According to former journalist, turned biographer, Besma Lahouri, French 1st lady Carla Bruni's past was so checkered that she needed an extensive media make over.The make over tried to create a likable and even demure Bruni. The real Bruni is a ambitious woman who's agenda's set herself as no 1 priority. She's a woman who has been described as a "female Don Juan". She's also been described as solitary, capricous, and demanding. How demanding? Well she forces her husband French President Nicolas Sarkozy to socialize with her ex lovers for one thing. There are a lot of ex lovers.20 odd years
Now the singer/model has gotten around in the past 20 odd years. She was pursuing a career as a singer - not very credibly - so she slept with anyone who could help her a long the path. That's normal in the music biz. These wern't just no names she was gettin' it on with either. She's been bedded by such sundry paramours as Eric Clapton and Sir Mick Jagger! Many of these people keep popping up again and again in the lives of France's 1st couple. Says author: "Since he married the woman that some called a 'man-eater', (Mr Sarkozy) has to put up every day with this burdensome tribe. Singers, philosophers, lawyers, bosses, men of the press or politics." They often show up at Bruni's Riveria Villia. Tedious dinner parties with your spouse's wind bag ex lovers sounds like some kind of existentialist mightmare!
an empty shell
Lahouri does more than dish up dirty details. The author also shares their insights into Burni's character. According to the excerpts. Burni's character might be inferred to be "whorish". Of course the "maneater" crack got made. Some other stuff got said, too. Stating that "I did not set out to be unkind but to reveal what she really is... The image of Carla Bruni is totally false," the author then describes Bruni as "attractive and impetuous, free and calculating... faithful in friendship and fickle in love" (Add "psychopathic" & "oversexed" and she could be a bond girl!). Now that pretty much is the public perception of Bruni, but Lahouri get's more specific. For one thing Bruni's foundation to fight AIDS is a sham! Lahouri's exact words are "an empty shell". Looks good on her resume though.
Coming out Carla: touched & retouched
Not that Bruni can be blamed for that. When she started going with Sarkozy, she got all kinds of advice about cleaning up her "rock groupie" image. Bruni herself had warned that "they are going to say a lot of things about me, about my past life. Things, photographs are going to come out!" So that lead presidential aide Pierre Charon onto a Henry Higgins trip. His mission was to turn a Madonna Like over ambitious aspiring singer music groupie into a creature of effortless chic. That transformation involved a world wind romance and a total image make over! The image make over also included extensive plastic surgery. Fortunately Bruni had a guy on hand - she's been seeing a Paris plastic surgeon for 20 years! Bruni has always denied getting touch ups.
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the kind of a gal who if told nude pix of her were coming out might ask how recent they were and whether or not she looked good in them
As for Charon, he's still guarding the image. He personally tried to deter Lahouri from writing her book. There were no ugly threats; he merely opined that the life of Ms Sarkozy was just "too complicated" for a bio treatment. That didn't deter Lahouri from her exhaustive 2 year investigation into Bruni. What emerged was a picture of Bruni as one of a new group of public persons; the political celebrity (what's a political celebrity? They're some one who set out to be famous and found themselves in politics by chance. Think Sarah Palin, who wanted to be a sportscaster.). It's the story of an ambitious woman who was determined to rise in the world one way or another; and who might as well have been come to public attention as a Mrs Eric Clapton than as a political wife. Carla herself doesn't seem like a woman who was too particular about how she got there. She might have been just as much at home in a reality TV series as in the Elysee Palace. Carla, A Secret Life is due out later this month!
PS Ms Bruni - Sarkozy seems to evoke almost as much excitement as Sarah Palin. Perhaps some people hold her rock music background against her now that she gone legit and entered the world of politics without having to organize a benefit concert and get knighted. Rock music does have a reputation; one that's almost as bad as politics. So I guess that the moral of the story is that if you must get involved in show business, then do it using an alter ego, to protect you secret identity.
Secret identities are very important and even more so if you're famous. Apart from the good fun of sneaking around, getting away with shit, and taking off clothes in odd places; it affords a layer of personal privacy that often gets stripped away when you step out of the day to day world and into the glass house for the sake of fortune & whatever.
Besides, all the golden and silver age Hollywood stars had 'em. Tony Curtis was really Bernie Schwartz, John Wayne started out as Marion Morrison before he became the Duke - when asked how he got that nickname Wayne explained that as a boy his pet dog was "Duke" and peoples tarted calling him after the dog, and of course Marylin Munroe started out as Norma Jean Baker. It makes you wonder sometimes whether Rock Hudson is buried as Roy Fitzgerald, or under his studio slave name. So remember to keep you super powers under your shirt the next time you go out, or something like the following might happen to you!
