The Renault Blues (and Was De Gaulle A Royalist?)

Moutet's Paris: The Renault Blues (and Was De Gaulle A Royalist?)

The European, 18 March, 1994

Renault's boss Louis Schweitzer, the quiet Protestant Polytechnicien who used to be chief of staff to Socialist PM Laurent Fabius (and is a direct descendent of legendary Dr Albert Schweitzer), has cause to feel sore these days. First of all, his long-planned merger with Volvo, the ailing Swedish carmakers, was botched at the last minute. The jittery, privately-owned Swedes left their French bride standing at the altar after our new Minister for Industry Gérard Longuet's undiplomatic gesticulations, insisting to announce and sign the new contract himself, thereby showing how little the French government believes in the independence of the companies it controls.

This cost Renault, in addition to a massive loss of face, hundreds of millions of francs in fees to their investment bankers, the arch-establishment Lazard Frères. (The Lazard partner who drew up the contract, énarque François Polge de Combret, a former aide to President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is also said to have included, with Giscard-like arrogance, clauses leaving the Swedes in casual ignorance as to the French government's golden shares.)

Secondly, Schweitzer, who thought he would preside over the Renault privatisation, now awaits to be sacked on 22 May, the date at which he could reasonably have expected his mandate to be renewed. (The company is comfortably in the black and the entire Renault range of cars is a success, to the extent that the R21 is now the best-selling foreign car in Germany.) Longuet, a naive soul, was all in favour.

Yet instead of Renault, the government will next put the loss-making Bull computers company on the block, even if it means flogging it off at bargain basement prices to IBM: Edouard Balladur has decided that no Socialist could possibly have the power to set up a noyau dur, the tightly-knit group of influential shareholders which prevent large French corporations from being taken over. Instead, Schweitzer is currently being enticed to accept the chairmanship of SNCF, the national railways, which has posted losses of FF 10Bn last year, is overstaffed, strike-ridden, under attack from the Greens for its projected TGV-Provence, and has just failed miserably to introduce its new reservations system, Socrates. Schweitzer's qualifications, you are told in Paris, is that he has always collected model electric trains and of course that he's a Fabiusien.

POOR Jacques Delors is rumoured to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At the very time when he is being pressed to run for the presidency by a wide majority of left-wingers, who believe he can attract enough votes from the centre to win in 1995, his strong-willed daughter, former employment minister Martine Aubry, has put her foot down. Aubry has a good shot to become France's first woman president in 2002, and reportedly told her father that his taking the top job would be damaging to her own career (she would hate the likely suspicions of nepotism). The mousy Madame Delors herself, a bespectacled, unfashionable woman who may not relish the perspective of living in the Elysée glass-house, is said to have sided with her daughter, telling the beleaguered Delors that it was ''Martine's turn.''

WAS General de Gaulle a Royalist? So says Henri, Comte de Paris, 85, the pretender to the throne of France, who for years told intimates (and not-so-intimates) how Le General really intended to make him his successor in 1965.

The Comte prefers to underline that he's descended from Louis XIV younger brother, Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, than from France's last reigning King (and first Constitutional monarch), Louis-Philippe, called ''the regicide'' by most of his family since he voted the death of his cousin Louis XVI in 1793.

Barred from living on French soil by an 1886 Bill of Exile repealed only in 1950, Henri de Paris fought in the Foreign Legion during the Second World War, and finally came back to France with his family, soon to be sought out, says he, by General de Gaulle. They started meeting regularly over lunch, a habit which didn't stop with de Gaulle's return to power in 1958. The Comte claims de Gaulle had in mind for him a scheme not unlike Franco's high-handed restoration of Juan-Carlos de Borbon in Spain - but that the General's entourage almost coerced him into standing a second time. Surviving Gaullists guffaw at this. One didn't coerce de Gaulle, they say, adding that the Comte would have believed anything.

Now the Comte has published in book form his entire correspondence with de Gaulle (Dialogue sur la France, éditions Fayard), as well as what he claims to be exact transcripts of their conversations. The result is, how shall one put it, embarrassing.

The conversations show de Gaulle discussing everything from Algerian independence to the Fifth Republic Constitution with the Comte. The letters are considerably sparer, to the extent that the Comte has had to include absolutely every single piece of paper that ever circulated between them: bread-and-butter letters, Christmas cards, condolences, congratulations for the Comte's thirteen children's marriages, cover- and thank-you notes, stiffies from long-forgotten State dinners at the Elysée (robe longue, décorations), transcripts of telephone calls between de Gaulle's and the Comte's private secretaries, opinion pieces the Comte wrote for his own political newsletter and sent to the Elysée, everything is grist to his mill to fill up some 200 widely-spaced pages.

The most interesting revelation is no doubt that the General usually signed off with l'hommage de mon fidèle devouement, while the Comte never failed to conclude as votre affectionné, Henri., which I can't help believing must have sounded to the General as a deplorable instance of familiarity.

HOWEVER ungallant this sounds, it's hard not to notice that as his ratings plunge in the polls, Edouard Balladur seems to have gained the few extra pounds that cause his beautiful, made-to-measure Henry Poole Savile Row suits to strain at the seams. In his five years in Opposition, preparing for his current job with amazing determination (and a full-time staff of half a dozen political advisers), the sweet-toothed Balladur lost over 10 kilos in order to look younger on the day of his projected appointment as PM, a remarkable achievement for a man of 60 whose favourite pudding is a heavenly confection of whipped cream, chocolate and chestnut mousse called a Mont-Blanc from the renowned rue de Rivoli tea-room Angelina's. Vowing he'd never regain his flab, Balladur intrepidly had all his pinstripes, herringbone tweeds, exquisite Prince of Wales checks and heather mixture sports jackets flown to London to be taken in. Considering the price (some 2,000 for a coat, a decent shirt and two pairs of trousers) of a single Henry Poole outfit suitable for the nattiest man in France, the PM now has what might be called a considerable vested interest in staying popular and keeping off the gratification food.

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1994.

Salon Decadence: Hair-Raising Tales at Carita

An interest ought to be declared here. I have been a Carita customer for I don't know how long. Well, I do know how long: even since, just out of university at 22, and earning less than today's minimum wage in my first magazine job, I started blowing almost a third of my earnings on a really good haircut, highlights, and the odd facial, regularly: I simply couldn't resist the way I could be made to look from what, over years of school and undergraduate years, I thought ineradicable ugly-duckling basic material. All of you non-French readers (except possibly the Italians, who know what I mean), take note: this is what Paris does to you. Frenchwomen (and French men) are usually good-looking, but there's no secret to it: they work at it. Hard. And expensively.

The grand old house of Carita's, at 11 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a stone's throw from the Elysée Palace, was founded in the late Fifties by two emigré Spanish sisters, Rosy and Maria Carita, and is now owned (with commendable lightness of touch) by the Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido. It is arguably the most sybaritic beauty and hairdressing salon in the world, not discounting establishments aspiring to that title in Los Angeles, Tokyo and New York. On four Andrée-Putnam-starkly designed floors, men and women are offered a range of beauty care undreamt of anywhere else. I am not lightly indulging in puffspeak here. They have a regular Italian customer, a man, who flies over every month from Rome to get his eyelashes permed. It may cost FF495 sans le service, but I'm told it gives him that extra velvety eye no doubt necessary to his feminine conquests.

Other perfectly respectable Frenchmen (and discerning foreigners) come to Carita Monsieur not just for a shave and a short back-and-sides (which they can of course get) but to get their backs waxed (FF265), their chest hairs dyed (FF275), their scalps, neck and shoulders massaged for an hour (an absolute snip at FF368), their extremities pedicured and manicured (FF345 and 145 respectively), and anything else you can think of from a light beard trim à la Yasser Arafat (FF115) to a one-and-a-half-hour shiatsu massage (FF500) with the best practitioner in Paris, a trim Japanese called Sendi, who is usually booked eight weeks in advance.

I've always been fascinated by the Carita Monsieur section of the salon, chiefly because, in an interesting role-reversal, it's men who are in complete purdah here on the top floor, with a discreet separate entrance and almost complete anonymity. Carita's efficient press officers will happily namedrop feminine luminaries ranging from Catherine Deneuve to Paloma Picasso, Isabelle Adjani, Carole Bouquet, the late Indira Gandhi, Jerry Hall-Jagger, Princesses Caroline of Monaco and Ira of Furstenberg et al, but do clam up the minute you try and find out who les messieurs are. (Broad-mindedness, even in France, still has some limits.) Over the years, I have however espied, passing the little door at the left in the hallway, such diverse stars as Jean d'Ormesson, the Académicien Francais and Le Figaro columnist, the champion jockey Yves Saint-Martin - and I still remember the frisson at knowing from his own hairdresser (summoned at the nearby Palais Marigny, official residence of France's most honoured guests) definite confirmation that Ronald Reagan did indeed dye his hair.

If the men's salon is discreet, the women's is flamboyant, with some of the city's best gossip being bandied over salmon canapés and champagne (Carita's, where a star hairdressers like Jean-Michel Henry has been known to keep addicted customers waiting for over three hours, happily has its own restaurant). Sometimes the object of the gossip itself takes place there, and the parties for which everyone is being readied turn out to be an anticlimax.

I still remember the time, a good ten years ago, when Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild found herself, for some unfathomable reason, driverless. 'Un taxi pour madame la Baronne!' echoed round and round the salon. Alas, the chasseur downstairs couldn't find a taxi, and for some reason the switchboard had gone kaput. The Baroness, in her impeccable hairdo and makeup, still clad in her white peignoir over a little Givenchy something, was led with many apologies to the payphone in the corner. 'But how do I go about this?' she was heard to ask. 'You need a one-franc coin, Madame La Baronne. Un franc!' She fumbled ineffectually into her Hermès handbag. In a matter of minutes, four hairdressers had proferred franc coins, pushed them into the slot. 'Appuyez sur le bouton, madame la Baronne!' There was the taxi service number to be dialled, the muzak waiting tone to endure: the whole process defeated her. As I left, my own hairdresser was suggesting lending his own cherished BMW so that one of his teen-aged assistants could be allowed to drive the Baroness to Hotel de Lambert, her splendid Ile de la Cité townhouse. I never knew the end of the story, although I don't think the BMW was totalled, and certainly Marie-Hélène de Rothschild has been seen, perfectly coiffed, at many parties since.

Yet the new, revamped Carita (they have hired as their new Directeur Artistique Bruno Pittini, who until recently had established his own house in New York) is keen to establish their technical pre-eminence: the Nineties may no longer be the time to rely only on the 'star effect.' They therefore invited me to come and spend a full day at the salon, promising, among other delights, their new star treatment, a 'body lifting' care called 'prolifting.' 'You'd need a forklift truck to lift my body,' I answered. They insisted. Reader, I selflessly accepted. All day long, my hair was massaged with oils, washed, streaked, cut and set; my face was sloughed, moisturised and made up, and yes, yes, my body was massaged all over with tingling little sponges linked to an electronic machine. At the end of all this I looked, and felt, like a zillion Francs Forts. (Which, thank God, I didn't have to pay this time.) They needn't have gone all this way out with me: I was already convinced. I'll be back with the mortgage money. Soon.

© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1993

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1993.

The Sons Also Rise: Paul Belmondo and Anthony Delon

Remember the split-screen opening titles of the old Sixties television series The Persuaders, where Roger "Brett Sinclair" Moore's aristocratic, privileged childhood ran parallel with Tony "Danny Wilde" Curtis's up-from-the-slums, tough, brawling one? That's exactly what reading the cuttings on Paul Belmondo (son of Jean-Paul) and Anthony Delon (son of Alain) feels like.

By the time both were eighteen, Paul's proper wooing of Princess Stephanie of Monaco had gained him entry to the Grimaldi palace as well as Vogue's society pages, while his first car racing victories got treated with respect by France's sports daily L'Equipe's seasoned hacks.

Meanwhile Anthony was already crime-reporter material - his first arrest in a stolen BMW, which somehow contained a 9 mm gun traced to a famous French gangster, his trial, his time in remand, and eventual conviction (to an eight months' suspended sentence) made headlines in France-Soir and Le Parisien for months.

Paris-Match ran pictures of one kid's film-star dad picking him up from Kensington's Lycée Français - and of the other's waiting for him, stony-faced in a too large, too shiny Lancia, at the gate of Bois d'Arcy jail.

"The press really had a field day with Anthony and me, playing up the 'good boy/bad boy' image, and it was tough on him" Paul says carefully, deftly picking a piece of sushi with his wooden chopsticks in the subdued Suntory restaurant off the Champs Elysées.

The Suntory is mostly grazing land for neighbouring Japan Airlines executives, which makes it a good place for a quiet celeb interview, provided no-one objects to raw fish. Two days before, at the shoot for the pictures you see here, I'd tentatively suggested it to the younger Belmondo, and he'd agreed, pulling out a beige leather Hermès desk diary from his duffle bag and writing the address down. Any qualms I might have had disappeared when he ordered his meal - "how many rolls of tekka-maki are there on the platter? Good. And I'd like the squid without mustard, please." Anthony Delon's manager, on the other side, had set the locale for our interview: the bar of the swank Bristol hotel, on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Anthony and the bartender there were on first-name terms.

I'd just asked Paul about Princess Stephanie - whose tempestuous, short-lived affair with Anthony, around 1983, just after they had ended their two and a half-year relationship, had ensured that the "rivalry" between the two boys with the famous names would provide tabloid fodder for years to come. ("In His Father's Footsteps: Anthony Delon Captures The Heart Of Belmondo's Son Princess Girlfriend!" screamed a typical Ici Paris front page.)

"They got it wrong," Paul says. "By the time Stephanie met Anthony, we'd split up for almost a year. Well, drifted apart, really. People change a lot. I met her when I was 18 and she was 16. You don't marry the girl you met at 18." Some do, I suggest. He grins disarmingly: "Okay, sometimes they do. But rarely."

At this moment, he has every bit of his father's winning charm, the engaging scamp who walked down the Champs-Elysées, hawking the Paris Herald Tribune with Jean Seberg, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless; or Alain Resnais's inspired choice for his Stavisky, the Third Republic big-time swindler to whom no-one could refuse anything, and whose fall brought down a government.

There never was much truth to the famed Alain Delon - Jean-Paul Belmondo rivalry, except that both became France's leading film stars at about the same age (Delon was born in 1935, Belmondo in 1933), and exactly the same time. Their first films, in the late Fifties and throughout the Sixties, were often masterpieces: Delon starred in Luchino Visconti's neo-realist Rocco and his brothers as well as his sumptuous Sicilian epic The Leopard; in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai; in Joseph Losey's The Assassination of Trostky and Mr Klein. Belmondo was Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou and Melville's Léon Morin Prêtre opposite that Muse of the New Wave, Emmanuelle Riva. He was directed by Marguerite Duras (Moderato Cantabile) and Francois Truffaut (La Sirene du Mississippi).

Then both stars' careers (if not their bank balances) took a downturn as each started making, almost back-to-back, predictable, tired gangster movies where all that seemed expected of them were a lot of car chases, bang-bang with big handguns, and final showdowns with either the police or the hoods (it didn't really matter which.) Somehow, this decline coincides with the one film in which they co-starred, Borsalino, a 1970 Jacques Deray period gangster movie set in Marseilles, which tried unsuccessfully for the effect The Sting would achieve three years later.

But every now and then, just when you'd almost discounted them for the younger generation of actors, the Depardieus and the Bohringers, one or the other would remind you how he could act, really act. There was Delon's incandescent cameo as Baron de Charlus in Volker Schloendorff's Swann's Way. (His son would shine with the same vibrant presence as the doomed Santiago Nasar in Francesco Rosi's 1987 Chronicle Of A Death Foretold, a film which the young Anthony neatly stole, with only three scenes, from a wooden Rupert Everett).

Equally inspired was Belmondo's much heralded return to the Paris stage three years ago, as Kean in the Jean-Paul Sartre rewrite of Alexandre Dumas' flamboyantly romantic play. (Its huge success prompted him to take on Cyrano de Bergerac last Christmas.)

Yet, if not enemies ("No-one ever spoke ill of Alain Delon at home," Paul Belmondo stresses) Delon and Belmondo the elders never became close friends. You could trace it all the way to their beginnings - while the pretty-faced, working-class Delon was picked, groomed, taken to parties by Visconti (whose title of Count of Modrone dates back to Piedmontais XIVth century), Belmondo, the son of a respected sculptor (who died three years ago a Membre de l'Institut) attended the Conservatoire, trying his hand at Molière when he wasn't getting his nose broken as an amateur boxer. With stardom, Delon took to hiring a retinue of gofers and yes-men, some of whom distinctly unsavoury (the discovery of the murdered corpse of one of his bodyguards, the Yougoslav hoodlum Stefan Markovic, in a limestone quarry in 1968, was used to start a political scandal aimed at tainting the wife of the then Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou.)

Delon's short-time wife Nathalie, Anthony's mother, then his glamorous girlfriends, from actress Mireille Darc to starlet Véronique Jeannot, were paraded like trophies in front of paparazzi flashbulbs, at parties, dancing at Régine's, at prizefights, at opening nights, for as long as they obediently remained in favour; then were discarded faster than gangster's molls.

Belmondo is so much of a family man that he remained friends with his wife Elodie, Paul's mother, after they'd divorced and she went on to marry Hugh Hudson. (He afterwards lived for several years with the original James Bond girl, Ursula Andress, then with Carlos Sottomayor, a Brazilian pop-singer and heiress to Banco Sottomayor, and he's still on friendly terms with both: he is famous in Paris for his parting gifts, such as the huge Seixième flat he offered Carlos Sottomayor when she moved out of his house.) Jean-Paul Belmondo still gives lunch to his mother at La Coupole most Sundays. A good party, for him, can mean getting drunk, raising hell and breaking glasses at Castel's with his photographer friend Claude Azoulay - but the one time he was actually beaten up by policemen whom he'd tried to stop from harassing a passersby (he was on his way to the clinic where his wife was giving birth to Paul, in 1963, the tense aftermath of the Algerian War) he let himself be clobbered rather than hit back: as a qualified boxer, he explained later, he knew that by French law his fists were considered as weapons.

If you know this - and everyone in France knows all about Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo - then the fates of their sons seem to bear the stamp of something like Greek tragic inevitability: aren't soap operas and fan magazines rewritten on Aeschyles plots the world over?

"Yes, I was incredibly lucky in my family," Paul says. (He has actually been a guest on a TV chat-show on divorce, telling how his parents had "made a success of theirs.") "My father has always been there when I needed him. I listen to him because he has 30 years' worth of experience ahead of me - and he supports me whenever I need help. I couldn't have started my racing career without him." There aren't many young men who can get away with this kind of saccharine statement, but Paul Belmondo is one - you cannot but believe him. Because of that, he has sometimes been labelled "transparent" by the French press, the times when even Paris-Match gets tired of the" good boy," wholesome image.

As we started on our sushi, I asked about his profession, with little more than an opening gambit in mind. What I got was Harvard Business School case-study material, all the more impressive since Paul dropped out of the Lycée after failing at his Bac exam: how he builds his presentations to prospective sponsors, the answers he has ready for the money men arguing that a TV commercial would be cheaper and more efficient for sales than having their brand-name plastered over a Formula 3000 450cv racing-car.

"A Formula 3000 season costs 12 million francs (1.4 million) for two cars, and the pilots are expected to bring in half the sponsoring themselves." He races for a British team, CBM, belonging to a businessman named Brian Holmes. ("Bree-yan 'Olmess, like the detective" he repeats so that I can take it down, with exactly his father's French accent.) His sponsors are a video conglomerate, the French state-run horse-racing betting agency, a natural gas distributor, a fast food chain.

"Quick, the fast-food people, circulate news of my results among the employees, as part of their internal communication and motivation programme. I give advice and lessons during race driving sessions they organise for their franchise-owners; and they also organise a lottery for the restaurants' customers, with a series of lessons as prize: I just gave some yesterday. Obviously that's good for their image as well as team spirit within the company. And they do benefit from the fact that my name is well-known."

He really speaks like this, I swear he does. His poise is remarkable; also the ease with which he accepts his father's fame, the unassuming self-confidence that enables him to say that his father gave him his (okay, used) Ferrari two years ago, without in the least sounding like a spoilt brat.

"My parents never gave me expensive presents," Anthony Delon had told me almost apologetically, his long legs stretched under the small, gilt coffee-table, drinking his third espresso at the Bristol Bar. "I bought my first motorcycle, my first car myself." From Anthony's artless account, both the flighty Nathalie (a thoroughly Sixties girl, she once told a French radio interviewer her child-rearing principles, which including smoking cigarettes from age 6 and reading Sade rather than fairytales) and Alain Delon (if and when he took the trouble to see his son,) seemed imbued with character-building theories. As a teen-ager, Anthony was given £10 a week pocket money "which really was enough, since I could always cadge something extra from Mum to go to the movies." He remembers leaving a china lion money-box near the door of his then single mother's flat near the Invalides, with a sign requesting all her visitors (of which there were many) to contribute to his "fund" and his amazement at finding, when he finally broke it, a fortune - the equivalent of £250 in small change.

When he was 14 - and had dropped out of several schools - his mercurial father decided to that his character could do with some more building, and summarily installed him in the large Seixième Sud flat he shared with Mireille Darc. "God, was it useless to leave a money-box in that place," Anthony says wearily. "For one thing, no-one ever came. All I remember is banging on walls."

He did like the blonde Darc. "She did listen to me. She tried to be a buffer between me and my father. No use. Eventually I left when I was 17, and of course, after that, I wouldn't ask money from my father." His mother hadn't yet met her present husband, Island Records tycoon Chris Blackwell (whom Anthony describes enthusiastically as "the best ear in the music business, and so sharp as well!") and was broke.

"Well, it stands to reason," Anthony says, "if you say you're going to make it on your own, you're not going to run to your parents for money." And so he ran elsewhere, to people who looked more like his father's parts than like his father, who spent their nights in clubs and jimmied open the first car they found on the kerb at 5 a.m. for a ride home.

Comparing these two boys, both handsome, engaging, gifted, is a chilling exercise, reminding one with final clarity that no man whose childhood wasn't secure will escape unscathed.

"I used to run across him every now and then, but I've only gotten to really talk to Anthony since his return from living in Los Angeles, last year," Paul says. "We're good friends, you know." And then he tells two stories.

The first is this: he is watching TV on New Year's Eve, Sacrée Soirée, a popular variety show with a bit of This is your life thrown in. The evening's guest is Alain Delon, who will be confronted with a "surprise" in the course of the evening. The "surprise" is Anthony, flown back from California to be "reconciled" on air with the father who did not attend his 1982 trial after fetching him from remand jail, and two years later sued him for using the Delon name to promote a line of clothes, Anthony Delon leatherwear. (There is an Alain Delon scent.) Jean-Pierre Foucault, the show's host, duly calls for the "surprise" - and gets everything he could ever hope for. Alain Delon embraces his son for all the cameras to see, an Italian bear-hug like a Sicilian don's; he is actually crying ON PRIME TIME. His emotions overwhelm him, Delon says (or words to that effect.) His son, his son has finally come back to him.

"Well, I'm sorry if Alain Delon isn't happy when he reads this, but it really shocked me," Paul says. "First that it happened in public like that. And also, I mean, it's unnatural for a father to cry because he sees his son. That is something my father will never do. He doesn't need to, he sees me all the time."

I then tell him what I learned from Anthony when I brought up the show the day before: that when it was over, Alain Delon just walked away, didn't even have dinner with his son. That Anthony - who'd eagerly agreed to come, just to see his father - had flown back to L.A. the following day. Paul doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to - you know what he's thinking.

The other story is that of the star-studded "reconciliation dinner party" for fifty staged by a mutual friend at Maxim's a year ago, between these two boys who barely knew one another, and which got written up in Paris Match - perhaps unsurprisingly since the friend also happens to work as a PR for Pierre Cardin, the couturier, who owns Maxim's. The really interesting thing about it is that Paul is still friends with the Cardin PR. "Oh well, it doesn't really matter," he shrugs. "Of course we didn't come to know one another at that dinner; but later Anthony and I got to talk, at this friend's country house. So who cares, some good did come out of it." On both occasions, the 26-year-old Belmondo's tone, talking of the 25-year-old Delon, takes a tinge of protectiveness. This is when you start to really like him a lot.

Both boys are quite likeable, as a matter of fact, and it is difficult to find someone in Paris who, knowing them, will bad-mouth either of them. The French actor Marc de Jonge, who met Anthony while having a drink with a producer at the Plaza Athenée, recalls how the young Delon, who knew the producer, eventually approached them and asked him eagerly what it was like to work with Sylvester Stallone. (De Jonge played the Russian baddie in Rambo III.) "He was much better known than I, yet he acted just like a nice kid. And he asked good questions."

Both Anthony and Paul answer the inevitable questions on Princess Stephanie like gentlemen: "She's had a really rough deal with the media," Paul staunchly says, before volunteering that yes, she may be badly advised. "If I'd had to organise her scent launch, I'd never have put her in those public situations [a Galeries Lafayette promotion appearance] that were so bad for her image, her status," he explains, his voice gettting protective again. (He doesn't see her anymore; the last time they met was a year ago, in an airport lounge.) Anthony is even more diffident: "I used to see her from time to time at friends' in L.A., hello-howareya, that's all," he says.

There are differences, of course. The ever-rational Paul says he want to give Formula 3000 yet another year, then, if he doesn't get to Formula One level, he'll quit. "I won't like it, but at least I'll know I'll have given it my really best shot." If he doesn't become another Alain Prost - and it is worth remembering, in a field that isn't governed by showbiz rules, and doesn't take kindly to moneyed amateurs, that Prost has commented favourably on his driving - then he'll work in films, producing or directing rather than acting, although he doesn't rule that out. "If you're a baker's son and you take over your father's boulangerie, nobody sees anything in it. Why shouldn't the same apply to movies? I was born in the movie world, I worked on my father's films' sets when I was a kid, I was even an assistant director on another film. Like it or not, I know more about the business than someone who's just starting."

He has a point, but then he always has. He's walking on air, Paul Belmondo is, never puts a foot wrong, not even down the Suntory's narrow staircase (man goes FIRST) after which he managed to let me pass him (woman gets seated at the table FIRST), no so that you'd notice, he does that instinctively, just as he instinctively made a move for the bill, because he usually never lets a girl pay. He lives in a Parisian duplex with his dog, which of course is a black Labrador, he is taking piano lessons, he likes going to deserted churches that no-one in Paris thinks of entering, his favourite books are Camus's L'Etranger and Balzac's César Birotteau - how more PERFECT could one get?

In contrast, Anthony had answered my first question on his everyday life with a not-too-promising "I am usually bored." He was in-between films; he'd left California and acting school for Paris and a rented Latin Quarter flat; he looked as if he wasn't too sure he would enjoy a talk. His manager, a Mr. Taieb Allard, had come too, and sat with us at the Bristol bar. An hour later the pair was due at yet another bar, the Crillon's this time, down the Faubourg Saint Honoré, on Place de la Concorde. I remembered that before he'd agreed to the Tatler pictures, Anthony had asked to meet our photographer, Thierry Rajic, at the Plaza Athenée bar - and I suddenly had this vision of him trekking from one luxury Parisian hotel lobby to another, time hanging on his hands, drinking strong espressos along the way, half slouched in repro armchairs, attended to by white-coated waiters. During his trial, his defence barrister, the star Paris lawyer Georges Kiejman, had referred to his dark good looks and clear blue-green eyes as those of a "languid Adonis," and you could see why - if there is such a thing as fatal beauty, then Anthony has it, in spades.

The thing is that he laughs if you say something of the kind, a genuine, dazzling smile, the smile that comes to his lips when he mentions his mother, his helicopter-flying lessons, his 16-month godson who is Taieb's fifth child. He wants children, he says, several children, whom he'll bring up and love. And so instead of liquefying at his feet, what you really feel is a strong urge to cuddle him. I'd brought his cuttings file with me, and mentioned that the first picture I'd seen published of him was at a picnic organised by his parents when he was five. He looked surprised, so I pulled out the yellowed France-Soir clipping. "I can't believe it!" he exclaimed, staring at it. "I know that picture. My father has it. He's got it in his house. I never knew he gave it to them. Great." It was as if the betrayal had taken place yesterday, not twenty years ago.

A little time ago, this boy who may be even more gifted than his father, and still hurts when he talk about him, who's done time in prison, and was given a party in New York by Régine at her Park Avenue disco barely weeks afterwards ("In honour of Princess Chantal of France and Anthony Delon," the tricolour stiffy read), started seeing an analyst, a man who'd saved, he said, one of his friends. "I believe you pay for everything in life," Anthony says. "You pay for your happiness, for your success, for your money. And all you can do is try to understand, try not to follow your instincts rather than your intelligence, try not to pass judgement on people."

© Copyright The Tatler & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1990

Another big name on a little bottle: Princess Stephanie dabbles in the perfume business

THE celebrity scent gimmick is an extension of the couture perfume business. There has to be A Name. The stakes are high: of the 500 or so perfumes on the market, fewer than 20 account for some 80% of sales in a $1.5 billion industry. Paloma Picasso's is one. Elizabeth Taylor's is another, in America at least. Cher's Obsession and Deneuve are also fighting for customers.

And now, in France, there is Stéphanie. The 24-year-old Princess Stephanie of Monaco is launching her own scent. Or to be exact, the Bourjois cosmetics company (the House of Chanel's mass-market division), having secured her name against unspecified royalties, has produced, packaged, and will soon be flogging (at £17 for 3.5oz) an eau de parfum called Stéphanie in department stores and "a few selected supermarkets''.

The launch was celebrated at the Ritz in Paris last week. There was a video presentation, a press conference, a "picture opportunity'' - a ritual involving the release, Circus Maximus style, of two dozen growling and clicking French paparazzi who swarm before the celeb on display for a few minutes, before several security guards shoo them away - and a lunch. The tone was understated, but forceful. Princess Stephanie, for those few readers who have managed to escape all of the past decade's gossip columns, is the rock-singing, disco-going, swimsuit-designing one. The idea was to make us forget all those Paris-Match covers.

There were, therefore, five Bourjois execs on the rostrum, surrounded by huge, glossy pictures of their precious property: Stephanie elle-même, in a severe Saint Laurent charcoal suit, high heels and sheer black tights. She is unexpectedly and strikingly beautiful, in a fine-boned, coltish sort of way. She sat down, fidgeting, tossing her head back or hiding behind her hands. Everyone's eyes were distracted from the video screen to her, and back, assessing, comparing. The Cartier watch matched the outfit. The silver slave bracelet belonged to the blue-jeaned, Mexican-booted Stephanie of the gossip magazines.

The video must have cost a mint. It showed us Stephanie walking on the beach at Deauville and Malibu, waterskiing, sitting in a Californian house to the sound of Aretha Franklin's Natural Woman and of Maurice Jarre's Out of Africa score, so that we could understand her Creative Process. ("C'est bien,'' she said, on being given perfume samples to smell. "Non, c'est pas bien.'' "Oui, j'aime bien ca.'')

The Bourjois people had rigged the press conference so that the first question would be suitably deferential. They looked alarmed when another journalist grabbed the microphone from their plant. Knowing the French press, they needn't have worried. Stephanie was addressed as "Princess'' and was given the opportunity to explain how Jacques Polge, Bourjois's star "nose'', had taught her that smells remind one of images and memories.

Why had she chosen to embark on the perfume business? "I was asked.'' How much work would the launch entail? "As little as possible.'' The execs showed dismay. Would she follow with the whole line bath oil, soap, body lotion? How about cosmetics, nail varnish, eyeshadow lines? Antoine Housset, chairman of Bourjois, soothingly took over. "Of course, if the princess wishes to...'' "The princess,'' Stephanie snapped, "hasn't decided yet.'' We then trooped out to lunch, she herded by Bourjois hostesses in blue and silver lamé dresses matching the scent's package. Finding myself next to her, I asked if she felt whether that woman, the one in the film and on the pictures and on the bottle displays, was really her. "I don't understand your question,'' she said.

Two or three months ago, I had attended a similar charade at l'Automobile Club in Paris: Liz Taylor had been whisked out of a Californian fat farm to launch the men's line of her Passion scent. The Passion hoopla, which must have earned the club serious money, was the kind of thing that has older members of L'Auto scuttering for the Travellers, the Interallié or the Jockey-Club: TV crews, all the tabloids, arc lights, massive security. Taylor looked terrible - she was an embarrassing three stones heavier than on publicity pictures surrounding her - and sold her stuff like a trouper. "Wear it everywhere you want to be touched,'' she said coyly.

But despite the hype, not every celebrity scent succeeds: can you remember Sophia, Sophia Loren's perfume? Or the ghastly Forever Krystle after Linda Evans's character in Dynasty? Which brings us to the question: what is Princess Stephanie's scent like? It's flowery, fairly strong, and it smells a bit of vanilla. Mon parfum est comme je suis, goes the advertising slogan. That Princess Stephanie doesn't seem to know exactly who she is doesn't seem to bother anyone.

23 September 1989

© Times Newspapers Ltd & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1989.

The Men Who Would Be Le Roi

In this French Revolution Bicentennial, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet meets the many pretenders to the throne of France.

On Monday 30 January last, I clearly remember standing in my Parisian kitchen, hoping to defrost something that might pass for dinner, when the telephone rang. "The King is dead," my friend Dominique announced dramatically. "It is a disaster."

Now 1989, as the French Ministry of Culture, the Mairie de Paris, the French Tourism Board, various Air France offices round the world, and the all-blue-white-and-red window-displays at Galeries Lafayette (complete with miniature tricolour key-ring guillotines) won't allow you to forget, is Revolution Bicentennial Year here. Some things therefore take a little longer to register. Only two weeks before, TF1, the main commercial television channel, had treated us to an extraordinary phone-in live extravaganza purporting to be a reconstitution of Louis XVI's trial. Roger Planchon, the closest we have to Sir Peter Hall, played the King; Jean-Edern Hallier, the maverick novelist and professional provocateur, thrice blackballed from the Académie Francaise, was Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor. And acting as Louis's defender was one of present-day France's most hated figures, the flamboyant barrister Jacques Vergès, whose clients include Klaus Barbie and the Lebanese terrorist convicted of having masterminded the bloody September 1986 Paris bombings, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah.

Viewers were invited to pass the verdict all over again. Over 65% voted against death, which didn't bode so well for the projected year-long celebrations, already budgeted at some 4 billion francs. On the other hand, the 50,000 or so French royalists, my friend Dominique de Lastours - whose ancestors either emigrated or got their heads chopped off during the Revolution - among them, were delighted. "All this Bicentennial nonsense will lead to exactly the opposite of what was intended," he'd said with glee. "What actually went on during the French Revolution doesn't bear close inspection in our mawkish, liberal times."

These optimist forecasts are about the only mutual ground to be found between the various warring French royalist factions, a breed even more divided than, say, the London-based Free French during World War Two, and no more numerous. There are Left-Wing monarchists and Le Pen-voting monarchists. There are Bonapartistes and there are Orléanistes. And - until 30 January 1989 at least - there were enough pretenders to fit each splinter group. Except that on that very morning, in Vail, Colorado, the 52 year-old Prince Alphonse de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou and Cadix, grandson of King Alfonso XIII of Spain, great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson in direct line of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and considered by an increasing number of French royalists to be the only rightful pretender to the hypothetical Trône de France, skied down a piste that had just been closed off to be readied for the afternoon's world downhill racing championships, straight into a steel cable marking the finish line - and, barely a week after the anniversary of Louis XVI's 1793 execution, was decapitated.

"His son Louis becomes the rightful pretender now," Dominique went on. "But he's only 15 - he hasn't got a chance." I refrained from saying I didn't feel the late Duc d'Anjou had stood that much of a chance to reign as King Alphonse I of France either. French royalists are serious about these things. Besides, what Dominique really meant was that the young "Louis XX" was no match for the other serious Pretender, Henri, Comte de Paris, 80, descended from Louis XIVth younger brother, Philippe, Duc d'Orléans - and also from France's last reigning King (and first Constitutional monarch) Louis-Philippe, deposed by a Bonaparte in 1848.

The Orléans branch had been in almost sole possession of the field for over a century - to the extent that in 1886, at the shaky beginnings of the French Third Republic, an uneasy National Assembly passed a Bill of Exile barring the Orleans pretenders from living on French soil. The Bill was repealed in 1950, and the Comte de Paris, who had fought in the Foreign Legion during the Second World War, came back to France with his family, soon to be sought out by General de Gaulle. The Pretender and the then-retired General started meeting regularly over lunch, a habit which didn't stop with de Gaulle's return to power in 1958.

The Comte de Paris claims de Gaulle promised him he would name him as his successor shortly before the end of his first Presidential mandate in 1965 - a scheme not unlike Franco's high-handed restoration of monarchy in Spain, having appointed Juan-Carlos de Borbon as his successor - but that the General's entourage almost coerced him into standing a second time. Surviving Gaullists guffaw at this. One didn't coerce de Gaulle, they say, adding that the Comte would have believed anything.

French Royalists, of course, don't base the validity (or lack thereof) of the Comte's claim on De Gaulle's hypothetical anointment, but on an arcane dynastic debate: could Louis XIV's son Philippe, who became King Philip V of Spain in 1700, by formally renouncing his claims to the French throne, actually give them up in his posterity's name as well? Yes, answers the younger Orléans branch, since that conveniently puts them next in line. No, say the Légitimistes, who quote whole treatises of monarchic law to the effect that the head of the elder branch is next in line of succession, whatever decisions one of his ancestors may have taken in his own lifetime. Accordingly, the Légitimistes supported the late Alphonse, Duc d'Anjou.

Of course there's a lot more than minute constitutional legalities involved here. The Comte de Paris and his 9 surviving children (out of 11) have come under a lot of unseemly publicity in recent years. First, his younger son Thibault married without his permission a Scottish girl of good, but not noble family, Miss Marion Gordon Orr. The Comte was so furious (almost all his other children have married into European royalty) that when Thibault's first son died aged 18 months, he flatly refused permission for the baby's body to be buried in the Orleans Royal Chapel in Dreux. A few months later, Thibault was arrested for burgling paintings from a villa in Southern France, and was sentenced to a year in jail, to screaming headlines from the delighted French popular press.

Then the Comte's eldest son and heir, Henri, Count of Clermont, divorced from his first wife (née Princess von Würtemberg) to remarry a divorcée commoner, whereupon his father stripped him of his rights to the throne, demoting him to mere Comte de Mortain (pop. 3,000), and appointed Prince Henri's own 19 year-old son Jean as Duc de Vendôme and heir to the French Crown. (Prince Henri, who makes a living flogging his scent "Lys Bleu" to Japan and the Gulf countries, refuses to accept his father's ruling.) Meanwhile, the Comte himself was separating from his wife of fifty years (née princesse Isabelle d'Orléans-Bragance) to go and live with a Madame Monique Friesz, the housekeeper of the Fondation Condé, a charity for the elderly he runs in Chantilly. The Comtesse retaliated by suing for family property, jewels and silver which she claimed the Comte was selling at the instigation of Mme Friesz.

The Comte de Paris's fourth son Jacques, the present self-styled Duc d'Orléans, known in Paris as "rent-a-Duke" because he and his wife, the pianist Gersende de Sabran, will grace any committee or attend any party they are asked to, briefly went into the champagne business (it sold, or tried to sell, under the brand-name "Champagne Duc d'Orléans") and is now a reporter for Dynastie, a royal-watching weekly next to which Ingrid Seward's Majesty reads like The Independent Magazine. His 44-year-old sister Claude divorced in 1982 from the husband their father had handpicked for her, Prince Amédée of Savoy.

But to many of his former partisans, the Comte de Paris's chief fault remains having declared for Francois Mitterrand in 1981. The Comte says Mitterrand is the most "monarchic" president since de Gaulle. He may have a point, but it is not one the majority of French Royalists - including many members of the Orléans family - are prepared to take. French royalists by and large believe Mitterrand is the Anti-christ. (The Comtesse de Paris herself once told me that France was being ruled by "bandits," professed support for National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, then unfelicitously explained that Cardinal Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, had had to "overcome the heavy handicap of his Jewish origins.")

All of which helps explain the rising popularity of the late Alphonse, Duc d'Anjou, King Juan-Carlos's first cousin, a quiet, unassuming French-Spanish banker, who for quite some time was better known for being General Franco's handpicked aristocratic husband for his granddaughter, Maria Del Carmen Martinez-Bordiu. The man who took it as his sacred task to further the Anjou claim to the French throne is Baron Pinoteau, a chubby, dapper, fastidiously polite man whose title was created by, of all French monarchs, Napoleon. This unlikely kingmaker masterminded a low-key campaign in which Prince Alphonse politely started answering all invitations from French Legitimist Royalist circles to attend ceremonies excluding the Orléans family, never issued a formal claim to the French throne ("it has to come from the people," he said), and eventually won a Court case against the Orleans four months ago to retain his Anjou title. (A sure indicator of Prince Alphonse's growing popularity was the annual January 21st Commemorative Mass for Louis XVI, over which he started presiding five years ago, and which soon drew twice the attendance of the rival Orléans Mass said in another Paris church.) Although Prince Alphonse never pronounced on political issues, Pinoteau is an avowed Le Pen partisan, and the annual Mass is said in Latin, in defiance of Vatican rulings.

Baron Pinoteau has vowed to serve the young prince Louis's cause as he did his father, but it is fairly obvious he will have a much harder time of it. So obvious that many French royalists have started reconsidering their loyalties, and giving the field another look. The result has been a recent flourishing of Pretenders, all kinds of Pretenders, who feel this may be their big chance (or, who, more simply, have been "discovered" by the ever increasingly Royalty-obsessed French Press.)

First there were a few tentative stirrings from Switzerland, where Prince Napoléon - descended from Jerôme Bonaparte, Napoléon's brother whom he made King of Naples - lives. (Until a few years ago, French debutantes were presented to the Princesse Napoléon.) This elicited in no time a reaction from a Count Léon, who raises prize black hens in Villiers-sur-Marne, some 40 miles out of Paris, and claims to be the illegitimate great-grandson of Napoleon. Count Léon's card bears a genealogical tree which he'll gladly explain to anyone who might ask. The gendarmes at Villiers-sur-Marne have granted him a special parking pass and a N.B. registration plate for his battered Peugeot. "They respect me because many of them are Corsicans," Count Leon explains. Count Leon is fairly famous in his Département of Seine-et-Marne (he regularly features in the local paper, and on the local TV news) but his following outside the area is weak, to say the least.

We've also seen the recent advent of Charles XII, a French-Canadian real-estate dealer from Stouffville, Ontario, who claims to be descended from Louis XVI's son Louis XVII - over whose death, in 1795, aged 10, at the Temple Prison in Paris, strong doubts still linger. In the XIXth century over half a dozen pretenders, including a West Indian quadroon, appeared at various times claiming to be the lost prince, with little success. The self-styled Canadian Charles de Bourbon, Duc de Berry first made headlines a year ago, claiming to be directly descended from one of the most convincing early pretenders, Charles Guillaume Naundorff (1785-1845.) He now has a small but devoted band of followers, led by the elderly Baroness Marie-Madeleine de Rasky, and the actress-turned-historical novelist Jacqueline Monsigny, who organise tea-parties for him. At the time, Naundorff's claims had been acknowledged by the Royal House of the Netherlands, and the Dutch Ambassador is infallibly represented by several Hesse princesses at Baroness Rasky's parties.

Then, just in case, there is Prince Sixte de Bourbon-Parme, 46, a descendant of a younger Bourbon branch, and whose brother Hugues pretends to the Spanish crown. Prince Sixte doesn't exactly pretend, but he is, we are told, "available". (It runs in the family.) Prince Sixte de Bourbon-Parme is known for his extreme-rightist opinions. He numbers among his close associates Christian Lebanese militiamen, Italian MSI members, and the Basque reactionary leader Ernesto Mila. With such friends one may make the kind of enemy who, eight years ago, on a quiet Sunday morning, surged from behind Prince Sixte's back near Saint-Augustin church in Paris, slit his throat over 4 inches with a razor, missing the carotid artery by a millimeter, and ran away, never to be traced.

But some other Bourbons lead notably quieter lives - such as the urbane Académicien Français Jacques de Bourbon-Busset, descended in male line from the illegitimate son of a XIIth century Bourbon bishop. The Bourbon-Bussets would be the eldest Bourbon branch had they been legitimized (not necessarily easy in the circumstances,) and every now and then, a member of the family points out that they gained actual recognition when they were allowed to call themselves Bourbon in the XIVth century. The present Bourbon-Busset wisely stays away from the controversy, secure in the knowledge that his life seat at the Académie founded by Cardinal Mazarin in the name of Louis XIV is rather more prestigious, and a good deal more secure, than having to slug it out with half a dozen other pretenders. In today's France, this, of course, gives his the kind of legitimacy any Pretender, and most politicians, can only wistfully dream about.

© Copyright The Tatler & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1989

The twilight years of Madame Man Ray

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet meets the widow of the great Surrealist in Paris.

What struck me first was the intercom button. It was made of ordinary translucid plastic, one in a row lit from inside, with "Man Ray" inscribed on it, among names like Jean Bernard and Jean-Claude Amselle, and Marie-Thérèse Fischer - who, come to think of it, could have been one of Picasso's mistresses, late Cubist period - and Berthe Michel, who sounded like a late XIXth century revolutionary; and Yolande Zelmanovich, who I was sure could have been one of those bedraggled Russian nihilists throwing bombs at the Czar's carriage. STOP! this was a lot too much to daydream about in this perfectly ordinary early seventies cossu French apartment block, admittedly marble-plated, admittedly in one of Paris's choicest locations (rue d'Assas, in the Sixième, just opposite the Luxembourg gardens, average price per square ft. freehold £ 350,) terribly banal nonetheless. We were about 800 yards and one zillion years away from La Coupole, circa 1922. This was not the kind of building where I expected Juliet Man Ray, widow of the famous Surrealist photographer, painter, sculptor, designer, touche-à-tout, to live.

Juliet herself was more like the real thing - even though, in many ways, she isn't. (For one thing she never knew Man Ray's truly great days, in Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, when everyone from James Joyce to the Marquis de Castellane vied to pose in his studio. They met in Hollywood, in Vine Street of all places, in the Forties: he'd fled Paris, she was a tourist from the Midwest.) She is a slight, vague, elegant little old lady with the dark hair colour she's obviously decided to keep forever, a quiet knit dress, Ferragamo pumps, who won't tell you her age with a simpering "Oh, a lady really doesn't say, does she?"

She has somehow appointed herself guardian of that curious unshrine-like shrine, that white, square-roomed, plate-glass-windowed modern flat on Rue d'Assas, almost entirely filled and furnished with Man Ray oeuvres d'art. There's the chess-set director Albert Lewin used in his best film, the mythical 1946 "Pandora", with Ava Gardner and James Mason. There are variations on Man Ray's Marquis de Sade's famous portrait - in copper, in wood, in watercolour. There are wonderful articulated screens with her name written in Man Ray's round, unchildlike, distinctive handwriting - "the twenty days and nights of Juliette", Juliette happening to be Sade's most famous heroine - the virtuous one. There are priapic compositions of two round stone balls and an erect column, several of them, set on the floor, size from 2 to 4 ft. There is a bronze broom which she urges you to try and use (impossible), giggling at the 55-year-old joke. There are her shopping lists on the coffee-table, presumably written for the French daily, "cibolette" for "chives", "aile" for "garlic", etc. in her bad French, on ordinary squared notepaper (Man Ray wrote grammatically impeccable French). Next to these is a book with a black and white photograph of an impossibly beautiful and enigmatic woman, partly veiled.

"I saw this in a bookstore recently and thought, 'this looks very much like me'," Juliet Man Ray says, in her slightly quivering voice. It doesn't, but you let it pass, because she is rambling on anyway, telling you that she almost got the main part in "A Farewell to Arms." Then she shows you the book, a French coffee-table edition of Man Ray's photographs, and there she is, you know her now, the shape of the jaw, something in the firm mouth, on every page, wonderful photographs etched over with strong lines by Man Ray, evocative of Matisse's or Picasso's drawings, or lit with sensuous softness, or superimposed with the shadows of a decaying stone wall. It is splendid, imaginative, elegant - and yes, yes, something does click now, you can forget about the white-walled, too modern apartment in which she has lived for only three years. (Every single object in the sitting-room, including the hardwood chairs with their inkwell-shaped ashtrays in the arm, was designed by Man Ray.)

"We met in Hollywood," she says. They were married there, with Max Ernst as their witness in front of a Beverly Hills justice of the peace. "It was quieter then," she says, "almost provincial." There she met other exiled surrealists, a French group unhappy in Southern California, the poets Paul Eluard and Tristan Tzara - both communist fellow-travelers; and Jean Renoir who was making movies and would, years later, after some years in France, reconciled with Hollywood, return to California to live his last years. But Man Ray didn't like his native country - he wasn't feted like some of the Surrealists, he wasn't exotic enough. They returned to Paris in 1951.

Then her memory fades a bit; dates and places and time waver just like in one of her husband's compositions. Tim Mayotte, the tennis champion, who's currently playing in the French Open at Roland Garros stadium, is coming to visit her this afternoon, she says. They are friends because his girlfriend in an American journalist and wrote an article on her, she says. He likes the chess-set, she says. Would I like to see her bedroom? Yes, I would, and so we go and see the same casual mixture of impersonal modern furnishing, Man Ray objetcts and paintings, and shelves with nothing but books on him and his work. Would I like to see the chess set? I remember the chess set from a passage in "Pandora", which has been playing in one or the other Paris revival houses almost non-stop for at least twenty years, and is the most surrealistic and romantic film I've ever seen, a blue-lit gem set in an imaginary Spanish coast in the madcap Twenties - no Revolution, no Spanish War, no Republic, no Francisco Franco... - with sets like Delvaux and Chirico paintings, and Ava Gardner as the femme fatale. There it is, in the beige pile wall-to-wall carpeed hallway, the board surrounded by Man Ray's inscription like a poem, in his rounded script: "Le Roi est à moi, la Reine est la tienne, la Tour fait un four, le Fou est comme vous, le Cavalier déraille, le Pion fait l'espion ,comme toute commande, fait de toutes pièces, Man Ray."

The two rooms on the other side of the flat are two offices where Jerome G__ , a soft-spoken American art expert, who doubles as sometimes nurse and dame de compagnie for Juliet Man Ray, quietly toils away at cataloguing all of Man Ray's as yet unpublished photograps and manuscripts, has been working on the forthcoming book and a large retrospective at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, and, like some mediaeval monk, seems exclusively devoted to the anonymous praise of the artist (he didn't want to be quoted or his name printed.) "I will gladly help you to check any facts you need," he said humbly. "Mrs Man Ray can sometimes mix them up, as you perhaps have noticed." (I hadn't noticed that many facts in our rambling conversation.) He showed me photographic plates and prints and explained there were many more. He praised Bloomsbury for republishing Man Ray's autobiography, self-portrait. It was clear he'd written Juliet Man Ray's Afterword himself, although he was quick in denying any credit for it. His selflessness, whatever its motivations, was rather endearing.

And then, of course, next to the matt black filing drawers and the chrome office chair on its hi-tech casters, I saw the wooden filing cabinet, about four feet tall. It was ugly and scratched and overvarnished with the kind of cheap, yellowing varnish used on unexpensive, utilitarian office furniture in Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. It had four drawers with old lttle brass label holders on them, where you slid a card indicating the contents of the drawer. Two drawers were unremarkable but the third had a yellowing bit of cardboard that said "Letters", in a rounded script I'd seen on many priceless objects in the flat. "That was Man Ray's, wasn't it?" I couldn't help asking. "Yes," Jerome told me. "That's his handwriting, isn't it?" Yes, it was, and the drawer was used to store personal correspondence, as it alwas had been. That ugly wood filing cabinet touched me in a way no other art object in the flat had. It was neither on display nor exalted nor catalogued. But it had existed, serving the same purpose, in Paris in the Twenties when La Coupole was just the brasserie next door from Man Ray's atelier, a few yards and a zillion years away from this pretty modern flat. "Nice label," I said. "Label? Oh... yes," said Jerome.

© Copyright The Tatler & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988

Raine at the Ritz

Lord and Lady Spencer, the Escoffier Cookery School, and Paris Ritz memories

"Can you be at the Ritz tomorrow morning by 11:30?" a Mr. Klein said out of the blue on the telephone. "Lord and Lady Spencer will be opening the new Ritz cookery school." "Tomorrow?" I said. "Tomorrow. Earl Spencer, you know, the Princess of Wales's father. And Lady Spencer, uh..." "...is her stepmother. Barbara Cartland's daughter," I said. "Yes, we-ell, yes. Well, can you make it?" I said this was jolly short notice, and I might be ten minutes late, due to a prior appointment at the other end of Paris. "Oh, that's quite all right," Mr Klein (who later turned out to be the Paris Ritz's president, no less) said. "Actually, we're expecting Lord and Lady Spencer at noon, but you know how it is, we want the press to be there before them."

I then knew exactly how it was: we - half a dozen hacks and twice as many photographers - were going to get the closest to a Royalty walkabout as could possibly be contrived. Be there before them. Don't leave before they go. Dutifully smile at their jokes. Don't touch. Look, but don't stare. Jot down every utterance, however inane. And, puh-leeeze, give a good plug to the new Ritz-Escoffier cookery school, ready from April 5 to take on Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne in the highly competitive market of expensive Paris-based top class cookery schools (one week spent in the basement of the Ritz under neon lights, learning to knead pate brisee, starts at £450; the full 12-week course costs £5650,) whose attendance is roughly equally divided between English society debs (there is life after spag. bol.) and serious aspirant two-rosette chefs from all over the world (there is life after kiwi fruit.) In fact, the man in charge of the Ecole De Gastronomie Francaise Ritz-Escoffier, an inexpressibly chic American with a Mid-Atlantic accent called Gregory Usher, was poached by Mr Klein from La Varenne, which he manages to praise while letting it be known that the Ritz-Escoffier will be a lot "more inventive."

The following morning found us dutifully assembled in the immaculate Ritz basement kitchens - a far cry, indeed, from George Orwell's horrendous, squalid descriptions of the neighbouring Hotel Lotti's, circa 1928, in Down and Out in Paris and London. The New York Times was there, and the Sunday Times, and the Telegraph, and ELLE, and Le Figaro Madame. The white-hatted Ritz chef Guy Legay, one of the three French chefs to be awarded the Legion d'Honneur (the other two are Paul Bocuse and Jean Troisgros) was handing out his card to everyone in sight, and promising us he would explain the recipes again afterwards. It was all very cosy, due to the absence of students, who were not expected to start courses until about a month later. Gregory Usher looked charming. Mr Klein looked worried. And then, at 12:00 on the dot, They appeared.

As always when you meets celebrities whose pictures you've seen everywhere, you had to adjust for a fraction of a second to what they really look like. Raine, Countess Spencer, for instance, is much taller than you'd expect - almost as tall as her husband, whom she calls John (not Johnny.) This, coupled with the fact that Princess Di's dad is a quiet sort of unassuming chap, with a friendly manner and unsure smile (not unlike his youngest daughter's in the days when she tried to avoid the press outside her Coleherne Court flat,) certainly contributed to the instantaneous effect she gave - of being totally and immediately in charge.

Clad in an impeccably cut blue dress and a few good jewels (canary yellow diamond ring, diamond bracelet, huge pearl choker, pearl and diamond brooch, all in definite need of cleaning) Raine swept into the gleaming white-tiled kitchen, her husband meekly following three paces behind. (Well, perhaps two paces. Behind.) She exhibited definitely royal graciousness, underscored with Princess Michael-like aplomb. How perfectly lovely, she said, and how extraordinary that in forty years that she'd been coming to the Ritz, she'd never been down to the kitchens before. The two assistant chefs who were about to demonstrate how to cook a Tarte Tatin and a Mussel Soup were duly introduced. "Je ne sais absolument pas faire la cuisine," Raine said in excellent French, translating for our benefit "I really can't boil an egg", then switched back to French, never missing a beat. "Mon mari adore le Ris de Veau, vous savez. Nous venons ici depuis toujours." The Ritz people were impressed. We were impressed.

"Your wife speaks excellent French," I told Lord Spencer, who had pottered away from the group, unnoticed. "She does, doesn't she?" he said with obvious pride, beaming at her. "D'you know, she speaks Japanese too." Japanese? "With all those tourists coming to Althorp, our house I mean. She learnt Japanese and now they're tremendously chuffed when she starts speaking. Fluent Japanese, d'you know." Did he speak Japanese? Oh no, he said, he wasn't clever like his wife. But French, perhaps? Lord Spencer demurred. "Pas devant la famille", he said somewhat puzzlingly with an atrocious accent, making his point.

In the background, the two Ritz cooks had started preparing the mussel soup with swift, competent moves, chopping shallots and heating butter and mincing vegetables and in general being very, very efficient, without anyone paying much attention. The mussels disappeared into a pan, reappeared, got shelled and chopped so fast that I'd defy a competent cook to see how it got done, let alone our little platoon. (Guy Leguay said yes, the cooks would take more time during an actual class.) Within minutes, a small round pan containing an appetizing, sophisticated saffron-yellow steaming mixture was presented to Lord and Lady Spencer, who got at it with large spoons and obligingly posed for the photographers, the full spoons poised in mid-air. Then Raine spoon-fed Lord Spencer, twice (one of the photographers had missed his shot the first time round.) Excellent, they pronounced. Wonderful, very good, first class, absolutely marvellous. The two young cooks then started on the Tatin, ignored by the group - it was now time for the requisite bit of chitchat with Lady Spencer.

"When, uh, when was the first time you came to the Ritz ever," I asked. "Oh, it's such a long time ago," she said a bit vaguely. "Years and years and years. Such a lovely place." I was about to tell her her husband had just told me of his first stay here on Place Vendome, in 1947, aged 22, on his way to ski-ing in Meribel (he'd remembered how his telephone call to his family had been "a big thing, had to book it hours in advance, in those days") then checked myself. Raine Spencer had first stopped at the Ritz when she was still married to the Earl of Dartmouth, while her adoring husband was taking his first wife, Frances Fermoy, now Mrs Shand Kydd, to that same gilded, grand palace of a place. The Paris Ritz, one of the world's truly magical places, had started as separate memories for them - before their messy divorces, before their marriage.

So instead I lamely asked about her knowledge of Japanese. "There are already a lot of Japanese tourists coming to the UK, and we must attract some more," Raine said forcefully, her manner switching in a flash from Royal to New Tory - she reeled off so many figures she could have been Mrs Thatcher on the campaign trail. "The largest group is the Americans, two and a half million. Then the French, 897,000; then the Germans. I was in Berlin recently for the World Tourism Fair, you know." She is, she explained, a member of the British Tourism Authority, has been for years, long before she opened Althorp to the public. "I already was very active when I was married to my first husband." She was recently a judge in a Bed-and-Breakfast competition ("We British must stick to what we're best at, but excel at it") and another tourism design competition. What was she like as a judge? "Oh, I suspect I'm rather bossy," she said with a smile. "But it's worth its while - you feel you're doing something effective."

In past years, Raine Spencer has often been cast in an unfavourable light - her flogging off XVIIth century paintings to refurbish Althorp earned her a lot of flak, as did the tabloids' easy picture of her as the Princess of Wales's wicked stepmother, not to mention the high visibility of her best-selling authoress mother. But with our little flock of journalists, including the notoriously hard-bitten French photographers, she came out with flying colours. "Elle est très sympathique, cette Lady," the tall burly paparazzo from the Gamma picture agency, with his 35lbs of expensive Japanese hardware dangling from his soulders and neck, said between clicks.

Under the eyes of an agitated Mr Klein, I sidled up to her during a brief lull in the baking of the Tarte Tatin. Would she and her husband perhaps agree to a portrait picture upstairs, in the great Ritz hallway? "Of course," she said. We waited for the Spencers for a good while, slightly worried that once the function had been performed, they might have vanished to enjoy their holiday in Paris in peace. But they were as good as their word. "You must excuse us - my husband was a bit tired, and needed to rest for a while," Raine said. I couldn't help remembering that it was she who nursed him, willed him back to life ten or fifteen years ago, when he suffered a serious stroke and lay in hospital in a coma. She had never stopped talking to him for days, until he responded, and it was agreed in the family that she had "brought him back." "Are you all right, sir?" we asked. "Oh, yes, fine," said Lord Spencer. "Well," said Raine Spencer brightly, "where would you like us to stand?" She led her husband over Aubusson carpets into the great gilded and paneled corridor, its French windows opening onto the lovely indoors Ritz garden, and obligingly stood next to him in the best-lit spot, holding his arm and smiling. "We've been coming here for forty years," Lord Spencer said.

© Copyright Associated Newspapers - Mail on Sunday & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988

CHARLOTTE AU CHOCOLAT

Ingredients for 6 to 8 servings
3 layers of sponge cake
Sponge fingers for a charlotte
1 cup (1/4 l) black coffee
Chocolate Mousse (recipe below)

Method
Brush the sponge cake layers with black coffee. Place one inside a flan ring on a serving platter. Slide the sponge fingers in-between the sides of the ring and the sponge base.

Pour a third of the mousse into the ring, smooth the surface and place the second sponge base on top. Fill with half the remaining mousse and cover with the remaining base.

Finish with the rest of the mousse. Decorate with chocolate curls and a dusting of icing sugar.

Refrigerate for at least 3 hours. Remove the flan ring before serving.

Mousse au Chocolat Ingredients:
5 tbsp (7cl) black coffee
9oz (250g) plain chocolate chopped into small pieces
1 cup (1/4 l) egg whites
6 tbsp (75g) sugar

Method
Heat the coffee in a small saucepan until it almost boils. Remove from the heat, add the chocolate and stir until smooth and creamy. Leave to cool.

Beat the egg whites until stiff, but not overly so, then fold in the sugar little by little until perfectly smooth. Combine a little of the whites with the chocolate, then transfer mixture to the remaining whites and fold in, using a spatula. The mousse should be perfectly smooth when finished.

N.B. The egg whites are easier to beat and much smoother if a little lemon juice is added to them first

© Copyright Escoffier Cookery School, Associated Newspapers - Mail on Sunday & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988

Fink Tank

Alain Finkielkraut is the Left Bank's most conspicuous new star. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet studies his fatal attraction

They may have sold La Coupole to the mass-market Brasseries Flo chain, and admittedly Lipp's is wall-to-wall nobody now that Monsieur Cazes has died, and yes, the level of the French novel has sunk to the point that Philippe Djian, of Betty Blue fame -- Philippe Djian! -- is rated the best writer in France these days; but don't let yourself be deceived: your Left-Bank French intellectual -- bright, elitist, arrogant, handsome, seductive, mad, bad, and bent on the pursuit of universal truth pour épater le bourgeois -- is around and kicking and still published by Gallimard's, juste like Sartre and Camus before him. The only concession he may make to these sad modern times is to chainsmoke Marlboros instead of Gauloises. (For our Gordon Gekkos of the intellect, low-tar is for wimps.)

Consider this: I am sitting at a choice table in Les Antiquaires, the Hôtel du Pont-Royal restaurant, just above the bar where Sartre and Malraux and Philippe Sollers drank, where Francoise Sagan used to beg her publisher Henri Flammarion for fatter advances, where Michel Foucault indulged in a spot of (harmless?) highbrow cruising. Pierre Nora, the historian, is engrossed in serious speculation with a Nouvel Observateur columnist two tables away. The white-maned, 70-year-old Claude Gallimard is ensconced behind me, his back (safely?) to the wall, with a novelist, whose face I know and whose name I can't place, from his nearby stable receiving eagerly The Word between morsels of Oeufs Savignac.

And, next to me, simultaneously berating les copains: Libération, the trendy Globe magazine, all six French television channels, humanitarian champion Bernard Kouchner, philosophers André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Gilles Lipovetsky, and the slowness of the waiter, is Alain Finkielkraut, 38, latest boy wonder of the Paris literary scene, a former Agrégé de Lettres turned visiting professor at Berkeley, turned philosopher-at-large at Gallimard's, turned sudden bestseller and media superstar last summer with his eighth essay, La Défaite de la Pensée, now turned Savonarola of the establishment that created him. A ho-hum everyday success story on the Left Bank. The Parisian Dream writ in 12-point Plantin typeface inside the white and red covers of a Collection Blanche Gallimard novel.

"Television ought to be restricted to one, two channels maximum, and be forbidden to show movies, any movies at all," Finkielkraut is intoning. "This... debauch of images is perverting us, debilitating our culture, trivialising everything. It's a drug, an addiction -- you come home tired, you turn the box on, you leave it droning on and on. Fellini is right: films should be shown in theatres, on a real screen, in the dark, the way they were meant to be seen, none of this cropping the edges to make the pictures fit, no commercial breaks. Television shoud be educational -- definitely more than just one or two hours of intelligent programmes a week. I mean, how can you hope to counteract the daily effects of Wheel of Fortune or Falcon Crest with one hour on Lacan or Dumézil every other month? Am I talking too fast? Did you take all of this down?" he asks solicitously, peering at the illegible scrawl on my notebook. Yes, I assure him. "Will you be able to re-read it?" he insists, his voice gently blending concern and doubt. "Certainement," I say, which single reassuring word triggers new bursts of impassioned eloquence against those misguided spirits who think fashion is art and equate a Jean-Paul Gaultier suit with a Turner painting, graffiti on Métro cars with the Divine Comedy. "Do have some wine," he offers at the end of a period, never missing a beat -- hell, he must be a lot thirstier than I am. "It's not bad at all, non?"

Since it is Château La Lagune 1985, I should jolly well say it's not bad at all, nod, and down some more. These mad reforming monks of the French intelligentsia wouldn't dream of going out to the barricades without some decent claret. That's why changing the world in Left Bank cafés is so... well, comfortable. (The same form applies in, say, a fight between two motorists in the middle of a traffic jam on Place de La Concorde at 6:00 pm. You shout a lot, wave your arms a lot, "...et vous en êtes un autre, Monsieur!" a lot. You don't whisk out a .22 rifle and shoot indiscriminately. That's for Americans, who, as we know, are naught but overgrown children and flood our French airwaves with the deplorable Dallas and Dynasty.)

Yet, for all his imprecations against late 80s mod. cons., Finkielkraut is not your French egghead buffoon, as reviled in (for instance) Sun leaders. La Défaite de la Pensée is a surprisingly clear book, making a few points which Spectator readers might find themselves agreeing with. To wit: the seal of approval indiscriminatingly granted Third World dictatorships as long as they call themselves "progressive," punk musicians, rock video directors et al, always proceeds from the same spirit of appeasement -- when in doubt, follow the latest fashion. Finkielkraut dares to challenge current sacred cows (youth "culture;" the mediacracy -- no better in France that in England; the little coteries who run the publishing world; Live Aid; the myth that the Barbie trial would clear up France's past; France's most watched book programme, Apostrophes and its Clive James-style star presenter Bernard Pivot; the Pope) in a tone Peregrine Worsthorne might now disavow.

Finkielkraut himself is articulate, intense, handsome. For all his disdain of the star-system, he did allow himself to be photographed for an 8-page French ELLE spread enticingly headlined Les Nouveaux Séducteurs, in which he was profiled next to actors Peter Coyote, Rupert Everett, Jean-Hugues Anglade, and heartthrob Paul Belmondo -- and so he became the latest coqueluche in Paris, being interviewed on anything from Israel's policies to the deeper meanings of the film Fatal Attraction -- which, incidentally, he hated. "It's a regressive, infantile fantasy. Americans are so scared of AIDS that they'll call 'an instance of moral revival' what is really little more than a juju dance."

This is when I remember that Finkielkraut also wrote two essays on the need for a return to what he calls "the wisdom of love:" Le Nouveau Désordre Amoureux and La Sagesse de l'Amour. "You've read them?" he asks a little impatiently. Well, no, I haven't, for the very good reason (to me) that they're out of print. I am soon made to feel that I ought to have bought them at the outset. Broadly, he explains, we ought to try for fresh emotions, for a creative romanticism, for relationships that break out of our era's tired routine -- "not just between men and women but in all the relationships of love -- love toward friends, family, parents." (After our lunch I managed to track down copies of the books, and they indeed contained beautiful pages in his distinctive, clear, literary style -- on watching the face of someone you love; on dispelling a child's fear of the dark; on the rapture of being in love -- pages that brought to mind Stendhal's cristallisation theory, and bore evidence to Finkielkraut's literary training.)

He is Jewish, born of Polish parents who settled in France in the Thirties and managed to escape the Nazis during the Occupation. His unsettling, almost Sartrian honesty in describing the strange condition of being a young Jew growing up in France after the Holocaust has often provoked -- enraged -- militant French Jews. "I experienced all the vicarious advantages of being a hero without having been exposed to real danger. Being Jewish was an easy way out of the eventless Fifties." Jewishness as a safe course out of the Zeitgeist does not necessarily tally with the more orthodox views of a, say, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Finkielkraut doesn't make things any easier with offhand remarks such as: "Of course I was not immune to bouts of depression -- but I had over the other children the immense superiority of being able to dramatise my own biography. Out of my people's real tragedy I created a tragic theatre in which I was the hero."

True to form, Finkielkraut delights in being hard to place. Having taken firm stands against the Revisionists during the Faurisson and Barbie trials -- he'll say flatly he doesn't believe, "on the dubious grounds of freedom of expression," in allowing the publication of Revisionist history treaties, the kind which pile up thousands of grim, surrealistic figures (time needed to consume a human body multiplied by square feet on concentration camp groundplans multiplied by cost of fuel...) to deny the Nazi genocide of the Jews -- he then voiced concern at Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and, recently, handling of the Palestinian riots.

"I don't think the French are anti-Semitic," he says, "but I do believe the real anti-Semites are the antii-Zionists. You just can't be anti-Semitic anymore in Europe -- you can't shout 'Death to the Jews' because too many Jews died already. But you can keep a smug Left-Wing stance and be anti-Zionist -- this is socially acceptable, this is the latest in radical chic. Instead of telling the Jews: "You are an evil race," you tell them "You are racist; Israel leads Nazi policies; therefore you have to justify yourselves for Israel's policies. I hear this all the time around me."

This is one of the exquisite attractions of La Rive Gauche: one can indeed have a serious, intense conversation while sipping Château La Lagune and ordering more coffee and bitter chocolates. Our talk turns to the loss of quality in life, the evermore accepted sloppiness in intellectual pursuits; in books, in films. Finkielkraut likes to quote Hannah Arendt wondering whether the world's greatest works of art would survive their trivialising commercial exploitation.

"Well, she wrote it of Hollywood in the Fifties. You know, people who saw Doctor Zhivago, or Madame Bovary, or The Idiot -- and assumed they'd read the books. Now they produce this pap for television." Doesn't he watch television? (He certainly has appeared on it quite a few times.) "Of course I do. I hate myself for it. I feel soiled, dirty when I've watched it -- but it's addictive and I can get myself sucked in by it." Oh, the demons that threaten a French Left Bank intellectual! The dragons that lurk in a book-lined Quatorzième flat! And all of this before you've bought your morning copy of Libé, which you'll read spluttering with rage at your rivals' infernal gall! "I loathe the Libération - Globe branché crowd because they work on a principle of exclusion. Fashion is exclusion. Trendiness is exclusion -- and an admission of defeat. You blow with the wind, you hold no moral convictions, you start pushing this infernal idea of consensus, you annihilate any kind of debate. Left is not Right! It is now de rigueur in France to despise the body politic. Well, politics have a function -- one that can't simply be fulfilled by humanitarian associations. One-shot orgies of charity, Live-Aid pop concerts and the such, are an easy way to buy oneself a clear conscience -- it's Wash'n Dri absolution!"

He motions to the waiter. No, no, I protest, the lunch's on Tatler. We go through the accepted motions, in French polite society, of fighting for the bill. (Finkielkraut does this ritual dance very well, and loses gracefully. I pay.) Whom does he like, then? He looks surprised. He likes lots of people and things. Francis Ford Coppola. Ryszard Kapuscinski. Jacques Derrida. Duke Ellington. Mozart. A new French writer called Claire Desréaux. Fellini's Intervista; in fact anything by Fellini. This, you understand, is Paris, where bookshops on Boulevard Saint-Germain, next to the Café de Flore, stay open until 2:00 am; where you can see 500 different films a week; where they're building a fourth Opéra on Place de la Bastille; where you can hear jazz at Le Rosebud and Barbara Hendricks at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; where you can get up from lunch at Les Antiquaires at 3:45 pm, having agonised over the problems of the world, pronounced against false prophets from the rival publishing houses, polished off a bottle of Château La Lagune over a Navarin d'Agneau -- and all of this without guilt! For this is how we live, on the Left Bank, upholding our right to freedom, truth, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. Or at least of a really good book programme on prime time television.

© Copyright The Tatler & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988