Liliane Bettencourt

"Not a week, not a month, not an evening has gone by recently without the radio, the television and the magazines talking about the billionaire and her gigolo," railed France's most celebrated lawyer, George Kiejman, over the extraordinary story that has France spellbound.
The billionaire in question is L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. The "gigolo" is celebrity photographer and society dandy François-Marie Banier, 63, on whom she has bestowed almost €1bn (£800m) in gifts, much to her only daughter's dismay.
Eighty-seven-year-old Bettencourt intended to pass the twilight years of her privileged life in peace, flitting between her luxury homes: a sumptuous mansion in the chic Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, an equally luxurious property built by her father in 1920 overlooking the Brittany coast, and an isolated Seychelles island.
She had arranged for her only child, Françoise, 57, to inherit most of her vast fortune – as French law dictates – and was ready to live out her dotage on the interest – an estimated €34m a month, roughly 25,350 times the French minimum wage.
But then her tranquil retirement was disturbed by the clatter of skeletons tumbling out of the closet.
Today, this discreet pillar of polite French society is at the centre of a national scandal, as investigators pursue claims that she made an illegal donation to Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 campaign for the presidency via employment minister Eric Woerth.
The very regal Bettencourt is appalled to find herself in the spotlight. For decades, France's wealthiest woman has followed our own Queen's golden rule: never explain, never complain.
Even when in 2004 Monica Waitzfelder accused L'Oréal of receiving stolen goods for having acquired her Jewish family's home after it was illegally seized during the war, Bettencourt's immaculately painted lips remained sealed.
Unimaginable wealth has allowed the Bettencourt family to gloss over the more suspect aspects of its history, including antisemitic tracts and Nazi sympathies, as efficiently as one of L'Oreal's cosmetic cover-up sticks. Money talks. But an estimated €20bn fortune buys silence.
The only child of L'Oréal founder Eugène Schueller, who built a beauty empire on a patented hair dye he called Aureale, developed in 1907, Bettencourt formed a close bond with her father after her mother died when she was five. She has admitted being jealous of women who "circled around" her father, perhaps explaining why he never remarried.
Schueller, a boulanger's son, was a brilliant science student and heading for a top college when his family's fortunes took a dive and he was forced out to work. By hawking and trading on his wits, he made enough money to complete his studies.
After university, he went to work for a barber looking for a chemist to help him develop products for his customers. The famous hair dye was created in the family kitchen and in 1909 he set up the forerunner of L'Oréal, the "French Society for Inoffensive Hair Colouring", run from a two-room Paris flat that served as an office, laboratory and showroom. By night Schueller mixed dyes, and by day he did the rounds of hairdressers.
The belle époque came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the first world war, in which Schueller distinguished himself, receiving five citations for bravery during the 10-month battle of Verdun in 1916.
After the war, Schueller began buying up beauty product companies, acquired a Rolls Royce and a chic Left Bank apartment and built his Britanny holiday home.
By the 1930s, however, he had stretched his investments way beyond hair lotions and lipsticks, putting money into a secret group called CSAR (Comité Secret d'Action Révolutionnaire – Secret Committee for Revolutionary Action), a fascist-leaning, anti-Communist organisation that Schueller allowed to meet at L'Oréal's Paris headquarters. Known as Cagoule (Hood), the group was considered anti-republican and quasi-terrorist by the French government.
During the Nazi occupation of France he founded the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire, or MSR (Revolutionary Social Movement), set up with the approval of the Germans and opposed to capitalism, Bolshevism, Judaism and the Freemasons.
It was through these organisations that Schueller met André Bettencourt, the son of a bourgeois Catholic family from Normandy. Bettencourt wrote for the collaborationist and antisemitic revue La Terre Française (the French Land), an organ of German propaganda under the triple command of Joseph Goebbels, the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo.
"The Jews, the hypocritical Pharisees, have no more hope," he wrote in 1941. "For them the matter is finished … their race has been sullied for eternity by the blood of the righteous. They will be cursed." Later that same year he wrote: "Denunciation [of Jews], is it a duty? Yes, if it serves the collectivity."
Around 1944, the year of the Allied landings in Normandy, Bettencourt had a change of heart, joining the Resistance. He was later awarded a Croix de Guerre and given the Legion d'Honneur, though his role in the organisation is disputed.
After the war Schueller faced prosecution for collaboration. Bettencourt, who was to marry Liliane in 1950, got him off the hook on the grounds that he had also been in the Resistance and had allegedly saved the lives of Jews.
André Bettencourt, who became a minister under General Charles de Gaulle, later recanted his wartime antisemitism. "I was 20 years old in 1940: it was an error of youth. We thought the Marshal [Pétain] would lead us out of the mess … I always said I regretted what I wrote," he said.
Much later, when his only daughter, Françoise, married Jean-Pierre Meyers, the grandson of a rabbi killed in Auschwitz, André Bettencourt was also fond of telling people his daughter had "married an Israelite [sic] who likes us a lot".
The Bettencourts' luxury home became a centre for Paris's beau monde where politicians, financiers and artists mingled under the art deco chandeliers.
"She knew how to choose the right people," Jean-Françoise Dalle, son of the former head of L'Oreal, who stayed with the Bettencourt family for six years and witnessed their "wealthy but ordinary" life, told the Parisien newspaper.
He said the Bettencourts' daughter, Françoise, was "pampered and brought up by an English nanny". Françoise, described by her mother as "always a cold child", met Meyers in the chic Alpine ski resort of Mégève. Despite her strict Catholic upbringing, Françoise has adopted her husband's religion, raising her sons in the Jewish faith.
Today, when not pursuing her mother's "gigolo", Banier, through the courts for allegedly abusing Bettencourt's enfeebled state of mind to persuade her to part with almost €1bn in art masterpieces, cash and life insurance policies, Françoise, 57, writes books about the Bible and links between Judaism and Christianity.
In another of his acerbic courtroom observations, Kiejman, who is representing Bettencourt in the photographer's trial, has said he believes the case is less about money than it is about a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship.
"This is a family story; the daughter is trying to use this court to settle a psychological conflict with her mother. It's a 57-year-old little girl complaining 'my mummy doesn't love me. She loves him more than me'."
Kiejman added: "That Madame Bettencourt should have the misfortune of finding the brilliant Mr Banier more amusing that her own daughter – and between you and me that's no surprise – is not for this court to decide."
The Bettencourt saga, with its deeply personal and damaging political twists, is set to run and run.

Copyright © 2013 : http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/09/liliane-bettencourt-profile