Caroline, Monique and Jack Lang at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, on September 29, 2019. BERTRAND RINDOFF PETROFF/GETTY IMAGES/US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE/ LE MONDE
On June 20, 1990, before dawn, Jack Lang arranged to meet his guests at Le Bourget airport, just north of Paris. President François Mitterrand's minister of culture had big plans to export the annual national music celebration he had created to the Soviet Union. His round trip to Moscow involved celebrities (Eddy Mitchell, Charlélie Couture, Alain Delon), a filmmaker tasked with capturing the event, and around 15 journalists. Out on the tarmac, the delegation discovered their aircraft: a private Boeing 727, fully fitted out with a lounge, bedroom and bathroom. The plane had been lent by a "friend," answered Monique Lang, the minister's wife, when asked about the mysterious owner's identity. That "friend," French diplomats whispered to the stunned guests, was Robert Maxwell.
The British media mogul and Lang had already known each other for several years. In 1987, the Socialist culture minister and the businessman, a former Labour MP in the House of Commons in London, even formed an alliance. At the height of the battle over the privatization of TF1 television station, undeterred by any mixing of business and politics, it was with Lang's support that Maxwell and Francis Bouygues, head of the world's largest construction group, managed to convince Mitterrand to choose them to buy France's first television channel.
