Volume 33, Number 17 · November 6, 1986
Insulin & Innocence
By Alan Pryce-Jones
Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case
by Alan M. Dershowitz
Random House, 276 pp., $19.95
If, like me, you spend much of the year in Newport, Rhode Island, you will have suffered, since 1981, moments of acute mental distress, matched, after the first months, by unbearable boredom. They arose from a local scandal which quickly had international reverberations. A member of the Newport summer colony, Claus von Bülow, was put on trial for attempting to murder his wife. Moreover, he was tried twice: found guilty at the first trial and acquitted at the second. Reversal of Fortune is the work of Von Bülow's successful defense lawyer at the second trial, and it tells a remarkable story with remarkable brio. I picked it up one evening and read it straight through until the early hours: boredom was dissipated in a flash. 'This case has everything,' declared the prosecutor. 'It has money, sex, drugs; it has Newport, New York and Europe; it has nobility; it has maids, butlers, a gardener…. This case is where the little man has a chance to glimpse inside and see how the rich live.' These are the opening words of the book. We all have enough of the little man in us to respond with due avidity to such allurements.
Review, 3302 words
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