Dapper socialite acquitted of trying to kill wife in ’80s
Claus von Bulow, the debonair Danish-born socialite whose conviction and then acquittal for attempting to kill his millionaire wife riveted the nation in the 1980s during two sensational courtroom dramas, died Saturday at his home in London. He was 92.
His son-in-law Riccardo Pavoncelli confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.
The televised trials, with their allusions to money, power and infidelity in high places, swung open a not entirely welcome window to the exclusive world of Newport, Rhode Island, where the von Bulows lived in palatial splendor among the resort town’s wealthy residents.
Centrally visible in the daily courthouse scene was the tall, meticulously tailored von Bulow — accused of plotting the death of his wife, Sunny, in their seaside mansion bedroom in order to inherit her millions and marry his mistress, a soap opera actress waiting in the wings.
Von Bulow, known for his trenchant quips to journalists and others, became a fascinating figure on the evening news and near gavel-to-gavel cable TV coverage of the trials.
Once asked by a reporter in Newport how tall he was, von Bulow answered, smiling, “Six-foot-three — plus my halo.”
In the first trial, in 1982, he was convicted of two counts of trying to trigger his wife’s death by injecting her with insulin, leaving her twice in a coma. The first coma was brief; the second, almost a year later, became permanent.
His conviction was reversed on appeal, and von Bulow was acquitted in a second trial in 1985. A jury in Providence, Rhode Island, spurned the insulininjection theory in the face of new defense assertions that Sunny’s comas were self-induced by overindulgence in alcohol, prescription drugs and sugarladen foods. She suffered severe hypoglycemia, a condition that can cause low blood sugar after ingesting sugary foods.
Sunny — her name was Martha Sharp Crawford von Bulow — died in 2008 at 76 in a private nursing home in New York after lying in a largely vegetative state for more than 28 years.
The legal saga — involving a suspicious housemaid and a mysterious black bag containing drug paraphernalia — spawned TV specials and books, including a 1986 bestseller by Harvard University Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who represented von Bulow during the successful appeal.
A 1990 film version of the book, “Reversal of Fortune,” starred Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close as the von Bulows and earned Irons an Academy Award for best actor.
Von Bulow later complained that Irons unfairly portrayed him as cold and aloof. “Now I am stuck with that reputation, no matter what,” he told The Daily Telegraph, a London-based newspaper, in 2010.
In the years after his acquittal, von Bulow enjoyed something of a rise in the social scene in New York and later in London. Casting aside his customary double-breasted suits, he posed in a mod black leather jacket for fashion photographer Helmut Newton in Vanity Fair magazine in 1985.
In London, he hosted small dinners for artists, historians and assorted intellectuals and was voted 46th “most invited” party guest in London by Tatler magazine in 2001.
Von Bulow was born Claus Cecil Borberg on Aug. 11, 1926, in Copenhagen, son of Svend and Jonna Borberg. His father was a playwright and drama critic, his mother the daughter of Frits Bulow, a financier and descendant of a German-Danish noble family. His parents divorced when he was 4.