The voice was polite, but there was suspicion in it.

I was on the phone with Andrea Reynolds Plunket, who in 1985 had been the mistress Claus von Bulow brought with him to his second trial.

Back then, she radiated glamour, with her Hungarian accent (pronounce her first name “Ahn-DRAY-uh”), three ex-husbands (including TV producer-director Sheldon Reynolds) and high-fashion dress (though some said she was wearing Sunny von Bulow’s jewels, a charge both reported and denied after the trial in a Vanity Fair piece by noted writer Dominick Dunne).

Now, just turned 70, she runs a bed-and-breakfast in the Catskills with her fourth husband, the Hon. Shaun Plunket, who is first in line to be Britain’s 9th Lord Plunket.

Her name does show up from time to time in the New York gossip columns, and she still administers the literary estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, though exactly what that means is open to dispute. She’s seen herself played in an Oscar-winning movie by Christine Baranski, a portrayal about which she has strong opinions. And there was that interview she conducted in 1991, just before the first Gulf War, with Saddam Hussein.

But for the most part, hers is now a quiet life. And I’d just told her why I was calling: as part of a where-are-they-now story about people involved in the von Bulow case.

“Oh, dear,” she said. And she wanted to know: “You’re too young to have been there, aren’t you?”

Alas, I am not. And when I told her that I’d even met her once, in the hall at the Providence Biltmore, where she’d been staying with von Bulow, she relaxed and chatted, glad to take a break from her duties as innkeeper and have a few minutes to get off her feet.

ANDREA WAS AT von Bulow’s side throughout the trial that led to his acquittal, but they split up soon afterward.

“I think that the drama we went through would have broken up anybody,” she says now. “We were totally exhausted.

“But I do not have regrets, because I really did not believe he had committed the crimes he was accused of.”

In 1989, she married Plunket, a man with an interesting family history of his own. His father, the 6th Lord Plunket, and mother, actress Fanny Ward, died in 1938 in a plane crash on William Randolph Hearst’s 300,000-acre ranch, San Simeon. Shaun’s oldest brother, Patrick, was equerry to King George VI of England, serving as the king’s personal aide; had the same job with the king’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, after she took the throne; and finally was deputy master of the royal household from 1954 until his death in 1975. These days, the second of the three Plunket brothers, Robin, holds the title, established in 1827 for Irish lawyer and politician William Conyngham Plunket, best known for arguing successfully in favor of the admission of Catholics to the House of Commons.

Cindy Adams, the New York Post’s gossip queen, calls Shaun “the handsome albeit slightly impoverished cousin of Her Maj Elizabeth.”

Andrea says she met Shaun on a blind date, during which the man she was with bored her, and “I snatched away my hostess’ date.” She married him 2½ months later.

Today, the Plunkets live on a 40-acre estate in Livingston Manor, N.Y., in the northwestern Catskills, two hours from New York City. When Andrea was married to Sheldon Reynolds, the place was called Pannonia Farm. Now it’s The Guest House, where each cottage is decorated like a movie set, she says — themed to India, Brittania, Africa, China and Russia — and room rates range from $162 to $400, double occupancy. A full breakfast is included, and the couple’s Web site, www.theguesthouse.com — which describes him as an Irish aristocrat and passionate tennis player, and her as “a very attractive Hungarian lady” — notes, “Our signature dish is Andrea’s French Toast. Try it!”

But their life isn’t all tennis and French toast. Last October, the B&B’s main house “burned down to the ground,” Andrea says. “We lost five rooms and a huge reception room, and all our personal belongings.”

The cause isn’t certain; “it could have been caused by something as innocuous as a mouse” chewing on wiring. But the house was underinsured, she says; “very few people are insured to the true value of the house.”

So along with living “a contemplative life” and gardening, “I try to build new cottages.

“I do carpentry,” she says. “I break my nails.”

IT’S A FAR cry from her adventure in 1991, when she went to Iraq as a reporter and interviewed Saddam Hussein in the days before Operation Desert Storm.

News coverage in The Journal’s People column that February focused on the titillating — that in a Q&A interview in Britain’s Tatler magazine, Saddam would admit “to keeping a mistress — but with a caveat. ‘I am a virtuous man compared to President Kennedy and President Bush.’ ”

Looking back, Andrea remembers it differently, and more substantively. She says that Tatler was one of several newspapers and magazines she was writing for, but she primarily went as a TV reporter. Fascinated by the Middle East, she says — “I’m very knowledgeable about Arab affairs, and I’ve traveled the Mideast extensively since 1960” — she went on behalf of FOX TV about a month before the American assault began. She got in to see Saddam on Jan. 14; the bombing of Baghdad was due to start on the 16th.

“He didn’t believe that the Americans would bomb him,” she says. “I said, ‘I would bet you anything that they will.’

“He said, ‘No, no, no, it’s a poker game.’ I said, ‘I’m afraid you’re wrong.’ ”

She can’t remember who hired her for the FOX gig — the FOX News network wasn’t founded until 1996, five years later, though FOX Broadcasting had started a decade earlier. But she recalls vividly appearing on the air in her gas mask.

“Then everybody wanted to interview me, from Joan Rivers on upwards.”

SHE HAD BEEN seen on bigger screens just the previous October — or at least, there was a movie version of her, in Reversal of Fortune, based on Harvard law Prof. Alan Dershowitz’s book about the von Bulow case. Her part was played by Christine Baranski, not yet known for her breakout role as Cybill Shepherd’s best friend Maryann Thorpe in the 1995-1998 sitcom Cybill.

Did Andrea see the movie?

“Of course,” she said.

And what did she think of it?

“I loved the movie as a movie. It had nothing to do with reality, but it was a lovely movie.”

She found Jeremy Irons, who played von Bulow, “very attractive. I think I would have had an affair with him instead of Claus!”

Baranski’s character, she said, was a “certifiable moron. But it was not her fault. It was Mr. Dershowitz who wanted it that way.”

During the time leading up to von Bulow’s appeal, she said, she did research that helped him. (She later claimed a reporter’s legal privilege in refusing to turn over the draft of a book she was writing to von Bulow’s stepchildren during their civil suit against him. Her loss in that case helped to determine who courts would consider a journalist, since the court ruled that she had taken her notes not to write the book but to aid von Bulow.)

But the movie, she said, made it seem as though Dershowitz and his assistants had done it all. “When you do a literary history, you don’t want to make me look intelligent, because that takes away from him and his students. …

“I have a very thick skin. Otherwise, I would have been mortified by the movie. I could not possibly have been as stupid as she played me.

“But she’s an excellent actress. She portrayed me as she was told to.”

I HAVE TO ASK: Does she still see von Bulow?

She sees him regularly, in London, she says.

And how is he doing?

He had cancer, but it’s under control. “He has a bit of a limp, because he’s growing older.” When she saw him last month at the funeral of Mark Birley, founder of the nightclub Annabel’s, “he looked elegant and was charming as always. Now wears a light stubble beard which is not to my liking.”

Von Bulow is “a devoted grandpa” to his daughter Cosima’s children, she says. And he’s the godfather to Andrea’s 22-year-old granddaughter, Eliza McCarthy, a concert pianist who recently graduated from London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Can Plunket put me in touch with him?

He’s “on retreat, taking the waters,” she says. Besides, in settling lawsuits with Sunny von Bulow’s children from her first marriage, Alexander von Auersperg and Ala Isham, “he has signed documents that he doesn’t talk to the press. … He’s held by that. He would be in contempt of court if he talked to anybody. …

“He goes a lot to the opera and plays, which is a lovely way to end one’s life.”

BESIDES HER CARPENTRY and gardening, Plunket also administers the Conan Doyle literary estate, she says, “which is a little more intellectual.”

The work, she says, involves controlling who’s going to get a license to use the characters. There’s trademark protection, she says, and some copyright protection until 2023, when the copyright on the last of the Holmes works, The Case Book, expires.

Plunket’s third husband, Sheldon Reynolds, wrote, directed and produced Holmes shows for TV, starting in the 1950s. But her claim to the estate actually begins with her father, a banker who she has said bought it from the author’s heirs.

Others dispute her control of the Holmes characters — Holmes Web sites are full of contentions that her control is extremely limited, valid only for the American copyright of the one book and as a trademark in the European Union for the words “Sherlock Holmes,” “Dr. Watson” and “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” Jon Lellenberg, historian of the Holmes fan group the Baker Street Irregulars, said in an e-mail that it is he, not Plunket, who represents the estate of the author’s daughter, Dame Jean Conan Doyle. Courts in New York and Washington, D.C., have ruled for him repeatedly over the last 10 years, he said.

Plunket dismisses such talk. There’s another book she’d rather discuss — the memoir she’s writing.

She’s calling it The Lady Was a Tramp.

“First of all, I love the song,” she says, referring to “The Lady Is a Tramp,” Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s 1937 ode to an independent-minded society woman who’d “never bother with people she’d hate.” And the book has a musical theme — each chapter has the name of a piece of music.

“Claus would be more in the Wagnerian mode,” she says. “Claus was not really a dancer. … Sheldon Reynolds was a great dancer, and we used to dance to jazz and boogie-woogie.”

Irwin Drake, composer of such standards as Frank Sinatra’s hit “It Was a Very Good Year” and Billie Holiday’s mournful “Good Morning Heartache,” is helping her with the book, she says. And she adds:

“Maybe they’ll make a musical out of it.”

For a woman whose life has already been turned into a major motion picture, this can only seem natural.