While Sunny von Bulow, whose obituary appeared in the New York Times yesterday, is finally laid to rest, the circumstances surrounding her infamous case will not be. Her sad story will fascinate us for many years to come. Back in 1990, I was asked by Heather Cohane at Quest magazine to write a piece about her life at the very moment the film Reversal of Fortune was opening in New York. I was of two minds. How could I do justice to a story that had already dominated the media for several years, had spawned dozens of magazine covers, TV specials, and the book about the trial by lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz which had inspired the new movie? What more could I add to what had already been said in the book of essays entitled Fatal Charms by Dominick Dunne?

And could I really contradict Alan M. Dershowitz, one of the most brilliant and cunning lawyers of the era? The more I delved into the case, the more convinced I was that the film — even though brilliantly executed — was doing Sunny von Bulow an injustice. Glenn Close’s portrayal of her as a shrewish pill-popping society zombie was light years off from the image I had gleaned from family and friends. I had no desire to retry Claus von Bulow. He had been acquitted. But I did have a yearning to see justice done to Martha Crawford Von Bulow, aka “Sunny” who was lying in a hospital in a coma, unable to get up and restore her reputation.

Below is an excerpt from the article. The bulk of the piece centered around the film and its reception. I’ve left all that out here because it seems terribly dated. What I think is still interesting and relevant is the character of Sunny von Bulow. Whether or not an attempt on her life was made, the truth remains that her character was assassinated for the rest of her life. Requiescat in pace.

Defending the Defenseless (excerpt, Quest December 1990)

Thanks to an unprecedented amount of publicity in magazines, newspapers and on television, Sunny von Bulow has become one of the most famous women in the world, a fact that is cruelly ironic considering how much she loathed publicity. Even as a young woman who danced at El Morocco and the Stork Club, and hosted private dinner parties at 21, Sunny Crawford went to great pains to keep her name out of Cholly Knickerbocker’s gossip column. “Sunny didn’t go in for any kind of public acclaim,” says the writer Frederick Eberstadt, who first knew her in her debutante days. “She was not a pop celebrity, and the last thing she would want to be is one. One of the ironies of this whole thing is that her name has become a household word. I don’t think she would have liked that at all.” Isabel Glover, another old friend, shares that opinion. “This gentle person who you could hardly imagine swatting a fly is suddenly in this blaze of publicity. Even if they made her out to be the most sophisticated and glamorous person in the world, she would still hate it.”

Today Sunny von Bulow is remembered not just as the heir to a $75 million fortune whose life was destroyed by tragedy, but as a symbol for other victims of traumatic injury. Two foundations have been set up in her memory by her children, Ala von Auersperg Isham and Alexander von Auersperg, the National Victims’ Center, established in 1985 to secure rights and fair treatment for victims of violent crime, and the Sunny von Bulow Coma and Head Trauma Research Foundation, dedicated to increasingly public awareness of these debilitating disorders.

Now a film directed by Barbet Schroeder, based on the circumstances leading up to Claus von Bulow’s second trial, has been released by Warner Brothers, starring Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bulow and Glenn Close as Sunny. Ron Silver portrays the defense attorney, Alan M. Dershowitz. The skillfully made movie, entitled Reversal of Fortune, after the book of the same name by Mr. Dershowitz, has won accolades from the critics, and is destined to be talked about and remembered for years to come. No doubt Jeremy Irons will be nominated for an Oscar for his canny portrayal of the debonair, yet creepy, Claus.

Whether Glenn Close will be similarly honored remains to be seen. For the moment, one thing is certain: her portrayal of Sunny von Bulow as a melancholy, drunken, drug-crazed termagant has appalled and outraged those who knew Sunny well, and deeply offended her family. As Princess Honeychile Hohenlohe, one of Sunny’s best friends, puts it, “I don’t understand how a motion picture company can put out a movie that ruins a woman’s reputation, making her out to be a drug addict, while she’s lying in a coma unable to defend herself. I thought in America you couldn’t do things like that.” Sunny’s old beau Georgie Vassiltchikov, concurs. “When you read the stories on which the film is no doubt based,” he says, “I am not surprised. Sunny is totally defenseless. She would certainly be shocked to hear what is being said about her. She was very much a lady of the old school.”

Unlike her counterpart, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close has been unavailable for interviews regarding her role in the film, and apparently made no effort to contact Sunny’s children to arrive at an understanding of the woman’s character. “Perhaps she is ashamed,” says Ruth Dunbar Cushing, one of Sunny’s oldest friends, who has been tempted to write the actress a letter, asking, “Do you know what you’ve done? “To have this done to Sunny is like a rape,” Cushing adds. “She doesn’t deserve it.”

Martha “Sunny” Crawford was born in 1931 in a Pullman railway car passing through Virginia, thereby earning the childhood nickname “Choo Choo.” Her mother, Annie Laurie Warmack, the daughter of a successful shoe manufacturer, had married George Crawford, a very wealthy utilities magnate from Pittsburgh. At the time of Sunny’s birth, he was seventy-one years old. Four years later, he died, leaving her to be brought up by her mother, Mrs. Crawford, and her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Warmack. The latter was like a character out of an Edith Wharton novel, a forceful, overbearing woman who kept a close watch on every move her granddaughter made. “Mrs. Warmack was a real monster, a virago,” says Frederick Eberstadt. “She was absolutely authoritarian. Sunny grew up in this matriarchal ivory tower. Mrs. Warmack wanted Sunny to be a princess with a court.” Sunny’s mother (who remarried, becoming Mrs. Russell Aitken) also kept a close eye on her daughter’s movements. “She had one of those American front porch faces,” says man-about-town Diego del Vayo. “She was always watching everything. They treated Sunny like a doll. She was always well turned out. Perhaps too well turned out for a girl that young.”

The three women lived together at Mrs. Warmack’s large apartment at 990 Fifth Avenue and at Mrs. Crawford’s estate “Tamerlane” in Greenwich, Connecticut. They would travel constantly making it difficult for Sunny to form lasting attachments, and contributing to her shyness and fear of people. But Sunny did have some very close friends. As a child, Ruth Dunbar Cushing lived a few floors below her on Fifth Avenue. “I’ve known Sunny since I ws three years old,” she says. “Sunny was always a lot of fun. We did the usual things kids do. We played in the park, and visited each other’s homes. I remember one time she got reprimanded for dancing on the dining room table.”

After attending Chapin in the city, Sunny went to boarding school at St. Timothy’s in Maryland. “She was a very simple person,” her roommate and lifelong friend Isabel Glover recalls. “She lived in a luxurious way but that was just part of her — the trappings of having all that enormous wealth never seemed peculiar to her. She was very unusual, and it is hard to describe her. She was not a typical anything, from the way she looked to the way she was. I have read so much about Sunny written by people who knew her only slightly, and most of it is inaccurate. One of the first things you noticed about her, after the initial impact made by her looks, was that she was so ladylike, so refined. She had a very sophisticated mind and read voluminously, more than anyone I can think of. She loved Victorian authors and often read right through all the works of a particular author.”

But for reasons that were never clear, Sunny decided against going to college. Instead she returned to her luxurious home on Fifth Avenue and planned to get married. She had a succession of beaux. One was John Bradley, who squired her around New York, and to this day insists on calling her Sunny Crawford. “The name von Bulow is a misnomer,” he says. “I was stunned by Sunny. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever met — regal, full of grace, with an ineffable quality, a sort of radiance, that disarmed everyone who came into contact with her. She loved staying up late and dancing, and she had a slightly risque sense of humor.” (According to a Newport acquaintance, Alan Pryce-Jones, Sunny once asked a guest if he was the secret lover of Leontyne Price. The comment, Pryce-Jones adds, “cleared the room.”) John Bradley also remembers the effect of Sunny’s golden hair, which made her look as if she were wearing a tiara. “She was the first woman I ever knew to streak her hair,” he says. “She did it because she was more mature than her contemporaries and wanted to look older. There was more to her than people give her credit for.”

The great love of Sunny’s early years was Georgie Vassiltchikov, a White Russian nobleman who now works with De Beers in London. “It is very exceptional that I ever allow myself to be interviewed by the press,” he says. “But it is just that I am so sickened by what they have made Sunny into being. I met her when she was  very young. She was a delightful person — a lady from the tips of her fingers when that idea was already on the way out. Physically she was one of the loveliest girls I have ever seen. Very shy, terribly nice and unpretentious. She came from a wealthy background but she was by no means a spoiled babe. A lot of articles say she was easily influenced and was melancholy, but not at all. She was strong and very determined, and managed to function in that difficult world between the old-fashioned American family and a rather go-go European lifestyle. There was never any sign of a morbid attitude. She was a very jolly person. ” Gelnn Close, he says, has been totally miscast. “She plays her as a rich, blonde, icy bitch. But Sunny was not blonde. She was not icy. And she was not a bitch.” Frederick Eberstadt recalls that “Sunny was crazy about Georgie, but he was reluctant to marry her because he felt he would be trapped by her mother and grandmother. He was intimidated by the situation.”

Contrary to popular belief, Sunny’s marriage in 1957 to His Serene Highness Prince Alfred Edward Friedrich Vincent Martin Maria von Auersperg, better known as “Alfie” (above), was not arranged by either Mrs. Aitken or Mrs. Warmack. In fact, Mrs. Aitken did not approve of Alfie because he was too young (he was only 20, Sunny was 26), and not rich enough. Indeed, he was broke. Sunny met him at the famous hunting club Schloss Mittersell, in the Austrian Alps, where he taught tennis to the rich daughters of American businessmen. Princess Honeychile Hohenlohe — whose husband Alec was a cousin of Alfie’s — was in charge of the resort, and vividly recalls Sunny’s and Alfie’s first meeting. “The first night we had a ball with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,” she says. “We played the pillow game where one puts a pillow in front the person one is most fond of. The duchess put the pillow in front of Alfie, then he put it in front of Sunny. They fell in love at that moment. The next day they went fishing and she came back and told me he had kissed her and that she had fallen in love.” Mrs. Warmack was dead set against the romance because Alfie — who friends nicknamed him “the Flea” because he loved to flirt — didn’t have a career. Sunny was whisked back to New York, but she returned to his side and eventually married him over her mother’s and grandmother’s objections.

During the seven years Sunny was married to Alfie, Honeychile became her best friend. “She was very happy then,” Honeychile recalls. “We used to take the Orient Express to Paris just to see the collections at Jacques Fath, Christian Dior and Yves St. Laurent.” Together, they would go to Maxim’s unescorted, and a black singer there used to serenade them by singing “You can’t have Honey without Sunny, and you can’t get Sunny without Honey.” One thing Honey is adamant about is that Sunny never drank at all. “I wish I had a nickel for every Coca-Cola she drank. I’d be rich.”

Countess Aline de Romanones remembers Sunny from this period, when she used to entertain her in Marbella. “She was the kind of fellow American you were proud of,” the countess says. “She was always well-dressed, pleasant and very glamorous. You couldn’t help but remember her because she was so beautiful.” Frederick Eberstadt remembers visiting Sunny at her home in Kitzbuhel. “She was like the person Grace Kelly acted on the screen,” he says. “But Sunny was the real thing.” (Incidentally Sunny’s home in Newport, Clarendon Court, was the setting for the Grace Kelly film High Society.)

It is, of course, possible that Sunny’s divorce from Alfie and subsequent marriage to Claus von Bulow could have changed her personality for the worse. But those who knew her didn’t see much of a change. John Bradley admits that “she lost that wonderful, winsome smile,” and Georgie Vassiltchikov believes the divorce made her “more mature,” but Isabel Glover, who knew her best, right up until her second coma, says that “Sunny’s personality never changed.” In Newport, she was known as a shy, unassuming hostess. Alan Pryce-Jones recalls the croquet party thrown for young Alexander’s birthday at which sea mist rolled in over the estate’s manicured green lawns. “The great point about Sunny,” he says, “is that you couldn’t not like her.” Everybody knew her and loved her,” agrees her Newport friend Hugh Auchincloss. “And she reciprocated that feeling. She was a person you could trust completely. And since she didn’t know anything else, she automatically trusted people. It was against her nature to think badly about anybody.”

Frederick Eberstadt believes that Sunny’s naivete and trusting nature were her undoing. “One of Sunny’s failings is that she really had very little discrimination about people,” he says. “She had many friends who were really not top drawer and a taste for guys who were bad boys. She liked Alfie because he was so outrageous. He had failings, but he was more silly than malign. After they busted up, Claus came on like Dracula. She got a big rush out of that. It was a terrible mistake on her part.”

Later during her marriage to Claus, Sunny often thought about going back to Alfie. At Ala’s wedding to Frank Kneissel, Alfie is said to have told Sunny that he was still in love with her. One of her friends, who spoke on condition that his name not be used, recalls sitting in the library with Sunny one evening after dinner. “She told me she wanted to get a divorce and go back to Alfie,” he says. “I told her, ‘One can never go back.’ She said she knew that. At that moment, I realized Claus was standing by the door. He had overheard everything. I got a chill down my spine. From then on, I was never able to see her alone again.”

Around this time Sunny’s old friend Ruth Dunbar Cushing heard vague rumors that Sunny had a drinking problem. Having worked with the National Council of Alcoholism for years, she felt there was something she might be able to do and went up to Newport to offer her support and assistance. What she found, however, was a woman who was completely “interested in health, always went to exercise class, and bought hundreds of dollars worth of vitamins.” She bore no resemblance to the woman portrayed in the film. “Sunny was beautiful and sweet and kind and didn’t have a mean bone in her body,” Cushing says. “She was the kind of friend you could go to if you were really in trouble. I did not see any evidence of drugs or drinking. It was Claus who used to talk that up. I looked carefully at her skin and eyes. I checked her hands to see if they were shaking. She was drinking soda water. She was devoted to her children, her dogs, her gardens and her home. She made the msot astounding flower arrangements. She was very much the chatelaine doing her job. It was certainly not the home of someone with a drinking problem.”

Undoubtedly the most damaging stories regarding Sunny von Bulow came from Truman Capote (above) who claimed in a 1982 People magazine interview that he knew Sunny for thirty years and that she had taught him how to inject himself with drugs back when he was writing Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But to Sunny’s oldest friends this is an outright lie. Georgie Vassiltchikov says the story is ludicrous. “There is no relation between what they are saying and the person I knew,” he says. “Sunny never talked about drugs to me. Neither was she taking pills. She was a perfectly healthy lovely young girl.” Capote’s thirty-year friendship with Sunny, he adds, is a complete fabrication. “She despised Truman Capote. He was never an intimate of hers. He amused her in a despicable way, like a clown, a bad taste clown. When his name came up she didn’t conceal her feelings. She despised him for the right reasons.”

Ruth Cushing offers a similar point of view. “Sunny thought he was a horrible little man. He was just cashing in on the publicity.” John Bradley questions Capote’s mental state at the time he made the defamatory remarks. “I never believed it,” he says. “I used to see him around town. He gave me the creeps. He was probably on drugs himself when he said it.” Honeychile Hohenlohe, who knew Truman Capote better than any of Sunny’s friends, especially when he was writing Tiffany’s (she claims to have been the inspiration for the character Holly Golightly) says that Truman was simply making it up because “the little schmo” loved nothing more than to stir up trouble.