An NPR Best Book of 2017

Heiress to the nearly forty-billion-dollar L’Oréal fortune, Liliane Bettencourt was the world’s richest woman and the fourteenth wealthiest person. But her gilded life took a dark yet fascinating turn in the past decade. At ninety-four, she was embroiled in what has been called the Bettencourt Affair, a scandal that dominated the headlines in France. Why? It’s a tangled web of hidden secrets, divided loyalties, frayed relationships, and fractured families, set in the most romantic city—and involving the most glamorous industry—in the world.

The Bettencourt Affair started as a family drama but quickly became a massive scandal, uncovering L’Oréal’s shadowy corporate history and buried World War II secrets. From the Right Bank mansions to the Left Bank artist havens; and from the Bettencourts’ servant quarters to the office of President Nicolas Sarkozy; all of Paris was shaken by the blockbuster case, the shocking reversals, and the surprising final victim.

It all began when Liliane met François-Marie Banier, an artist and photographer who was, in his youth, the toast of Paris and a protégé of Salvador Dalí. Over the next two decades, Banier was given hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, cash, and insurance policies by Liliane. What, exactly, was their relationship? It wasn’t clear, least of all to Liliane’s daughter and only child, Françoise, who became suspicious of Banier’s motives and filed a lawsuit against him. But Banier has a far different story to tell…

The Bettencourt Affair is part courtroom drama; part upstairs-downstairs tale; and part characterdriven story of a complex, fascinating family and the intruder who nearly tore it apart.

A riveting, on-the-edge-of-your-seat tale about the notorious 1978 kidnapping of Baron Édouard-Jean “Wado” Empain, intertwined with the story of his famous grandfather, the first baron and builder of the Paris Métro. A multigenerational saga told against the backdrops of both Belle Époque and 1970s high-fashion Paris.

What does it take to create a dynasty? What does it take to keep one going? And what does it take to save the life of the dazzling but flawed man who inherited it all? Launched in the 1880s by the first baron, the Empain industrial empire spread from Belgium and France to span more than a dozen countries. When Wado took over, he further expanded the company, became a key player in France’s nuclear sector, and, by the mid-1970s, was one of the country’s most powerful business leaders—a self-described “master of the universe.” But these were also the “years of lead,” marked by a rash of high-profile kidnappings around the globe, including the headline-grabbing seizure of American heiress Patty Hearst.

Wado’s vertiginous rise caught the eye of Alain Cailloll, a small-time gangster who had grown up in a wealthy family before embracing a life of crime. On January 23, 1978, Caillol and his confederates snatched the baron off the Paris streets, sure that they’d get the 80 million francs they demanded in ransom. To show they meant business, they chopped off Wado’s little finger and warned that more body parts would follow.
 
But nothing unfolded as the kidnappers, or Wado himself, expected. Would Empain’s company pay? Could his family afford this astronomical sum? How much was the life of a leader, a father, and a husband worth? Most important, could a determined police chief and his crack investigators outsmart the kidnappers? The answers to those questions unspooled over two months in a tangle of events leading to a bloody showdown whose consequences would prove fatal to the Empain dynasty.