2023-12-03 02:25:28
It began as a private dispute: the daughter went to court to prevent her mother from wasting the family wealth on “little gifts” for the younger man who had come to brighten her old age.
This petty story, which is repeated in many families, gained public attention in France because the widow was the main shareholder of the largest cosmetics company on the planet, L’Oréal.
When she died in 2017, aged 94, Liliane Bettencourt had been the richest woman in the world for decades, with a fortune of around 30 billion euros. The obituaries also recalled her involvement in the scandal that began with her connection to photographer François-Marie Banier and ended up implicating Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France from 2007 to 2012.
Documentary in three episodes created for Netflix by Baptiste Etchegaray and Maxime Bonnet, The Billionaire, the Butler and her Boyfriend owes much of its charm to the fascination exerted by the protagonist’s colossal wealth. Throughout the miniseries, numbers with up to nine zeros fill the screen, measuring Liliane’s wealth – and the national shack she ended up getting into.
In the first episode, for example, the figure of one billion euros is stamped on Banier’s face. Exaggeration: between 1997 and 2007, the photographer would have received only 917 million from Liliane. Part of this amount came in the form of works of art signed by modernists such as Picasso, Gris and Braque.
Liliane was a lonely woman. Her lawyer, Georges Kiejman says she was never able to express her personality: “After being her father’s daughter, she was her husband’s wife.”
His father was the chemist and businessman Eugène Schueller, founder of L’Oréal. An only child, Liliane inherited her fortune in 1957, when Schueller died. Her husband was the politician André Bettencourt, who held ministries in the governments of Charles De Gaulle and Georges Pompidou. A distant and cold man, he never offered his wife the social life she wanted to lead.
Banier made waves at the Bettencourt mansion as soon as he arrived there, in 1987. He came to take a portrait of Liliane for a magazine. The servants were horrified by the savage who urinated on the roses in the garden, but the lady of the house was enchanted by his irreverence. Banier soon became a companion on Liliane’s international trips.
The original title of the documentary is The Bettencourt affair – Scandal among the richest woman in the world (The Bettencourt case – Scandal in the home of the richest woman in the world). The word “boyfriend” in the Portuguese title is eye-catching but not accurate: Banier has always been openly gay. Liliane and the photographer were just “good friends”, in the definition of artist Arielle Dombasle, a friend of the Bittencourt family.
The good friend gained full access to the mansion – and the safe – following the death of André Bettencourt, in 1995. The billionaire’s only daughter, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers decided to defend her inheritance: in 2008, she opened a case once morest Banier and tried to take her mother to court under his tutelage.
The mansion’s numerous servants were divided between the parties of Françoise and Banier. Pascal Bonnefoy, the butler of the title, took his daughter’s side. Hoping to compromise Banier, he began recording his boss’s conversations with a recorder hidden on the table where he served coffee and snacks.
The recordings ended up in the hands of Françoise – and the press. Banier, however, barely appears in them. Published by the Mediapart website, the conversations were, for the most part, between Liliane and her wealth manager, Patrice de Maistre.
De Maistre organized a large tax evasion scheme, instructing his client to transfer resources to tax havens. It was even discovered that Liliane owned an island in the Seychelles archipelago that she had never declared to the IRS.
The scandal ensnared the Élysée Palace: De Maistre urged the billionaire to make illegal campaign donations to Sarkozy and Éric Woerth, the president’s minister and treasurer of his party. It is suspected that the objective was to gain tax favors. The revelations contributed to Sarkozy’s 2012 electoral defeat.
The recordings made by the butler represent the backbone of the documentary, which uses reenactments to reproduce them – scenes filmed from above, as if a drone were spying on the hidden dialogues in the billionaire’s office. Patrice de Maistre is the only one implicated in the scandal who gave an interview.
Elegant, sinuous, he swears that he always looked out only for the client’s interests – although the recordings suggest that he manipulated a confused and senile lady. He ended up being removed from his duties when Françoise reached an agreement to protect her mother, in 2010.
A dismissive review in The world equated the documentary to a soap opera. Unfair: the film gives a competent – and engaging – overview of the Bettencourt case.
Your best term of comparison is another Netflix series: The Crown, the dramatization of the career of Elizabeth II whose final episodes air in December. Regardless of the differences between being crowned Queen of England and inheriting 30% of L’Oréal’s shares, the two protagonists occupied positions of eminence that came to them from birth, not from personal achievements.
Each in their own way, they experienced the loneliness that accompanies this privilege.
Jerônimo Teixeira
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