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By Root 885 0

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.

• • •

WORK 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