Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts

by Robert Hofler

  Often it was tit for tat. “I introduced him to Rhode Island’s major players at the trial,” said Tracy Breton, a veteran reporter for the Providence Journal, “and he gave me entrée to Sunny’s world in New York.”

  He was a generous guide and succeeded at being “one of the gang,” according to several reporters. One of them, Dick Lehr, would go on to write such best-selling crime books as Black Mass and Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss. But in 1987 Lehr was a twenty-three-year-old cub reporter, on his first big assignment for the Boston Globe, and he instantly hit it off with the Vanity Fair writer, thirty years his senior.

  “Dominick had the energy of someone just out of college on their first big job. It was contagious,” said Lehr.

  “Isn’t this a blast?!” Dominick kept telling the young reporter. “Isn’t this fun?!”

  After a typical day in court, Dominick would invite Lehr and other journalists to hang out in his room at the Biltmore Plaza Hotel to brainstorm and run up his room-service tab courtesy of Vanity Fair. “Where’s this trial going?” Dominick asked. “Are they going to get him? I have too much information. What am I going to use?”

  Even though Dominick tried out his observations and theories on other reporters, he never turned stingy when it came to sharing his extensive knowledge of the Chippendale and chintz at Clarendon Court or the names of the designers who made the long capes that von Bülow’s daughter, Cosima, wore to court.

  He also entertained with stories about Liz and Dick fighting on the set of Ash Wednesday. Or how Peter Lawford used to play pimp for his brother-in-law and how the women complained that the president refused to be touched after sex. Dominick also did not hold back when people asked him to describe his famous sister-in-law. “Here’s all you have to know about Joan,” he would say and then tell the story of her tying up a phone line at his ex-wife’s house in the days leading up to Dominique’s death. “There was serious fallout because of that phone call,” said Joyce Wadler.

  Only rarely did Dominick indulge in social one-upmanship. He told reporters that Sunny’s two children by Prince Alfred von Auersperg were old friends; in fact, he had only recently been introduced to Prince Alexander and Princess Annie-Laurie through his friend Freddy Eberstadt. “Dominick boasted about knowing them, Ala and Alexander, and he liked them. I didn’t like them because they framed Claus,” said Andrea Reynolds.

  Unlike von Bülow’s girlfriend, the prince and princess came late to taking an active interest in the second trial. “Sunny’s family held back until they felt the trial was going badly,” said Jonathan Friendly, a reporter for the New York Times.

  They knew they also “had to fight a public relations war,” said Barbara Nevins Taylor.

  “It was much more controlled with the von Auersperg children,” Dick Lehr said of their press conferences.

  Claus von Bülow and Andrea Reynolds, on the other hand, held nightly dinners with the reporters. The defense also had another, greater advantage in the second trial. In preliminary hearings, they disposed of the prosecution’s smoking gun: the black bag containing the syringes with which von Bülow allegedly injected Sunny.

  Then there was the prosecution. The second time around, they failed to present a strong case. Dominick, using one of his rare sports analogies, saw it like “a football game between the New York Jets and Providence High.” At one point, the judge even lectured the prosecutors “to prove their case or get out,” said Jonathan Friendly. “Then I remember being contacted by Sunny’s son, who told me, ‘We have pictures. Mom was not a heavy drinker. She was in good health.’” The two von Auersperg children also gave Friendly a private tour of Clarendon Court.

  Most reporters visited the attempted-murder scene. “The jury was taken to the house. We all went to the house,” said Nevins Taylor. “One room was larger than the next, and the jurors were tittering and trying to get serious. It was a murder scene, yet Sunny’s two children were in the house, living there. The whole thing was so strange.”

  What other reporters described in routine fashion, Dominick knew to animate, to punctuate with drama, and coming from Hollywood he possessed a natural flair for self-promotion. He fashioned his copy so that it always gave the appearance, if not the substance, of delivering something unique. He did not present his Vanity Fair readers with a general tour of Clarendon Court like the other reporters. He talked the two von Auersperg children into letting him “spend the night” at their Newport residence. Before bedtime on that overnight stay, he and the kids visited the neighbors. Dominick wrote, “We dined across Bellevue Avenue at the home of the Countess Elizabeth de Ramel, an American friend of Ala’s titled by a former marriage, whose Newport antecedents, the Prince and Wood-Prince families, dated back for generations.” When it came to name-dropping, Dominick took it to an Olympic level, and no other reporter could compete.

  He also wrote about staying on the same floor of the Biltmore Plaza Hotel as von Bülow, as if he had special access. In fact, almost every out-of-town reporter stayed at that hotel, many of them on Dominick and von Bülow’s floor. Only Dominick let his readers know his close day-to-day proximity to a possible murderer.

  “That comes from the movies, how you create your story,” said Nevins Taylor. “Dominick understood that color was important to the story.”

  Most significant, he knew to look beyond the witness stand for drama. Cosima von Bülow, Sunny’s only child by Claus, took her father’s side in the controversy. She never gave Dominick an interview, which did not stop him from lavishing copy on her. “She would show up at the courthouse sweeping down in this large cape and going to lunch with her father,” Charles Feldman recalled. “It added to the theatricality of the trial. Dominick understood that: the theater happens outside the courtroom.”

  On the subject of Cosima, Dominick reported that von Bülow and Reynolds dined around town with her, even threw a huge birthday party populated with no one her age, because “as long as they take Cosima with them when they go out, her trust pays the bill,” according to “an informed source.” No other reporter bothered with such delicious gossip.

  And no other reporter knew how to tell tales better than Dominick, especially when it counted most—over dinner with von Bülow and Reynolds. Those evening get-togethers with reporters took place at various restaurants around town. “There was nothing else to do in Providence,” said Nevins Taylor. “Also, it was unbelievable access.”

  Since von Bülow had been criticized for being aloof and icy during the first trial, he tried a different tack the second time around. Not only was he accessible to the reporters, but he tried to charm them, which was not easy considering his naturally aloof and icy personality. Dominick saw through the performance. He knew rich people. He knew what they thought of reporters; at best, they considered them inferiors and, at worst, contemptible parasites. Dominick never believed von Bülow’s attempts to joke with journalists. Like putting a napkin over his head to imitate Queen Victoria. Or telling stories about Winston Churchill. Or giving advice on oil stocks. Or dipping “a friendly spoon into a reporter’s parfait,” according to Alex S. Jones of the New York Times.

  “Dominick enjoyed it; particularly he enjoyed Andrea,” said Nevins Taylor. At least he gave the impression of enjoying it.

  Where other reporters were intimidated, Dominick carried on relaxed, jovial conversations with the infamous couple. “I was just this kid from Connecticut,” Dick Lehr recalled. “I didn’t know what to say, but Dominick! Dominick had the social skills to just be in the conversation with Claus and Andrea, and he knew all these aristocratic people they talked about, whom I’d never heard of.”

  Lehr recoiled at the whole idea of having dinner with an accused murderer. It seemed very “People magazine” to him. “What am I doing here as a journalist?” he fretted.

  Dominick never asked himself such a question. He knew instinctively what he was doing there.

  One night at dinner with the reporters, von Bülow
told a joke about his wife, Sunny, being in a coma. “Are you kidding me?” thought Lehr. That night he went to bed and had the worst nightmare of his life. “I attributed it to eating dinner with evil,” he recalled.

  According to Lehr and others, Dominick harbored similar feelings about von Bülow—“that he was evil incarnate,” said Joyce Wadler.

  But Dominick’s acting days at Williams College served him well. “He was completely convinced of Claus’s guilt,” said Lehr. “This guy is on trial for murder, and they’re acting like it was a night out on the town. Dominick felt genuinely disgusted, but he didn’t let it show during dinner. He was working. He was a sponge. He was very smooth.”

  During trial recesses, Dominick and Lehr often ran into von Bülow and his entourage in the hallways of the courthouse or the hotel. “I didn’t know what to say,” said Lehr. “Dominick always knew how to banter.”

  On one such occasion, von Bülow introduced Dominick to Andrea Reynolds. “Mr. Dunne is not a friend,” added the defendant.

  “I’m being friendly now,” said Dominick.

  Dominick did not need to be introduced to Reynolds, the woman who had essentially masterminded the defense for von Bülow’s second trial by contacting attorney Alan Dershowitz. (Dershowitz denied the Reynolds connection, saying retired Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas recommended him to von Bülow.) It was definitely her idea to hold the nightly dinner parties with reporters. “I was aware of everything at that trial,” said Reynolds. “Most people didn’t like Claus. Maybe it was a bit of jealousy; he was very classy.”

  Reynolds played her role of the rehabilitator to the hilt and beyond. “Two-thirds of her ideas were bad,” said Dershowitz. “One-third were good.” He put the nightly dinners with reporters in the former category, saying their impact was “probably negative.”

  Dominick, in fact, met Andrea Reynolds years before the trial, in 1965, at the Corviglia Club in St. Moritz, where Henry Ford and his second wife, Christina, were celebrating their honeymoon. Reynolds, however, did not remember him from some alpine resort in Switzerland. She remembered Dominick from dinner parties given by her friend Alice Mason, a Manhattan socialite turned uber-realtor. Mason liked Dominick enough to invite him occasionally, but Andrea was a better friend. Or, at least, she proved more protective of Reynolds than she was loyal to Dominick.

  “Alice was afraid for me; she thought Dominick would do something horrible,” said Reynolds. Mason had warned her friend not to give an interview to Dominick. It was advice Reynolds refused to heed and soon regretted.

  Dominick’s gift as a journalist did not end with his flair for gossip and color. He also knew as an interviewer how to fill the news void when nothing happened. He knew how to create a scenario that would produce anecdotes, especially when speaking to women.

  “It was obvious to me that Dominick was gay,” said Joyce Wadler. If he was not physically attracted to the opposite sex, he did know how to talk to them about decor, art, fashion, hair, and makeup.

  “He used those skills and those passions to make himself appealing to Andrea Reynolds in a way that other reporters could not,” said Barbara Nevins Taylor. He even used that special charm on female reporters. Nevins Taylor recalled his coming to her office at WCBS in New York City. He took one look at her coat on a hanger and immediately pointed to the Christian Dior label. “That’s my friend!” he exclaimed. They soon became good friends.

  With Andrea Reynolds, Dominick exploited that gay-friend syndrome to the max. Nevins Taylor recalled the excited conversation she and Dominick had after he interviewed von Bülow and Reynolds for Vanity Fair. The interview took place at the Fifth Avenue apartment owned by Sunny von Bülow that Claus and Andrea used as their residence. Dominick had been assigned by the magazine not only to cover the trial but to profile the notorious couple. That interview would turn into a spectacular cover story when photographer Helmut Newton convinced the couple to pose in matching black leather jackets. Dominick knew the photographer’s sinister stylistic flourish would position his article squarely in the public’s solar plexus.

  After gossiping with Nevins Taylor, Dominick phoned his friend Marie Brenner to tell her all about the photo shoot, too. “You’re not going to believe this!” he began. “We have gotten Claus to pose in a black leather jacket!”

  Alan Dershowitz considered the cover story Reynold’s worst idea. “We were just thrilled that the jurors didn’t read Vanity Fair,” he said.

  Equally important to the cover story’s success was Dominick’s intimate tête-à-tête with Reynolds in Sunny’s bedroom. He asked Claus’s mistress if it was true she wore the comatose woman’s jewelry.

  “I have better jewels than Sunny,” Reynolds shot back and then proceeded to show Dominick just how fabulous those jewels were.

  “What he didn’t write in Vanity Fair is that Andrea dumped her jewelry onto the bed,” said Nevins Taylor. “They went through all the jewels together. It was delightful to him. He loved it, and he described it with such delight to me.” Nevins Taylor found herself “half-appalled and amazed and astonished, and I admired him, to play both sides like that, with Andrea and her jewels. His description of Andrea and touching the jewels, it was like two girlfriends. On the one hand, he wanted to be part of this other world.”

  But Dominick knew he was not. He did not get sucked into their world completely. According to his friend James Duff, Dominick possessed what Thomas Mann called erotic irony—“To love something and make fun of it at the same time,” said the writer-producer.

  “When he was invited inside, he played. He loved the glamour and all the pretty tags,” said Nevins Taylor.

  “Dominick loved the jewels,” Reynolds agreed. “He touched them. He did not wear them.”

  He came off as a fearless reporter who had no problem asking even the toughest question. The reality was somewhat different. Dominick spent hours obsessing about his interview with the couple. He did not know the right way to approach Reynolds about one story: had she shot her first husband? And how would he phrase his question to von Bülow: “Are you a necrophiliac?”

  “He was very straightforward,” Reynolds said of Dominick’s interview technique. She also was blunt, telling him there was a “rumor” that she had shot her second husband, not her first.

  Dominick proved equally direct when it came to asking von Bülow if he had sex with corpses. Von Bülow took it well. Dominick wrote of their exchange: “The necrophilia story, he says, was pinned on him in 1949, as a joke, on Capri, by Fiat owner Gianni Angelli and Prince Dado Ruspoli.” Von Bülow added, “Like dirt, it stuck.”

  Dominick wanted more on the subject. “He was agonizing how he was going to work in the necrophilia,” said Nevins Taylor. “He was convinced about the necrophilia story. He had heard that there was a funeral home on the far West Side of Manhattan where they kept bodies, and there were these parties that von Bülow attended. He was trying to get me to do a story. I tried to search it out. I could never prove it.”

  Other reporters on the trial got the impression that Dominick and Reynolds knew each other and were, if not close friends, good acquaintances. It was not the case.

  “I was a bit scared being interviewed by Dominick. I like being scared,” said Reynolds, who later remarried, and as Andrea Reynolds Plunket now runs a bed-and-breakfast in the Catskills. She never liked being made to look like “S&M people” in Vanity Fair and regretted falling for Dominick’s charm.

  “He was manipulative,” said Charles Feldman. “Reporters and writers, to a large degree, are con artists. You have to convince whomever you’re talking to that they’re the most interesting thing in the world. You care more about their story than anybody else’s. And you’re their best buddy and you won’t screw them over. And often you do all those things.”

  According to Feldman, Dominick carried a far more demanding burden than most reporters covering the trial. “If you’re Tina Brown you want something that is unique,” he explained. “That’s a lo
t of pressure, to fashion something covered by so many people and come up with something that nobody else had. Dominick didn’t have the rep that he had years later. This was a huge break. He was either going to succeed or fail miserably.”

  When the seven-week trial finally ended, the reporters had little to do while the jury deliberated. The New York Times’ Jonathan Friendly had been more circumspect about his thoughts on the verdict than most journalists, especially Dominick, who made his choice of guilty known from the first day.

  “The normal conceit in reporting is you don’t take one side or another. You’re skeptical about everything. Until the very end,” said Friendly. He did not hang out with Dominick and the reporters for the simple fact that he did not stay at the Biltmore. The New York Times rented him a house for the duration of the trial. Only after the attorneys’ final summations did Friendly join the press corps for a group dinner, one not hosted by Andrea and Claus. Friendly told his colleagues, “OK, here’s my hat. Here are slips of paper. Guilty or not guilty?” They all agreed not to tell the results of the tally. Every reporter but one voted “guilty.” The other reporter voted “not proven.”

  Three days later, after only eight hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted Claus von Bülow of twice trying to kill his wife with insulin injections. Von Bülow lowered his head and put his hands together. Behind him in the courtroom, Andrea Reynolds wept. The two von Auersperg children were at Clarendon Court when they heard the verdict and quickly made the trip from Newport to Providence to answer reporters’ questions. The princess said, “We know and he knows that he tried to murder our mother.”

  Von Bülow called his stepchildren “misguided.” But, he added, “I have no feeling of vindictiveness.”