The French President’s Lover-NY Times
MAN trap, serial heart-wrecker, rocker arm candy, photogenic cipher, arrogant heiress, polling gimmick — the woman who appears likely to become the first lady of France has been called a lot of things lately. The last thing anyone would have thought of is that she’s a catch.
Barely three months after his divorce from his wife, Cécilia, the polarizing but media-savvy French president Nicolas Sarkozy has become a principal in a hyper-publicized romance that has even the normally high-minded French press gossiping about the details in goosey tabloid terms. See the lovers moon around the pyramids and Euro Disney! Watch the Saudis grapple with the free-living ways of the French! Can Indian officials invent protocol to accommodate a First Sleepover Pal? Will the French public accept a woman who espouses polyandry, has a son by a philosopher whose father she once also dated, and who has been romantically linked with Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger? Will a whirlwind courtship and marriage ultimately bring Mr. Sarkozy’s approval ratings up from the dumps?
Because model is so often used as a synonym for moron, few have stopped to consider that, in pure résumé terms, Ms. Bruni may be better equipped than many for a gig at Élysée Palace. For starters, she is a stepdaughter of an Italian tire magnate and classical composer, Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, who is married to her mother, Marisa Borini, a concert pianist. She is rich and well educated (in France, where her family moved in the 1970s to escape a wave of kidnappings in Italy) and speaks three languages.
After she aged out of her career as one of the most highly paid models of the 1990s, with campaigns for Dior and Chanel and some 250 magazine covers to her credit, she became a musician, a transition less surprising when one considers her heritage and past relationships. Her first album of breathy emotive music, set mostly to acoustic guitar was released in 2003 and quickly became a success. “Quelqu’un m’a dit” (“Someone Told Me”) produced a best-selling single, sold over a million copies in France, another 300,000 outside the country and in 2004 garnered Ms. Bruni the French equivalent of a Grammy as the country’s best female vocalist.
That she managed to make a go of her sophomore album, “No Promises,” was no mean feat, either, said Joe Levy, the newly appointed editor of Blender magazine. Why? “It’s pretentious and sexy at the same time,” Mr. Levy said, adding rhetorically, “how completely appropriate is it for a woman who embodies those virtues to marry the president of France?”
No comments:
Post a Comment