Carla Bruni polishes her image
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OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso: Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the first lady of France, looked out the window of her 13-seat military jet as it touched down here, spotted the red carpet and receiving party awaiting her and suddenly realized what she was wearing.
"Oh, I'm in jeans!" she said. "Well, at least they don't look like jeans."
The 20-hour visit of the Italian-born singer, heiress and ex-model to one of the poorest countries in the world last week marked Bruni-Sarkozy's debut as a good-will ambassador, a personal experiment in burnishing her image and projecting the soft power of France.
A year after her marriage to President Nicolas Sarkozy catapulted her into the role of first lady, Bruni-Sarkozy said she had decided to "do something useful," signing on with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria last December as its first formal celebrity envoy.
She visited a hospital, a medical center for women and the presidential palace in this West African country, as her hosts sought to capitalize on her star quality for a humanitarian cause, without being capsized by it.
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"There is always too much fuss about what I'm doing, you know," Bruni-Sarkozy said during an interview after the whirlwind tour, snuffing out one of several menthol Vogue cigarettes in her nearly empty glass of beer. "I don't feel very comfortable with the talking part."
In private, Bruni-Sarkozy has no trouble making down-to-earth small talk: that Daniel Craig is good-looking but Sean Connery will go down as the best James Bond; how some of her friends have become paranoid that their phone conversations with her are monitored by French intelligence officers; how women over 25 - 28 at the latest - should stop wearing makeup because it ages them; how she longs to have a child with Sarkozy, but knows that at age 41, she is "just at the edge."
In the past year, Bruni-Sarkozy's approval ratings have risen to more than double those of the president. After initial condemnation by the French, who criticized the public and glitzy nature of their romance and marriage just 11½ weeks after their first meeting, and 3½ months after Sarkozy's divorce from his second wife, things turned in her favor.
The image of a demure wife in a gray midcalf coatdress and matching pillbox hat curtsying before the Queen of England replaced that of the sex-crazed foreigner with nude photos on the Internet and Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton in her past.
"For the French, she finally appeared elegant and respectful of the unwritten code that says the first lady should not overshadow the president," said Stéphane Rozès, the director of the polling group CSA.
Indeed, Bruni-Sarkozy is credited with quietly calming down her high-octane husband. She said she has helped cure his migraines by persuading him to stop eating refined sugar and to break his chocolate addiction. She has helped relieve his backaches by getting him to use her personal trainer. ("Since he started working on his upper belly, he never has a backache," she said.)
She has tried to curb his fits of anger. "A lot of people are scared of him, not just because of his position, but because of his temper," she said. "I don't think he ever had the time for 'la dolce vita.' I gave him the virus."
Committed to continuing her career as a singer and songwriter, she produced a third CD last summer, with songs featuring lyrics like, "I am a child/despite my 40 years/despite my 30 lovers, a child."
(Bruni-Sarkozy has said that she never counted her lovers, and that she chose the number 30 for its lyrical value.)
She still takes her son Aurélien, from a previous relationship, to the neighborhood public school and makes him lunch at home every day.
Although her husband has not dared to venture deep into France's troubled suburbs as president, she is planning to use some of her personal fortune - as well as raise other private-sector funds - to start what she probably will call the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation. It will finance scholarships and cultural centers for underprivileged young people living there.
She said she takes her inspiration from a long list of women - from Catherine the Great to Audrey Hepburn, from Jacqueline Kennedy to Bernadette Chirac, her predecessor as first lady - but believes that given her past, if she had been involved with Sarkozy earlier, he might never had made it to the presidency. "I don't know if he would have had such a wonderful, fantastic career with me at his side," she said.
The latest inside story about her and her husband is included in a new book by Jacques Séguéla, a French advertising mogul and a friend who brought the two of them together at a dinner at his home (and who apparently took notes).
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