Reply #64: There's one book . . . [View All]

[TeeYiYi]

. . . about her from 1980, a biography called, "Little Gloria, Happy at Last" that's pretty informative. Here's a synopsis from the author's website:

Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last

Not even Hollywood in its heyday could have dreamed up a melodrama so electrifying as the one that swirled around 10-year-old “Little Gloria” Vanderbilt in 1934 when she became the object of a scandalous custody battle between her beautiful but poor, and none too bright, mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and her rich, powerful aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney whose own private life included several lovers and a pseudonymous novel about lesbianism. Taking the court case as her focal point, and documenting it every step of the way, Goldsmith has produced a book of fabulous readability. It is the psychological perception she brings to her story that grips so intensely, however. What she is chronicling is the whole passing parade of American and international high society at a time of tumultuous transition when the old guard was giving way to the new “café” society. And what a cast of characters she has?everything from royals (Thelma, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt’s twin, was mistress to the Prince of Wales), grande dames, a rigid Irish Catholic Tammany judge, and a “devoted,” hideously possessive nurse, to the terrified little girl, told her mother might kill her. Over it all loomed the aura of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Goldsmith probes the motives, the secrets, the hidden longings of them all credibly and compassionately in a book that will sell and sell and sell. This book has it all.
--Publishers Weekly

Barbara Goldsmith’s book is a stunning retelling of that episode that emphasizes both its sociology and it psychology. This is the year’s most …unputdownable slice of American social history. It has virtually everything: immense wealth, the clash of strong personalities, petty bickerings, sex on Porthault sheets, British royalty and a child in psychic pain. Ms. Goldsmith paints a Proustian picture of the American upper class and the international set of which it was a part a picture that throbs with verisimilitude because it includes so much magnificent detail. It is scrupulous and well written.
--Alden Whitman, The Philadelphia Inquirer

http://www.barbaragoldsmith.com/work6.htm

In LITTLE GLORIA, Barbara Goldsmith has written the definitive biography of Gloria Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt has had a life that reads like a preposterous soap opera. Goldsmith details all of it, particularly the notorious custody trial in which Gloria's paternal aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, battled Gloria's notorious mother for custody. The fact that the focus of this well-publicized battle was just a single little girl too often is forgotten. This book is a thorough look into a fascinating footnote to history, and a glimpse at the lifestyle of America's richest family from the Gilded Age through the early years of the 20th Century. LITTLE GLORIA is required reading for students of American social history.
--HeyJudy "heyjudy" (East Hampton, NY USA)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0394428366/qid=1129683243/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-1451784-5015235?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

TYY