Claudine Longet, the French-born singer, actress and ex-wife of Andy Williams who was at the center of a scandalous 1976 trial and media circus after she fatally shot her boyfriend, Olympic skier Spider Sabich, has died. She was 84.
Her death was reported Thursday by her nephew Bryan Longet. No details of her death were immediately available.
The enchanting, doe-eyed Longet recorded albums of breathy pop for A&M Records before she sang the Henry Mancini-Don Black song “Nothing to Lose” in Blake Edwards’ The Party (1968), in which she portrayed an aspiring actress alongside Peter Sellers.
A onetime Las Vegas showgirl, Longet had married “Moon River” crooner Williams in December 1961 and appeared on his long-running NBC variety show and Christmas specials, often with their three children.
After she and Williams divorced in 1975, Longet and the kids were living with the California-born Sabich at his chalet in Starwood, Colorado, when she shot him on March 21, 1976, in his bathroom with a .22-caliber German‐made gun that had been purchased by his father. She claimed the gun accidentally discharged as he was showing her how it worked.
Longet was with the 31-year-old Sabich in the ambulance when he died on the way to the hospital from a single gunshot wound to the abdomen. A month later, she was charged with reckless manslaughter and faced as many as 10 years in prison.
At her Aspen trial, Williams escorted her to and from the courtroom, testified on her behalf and provided legal assistance. “I thought it was unfair, I thought she was innocent, I thought it was an accident,” he told Cynthia Bowers in a 2009 interview for CBS Sunday Morning.
With the prosecution facing significant hurdles because of mishandled evidence and illegal search practices, a jury after four days of testimony and 3 1/2 hours of deliberations convicted Longet, 36, of criminally negligent homicide, a misdemeanor, in January 1977. She was given two years’ probation, fined $250 and sentenced to 30 days in jail (she was able to serve most of her sentence on weekends).
The Sabich family later filed a civil suit against Longet for $1.3 million, but the case was settled out of court. Longet agreed not to speak publicly about Sabich or the murder and to never publish a book about her life and the trial, and her career as a singer and actress was done.
Claudine Georgette Longet was born in Paris on Jan. 29, 1942. Her father was a businessman specializing in X-ray technology; her mother was a doctor. She was in a production of The Turn of the Screw when she was 10, then appeared on French television and in plays in Milan and Venice.
Hired by nightclub impresario Lou Walters (Barbara Walters’ father), Longet had moved to Las Vegas and was dancing in a Folies Bergère revue at the Tropicana in 1960 when she first met Williams alongside a highway in town.
“My manager and I were driving down there and we saw this lovely girl and her girlfriend, who was also quite pretty, pushing this car,” he told Bowers. “And so, being gallant — and also because they looked pretty good — we stopped to see if we could help them.”
They started dating, and after Williams proposed to her in Paris — she had returned home to her parents, who were alarmed that she was dating an older man — they wed at a church in Bel-Air on Dec. 15, 1961 (she was 19, he was 34).
In 1963, Longet appeared for the first time on The Andy Williams Show and acted on episodes of McHale’s Navy and Dr. Kildare. She later guest-starred on installments of Combat!, 12 O’Clock High, Mr. Novak and Hogan’s Heroes before playing a novelist named Nicole who has a romance with Ben Gazzara’s character on the first-season finale of NBC’s Run for Your Life.
On the May 1966 episode, Longet mimicked playing the guitar and sang an English-French version of the bossa nova song “Meditation.” That got her a contract at Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss’ new A&M label, which released “Meditation” as a single. Her first album, 1967’s Claudine, produced by Tommy LiPuma, sold more than a million copies.
She would record three more LPs for A&M before jumping to Williams’ new Barnaby imprint for 1969’s We’ve Only Just Begun. She and her husband separated around that time — “We just sort of grew apart, I was never home … it was all my fault, I just didn’t take care of my marriage,” he said — though she would continue to appear on his TV shows through 1974. (Her last album was 1972’s Let’s Spend the Night Together.)
Meanwhile, Longet also showed up in the 1965 McHale’s Navy feature and Massacre Harbor (1968) and on TV in The Name of the Game, The F.B.I., The Bold Ones, Love, American Style, Alias Smith and Jones and The Streets of San Francisco.
Longet and Williams were close friends of Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, and they were watching his televised primary victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles upstairs in the senator’s suite on June 4, 1968.
After Kennedy was shot shortly after midnight in the hotel by Sirhan Sirhan, the couple joined RFK’s family and other friends at Good Samaritan Hospital, and they were there when he was pronounced dead on June 6, nearly 26 hours after the shooting.
Longet and Williams attended Kennedy’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on June 8 — Williams and a choir performed “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — and were on the funeral train that took his body to the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington for burial.
She and charismatic Vladimir “Spider” Sabich, who was the model for Robert Redford’s character in Downhill Racer (1969), first met in 1972 at a celebrity skiing exhibition in Bear Valley, California.
At the time of the shooting, they had been living together for a couple of years but their relationship was on the rocks, as she wrote in her diary. (Since officers failed to attain a search warrant, that evidence was inadmissible in court.)
After her sentencing, Longet told reporters she was not bitter. “Because of the many cards and letters I’ve received, the prayers, I feel very good about everybody,” she said.
Her case was spoofed on Saturday Night Live in April 1976 when sportscasters played by Chevy Chase and Jane Curtin offered play-by-play of skiers being “accidentally shot” by Longet while competing in “The Claudine Longet Invitational” in Vail, Colorado. Announcer Don Pardo would read an apology on the air the next week.
The Rolling Stones also recorded a derisive song called “Claudine” for Some Girls that didn’t make it on their 1978 album, apparently for legal reasons.
Longet and one of her defense attorneys, Ronald Austin, moved in together shortly after her sentencing — he was married with two children at the time — and they wed in June 1985, remaining in the Aspen area on a 5.4-acre estate for years before moving to Hawaii.
She had three children with Williams, sons Christian and Bobby (who was named for RFK) and daughter Noelle, who reportedly died in 2023.
Read the full article here
