Gloria Vanderbilt

• Born: February 20, 1924
• Birthplace: Manhattan, New York, NY
• Died: June 17, 2019
• Place of death: Manhattan, New York, NY

American businesswoman, socialite, and author

An heir to the Vanderbilt family fortune when she was only fifteen months old, Gloria Vanderbilt became a textile and fashion designer, actor, artist, perfume manufacturer, and author.

Early Life

Gloria Laura Morgan Vanderbilt was the daughter of Gloria and Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt. Her father was the grandson of transportation magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. When she was only fifteen months old, her father died, leaving her a $2.5 million trust fund. However, she was unable to access these funds herself until she was twenty-one, leaving her mother with access to a significant sum each year. Her mother used the money to enjoy a socialite’s lifestyle, partying throughout Europe and most leaving Gloria under the care of nannies.

In a highly publicized legal battle, Reginald’s aunt, the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sought custody of Gloria, and Gloria began living with her aunt in 1931. Vanderbilt enrolled in the Mary C. Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island, and in Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut. She discovered her love for the arts and began keeping a journal, which helped with her later writing.

Vanderbilt left school at age seventeen, and in 1941 she married Pasquale DiCicco, an actors’ agent. This marriage lasted until 1945, and that same year Vanderbilt wed conductor Leopold Stokowski, with whom she had two sons, Stanislaus, born in 1950, and Christopher, born in 1955. She divorced Stokowski in 1955, and the next year married her third husband, director Sidney Lumet (they would divorce in 1963).

First Ventures

Vanderbilt wrote her first book, Love Poems, published in 1955. She based this book on her diaries. Other books would follow. In the mid-1950s, Vanderbilt trained to be an actor at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in New York City, and she made her debut in the play The Swan. She had several roles on television programs, including appearances in two episodes of Studio One in 1957; in a play directed by Lumet, Dog in a Bush Tunnel, which aired on Kraft Televison Theatre in 1958; and in an episode of the television series Adventures in Paradise in 1960. She also performed in a Broadway play and summer stock. Her acting brought her publicity, acclaim, and income.

Vanderbilt studied art at New York’s Art Students League before she married her fourth husband, Wyatt Emory Cooper, in 1963. She and Cooper had two sons, Carter (1965–88) and Anderson, born in 1967. Cooper encouraged her to pursue her artwork, and she began to give one-woman shows of oils, pastels, and watercolors.

Mature Wealth

In 1968, Vanderbilt began to design linens, china, glassware, and flatware for Hallmark Paper Products and textile manufacturer Bloomcraft, which adapted her designs and licensed her work. By 1970, the name “Gloria Vanderbilt” appeared on eyeglasses and clothing. One of her most notable ventures was using her famous name on a collection of high-end jeans with cuts made specifically for women, which she introduced in the mid-1970s. The following decade, she began marketing her perfume, Glorious. These products carried her logo of a swan, a reference to her favorite acting role in the play The Swan.

In the 1980s, Vanderbilt’s attorney, Thomas A. Andrews, and her psychiatrist, Christ L. Zois, founded a design company. Vanderbilt sued the two men, alleging that by establishing their business they had colluded to defraud her of her $2 million line of home furnishings. An extensive court case was settled in her favor, and the two partners lost their licenses to practice law and psychiatry. The court awarded Vanderbilt damages in the amount of $1.6 million, but she never obtained the vast majority of this sum. When she had to sell her town house to pay her back taxes, Vanderbilt, a widow after Cooper’s death in 1978, realized she needed additional income.

She received royalties from her nonfiction books. Three of her earliest books were The Gloria Vanderbilt Book of Collage (1970), Paintings and Crayon Drawings (1977), and Woman to Woman (1979), in which she provides practical advice to other women. She used her diaries to prepare the autobiographical Once upon a Time: A True Story (1985); Black Night, White Night (1987); A Mother’s Story (1996), which described her son Carter’s suicide; and It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir (2004). These successful books were able to increase her income. Vanderbilt also wrote works of fiction, including Never Say Good-Bye (1989), the semifactual The Memory Book of Starr Faithfull (1994), Stories and Dream Boxes (2002) with Richard Burgin, Obsession: An Erotic Tale (2009), and the short story collection The Things We Fear Most (2011).

Later in life Vanderbilt published The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (2016), coauthored with her son Anderson. That same year the two were featured in the documentary Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt & Anderson Cooper, released on the HBO network. Vanderbilt died at the age of ninety-five in her Manhattan home on June 17, 2019.

Legacy

Born into vast wealth, Gloria Vanderbilt was a public figure her entire life, often making headlines for things outside her control, such as the infamous custody battle between her mother and aunt. However, the widespread interest in her family and her inherited wealth also enabled her to successfully market her fashions, perfumes, art, and books, which in turn increased her fortune and profile. She is chiefly remembered for her fashion influence, including her role in pioneering the concept of designer jeans, though her writings are also a lasting look into the lifestyle of the rich and famous in the twentieth century.

Other writers have found Vanderbilt to be a subject of interest. Famously, Truman Capote claimed to have based the character Holly Golightly in his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Vanderbilt. Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last, a television miniseries about her great-aunt’s battle to retain custody of the young Vanderbilt, aired in 1982. Vanderbilt’s children, including her son Anderson Cooper, a well-known television news anchor, are also a legacy of this artist, writer, socialite, and businessperson.

Bibliography

Gaines, Steven. Sky’s the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan. New York: Little, Brown, 2006.

Galewitz, Herb. Mother: A Book of Quotations. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2002.

McFadden, Robert D. "Gloria Vanderbilt Dies at 95; Built a Fashion Empire." The New York Times, 17 June 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/style/gloria-vanderbilt-death-dead.html. Accessed 2 Oct. 2020.

Stasz, Clarice. The Vanderbilt Women: Dynasty of Death, Glamour, and Tragedy. Bloomington, Ind.: iUniverse, 2000.