Obituary: Liliane Bettencourt, L’Oréal cosmetics heiress
Liliane Bettencourt, the French heiress to the L’Oréal cosmetics fortune and a family legacy of fascist associations, whose final years were vexed by allegations that she had fallen under the sway of a younger man and given him $1.4 billion, died Wednesday at her home in the Paris suburb Neuilly-surSeine. She was 94.
Her death was confirmed by Jean-Paul Agon, chairman and chief executive of L’Oréal Group, on the company’s website.
L’affaire Bettencourt had captivated France since 2007, when a daughter’s lawsuit charged that Mrs. Bettencourt, ranked as the richest woman in the world, had been bamboozled by a society photographer 25 years her junior for cash, annuities, fine art and, it seemed, an island in the Seychelles. The complaint challenged her mother’s competency and led to criminal charges against the man.
Accused of “abus de faiblesse,” or exploiting the old woman’s frailty, the photographer, François-Marie Banier, was bombarded at a trial in early 2015 by the testimony of maids, butlers, doctors and others who called him the dominating manipulator of an overmedicated, disoriented woman.
Deaf and afflicted with dementia, Mrs. Bettencourt did not attend the trial. But her daughter and court-appointed guardian, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, told the court in the southwestern city of Bordeaux: “The strategy of Mr. Banier was not just to divide and conquer. It was to break and conquer. To break our family. It was programmed destruction.”
Banier vehemently denied the daughter’s accusations. In May 2015, the court convicted Banier of abuse and money laundering and sentenced him to three years in prison, of which six months were suspended. He was also ordered to pay 158 million euros, or $173 million, in damages and a fine equivalent to about $418,000.
Regal, extroverted, a tireless socialite who loved balls and dinner parties, jewels and haute couture, Mrs. Bettencourt was ranked by Forbes this year as the richest woman in the world, with her net worth put at $39.5 billion. She was the majority shareholder of L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics company.
She was the only child of Eugène Schueller, a chemist who, in the kitchen of his Paris apartment in 1907, created a hair dye he called Auréale. His business, renamed L’Oréal in 1939, acquired Lancôme, Maybelline, Helena Rubinstein, Giorgio Armani and other brands, creating a giant that employs more than 77,000 people in 130 countries and had revenues of almost $26 billion in 2016.
Liliane grew up in a cocoon of privilege and secrets. Her father was a Nazi sympathizer who acquired property taken from Jews in Germany, supported a French fascist organization in the 1930s that met at L’Oréal’s Paris headquarters, and founded a wartime movement against Bolshevism, Judaism and the Freemasons. He was spared from prosecution as a collaborationist by the intervention of political allies, including his future sonin-law, who claimed he had joined the Resistance and saved Jews.
In 1950, Liliane Schueller married André Bettencourt, the scion of an old Norman Roman Catholic family. He had been a virulently antiSemitic propagandist early in the war — a role hidden most of his life behind the sanitizing record of his Resistance exploits in the final stages of the war.
She lived in great opulence. Her principal home, an Art Moderne mansion in Neuilly-surSeine, was filled with antique treasures and paintings. She owned properties in many countries, yachts in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, and an island in the Seychelles.
Her largesse was legendary. She gave millions to education, medical research, humanitarian projects, museums and the arts. She and her husband, who died in 2007, had long supported France’s conservative governments, and her soirées were a swirl of France’s social and political beau monde.
Liliane Henriette Charlotte Schueller was born in Paris on Oct. 21, 1922, to Eugène Schueller and the former Louise Madeleine Berthe Doncieux.
Liliane grew up with servants and tutors, a flow of VIPs through her spacious apartment on the Left Bank, RollsRoyces and a sumptuous home overlooking the Brittany coast. Her mother died when she was 5, but her father took her along to his office on the Rue Royale and to his factories. At 15, she dabbled in an apprenticeship, but never seriously worked.
Mrs. Bettencourt is survived by her daughter as well as two grandsons.