The LBO Artist As Movie Star: Reinventing Bernard Tapie

Filmmaker Claude Lelouch Reinvents Bernard Tapie: from business tycoon to movie star, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

The European, 27 August 1996.

In one of the early shots of Claude Lelouch's new film, Hommes, Femmes: Mode d'Emploi ("Men, Women: Instructions for Use") starring Bernard Tapie, the 53-year-old bankrupt businessman, Eighties icon and ex-minister of François Mitterrand, the camera glides past a Crédit Lyonnais branch on Place de l'Opéra. This triggers some nervous giggles in the audience. Crédit Lyonnais is of course the bank that financed Bernard Tapie's wildest business ventures throughout the Eighties, and, being still owed 1.3 billion francs, forced him into bankruptcy a year and a half ago.

Asked about the shot, Claude Lelouch claims he didn't even notice the Crédit Lyonnais sign while filming. Neither did he plan a subtle reference to Bernard Tapie's tax-dodging shell company for his corporate jets (and his yacht), which resulted in an 18-month prison sentence currently under appeal ­ one of several ­ when he shows Benoît Blanc, the fictional character played by Tapie, flying his own helicopter inscribed "Air Blanc".

One is inclined to believe Lelouch, if only because movieland is a vastly different world from the financial and political one inhabited until now by Bernard Tapie. In the latter, people know all about the companies Tapie bought (Wonder, Look, Terraillon, Testut, Adidas), the bankers who gave him unlimited credit (Pierre Despessailles of SdBO, Jean-Yves Haberer of Crédit Lyonnais), the judges who have charged him with corruption, tax evasion, misappropriation of company funds, intimidating witnesses (Eric de Montgolfier, Eva Joly, Thierry Philipon), the politicians who supported his meteoric career (François Mitterrand et al.)

It's an impressive cast list, with intricate ramifications and hundreds of episodes. Tapie's own life isn't a two-hour feature film, it's an Aaron Spelling series spread over the years, and true addicts in Paris know every little plot turn.

But Claude Lelouch, who has clocked some 30 movies since his famous A Man And A Woman, churning out at least one a year, isn't that kind of an addict. Twenty-seven years ago, he came across the young Bernard Tapie, who had taken to rent his screening room every Thursday night not to show pictures but to give motivational sales talks. He was, Lelouch recalls, "riveted" ­ and asked Tapie if he had considered acting. The former car salesman and budding business leader, who five years earlier had cut three singles in an attempt to break into the pop music scene, answered he wasn't interested. In 1972 Lelouch followed up on his instinct and called Tapie, offering him a part in L'Aventure, c'est l'aventure, opposite Jacques Brel and Lino Ventura. He didn't have time, Tapie said.

Lelouch called again ten years ago, in the middle of the go-go Eighties, when Tapie had become a star on the Bourse, in the evening news, as chairman of Olympique de Marseille football club. His latest project was a monthly TV programme entitled Ambitions, in which he interviewed, in front of a studio audience, young people who had plans to set up a business, and solicited phone-in financing pledges. He was proving a first rate television personality. "I told him I didn't know whether, in ten years' time, he would sit in the Elysée Palace or in jail, but both would be interesting to watch ­ would he let me follow him around with a camera for a documentary?"

Still Tapie turned Lelouch down. But when, last year, having been declared bankrupt, his house and his furniture repossessed, threatened with expulsion from his seat in the Assemblée Nationale and jail, he received yet another telephone call from Claude Lelouch, he knew the filmmaker was in earnest, not trying to score easy publicity points. "He was in the pits," Lelouch recalls. "Nobody else was calling ­ apart from his lawyers. He said yes."

"We knew perfectly well it would be no use making me an idealist hero, a knight in shining armour," Tapie says. "Nobody would have believed it. So Claude chose the only option ­ he made me into an even worse bastard than expected."

This is disingenuous. Benoît Blanc, the shady, high-powered lawyer whom Tapie portrays in the film, is fallible but engaging, capable of great charm (like Tapie) and vulnerability (much less like Tapie), a persuasive talker (like Tapie) who can argue about religion and philosophy quoting Pascal or St Augustine (totally out of character). Tapie's quick, instinctive intelligence is there, but not his essential brutality and ruthlessness. "I was not interested in these aspects of his personality", Claude Lelouch told me, a little wary. "You have to remember this is a fiction film. Benoît Blanc is not Bernard Tapie. He is a character I wrote up, and then offered to Bernard because I thought he would be ideal. If he'd turned me down I would have offered the part to Jean Yanne."

It should be said at this stage that Hommes, femmes, mode d'emploi is a very good movie, and that Bernard Tapie is a brilliant actor in it, unexpectedly understated: but then the entire cast is superlative, from Fabrice Luchini, who plays a plainclothes cop whom Tapie befriends in a hospital waiting roomwhen both have to undergo tests for stomach cancer, to Anouk Aimée as a charming black-crepe-wreathed confidence trickster working Paris cemeteries in search of rich widowers. Lelouch has been known to be uneven, but this is one of his best efforts ­ a wistful fable about playacting on stage and in life, about human relationships and death.

To a French viewer, the sub-text of Tapie's personal history adds obvious depth to his character. (It's probable some of the on-screen coincidences came unconsciously to Lelouch.) But Tapie's performance is such that Gillo Pontecorvo insisted that the film should open the Mostra at Venice next week, asking Lelouch "Who is this new actor you have cast? He is remarkable." Now there is talk of two parts being offered in America (including one, possibly, as Che Guevara), and although Tapie isn't talking, he admits that he has been brushing up on his English. "There's a strong buzz about him," Lelouch confirms. "People in Hollywood have their ears to the ground. Bernard has a serious career ahead of him."

To dedicated Tapie-watchers, there are strange similarities with Bernard Tapie's previous incarnations. Whenever he bought up a new company or started in a new enterprise, he was, he assured the audiences that invariably flocked to see him, a changed man. When he ran for the House, in 1988, he said he would put all his businesses into a blind trust. (He didn't.) When he acquired Adidas in 1990, he swore it was the culmination of his career, that he would run it for decades (He flogged it off two years later.) Earlier he variously vowed he would devote his entire energies to cycling (he sponsored a team including Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault in the Tour de France for three seasons), to football (he bought Olympique de Marseille in 1986 and sold it in 1993). Even Lelouch had a few private butterflies before he started: he shot the 53-million-franc film in 39 days last winter, having worked out a supertight schedule "because I couldn't be sure Tapie's interest in the whole exercise wouldn't flag. But it didn't. He never came late, not even once, and he always knew his lines."

"Can cinema save Tapie?" asked the headline on the cover of thre newsmagazine L'Express last week. The answer, roughly, is "no". On the day the movie was released, Tapie formally resigned from his seat of Député, explaining in radio interviews that he couldn't lead a political and an acting careers at the same time. This had been nicely timed to ensure additional media coverage for Lelouch's film. It was also untrue: Tapie jumped because he was about to be pushed ­ in a matter of days rather than weeks. He has already been given separate suspended jail sentences adding up to over eight years, only part of which are suspended; these, together with his bankruptcy, make him uneligible for elected office; he isn't even allowed to vote anymore. He hasn't given up his EuroMP seat, however ­ the invalidation procedure there is much more arduous, and Tapie needs the job and the 70,000 francs a month pay, his only source of income these days. "Brussels is different," he says unconvincingly. "You don't have to give up your professional activity to be a MEP." But soon, when all the appeals have run out, Tapie will in all probability have to do time ­ one or two years at the very least. It is, say intimates, a perspective that terrifies him.

Bernard Tapie was born in 1943 in North Paris, in a working-class family, and grew up in Le Bourget. He doesn't even have his baccalauréat (although he has at times to have an electrical engineering degree). But at school, at the army or on a hadball field, he was from the start the boy around whom all the others clustered. After the army he worked as a car salesman, then started a business selling TV sets. From this (and after his brief attempt to become the next Johnny Hallyday, under the name Bernard Tapy) he graduated to creating a commercial consumers' association that obtained discounts in big stores for its members.

He had a partner there; he left under a cloud. More can't legally be printed: Bernard Tapie, until two years ago, had a clean criminal record; it is actionable under French law to mention whatever got amnestied in the past. There followed an unsuccessful attempt to create an emergency heart disease ambulance service; then a first buy-out of an ailing newsprint company, the harbinger of countless LBOs throughout the Eighties. But Tapie first impinged upon the national consciousness in 1979, when he announced grandly he would buy up the castles belonging to the deposed Central African "emperor", Jean-Bedel Bokassa. The deal eventually fell through, but Tapie became a star, getting his first taste of being interviewed by every television channel.

He had vowed he would become an industrialist. What he really became was an asset-stripper. His technique was always the same - he'd buys up a practically bankrupt company for one symbolic franc, file a winding-up petition, then got the receivers to agree to a 12- to 24-month freeze of all its debts. Next came ruthless downsizing, while Tapie convinced hard-pressed creditors to let him buy back the company's debts for a small fraction of their face value ­ between 10% and 30%. Publicity he took care of himself. Usually management and employees at first welcomed this forthright, smiling, charismatic character who swooped down upon them flying his own plane, haranguing them on the shop floors, vowing that he'd make the company great again. But Tapie's problem is that he is no industrial strategist ­ and he can't resist a quick franc. The plane costs were billed to the companies he visited, for instance. New products were long in coming. He announced profits when there were none.

In the mid-Eighties it was impossible to miss Tapie in the media. He had his own TV programme. He said he would start "no-nonsense" business schools designed to train good salespeople. He bought an 18th century townhouse in the grand Faubourg Saint-Germain from the couturier Hubert de Givenchy, and said he was filling it with priceless antiques. (When they were seized by Crédit Lyonnais two years ago, it turned out many were fakes.) He sailed the biggest yacht in France, the Phocéa. He gobbled up companies with proud old names, such as the 84-year-old Madame Grès's couture house. And thoughout, he was bankrolled by SdBO (Société de Banque Occidentale), a Crédit Lyonnais subsidiary, with gay abandon.

Tapie says today many more people share the responsibility for Crédit Lyonnais's appalling losses (estimated at some 100 billion francs) ­ but he's the only one whose name comes back again and again: the establishment figures get away with it. He has a point: a former Crédit Lyonnais chairman, Jean-Maxime Lévêque, for instance, whose own small private bank, IBI, was bought out by the Lyonnais, lost them 8 billion francs, 6 times as much as Tapie. Yet the man in the street doesn't know Lévêque's name. But this is a poor excuse ­ and it doesn't start to cover such convictions as corrupting players from the Valenciennes football team to throw their match against Olympique de Marseille, or Tapie's numerous tax dodges.

Still, when he acts in a film, Tapie doesn't cheat anyone. All he is contracted to do is there to see on the screen; there are no disappointments, no funny surprises. Rather than being paid up front for Hommes, Femmes, Mode d'Emploi, he has decided to get a percentage of the box-office results: after the first 35,000 tickets are sold, he is to receive 2.85F on each ticket price. (That way the money won't be confiscated too soon by the Lyonnais). If the movie does well, he stands to make several million francs. As it is, his letterbox is filling with scripts every morning.

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 27 August 1996

Credit Lyonnais bought a studio but loses script

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet looks at the hubris of a French bank that overreached itself

The European, 28 March 1996

THE persistent rumour in Paris is that Jean Peyrelevade, the chairman of Credit Lyonnais, is seriously thinking of jumping ship and joining Lazard Freres as a senior partner. It surprises no one.

Until a year ago, his bank was commonly known as "Discredit Lyonnais" , and it sometimes seemed as though there was no loss-making venture in Europe in which Credit Lyonnais was not involved. However, Peyrelevade was recently able to announce that the bank was in the black for the first time since 1991; although he was not expecting wild praise, he did hope for some modest kudos.

The bank posted token 1995 profits of Ffr13 million ($2.5m) for an overall gross banking income of Ffr43 billion - the latter down by five per cent from last year. Provisions still stood at almost Ffr6bn, encouragingly down from Ffr14bn last year. Overheads were down by 3.4 per cent.

But few French analysts or fellow-bankers were in anything but a scathing mood, pointing out that even after the biggest bail-out in French banking history, estimated at Ffr45bn by the European Commission when it gave it a reluctant go-ahead, 1996 projections were so sombre that it was unlikely that Credit Lyonnais would stay in the black.

Peyrelevade forecast that the fall in French interest rates would cost Credit Lyonnais an additional Ffr1bn to finance its loan to CDR (Consortium de Realisation), the state-backed body established last year to administer much of its debt.

Privately, most Parisian experts believe the cost of this loan will be closer to Ffr2bn. CDR borrowed Ffr145bn from Credit Lyonnais at a variable rate, while Credit Lyonnais refinanced it at a fixed rate on the markets.

THE Credit Lyonnais saga has occupied, and fascinated, the French political and banking scene for almost five years, although measures to contain what may eventually amount to a Ffr100bn catastrophe started only on 10 November 1993, when Jean-Yves Haberer, the bank's chairman since 1988 and the main architect of its all-out expansion, was finally sacked by Edouard Balladur's government. In the meantime, the bank had posted Ffr1.8bn losses in 1992, and was about to announce Ffr6.9bn losses for 1993.

That Haberer stayed so long in office has everything to do with the French system of governance of stateowned enterprises. Credit Lyonnais' boss, like his France Telecom or Thomson counterparts, is appointed by the Cabinet, and usually plucked from the small, incestuous ranks of the upper French civil service, bred in elite schools, mostly ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration, Haberer's alma mater); and sometimes Ecole Polytechnique. As the losses mounted and the scandals surfaced -- bankrupt Credit Lyonnais creditors from Robert Maxwell to Giancarlo Parretti made world headlines -- it was distasteful for ministers who had themselves graduated from the same exclusive establishments to throw a colleague to the dogs.

Haberer belonged to ENA's creme de la creme, the Inspection des Finances, a state body that creams off only the five best out of each 120-strong ENA class annually. He had then headed the French Treasury during the presidency of another Inspecteur des Finances, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, before branching out into the private sector and chairing Paribas. Cross the Inspection des Finances with the senior ranks of the Treasury's alumni, and you find a list of a couple hundred men -- and few women -- who are the most powerful figures of France.

Haberer's fantastic ambitions for Credit Lyonnais become clear from a list of its major fiascos. In 1990 it financed, to the tune of $1.3bn, Giancarlo Parretti's takeover of MGM studios, through its Dutch subsidiary Credit Lyonnais Bank Nederland. During the 1994 National Assembly parliamentary inquiry hearings into Credit Lyonnais, it emerged the decision to go ahead with the MGM deal was taken in half an hour by the Credit Lyonnais executive in charge of foreign subsidiaries, Georges Vigon.

Vigon, who had not even consulted his direct boss, Alexis Wolkenstein, had previously been forbidden by Haberer in writing to grant any new loans to Parretti. But this did not prevent him from stepping in after Time-Warner withdrew from a similar deal a few hours before the projected closing. Episodes like this were common under Haberer.

Such was the bank's gung-ho culture at the time that Vigon was congratulated rather than sacked. Parretti has since been declared bankrupt by American courts, while his Credit Lyonnais-financed partner, Fiorino. Fiorini's Swiss company SASEA, now insolvent, is the object of a Swiss judicial inquiry. Credit Lyonnais still owns the loss-making MGM, which it has unsuccessfully tried to sell off ever since.

In 1990 Credit Lyonnais also bought, for Ffr250m, a controlling interest in the indebted International Bankers bank from its owner, Jean-Maxime Leveque, another Inspecteur des Finances and Haberer's predecessor as Credit Lyonnais chairman. A flamboyant right-wing establishment figure, Leveque, having chaired French bank CCF before its 1982 nationalisation, fancied himself a banker; and it would have been bad form for a fellow inspecteur to deny him. Not only did International Bankers specialise in risky property financing it turned out that several of its top executives had been receiving illegal commissions to extend loans. International Bankers is now in receivership, with few of its Ffr8bn debts expected to be recovered.

Since 1977 the maverick businessman, politician, film actor, and football impresario Bernard Tapie had enjoyed a special relationship with SdBO (Societe de Banque Occidentale), a wholly owned Credit Lyonnais subsidiary specialising in financing buyouts of bankrupt companies.

BASICALLY an asset-stripper, Tapie outreached himself with the buyout of Adidas in 1990, which Credit Lyonnais forced him to sell two years later to a consortium headed by former Saatchi & Saatchi chief Robert Louis-Dreyfus for Ffr1.6bn, as his outstanding debt to SdBO stood close to Ffr2bn.

Since Peyrelevade's arrival, the Tapie affair has degenerated into a blood feud. Peyrelevade, a born Marseillais of modest origins, resents Tapie's political ambitions in Marseille as well as his flamboyant, Credit Lyonnais financed lifestyle. He ordered that Tapie's 18th- century town-house and antique furniture be publicly repossessed in the summer of 1994.

Tapie is suing Credit Lyonnais. He claims that he was forced to sell at a loss; Adidas was successfully floated on the Frankfurt stock exchange last year, and stands at a Ffr11bn market capitalisation.

Credit Lyonnais' nose for a bad loan was unrivalled; its poor customers include Eurotunnel and the developers of Canary Wharf, Novalliance venture capital and the Jacques Fath couture house. If Credit Lyonnais was not top of the list of French banks hit by the property crisis, it is partly because losses sustained by other banks were even better publicised. In fact, the Lyonnais shared the property disaster, mostly with the developer Michel Pelege.

Pelege, like La Défense developer Christian Pellerin, is still afloat -- entirely propped by Credit Lyonnais, which feels it would stand to lose more in bankruptcy proceedings. SdBO is stuck with an unsaleable property portfolio -- the "assets" unsuccessfully stripped by its stable of dubious 1980s turnaround specialists, such as the disreputable Pascal Jeandet, who was bankrupt when he died two years ago, costing SdBO Ffr1bn.

The European Commission gave its agreement to the government bail out on condition that Credit Lyonnais sold 35 per cent of its foreign banking network. This leaves Credit Lyonnais with a reduced income basis at a time when even sound banks find it hard to make money in commercial activities. Haberer's ambitions of creating a German-style universal bank are dead: Credit Lyonnais has also been forced to shed most of its industrial portfolio.

Reduced to the state of a chronically unprofitable rump, Credit Lyonnais is short of expectations, and bereft of hope. It is hard to fault Peyrelevade for thinking of jumping ship.

© The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1996