Far be it from me to fail to comment about something that’s none of my business, is way beyond my small social circle and doesn’t even take place on the continent I live. I’m talking, of course, about the paparazzi-shrouded romance between French president Nicolas Sarkozy and former model/singer/heiress Carla Bruni.
I’d read accounts of Carla Bruni, affectionately nicknamed “The Maneater,” for years. She’s the one who sashayed off with Mick Jagger when he was still married to Jerry Hall. When she learned how upset Hall was, Bruni lectured her through the tabloids about how insufficiently European and unsophisticated she was to care so much, to be so sadly possessive and jealous. Clearly, in Bruni’s eyes, Hall was just an overgrown Texas hayseed who didn’t know she should order her pasta al dente and her men already married.
More recently, Bruni took up with an older Frenchman, then dumped him for his married son. (Who says Harold Robbins didn’t write non-fiction?) When the son’s estranged wife wrote a novel with a rather unflattering portrait of Bruni in it, Bruni commented she’d rather be a predator than an old hag.
All this — and Bruni’s recent interview in a European magazine, which pointed out that a monogamous relationship was an impossibility for her. However, she noted, she was always “faithful to myself.”
Have I mentioned I dislike Bruni?
Eh bien!, as the French would say. As I mentioned earlier, it’s really none of my business. I mean, I’m not even French. But Bruni strikes me as the kind of girl you go to high school with who’s always the class queen, madly pursued by the whole football team and half the male faculty. You go back to your 20-year reunion, hoping against hope that she’s obese and slovenly, with a tragic case of eczema, been jilted by her latest boyfriend (a minor member of the New Jersey mafia), is missing a few teeth (meth mouth, maybe?), and wears a tattered bathrobe and moth-eaten fuzzy slippers all day as she struggles to keep up with the intellectual rigors of afternoon soap operas.
But, oh, no! There she is. She’s still gorgeous, she’s the CEO of an international corporation, she reads Sartre to relax, she speaks six languages, she’s a killer on the squash court, and you begin to question why on earth you ever wanted to go to your high school reunion, since it turned out to be even worse than high school, for God’s sake.
Still, it’s none of my business. I have only two comments to make:
1) Does Sarkozy really think he’s going to win the female vote in France with “The Maneater” at his side?
2) And a little advice to Bruni, vis a vis her preferring to be a predator instead of an old hag: Just hang around and live long enough, honey. Eventually, you’ll get to be both.
(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)
