In the 1930s Gloria Vanderbilt was the subject
of an intense legal case known as ‘the trial of the century’ as her mother and aunt fought
over custody and her inheritance. She was possibly the last Vanderbilt Heiress
but despite her family issues she rose to become a successful figure in her own
right. Join me as we explore her story. Birth & Family
Gloria Laura Vanderbilt was born on the 20th of February 1924 in Manhattan, New York into a
dynasty of massive American wealth and influence. It’s reported that after her birth, Glorias father
was heard saying “It is fantastic how Vanderbilt she looks! See the corners of her eyes, how they
turn up?". The Vanderbilts were a large network of families by that time, all ultimately descended
from Cornelius Vanderbilt, the foremost steamship and railway tycoon in the United States in the
middle of the nineteenth century. Vanderbilt had once quite possibly been the wealthiest
man alive as his trains and ships formed the transport nucleus of the industrialisation of
America. The family’s wealth had been dispersed in subsequent generations, though many scions of
the Vanderbilts were still enormously wealthy. Gloria’s father was one of the heirs to this
wealth. Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt was a great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
His older brother Alfred had inherited the lion’s share of their branch of the family’s
money, but in an age when existing wealth could beget further wealth if invested wisely
Reginald’s few million dollars’ of inheritance still constituted a sizeable fortune. Though,
he ended up squandering a large part of it, spending lavishly on equestrian sports and
gambling. He was also an alcoholic and he died in September 1925 from cirrhosis of the liver
when Gloria was just one and a half years old. Gloria was the only child of Reginald’s marriage
to Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt. She came from a prominent political family and had married
Reginald, who was 24 years older than her, in 1923, not long before little Gloria was born.
In his will Reginald left most of his wealth to Gloria Jnr. and another daughter he had, Cathleen,
from a separate marriage. Reginald left Gloria’s mother only a comparatively small allowance and
this would soon become the point of contention in an infamous trial which Gloria would be
central to while she was still just a child. The Trial of the Century
Despite Reginald Vanderbilt’s irresponsibility and poor business acumen,
the estate which Gloria and her half-sister inherited was still worth about five million
dollars, a very sizeable sum in the 1920s worth approximately one-hundred million dollars
in today’s money. This was held in trust for Gloria and the money was to be administered
during her younger years by her mother. However, in the course of the late 1920s and early
1930s, and particularly so after the Wall Street Crash and the inception of the Great
Depression, Gloria’s aunt, her father’s sister, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, began to scrutinise
how Gloria’s mother was spending this money. This escalated in the early 1930s as Gertrude
began questioning whether Gloria’s mother was fit on any level to parent her. There was a
legitimate case here. Gloria Snr. had spent much of the second half of the 1920s living
the high life in Paris, London and Biarritz and had often left her daughter with family
members for protracted periods of time in New York while she swanned around Europe. It
was in this context that Gertrude Vanderbilt pressed legal charges against Gloria’s
mother in 1934 to obtain custody of Gloria. What was dubbed the trial of the century at
the time was really just a custody battle, though it also focused on whether or not Gloria’s
mother had mismanaged her daughter’s inheritance. The trial was scandalous. Newspapers reported
on the salacious revelations for weeks as evidence of a lesbian relationship Gloria’s
mother had been involved in surfaced. On one occasion a maid who had worked for Gloria’s
mother testified for five hours in a manner which depicted Gloria Snr. as what one
publication at the time termed, quote, “a cocktail-crazed dancing mother, a devotee of
sex erotica and the mistress of a German prince.” Unsurprisingly, Gloria herself ended
up being described as a ‘poor little rich girl’ by the media, the ten-year
old heiress who had lost her father and been effectively abandoned by
her neglectful mother. Meanwhile, in an effort to manage the media circus in
and around the court, the judge ordered that the court be emptied of nearly all attendees
in order for ten-year-old Gloria to testify. When the result came down it was a negative one
for Gloria’s mother. She was deemed to have been a neglectful mother and custody of her was granted
to Gertrude, as was the responsibility of managing her inheritance, although an allowance was
maintained for Gloria Snr. Her mother was allowed visits on weekends and would appeal
the result in 1936, but she was unsuccessful in doing so and the relationship between mother
and daughter never fully healed. In 1946, when she was in her early twenties and had acquired full
control over her finances, Gloria stopped paying the $21,000 allowance which her mother received
annually, saying her mother could work for a living and that she would henceforth be donating
the $21,000 to various charities every year. From the 1940s until her death, Glorias
mother would live with her sister, Thelma Furness, Viscountess Furness
in New York City and Los Angeles. Gloria snr eventually died from cancer in 1965. Early Adult Life
As Gloria grew up after the trial she attended numerous schools in New York
and the wider East Coast of the United States. Initially this was at the prestigious Greenvale
School on Long Island followed by a stint at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, a
girl’s preparatory school which has been attended over the years by the daughters of America’s
leading business and political dynasties. An increasingly attractive young woman, she was also
modelling by her late teens, though her full foray into the world of fashion would only come decades
later. By age seventeen, tiring of the rigidity of life under her aunt, she struck out on her own
and went to live in Hollywood in California. These early adult years saw her
endeavour to begin a career in the arts, attending the Arts Student League in New
York City for a time and then working both as a visual artist and as an actress,
the latter in part motivating her decision to move out west to Los Angeles in the early
1940s. This interest would continue over the years and in the 1950s and 1960s she appeared in
numerous Broadway productions as well as several well-known television shows of the time such
as The Love Boat and The Time of Your Life. Marriages & Relationships
Gloria’s arrival in Hollywood soon resulted in her first marriage. This was to
Pat DiCicco, a Hollywood talent agent who was in his early thirties. She was just seventeen
when they married. The marriage was abusive, and Gloria later stated that DiCicco
had left her repeatedly with black eyes and psychologically belittled
her. She divorced him in 1945, however the union had done lasting damage to
her relationship with her aunt Gertrude. She disapproved of him from the start and as Gloria
Married him anyway, Gertrude cut her out of her share of the Vanderbilt wealth in her will. She
died in 1942, just a year after the marriage. A day after divorcing DiCicco, Gloria married
the 63 year old conductor Leopold Stokowski. It was a happier union than her first,
despite his being three times her age at the time of their marriage. It lasted
ten years and resulted in two children, sons called Leopold Stanislaus and
Christopher born in 1950 and 1952. Again Gloria did not remain single for long after
her second divorce in 1955. Just a year later she married Sidney Lumet. He was the same age as
Gloria, and they had quite similar interests as he was a Broadway director, and she was
an aspiring actress. The following year, his immensely successful directorial career commenced
with the release of Twelve Angry Men, one of the greatest films of all time. The marriage did
not result in any children and ended in 1963, presumably the result of infidelities as both of
them were married again within a matter of weeks. Gloria’s fourth and final husband was Wyatt Emory
Cooper, another screenwriter and actor. They would remain married until his death during open heart
surgery in 1978. They had two children together, Carter and Anderson born in 1965 and 1967
respectively. While these were the details of her four marriages, Gloria had numerous
other relationships with prominent individuals over the years, many of them affairs
while she was otherwise married. These included relationships with the actor Marlon
Brando, the singer and actor Frank Sinatra, the inventor and mogul Howard Hughes and a reputed
affair with the children’s writer Roald Dahl. Fashion Career
While she had set out to be an actress in the 1940s and 1950s, Gloria
is primarily remembered today for her fashion career. In the 1970s she collaborated with
Mohan Murjani of the Murjani Group to launch a line of jeans bearing her name. The line was
successful and in the years that followed was expanded out into a range of other clothing and
accessories including dresses, blouses, shoes, leather bags and other items. This continued
to expand over the years and by the 2000s also involved a range of successful fragrances.
All of these endeavours were lucrative, catching the changing trends of
women’s fashion and so Gloria managed to establish herself as a successful
businesswoman between the 1970s and the 2000s. Later Life & Literary Work
Gloria Vanderbilt’s later life was more settled and less chaotic in many ways
than her earlier life had been. She certainly had a less dramatic love life and she did not
marry again after her fourth husband died in 1978. She developed new interests in the 1980s
and 1990s. One was renewed interest in a career as a visual artist. Back in the late 1960s
some of her earlier work had been used to develop a range of cards by Hallmark and in
the 1990s she began working again in glass, paint and pottery. The result was a series of
shows, most of which were held in the 2000s, in various exhibition spaces on the East
Coast, while she also took up a roll as a philanthropist in this respect, acting as
a critic at various shows and competitions. However, Gloria’s great love in her later life
was writing. Between the 1970s and her death she published half a dozen memoirs documenting
various aspects of her life up to that time, notably reflecting on the trial involving her
mother and aunt back in 1934 and another on her marriages and relationships over the years. She
also published three fiction novels, Never Say Good-Bye, published in 1989, The Memory Book of
Star Faithfull, published in 1994, and Obsession: An Erotic Tale, published in 2009. There was
also a growing interest in writing about her, notably through the appearance of Barbara
Goldsmith’s book, Little Gloria, in 1980, a work examining the trial in 1934 and the
cultural contexts in which it occurred. Death & Ancestors
Vanderbilt died at home in Manhattan on the 17th of June 2019. The apparent
cause of her death was stomach cancer, though she was 95 years of age by then and had lived a long
and productive life. She was laid to rest in the Vanderbilt family crypt on Staten Island.
One of her sons from her fourth marriage to Walter Emory Cooper, Carter, had committed
suicide back in 1988. She left her estate to the other son from that union, Anderson Cooper,
the well-known CNN news anchor and journalist. Thank you everyone so much for watching this
video on Gloria Vanderbilt I hope you found it interesting let me know what you thought
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