Lady Bing in Hospital, Her Lawyer Reveals

Lady Carroll Douglass Bing, wife of former Metropolitan Opera impresario Sir Rudolf Bing, has been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for the past two weeks, her lawyer says.

Attorney Harvey Sladkus said Tuesday that police took her to St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan on July 17 and she was admitted after “an incident involving some friends of hers. What the incident was, I don’t know.”

“She’s an emotionally fragile lady,” Sladkus said. He blamed her current instability on attempts by Bing’s lawyers to annul her marriage.

The Bings were married in January, 1987, in Maclean, Va. Bing’s lawyers are trying to get the marriage annulled on the grounds that the 86-year-old former opera general manager, who has Alzheimer’s disease, did not know what he was doing.

Sladkus said he has asked that the annulment proceedings be postponed until doctors say Lady Bing is able to defend herself.