When, after a lucrative modeling career, Carla Bruni Tedeschi took hold of her guitar in 2002 to pursue music, most in the fashion business still saw it as a fun hobby. Her debut album Someone told me turned out to be a hit, even outside France.
The multi-instrumental singer-songwriter has now sold more than 5 million CDs and her sixth album – the first to bear her name – has just been released, seven years after her previous one. Created during the pandemic, imprisoned with piano, guitar, pencil and paper, and recorded in six days in a studio not far from her home in the 16th arrondissement, which she shares with her husband Nicolas Sarkozy, former President of France and their nine-year-old daughter Giulia.
Thirteen songs about love, desire and life, eleven in French, one in English and one in Italian, “Voglio l’amore” (“I want love”), a duet with her acting sister Valeria. ‘Rien de l’extase’ and ‘Un grand amour’ are the songs that come closest to her own feelings, Le garçon triste is dedicated to her husband. Accompanied only by a single guitar or piano and a tapping foot, the album again exudes Bruni Tedeschi’s intimate acoustic style.
melancholy
Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, Ornella Vanoni and Umm Kulthum calls Bruni – on this album she uses the shortened surname that she used during her modeling career – her musical sources of inspiration. As a songwriter, her poetic references are Charles Baudelaire, William Yeats, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath.
The lyrics dripping with melancholy, her voice, a tad hoarse, soft and timeless, but less Lolita and sweet as the songs of that other French singing model, Vanessa Paradis. Where you quickly get bored with Paradis’ music, you continue to listen and watch Bruni Tedeschi, a kind of magnetic attraction.
The American writer Bob Colacello also witnessed this when he was allowed to interview her in 1992 for Vanity Fair in the Bruni Tedeschi’s Art Deco villa in Saint Tropez. Bruni himself opened the door in a deep-cut bathing suit with a print of Van Goghs Sunflowers, which left little to the imagination of the body that in its modeling heyday generated 7.5 million euros per year. Colacello was briefly taken aback, whereupon Bruni turned around, threw his suitcase over her shoulder and carried it to his room. Colacello on the back of the stairs, the focus on her beautiful ass. The buttocks that at that moment made Mick Jagger’s head crazy and did that before with Eric Clapton. The latter seems to have begged the Stones singer in vain to stay away from his girlfriend.
Even though Carla Bruni Tedeschi was born in a castle in Turin, she breathes from every poreeffortless chic, the I do not know what of Parisiennes that kill women worldwide. See also the success of books like How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are, a guide by archetypal Parisienne and model Caroline de Maigret and film producer Sophie Mas who is so popular that they launched a sequel last year: Older, but Better, but Older.
That aging hardly applies to 52-year-old Bruni Tedeschi, she still looks 32 and still is casual cool. In the video for ‘Un Grand Amour’ she wears a sleeveless Harley Davidson T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. With her straight hair parted in the middle, she is a cross between British actress Julie Christie and Pilar Crespi, the Italian socialite who worked for Valentino and Gucci.
Nude photos
I once saw Bruni at a Yves Saint Laurent show in Paris, in a ballroom full of golden chairs, as was still common at the time. Bruni did not walk on the catwalk this time, but was taken to her seat in the front row by a PR lady at the last minute. She kept her coat on, the white knitted cap on her head, no make-up, porcelain white flawless skin, piercing steel blue eyes, the most fascinating woman in the room. Then already transcended her modeling status. Belonging to the select group of models that go into eternity as ‘the Supers’, Bruni did not often hang out with her colleagues Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington. Bruni went her own way and was quite sober about her profession (‘It’s mostly about moisturizing’).
She kept her cool nonchalance on Nicolas Sarkozy’s arm. According to the French magazine Paris Match she would even have rid her husband – nicknamed ‘Bling bling’ – from his Rolex. At her request he exchanged this for a sophisticated Patek Philippe. She also stopped Sarkozy from his running laps in the Bois de Boulogne, because Parisians complained that they didn’t think the face of a sweating president was chic. Since then she has accompanied Sarkozy on rounds in the garden of the Élysée.
Picture Redferns
“Bruni has the confidence of the rich & beautifulbut without their neuroses, ”wrote a British newspaper after nude photos of her surfaced on the eve of a state visit to the United Kingdom. The first, a 1993 photo by French photographer Michel Comte, showing a topless Bruni covering her genitals with her hands, went to an anonymous bidder in New York for about $ 75,000 at an auction. In another famous photo, this time by the German photographer Helmut Newton, a 25-year-old Bruni leans forward on a mahogany piano, dress up at the back with a view of the aforementioned buttocks. Bruni was neither warm nor cold.
Scandals
Carla Bruni Tedeschi was born into an eccentric and extremely wealthy family – grandfather founded the tire company CEAT, which was later sold to Pirelli. She once posed with her parents, the Italian concert pianist Marisa Borini and classical composer Alberto Bruni Tedeschi at a grand piano – all three naked. Later on, her biological father turned out to be the Italian businessman Maurizio Remmert. When Bruni was five, the family moved to France for fear of kidnapping. The son of the family who bought their house in Turin later actually suffered that fate.
Her family is used to something. Such as the stream of men reviewed over the years and the entertaining scandals that ensued. In 2001 Bruni Tedeschi had a son, Aurélien, with professor of philosophy Raphaël Enthoven. Previously she was the mistress of his father, journalist Jean-Paul Enthoven. Author Justine Lévy, daughter of the well-known French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy and ex-wife of Raphaël, wrote off the grief in the novel Nothing serious (2004), in which a former model steals her husband.
The 71-year-old father and 45-year-old son are currently in a battle that has been publicly fought since Junior’s autobiography Time Saved appeared in September. In it, he describes not only his father’s shortcomings, but also how he dumped his ‘horse-faced wife’ to steal his father’s girlfriend. Nothing but praise about Bruni in the book, he even calls her ‘the perfect woman’.
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The Donald
Most notable is Bruni’s alleged relationship with Donald Trump. A gossip that Bruni refers to the thick book of tall stories thrown into the world by the president himself. According to Bruni, she drank tea with him three times, flanked by her chaperone Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia. However, those conversations quickly ended when she woke up one morning with the People Magazine-head: ‘Trump says goodbye Marla, hello Carla’.
“Not for a second have I thought of starting an affair with him. I don’t know what was clicked in his head, it was probably his need for constant publicity, ”an irritated Bruni said in various media. The writer of the play has been receiving anonymous phone calls from for a while ‘a mysterious pr-man who sounds just like Donald’ who confirmed the gossip. Hopefully Bruni will write another song about it.
Carla Bruni is out now at Universal.
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