On the sweltering summer night of July 3 2001, the limousines of the cream of the French banking, business and political worlds drew up outside the Centre Pompidou, the modern art complex in the heart of Paris.
Several members of Vivendi Universal's board, including Bernard Arnault of Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton (LVMH), Serge Tchuruk, chairman of Alcatel, and Marc Viénot, honorary chairman of Société Générale, were among the grandees escorted by svelte hostesses to the glass-enclosed rooftop of the Chez Georges restaurant. Standing on a dais before his 300 guests, the city spreading out behind him, Jean-Marie Messier was radiant. He could have hoped for no better going away party than this.
A few months earlier, he had been informed that he was to be made a member of the Legion of Honour, France's foremost decoration. Messier had decided the award ceremony would be a fitting occasion to mark his departure from Paris to conquer the new world. In early September, he and his wife Antoinette, along with their five children, would move to New York to start their new lives in the splendid apartment being prepared for them on Park Avenue. He could depart with the blessings of the French Republic resounding in his ears.
Protocol dictates that only someone who is already a member of the Legion, and of the same or superior rank, can confer the award. To lend his ceremony special prestige, Messier had asked the president of the republic, ex-officio grand master of the Legion of Honour, to decorate him. Jacques Chirac had accepted.
But when Messier specified, as if he were Napoleon dictating the terms of his coronation to the Pope, that the ceremony should be held for him alone and at the headquarters of Vivendi Universal, Chirac bridled. Even in this era of triumphant capitalism, the president was not a performing clown whom chief executives could hire for private parties. If Messier wanted the presidential benediction, he could attend the same mass ceremony as everyone else.
Chirac's proxy
Crushed by Chirac's snub and unwilling to share the limelight on his big day, Messier decided instead to ask Bettina Rheims to preside over his ceremony. The fashionable photographer, famous as much for her chic-porn glamour work as for the official portrait of Chirac that graced mairies across France, was a much better symbol for a modern media group than a septuagenarian politician.
Messier had let it be known he would soon become the first chairman of a big French group to run his business in person from the US. Too many French acquisitions in the US had failed because the chief executive was not on hand to run the show, he said. "If you are not there, you are not the boss," he explained. Nonetheless, the French business world was surprised by this move and not a little put out at his decision to abandon them. How did he anticipate being able to run a group as deeply enmeshed in French politics and society as his from New York? Through Bettina Rheims, France's leading business figures gave him some last advice before his departure.
In a subtle speech written with the help of her husband, the lawyer Jean-Michel Darrois, and consultant Alain Minc, the former fashion model and photographer outlined their hopes and fears: "When a Frenchman says, 'I want to build an international company with the objective of cultural cross-fertilisation', we can only be happy. But then the chauvinist that we have in each of us tells us to hope that this immense enterprise will also remain French and that its chairman will, with all the means at his disposal, help French artists to regain the place that they once occupied in the world and that they have, today, to a certain degree, lost." Rheims lavished praise on the 44-year-old star of French capitalism: "It's easy to see you in 20 years at the head of this company, which will by then have absorbed Disney, Fox and who knows which others. Others will perhaps see you in the Elysée ..."
Caesar's dream
"Where will I be in a few years?" Messier responded. "Some imagine I will be tempted by a political career, others see me as a hermit. Most probably, I will still be chairman of Vivendi Universal ... When we look at Vivendi Universal today, we can legitimately say ..." Messier paused as the recorded voice of Shania Twain, Universal Music's top-selling female artist, filled the restaurant. Gripping the microphone, he then started to croon along to the country-life barnstormer, triumphantly belting out that, like the cavalry, he had finally arrived. He topped it off by inviting the gathered grandees to look how far he'd come, yeah baby. As the cream of French society cringed, Messier turned to his children and proceeded to sing along to Stevie Wonder's I Just Called to Say I Love You.
The various company chairmen who had followed and supported Messier in his ascent over two decades were dumbfounded. Their astonishment turned to discomfort when Messier started to speak of his sadness at the death of his 10-year-old niece in an accident in the mountains. As he launched into a karaoke rendition of Yves Duteil's sentimental Take a Child by the Hand, his brother - father of the girl - dissolved in loud sobs in the front row. René Thomas, former chairman of Banque Nationale de Paris, Jean-Louis Beffa, chairman and chief executive of Saint-Gobain, financier Vincent Bolloré and even Messier's friend, Nicolas Bazire, a director of LVMH and godfather of his son Nicolas, all looked at their shoes.
· Jo Johnson is a Paris correspondent for the Financial Times, Martine Orange is a journalist for Le Monde.
Extracted from The Man Who Tried to Buy the World: Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal by Jo Johnson and Martine Orange to be published by Viking on July 15 at £20. ©Jo Johnson and Martine Orange 2003.