A Dangerous Meeting in Prison

A Dangerous Meeting in Prison

Dominique Lapierre, one of the co-authors of the fictional political book “The Fifth Horseman,” in which Colonel Gaddafi uses atomic blackmail against the president of the United States over Israel, met, among others, with the Japanese terrorist Kozo Okamoto in Ramla Prison while gathering material for his book.

“The guard ushered me into his cell,” he recounts, “and said: Look, this man is very dangerous. He has such strength in his hands that with two karate moves he can finish anyone off in seconds... And then he left me alone with the prisoner and went off to eat lunch...”

So if you come across a few lines that clearly seem to have been written in a trembling hand, you’ll probably understand why.

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The Wealth of Public Figures

The wealth of public figures is a very confidential matter in privacy-loving France. Following the controversy over the publication of photographs of the income-tax returns of President Giscard d’Estaing and industrialist Marcel Dassault by the satirical weekly “Le Canard enchaîné”—which revealed, among other things, that the president had interests in a securities firm—the weekly “Le Point” approached ninety prominent figures and asked them to disclose publicly the sources of their income.

Only fourteen responded, among them the leaders of the Socialist and Communist parties. Prime Minister Raymond Barre, after consulting with the president, forbade his ministers to answer the questionnaire. Figures such as National Assembly President Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac replied that they would support a law requiring public figures to disclose their income, but did not believe a newspaper was the proper forum for it. Another brick in the power and standing of the Seventh Estate in the Fifth Republic...

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A Billionaire Without a Gold Watch

The man who has no trouble estimating his wealth is the billionaire and oldest member of the National Assembly, Marcel Dassault, aged 88. It is not that he is unwilling to disclose the sources of his income to the public; rather, he says, he simply does not know them all. Even so: “I have no personal wealth at all,” says Dassault. “You won’t even see a gold watch on my wrist...”

Without a gold watch, he runs his sprawling empire from a palace on the Champs-Élysées, which also houses the offices of his newspaper, “Jour de France.” And he has plans for at least another ninety years. Having moved through aircraft, newspapers and political parties, Dassault has recently turned to films and has already produced two or three that did quite well. He is willing to watch any screenplay—provided nobody undresses, there are no vulgar words, and it has a “happy ending.” But his main role, he says, is to help people. “I helped Vietnam,” says the maker of the Mirages, “and I continue elsewhere.” Perhaps it was in this spirit that he made his famous election proposal: a house in the countryside for every French person. Just goes to show that anyone can be Dassault. You only have to dream the right dream...

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Michèle Morgan Is Fifteen

“Michèle Morgan is fifteen and still has the most beautiful eyes in the world,” the Paris newspapers declared. The second part is indeed beyond dispute. But, with all due goodwill, it is hard to grant an actress, in many details of her youth, an impossible age such as fifteen...

Well, there is no bluff here. Michèle was simply born on February 29. A date with the funny habit of appearing only once every four years, like the Knesset. This date is the object of a whole cult in France, and there is even a newspaper here that appears regularly, but only on February 29.

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Striptease in an Aquarium

It was supposed to be the “Moulin Rouge”’s showstopper of the century: two noble dolphins entertaining a real looker, no less—a real bombshell before your eyes, inside a gigantic aquarium.

But for now, the whole thing is delayed. The two performing dolphins have indeed reached the shores of France, eager to meet their co-star, but customs officials at the port of Le Havre refuse to release them, citing laws on the importation and protection of animals. Animal welfare—one gets the impression nobody asked the dolphins whether the planned act would really cause them so much distress. And besides, has anyone thought at all about the poor stripper, who will be shivering in the aquarium water?

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A Holiday for Emirs

This is the new idea of French Tourism Minister Jean-Pierre Soisson. France is offering the rulers of the oil principalities in the Persian Gulf a series of holiday villages to be built in their countries, exclusively for the local leaders and their guests. The French leaders naturally hope that, in addition to the right to operate them, they will also be able to stay from time to time in the villages to be built in the desert.

And while we are talking about the French, villages and Arabs, Alexandre de Marenches, head of the French secret service, the SDECE, is about to sell his country estate, which includes a fine swimming pool, to an Iraqi millionaire. From now on he will make do with the service’s headquarters in Paris, which, incidentally, is known to the public as “the pool,” because it is next to a public swimming pool.

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“Emmanuelle,” Yugoslav Style

Director Just Jaeckin returned utterly shocked from the latest Belgrade Film Festival. After seven years of prohibition, his famous erotic film “Emmanuelle” was screened there. It turned out, however, that no subtitles had been prepared for the film. The resourceful organizers found a solution. They seated a Yugoslav female announcer, who whispered all the dialogue and the very particular sounds with which this film, as everyone knows, is so richly endowed, in a very erotic voice...

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A Feast for the Churches

The days of veteran dancer Ginger Rogers’s performances in Paris are a feast not only for dance lovers who come to see her at the “Olympia.”

The real feast belongs to the churches of Paris. Ginger visits them twice a day, and in the process drops half her earnings into their charity boxes. Before long, I think, we’ll hear the bells of “Notre-Dame” ringing out “Invitation to the Dance”...

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The Houses of Marshal Pétain

Thirty-five years after the Liberation, the shadow of Marshal Pétain, the notorious head of the Vichy regime, still hangs over the French. Most prefer to see him as a national hero who went senile in his old age, but they avoid the house where he was born near the English Channel as if it were plague-stricken.

For ten years this house has been up for sale, but no buyers have been found. An old woman, one of the marshal’s admirers, comes to clean it every day. A small commemorative plaque stating that Pétain was born there was quietly removed so as not to hinder the sale, but there are still no buyers. The house remains vacant.

A different fate was reserved for the marshal’s country chateau: it was confiscated after the war and now houses a psychiatric hospital. Finally, the marshal’s prison on the island of Yeu, where he died at the age of eighty-five, is now used as a children’s holiday camp. France prefers to forget Pétain. And yet a documentary such as “The Seizure of Power by Philippe Pétain,” which has just been released in cinemas, returns to pick at the old wounds of a period from which the glory of French history turned its face.

Bahrain and Zionism

It cannot be said that the principality of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf is inconsistent. Not long ago, the local airport authorities forced a group of 34 French passengers, part of a larger group of 300 people who had stopped there in transit on their way to the Far East, to sleep on the benches in the terminal, without permission to leave to eat or use the toilets. The reason was that these passengers had been identified as “Zionists.” The proof was visas in their passports showing that they had once visited the country.

As French President Giscard d’Estaing set out to visit the Gulf states, Bahrain refused to allow another “Zionist” to enter. This was Yves Mourousi, the popular news broadcaster on the first French television channel. He had previously been labeled a Zionist by a mysterious organization that planted a bomb which destroyed a wing of Mourousi’s home. He himself escaped by a miracle because he was not at home. So Giscard went, and Mourousi stayed behind. The Bahrainis are people of principle. And the French?