It says much about Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, her complicated relationship with her husband, the French political world at large, and her personal sense of self that of her two biographies published recently, the one with which she co-operated paints the less flattering portrait.
According to Carla et les Ambitieux, a gossipy but well-documented tome by two journalists who have previously produced best-selling instant biographies of Cecilia Sarkozy and Rachida Dati, France's first lady regularly overrules her husband's chief foreign policy adviser, an experienced diplomat whom she tried to have fired.
She obtained police and secret service files in order to finger the source of rumours on her and her husband's alleged infidelities; she disclosed an embarrassing private conversation with Michelle Obama in which the American president's wife allegedly confessed to hating life in the White House; and she believed herself the victim of a conspiracy between former justice minister Dati, Sarkozy's brother's ex-wife, and a mysterious "mage" to spread slander about her private life.
She also, the book says, reorganises her husband's schedule at the last minute if she thinks puts too great a burden on him, no matter how much work was involved in arranging it or how many people will be stood up as a result.
And that's the good news.
While she sat for several lengthy interviews with Michael Darmon and Yves Derai, the authors of the first book, Bruni not only refused to grant access to Besma Lahouri, a sometime Zinedine Zidane biographer who wrote Carla, une Vie Secrète; she also discouraged aides and friends from having anything to do with the author.
Yet many of Lahouri's "revelations" and "insights" paint a picture of a self-possessed and intelligent woman, hard-working and dedicated, whose success in her chosen professions — modelling and singing — was achieved by dint of clearly thinking through her objectives, and how best to achieve them.
We learn from former colleagues, photographers, fashion editors and agents that from the tender age of 16, when she started on the catwalks, Bruni was unfailingly punctual, polite, and considerate to stars and humblest staffers alike.
She never threw a strop or complained about endless waiting times ("so unlike Naomi Campbell", says a former editor of ELLE); she never stopped taking singing lessons, requesting blunt criticism from the composers and songwriters with whom she worked; and she did not hesitate humbly to petition for work with those stars whom she admired, yet who seemed at first to be unaware of her existence, from Christian Lacroix, the couturier, to Jean-Jacques Goldman, the musician.
In general, she could have taught Alan Sugar a thing or two about hard-earned success.
Lahouri tells us that Bruni went after the men in her life, whether Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger or Nicolas Sarkozy, with the same intelligent determination.
Again, this is the stuff of self-improving Cosmopolitan and Marie-Claire features: all that's missing from the story of how she inserted herself into Clapton's life, then hopped into the arms (and bed) of Jagger are a few bullet points and a pop quiz.
"You have a ticket to a concert by a top musician whose best friend is the rock star you've worshipped since you were 12. Do you a) stay in your assigned seat; b) work your way across the mosh pit to the front row, hoping to be noticed; c) immediately score an invitation to visit backstage; or d) ditch the first musician for the even bigger rock star as soon as possible? Give yourself a pat on the back if you've answered b, c and d." (Half the nation sighs wistfully.)
Well, wouldn't we all, if we could?
The difference being that Bruni manages to remain good friends with all her exes. Lahouri describes amusing summer holidays in the Bruni family's elegant Riviera house, where an easy-going Sarkozy jogs with one of his wife's former lovers, bikes with another and plays cards with a third. Then everyone meets for long dinners in the Mediterranean evenings, punctuated by the sounds of the sea and the cicadas in the garden.
Ditto with allegations that she repeatedly underwent plastic surgery. None of that is new, mind you: after Bruni, at a chic house party in Marrakesh 10 years ago, "stole" the glamorous philosopher Raphaël Enthoven from under the nose of his young wife Justine Lévy, the wronged wife retaliated by writing a transparent roman à clef. A character obviously modelled on France's future first lady was described as "the bionic woman", "sewn up and Botoxed to complete facial rigor".
Different story
Bruni now denies ever going under any kind of knife; Lahouri, however, has dug up early employers as well as former model colleagues who have a different story, sometimes with telling snapshots.
Yet who would today criticise surgical improvement, or condemn out of hand someone who chooses to lie about it? On a scale of sins surely this ranks well below wearing high heels when your husband is four inches shorter than you.
Carla et les Ambitieux, written by two Elysée correspondents, Michaël Darmon and Yves Derai, purports to be a far more political book. Bruni went out of her way to help the writers, no doubt because of their earlier hatchet jobs on both Rachida Dati and Sarkozy's previous wife, Cecilia.
In addition to Bruni, her aides and friends also spoke to the authors at length, so there can be little doubt of the accuracy of the anecdotes quoted. In the incestuous world of the French media, where most politicians, bosses and celebrities ask and get to read their interviews before publication, it is very likely that Bruni also saw significant excerpts of the manuscript before the book went to press.
That she (and, presumably, her husband too) apparently never imagined the result might come back and bite her says a lot about the peculiar deafness which develops after a couple of years in power.
