22 February 2018
Hallyday’s Family
The right to disinherit.
By Lynda Goetz
Johnny Hallyday is not a name well-known in this country, but to millions of French men and women he was a mega star, often known simply as ‘Johnny’; their very own rock icon, at a time when the Americans and the English had all the idols. His real name was Jean-Phillippe Leo Smet. Hallyday’s death at the end of last year caused almost national mourning, and his funeral in Paris was an elaborate send-off with intense security ordered by current president Emmanuel Macron (who also gave a speech) and attended by former presidents Nicholas Sarkozy and François Hollande as well as millions of fans.
A few months on, however, all is not well in the Hallyday family. At the time of his death, 74 year-old Hallyday was married to 42 year-old former model Laeticia, his fifth wife (or his fourth, allowing for the fact that his third and fourth marriages were to the same woman). They have two daughters, Jade and Joy, adopted from Vietnam. According to his final will made in 2014, Hallyday has left his reputed $100 million fortune in its entirety to his wife, cutting out son David (a singer songwriter) from his first marriage to singer Sylvie Vartan, and his daughter, the actress Laura Smet, from his four-year relationship with French actress Nathalie Baye. When his wife dies the remainder of the estate will go to their adopted daughters. David and Laura are now contesting his will.
Johnny Hallyday was French. Under French law it is not possible to disinherit your children. Without going too deeply into the complexities of French inheritance law, if you do not write a will your children benefit more than your wife. Even if you do write a will, a certain proportion of the estate, la reserve, still goes to them with the remaining ‘partie disponible’ available to leave to a surviving spouse, or indeed anyone else. It is this fact upon which Hallyday’s children’s lawyers will rely, although his wife’s lawyers will undoubtedly argue that the will was drawn up under Californian law and that, since she and her husband and daughters had lived in Los Angeles since the early 2000s, the links to the USA were sufficiently strong for French law not to apply. No doubt the lawyers will have a field day and the case will go on for years. There is probably more than enough money in the estate for there to be some left at the end of it.
What about smaller estates, though? Modern families are complicated and whilst, as Tolstoy famously said in Anna Karenina, ‘each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’*, he was not even considering the complications of modern family life with multiple marriages, relationships and any number of half siblings, step siblings and natural children involved. The potential for failure in different areas increases exponentially.
I was reminded of this when two people I spoke to about the Hallyday case had their own stories to tell. One explained that she had recently seen a solicitor with her husband to sort out their wills. “I told him initially that I wanted my half to go to my chosen charities,” she said laughing “as the children are not mine and they don’t even like me!” She admitted that in the end she’d made some small legacies to her charities and in order to please her husband (“as I won’t be here anyway”) she’d agreed that, to avoid the expense and complications of trusts, she would keep things simple and effectively make mirror wills, leaving everything to her husband but should he predecease her, to his children.
The other person I spoke to was fuming about the fact that she had found out that her ex had left everything to his second wife, making no provision at all for the three children of his first marriage. Given that the second wife had, for the ten years she had been married, refused to let his children cross the threshold and made it quite clear that she expected him to have nothing to do with them either, it was quite apparent that should he die first (as was most likely given his state of health) then she would simply leave everything to her three children only. “Fine. We split up,” my friend railed. “He is no longer my husband; he is hers, but he is still the father of our children. I just don’t understand his thinking. The breakdown of the marriage was clearly not their fault. Why on earth should he choose not only not to keep in touch with them, but to make their sense of abandonment worse by disinheriting them as well? It is not as if they have done anything wrong!”
It is clearly a sense of injustice which has prompted Laura Smet’s decision to contest her father’s will. One has no idea of course what is behind Johnny’s decision to disinherit his two biological children. On the surface it does not appear that there was any estrangement. Certainly in 1999 he was collaborating with son David on his album Sang pour Sang (‘Blood for Blood’), a hugely successful album both in France and French-speaking Belgium. He had married Laeticia in 1996 when she was not even 21. At that stage, David was 33, Laura only 15. According to articles published online in the French celebrity magazine Gala yesterday (Wednesday 21st), Laeticia is now the butt of a great deal of public anger over the will, many calling her a ‘manipulatrice’. In the will which was released last week, Hallyday apparently stated that he had already given the two elder children enough in his lifetime. However, that argument does not detract from the claim that his children deserve at least something from an estate seemingly worth so much, even if it is only a relatively small legacy or some sort of memento. That he should wish to look after his young wife and the two young girls they had adopted is entirely understandable. That in so doing he should completely cut out his other two children is not – particularly to the French.
Should children expect anything from the death of a parent? Perhaps not, but it is in many ways a very natural instinct to wish to pass down any wealth that has been accumulated in a lifetime or indeed, in the case of landed estates, perhaps simply safeguarded in a lifetime. The English and the French have always had very different attitudes in this matter. The English way used to be (and in some cases still is) to safeguard inheritance by passing it down in its entirety to the eldest son. The French have always felt it fairer to divide it equally between all children (including adopted children), but this has led to complications with their agricultural industry (smaller and smaller plots which become uneconomic to farm). With the increase in divorce and re-marriage, finding ways of passing assets on to spouses (‘tontine’ clauses and marriage contracts with a ‘régime de communauté universelle’) can give rise to their own injustices if the spouse who dies last is not a blood relative of all of the surviving children.
In this country we do, in theory, have ‘free testamentary disposition’ but this does not prevent cases reaching the courts each year where descendants, spouses or even cohabiting partners (of at least 2 years) contest wills. There are roughly three grounds on which one can do so; firstly the will is invalid (i.e. not drawn up or executed in accordance with the legislation); secondly the testator hasn’t made ‘reasonable’ provision for dependents, or thirdly that the will was made when the testator was not of ‘sound mind’ or was subject to ‘undue influence’. It is this latter cause which children tend to use when contesting wills made by parents leaving everything to second, third or fourth spouses. It may perhaps be a similar starting point which has prompted Johnny’s children to pursue their claim – even if they will be using different arguments (i.e. French law should apply) to pursue it.
Ms Smet’s open letter to her late father, quoted in the national newspapers here, would appear to suggest that in spite of quite a long illness (he died of lung cancer) she was ‘not able to say goodbye’. She adds, ‘So many questions without answers. All those times when we had to hide to see and call each other’. Without knowing or indeed wanting to know what happened in that particular family, it is not too difficult to see similar scenarios playing out in other unhappy families where controlling last wives (and let’s be honest here, frequently it is wives) wish to obliterate the presence of those family members who were important to the person over whom they appear to need to have total control – even in death. Money plays a powerful role, quite clearly, but there are also other very fundamental issues at play here. In this case it will be interesting to see whether the courts opt for the restrictive French inheritance laws or the freer testamentary disposition available in California. Either way, this is sadly a much fragmented family and in that its members are not alone.
* “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
