La belle Lili had a close call,” Caillol said after his release from prison. “If we had nabbed her, we would have gotten the money with no problem.”
Françoise likes to recount a happy childhood in which she and her parents “formed a close-knit family that loved to share the simple things of life.” She and her mother adored visiting museums, traveling, and shopping together. She recalls happy family vacations at Arcouest—tennis games, sailing parties—and foreign trips with her parents, who let her choose the destinations: San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Haiti, New Orleans. “I was always very close to my parents, and perhaps even more so with my mother. My father was involved in politics and was often absent, but she bridged the gap. . . . She was always beautiful, yes, but I never felt the least rivalry. ‘Jealousy’ is a word that is foreign to me. Since she was always very elegant, I observed her with admiration. We have different tastes and personalities, yes, but is that an obstacle?”
Françoise’s rose-tinted version is belied by Liliane’s disdainful, often cruel words. “It’s a failure with my daughter,” she confided to a psychiatrist in 2009. “Françoise was heavy and slow, always one lap behind me.” Liliane reflected on the relationship in a 2010 interview with Paris Match that shows, along with some harsh criticism, a certain tenderness mixed with regret. “I told you she was not happy, but that’s not the right word,” she said. “The word is unsatisfied. She never found what she wanted. . . . At age ten or eleven, she was still affectionate. Or was it me who remained passive because she didn’t accept what I gave her? Perhaps.” She reproached Françoise for not being more “magnetic”: “With her everything remains in the moment, there is nothing to hook onto. That doesn’t mean we’re not touched or moved. There have been tears in our lives. . . . Nothing in this life makes one suffer more than love.” Asked what Françoise blamed her for, Liliane snapped: “Not being a maman gâteau”—a mother who bakes cakes. “Even so, I interested her. I think she took a certain pride in me. But she didn’t lift me or stimulate me. . . . She was timid, she never wanted to do anything or go swimming. She didn’t go for it!”
But there was another side to the story. As Liliane recounted in dozens of letters to François-Marie Banier, dating back to 1989, she herself suffered from Françoise’s lack of affection toward her, and from her limited access to her grandsons. “She never kisses me, she never holds my hand,” she wrote in 1998. “Do you realize what that is for a mother? It’s a total failure.” In a 1997 letter she complained that her grandsons passed by her door “four times a day” but never stopped to say hello or give her a kiss. “She keeps them on a leash. Do you realize the lack of affection they show me? I really wonder if they are worthy of all that I’m going to leave them.” In 2000, she complained that Françoise “has annihilated me, as far as her sons are concerned, I have no relationship. That’s what she wanted.” In this tragically difficult mother-daughter relationship, the pain flowed in both directions.
One observer put the problem succinctly: “The mother massacred the daughter, then the daughter massacred the mother.”
Françoise appears to have had an easier rapport with her father. Though he was often away on political (and personal) business, André Bettencourt felt a closeness to his daughter that Liliane did not share. In a way, he acted as a buffer between the two females—a “conciliator,” as he put it—often appearing between them in family photos. Françoise considered him her “rampart.” It was André, deeply steeped in traditional Catholic culture, who decided to name his daughter for St. Francis of Assisi. In his privately published memoirs, he described her as “joyous, docile, and emotive,” endowed with a “strong-willed independence . . . Our daughter is probably more Bettencourt than Schueller,” he wrote. Some have speculated that one source of friction between the two women was Liliane’s jealousy over her daughter’s close relationship with André. Perhaps. But there were many other reasons.
No woman could have been more different from Liliane Bettencourt than her daughter. While Liliane was social, outgoing, fashion conscious, and fiercely devoted to the family business, her only child was introverted and taciturn, drawn more to books and classical music than to fancy receptions or L’Oréal meetings. Though she was considered pretty when she was young—some compared her to Ali MacGraw—her looks as she grew older were no match for Liliane’s scintillating beauty. With her unshaped mass of black hair and her heavy jaw often fixed in a frown, Françoise seemed to hide from the world behind the thick-framed tinted glasses that Liliane judged “hard to wear and hard to look at.” Nor did her dowdy dressing style echo her mother’s haute-couture elegance. Françoise suffered from the “syndrome of Nefertiti’s daughter,” says Georges Kiejman, Liliane’s former lawyer, “sad because she was less beautiful than her mother. And it’s true that there was a sort of rivalry between Françoise and her mother.” As Liliane described the relationship in a 2008 letter to Banier: “It’s a story of jealousy between women, it’s the easiest thing in the world to understand.”
Faced with a mother who was admittedly stingy with affection, Françoise found solace in her piano. Then, as now, she would practice for hours each day, with a special passion for Bach. “Music is my oxygen,” she said. Though it was a mostly solitary pastime, she would sometimes play duets with her friend singer/actress/filmmaker Arielle Dombasle. “From the beginning, our common sensibility, our friendship was based on music,” recalls Dombasle, who, as it happened, was also a friend of the young François-Marie Banier. “And I remember that Liliane absolutely adored our duos, especially one I sang for years, Offenbach’s ‘Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein.’”
Even if Liliane could enjoy her daughter’s music at one time, she later came to see it as a shell into which Françoise retreated to block out the rest of the world. “I am too eccentric for her,” Liliane wrote in 2007. “She does five hours of prayer [piano practice] a day, she’s not interested by anything that is out of her sight.—Amen—I am just the opposite.”
Dombasle offers an intriguing insight into the rift that developed between mother and daughter over the years. Françoise, who has the temperament of an “austere Carmelite nun,” actively rejected the scintillating world of her wealthy parents and their friends. “Françoise was a somber little girl, rather reserved, and she could not abide their world of social conventions and superficiality. So she said that she must exist in her own way, on the enchanted island of her music. Her position as an heiress, her position as a rich girl, a powerful girl, all that is something she has always detested. Françoise did not like her mother’s milieu at all.” That temperamental difference with her mother, more than anything, drove a wedge between them.
According to Dombasle, the person Françoise liked and admired most was her piano professor, Yvonne Lefébure, a renowned performer and teacher who died in 1986 at the age of eighty-eight. Was she perhaps a surrogate for Françoise’s grandmother, Betsy Doncieux Schueller, herself a piano teacher?
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Françoise first laid eyes on Jean-Pierre Meyers one night in 1972, when he attended a preview showing of The Godfather in the Bettencourts’ private box at the Garnier Opera House. Meyers, then twenty-three, son of a L’Oréal manager, had begun a promising career as a banker. He had a distinguished family background, but one very different from the Bettencourts and their circle. His great-grandfather had been the head rabbi of Avignon and Nice. His grandfather, Rabbi Robert Meyers, had died at Auschwitz, along with his wife after heroically saving dozens of Jews from arrest and deportation.
Françoise and Jean-Pierre got to know each other better at the Bettencourts’ villa at Arcouest, where Liliane had invited the young man to vacation with the family—an invitation she may later have come to regret. Over the next decade, the friendship ripened into a romance, and one fine day the couple stunned their respective families by announcing their intention to marry. Jean-Pierre’s parents, who had hoped to see their son wed a nice Jewish girl, initially opposed the idea. Nor were the fervently Catholic Bettencourts enamored of the match. As André noted in his memoirs, his daughter’s marriage to a Jew “was not an easy thing to contemplate.”
There was another problem. At the time, Jean-Pierre Meyers was living with Agnès Greggory, sister of the actor Pascal Greggory. Agnès, a widow, had two young daughters who looked to Jean-Pierre Meyers as a surrogate father. According to Pascal Greggory, Meyers just disappeared one day. “Agnès learned of the [impending] marriage between Françoise and Jean-Pierre through a notice in the Figaro four or five days after he left.”
Françoise, in any event, was determined to wed Jean-Pierre, and the families eventually withdrew their opposition. “I wouldn’t have prevented it, because I would have been too afraid of her reaction,” Liliane confided in a 2001 letter to Banier. On April 6, 1984, they were married at Fiesole, Italy, in a small civil ceremony. “It was a marvelous wedding in all the sublime Italian colors,” Françoise recalled, denying any family frictions over the mixed marriage. The couple moved into a duplex apartment—a gift to Françoise from her parents—located fifty yards from the Bettencourt mansion in Neuilly.
Apparently resigned to having Jean-Pierre for a son-in-law, Liliane and André asked him to quit his bank job and take a position at L’Oréal. André eventually developed a cordial relationship with Meyers, even calling him “an affectionate son,” but Liliane never warmed to him. “She always blamed Françoise for marrying a man from a different social milieu,” confided her friend Lucienne de Rozier. “She detests her son-in-law.” Years later, Liliane described Jean-Pierre’s courtship in these blunt terms: “He never lost sight of the prize: Money is money.”
The couple had two sons, Jean-Victor, born in 1986, and Nicolas, born in 1988, and decided to raise them in the Jewish religion. It is tempting to see Françoise’s choice of a Jewish husband, like the Jewish upbringing of her sons, as an act of atonement for a dark chapter in her family history: her grandfather’s Nazi collaboration and her father’s anti-Semitic articles. Of course, there is no way to prove this theory. It is even possible—though unlikely—that Françoise was unaware of that inglorious family history at this time. But it is a telling detail that she always avoided speaking of Eugène Schueller, much to her mother’s chagrin. “In 50 years, my daughter has never talked to me about my father,” Liliane wrote in 2008. “I think my father was too important for her.” Important in what sense? Perhaps because Schueller’s past was too heavy a burden for her to shoulder?
In any event, Françoise’s marriage remains a striking symbolic act, one that found an echo in her 2008 five-volume study of the Bible, Les trompettes de Jéricho (The Trumpets of Jericho), aimed at fostering understanding between Catholics and Jews. In his review of the work, author Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote, “I suppose, since I know Françoise a bit, that she had personal reasons—biographical choices, the weight of past destinies—to undertake this task.” Françoise’s other published work, a 1994 study of Greek mythology entitled Les dieux grecs (The Greek gods), is no less symbolic. Its tales of jealousy, vengeance, and retribution, of parricides and matricides and ancient curses that tear families apart, seem eerily to foreshadow the events that would later befall the house of Bettencourt.
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Today, Françoise Meyers still resembles the austere Carmelite described by her friend. She dresses most often in black pantsuits, their bleakness offset by large colored scarves. She eschews fancy jewelry and wears little makeup, apart from the black eyeliner that enhances her dark looks. “Françoise doesn’t like luxury,” says Arielle Dombasle. “She likes her Labrador, she adores her children, and she loves her husband.”
There is little luxury on display in the Meyerses’ apartment, which occupies two floors of a modern building on Neuilly’s Rond-Point Saint-James, across the street from the Bettencourt mansion. The living room, with its two large picture windows, is modestly furnished with beige curtains, metallic bookshelves, and a few modern paintings—including a large black-on-black canvas by Pierre Soulages. The space is dominated by two grand pianos, a Steinway and a Yamaha, on which Françoise practices up to five hours a day. One visitor describes the décor as “frozen in the 1970s, sober and rather cold—the opposite of Liliane’s elegance.”
In contrast to the Bettencourts’ lavish entertaining style, the Meyerses’ social life consists mainly of quiet dinners at home with a few close friends. Though they have two domestics, it is Françoise who opens the door and pours the coffee. She appears to have few personal interests outside her music and her family, although she is involved with the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation and actively supports a research institute that has developed new cochlear-implant techniques to treat deafness—a condition that affects Françoise as well as her mother. Jean-Pierre, for his part, is deeply involved in supporting Jewish charities but, like his wife, flees the glare of public attention. Friends describe him in bland terms as “extremely polite,” “nice,” “simple,” “warm, with a sense of humor.” But it is difficult to get a fix on him as a personality—or as a businessman. At L’Oréal, says former public affairs chief Jean-Pierre Valériola, Meyers “never intervened very directly” in important decisions. Another L’Oréal veteran, former number two Pierre Castres Saint Martin, says Meyers is simply, like his father-in-law, “a prince consort.”
For all her professed disinterest in wealth, Françoise and her family are sitting on one of the world’s greatest fortunes. In 1992, to ensure the future of L’Oréal and the transmission of her estate, Liliane Bettencourt gifted the bulk of her company stock, nearly 172 million shares, to Françoise (two-thirds) and her grandsons (one-third) in the form of nue propriété—reversionary shares that will become theirs upon Liliane’s death. At the time, the gifted stock was worth some €2.5 billion; today the value is more than ten times that sum. Liliane herself retained the voting rights over her shares and usufruct in the form of stock dividends that currently average over a million euros a day. Once she had taken care of her heirs, Liliane considered that she was entitled to spend her own money as she saw fit. As she put it in a letter to her notary in October 2002: “That’s my margin of freedom, and I intend to preserve it.” For her part, Françoise thanked her mother for the shares but added, rather tactlessly in Liliane’s opinion, “If you had made this donation 25 years ago, we could have avoided all the complications.”
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Until the eruption of the affair, the Meyerses had lived under the same veil of discretion as the Bettencourts. Scrupulously avoiding publicity, neither family was fodder for tabloids or gossip columns. The Bettencourt name was associated with L’Oréal, with the foundation, with André’s political positions, but their private lives passed under the radar. So it was surprising to publicist Seth Goldschlager when Françoise and Jean-Pierre Meyers contacted him some time before the suit was filed. “We’re active in a lot of things, but nobody knows about us,” Françoise told Goldschlager. She pointed, for example, to the couple’s funding of cochlear-implant research. She told him she was preparing her book on the Bible, that she played the piano—she had even recorded a CD that was distributed privately to family and friends. When Goldschlager met with the couple, he found her “very headstrong and determined. She looked me in the eye and said, ‘How can we exist?’ They wanted to be known, you see? So we did a little work on her books and her piano, but frankly nobody was interested in that. The cochlear implants got a little play.”
What motivated that sudden desire to attract attention? Was Françoise trying to send a message to her mother? Look at me, Maman, I can write books, and play piano, and do good works. I am not just the dowdy, reserved, timid daughter you are so ashamed of—I am somebody. Her initiative fell flat that time, but she would soon exist in a big way.