This Crazy Thing Called Love

August 3, 1992
In 1955 Ann Woodward--sleeping-pill addict, ex-model and radio actress--shot to death her husband, Billy, heir to a banking fortune, on their Oyster Bay, N.Y., estate. The beautiful socialite was cleared by a grand jury swayed by a burglar's belated, disputed confession that he was on the Woodward estate that night and so could have triggered an accidental shooting. Braudy ( Who Killed Sal Mineo? ) argues that Ann killed her husband by mistake and rejects as ``myth'' the notion that society matron Elsie Woodward, Ann's mother-in-law, helped cover up a murder for the sake of her grandsons. This investigation of a much-publicized case is not likely to settle the decades-old controversy over whether Ann intentionally shot her husband. Braudy fails to elicit sympathy for Ann as she traces her rise from an impoverished Kansas farm to cafe society and dissects a marriage marked by violent fights, drug dependency and affairs on both sides, including Ann's fling with Prince Aly Khan, Rita Hayworth's fiance. Photos. Literary Guild alternate.

November 1, 1993
An investigation of the much-publicized case of Ann Woodward, an ex-model and radio actress, who was acquitted in the 1955 murder of her husband, heir to a banking fortune.

September 1, 1992
In 1955, Ann Woodward shot her husband, Billy, in their Oyster Bay, Long Island, home. While she was cleared by a grand jury, which believed her story that she had mistaken Billy for a prowler who had been recently breaking into neighboring houses, New York society was convinced that she had deliberately murdered Billy and that her formidable mother-in-law, Elsie Woodward, had covered up the crime to prevent further scandal to the socially prominent family. The incident became fiction in Truman Capote's malicious 1975 Esquire story, leading to Ann's suicide, and later was the subject of Dominick Dunne's The Two Mrs. Grenvilles ( LJ 7/85). Now, after years of research, Braudy reveals the truth behind the legend. Tracing Ann's life from her difficult Kansas childhood through her early years as a model and aspiring actress to her stormy marriage to Billy Woodward and the sad years of her social exile after his death, Braudy shows how Ann, a victim of cruel gossip and class snobbery, could not have deliberately killed Billy. Fans of Dunne's book will enjoy this sympathetic chronicle. Recommended. Excerpted in the July 27, 1992 issue of New York magazine.--Ed.-- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"

Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 1992
As a true-crime tale, Braudy's account of the high-society killing of banker Billy Woodward by his wife, Ann, seems to lack many of the basic ingredients for success: there is no suspense, since Ann was found not guilty of the crime and since Braudy has little difficulty in defending the court's verdict; there is certainly no timeliness, since Woodward died more than 30 years ago; and there is precious little sensationalism, though some of the more monstrous aspects of Billy's personality may titillate Leona Helmsley fans. What this book has instead of suspense, timeliness, and tabloid thrills are long, detailed family histories of both Billy's upper-crust New York clan and Ann's dirt-poor Kansas farmers. So why do we keep reading? Perhaps to see if the nouveau rich are as different from the rest of us as the old rich. And perhaps to watch the fascinating way myth and reality intermingled in these two lives. Ann grew up alone, watched movies, and fashioned a personality for herself; it seemed to pay off in her marriage to banking heir Woodward, but then the script was changed: the marriage went bad, and in a heavily ironic finale, Ann shot Billy accidentally, thinking he was a prowler. She was found innocent by a court but not by her new-found society friends, who snubbed her, thus completing the transition from dream to nightmare. Facade is everything, and pretense is everywhere in this story: banks, racing stables, and English educations could never hide the fact that the Woodwards weren't old money, and movies never quite could tell Ann how to live with the self she had forged and in the world she had conquered. Don't expect garden-variety true-crime readers to sit still for this exploration of low life in high society, but others, more interested in the vagaries of the human psyche, will find much to ponder. ((Reviewed Aug. 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)