Martha (Sunny) von Bülow, heiress, socialite, and philanthropist, 76

[Deathwatch Central]

December 7, 2008
Sunny von Bülow, 76, Focus of Society Drama, Dies
By ENID NEMY

Martha (Sunny) von Bülow, the American heiress who was first married to
an Austrian playboy prince and then to a Danish-born man-about-society
who was twice tried on charges of attempting to murder her, died
Saturday at a nursing home in Manhattan. Mrs. von Bülow, who was 76,
had been in a coma for nearly 28 years.

Maureen Connelly, a spokeswoman for the family, confirmed the death.
Mrs. von Bülow’s three children said in a statement that they “were
blessed to have an extraordinary loving and caring mother.” The cause,
as listed in the death certificate, was cardiopulmonary arrest, Ms.
Connelly said.

Mrs. von Bülow’s death came 27 years, 11 months and 15 days after she
was found unconscious on the floor of her bathroom in her mansion in
Newport, R.I., on Dec. 21, 1980.

In her long, silent years at the Milstein Building at
NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital, and then at a nursing home on
the Upper East Side, doctors said Mrs. von Bülow never showed any signs
of brain activity; she was fed through a tube in her stomach. Yet there
were always fresh flowers in her room, and photographs of her children
and grandchildren sat on a bedside table. She was attended by private
nurses, and her room, for some time, was guarded by private security
personnel.

She is survived by her daughters, Annie-Laurie von Auersperg Kneissl
Isham and Cosima Pavoncelli; her son, Alexander von Auersperg; and nine
grandchildren.

Her second husband, Claus von Bülow, was convicted and later acquitted
of twice trying to kill her with injections of insulin so as to
aggravate her hypoglycemia, a low blood sugar condition.

His trials were among the most sensational of the 1980s. News media
from around the world were drawn to the drama of the beautiful heiress
who lay in a twilight zone, the debonair husband accused of attempted
murder and two royal children pitted against their younger half sister,
with the glittering social milieus of Newport and New York providing
the backdrop.

Hollywood, too, could not resist. The trials became the subject of the
1990 movie “Reversal of Fortune” with Glenn Close as Mrs. von Bülow and
Jeremy Irons as Mr. von Bülow.

The prosecutions were the result of an investigation initiated by
Alexander von Auersperg and his sister Annie-Laurie von Auersperg
Kneissl, known as Ala, the children from Mrs. von Bülow’s marriage to
Prince Alfred von Auersperg. The accusations pitted the von Auerspergs
against their stepfather and their half sister, Cosima von Bülow, and
divided the loyalty of friends in Newport and New York.

In his first trial, in Newport in 1982, Mr. von Bülow was found guilty
of twice trying to kill his wife and was sentenced to 30 years in
prison. He appealed and posted a $1 million bond believed to have been
put up by his friend J. Paul Getty Jr., the oil tycoon.

The appeal was guided by Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor,
and the conviction was overturned on the grounds that certain
information had not been made available to the defense and that there
had been no search warrant when pills were sent for testing.

Mr. von Bülow was acquitted in 1985 after a second trial in Providence,
R.I., where his chief defense counsel was Thomas P. Puccio.

A $56 million civil suit filed against Mr. von Bülow by his
stepchildren was settled in 1987 with the stipulation that Mr. von
Bülow agree to a divorce and not discuss the case publicly. The couple
were divorced in 1988. Mr. von Bülow lives in London.

A principal prosecution witness at the trials, Maria Schrallhammer,
Mrs. von Bülow’s longtime maid, testified that shortly before Christmas
1979, she became worried when Mr. von Bülow refused to call a doctor as
his wife, moaning behind a locked door, sank into a coma. Mr. von Bülow
said that he thought his wife was sleeping.

Mrs. von Bülow eventually recovered at Newport Hospital, where tests
indicated a high level of insulin. A few months later, the maid said,
she found in Mr. von Bülow’s closet a small black bag containing
syringes, yellow paste and white powder. She said she had passed these
on to Ala von Auersperg, who had the family physician analyze the
contents. They were determined to be Seconal and a paste form of
Valium. Ms. Schrallhammer said that she kept an eye on the bag and that
some months later found insulin in it.

On Dec. 21, 1980, Mrs. von Bülow was again found unconscious and taken
to Newport Hospital. Shortly afterward, an investigator working on
behalf of the two older children searched the house and found a black
bag said to contain three hypodermic needles, one with traces of a
sedative and insulin.

Mrs. von Bülow, who had inherited $75 million, was depicted by the
defense as a reticent woman who drowned her insecurities in alcohol and
was familiar with drugs. The von Auersperg children, backed by Ms.
Schrallhammer, claimed that Mrs. von Bülow needed as little as two
drinks to appear that she had had too much.

The prosecution put Alexandra Isles, a socialite and former actress who
had been Mr. von Bülow’s mistress, on the stand to admit that she had
given Mr. von Bülow an ultimatum about dissolving his marriage. It was
noted, too, that a divorce would have voided the $14 million that Mr.
von Bülow would have inherited under his wife’s will and left him with
an annual income of $120,000 from a trust.

Mr. von Bülow acknowledged that he and his wife had discussed divorce,
but he denied that the issue was another woman. He initiated the talks,
he said, because he wished to return to work and his wife did not
agree. He had been working intermittingly as a broker.

Mrs. von Bülow, the former Martha Sharp Crawford, was born in Manassas,
Va., on Sept. 1, 1932, the only child of Annie-Laurie and George W.
Crawford, a former chairman of Columbia Gas and Electric Company of
Pittsburgh, who died in 1935. Mrs. Crawford, the daughter of Robert
Warmack, founder of the International Shoe Company, was remarried in
1957 to Russell Aitken, a sculptor. She died in 1984, leaving an estate
estimated at $100 million.

Her daughter was originally nicknamed Choo-Choo because she was born in
her father’s railway car, and later called Sunny because of her
disposition. She attended the Chapin School in Manhattan and St.
Timothy’s School in Maryland, and she had an elaborate debut in 1949.
She was 24 when she married Prince Alfred von Auersperg, a 20-year-old
tennis pro at the exclusive Schloss Mittersell in Austria.

The couple settled in Munich and later in Kitzbühel, Austria. Ala von
Auersperg was born in 1958 and Alexander the following year. The
marriage ended in divorce in 1965. The princess had few interests in
common with her husband, did not share his ardor for big-game hunting
in Africa and disliked his flirting. She also missed the United States.
The prince received $1 million and two houses in a settlement.

(In a twist of fate, Prince von Auersperg went into an irreversible
coma in 1983 after an automobile accident in Austria. He died in 1992.)


The year after her divorce, the princess married Claus von Bülow, whom
she had met years earlier in London. He was originally neither a von
nor a Bülow. His mother was divorced from his father, Svend Borberg, a
playwright and drama critic who was convicted of collaborating with the
Nazis by a Danish court after the war. He was sentenced to four years
in prison, released after 18 months and died shortly after.

Claus grew up with his mother and maternal grandfather, Frits Bülow, a
former minister of justice in Denmark and a successful businessman.
Claus adopted the Bülow name and added “von” as a young adult. At the
time of his marriage, Mr. von Bülow was a senior aide to Mr. Getty.

The couple settled in an imposing Fifth Avenue apartment facing Central
Park. A short time later, following the lead of her mother, Mrs. von
Bülow acquired a Newport estate, Clarendon Court, a 23-room Georgian
mansion on 10 acres overlooking the sea. Mrs. von Bülow had the huge
lawn lowered 17 feet to improve the view of the ocean.

The house had been the setting for the 1956 musical “High Society,”
starring Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. The property was
sold in 1988 for $4.2 million; the same year, an auction of von Bülow
furniture, paintings, porcelains and silver brought more than $11.5
million.

A daughter, Cosima, was born in 1967, and the three siblings apparently
got along well until their mother’s comas aroused the suspicions of the
von Auersperg children. Miss von Bülow supported her father during his
trials and as a result was cut out of her maternal grandmother’s will.
When Mrs. Aitken died in 1984, Miss von Bülow filed suit claiming that
family members had turned her grandmother against her. In a 1987
settlement, Mr. von Bülow renounced all his claims to his wife’s
fortune in return for his daughter’s receiving a share of Mrs. Aitken’s
estate, equal to those of her half sister and half brother.

Ms. Connelly, the family spokeswoman, said the three siblings, after a
long period of estrangement, are “reconciling and moving forward
together as a family, because that is what their mother would have
wanted.”

After the trials, the von Auerspergs founded the Sunny von Bülow
National Victim Advocacy Center, with headquarters in Fort Worth, Tex.,
and the Sunny von Bülow Coma and Head Trauma Research Foundation in New
York. The author Dominick Dunne wrote about the case and had known Mrs.
von Bulow since she was a debutante. He said on Saturday that she had
been portrayed unfairly in the film as an emotionally frail alcoholic.
He said she was a “beautiful and shy” woman who “really did not like
the social life, although she was totally associated with the social
life.”

Ray Rivera contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 13, 2008
An obituary last Sunday about Martha (Sunny) von Bülow, the American
heiress at the center of two sensational trials in which her second
husband, Claus von Bülow, was charged with trying to murder her,
misstated the relationship of her daughter Cosima von Bülow Pavoncelli
to two children by Mrs. von Bülow’s first marriage, Alexander von
Auersperg and Annie-Laurie von Auersperg Kneissl Isham. As noted
elsewhere in the obituary, Ms. Pavoncelli is their half sister, not
their stepsister.

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary