Respect Authority

In what could be called the series finale of the longest running soap opera in American history, Martha “Sunny” Sharp Crawford Auersperg von Bülow died yesterday, after a 28 year long coma. I know. Who the hell is that? This is the question that has shocked me for the last 24 hours when I walked around exclaiming to friends, family members, and strangers on the street “oh my god, Sunny von Bülow died today!”  and no one knew what I was talking about. Not a single person. Her story, as her death, is a tragedy, albeit her life as she knew it has been over for nearly three decades.

Born at the epicenter of Manhattan’s cultural and societal elite, Sunny (the former Martha Sharp Craford) was nicknamed by her parents, after her cheery disposition. She married young, to an Austrian tennis pro, Prince (oh yeah, also a prince) Alfred von Auersperg, had two children, and was divorced in 1965. She remarried the next year to a Danish-German noble named Claus von Bülow, the son of a Nazi collaborator (his grandmother also famously had a passionate love affair with the composer Robert Wagner). Claus and Sunny had a tumultuous marriage, and after 13 years, each spoke publicly about seeking a divorce, especially considering Claus’s public and adulterous affair with soap opera star Alexandra Isles.

After a lengthy argument heard by the couple’s maid the previous night, Sunny was found unconscious on the floor of her bathroom on the cold morning of December 22, 1980 with the window pushed open.

The doctors discovered she had been injected with a nearly lethal amount of insulin, and had fallen into an irreversible coma, although she could still breathe without the aid of life support, making the Terry Shiavo argument utterly moot. She died yesterday in a nursing home in upstate New York, where she had been for the last 28 years.

Claus was famously put on trial, found guilty and then innocent upon appeal (defended by noted OJ Simpson lawyer Alan Dershowitz) which can be seen in the excellent film Reversal of Fortune starring Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons (a role for which he earned an Academy Award). The only connection 98% of the population has to this fine film is in this clip, in which Irons, as Claus, says a line that he later reprised in Disney’s The Lion King as Scar (”You have no idea”). Sunny’s children from her previous marriage sued Claus and settled outside of court under the agreement that he divorce his comatose wife, relinquish his inheritence and leave the country. He followed every letter of the agreement, and moved to London, where he is now an art critic and suspected necrophiliac. No, really, look it up.

Eat that Real Wives of Orange County, this is proof that they don’t make rich crazies like they used to. It calls to mind last year’s film Savage Grace about the true murder of socialite Barbara Baekeland at the hand of her son, whom she was sleeping with. When did the von Bülows and the Baekesland of the world turn into the Hiltons and the Hearsts? YAWN. When did fucking your gay son and putting your wife in a coma to run off with your soap star girlfriend become having a cameo on Gossip Girl or starring in your own reality show on E! ? Future socialites and society swank of America: do not disappoint, you have a reputation to live up to. Step it up a little bit.