I hope your future wife will have the financial means to help you, but not too much, because money is also the source of many complications.
—Victor Bettencourt, advice to his son André
Among the Bettencourts’ twenty or so domestic employees, some were closer to Liliane than others. Her longtime chambermaid, Dominique Gaspard, who cleaned her room, made her bed, prepared her medicines, and helped choose her clothes, jealously guarded her proximity to Madame. Christiane Djenane, Liliane’s personal assistant, handled her correspondence, managed her appointments, and organized her travel and her relations with L’Oréal. Djenane often served as Liliane’s intermediary for telephone calls, a trusted position that gave her an intimate knowledge of Madame’s exchanges with Banier and others. Thierry Coulon, the Bettencourts’ chef, met with Liliane daily to go over the luncheon and dinner menus, an “important position,” as he put it, since Madame paid particular attention to the quality of the cuisine served both to her guests and household employees. Probably her favorite was Enrico Vaccaro, the square-shouldered, sandy-haired bodyguard to whom she bequeathed an apartment and €1 million to take care of her dog after her death.
As for André, no employee was closer to him than Pascal Bonnefoy, the faithful valet who watched over “Monsieur” with a filial devotion for eleven years. It was Bonnefoy who chose the master’s clothes, shined his shoes, cleaned his study—and shared many of his secrets. After André’s death, Bonnefoy would play a pivotal and explosive role in what came to be known as the Bettencourt Affair.
Born in the central French city of Châteauroux, Bonnefoy chose the profession of what he quaintly calls “servitude” because he was “in search of paternal recognition.” His father, owner of a bar-restaurant, was murdered when Bonnefoy was twenty-one, leaving him to find his own direction in life. After moving to Paris and working as a waiter and barman, he was taken on by an agency that supplied servers for fancy corporate events. One day, he was sent to the home of the Bettencourts, who were seeking to hire a new valet for André. The trim, strikingly handsome young man immediately caught Bettencourt’s eye. “You seem like a down-to-earth man, that’s good,” said Bettencourt, playfully adding, “I like your name.” (Bonnefoy means “good faith” in French.) His contract was signed on June 1, 1990.
“I think André was seduced by the physical beauty of Pascal Bonnefoy,” says Antoine Gillot, Bonnefoy’s lawyer. “That’s why he was hired in the beginning. Then a relationship developed over the years.” It was apparently platonic—Bonnefoy is married and has a child—but the two were extremely close. André played a Pygmalion-like role toward this naïve and unsophisticated provincial, taught him elegant manners, how to speak and dress and conduct himself with a certain refinement. Bonnefoy was forever grateful for that.
The bond was interrupted in 1993. Disgusted by the rivalries and backbiting among the domestic employees, Bonnefoy took a job as personal valet to the Aga Khan. After crisscrossing the globe with “His Highness”—“the most demanding master there is”—he happily returned to the Bettencourts six years later. André welcomed Bonnefoy like a prodigal son. The faithful valet accompanied the couple on their regular trips to Arcouest, Formentor, and the Île d’Arros. The private lives of the Bettencourts held few secrets for him. He says the couple would even swim nude in their swimming pool at Arcouest in full view of their domestics.
When they were home in Neuilly, Bonnefoy attended to André’s every need. “André Bettencourt was an esthete, a refined dandy, as elegant in his clothes as in his words,” he says. “He was horrified by dust. Everything had to be impeccable: his office, his clothes, his shoes—John Lobbs or Corthays. I shined them with a silk stocking. I chose his clothes according to the seasons and his daily schedule. He was always even-tempered, the very embodiment of distinction.”
After retiring from the Senate, André spent much of his time in his second-floor study, which Bonnefoy made sure to keep in order—and well dusted. It was a large room, bathed in light, lined with mahogany bookshelves, furnished with a large Empire desk, armchairs, a coffee table, and side tables. The bed in which André slept was nestled in an alcove. On one wall hung a large framed battle flag of the French Revolutionary armies. An alabaster bust of Dante stood on a pedestal. There were signed photographs of de Gaulle, Mitterrand, and Pompidou; portraits of Liliane, Françoise, her husband and sons. Among the bric-a-brac, one object stood out: a bronze statuette of an erect penis. When alert readers of Capital magazine noticed this curious item in a photo tour of the Bettencourt home, an ex-employee explained that it had been given to André by an old friend as a “humoristic gift, an allusion to their vigor in spite of their advanced age.” Other interpretations are possible.
By far the most important object in André’s study was the safe, which he kept stuffed with banknotes. Though discretion was de rigueur, all the domestics knew that Monsieur received many political personalities, especially during election season, and that they rarely went away empty-handed. “Madame et Monsieur were very much solicited,” says Bonnefoy.
No employee knew more about that than Claire Thibout, the Bettencourts’ personal accountant. It was Claire who made regular runs to the BNP bank on the avenue de la Grande Armée to withdraw cash for the couple’s household expenses as well as André’s political donations. It was a well-oiled routine: André would tell Claire that he needed a certain sum on a given day and she would prepare the cash in a brown paper envelope. Often, after a visit, he would call her back and say he needed more cash: “I’ve been drained dry.”
“He didn’t hide it,” says Thibout. “He had always financed the right. It was a veritable parade of politicians at the house. They came especially at election time. Each one came to get his envelope. Some of the envelopes contained €100,000 or even €200,000.”
Secret donations by well-heeled individuals like André Bettencourt were avidly sought by politicians because of the limits placed on funding by French campaign finance laws. There are no super PACs in France. No Citizens United. Political ads on radio and TV are strictly forbidden. Billionaires cannot blithely shovel tens of millions of dollars into campaigns under the guise of “free speech,” as the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and George Soros do in the United States. Before 1988, French political parties were expected to be financed solely by the dues of their members—a woefully inadequate revenue source. As a result, they resorted to all sorts of shenanigans to fill their coffers: kickbacks and false billing from public contractors, municipal payrolls padded with fictitious jobs, corporate slush funds recycled through African cutout companies, and the like.
In an attempt to remedy these abuses, a reform law in 1988 set up a system of partial public financing of candidates and set caps on the total amount any campaign could spend. Subsequent laws forbade companies and organizations to make political donations, and limited individual gifts to €7,500 per candidate or party in any one election season. Under those circumstances, concealed cash was doubly desirable because it was not subject to caps on donations or to the overall limits on campaign spending. That’s why sugar daddies like André Bettencourt were avidly courted by politicians of all stripes.
Like Schueller before him, André had always cast a wide net, dispensing cash to parties left, right, and center, because a major French company like L’Oréal always needed friends in government regardless of their political color. Though he scattered his donations across the political spectrum, André naturally favored parties and candidates who shared his own conservative leanings. Liliane, who held the purse strings, never got involved in the process but gave it her blessing. “My father was already doing it before I was married,” she said. “And one is not the wife of a politician in order to play marbles. You have to get on with it!”
As the laws got stricter, though, getting on with it could be a risky business. In 2004, no less a figure than former prime minister Alain Juppé was convicted of political financing violations, handed a suspended jail sentence, and declared ineligible to hold political office for five years. When Nicolas Sarkozy geared up his presidential campaign in 2007, prudence and discretion were de rigueur. But elections still cost money, and the support of willing, wealthy donors like André Bettencourt was most welcome.