The degree of separation between Dorothy Parker and the president of France is 1. That would be Carla Bruni. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, took Bruni on a trip to Egypt over the Christmas holiday, stepping out into headlines with the stunning French-Italian supermodel/singer. Sarkozy recently announced he and his wife split up. With Bruni as the No. 1 girlfriend in the country, she will be even more famous.
How is this related to Parker? Bruni released the album No Promises early this year, which features Dorothy Parker verses on “Ballade at Thirty-Five” and “Afternoon” (in heavily-accented English) on the pop album.
She also samples three Emily Dickinson poems, along with W.H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, Walter de la Mare, and Christina Rosetti. The album is all dead poets set to French Pop.
The reviews have been good. Critic Liz Hoggard wrote in the London Telegraph:
Remarkably for a beautiful woman, the most successful tracks on the album are songs of loneliness and unrequited love: from the chilling precision of Emily Dickinson’s ‘I Felt My Life With Both My Hands’, set against grungy electric guitars, to Bruni’s wonderfully spiky reading of Dorothy Parker’s ‘Ballade at Thirty Five’, with its weary refrain: ‘I love them until they loved me.’ But the album’s masterpiece is Bruni’s thrash-punk arrangement of Parker’s ‘Afternoon’, in which a middle-aged woman anticipates the day when, post-desire, she’ll have nothing but ‘memory to share my bed / and peace to share my fire.’
What does this mean? Will the president of France now be exposed to Dorothy Parker poems? Parker always loved Paris and visiting France. Maybe now that the leader of the country is in bed with a beautiful Parker fan, we can look forward to more Parker exposure in France? Bruni has a string of famous ex-boyfriends.
If you figure out her web site, you can listen to the 2 Parker pieces under the “No Promises” section. Here is a video (in English) of Bruni talking about the the record and performing songs from it. She mentions Parker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dUZ-GGqizQ