INTERVIEW:'There are probably several women inside me.' Carla Bruni wants it all - to be a great songwriter, First Lady and devoted wife. She invites Lara Marloweto meet all three during an interview held in her private house, well away from the Elysée Palace
IT'S BEST TO walk the last 50 metres up the steep, cobblestoned lane to Carla Bruni's house, because it's difficult for a taxi to turn around in the narrow cul-de-sac. This hidden corner of Paris' 16th district, with its villas and walled gardens, reminds you of Montmartre painted by Maurice Utrillo, or Paris of a century ago, as photographed by Eugène Atget.
It's like entering a time warp, where the only things that move are falling leaves. I ask myself which Carla Bruni I'm about to meet: the glamorous high-fashion model, the ingenue, femme fatale or regal consort? For, as she'll tell me when we part an hour and a half later: "There are probably several women inside me." Together, they comprise a unique 21st-century First Lady.
Beneath the white portico, along the stepping stones through the garden, the smiling, middle-aged Italian housekeeper ushers me into a high-ceilinged room where a slender woman is curled up in an armchair by the fire. Carla Bruni rises slowly, stretches one arm, then the other, blinking, exactly like my cat when he leaves the fireside. She wears a plain, tight-fitting blue pullover and blue trousers. "Bonjour Madame," she addresses me formally and shakes my hand. She returned from New York the previous evening and half-stumbles out of the room saying, "I'm so jet-lagged!"
Bruni's brief absence gives me a chance to study the room where the president of France takes refuge most weekday evenings. Two walls of floor-to-ceiling French doors open to the garden. A bicycle belonging to Bruni's seven-year-old son Aurélien is propped against the window. In the corner, two guitar cases sit on armchairs, facing each other, as if in conversation. The fireplace is surrounded by bookshelves containing the complete works of Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Verlaine, Jules Vernes, Saint-Simon . . .
Bruni's long-haired pet Chihuahua, Tumi, snuggles up to me on the sofa. Even the dog seems feline. Clara, the yellow Labrador puppy who was a gift from the Canadian prime minister, had to be entrusted to a trainer. "She went pipi on the bed, kept us awake all night!" Bruni laughs. "Mon Mari has to sleep!
Beneath the coffee table there's more contemporary fare: books by Rama Yade, France's junior minister for human rights, and the philosopher Raphael Enthoven, Bruni's previous partner and Aurélien's father. MAC cosmetics spill out of a make-up bag on the large, square coffee table, next to a can of Diet Coke, a pack of Vogue cigarettes and a pair of reading glasses.
This is the house of Carla Bruni, songwriter, poetess and singer. When she lives in the Élysée Palace, she becomes Carla Bruni Sarkozy, presidential spouse. And when she travels abroad, her passport indicates that France's newly naturalised First Lady is simply Carla Sarkozy, trophy bride and photo opportunity. The three share the same playful and amused personality. With carefully preserved distance, Bruni analyses her own and others' behaviour, never taking herself too seriously. If there's one totally subjective blind spot, it's for the man she proudly calls Mon Mari.
Don't expect any daring quotes about the boredom of monogamy, about being a tamer of men, or how ill-humoured the French are. To use the title of a Yeats poem which Bruni turned into a song, Those Dancing Days are Gone. Despite Bruni's protestations that there is absolutely no self-censorship, the public figure of Carla Bruni Sarkozy has seeped into the private Carla Bruni. And if, as one strongly suspects, she tells little white lies about past lovers or having smoked marijuana, well it's all in the national interest, raison d'état.
"I care a lot about my profession as a singer. It's the meaning of my life," Bruni told Le Parisien newspaper when her third album, Comme si de rien n'était (As if nothing had happened) was released last summer.
Today, Bruni tells me she wants it all - to be a great songwriter, First Lady and devoted wife.
"First Lady is not a profession," she notes. "I'd like to become a better singer, because I can't go where I want to with my voice yet." Bruni has taken voice lessons twice weekly for the past 10 years. "I'm more a songwriter than a singer, because I wouldn't have sung if I hadn't written my songs," she says. "It's not easy for me to sing in front of people. As soon as I have an audience, the emotion goes out of my voice. I am very shy."
Several times during the interview, Bruni illustrates a point by breaking into song. The two people she quotes most often are the French singers Serge Gainsbourg and Barbara, both deceased. "Music has always been very present in my life," she says. "I don't know if it was in my blood or in the air - probably both."
The black lacquered baby grand piano which she brought from her childhood home stands in a corner. Bruni's father, the engineer and industrialist Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, composed operas in his spare time. Her mother, Marisa Borini, was a concert pianist who met Bruni's genetic father, Maurizio Remmert, a classical guitarist 12 years her junior, when they played music together. Herbert von Karajan, Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi and Rudolf Nureyev were guests in her parents' home when Bruni was growing up.
L'Amoureuse (woman in love) is the title of the single on Bruni's latest album. "Love is the only thing worth having," she sings. The song is about being in love with life and with Sarkozy, "but it's about all women in love," Bruni explains. "We're all the same, at the beginning, when we're in love. You have an impression of drunkenness, of exaltation. I wanted to describe this sensation at the moment when it crystallises. Obviously, the song was triggered by the love I feel for Mon Mari. But it's neither him nor me precisely. It's about that feeling of walking on clouds."
Bruni met Nicolas Sarkozy at a dinner party in the home of the retired advertising executive Jacques Séguéla in November 2007. "With Mon Mari, it's a blessed love because he was ready to fall in love. I was ready to fall in love. Both of us were free. We were ready. We wanted it." Sarkozy had divorced his second wife the previous month, and Bruni had recently separated from Enthoven, after seven years together.
"I want to find my double," Bruni sings on her new album. Bruni and Sarkozy "are hunters who met - predators," the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld told Vanity Fair. "It's a good thing. He had seduced many women, and she was a kind of seductress. When two like this meet, it can be good."
"He's so clever, Karl!" Bruni laughs. She says she can't judge [her couple] from the outside, but speaks of Freud's theory of transference, an identification with the loved one. "When you fall in love, you start talking like the other person. You steal his expressions. You're under the influence."Sceptics claim Bruni loves Sarkozy for his power, for the finger on the nuclear button. Is power the ultimate aphrodisiac, I ask her. "It's more a source of worry or fatigue," she says. "But he's been a professional for more than 20 years; it's an integral part of his personality. So obviously that is part of his charm. I don't find power particularly aphrodisiac, but I find Nicolas particularly attractive."
Carla Bruni Sarkozy is a one-woman fan club, her husband's most effective propagandist. Each time he wraps up a summit early, the presidential press corps assume he's eager to rush home to Bruni. "I hope so," she laughs. "But the truth is that he's quick. He's a fast man, who gives the impression of a locomotive. He tries to fold things to fit his time. He comes to conclusions very, very quickly. And he is hypernesic - the opposite of amnesic. He remembers everything, even things that don't interest him."
Her husband is impatient, Bruni admits. "But especially, there is very little time between the moment when he decides something and the moment he does it, contrary to most people. When there's a problem, Nicolas starts to resolve it immediately. He grabs the bull by the horns . . . I thought I was quick, but when I met him I realised he was quicker than me, much quicker."
Sarkozy's detractors find him aggressive. "He's not very aggressive. He's impulsive," Bruni corrects them. "So, for example, he responds to provocation. It's difficult to tell someone, 'Be impulsive only for positive things'. Speed and impulsiveness are important engines, especially for the life he leads, which is heavy with responsibility. If he were slow and apathetic, I assure you that during the European presidency . . . Fortunately there was this energy, this impulse. He never hesitates to dive in, to set an example, which brings the others on board."
Bruni watches all her husband's press conferences on television. "He jokes a lot," she says with relish, and I realise this is another thing they have in common. As a schoolgirl, I imagine Bruni writing puns on the chalkboard, leaving fake spiders on other girls' chairs, then sitting primly in the front row, secret prankster and teacher's pet.
Sarkozy "could have had a great career as a performer, because he's very, very good at it," Bruni continues. "He's a great orator. He improvises a lot in his speeches. I read them beforehand, and I see the difference between the song and the interpretation, so to speak. He's artistic, the way he places his voice; it's a natural talent, which he has had for a long time."
When he was younger, Sarkozy told Bruni, "he didn't find himself particularly interesting or intelligent. He didn't find himself seductive, but when he talked, he felt people listening, that he could change something in their minds or hearts or the way they were thinking. He felt he had that. I think that's why he went into politics."
So was it through his command of language that Nicolas Sarkozy seduced Carla Bruni? "He still seduces me," she says. "We talk a huge amount. All the time. All the time."
When Bruni's last album was released, a British newspaper labelled it "Sex and Drugs". There are a few racy verses. In Ta tienne, the song most evocative of Sarkozy, Bruni sings: "I give you my body, my soul and my chrysanthemum . . . you are my lord, my darling, my orgy . . . I burn for you like a pagan . . ." The song was half-written before she met Sarkozy, she insists. And she composed it with a sense of fun. "What I write is not the way you read it. You read it thinking it's me."
The verse that attracted most attention comes from another song, Je suis une enfant: "I am a child/Despite my 40 years/Despite my 30 lovers/A child." Bruni never tried to hide her affairs with rock stars, intellectuals and politicians. Only 30 lovers? I ask her. She pleads artistic license. "There were probably fewer, but it didn't work for the rhyme. When I write a song, I think about the song, not what people will say . . . I didn't write it as First Lady of France! There are mischievous things in my songs, and it amuses me a lot that people take them literally. They're really missing the point . . . I'm happy that people read my texts, even if they do it only because I'm First Lady. It gives me satisfaction as a songwriter."
Another song, Tu es ma came (You're my drug) also raised a few eyebrows. The Colombian government objected to the verse "more deadly than Afghan heroin/More dangerous than Colombian white". In another line, Bruni sings: "I breathe you in, I breathe you out and I swoon."
She feigns disbelief that the French might wonder whether their First Lady tried drugs. "Never!" says Bruni. "I always hated people getting high. Not only I do I not like these things, I condemn them, because you can't get rid of them once you're hooked!" The only addictions she admits to are exercise, Diet Coke, cigarettes, and Sarkozy.
In the song Notre grand amour est mort (Our great love is dead), Bruni recounts the end of her relationship with Enthoven. "We separated because we'd become very good friends," she says. "If we didn't separate, maybe we would have started falling in love with other people, lying to each other." In the song, Bruni turns their break-up into a source of melodramatic derision: "Our great love is dead we must wrap it in white/Perfume its body, watch over it three nights . . ."
"You take a sad, shabby feeling, and when it's a little tragic, you digest it for a while, then you make something almost happy of it," Bruni explains. "It renders something that was negative, a failure, positive. It enables you to move on . . ."
Only once, in Salut marin ('Bye sailor), the song she wrote for her brother Virginio, who died of Aids and lymphoma in 2006, does Bruni's grief come through, subtly, in one line. Virginio's death was the worst thing that has happened to her, she admits. He took with him "our crystal childhood, and our youth of honey," she sings.
Bruni's mother sold her husband's antique collection, raising € 18.7 million for a foundation named after Virginio. In It's easier for a camel . . . Bruni's older sister, the film-maker Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, shows the three children playing in the magnificient interiors of Castagneto Po castle. "This is all I've kept," says Bruni, pointing out the mirror above the fireplace, an ornately painted secretaire and a statue of an African slave behind the piano. "It reminds me of my childhood, of the insouciance of my childhood."
So what is it like to be Carla Bruni Sarkozy, the woman who has everything? Though she has never known "the terrible suffering of poverty or illness," Bruni assures me, "I have all the others. You lose many things, in the course of a life. You're not spared . . . I am a human being, with the same problems as everyone else, even if I am very privileged."
Bruni has spent years in psychoanalysis, and writes down her dreams every morning. Analysis teaches one "absolute responsibility for all feelings," she says. "It is not romantic, not erotic . . . The only place where artistic creation and psychoanalysis meet is in dreams, because there's such mad creativity in the subconscious."
Bruni shows me a large orange book on the piano, facsimiles of the film-maker Federico Fellini's diary of his dreams, complete with his watercolours. "Analysis serves one purpose," she says. "It gives you a little suitcase that you carry around, so you don't make others carry your life, your decisions, your history. It helps you mature in the sense that you've understood your own history, and especially, you take responsibility for it. It gives you a great deal of wisdom."
Bruni says she maintains a distance from her public image, though "there's little difference beween me and my image". That image is "a different place, something else. I don't fall into it. I never say to myself, 'I am Carla Bruni. I'm a model', or 'I am a singer. Henceforward I am First Lady of France.' I never say that to myself. Sometimes I say, 'Hey, I'm a singer. I've been invited to sing, so I must sing better.' Or 'Hey, I'm First Lady of France. I must be a credit to this country.'"
What we see of Carla Bruni is only her reflection in the mirror, she says. "The heart of hearts, the deep-down-inside that everyone has, well I have it too. And that's where I live."
It must be a happy place, because she laughs when she says it.
Peter O'Brien, fashion designer, on Carla Bruni
"AS A MODEL she was always perfectly mannered and polite and always nicely dressed in an understated, quiet kind of way. I remember once when we were doing a fitting at Rochas with her (in Paris) and she didn't have a driver — models usually have drivers to take them from one show to the next - and I watched her walk down the Rue Francois 1er and every guy in every car was transfixed by her. She looked so fabulous dressed simply in jeans and a tailored jacket.
"She has that great voice and terrific charm and she was always pleasant and delightful to work with - never difficult. A lot of models were American teenagers who always seemed a bit lost in Paris. In contrast she was terribly sophisticated and worldly, a very well-bred, polite girl.
"As First Lady of France I love the way she looks, though I think (her style) could loosen up a bit at times. In general I think she looks terrific and I loved the navy peacoat she wore on the trip to the UK, but I hated the hat. Maybe it was a protocol thing, but it was unnecessary. She looks her best in a V-neck cashmere sweater and slacks. You don't need to gild the lily. And we all know she's taller than Sarky, so let her wear high heels! I put her in heels a lot."
CARLA BRUNI SARKOZY
A life of privilege, love and music
1888The Tedeschi family, of east European Jewish origin, found Cavi Electrici Affini Torino (CEAT), which produces electrical cables and becomes a multinational with 53 factories.
First World WarCarla Bruni's grandfather, Virginio Tedeschi, converts to Catholicism to marry a Miss Bruni. Their son Alberto is born in 1915.
December 23, 1967Carla Bruni Tedeschi is born in Turin. She spends her early childhood in the castle of Castagneto Po, built on an 11th century fortress.
1974The Bruni Tedeschis move to France, out of fear of kidnapping by the Red Brigades. Alberto Bruni Tedeschi sells CEAT to Pirelli. Henceforward, the retired industrialist devotes himself to his twin passions: composing operas and collecting 18th-century antiques.
1987Carla Bruni abandons architecture classes to become a high-fashion model. At the height of her career, she earns $7.5 million a year.
1996Alberto Bruni Tedeschi dies, age 81. Carla Bruni meets her genetic father, Maurizio Remmert, and remains in close contact with him. An Italian businessman living in Brazil, Remmert, now 61, confirmed in a Sao Paulo newspaper last January that he had a six-year affair with Bruni's mother Marisa that started when he was 20 and she was 32. "The father is the person who gives the name," Bruni tells Paris Match in 2004. "My father is Monsieur Bruni Tedeschi."
1998Bruni stops modelling and begins voice lessons.
2001Bruni gives birth to a son, Aurélien, whose father is the philosopher Raphael Enthoven.
November 2002Bruni's first album is released. Quelqu'un m'a dit (Somebody told me) sells 2 million copies worldwide, including 1.2 million in France.
2004Bruni is female artist of the year in the French Victoire de la Musique awards.
2006Bruni's older brother Virginio dies.
March 2007The Bruni Tedeschis auction part of Alberto's art collection, raising €18.7 million for a foundation for research on Aids in Africa, in memory of Virginio.
2007Bruni's second album, No Promises, is comprised entirely of songs written by Bruni to the words of Irish, British and American poets. 380,000 copies are sold worldwide, 110,000 of them in France.
November 13, 2007Bruni meets President Nicolas Sarkozy.
February 2, 2008Bruni weds Sarkozy at the Élysée Palace.
March 26-28, 2008State visit to London. After criticising Bruni's wild past, British media is charmed by her.
July 2008Bruni's third album, Comme si de rien nétait (As if nothing had happened) released in France.