Everybody knows that supermodels don’t fit the dumb-blonde stereotype: in
fact, these days it’s difficult to find one whose beauty isn’t backed up by
formidable brains. But while you can discuss human rights with Bianca
Jagger, Eastern philosophy with Christy Turlington or social and political
science with the bright young British model Lily Cole, when conversation
turns to the late verse of William Butler Yeats, there’s only one woman
worth listening to: Carla Bruni.
The French-Italian supermodel-turned-pop star is perched on a scruffy sofa in
the Covent Garden Poetry Café, singing the praises of the Irish bard, two of
whose poems feature on her new album, No Promises (released in the
UK next month). Each song on the album is adapted from a poem, with Yeats,
W. H. Auden, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson and Dorothy Parker all
providing words for Bruni’s intimate, quivering voice and folky guitar. On
the cover she is neither staring sultrily nor strumming sensitively (the
stock female solo artist poses), but sitting on a cushion, absorbed in a
book of verse.
On this side of the Channel Bruni is best known not as an ambassador for
poetry but as a serial celebrity-seducer: she was Mick Jagger’s “other
woman” during his marriage with Jerry Hall, and has been romantically linked
to both Eric Clapton and Donald Trump. In France, however, her music career
has eclipsed her colourful past: Bruni’s first album, Quelqu’un m’a
dit , in 2003, was a surprise hit, with national sales of 1.2 million.
So why, now, is she ditching popular chansons for dusty old quatrains, and
risking her new-found success?
Bruni, whose superhumanly sculptured features are undiminished at 39, admits
that there was resistance: “Everybody was like, ‘What? Poetry from the 19th
century?’ The record company thought it was suicide.” But having fallen in
love with a handful of poems, Bruni couldn’t stop herself: she began to
weave tunes around them, and “ petit à petit ” the project
grew into an album. Using verse in English was a conscious, if unpopular,
decision. “The French say: ‘Why didn’t you use French poetry? We have the
best poets!’ But English has a rhythm and a sound that is made for songs,”
she argues.
She uses that rhythm well, turning key verses into refrains and teasing the
poems out into laid-back pop songs, in which her pleasantly smoky
half-whisper (somewhere between Marianne Faithfull and Isobel Campbell) is
accompanied by tasteful, unobtrusive guitar and harmonica. Musically, No
Promises doesn’t break any new ground — it shifts between jazz, blues,
folk and country while never straying far from Norah Jones territory — but
it’s a daring concept and, remarkably, it works.
There is a tradition of adapting poetry in Italy and France, Bruni points
out: Léo Ferré sung Rimbaud and Verlaine’s poems in the 1960s and Fabrizio
De André adapted the American poet Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon
River Anthology . But the Brits are less used to pop upstarts messing
with their poetic heritage. “I hope the purist is not going to mind,” she
says, in her musical, drawn-out accent. “Now that I am in England I am a bit
worried . . .”
Bruni has another reason to be anxious: as we talk, the contents of her
childhood home, an 18th-century Piedmontese castle, are being auctioned off
at Sotheby’s to benefit a charitable foundation set up in honour of her
brother Virginio, who died last year. The items, acquired by her father
Alberto, who was a passionate antiques collector, fetched £12.7 million —
the highest total for a private collection of decorative arts that Sotheby’s
has recorded.
The Bruni family is, as you might have guessed, not short of a bob or two.
But their wealth, which comes from Alberto’s father’s tyre-manufacturing
company, hasn’t always been a blessing: in the 1970s it made them a
potential target for the terrorist Red Brigades, and when Carla was 7 they
fled to Paris.
Whether in France or Italy, their homes were always full of music: Alberto, a
composer, would write at his piano while his wife Marisa, a concert pianist,
would practise at hers. Carla learnt the piano and violin as a child but it
wasn’t until, aged 9, she picked up a guitar that she really fell in love:
“From the minute I had it I played it every day.”
Even after she became a model at the age of 19, she kept strumming away: “I
was always imagining being a musician, and then modelling was a very funny parenthãse
.” Some parenthãse : in Bruni’s 12-year career she
modelled for Guess, Dolce & Gabbana and Chanel and made enough money to
qualify for the Top 20 supermodel rich list in Business Age . And,
thanks to her affair with a certain Rolling Stone, she was a regular tabloid
fixture, usually portrayed either as a schemer arranging for paparazzi to
snap Jagger leaving her flat or a catty rival claiming that Jerry Hall had
“no class”.
Spending time with rock stars might have been exciting, but it did not inspire
her creatively. “It would have been even more difficult for me to write
music if I was married to a musician.” Instead, Bruni found herself a young
French philosopher, Raphaël Enthoven.
Unfortunately, like Jagger, he came with a certain amount of baggage: namely
Justine Lévy, daughter of the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Enthoven’s
former wife. Soon after Enthoven left Lévy, she wrote a venomous novel, Rien
de Grave (Nothing Serious), in which Paula, a silicone-enhanced
model-turned-rock star, steals the protagonist’s husband. When the book was
published in 2004, it didn’t take a master code-breaker to work out that
Paula was Carla by another name.
But by then Bruni, whose modelling work had dried up in 1998, had returned to
her true calling — music — and was in a more contemplative mood:
“After all these years of running around, I finally had the empty time that
I needed to write songs.” And with that “empty time” came poetry, and the
idea for No Promises .
Before recording the album, she enlisted the help of her friend Marianne
Faithfull, who spent two months guiding her study of the poems. “I had to
call her ‘my dear professor’. We looked at the biographies of the poets.
Marianne showed me the letters between Yeats and Maud Gonne.”
It is Yeats (or “Yeets”, as Bruni charmingly refers to him —
along with “Owden”) who begins the record, with Bruni’s most daring choice, Those
Dancing Days are Gone . Despite its sunny refrain, this is a poem about
old age that involves “wrapping that foul body up/ In as foul a rag” —
lines not, perhaps, written with the supermodel in mind.
His second poem on the album, Before the World Was Made , is a better
fit. A woman argues that her artificial self — made-up and flirty —
is actually more authentic than her natural one; a sentiment that chimed
with Bruni’s experience of the modelling world, in which she “found
artificial things in the deepest situations, and the opposite, too”.
There are other personal echoes. Christina Rossetti’s Promises Like
Pie-Crust , for example, captures the pragmatic tone of a woman like
Bruni, whose romantic history will never be fully revealed: “Promise me no
promises . . . For I cannot know your past,/ And of mine what can you know?”
Now edging into middle age, Bruni has had occasion to look back on her
eventful life and carve out something of a personal philosophy. Of all the
poems on No Promises , Dorothy Parker’s Ballade at
Thirty-Five expresses it best: a song of experience from “a lady who/
Followed ever her natural bents”, it could have been written for Bruni
herself. “When I have to choose,” she explains, “I always choose doing
things, so I make great mistakes but I don’t have regrets.” Between regrets
and mistakes, she adds, with a pleased little laugh, “I would choose
mistakes”. No Promises is released on May 7 on Dramatico
Entertainment
Fashion and pop: a two-way street?
Karen Elson The 28-year-old Mancunian proponent of “freak chic” duetted
with Cat Power, co-founded the hip cabaret troupe the Citizens Band and even
wed Jack White.
Kate Moss Having previously dabbled with Primal Scream, the waifish one
is now writing songs with her beloved Pete Doherty — to the irritation
of Babyshambles, who see her as Yoko Ono Mk II.
Victoria Beckham Made her debut on the catwalk for Maria Grachvogel in
2000; since then Posh Spice has concentrated on her fashion designs —
and fragrances.
Bryan Ferry “They’re great old-fashioned British brands,” said the
former Roxy Music frontman of Burberry and Marks & Spencer, both of whom
he has modelled for.
