There is a photograph from 1934 that shows a ten-year-old girl with a neat bob haircut being led through a crowd of reporters toward a New York courthouse. She is one of the richest children in America, and she looks terrified. What was decided behind those doors would follow her into every marriage she ever had. By the autumn of 1934, America was deep in the Great Depression.
Millions of people were out of work, and breadlines stretched around city blocks. And yet, for weeks, the country could not stop reading about a courtroom battle over one little girl and her money. The girl was Gloria Laura Vanderbilt. She had been born on the twentieth of February 1924 in New York City, into one of the most famous families in the country.
Her great-great-grandfather was Cornelius Vanderbilt, the steamship and railroad tycoon who had built one of the largest fortunes in American history. By the 1920s, the Vanderbilt name meant mansions on Fifth Avenue, summer palaces in Newport, and a level of wealth most people could barely imagine. Her father, Reginald Vanderbilt, had been a charming, heavy-drinking heir who had spent much of his inheritance on horses, gambling, and parties. Her mother, Gloria Morgan, was a beautiful young socialite who had married him when she was just eighteen.
When the baby was only about a year and a half old, in September 1925, her father died. He was forty-five. He left his daughter a trust fund worth millions of dollars, and he left his young widow very little of her own. What followed was a childhood of glamour without warmth.
Her mother, still barely out of her teens, moved to Europe and spent the late 1920s and early 1930s in Paris, Biarritz, and the fashionable resorts of the continent, living on an allowance drawn from her daughter’s trust. She was often away at parties or traveling. Her twin sister, Thelma, became famous in her own right as the companion of the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII. The person who actually raised little Gloria was her nanny, an Irish-born woman named Emma Keislich, whom the child called Dodo.
Dodo was fiercely protective and deeply devoted to her, and she was deeply suspicious of the mother’s lifestyle. Little Gloria clung to her nanny as the only steady presence in her world. In the summer of 1934, the child was staying at the Long Island estate of her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a wealthy sculptor and art patron who would later found the Whitney Museum of American Art. When the mother wanted her daughter back, Gertrude refused to return her.
Instead, she went to court and asked for custody. What happened in that courtroom became known as the trial of the century. Every morning, crowds gathered outside the courthouse in Manhattan, hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous Vanderbilt women. Photographers jostled for pictures on the steps.
Newspapers across the country ran the story on their front pages day after day, and radio bulletins followed every twist. For millions of ordinary families struggling to pay the rent, it was an escape into a world of mansions, maids, and scandal. The mother’s twin sister, Thelma, stood by her throughout, and the two glamorous sisters, dressed in furs and pearls, became a familiar sight in the newspapers that autumn. The most shocking witness was not a stranger.
It was the child’s own grandmother, Laura Morgan, the mother of Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, who took the stand and testified against her own daughter, describing her as a neglectful, pleasure-seeking parent. Then came a former maid who made claims about the mother’s private life that were so scandalous for the time that the judge cleared the courtroom of reporters. The newspapers printed what they could anyway. The whole country was reading gossip about the sex life of a young widow whose only crime, as far as many people could see, was being young and fond of parties.
And then the child herself was questioned. In private, in the judge’s chambers, the ten-year-old told him that she was afraid of her mother and did not want to live with her. Whether those words were really her own, or whether they had been placed in her head by the adults around her, including her devoted nanny, has been debated ever since. She herself later came to believe that she had been manipulated.
In November 1934, the judge gave custody of the child to her aunt Gertrude. Her mother was allowed only limited visits. The mother was crushed. She had lost her daughter, her reputation, and, before long, much of the income that had come through the child’s trust.
She spent the years that followed in reduced circumstances, and the bitterness between her and the Vanderbilt family never really healed. It was a devastating outcome for the mother and a confusing one for the daughter. The newspapers called Gloria Vanderbilt the “poor little rich girl,” and the name stuck to her for the rest of her life. And soon, the one person she truly loved would be taken away too.
Not long after the trial, the court and her aunt’s household decided that Dodo was a bad influence. The nanny who had raised her from infancy was dismissed and sent away. For a little girl who had already lost her father and, in effect, her mother, it was a loss that would stay with her for life. She later described it as the most painful thing that had ever happened to her as a child.
She had not been allowed to say a proper goodbye. One day, Dodo was there, and then she was simply gone, and the little girl was left to wonder for years afterward whether she had somehow been to blame. She was now growing up in her aunt’s vast estate in Old Westbury on Long Island and in a grand house in Manhattan, surrounded by servants, tutors, and security guards. Kidnapping was a real fear for wealthy families in the 1930s, especially after the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932.
She was rarely allowed out alone. Her aunt was kind in her own distant way, but she was elderly and busy, and she did not know how to be a mother to a lonely, frightened child. The girl had cousins, dogs, horses, and every material thing imaginable. What she did not have was anyone who held her.
She saw her mother on weekends and during school holidays. Those visits were stiff and uncomfortable. The two Glorias barely knew each other. The mother, stung by the trial, could be cold and resentful.
The daughter felt guilty and confused about the part she had played. She was sent to good schools, including Miss Porter’s in Connecticut. She was shy, dreamy, and artistic. She loved to paint and to write in her diary, and she grew up with a deep, aching hunger for someone who would love her completely and take care of her.
By her teenage years, she had become strikingly beautiful. She had dark hair, pale skin, large, dark eyes, and a fragile, delicate look that photographers adored. The magazines and gossip columns watched her closely. Everyone wanted to know what the poor little rich girl would do next.
In 1941, at seventeen, she went to California to spend time with her mother in Beverly Hills. It was the first time she had lived with her in years. These were the glory days of the Sunset Strip, when stars dressed in evening clothes, packed nightclubs like Ciro’s and the Mocambo, danced to live orchestras, and were photographed at every table. Hollywood in 1941 was a glittering, dangerous place for a beautiful young heiress with a fortune coming to her at twenty-one and no one really looking out for her.
She was invited to every party. She went out with famous men, including the billionaire Howard Hughes. And at one of those parties, she met a man who, by her own later account, would become the first great mistake of her life. His name was Pasquale DiCicco, and everyone called him Pat.
He was a Hollywood agent and fixer, a handsome, smooth-talking man in his early thirties who knew everyone in town. He was a cousin of Albert Broccoli, the man who would later produce the James Bond films. He was also said to have ties to organized crime. His name had been linked in the newspapers to the gangster Lucky Luciano, and he had a past that many people in Hollywood whispered about.
In the early 1930s, he had been married to the popular comedy actress Thelma Todd. The marriage was stormy and ended in divorce in 1934. The following year, Thelma Todd was found dead in her car in a garage, in circumstances officially ruled an accident but that led to rumors and speculation for decades. None of this seemed to worry the seventeen-year-old heiress.
She was dazzled. He was older, confident, and worldly, and he made her feel grown up and wanted. For a girl who had spent her whole life longing for someone to take charge of her, he seemed to offer exactly that. Her family was horrified.
Her aunt Gertrude disapproved strongly. It made no difference. On the twenty-eighth of December 1941, just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Gloria Vanderbilt married Pat DiCicco in Santa Barbara, California. She was seventeen.
He was thirty-two. The newspapers covered the wedding breathlessly. There were photographs of the young bride in a long white gown and veil, looking up at her new husband with shy adoration. To the readers at home, it looked like a romantic Hollywood match.
The young woman in the pictures had no idea what she was walking into. Within weeks, according to her own later account, the marriage had turned violent. She described him as a man with a terrible temper who hit her. She later wrote that he beat her, sometimes badly, and that she was often frightened of him.
She said that on one occasion he struck her head against a wall. She hid it from almost everyone. She learned to cover bruises and to smile for photographers. When friends asked how married life was going, she told them she was happy.
She was too ashamed to tell anyone what was happening, and in the 1940s there was very little help available for a young wife in her situation, however rich she might be. He was also, by her account, controlling and jealous. He decided where she went and who she saw. He criticized her appearance and her behavior, and he was keenly aware that she would soon come into her inheritance.
In 1942, her aunt Gertrude died. The one person who had been responsible for her since the trial was gone. That same year, DiCicco joined the army during the Second World War, and she followed him to the base where he was stationed, living in a small rented place and trying to play the role of a beautiful military wife. Nobody looking at the quiet young woman would have guessed who she was or what was going on behind closed doors.
When she turned twenty-one in February 1945, she came into control of her fortune. And with it came the freedom to do something she had not had the power to do before. She left him. She went to Reno, Nevada, which in those days was the divorce capital of America.
Nevada allowed a divorce after just six weeks of residence, and the little city was full of unhappy wives from New York and California staying in hotels and dude ranches while they waited for their freedom. She was one of them. She obtained her divorce, and almost immediately afterward she married again. Her new husband was one of the most famous men in the world.
He was forty-two years older than her. His name was Leopold Stokowski. To anyone alive in the 1940s, he needed no introduction. He was the most glamorous conductor in the world.
For years he had led the Philadelphia Orchestra and turned it into one of the finest in America. He had wild, flowing silver-white hair, and he conducted without a baton, shaping the music with his bare hands. In 1940, he had appeared in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, conducting the orchestra on screen, and in one famous moment, he shook hands with Mickey Mouse. Children and adults across the country knew exactly who he was.
He had also been linked romantically with Greta Garbo, and photographs of the two of them traveling together in Italy in the late 1930s had made headlines around the world. He had been married twice before, and although he spoke with a vague foreign accent and was often mysterious about his past, he had actually been born in London in 1882. When he met Gloria Vanderbilt, he was in his early sixties. She was twenty.
For a young woman who had grown up without a father, who had just escaped a violent marriage, and who longed for someone older and wiser to guide her, he must have seemed like the answer to everything. He was brilliant, cultured, and gentle in his manner. He talked to her about art, music, and poetry. He took her seriously as a painter and a thinker.
He seemed to offer her the safety she had always wanted. They married in April 1945 in Nevada, within days of her divorce from DiCicco. The newspapers were stunned. The poor little rich girl had married a man old enough to be her grandfather.
Cartoonists and columnists mocked them, but for a while she seemed genuinely happy. They had two sons: Leopold Stanislaus, called Stan, born in August 1950, and Christopher, born in January 1952. But the marriage was not what it appeared to be. As time went by, she came to feel that her husband treated her less like a wife and more like a child or a student.
He was controlling in quieter ways than DiCicco had been. He decided how their home should be run and how their life should be organized, and he expected her to fit in around his work and his routines. He was often away touring and conducting, and when he was home, he was absorbed in his music. By her later account, she felt she had little room to grow into her own person.
She was expected to be the quiet, admiring young wife at his side, and she played the part for years, even as she felt herself shrinking inside it. She later suggested that she had married him looking for the father she had never had, and that in the end, that was exactly the problem. She also felt that he was cold and distant with their sons. He was in his late sixties and early seventies when they were small boys, and by many accounts, he did not know how to be a warm, playful father.
She felt more and more trapped. She had married him to be looked after, and she found herself lonely all over again, living in the shadow of a great man who seemed to see her as part of his world rather than as a person in her own right. By the mid-1950s, she was in her early thirties and had begun to realize that she wanted her own life. She painted, she wrote poetry, and she began acting on stage and on television.
She was becoming someone other than the child bride of a famous conductor. In 1955, she left him, and within months, she was in the arms of a man even more famous than her husband. In 1955, after separating from Stokowski, Gloria Vanderbilt began a relationship with Frank Sinatra. He was then at the height of his comeback.
He had won an Academy Award, his records were selling again, and his heart was still bruised from his marriage to Ava Gardner, which had fallen apart but had not yet been legally ended. She was one of the most talked-about women in New York. It was a brief, intense romance, and by her later account, it gave her a taste of excitement and freedom she had never known in her marriages, but it did not last, and it was not meant to. The divorce from Stokowski was granted in 1955.
What followed was bitter. There were fierce disagreements between the two of them over their sons, over custody, and over how the boys should be brought up, and in the years that followed, those disagreements ended up in court. For Gloria, who had been the object of a notorious custody battle as a child, it was a cruel echo of her own past. Now it was her own children who were caught between two parents.
It was around this time that she met a young director who seemed to be everything her previous husbands were not. His name was Sidney Lumet. He was her own age, in fact a few months younger than her. He had been a child actor on the Yiddish stage in New York and had become one of the most exciting young directors in live television, the golden age of drama broadcasts that went out to millions of homes every week.
He was clever, energetic, warm, and, crucially, close to her own age. Those were the days when plays were performed live on television, broadcast straight into living rooms across America with no second takes and no room for mistakes. Lumet had directed hundreds of them, and he thrived on the pressure. They married on the twenty-eighth of August 1956.
For a while, it seemed like a fresh start. The following year, he directed his first feature film, 12 Angry Men, with Henry Fonda, which became one of the most admired courtroom dramas ever made. His career took off. She continued to act, paint, and write.
They moved in the lively world of New York theater and television, and they seemed, on the surface, a well-matched modern couple. But there were problems they could not fix. He was consumed by his work, and she often felt left behind. They wanted different things from life.
By most accounts, there was no great drama or violence in this marriage. It was quieter than that. Two people who had fallen in love quickly slowly realized that they were not right for each other. The marriage ended in divorce in August 1963.
Lumet soon married again, and he went on to make some of the most celebrated American films of the next few decades. She rarely spoke badly of him. Of all her marriages, it was the one she seemed to look back on with the least bitterness, and perhaps the most sadness. She was thirty-nine, and she had been married three times.
The newspapers treated her as a restless heiress who could not settle down. Only a very few people knew how much pain she had carried through each of those marriages. And then, within months, she met the man who would become the love of her life. It would be the happiest marriage she ever had.
And it would end in the cruelest way of all. His name was Wyatt Cooper. He was born on the first of September 1927 in Quitman, Mississippi, and he grew up poor in the rural South, in a world as far from the Vanderbilt mansions as it was possible to get. He had worked as an actor and then as a writer and editor, and he was gentle, funny, thoughtful, and deeply interested in people and their stories.
She met him at a dinner party in New York. By her account, she fell in love with him almost immediately. He was not impressed by her fame, and he did not seem to want anything from her. He simply listened, asked questions, and made her laugh.
After three marriages to men who had, in their different ways, wanted to control or mold her, she found that astonishing. For the first time in her life, she felt that she had met someone who loved her for who she was, not for her name, her money, or her fame. They married on the twenty-fourth of December 1963, Christmas Eve. Their first son, Carter, was born on the twenty-seventh of January 1965.
Their second son, Anderson, was born on the third of June 1967. For the next decade and a half, she had the family life she had always dreamed of. By all accounts, Wyatt Cooper was a devoted husband and a wonderful father. He was patient, curious, and loving with the boys.
He talked with them endlessly about history, books, and the family stories of the South. He later wrote a book called Families, published in 1975, about what families mean to the people in them, drawing on his own childhood and his life with Gloria and their sons. The boys grew up in a home filled with art, books, and conversation. Their father told them stories about the Mississippi relatives they had never met, and their mother painted in a studio full of color.
Anderson later recalled those years as a time of warmth and safety, a family that seemed to a little boy as if it would last forever. At the same time, her working life took off in an entirely new direction. She had always been artistic, and from the 1960s onward, she turned her talent into a business. She designed prints for scarves, linens, and household goods, and her name began appearing on everything from greeting cards to china.
Then, in the late 1970s, she helped launch something that made her more famous than ever. It was a line of designer jeans. They were cut to flatter women’s figures, they had her signature stitched on the back pocket, and they carried a little swan logo. At the height of the designer jeans craze of the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were everywhere.
Women of all ages bought them. Her face appeared in television commercials. The poor little rich girl had become a household name all over again, this time for something she had created herself. Many younger shoppers had never even heard of the custody trial.
To them, she was simply the elegant woman on the back pocket of their favorite jeans. Her first two sons from her marriage to Stokowski were grown by now, and she was living in New York with Wyatt, Carter, and Anderson. It seemed, at last, that the pain of her early life was behind her. And then, in January 1978, everything fell apart.
In early 1978, Wyatt Cooper went into a hospital in New York for heart surgery. He had been having heart trouble, and the doctors recommended an operation. It was a serious procedure, but he was only fifty years old, and the family was hopeful. On the fifth of January 1978, during the surgery, he died.
It was sudden and completely devastating. The man who had seemed to hold the whole family together had gone into the hospital expecting to come home, and he never did. Carter was twelve. Anderson was ten.
Their mother, who had finally found the happiness she had longed for her entire life, was left alone. Anderson later described the loss of his father as the moment his childhood effectively ended. He has said that he became quieter and more guarded, and that he felt he had to grow up very quickly. Carter, too, withdrew into himself.
The house felt different. His mother was lost in grief. The family’s sense of security was gone. For Gloria, it was the cruelest blow imaginable.
She had lost her father before she could remember him. She had been separated from her mother by a court. She had lost her nanny. She had endured a violent first marriage, a cold second one, and a disappointing third.
And now the one man who had truly loved her and made her feel safe was gone, taken on an operating table at the age of fifty. She threw herself into her work and her children. She kept designing. She kept painting.
She began writing her memoirs. The designer jeans business was thriving. And on the surface, she seemed to be coping. But she had come to rely on a small circle of trusted advisers to help her manage her money, her business affairs, and, in some ways, her emotional life.
She believed they were looking after her. They were not. In the years after Wyatt’s death, she placed enormous trust in two men. One was her lawyer, who handled her financial and business affairs.
The other was her psychiatrist, whom she saw regularly and who became a close adviser in her personal life. They were business partners with each other, and by the late 1980s, she had come to depend on both of them. She was not a woman who had been raised to understand money. When she signed papers, she often did not read them closely.
When she was told an investment was sound, she believed it. She had been born into a fortune managed by trustees and lawyers. She had never balanced a checkbook the way ordinary people do. And after Wyatt’s death, she was vulnerable and grieving.
It later emerged that the two men had been taking advantage of her. They had used her money for their own purposes, and they had been doing it for years. By the time she discovered what had happened, she had lost millions of dollars. She also found that she owed a huge amount in unpaid taxes.
She went to court. Years later, a judge ruled in her favor, but by then much of the money was gone for good. She was forced to sell her homes, including her house in Southampton and her apartment in New York. Belongings that had been part of her life for decades had to go.
For the first time, the woman who had been born to one of the greatest fortunes in America had to think carefully about how she would pay her bills. For a woman whose name was a byword for wealth, it was a humiliating reversal. She later described what it felt like to discover that the people she had trusted most had betrayed her. Her son Anderson would say that it made her even more determined to earn her own living through her own work, and she did, for the rest of her life.
But the financial betrayal, as painful as it was, would soon seem almost small compared with what was about to happen. In the summer of 1988, she would face the worst day of her life. By 1988, Carter Cooper was twenty-three years old. He was handsome, intelligent, and gentle, and by all accounts, he was very close to his mother.
He had graduated from Princeton University and was working as an editor at a magazine about American history. From the outside, he seemed to be doing well. But in the months before that summer, he had been struggling. He had gone through a difficult breakup, and he had become withdrawn and anxious.
His mother noticed that something was wrong, and she was worried about him. On the twenty-second of July 1988, a hot summer day in New York, he came to see her at her apartment on the Upper East Side. He had been resting there. He seemed confused and distressed.
And then, in a moment of crisis, he went out onto the terrace of the apartment, which was many floors above the street. His mother followed him. She tried desperately to reach him and to talk him back inside. She pleaded with him.
By her own account, she did everything she could think of to calm him. He fell from the terrace, and he died. She had been there. She had seen it happen.
In the hours that followed, police and reporters gathered outside the building, and once again, as in 1934, the most private agony of her life became a story in the newspapers. It is almost impossible to describe what that must have done to her. She had spent her entire life longing for a family of her own, and she had lost her husband and now her son within ten years. She had watched helplessly as her child died in front of her.
Anderson, who was twenty-one at the time, was away when it happened. He later described coming home to find his mother shattered. The two of them clung to each other in the terrible weeks and months that followed. For years, she searched for answers.
She believed that a reaction to a medication Carter had been taking for asthma might have contributed to his confusion that day. She wrote a book about her son and about her grief, called A Mother’s Story, published in 1996. In it, she described that day and everything that followed with extraordinary honesty. She said, in effect, that the only thing that kept her going was the knowledge that she still had Anderson, and that she could not leave him alone.
Anderson, for his part, later said that losing his father and then his brother shaped the direction of his life. He began traveling to some of the most dangerous places in the world as a young reporter, covering wars and disasters, and he has spoken about how being around other people’s grief helped him understand his own. The mother and son who had lost so much became closer than ever. And the loss of Carter was not the only family wound she carried.
Her relationship with one of her sons from her marriage to Stokowski had already become deeply painful, and it would remain so for decades. Her younger son with Stokowski, Christopher, had a complicated relationship with her. He had been a small boy when his parents divorced, and he had grown up in the middle of their bitter disagreements. The custody battles of the 1950s, which she had once endured as a child, had been repeated in her own family.
Over the years, Christopher became estranged from his mother, and for decades he had very little contact with her. She later spoke with deep sadness about that estrangement. It was one of the great regrets of her life. She kept his photographs, and she spoke of him with love, even during the long years when they did not speak at all.
She had tried again and again to understand what had gone wrong and to find a way back to him, but it was never fully resolved. Her relationship with her elder son, Stan, was closer. But the damage done in those early years, when two brilliant, difficult parents fought over their children, could not be completely undone. For a woman who had spent her childhood at the center of a famous custody fight, the pattern repeating itself in her own family was one of the cruelest ironies of her life.
And yet through all of it, she kept going. She kept working. She kept writing. And in her final years, she would find a way to tell her own story in her own words, alongside the son who had stayed beside her through everything.
In her later years, she lived in New York, surrounded by her paintings, her books, and her memories. She had a long, close friendship and romance with the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, one of the most important Black artists of the twentieth century. They were close for many years, until his death in 2006. She continued to paint, and her work was shown in galleries.
She never lost her appetite for surprising people. In 2009, at the age of eighty-five, she published a romantic novel for adults that was so frank it caused a small sensation, and she seemed thoroughly amused by the reaction. She wrote novels and memoirs, including books about her childhood and her marriages. In one of them, she wrote openly about the violence of her first marriage, which she had kept hidden for decades.
In others, she described her relationships with Stokowski and Lumet, and her love for Wyatt Cooper. Her son Anderson became one of the best-known television journalists in America. In 2016, the two of them published a book together called The Rainbow Comes and Goes, based on a year of emails they exchanged about her life, his life, their family, and their losses. That same year, a documentary called Nothing Left Unsaid told her story to a new generation.
In those final years, she spoke with remarkable openness and humor about everything she had been through. She talked about her mother, her aunt, her nanny, her husbands, her sons, and the moments of joy and pain in between. She did not ask for pity. She seemed, if anything, fascinated by her own life and by what she had learned from it.
She said, in effect, that she had always been a romantic, and that she had always believed that love was worth the risk, even after everything. She died at her home in New York on the seventeenth of June 2019, at the age of ninety-five. Anderson was with her. He announced her death on his television program, speaking about her with great love and describing her as an extraordinary woman who had lived an extraordinary life.
Looking back across those ninety-five years, it is hard to see where any of it could have gone differently. She was a child who lost her father before she could remember him, and then lost her mother to a courtroom. She was raised in luxury but without warmth. She spent her youth looking for someone who would love her and take care of her.
She found a man who hit her, a man who treated her like a child, a man who drifted away, and finally a man who truly loved her and was taken from her far too soon. Then she lost a son in a way no parent should ever have to endure, and she lived through a long estrangement from another. Each marriage, in its own way, echoed something from that first great wound: the need to be looked after, the fear of being abandoned, the longing for a safe home. And each time she reached for it, something cruel was waiting on the other side.
She kept reaching anyway. Today, that photograph from 1934 still exists. A little girl with a bob haircut being led into a courthouse through a crowd of strangers, with the whole country waiting to hear what would happen to her.
She had no idea what lay ahead.
