GLORIA'S EUPHORIA
Gloria Vanderbilt has written her memoirs and has finally exorcised the demons of her lonely childhood and its shattering custody battle, as she tells DOMINICK DUNNE in an intimate conversation
APRIL 1985 DOMINICK DUNNE
At the window table in Mortimer's on New York's Upper East Side, Jerry Zipkin, the First Lady's close friend, was celebrating his seventieth birthday with a group of social figures that included Nan Kempner, Chessy Rayner, Mica and Ahmet Ertegun, and Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera, all of whom were passing elaborately wrapped gifts to him. Mica Ertegun's present, which Zipkin opened and held up, was a nineteenth-century painting of a boar, with the name Zip on a small brass plate attached to the frame, and the joke was greeted with hoots and screams from the assembled company.
At a nearby table, faced away from the merriment, sat Gloria Vanderbilt, alone, waiting for her luncheon companion. And at the bar, all the people waiting for tables were staring at her, not at the riotous party behind her.
"She looks wonderful," said a lady in a feathered hat.
"Marvelous," her friend replied.
They spoke with that proprietary tone New Yorkers reserve for a cherished celebrity—a survivor as well, in this case, against all odds of being one—who continues to cast a magic spell.
"No one told me you were here!" she cried, greeting me at the door of her red library. "Have you been waiting long?" She was contrite. She always rises before six, and at that hour, shortly after nine, she had been about the business of her life for several hours.
Gloria Laura Madelaine Sophia Vanderbilt di Cicco Stokowski Lumet Cooper is, like the Queen of England and Elizabeth Taylor, a lifetime celebrity, famous from childhood. She was wearing brown cashmere, and she settled elegantly into the corner of a chintz sofa. The great-great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who founded the family railroad and shipping fortune, lives in a penthouse on Gracie Square with her two teenage sons by her last husband, writer Wyatt Cooper, who died in 1978. Outside, beyond the terrace, tugboats lumbered by under the Triborough Bridge on the sundappled East River—that magical view you see so often in movies about rich people in Manhattan.
She speaks in a breathless, whispery, society-girl voice, and there is a trace of a stammer, under control and attractive. Her much photographed flour-white face, so prominent at theatrical and social parties in New York, was scrubbed and clear. Her hair, no longer black and severe, is now chestnut-colored, and it moved freely as she talked and gestured. She looked healthy and fresh and much younger than her well-documented age of sixty-one.
That morning a gossip column had announced that she might be on the verge of marrying again, and she giggled luxuriously over the item, her dimples deepening, her eyes sparkling, at the same time dismissing and enjoying it. She was, even in the morning, decidedly glamorous. She held a gold cigarette case with a sapphire clasp that she had bought at auction. Inside, engraved, were the words "To Gertie from Noel' and the notes to the opening phrase of "Some Day I'll Find You."
"Isn't it divine?" she asked. She had bought it specially for her great friend Bill Blass, the dress designer, and had intended to leave it to him in her will, but Blass, a constant smoker, had recently lost his own cigarette case, which had been left to him by the late Billy Baldwin, the interior designer, so she had decided to give it to him when they met for lunch later that day, rather than leave it to him after she was dead.
