Another Life (81 page)

Andrea greeted us in a small sitting room, slightly more cheerful than the rest of the apartment and crowded with antique furniture and expensive bric-a-brac and bibelots, like a Madison Avenue antique shop. There was a well-used backgammon board on the coffee table. Claus was a striking figure. Very tall, broad shouldered, once athletic, he was dressed casually in a sweater, tan trousers, and moccasins, and it was easy to see how he had charmed Sunny not so many years ago, when she had still been married to the dashing and notoriously unfaithful Prince Alfie von Auersperg.

Sunny had been something of a throwback (it was hard not to think about her as if she was dead), a tall, beautiful American heiress of enormous wealth, whose ambition, so far as one can tell, was to marry into the European nobility. A hundred years ago, this was common enough, when the daughters of the robber barons of New York and the meat packers of Chicago were shipped across the Atlantic with their mamas and trunks full of clothes to look for the right kind of husband: a duke, or a prince, with the right bloodlines, a castle,
Schloss
, chateau, or palace, and a need for ready cash. By the end of World War Two, however, this was already the stuff of musical comedies rather than real life. Sunny appeared, in this as in so many other ways, to be hopelessly out-of-date. Nevertheless, her ambition was to be part of the aristocratic European fast set and to marry into it, which she did twice, with all-but-fatal results.

Claus himself had belonged to this set only on sufferance. It was said that he had appropriated the
von
to his name, he wasn’t rich, and,
having read law at Oxford, he eventually found himself a job working for the eccentric American oil billionaire John Paul Getty in England, where Getty lived in self-imposed and splendid exile. What Claus actually
did
for Getty is not altogether clear, but it gave him ample scope to play the man-about-town and to move easily in the circle of the international rich, where a good-looking, charming, and well-dressed single man with the right kind of manners was always welcome. In a way, Claus was as much of a throwback as Sunny, with his unapologetic snobbery, his life of ease as the husband of a rich woman, his fin-de-siècle elegance, and his weary sophistication. How many men these days had no profession, no job, and apparently no ambition?

Indeed, Claus did not seem to have accomplished much in his life (though many people no doubt regarded his marrying Sunny as the accomplishment of a lifetime, given her fortune). Even his notoriety was of recent date, acquired only when he was accused, tried, and convicted of trying to murder Sunny. Marriage had enabled him to live like a rich man, and the accusation of attempted murder had made him famous.

His expression was that of a man who was amused by both fame and fortune. He had a good face for a villain (if he
was
one): a supercilious, slightly lopsided smile, a long, slightly crooked nose, a raised eyebrow, sharp little eyes for such a big, strongly featured face. Absent the Prince Valiant hairdo and the funny hat, he reminded me of Olivier’s portrayal of Richard III, at once amused and gratified by the horror he inspires in other people. Claus, it was easy enough to see, hugely enjoyed his notoriety, which, like that of the Marquis de Sade, had an unmistakable whiff of decadence and sexual kinkiness to it. At his trial, his relationship to prostitutes and drug dealers was alluded to, and his former mistress, the beautiful Alexandra Isles, actually testified against him. It was even rumored that von Bülow practiced necrophilia, an accusation that he denied, but without any particular vehemence. I guessed that he would rather be accused of anything than of being middle-class. His strength, in fact, was that he not only was unshockable himself but rather enjoyed shocking people. I suspected that this might have been the reason why the charge of attempted murder was directed against him in the first place: He had made himself seem like just the kind of man who might do it.

We sat down and, while tea was served and Joni and Andrea exchanged gossip, Claus and I conversed about England. His voice was curious—upper-class English, with only the faintest trace of Europe
buried deep in the background and a tendency to laugh loudly at his own jokes. We were very quickly at ease with each other, perhaps because so much of my early life was spent around people who were self-created. Claus seemed to have invented himself as a cynical dandy, cultivating a certain Byronic pose.

Claus was at pains to make it clear that the book was going to be Andrea’s and Andrea’s alone. He would not interfere or influence her; she should tell the story as she saw it. Andrea laughed. “It will be
our
story, darling,” she said firmly—after all, she had sold the book to us on the basis that it would be as close as anyone could ever get to having Claus tell his story—and from the expression on her face it was easy to judge who the dominant partner was in this relationship. Claus lit a cigarette and smiled blandly. Whatever his relationship had been with Sunny, he did not argue with Andrea. He gave the strong impression, in fact, that he never argued with anybody, that he was always in agreement, which perhaps explains why people were puzzled and even angry when that turned out not to have been the case.

Would we like to see the apartment? Andrea asked. Of course, we were unable to resist, so we were taken on a brief tour. Along the way, we met Claus and Sunny’s daughter, who said hello quietly then leapt into another room like a startled deer. It was beyond mere shyness—it was the involuntary flight of a girl who has been exposed to more tragic incursions than she can bear and for whom, perhaps, the idea that Andrea was going to write a book about her father was the last straw. We went through an enormous, old-fashioned kitchen, the kind that required a small army of servants, hardly a place in which a young girl could get a glass of milk and a few cookies for herself, then down a short flight into a plain-looking room full of metal garment racks hung with clothing. In the center of this sat an elderly lady behind a sewing machine, working away. I wondered if the clothes had once belonged to Sunny.

I thought of Sunny herself, dressed carefully every day in an expensive negligée, her hair and nails done, unconscious and kept alive only by machines, and all of a sudden I wondered whether the book was such a good idea after all.

Years later, when I saw Al Pacino play the devil in
The Devil’s Advocate
, I realized to my surprise that the apartment in which he took up residence in New York looked exactly like that of the von Bülows.

•  •  •

W
ORK ON
the book progressed quickly, according to Andrea, even though—against our advice—she had chosen to write it herself, without help. As time went by, we became more familiar with Claus. He had a slightly heavy-handed sense of humor, a kind of leaden German joviality, and his charm, while constantly on display, could wear through to reveal a certain snappish petulance and some impatience when things did not go as he expected them to or when he was bored. Andrea worked hard to keep him amused, but I was reminded of Madame de Maintenon’s weary comment about Louis XIV when she was the mistress of his old age: “Quelle horreur d’avoir à amuser un homme inamusable” (What a terrible thing it is to have to amuse a man who is unamusable).

We took them to Rao’s, where Claus was treated with the grave courtesy owed a man who had beaten a murder rap, for dinner with Irving Lazar, who was eager to meet them—he was furious that he hadn’t signed up Andrea as a client and determined to get Claus to write a book of his own (an idea that Claus tactfully discouraged). During dinner, Andrea and I fell into a discussion about writing and editing (now that she was working on her book, she had taken on the airs of a writer and spoke of her new profession with grave authority), while Claus became increasingly bored, as was often the case when he was not the center of attention, at least of Andrea’s. Eventually, during a pause in our conversation, he interrupted. “Well,” he said, in his low voice, very slowly so that all attention was focused on him, “I’m an expert on comas, not commas.”

There was a moment of silence, then Lazar said, rather loudly, “Jesus Christ, he
did
it!” The same thought must have occurred to everyone around the table at the same time, because after that the dinner broke up rather quickly—there was none of the usual sitting around over coffee and brandy.

Shortly after my belief, such as it was, in Claus’s innocence was shaken, my confidence that we were going to get the book we wanted was also shattered when Andrea delivered her manuscript. We discovered that it was alarmingly reticent on the subject of Claus von Bülow and concentrated mostly on her own childhood, which, however picaresque, was not what we felt we had paid for. A tug-of-war followed in which we demanded more sensational newsbreaks and more about
Claus and his trials, while she dug her heels in, and eventually we turned down the manuscript and never got our money back, yet another example of the dangers of celebrity publishing.

*
Publishers were right to see that the hardcover mystery business was changing—the days when your local stationers rented out mysteries at a dollar a day (not so long ago—my ex-wife was still renting one or two a day even in the mid-sixties) went the way of the dodo—as mass-market paperbacks took the place of rentals, only to be supplanted, eventually, by the rental of videotapes. Things change, of course—the local stationer itself has been replaced by a convenience store owned and run by people who don’t even speak English. Nevertheless, the appetite for mysteries remains.

CHAPTER 33

A
s the eighties drew to a close, publishing was beginning to go through another period of rapid change, as the book suddenly seemed to be the way in which major news was made. Of course, books had always made news, but for the most part indirectly. Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
had made news by drawing the public’s attention to environmental threats, but the material in the book had run in
The New Yorker
first, as had John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
and Hannah Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem
.

In the seventies, however, Woodward and Bernstein’s
All the President’s Men
and
The Final Days
not only made news but
were
news. By the time Woodward wrote
Wired
, his book about the life and death of John Belushi, the “embargo strategy” had been adopted by many publishers, sometimes for books where a premature leak might matter, more often just to give the impression that a book contained newsworthy material when it didn’t. Books were thus not only an extension of journalism but a
subject
for journalistic scrutiny, as were, by extension, the people who published them.

This was something new. Books never brought people news. News was the business of papers or, later, radio and television. Now books, despite the slow, creaky, shade-tree-mechanic nature of producing them, which had not changed much since the invention of movable type, were becoming news carriers, even though it normally took nine months to go from a complete manuscript to a finished book, or perhaps three months if it was done on a “crash” basis, which required putting most of any publisher’s production department to work on a single title.

The “instant” book had been created by paperback publishers to capitalize on a news event, like the many brought out immediately after the Israeli raid on Entebbe, in 1976, but “instant” books were now
making
news, which led, among other things, to a whole new relationship between book publishing and the press that was at once far more competitive
and far more antagonistic. In any event, book publishing, so long as it remained small and relatively unprofitable as businesses go, had never been of much interest to the press to begin with—now that publishing houses had grown into major companies, often allied with even larger ones, as S&S was with Paramount, changes and events in the publishing business became legitimate news.

Until the eighties, most book publishers weren’t big enough to have anything interesting to hide, and any gossip worth printing would have been about the authors, not the people who worked in publishing houses. From the eighties on, publishing houses were growing and acquiring so fast that they nearly always had something to hide, if only from the financial press, while many editors and executives were getting more press than authors. Part of the reason why journalists began to pay more attention to book publishing was that it was neither far away nor a world apart, the way the movie business is; book publishing took place on the Boston/New York/Washington shuttle axis, and most people in book publishing were accessible, rather than walled off from the press by PR people. So long as somebody like Lee Iacocca stayed behind his desk, he was hard to get to, and any interviews would be with company PR men present to ensure that nothing controversial was addressed, but the moment he wrote a book, he was out there in the open, eager to be interviewed by anybody, if he thought the interview would sell books. In short, he was just like any other author, and you could ask him questions you could never have asked him otherwise and get answers, too.

The book, after all, has a totemic significance, and not only to the ancient Hebrews. Even today, when the role of the computer in education is becoming ever more significant, children in the Judeo-Christian scheme of things have it drummed into their heads at an early age that the book is something special, that books in general are worthy of respect, a good thing. People might not
read
them, but they respect them.

Somehow, books have managed to keep something of their sacred aura—misused, ghostwritten, edited until they scarcely bear any relationship to the original manuscript, sometimes so denuded of meaning as to call for a special category called “nonbooks,” shipped out by the truckload as “merch” (a category even lower than nonbooks), used as a political tool by aspirant or retiring politicians (the dreaded “campaign biography” being the lowest form of this category) and as a means of striking back at ex-spouses by celebrities, the book is nevertheless central
to our culture in a way that nothing else—movies, tapes, newspapers, television, or magazines—can or, very likely, ever will be.