I Helped Save Claus von Bulow

AP In a Daily Beast exclusive, his former mistress Andrea Reynolds offers her behind-the-scenes account of one of the 20th century’s most sensational trials.

I met Sunny von Bulow more than two decades before I fell in love with her husband, Claus von Bulow. Sunny and Claus were two charming, flamboyant socialites at the very top of American high society. So when Sunny was found unconscious on the floor of the couple’s Newport, Rhode Island mansion in December of 1980—and Claus was accused of attempting to murder her—the trial became one of the 20th century’s most sensational. Claus was ultimately acquitted on appeal, but Sunny never woke up from her deep sleep. Last Saturday, after 28 years in a coma, she finally passed away in a New York nursing home.

I knew Sunny and Claus well. Sunny and I met in the winter of 1959, at the deafeningly expensive Palace Hotel in Saint Moritz, Switzerland. Almost every evening, the hotel’s Restaurant Grill, with its excellent orchestra playing dance music in the background, was the place to be. I was then married to the attractive and very wealthy Pierre Frottier, and had a table reserved every night.

I ingested all the pills Sunny was known to be taking, then had my personal physician perform a blood test on me and send it to the same laboratory Sunny’s blood had been sent to.

As we were enjoying one evening with friends, the table next to ours exploded in shouts and screams. It was littered with Champagne bottles, and its occupants were obviously inebriated. A very handsome, tall, blond man jumped up, grabbed a bottle of Champagne, and smashed it over the head of a spectacularly beautiful blond woman. She fell off her chair, and I saw that there was blood trickling down her forehead. Jumping up, I got the woman to stand and, with difficulty, walked her to the ladies room.

Since I was much smaller than the wounded woman, I made her sit on one of the toilet seats. There, after unfastening the pins holding up a fashionable chignon, I started to remove two or three glass chards that were lodged into her scalp.

"My name is Andrea Frottier, and I hope you don't mind that I mixed up, but I am a compulsive ambulance chaser," I told her.

"My name is Sunny, and I am the wife of the man who hit me over the head."

"What is his name?" I asked.

“Prince Alfie Auersperg," was the answer. (Alfie was Sunny’s first husband, and father to her two older children, Ala and Alexander, who later accused Claus of killing Sunny.)

"You’d better go to bed and put a towel on your pillow,” I said. “But I don't think you need stitches, the bleeding has almost stopped. Let's meet tomorrow, at Alexandre, the hotel's hairdresser, where I have an 11 a.m. appointment. I'll gladly let you have it."