Claus von Bulow leaves court with his girlfriend, Andrea Reynolds, after he was acquitted in his second trial in 1985.

Providence Journal Files Providence Journal Files

It’s hard to believe that it’s 25 years since Danish-born socialite Claus von Bulow went on trial in Newport, charged with twice trying to murder his blue-blooded wife, Sunny, by injecting her with insulin in her Bellevue Avenue mansion.

It’s just as hard to remember a time before O.J. and Paris and Martha Stewart, a time when celebrity trials were a rarity and CNN had only recently given birth to the around-the-clock news cycle.

But the von Bulow trial was an international sensation — after all, it combined a medical mystery with intrigue and infidelity amid the monied class — and dozens of reporters came to cover it in 1982. When von Bulow was re-tried in Providence three years later, the number would climb to more than 200. Even now there’s interest in the affair; the French newspaper Le Figaro is currently revisiting the topic as part of a series on complex legal cases.

I was a young reporter on The Journal’s city staff during the first trial, and I didn’t get a seat in the courtroom — those went to Tracy Breton and Gayle Gertler, more seasoned Journal reporters. Instead, I worked in the overflow room and press headquarters at the Old Colony House, once one of Rhode Island’s five-at-a-time state capitals.

It’s recently been restored, but in 1982 it was ramshackle, and electrical cables snaked everywhere, straining its wiring to connect reporters’ computers and TV monitors. There was no wall-to-wall coverage of the trial — Court TV hadn’t been invented — so these televisions were for watching closed-circuit broadcasts of events in the nearby courtroom. I was there to file updates throughout the morning for our afternoon paper, The Evening Bulletin — precursors, in a way, to today’s 7to7 Blog on projo.com.

Even in these early days of celebrity culture, the von Bulow trial stood out. In late January, with the event still young, I wrote:

Twenty reporters and photographers crowded around the seven-inch TV screen. From their rapt attention, you might have thought that it was the latest report on an assassination.

The press was watching Claus vonBulow walk to court.

With Newport’s most celebrated trial three weeks old, the vigil has become a tradition. Every morning, the print and television photographers, shivering in the cold, wait for vonBulow to arrive at the courthouse so they can take fresh pictures of him in his brown tweed overcoat. Every morning, they take the same basic picture that they took the morning before.

And that was before the jury was even seated. Things only got more intense as the trial progressed.

(The Journal misspelled von Bulow’s name as “vonBulow” throughout both of his trials, because that was our reading of the way he signed his name to a court paper at the beginning of the process. It was only after the second trial that we asked him his preference, and he told us to separate the two words.

(His name at birth, we eventually learned, wasn’t von Bulow at all; he’d been born Claus Cecil Borberg, but later adopted his mother’s more aristocratic maiden name.)

WITH VON BULOW came a rich cast of characters — doctors and lawyers, actors and ballerinas, socialites and princes, and the servants who made their lives comfortable.

One of the most memorable witnesses was Maria Schrallhammer, Martha “Sunny” von Bulow’s maid of 23 years, a dour German woman who was the first to suspect that her mistress’ comas might not have been of natural origin. It was she who had found a little black traveling bag Claus von Bulow was fond of taking to Newport on weekends, opened it and found inside three vials, one holding a white powder, one a yellow paste, and the last one pills. The Boston Herald embraced her in its tabloid way with this headline: “Maid — Claus Was A Louse.”

As the trial progressed, there were lurid discussions straight out of the National Enquirer. Von Bulow had taken a lover, Swedish-born former soap-opera actress Alexandra Isles; the prosecution said it was love of Isles — and of his wife’s money — that had led him to twice try to kill his spouse.

The defense had a different view. “Martha vonBulow lost interest in sex during her marriage to Claus vonBulow,” I wrote on Feb. 2, as the lawyers made their opening statements, “and told her husband he could cheat on her if he chose, Claus vonBulow’s lawyer told a Superior Court jury today.”

There was drama outside the jury’s hearing, too, when Judge Thomas H. Needham, upset by a Journal profile that included a fellow jurist’s view of him as a “stuffed shirt,” briefly kicked reporter Breton out of the press box. After Journal lawyers intervened, with executive editor Charles McCorkle Hauser coming to the courtroom to lend Breton his support, Needham reconsidered.

And there were only-in-Rhode-Island moments, like this exchange in which von Bulow’s New York lawyer, Herald Price Fahringer, tried to trip up Mrs. Von Bulow’s son by her first marriage, Prince Alexander George von Auersperg, but succeeded only in showing that Fahringer himself was out of place in an Ocean State courtroom:

Fahringer, speaking loudly, asked von Auersperg if his mother "would go out very often into the kitchen and make herself her own milkshakes," using "special, homemade ice cream."

Von Auersperg stood tensely in the witness box, eyed Fahringer, dug his left hand into the pocket of his gray, pin-striped jacket and rested his right on the railing.

"I thought we had Newport Creamery ice cream at home," he said in a tight voice.

"Well," said Fahringer, while spectators tittered, "isn’t that special, homemade ice cream?"

"It’s ice cream," von Auersperg said without expression.

AT LAST, after five weeks of testimony and five days of deliberations, the jury came back with its verdict on March 16: Guilty on both counts. Afterward, in an early view of the celebrity culture that now envelops the Paris Hiltons of the world, a cheering crowd greeted von Bulow outside the courthouse, some of them raising their fists and chanting, “Free Claus! Free Claus!”

In May, von Bulow was sentenced to serve 30 years at the ACI. But he never spent a day behind bars. Freed on bail during his appeal, he hired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to represent him, and in April 1984 the state Supreme Court agreed with Dershowitz that his client should get a new trial.

A year later, von Bulow went back on trial, this time in Providence, where the case had been moved to avoid creating a backlog in Newport, which had just one Superior Court judge on duty. This time around, I led the team of reporters the Journal assigned to the case.

The press pack was more fierce — I remember being part of a gaggle of reporters who trailed closely at von Bulow’s heels as he walked the three blocks from the Providence County Court House to the Brown Faculty Club for lunch, with members of the public gawking and cheering him on — and the cast of characters even more exotic.

The name of author Truman Capote surfaced as a friend of Mrs. von Bulow’s. Alexandra Isles fled to Europe to avoid testifying, then returned at the last moment to take the stand against her former lover. And von Bulow brought along his new mistress, Andrea Reynolds, who, when not “busy managing the business end of the literary estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes,” was recorded in a memorable profile by Breton as heading for Westminster Mall to buy White Out at E.L. Freeman’s stationery store.

But the case the Providence jury heard was substantially different from the one the Newport jury had considered. Judge Corinne P. Grande ruled out a number of key pieces of testimony that the Supreme Court had not excluded. And I wasn’t surprised when, on June 10, 1985, this second jury came back with a verdict of “not guilty.”

MORE THAN 20 years later, memories of the von Bulow trial still surface from time to time. And so does von Bulow.

Several years ago, when I was editing The Journal’s entertainment coverage, I saw that he was doing theater reviews for a newspaper in London. A perfect occupation, I thought, for a man who had always seemed to be on stage.

And then, while listening to the first of a popular group of children’s audiobooks, I was startled to hear the names of two of the three lead characters: Sunny and Claus.

The books’ appropriate title?

A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Alan Rosenberg is now South County regional editor for The Providence Journal.

arosenbe@projo.com