When Claus von Bulow died six years ago, the BBC report about his passing carried the headline: 'Socialite cleared of trying to murder his wife dies aged 92'. Well, 92 is a good innings in terms of longevity, but that isn't the greatest of epitaphs. The term 'socialite' (a common description of von Bulow) seems to me to be freighted with negative implications, and there's no doubt that his trial is what almost everyone, including me, remembers about him.
Only now, though, have I caught up with the film about the von Bulow case, Reversal of Fortune, which dates from 1990. Jeremy Irons won an Oscar for his performance as von Bulow, while Glenn Close played his wife Sunny. Sunny's real name was Martha, and in the light of what happened, the name Sunny seems tragically inapt. She was another socialite, immensely wealthy, but deeply unhappy and apparently fuelled by drink and drugs. The rich are different, for sure, but sometimes not in a good way.
The film is based on shocking events, and it's really a stranger-than-fiction story. Sunny was found at home in a diabetic coma in December 1980. A year earlier, she'd been revived after falling into another coma. At first it seemed like a domestic tragedy, sad but relatively straightforward. However, suspicions were aroused about her husband Claus, who was, to say the least, a strange individual. He was found guilty of attempted murder and hired the lawyer and academic Alan Dershowitz for the (ultimately successful) appeal. The film is based on Dershowitz's book; he is played - very well, I think - by Ron Silver.
I found the way that Dershowitz and his team were portrayed to be slightly comical; they kept announcing to each other great breakthroughs that would surely have been fairly obvious in reality. The process certainly bore no resemblance to the work of any legal team I've ever encountered, but then again, I've never had any involvement with the American criminal justice system - thankfully.
I've always found the story of what happened to Sunny von Bulow to be both sad and extraordinary. She remained in a vegetative state for almost 28 years, which seems unimaginably terrible and that's the main reason I haven't watched the film before now. I've no idea what the precise truth about the incidents that led to her death was, of course. But for all the brilliance of Jeremy Irons' portrayal of the man, I'm glad I never met Claus von Bulow.
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