A Perfect Frenchman

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

(Page 3 of 6)

On the sweltering summer night of July 3, 2001, the limousines of the cream of the French banking, business, and political worlds drew up outside the Centre Pompidou, the modern art complex in the heart of Paris. Several members of Vivendi Universal's board, including Bernard Arnault of Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton (LVMH); Serge Tchuruk, chairman of Alcatel; and Marc Viénot, honorary chairman of Société Générale, were among the grandees escorted by svelte hostesses to the glass-enclosed rooftop of Chez Georges restaurant. Standing on a dais before his three hundred guests, the city spreading out behind him, Jean-Marie Messier was radiant. He could have hoped for no better going-away party than this.

A few months earlier, he had been informed that he was to be made a member of the Legion of Honor, France's foremost decoration. Most countries have an honors system, but only in egalitarian France is the status symbol, a red band worn in the lapel of the suit jacket, put on such ostentatious display. Messier had decided the award ceremony would be a fitting occasion to mark his departure from Paris to conquer the New World. In early September, he and his wife, Antoinette, along with their five children, would move to New York to start their new lives in the splendid apartment being prepared for them on Park Avenue. He could depart with the blessings of the French Republic resounding in his ears.

Protocol dictates that only someone who is already a member of the Legion of Honor, and of the same or superior rank, can confer the award. As was required, Messier was entering the order at the lowest level. At any one time, there could be a maximum of 125,000 knights, two-thirds of whom tend to be soldiers. The senior levels of the order thin out sharply, with progression based on a combination of merit and the passage of a fixed amount of time at the previous rank in the hierarchy. There are just 10,000 officers, 1,250 commanders, and a mere 75, generally former prime ministers, constitutional jurists, and the most senior ambassadors, who hold the grand cross. To lend his ceremony special prestige, Messier had asked the president of the Republic, ex officio grand master of the Legion of Honor, to decorate him. Jacques Chirac had accepted.

But when Messier specified, as if he were Napoleon dictating the terms of his coronation to the pope, that the ceremony should be held for him alone and at the headquarters of Vivendi Universal, Chirac bridled: even in this era of triumphant capitalism, the president of the Republic was not a performing clown that chief executives could hire for private parties. If Messier wanted the presidential benediction, he could attend the same mass ceremony as everyone else. Crushed by Chirac's snub, but unwilling to share the limelight on his big day, Messier decided instead to ask Bettina Rheims to preside over his ceremony. The fashionable French photographer, famous as much for her chic-porn glamour work as for the official portrait of Chirac that graced town halls across France, was a much better symbol for a modern media group than a septuagenarian politician....

Messier had let it be known that he would soon become the first chairman of a big French group to direct his business in person from the United States. Too many French acquisitions in the United States had failed because the chief executive was not there to run the show, he said. "If you are not there you are not the boss," he explained. The French business world was surprised by this move and not a little put out at his decision to abandon them: how did he anticipate being able to run a group as deeply enmeshed in French politics and society as his from New York? Through Bettina Rheims, France's leading business figures gave him some last advice before his departure.

In a subtle speech that was written with the help of her husband, the lawyer Jean-Michel Darrois, and the consultant Alain Minc, the former fashion model outlined their hopes and fears: "When a Frenchman says, 'I want to build an international company with the objective of cultural cross-fertilization,' we can only be happy. But then the chauvinist that we have in each of us tells us to hope that this immense enterprise will also remain French and that its chairman will, with all the means at his disposal, help French artists to regain the place that they once occupied in the world and that they have, today, to a certain degree, lost."

Bettina Rheims lavished praise on the forty-four-year-old star of French capitalism: "It's easy to see you in twenty years at the head of this company, which will by then have absorbed Disney, Fox, and who knows which others. Others will perhaps see you in the Elysée (Presidential palace)."

"Where will I be in a few years?" Messier responded. "Some imagine that I will be tempted by a political career; others see me as a hermit. Most probably, I will still be chairman of Vivendi Universal....When we look at Vivendi Universal today, we can legitimately say..." Messier paused as the recorded voice of Shania Twain, Universal Music's top-selling female artist, filled the Chez Georges restaurant. Gripping the microphone, Messier then started to croon along to the country-lite barnstormer, triumphantly belting out that, like the cavalry, he had finally arrived. He topped it off by inviting the gathered grandees to look how far he'd come, yeah baby. As the cream of French society cringed, Messier turned to his five children - Anne-Laure, Claire-Marie, Jean-Baptiste, Pierre, and Nicolas - and proceeded to sing along to Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You."

The various company chairmen who had followed and supported Messier in his ascension of the French cursus honorum over two decades were dumbfounded. Their astonishment turned to discomfort when Messier started to speak of his sadness at the death of his ten-year-old niece in an accident in the mountains and launched into Yves Duteil's sentimental "Take a Child by the Hand." In the front row, his brother, father of the young girl, dissolved in loud sobs. René Thomas, former chairman of the Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP), Jean-Louis Beffa, the financier Vincent Bolloré, and even Messier's friend Nicolas Bazire, a director of LVMH and godfather of his son Nicolas, all looked at their shoes.

Accounts of the karaoke ceremony filtered across the Atlantic. By the time Messier arrived in New York on September 2, 2001, just over a week before the terrorist attacks, Fortune had prepared a welcoming cover spread: "The haut monde of Paris is still talking about how Messier turned the Legion of Honor ceremony on its head. This reaction is, of course, exactly what he intended. Messier revels in being a provocateur. He's not just France's most famous businessman; he is the country's first rock-star CEO....Is he the next mogul?" BusinessWeek was no less admiring: "Not since Napoleon has France produced an empire builder as ambitious as Jean-Marie Messier. In five years of voracious dealmaking, the 44-year-old dynamo has transformed a financially ailing French utility into Vivendi Universal, the world's number two media company behind AOL Time Warner."

Back in Paris, the business community was less gushing. "That time, he really went too far with his American boss number, or rather what he imagines American behavior to be," one of his guests later recalled. Others, in resignation, contented themselves simply by saying: "That's Jean-Marie!" Tacky and mawkish certainly, but what self-confidence and panache! Nonetheless, this sort of thing could go only so far. Someone should take him in hand because if they weren't all so fond of him...The reality was that many found it hard to be too cross with Messier: during the course of his astonishing career, the young chairman had seduced them all.

Jean-Marie Messier was custom-made for success in the French cursus honorum. From an early age he was singled out to be groomed for power in the most exclusive institutions of the French Republic. In many ways, in fact, his career coincided with the demise of this system, reflecting the shift in power away from the administrative elite toward the private sector and the market. He was at once one of the last of the great technocrats and the first of a new breed of liberal businessmen. The economic history of France is written in his résumé. As an adviser to Edouard Balladur, finance minister between 1986 and 1988, he ran the privatization program that gave birth to a French equity culture. As a managing director at Lazard Frères, then by far the leading Parisian investment bank, he helped French firms compete for international capital and seize the acquisition opportunities that globalization had suddenly made available to them.

Born on December 13, 1956, grandson of the chauffeur to the local prefect and son of a chartered accountant from Grenoble, Jean-Marie Messier was, by all accounts, a precocious child. His mother, Jeanine, says he could read by the age of five and liked to calculate the day-on-day percentage variation of the share prices displayed on the television.1 The reality is doubtless more banal, not least because share prices rarely featured on French television before the major privatizations of the mid- to late-1980s. Still, there is no doubt that for this typical provincial middle-class family of the 1960s, education was the key to social success and personal fulfillment. The French meritocracy had served the Messiers well. "Our family climbed the social ladder in two generations," Messier liked to say. "That's why I don't believe people who say it's broken."

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