Twisted Tales: Easy Listening Star Claudine Longet's Hard Life of Gun Violence

Posted on Nov 27th 2009 5:00PM by James Sullivan
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For Claudine Longet, the shooting was horrible. The French ingenue and her husband, crooner Andy Williams, were dressing for a late-night rendezvous with their good friends Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. Bobby was on television, making a speech from the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning California's Democratic primary that day in June 1968. Just after finishing, the presidential candidate was ushered through the hotel kitchen, where he was assassinated.

A few days later, Williams sang a moving version of 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' at Kennedy's funeral mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. On the train that took Kennedy's body to Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC, Longet commiserated with Ted Kennedy.

She'd met the balladeer Williams a few years earlier, when, at 18, she joined the dancers in the Folies Bergeres revue at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. Williams, who was already 32 and a well-established star, had to make up a story about their meeting to deflect criticism that he was robbing the cradle. When the couple had their third child a year after the Kennedy assassination, they named him Bobby.

By then, Longet was a pop star herself, making regular guest appearances on Williams' variety show and launching her acting career on 'Hogan's Heroes' and 'McHale's Navy.' Her easy-listening albums, featuring soft covers of pop hits by the Beatles and bossa nova composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, were chart successes in spite of the fact that the Parisian singer sounded almost Japanese when singing in English.

By the early 1970s, though, Longet was moving out of the spotlight. With her marriage ending, she settled in the ski resort town of Aspen, Colo., where she became romantically involved with an Olympic skier and world-class playboy named Spider Sabich. After a few years of happiness, their jet-setting lifestyle was brought down by another horrific gunshot.

This time, it was Longet who pulled the trigger, shooting her lover, Sabich, in their bedroom. During the sensational trial, Longet testified that her boyfriend's death was an accident -- that he had been showing her how to use the gun. Each day Williams, her ex-husband, escorted the defendant to and from the courtroom. Although a blood test revealed she had cocaine in her system at the time of the shooting, the case against Longet was botched when evidence was thrown out and the weapon went missing. Convicted of misdemeanor negligent homicide, she was sentenced to 30 days in prison and a $250 fine. After the verdict, the former pop singer went on vacation in Mexico with her attorney, whom she would marry several years later.

For a while, Sabich's death and Longet's light sentence were popular gossip fodder. 'Saturday Night Live' was forced to apologize after running a satirical skit about the "Claudine Longet Invitational" ski tournament, in which competitors dodged bullets on the slopes. And Mick Jagger was advised to drop a song called 'Claudine' off the Rolling Stones' 'Emotional Rescue' album.

Longet has lived a private life in Aspen ever since; her music remains appropriately big in Japan. What really happened in Sabich's death? "Only Spider knows for sure," as Jagger sang, "but he ain't talking about it anymore."