Drill, Bébé, Drill
Nadav KanderBernard Touati’s dental practice may be the Avenue Montaigne’s most exclusive salon.
Sometimes dentists are lion tamers. Kings and presidents open wide for Bernard Touati, but he is careful, he says, to keep his own mouth shut.
His cabinet is in Paris’s Golden Triangle, where Chanel, Dior and Prada are perfectly aligned with the perfumer Caron and the impeccable chocolatier Fouquet. There is no plaque on the wall announcing his presence; he’ll see Diane Von Furstenberg on Yom Kippur if the film director Danièle Thompson asks him to, and Madonna can come in in a pinch, but this isn’t a walk-in clinic. He wouldn’t accept payment from Von Furstenberg; she gave him an I.O.U. for two dresses at her boutique instead. “He’d be worth moving to Paris for three months to see,” the designer says.
Nadav Kander “I can look in someone’s mouth and know their life,” says Touati, 63.
He grew up with Sidney Toledano, the C.E.O. of Christian Dior, who can watch what’s going on in the Dior showroom through the window when he’s being treated in Touati’s office. “My father wanted me to become a doctor, like Bernard,” says Toledano, a touch wistful. “It would have been simpler.”
Touati, born 63 years ago in Casablanca, Morocco, is fit, athletic, good-looking; also, low profile, a family man and famous. Married to Lily Buda for 41 years — they met in high school — he has three daughters. When the middle one, an actress and singer named Élisa, found that the producers of a Spanish film she was in had changed her name from Touati to Tovati, she kept the new name, so people wouldn’t keep asking if he was her father. Her duet with Tom Dice, “Il Nous Faut,” was a big hit this summer.
Touati knows a lot about a few world leaders, and, because he is diplomatic, as much about their mortal enemies. Surrounded by security, he started treating Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin hospital in 1996 and treated Vladimir Putin in the same hospital, surrounded by even more security. “The only words I can say in Russian are ‘open your mouth, close your mouth, don’t move,’ ” Touati says.
He looked after the teeth of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in prison in Russia for financial crimes, and still treats the regime’s archenemy Boris Berezovsky, who has political asylum in Britain. Mrs. Yelstin gives him homemade walnut cakes and jars of malossol pickles every time she sees him. He also treats the wife of Mikhail Fridman and other oligarchs like Alisher Usmanov, who owns a major share in England’s Arsenal football team.
But he’s a Chelsea man: for well over a decade, until last year, Touati flew regularly to Moscow for Roman Abramovich, who had equipped a full dental clinic in his office just for him. Abramovich had found it a waste of time for him and his friends to keep taking the plane to Paris. “I thought he was crazy,” Touati says, “but it was very useful.” Russian dentistry has caught up with Touati’s standards, and Abramovich now owns the Chelsea soccer team.
Touati likes to quote the author of “The Little Prince,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” “That,” he says, “applies to root canal — not visible, but essential, determining. It’s like politics — you can’t see the essential.” His art is in the concealed and the miniature: early on, while he was still an assistant university professor at Paris V, he created tiny dental burs that are now high-end standard issue. He founded the Société Française de Dentisterie Esthétique in 1983, is the head and chair and president of numerous associations and regularly writes aesthetic surgery textbooks full of truly terrifying close-ups of teeth and gums. Touati was one of the first proponents of composite inlays and ceramics for veneers and crowns — the worryingly named zirconium oxide and aluminum oxide. Traditionalists in the 1980s sneered at what they called “the white stuff,” but today no one in the public eye wants a glint of metal inside their mouth.
“I can look in someone’s mouth and know their life,” he says, sitting behind his desk, wearing a short-sleeved surgeon’s coat, in his immaculate and extensive suite of offices. “Levels of stress, hygiene, education, socioeconomic background. Are they nervous? The teeth are worn down. If the care is of a high quality, that means a sophisticated background; missing teeth, tartar, bad maintenance — not the same. You can see signs of smoking, or the erosion of bulimia — I can see the personality and the life habits of a patient by looking in their mouth.”
The blunt health care of the Soviet era meant that when the good times came around in the 1990s, Russian teeth were in pretty bad shape: multiple extractions, simple fillings, metal bridges, dentures, badly done root canals.
“They’d only had cheap materials,” Touati says.
“Our big advantage over the United States is the quality of the technicians, the ceramicists. In America, it’s more industrial than artisanal. There can be good work, but it’s not the high artistic level that we have in Europe. We have people with real talent — it’s like haute couture. Our prosthetics are known for that. As Chanel said: ‘Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.’ ”
From left: Miguel A. Lopes/Getty Images; BeImages; Marc Piasecki/WireImage; Sergei Zhukov/Getty Images; Markus Schreiber/AP Photo.Above, from left: Vladimir Putin; Valentino; Dr. Touati’s daughter, Élisa Tovati; Roman Abramovich; and Boris Yeltsin all know the drill.
Framed photos of the king of Morocco and the Russian nomenklatura are in his bookcase, along with pictures of some entertainers — Patrick Bruel, Jean Reno, Mélanie Thierry, Danièle Thompson and her companion, Albert Koski. In the past, he’s tended to Bernard-Henri Lévy’s teeth as well.
“Some actors won’t give you their picture because they don’t want people to know you redid their teeth,” Touati says. One actress has herself dropped off blocks away from his office, so that her driver can’t say she went to the dentist. “In America, people say they have caps; in France they say they’ve had a bleaching. Some women have had so much done to their lips that they ask to have their teeth lengthened, to compensate. When they smile or laugh, the teeth look like horse teeth. But women have been doing it forever — in antiquity, they used to prick their lips with needles to make them plump.”
Over a light lunch at a Japanese restaurant where he goes every day, he says: “I’m an artisan, at your disposal — I have no ego, but I like reciprocity.” The waitress, a pretty young Japanese woman, has incisors he finds charming. “Aesthetic concepts are entirely cultural,” he says. “In Japan, a big mouth is considered unattractive. Geishas made their teeth black to make their mouths look small. They would use lemon juice to strip the enamel and then lacquer their teeth with India ink.”
Before coffee, I learn that Northern people — Swedes, Danes, Norwegians — have bigger teeth than Spaniards and Italians. “It’s because in the south, puberty comes earlier,” Touati explains. The worst thing for teeth, he says, is grinding; he advises against bulimia, caramels, grapefruit juice, lemon juice, crunching ice, or using one’s teeth to open bottles and crack crab claws.
Late in the afternoon, Dr. Touati fixes one of my teeth. The treatment room is huge, with a Barcelona chair and its ottoman in one corner and his own paintings on the wall. He is a very good dentist; the most noticeable difference between his approach and that of others, however, is in the injection. He pulls the skin of the cheek away before he applies the hypodermic, and slaps it back against the gum just as the needle goes in. You’re so startled by the slap that you forget about the needle.
Afterward, he shows me his paintings. The canvases seem cheerful and bright. Looked at closely, some turn out to be collages that incorporate Band-Aids, surgical tape, medical gauze. “Life isn’t always nice,” he says.
He’s done a series based on photographs; one of them is of the young Marilyn Monroe. “She was only 19 in this picture,” he says, “married to the policeman, and was still Norma Jeane Baker, but look — she had two little teeth that had been redone.”
Doug Menuez/Getty Images
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