The rise and fall of Jean-Marie Messier, Part 2

The Man Who Tried to Buy the World: Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal
by Martine Orange

(Page 2 of 6)

During his rapid ascent, Messier came to symbolize a new generation of French businessmen that had become culturally more attuned to American entrepreneurialism than to the state capitalism of the Old Continent. "I am the most un-French Frenchman you will ever meet," he liked to tell American journalists. When Messier debated live on television in April 2000 with José Bové, the small farmer who orchestrated attacks on McDonald's fast-food restaurants across southern France, he did so in the name of a France ready to rise to the challenges of globalization rather than one set at all costs on defending the country's singularity and exceptionalism. In the end, ironically, it was the American investors he so dearly wanted to seduce who brought him down.

That morning in December 2002, the police faced a different Messier: beaten, angry, and bitter. "My sole revenge will be my success," he had promised on his return to Paris after a three-month holiday in Montana and the south of France. He had not kept his word. In early November he published, in French, Mon vrai journal (My True Diary), a vengeful and self-serving memoir of the events that led up to Vivendi Universal's collapse and his demise as chief executive. Many advised Messier to lick his wounds in silence and await rehabilitation. They were ignored. Messier depicted himself as a prophet without honor in his own country, a crusader for a reformed, shareholder-friendly form of French capitalism who was unfairly deposed by a reactionary counterrevolution.

"The 'Vivendi Universal affair' has set back the development of French capitalism by a couple of decades," Messier claimed. His chutzpah left his peers openmouthed. The self-conscious cockiness of j6m.com - his first autobiography, published in 2000, the title of which played on his nickname, Jean-Marie Messier, Moi-même maître du monde - was gone, to be replaced by self-pity, petulance, and bitterness at his desertion by the French establishment, at fickle journalists, at hapless analysts, at disloyal board members, and at the "bootlegger" methods of the Bronfmans that were used to bring him down. It was not persuasive. As Richard Lambert, editor of the Financial Times between 1990 and 2001, wrote in a review for The Times: "He has rushed out his version of the story in a book which will only convince his enemies that they were right to eject him."1

The book shows that Messier, who frightened others for a time, had ended up frightening himself. "Dallas...Your pitiless world exists. I have encountered it," he wrote. "Surveillance; espionage of my smallest acts, of my most insignificant human interactions; tapping of my telephones; manipulation of taped recordings; photos or purported photos; rumor-mongering and the passing of documents to my board or to newsrooms: the complete amateur James Bond."2 His paranoia expressed itself in a naive cynicism about the motivations of all who questioned him. Messier's favorite method of self-defense was to attack the credibility of others, often in the most offensive ways. To explain the mounting tensions with the Bronfmans and his credibility problem in Hollywood, he answered: "I am not a Hollywood Jew and I won't ever be one."

To discredit Claude Bébéar - the chairman of the AXA insurance group, who did his utmost on behalf of the place de Paris, France's Wall Street, to save Vivendi Universal from bankruptcy - Messier claimed he was motivated by jealousy of a younger man's success in the United States and a need to be "acknowledged as the 'godfather' of French capitalism." To call into question the work of the analyst who undertook hard-hitting research of an opaque and aggressive company, Messier dredged up trivial stories from the banker's distant past and suggested hurtful psychological problems; board members who became angry when he did not give straight answers to simple questions were dismissed as "deranged," while those who failed to back him to the bitter end were denounced as cowards whose hands he would no longer shake.

The authors of this book are, in fact, the only two journalists to be personally attacked in his own account of his downfall. Jo Johnson of the Financial Times is criticized for using "methods more worthy of a tabloid rag than a business newspaper" for probing immediately into excessive spending on executive perks, while Le Monde has the distinction of enjoying a virulent chapter all to itself.4 To discredit the French newspaper - whose only crime was to have been assiduous in exposing the weaknesses of his leadership and the fragility of his project - Messier alleged, unfairly, that editorial objectivity had been sacrificed to a crude personal vendetta. This, he claimed, was being masterminded by Le Monde's editor, Jean-Marie Colombani, and executed by Martine Orange, its staff reporter on the Vivendi Universal story. According to Messier, Colombani was seeking revenge for Vivendi's refusal in 1998 to sell the newspaper group L'Express, the French equivalent of Time. At one point, Messier claimed he had received a telephone call from the Corsican editor while he and his wife were being driven to a dinner with Philippe Camus, now the head of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space company, owner of Airbus. The bogus dialogue is worthy of the worst schlock writers: "'It's Jean-Marie Colombani here. If you do not sell us L'Express, you will see what it means to have Le Monde against you for twenty years!' We are into the fourth year. Le Monde, with Martine Orange in the lead, is running an anti-Messier campaign. Never mind the approximations, the methods, the hunt for moles at the heart of Vivendi. Only the end counts."

The evidence for this alleged campaign? Ten lead front-page articles over two years. "The harassment was permanent," Messier wrote in My True Diary. "Never get angry with newspapers, in particular Le Monde. They are so powerful. And if they decide to use this power against you unscrupulously, under the pretext of revealing the truth to the readers, you will always lose." To try to silence Martine Orange, Messier launched a _1 million lawsuit against her and Le Monde in May 2002 after she wrote an article that described how his wild ride at Vivendi Universal almost came to a shuddering end as early as December 2001. Soon proved to be wholly vexatious, the suit was immediately abandoned when he was fired and as the company plunged into the near-fatal liquidity crisis that Le Monde had foreshadowed.

Needless to say, Jean-Marie Messier chose not to cooperate with this book: "The answer is clearly no," he replied in an e-mail. Yet even if he denied us formal meetings in the context of the book, over the past two years the authors have interviewed him on numerous occasions, on the record, off the record, in his private jet, in the back of his chauffeur-driven limousine, in London, Paris, and New York. Access to Messier was never the problem. As Rupert Murdoch, with whom Messier was obsessively and self-destructively competitive, once told the Financial Times: "Jean-Marie's problem is that he's never met a journalist he didn't give an interview to." Messier's version of events coincides all too rarely with the eyewitness accounts given by the hundreds of people interviewed by the authors. This is still his story, as it actually happened, but almost certainly not as he might wish to see it told.

Copyright © 2003 Martine Orange. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.