Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [287]
FAILING ANYTHING better in the way of celebrity, murders will do, provided the case is sufficiently splashy. I myself published Flora Rheta Schreiber’s book about Joseph Kallinger, the humble shoemaker of Philadelphia who went on a killing spree with one of his own sons. For many years, I received a Christmas card from Kallinger, who was in the state institution for the criminally insane in Pennsylvania, where he was unwisely placed in the shoe-repair shop at first, thus giving him access to the same sharp, curved shoemaker’s knife with which he had carved up a number of people during his heyday as a serial killer, with results that would have been predictable to anybody but a psychiatrist. Still, it wasn’t Kallinger or any of the other murderers whose books I published who brought me the most attention but somebody who, in the end, got off: Claus von Bülow.
To be more exact, it was von Bülow’s then mistress, Andrea Reynolds, a Hungarian beauty with a background that read like the plot of an Ouida novel, who came to the attention of Joni Evans and me. Reynolds (who was eventually to soar to respectability as Lady Plunkett) was then at the height of her notoriety, having fled from life as a wealthy housewife to the defense of von Bülow, whom she scarcely knew, convinced of his innocence. She quickly became the Passionaria of von Bülow’s legal tribulations, as well as his mistress. Since few other people, so far as one could tell, believed that von Bülow was innocent of having attempted to murder his fabulously wealthy wife, this caused something of a sensation. It was no doubt in part Andrea’s sheer determination to prove the rest of the world (not to speak of a Rhode Island jury) wrong that helped get von Bülow through the second trial, in which his conviction was overruled.
The notion that Andrea was going to write a tell-all insider’s account of what really happened in one of the most sensational criminal cases of the 1980s would be enough to attract any publisher, and it was considered a remarkable coup that Joni Evans and I managed to get to her before anybody else—indeed, my involvement was based partly upon the belief that as a Hungarian and the author of Charmed Lives I would be irresistible to Andrea Reynolds, while as an Oxford-educated Englishman von Bülow and I would have much in common. As luck would have it, I had recently been awarded the George Washington medal by the Hungarian-American Society for being the most distinguished Hungarian-American of the year. As a result, I knew plenty of people who were acquainted with Reynolds, most of whom, when asked about her, raised their eyebrows and shrugged expressively. Hungarians have a certain admiration for those of their countrywomen who achieve fame for their beauty or their abilities as seducers of men, which explains the national pride in the careers of the Gabor sisters and their mother, so I was thus not surprised, when Joni and I finally met Andrea Reynolds, to find that she was a vivacious, shrewd, and voluptuous woman, with that peculiarly Hungarian combination of beauty and a razor-sharp tongue that is perhaps only truly appreciated by Hungarian men and explains, perhaps, much of the melancholy with which they approach marriage.
At any rate, Andrea entertained us at lunch with gossip about the trial and convinced us that the book would be full of headline-making news. Snyder, perhaps because he was trying to keep Joni happy, authorized us to buy the book, for which he ended up paying a lot more money than we had anticipated, with a lot of it up front, since Andrea turned out—not very surprisingly, in retrospect—to be a sharp bargainer who recognized two eager marks when she saw them and employed a first-rate power lawyer.
Shortly afterward, Joni and I went to see Andrea and Claus in their Fifth Avenue apartment—or rather Sunny von Bülow’s apartment, for her presence was everywhere, like that of a ghost, though she herself was still in a coma, as she remains to this day, across town in a luxurious hospital room, surrounded by some of her favorite