I was trying to rearrange things on my bookcase to make room for my latest treasures after last week’s trip to the Friends of the Ferguson Library book shop (stoked I found an almost pristine copy of the Mitford sisters letters in hardcover but it’s a doorstop and a half!) when I managed to knock over the knee high stack of mass market paperbacks next to my dresser. I really need to buckle down and write those V.C. Andrews reviews I’ve been planning one of these days. But instead of settling down with Clan Dollaganger, I found myself putting aside Dominick Dunne’s The Two Mrs Grenvilles. But Friday afternoon found me combing the stacks of the Avon Free Public Library and adding This Crazy Thing Called Love: The Golden World and Fatal Marriage of Ann and Billy Woodward to my armload of books.

Now given my fascination with true crime and the life of the very very rich, you would think I would have reviewed  This Crazy Thing Called Love: The Golden World and Fatal Marriage of Ann and Billy Woodward ages ago. This weekend’s reading wasn’t the first time I’ve encountered the book. Back in 1992 when This Crazy Thing Called Love was published I was right on the library reserve list behind all the old ladies who where old enough to remember the case and in one or two cases, ran in the right circles to have met the Woodwards back in the day. The old ladies in my home town? Full of surprises!  What boggles the mind is there are people out there who devoured Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers and Dominick Dunne’s The Two Mrs Grenvilles and took those embellished stories as the gospel truth. That’s like reading Jackie Collins writing about her late night soap opera diva Sugar Anderson and assuming you now know all there is too know about Joan Collins and Shirley Maclaine. The true story is so much more interesting.

For those of you who have never heard of the Capote or Dunne books or even know who the Woodwards were, here are basics. In 1955, socialite Ann Woodward shot what she thought was an intruder at her family’s country home. Only, instead of an intruder who had been targeting their neighborhood, Ann Woodward had killed her banking heir husband Billy Woodward. The Woodwards had a stormy marriage with affairs on both sides and many people thought Ann Woodward had killed Billy Woodward in cold blood to keep him from divorcing her to marry someone from his own class. Billy Woodward’s family stood by Ann Woodward but she spent the rest of her life under a cloud of suspicion and died just before Esquire magazine published part of Truman Capote’s uncompleted novel Answered Prayers that included the story of a scandalous woman who shoots her very rich husband.

Thanks to Susan Braudy, the picture of the Ann and Billy Woodward is treated with fairness and a steady hand. Ann Woodward (born Angeline Luceil Crowell) wasn’t a saint, but she wasn’t the whore that Dominick Dunne and Truman Capote paint her to be in their stories. There wasn’t a secret hick first husband she was hiding from Billy Woodward. Given the changes in Billy Woodward’s will as their marriage crumbled, Ann Woodward would have been better off financially as the former Mrs Billy Woodward vs the Widow Woodward. Believe it or not…there really was a burglar prowling in their exclusive neighborhood the fateful night Billy Woodward died. And you can’t help but feel that if Ann Eden (the stage name Angleine Crowell used before her marriage) had never meet Billy Woodward or at least if their affair had been just a passing thing versus a marriage, both parties might still be alive and thriving in their own worlds.

If you’ve read Answered Prayers and The Two Mrs Grenvilles, make an effort to track down and read This Crazy Thing Called Love. Ann and Billy Woodward and their family deserve that much.