Now, lean in, darling, because I am only going to whisper this once.
There are stories that belong in the papers, and there are stories that belong between us.
The affair of Sunny von Bülow is very firmly the second kind.
It has everything.
Money so old it has grown its own atmosphere, a husband with a monocle’s worth of charm and a murderer’s worth of motive, and a woman so gentle, so accommodating, so devastatingly passive, that one almost wonders if the world simply decided to take advantage.
Martha Sharp Crawford, or 'Sunny' as she was known due to her pleasant disposition, was born in 1932 in Manassas, Virginia, to the kind of family that does not need to announce itself. Her father, George W. Crawford, was an executive at Columbia Gas and Electric, and when he died, she was just four years old, barely old enough to understand loss but perfectly positioned to inherit it. He left behind a fortune of approximately $75 million.
In 1932 dollars. Which is to say an incomprehensible sum.
Her mother, Annie-Laurie Warmack Crawford, remarried, sensibly and well, into more money. Sunny was raised in Washington and New York, educated in the manner of girls of her station, with an emphasis on comportment over ambition. She came out as a debutante in 1951. She was, by every account, luminously beautiful with perfect posture, and the kind of fairness that painters once went mad over. She carried a warmth so sincere it disarmed people, and her trust in others reflected a rare kind of grace. In Newport, this is considered either a virtue or a vulnerability, depending on who you ask.
In 1957, Sunny married Prince Alfred von Auersperg, or 'Alfie' to his friends, an Austrian ski champion of genuine nobility and genuine charm, if somewhat less genuine financial wherewithal. They had two children: Alexander and Ala. They had a perfectly civilized marriage, and then a perfectly civilized divorce, finalized in 1965 after Alfie’s wandering eye wandered once too publicly.
Sunny kept the children and the title. She also kept the fortune.
And then, because the universe has a very particular sense of humor about wealthy women who have just reclaimed their independence, she met Claus.
Claus Cecil Borberg was born in Copenhagen in 1926 into a well-to-do family with ostensibly noble roots, though not entirely without a hint of tarnish.
His father, Svend Borberg, was a playwright accused of collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation of Denmark. Though his father was later cleared, that was the kind of biographical footnote that a man of Claus’s social ambitions would have been very motivated to distance himself from.
Claus drifted through Cambridge with law on the books and something far more deliberate on his mind. The careful editing of himself.
It was there he shed 'Borberg' in favor of his maternal grandfather’s 'von Bülow', a name which had considerably more drawing-room resonance than Borberg, and which is exactly the sort of calculation one notices, once one has started noticing.
He went to work for J. Paul Getty, who was, at the time, one of the richest men on earth and also one of the most spectacularly unpleasant. Getty famously installed a pay phone in his English mansion so he wouldn’t have to foot the telephone bill for his guests.
That Claus spent years in his orbit tells you something about his tolerance for a certain variety of man, and his ability to make himself indispensable to one.
He was tall, lean, and debonair. He was witty in the way that Europeans of a certain class are witty; dryly, pointedly, and usually at someone else’s expense. He had opinions on wine and architecture and the precise pronunciation of French that made Americans feel simultaneously educated and slightly humiliated.
Newport adored him. Of course it did.
He met Sunny at a party in New York in 1964, a year before her divorce from Alfie was finalized.
She was beautiful and rich and kind.
He was handsome and broke and brilliant.
The arithmetic, to anyone paying attention, was not subtle.
They were married in 1966. Her children from her first marriage, Alexander and Ala, were not immediately charmed by their stepfather.
This is putting it very gently.
The word ‘loathed’ appears in court documents later, which is a word that tends to stick.
They also had a daughter together, Cosima, born in 1967, who would grow up to be her father's most steadfast defender. Family dynamics, as ever, resist easy summary.
They had, by the standards of their world, everything.
There was Clarendon Court in Newport, a 1929 Georgian revival mansion on Bellevue Avenue, bought by Sunny for just under a million dollars in the days when that was still an extraordinary sum. Twenty-three rooms. Three acres. The sort of house that made guests lower their voices automatically upon entering, as though they'd walked into a very large, very hushed church devoted to the worship of inherited wealth.
Clarendon Court is a historic 1904 Gilded Age mansion.
There was a Fifth Avenue apartment in New York. There were houses in Europe. There were summers in Kitzbühel, where Sunny skied with the children of her first marriage and Claus charmed whoever needed charming. Sunny liked things orderly, beautiful, and calm. She was, by every account, a devoted mother. Attentive, generous, and present in the way that mothers with unlimited household staff can afford to be present.
She was also, and this matters enormously to what comes later, in fragile health. Sunny had hypoglycemia, a low blood sugar condition that required careful management and that, under certain circumstances, could become life-threatening. Her body, for all its surface perfection, required monitoring.
She also drank. Not in the way that scandals demand, not dramatically, not destructively but quietly, steadily, in the manner of wealthy women of that era who found that champagne at lunch made the afternoons easier and that nobody who mattered would say anything about it. Claus's lawyers would later make very much of this. Her children's lawyers would make very much of Claus making very much of it. The drinking, like everything else in this story, is disputed territory.
What is not disputed is that by the late 1970s, Claus had developed a very close friendship with one Alexandra Isles, a soap opera actress of significant beauty and significant inconvenience. Alexandra was not some minor character tucked into the margins of this story. She was, by the prosecution’s theory, the entire reason for it. The motive. The destination toward which a man might, if one believed the state of Rhode Island, have been willing to do something quite unforgivable.
She was born Alexandra Moltke, the daughter of a Danish count and diplomat, which means that she and Claus moved in the same rarefied transatlantic circles where everyone seems to be related to an aristocrat of some variety. She was raven-haired, the only appropriate word for that particular shade of dramatic, and she had the kind of cheekbones that make other women put down their forks and reassess their life choices.
She had been an actress. Specifically, she had played Victoria Winters on Dark Shadows, a gothic ABC soap opera full of vampires, ancestral curses, and a brooding New England atmosphere that now seems almost foreshadowing, given what she was about to walk into. She was the ingenue, the outsider, the good girl who didn’t quite understand the darkness around her.
One notes the irony without belaboring it.
Sunny was, apparently, aware of this friendship. She was, apparently, willing to overlook it. This is the thing about women who trust people. They keep trusting them, long past the point where trust has become something else entirely.
Here is where it gets properly interesting, darling, so do pay attention.
It’s Christmas 1979. The family is at Clarendon Court for the holidays. Sunny becomes ill. Severely, suddenly, frighteningly ill. She is found barely conscious on the morning of December 27. But Claus did not, one notes, leap heroically for the telephone.
Not immediately. No, that would have been far too… energetic.
It wasn’t until the languid hour of 2 p.m. that he finally summoned the motivation to ring a physician. The doctor, inconveniently occupied with actual urgency elsewhere, was unavailable, so Claus, dutiful in his own unhurried fashion, left a message.
When the call was returned, a full hour later, Claus offered his explanation with a kind of weary polish: his wife, you see, had a history. Alcohol had long been her troublesome companion, and she had indulged rather generously the night before. Yes, she was unresponsive now, he admitted, but really, nothing to fuss over. After all, she had been up earlier, out of bed, moving about like any other morning. In Claus’s telling, there was no drama here, no shadow of alarm, just a woman, presumably, sleeping it off. One almost imagines him shrugging as he said it.
According to the court filings (those sober little documents that so enjoy draining chaos of its color), the doctor did not arrive at the von Bülow residence until around 6 p.m., a delay that feels almost leisurely in retrospect. By then, Sunny’s condition had slipped from merely concerning into something altogether more theatrical, prompting Claus, at last, to discover panic. He called again, this time with urgency sharp enough to be noticed. The physician arrived just in time to witness a scene no one could politely dismiss: Sunny vomiting, gasping, her body betraying her in the most inelegant fashion before she stopped breathing entirely and drifted into cardiac arrest.
The doctor, to his credit, refused to be a spectator. He revived her, pulled her back, one might say, from the brink, and she was hurried off to Newport Hospital, not so much admitted as delivered, unconscious and ominously still.
There, the language became clinical but no less alarming. Cardio-respiratory arrest, they said, caused by a massive aspiration of gastric contents, a phrase both precise and grotesque. She was, quite plainly, near death upon arrival. Then came the curious detail, the one that lingers: her blood sugar was extraordinarily, inexplicably low. Sugar was administered in generous quantities, as though sweetness alone might persuade her body to cooperate, yet the levels refused to rise for hours, stubborn as a secret.
And yet, because stories like this insist on their reversals, after twenty-four hours of careful intervention, Sunny regained consciousness, as if returning from a place she had not intended to visit for quite so long.
The final verdict, delivered with the tidy ambiguity medicine sometimes prefers, was broncho-pneumonia and hypoglycemia of undetermined etiology. In other words: something had gone wrong, quite seriously so, and no one could say precisely why. She was advised, gently but firmly, to mind her sugar, avoid alcohol, and not allow too much time to pass between meals. The kind of practical instructions that feel almost quaint when set beside the drama that necessitated them.
So Sunny recovers, but the doctors are still concerned.
Claus, by various accounts, was present and attentive.
Or absent and unconcerned.
It depends, as with everything in this story, on who is doing the accounting.
Alexander and Ala von Auersperg
Sunny's children from her first marriage, Alexander and Ala, now adults and deeply suspicious of their stepfather, note the episode carefully. They have been watching Claus for years. They do not like what they see: a man who lives on his wife's money, controls access to that money with quiet efficiency, maintains a mistress with no apparent consequences, and treats the Auersperg children with a coolness that they find impossible to forgive. They begin, gently and then less gently, to raise concerns.
Fast forward to Christmas 1980. Clarendon Court again. The tree is up. The presents are wrapped. On December 21st, Sunny is found unconscious at the bottom of a staircase. Claus says she fell. The household staff says something else.
Sunny is rushed to the hospital, but this time, she does not wake up. She does not wake up the next day, or the week after that, or at any point in the following twenty-eight years.
The doctors who treated her rendered their diagnosis.
An irreversible coma secondary to hypoglycemic brain damage. Her blood sugar at admission was catastrophically low, the kind of low that does not happen by accident to a woman who knew her condition and managed it carefully. In their opinion, it was the kind of low that is caused by an excessive insulin spike, but how could that be explained?
Claus, in the days after Sunny's collapse, telephoned Alexandra Isles.
Then he also telephoned his lawyer.
In February 1981, just six weeks after Sunny was admitted to Columbia-Presbyterian in her permanent vegetative state, Claus and Alexandra vacationed together in the Bahamas with her twelve-year-old son.
The following month, they were off to Florida. This time, Claus also brought his fourteen-year-old daughter. One imagines those were complicated holidays.
And then, Alexander von Auersperg telephoned a private investigator.
This was not, under the circumstances, an unreasonable thing to do. His mother was lying in a hospital bed in a permanent coma. His stepfather had resumed his social life with a speed that the children found unpalatable, while Claus' supporters called resilience. Alexander wanted answers. He hired Richard Kuh, a former Manhattan District Attorney, to find them.
Kuh, with Alexander's assistance, searched Clarendon Court. In Claus's closet, they found a black bag. A medical bag, to be precise, the sort a doctor might carry, which Claus was not.
Inside the bag?
Sedatives.
And a needle.
The needle, when tested, showed traces of insulin on its exterior. Encrusted insulin.
The kind that accumulates when a needle is used and not cleaned, not the kind that appears from casual contact with a diabetic household.
Claus said the bag wasn't his. He said this calmly, in the manner of a man who has decided that extreme calmness is his best remaining option. He said the drugs belonged to Sunny, who sometimes used prescription sedatives. He said he didn't know how the needle got there. He said a great many things, in that dry, Cambridge-educated voice, and a Rhode Island jury listened to all of them.
They convicted him anyway.
Guilty of two counts of assault with intent to murder. Thirty years, potentially. Claus stood in the courtroom in one of his very good suits and received the verdict with an expression that witnesses described variously as stoic, stunned, and even calculating.
Then he hired Alan Dershowitz.
Dershowitz was, at the time, the most famous defense attorney in America. Brash, brilliant, operatically self-confident, and a Harvard Law professor who had never met a camera he didn't like or a case he couldn't complicate. He was, in short, exactly the man you hire when you are someone who has just been convicted of attempting to murder your heiress wife with insulin and you need someone to find a technicality.
He found several. The search of Clarendon Court had been conducted by private investigators, not law enforcement, which meant that the evidence they discovered occupied a legally awkward position. The handling of the needle had been irregular. The testing had been improperly conducted. The chain of custody was, to put it charitably, a chain in several disconnected pieces.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1984, and a second trial was ordered.
At the second trial, Claus was acquitted.
Not innocent. Not exonerated.
Acquitted.
The distinction, in a court of law, is everything. In Newport, it is considerably less.
Claus packed his things, presumably including that little black bag, and returned to London. He attended the theatre. He was photographed at very good restaurants. He gave the occasional interview in which he was charming, and aggrieved, and very careful indeed.
He and Sunny were never divorced, which meant that he retained certain rights regarding her care and her estate, a detail that her children found monstrous and that their lawyers found actionable, leading to years of additional litigation that would eventually result in Claus surrendering his claim to Sunny's estate in exchange for the divorce he never actually wanted.
Sunny lay in Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York for twenty-eight years.
She was cared for by nurses around the clock. She was faithfully visited by her children, Alexander and Ala. Cosima, Claus's daughter with Sunny, somewhat less so, a division in the family that ran along fault lines of loyalty so deep they will probably never fully close. Sunny's mother, who had survived all of this, visited until she couldn't anymore.
Of course, she never recovered, never showed signs of awareness. She merely ‘existed’ and that was, for twenty-eight years, the full extent of Sunny von Bülow's life in the world.
Claus, having moved to London permanently, into a house in Belgravia, lived the equivalent of a very comfortable life indeed. He was a figure in a certain kind of Anglo-American intellectual society. He attended dinner parties, the opera, and the occasional charitable board. He gave interviews. He maintained, with remarkable consistency, that he had loved Sunny and had never harmed her and that he had been the victim of her children's obsessive, grief-driven persecution.
Some people believed him. He was extremely convincing. This was, depending on your view of the matter, either evidence of his innocence or the most alarming thing about him.
Alexandra Isles, the soap opera actress, had long since moved on.
This is the part of the story that tends to get less coverage. The mistress for whom Sunny had been rendered permanently inconvenient (or so the prosecution's theory went) eventually became inconvenient herself and disappeared from Claus's story entirely. One wonders what she made of all of it. One imagines she has thoughts.
Sunny von Bülow died on December 6th, 2008, at the age of seventy-six. She had been in a coma for twenty-eight years. She died in the medical facility where she had spent the last chapter of her life, a chapter that lasted longer than most people's marriages, most people's careers, most people's childhoods, silent and still while the world went on without her.
Claus died on May 25th, 2019, at the age of ninety-two, in London. He had lived, all things considered, extremely well. He had never publicly admitted to anything. He had never stopped being charming. He was, to the end, the kind of man who made people feel they were being done a favor by his presence.
The black bag, as I mentioned, presumably survives them both.
The two Christmases, the warning and the verdict, were never, in any court that would make it stick, attributed to anything other than the accumulated misfortunes of a fragile woman in an unhappy marriage.
Clarendon Court was eventually sold. It is now, I believe, a private residence once more, which means that somewhere on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, in a house with twenty-three rooms and three acres and the ghost of several very bad Christmases, someone is probably having a perfectly lovely time and knows nothing about any of this.
Lucky them.
I have told you the facts, as best as facts can be pried out of this particular story.
What I have not told you, and what I cannot tell you, is what actually happened in that Newport mansion over those two terrible Christmases.
Nobody can.
The only person who was certainly present and certainly knew took all those details with her.
Some stories don't end. They just stop.
And the silence where the ending should be is the loudest thing about them.
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