Idea of Raising Dead to Prove Paternity Raises Ire in France

PARIS —  A passionate affair. A pregnancy, an angry separation and a child born out of wedlock. And then bitter wrangling over the inheritance. An old French story, older than Balzac or Maupassant.

That was before DNA testing could establish the identity of the father with near certainty. In a bizarre and remarkable paternity case that has sharply divided French public opinion, a court has ordered that such testing should be done, posthumously.

That would have been news enough. But the remains to be tested are those of the smoky-voiced cabaret crooner and film star Yves Montand, the screen incarnation of the French lover, who died six years ago at 70 and was buried in Paris’ Pere-Lachaise cemetery alongside his wife of 37 years, actress Simone Signoret.

For eight years, onetime starlet Gilberte Drossart, 44, who claims to have been Montand’s lover for two years beginning in 1974, when he was making director Claude Sautet’s film “Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others,” has been fighting in the courts to prove that the star fathered her daughter, Aurore, now 22.

Montand’s death of a heart attack on Nov. 9, 1991, an event that sparked nationwide mourning in France, did nothing to weaken the resolve of the combative Drossart and her daughter. Last month, a Paris court ordered that the remains of the alleged father be unearthed from their marble tomb, the oak casket pried open and DNA samples extracted from the teeth or bone marrow.

The deoxyribonucleic acid, which bears the genetic fingerprints of its host, will then be compared with samples taken from Drossart and her daughter. The method has already been used to prove that the remains found in Ekaterinburg in the Urals were those of Russian Czar Nicolas II and his family, killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. In France, the chances of misidentification through DNA testing have been put by experts at 1 in 50 million.

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In ordering the exhumation of Montand, the son of poor Italian immigrants who became one of France’s most popular entertainers, the Paris court kindled white-hot passions that have been vented in the press and on TV talk shows. One recent opinion poll for the magazine Paris-Match found that 61% of the French surveyed expressed “shock” at the legal ruling. More women than men were outraged.

“I think it’s a question of big money,” said Jean-Pierre Pranche, 70, who had come in from the Paris suburbs to spruce up the family tomb at Pere-Lachaise. “If this happened to anyone, it would be terrible, but with so much money at stake, I frankly find it disgusting.”

Bernard Kouchner, a friend of Montand who is a minister of state in France’s Socialist-led government, denounced the court’s decision. Journalist Ivan Levai, another friend who never knew the identity of his own biological father, said: “The father is the one who raises the child. Death must be the boundary marker. We give the dead a sepulcher. . . . We leave them in peace.”

“With all the ill that my father has done, he cannot rest in peace,” answered Aurore Drossart, who lives with her mother in a small, cluttered ground-floor apartment in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, where she recently began studying psychology by mail. “I have suffered greatly from the lack of a father, from the lack of an identity, from people’s mockery.”

The young woman with long brown hair does not have the lanky Montand’s nearly 6-foot-2 stature, but when she held up a photo of the late entertainer, the long face, the smile, the eyes looked strikingly similar.

“Like him, I am a man of the south,” she said. “I speak with my hands.”

She was 6, Aurore Drossart says, when her father called and said he wanted to see her. She rushed with her baby sitter to the apartment in western Paris where Montand lived with Signoret, who died of cancer in 1985, and found Montand, who was very active in political causes his entire life, with a member of the Polish trade union Solidarity.

“The Solidarity man asked, ‘Who’s that?’ and Montand, who I guess didn’t want any witnesses, said, ‘It’s just another fan,’ ” Aurore said. “When I heard that, I became so disgusted I ran out in a rage, saying, ‘I have no father, and never will.’ ”

According to Aurore’s mother, Montand broke off their affair when she told him she was pregnant with his child.

Even some of Montand’s friends acknowledge that there may have been a liaison.

“He was a born seducer,” said Levai. “He had a very active life.” After filming “Let’s Make Love” with Marilyn Monroe in 1960, Montand even had a brief fling with Hollywood’s most famous sex symbol.

In France, there is precedent for a paternity test on a corpse, ordered by an appeals court in Aix-en-Provence in February 1996. In that case, the family objected that the law requires the accused to formally allow such tests, but the judges overruled that objection, noting that a “cadaver cannot give its consent.”

In 1988, Montand fathered a child with another lover, Carole Amiel, the daughter of a decorator and furniture dealer from Champagne and 39 years his junior. When the entertainer publicly recognized the towheaded Valentin, now 8, as his child and spoke of the joys of being a father for the first time at age 67, Gilberte Drossart boiled over with anger. In 1990, she sued Montand for $200,000 in damages and child support of $2,000 a month, and had a lawyer serve him with a summons for a paternity test.

Twice a court asked him to undergo a blood test, and twice, as was his right under French law, Montand declined.

Two years after the actor’s death, changes in France’s civil code put the burden of proof in a paternity case on the accused. In September 1994, though hard proof seemed lacking to many, a Paris judge ruled that Montand was Aurore Drossart’s father.

Amiel, now 37, and Catherine Allegret, 51, a daughter born to Simone Signoret in 1946 when the actress was living with producer Yves Allegret, but who was later adopted by Montand as his own child, counterattacked.

Amiel demanded her own biological tests--on her own son, Montand’s purported daughter and his sister Lydia, now 82. An expert concluded from the tests that there was a 1 in 1,000 chance that Gilberte Drossart was telling the truth. But that was sufficient for the court to order the examination of the remains.

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The economic stakes are great, though neither Amiel, who was the last love of Montand’s life, nor Gilberte Drossart would talk about numbers. Montand is believed to have left an estate worth millions, and his recordings and films--he starred in more than 40--are still very popular. For the sixth anniversary of his death, Amiel oversaw the release of a new CD. Her book about life with Montand came out last month; Drossart said hers should be in bookstores this month.

As Montand’s natural or adopted children, Catherine Allegret and Valentin now each have a legal right to part of Montand’s estate. If the DNA test proves that Aurore is also his offspring, she will be entitled by the French civil code to an equal share.

Amiel, who lives in the singer’s last home, a swank apartment they bought together in 1990 in the trendy St. Germain des Pres quarter of Paris, has reluctantly gone along with the court’s decision. “If we oppose the DNA test, people will say that it’s because we don’t want the whole truth to be known,” she said.

Since Aurore Drossart stands to benefit, she is supposed to pay for the opening of the grave and the examination. By the end of December, her mother said, they are supposed to deposit $3,360 with the court. Test results should be made known by June.

The elder Drossart, who has a degree in law but whose real estate venture failed when the bottom dropped out of the Paris property market in the early ‘90s, would like to move to the United States and open a restaurant. Her daughter, teased for much of her life about her claim of being a star’s child, would like to go to America to study.

Whatever the test shows, and whatever Aurore’s motives, her willingness to trouble the dead to establish who her father was has scandalized many in France.

“Would the real daughter allow her father to be mutilated?” journalist Michele Fitoussi asked in the newspaper Telegramme de Brest. “ ‘Yes,’ say the scandalmongers, ‘if the corpse was worth gold.’ That is the case. May this young woman find the peace that she will not allow him.”