COOL WORLD OF CARLA BRUNI
Unflappable Italian-born model's new album is in the spotlight
We've all been there this year. A loved one Zoom-bombs an important work call, clattering into the room as we're trying to look and sound professional on screen.
“Ah, tu veux dire bonjour, non?” an effortlessly elegant Carla Bruni, vape in hand, is saying quizzically to someone off-camera in the study in her appropriately chic Parisian home. “My husband doesn't get the Zoom!” the supermodel-turned-singer-songwriter smiles as a noble head and welldressed torso bob into view, filling my laptop screen.
“How are you?” asks former French president Nicolas Sarkozy in English considerably more accented than his 52-year-old Italian-born wife's. “In my family there is not only my wife who is (creating)!” he exclaims, referring to his recently published lockdown-written book Le Temps des Tempetes (Stormy Times).
Our strictly professional ménage a trois has met before, in person, in that same room three years ago. Then, the perennially relaxed Bruni, smoking Virginia Slims, beamed lovingly at her husband and his boyish ways. Today, she shoos him away with a “Bye bye!” “He is very entertaining!” she laughs as Sarkozy's head pushes back in for a smooch. Right now the couple are both in promotional mode, he flogging the book written in their “family home” on the Cote d'Azur, she talking up her new, self-titled album, a set of selfpenned, very French, rather lovely guitar-and-piano pop songs.
Bruni appears in her husband's book, “a little bit”, but it is her mention in another book, Le Temps Gagne (Time Saved), the new autobiographical novel by French philosopher Raphael Enthoven, that has really made the headlines in France. Enthoven is Bruni's ex — and the father of her 19-year-old son, Aurelien. The book depicts a furious argument between the author and his father Jean-Paul over Bruni. The then-model had left the elder Enthoven — who she had started dating in 2000 — for his son.
True to unflappable form, Bruni waves away the feud that is delighting the French intellectual elite.
“I haven't read it yet. I'm a democracy person, everybody can do what he wants. I like everybody to be expressing themselves. So I said (to Raphael): `Go for it!'”
But even as Bruni promises to “read it on my next holidays,” she isn't bothered by the content. Not even her ex-lover's 23-line headline-making homage to her bottom? “Oh! Well, my bottom 20 years ago!”
That was the period when Bruni was successfully pivoting from fashion to music.
Her2002debutalbumQuelqu'un m'a dit was a surprise smash, a French No. 1, selling two million copies. The last time we spoke, she told me that she credits one of her other starry former boyfriends, Mick Jagger (in her modelling years, she also dated Eric Clapton), with helping overcome her initial performance anxiety.
“He said: `It can't be you. You have to put on a character, so you can separate your real life from your stage life.' I understood that.”
Her modelling career, which began when she was 19, made Bruni one of biggest and highest-paid “supers” of the '90s.
Remarkably, given that she worked with several #MeToo photographers, she was never “aggressed or abused.” The only incident she related the last time we spoke had occurred before she was a professional model. “I was maybe 16, I went to the Palais discotheque here in Paris and met this very famous guy who owned the biggest (modelling) agency you had in France. And he said: `Would you like a line of coke?' I hate drugs, I would never do coke, even when I was young.
“The guy offered me drugs when I was obviously such a young kid, so when I started modelling two years after, I remember thinking: `I'm never going into that agency because if the guy who owns it is like that, everything he would do would be mean and full of dismay.' So I went to this agency that was owned by only women. I was already prudent.”
She credits that prudence with being raised in “a very strong family.”
Growing up in Turin at a time when the Red Brigades terrorist group were kidnapping and killing politicians and the wealthy, for safety her well-to-do parents moved to France when she was seven.
Her mother is Italian concert pianist Marisa Borini, and Bruni was raised assuming her father was her mother's husband, Alberto Tedeschi, a classical composer and heir to a tire manufacturing fortune. But as he was dying in 1996, he told her that her biological father was Brazilian grocery tycoon Maurizio Remmert. He'd had a six-year affair with her mother, starting when Remmert was 19 and Borini was 32.
So was Bruni angry when she found out she'd been lied to about her true paternity all those years?
“Not at all! (Before finding out) I was always uncomfortable with something — so, knowing, it was a relief. I didn't feel traumatized at all. It was: `Oh, right. That explains everything.' When you keep a secret, it's like having a piece of gold in your heart or in your pocket.”