High life
Bloody chic
raki
New York A!though there was never any question -in my mind that it would happen, it did finally longer than I thought. Radical chic has Twelve given way to bloody chic — literally. li,W,_elve years after Leonard Bernstein ought to stick to the only thing .he f."flows a lot about, music — gave his in- Lain, °us party in order to raise money for 'tack criminals who shoot policemen, we now have the inevitable consequence: radical chic gone mad, an extreme leftist writer using his literary muscle to spring a cold-blooded murderer so that the killer can kill again. But do not worry. I will not repeat last week's Spectator story about Norman Mailer's latest caper which caused the death of an innocent man. I will simply Point out a few facts that somehow didn't aPIpear in this organ's august pages. Then I will go on to yet another murder trial, rnething more up my alley, as I was on "rst-name terms with the victim and the ac- cused.
Jack Abbott, the killer who is doing life behind bars, writes a few hundred letters to Flame's Mailer, the writer who frequents dame's and other fashionable spots of New York City, and the former gets out on Parole because — as Mailer puts it culture is worth a little risk'. The little risk turns out to be that Abbott — who in my bumble opinion took Marxism (which he assiduously read in prison every day) literal- i31 also takes Mailer seriously, believing that he (Abbott) is above the law. One night he is told that he cannot use a lavatory in a small bohemian restaurant (because of health laws) so he takes a poor aspiring playwright moonlighting as a waiter out in- to the street and plunges a knife in his heart. A witness testifies that Abbott then stood over him 'torturing him sadistically'. At his subsequent trial Mailer is seen autographing his book about Death Row, while Abbott is lionised by a long parade of literary lights who come to his defence. The verdict is second degree manslaughter, which means the killer could be out in six years. The result is that Mailer faces the press and gets in his cheap two cents' worth against a fascist state, and then attends a museum opening. Abbott gets a lobster lunch, and the family of the victim — un- . fortunately they are poor, and have not kill- ed, and so do not deserve Mailer's attention — come up with the only thing worth hear- ing about this dreadful case: consider this trial', said the dead man's father-in-law, 'to be the marketing of The Belly of the Beast [Abbott's book], the movie and the. T-shirt'. Oh, the father-in-law said something else worth repeating: 'I consider Mailer and all the other creeps to be ac- cessories to the crime'.
The most important fact, however, turns out to be that Abbott has turned stool pigeon before getting out, an act that directly contradicts the bulk of his writing that speaks of solidarity of the oppressed etc. So much for the integrity of people who are really into Marx.
My friend Claus von Bulow was never in- to him. Nor was his wife, the multi- millionaire beauty, Sunny. She is now lying in a coma, a vegetable for the past year, and Claus is accused of trying to kill her by in- jecting her with an insulin shot. The media have gone bananas. Here is a story that makes Harold Robbins wince at his inade- quacy. A Dane who was once the right- hand man of Paul Getty, the son of a noble Danish family, is in the dock for trying to murder the daughter of one of America's richest men. And there is more. Her children by her first marriage to an Austrian prince are the ones who first suspected foul play and had a criminal lawyer and some private dicks tail Bulow while he was having an affair with yet another socialite, Alexandra Isles. Hollywood and hundreds of hacks are drooling to such an extent that there is a shortage of Kleenex in this town.
There are only a couple of things that bother me. First of all, Sunny Crawford von Auesberg von Bulow had a long history of drinking and taking pills. The high in- sulin reading found in her body could mere- ly be a normal reaction to the consumption of a lot of glucose, be it from drink or sweets, yet another substance she was ad- dicted to. Therefore the insulin could have been manufactured internally. Second, the warrantless search that her children in- itiated turned up a needle with insulin traces on it. This, however, was two months after her coma. Was Bulow stupid enough to keep the needle in his cupboard all that time, or was it planted by an ambitious District Attorney, as the defence charges? And Claus was to benefit not a penny more had she died than had she remained alive.
So, why is he on trial? That's easy. Publicity never hurt anyone in this country, especially criminal lawyers and ambitious gumshoes. And Claus does have a history of being a necrophiliac. The papers have played that angle up too. But I know better. You see, Dado Ruspoli and myself started that rumour a long time ago in order to make Claus sound more interesting. Unlike the rest of us, he was always serious so we had to make up for it. So much for fairness in the land of liberty and equality.
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