Liliane Bettencourt and the Duchess of Alba

Eat, drink and be merry – especially if you’ve got pots of money and a much younger companion.

The case of L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt should concern all parents, particular those of us in a downhill slide into our autumn years.

Bettencourt, 88, happens to own 31% of the cosmetics behemoth L’Oréal, is the richest woman in France and is listed by Forbes as the 15th richest woman in the world. These three facts appear to be the source of her troubles, along with her desire to hang out with celebrity photo­grapher François-Marie Banier, 64.

Bettencourt is reportedly so charmed by the urbane Banier she allegedly gave him around $2 billion. As Bettencourt is worth around $35 billion, this is a mere bagatelle. When compared with my own miserable savings, it’s roughly the equivalent of giving him a bus fare and a packet of fags.

However, her daughter, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, takes a dimmer view, alleging Banier swindled Liliane and that her mum is obviously barking mad. A four-year court battle ended recently when Bettencourt was declared to be suffering from a form of dementia, anosognosia, which apparently is a condition where a person is unaware of their disability.

Leaving aside the fact that we may all be suffering from anosognosia but are obviously unaware of it, Bettencourt’s actions seem remarkably sane. She is nearing the end of her life and has met a younger man who keeps her amused and entertained.

Determined not to go quietly into that good night, she showers him with gifts and they have good times together. After all, she may have $35 billion, but you can’t take it with you, so why not make the most of what you have while you’re still in the world of the living?

Banier sounds like a fun kind of guy. A well-known photographer, rich in his own right, he makes her laugh with witty bon mots and humorous exploits such as peeing in her garden. He is quite famous in a Vanity Fair sort of way, and he was a gay icon of 1970s Paris. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Gay icon? He’s obviously after her money!”

Not necessarily. I don’t know what level of libido an 88-year-old woman might have (and, for God’s sake, if you happen to be an octogenarian – do not write and tell me), but I suspect Bettencourt may be more interested these days in being entertained by good company than banging like the proverbial dunny door in a gale.

The family’s legal fight was long and hard, at one point exposing a scandal over Bettencourt’s political donations to Nicolas Sarkozy in his 2007 presidential election campaign. From my reading of the case, the huge brown-paper-bag donations to Sarkozy may be the only real evidence of the extent of her dementia. It would be like a New Zealand billionaire writing large cheques to Winston Peters’s party. Oh, that’s already happened, hasn’t it, and no one’s trying to declare Owen Glenn senile.

Dear old Liliane would probably have been better off following the example of Spain’s richest woman, the Duchess of Alba, 85, who married civil servant Alfonso Díez Carabantes, 24 years her junior. She overcame staunch family opposition by simply giving the grasping children almost all her fortune, reportedly worth up to $10 billion. Although she could have refuted allegations of dementia simply by being able to publicly recall her full name, María del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva.

“Alfonso doesn’t want anything. All he wants is me,” declared the delighted duchess.

The point is both women have the right to do what they like with their own money. Their children have no automatic right to inherit the wealth of their parents and if their mothers decide to spend a bit or all of their wealth on having a damn good time, then why not?

Ah, but you might say, in the case of Liliane Bettencourt she is suffering from dementia and doesn’t realise what she’s doing. Dementia can be hard to define. My children would have a reasonable case to have me declared to be suffering anosognosia after I absentmindedly put a book I was reading into the washing machine last week. You can now spy on our lint-laden clothes lengthy passages from The Opium War by Julia Lovell.

Why were these rich elderly women subjected to litigation and public humiliation by their families simply because they choose to spend their twilight years in the company of younger men?

I don’t see anyone calling 85-year-old Hugh Hefner a senile old fool because he keeps shacking up with a bevy of blonde bimbos whom he showers with money. Quite the opposite, I fear.