You can always get what you want

Published on Saturday 29 March 2008 19:29

NOT even Jeffrey Archer could make up a life as wildly improbable as that of Carla Bruni, first lady of France. And if he did, it would be dismissed as ridiculously implausible, a tale more unlikely than even his most bizarre flights of pulp fiction fancy.

Born of an illicit liaison between her beautiful concert-pianist mother Marysa and her one true love, Maurizio Remmert, Bruni only found out while at his deathbed that the aristocratic tycoon, Alberto, whom she had always called "papa", was not her father. At the age of five she was forced to flee Italy for Paris to avoid the threat of kidnap by the Red Brigades. As a serious young woman she was studying art and architecture at the Sorbonne when she was "discovered", and dropped out to become the most successful French supermodel of her generation, fronting campaigns for Chanel, Guess Jeans and Dolce & Gabbana – and earning almost 4m a year.

But even that was not enough. The Dostoevsky-reading clothes horse craved to be taken seriously and when her brother Virginio died of cancer and then Alberto also passed away, the raven-haired beauty poured her grief into her music. She was a musical prodigy who played the cello, piano and guitar. As a child in her family's fairytale Piedmontese castle she would stage singalongs with family friends the Grimaldis and icons such as soprano Maria Callas and conductor Herbert von Karajan.

Inspired by Marianne Faithfull, Bruni was a runaway success, with her first album of folky love songs Quelqu'un m'a dit receiving praise and selling more than two million copies. Named the best French singer of the year, the polyglot's second album, an English-language musical rendition of the poetry of Yeats, Auden, Emily Dickinson and Dorothy Parker, delivered in her trademark husky voice, was a critical success but bombed commercially. Not that she needed the money.

In the background, the constant subplot is a love life that has more tragedy than Hamlet and more farce than any Brian Rix play. She loves men, and they love her, it's just that the men tend to love her for longer than she loves them, and that many of the men she loves are married.

Just as it looked as though Bruni would never find true romantic fulfilment, along comes Nicolas Sarkozy, the unpopular, vertically challenged and recently divorced president of France. He's in a rut, depressed at being publicly cuckolded, derided and deserted. Unable to sleep, he threw himself into a round of socialising, meeting Bruni at a posh Parisian dinner party thrown by President Mitterrand's speech writer. Despite the gulf in their politics – left-leaning Bruni campaigned against his immigration policies – they are smitten and marry just weeks later.

If that sounds like a fairytale, the French public begged to differ. Sarkozy's ratings were already in the gutter, and the spectacle of a 52-year-old man who had just been humiliated by his second wife, Cecilia, gibbering with pride over his conquest was deeply embarrassing. Sarkozy's infatuation also consolidated his reputation as a pleasure-seeking, bed-hopping "lapin chaud" or "hot bunny".

It didn't help that the similarities between Cecilia and Carla were unavoidable. Both of Sarko's squeezes are taller than him and have to wear flat heels while he dons stack-heeled loafers. The president presented Bruni with the same ring that he bought Cecilia last year, took her to Disneyland, where he and Cecilia used to take their children, then flew her to Jordan – where Cecilia first appeared in 2005 with her lover Richard Attias. The facial similarities between the two women are striking. France found it spooky.

The French like their leaders discreet when it comes to their indiscretions and parading Bruni in public voluntarily negated the country's fearsome privacy laws. It was like declaring open season, and Bruni was a non-moving quarry. Firstly, there is the sheer number of her conquests, including Donald Trump, Kevin Costner, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.

"I have always loved men. I am a tamer of men, a cat, an Italian," she once said, adding: "Monogamy bores me terribly."

As her actress sister Valeria said: "When my sister wants someone, she takes him."

Bruni's pursuit of pleasure first came to public attention when she was just 22 and going out with Clapton. At her prompting, they went backstage at a Rolling Stones gig, where she met Jagger. The attraction was instant, as Clapton recalls in his autobiography: "I remember saying: 'Please Mick, not this one. I think I'm in love.' For all my pleadings, it was only a matter of days before they started a clandestine affair."

If Clapton was unamused, Jerry Hall was incandescent, especially when Jagger left her 24 hours after the birth of their third child, Georgia May, to go to Bruni in Thailand. When Hall ran into Bruni at a party she kicked her in the shins; on another occasion, the two women had a screaming match in the lobby of a hotel.

In 2000, when living with French writer Jean-Paul Enthoven, Bruni began an affair with his son Raphael, a philosopher who at 26 was ten years younger than her. The affair broke Raphael's marriage with Justine Levy, the daughter of the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy. She took her revenge in 2004, publishing a novel, Rien de grave (Nothing Serious), about a woman whose husband is stolen by "a praying mantis with a Terminator smile".

Bruni's reaction to Levy's fury was icy: "Everyone knows that husbands are rarely stolen; you either know how to keep them or you don't."

Whether or not Bruni perseveres with Sarkozy, her first husband, she has become a French obsession. And with the president's state visit last week, she also seems to have caught the British imagination. She is widely credited with stealing the show as a guest of the Royal Family at Windsor Castle last week, the exuberance of Gordon Brown's kiss in front of 10 Downing Street – and his wife Sarah – gave new meaning to the Entente Cordiale.

The rumour mill first went into overdrive this year when a reporter from a London tabloid turned up to interview Bruni to find her naked from the waist up and apologising for the number of compromising pictures of her and Jagger littering her apartment.

The presidential couple don't seem well suited. Sarkozy rarely reads, likes the music of veteran singer Johnny Halliday, and when invited to the Vatican took along Jean-Marie Bigard, France's better-dressed equivalent of Roy 'Chubby' Brown. Where Sarkozy rarely drinks and likes to be in bed by midnight, she has a reputation for dancing on tables and knows how to let her hair down, once livening up Monaco's posh Red Cross ball by cavorting on Stevie Wonder's piano top.

It is not a match made in heaven. As one of Bruni's close friends said: "Carla likes powerful men, so what happens when Nicolas is no longer powerful?"

You've been Googled

Bruni is currently working on a third album, this time in Italian. In 2006, Bruni recorded 'Those Little Things' an English-language translation of the song 'Ces Petits Riens' by Serge Gainsbourg, right.

&#149 Bruni carried the Italian flag at the opening ceremony for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin.

&#149 When on tour in Egypt, Sarkozy and Bruni were put in separate hotel rooms to avoid offending their hosts' sense of propriety.

&#149 When her father's antiques collection from his 18th-century castle near Turin was sold earlier last year, it fetched 12.7m – a figure that Sotheby's says is the highest total ever recorded for a private collection of decorative arts.

&#149 Bruni denied ever having slept with Donald Trump or Kevin Costner. "Never! I never was with Donald Trump, he's a lunatic. And I've never even met Kevin Costner," she said. Trump responded that Bruni could never be trusted to tell the truth about anything.