Monday, May. 06, 1985
Society's Child Once Upon a Time
By Stefan Kanfer
The memoir starts with a profound error: "In the beginning," writes Gloria Vanderbilt, "a child believes that all other children are in the same world that she or he inhabits. That is how a poor child defines all others, and that is how a rich child defines all others."
In fact, deprived children are cruelly aware of those who have more; the streets and screens provide all the evidence they need. It is only the privileged young who can be free, however briefly, from envy. Given this flaw, Once Upon a Time, an account of the heiress's first 17 years, might have been a mere riches-to-rags saga of Society's Child, who proved that success was largely a matter of jeans. Instead the author speaks in melancholy outbursts about an evaporated world of titled men and breathtaking women, of movie stars and mansions and what seemed to be a permanently floodlighted arena lacking only one component: love.
Gloria Sr. was 19 when she gave birth in 1924; less than two years later, Little Gloria's father, Reggie Vanderbilt, died of inadequacy and excess, burned out at 44. Mama, a society beauty with the social conscience of a moth, fluttered from Europe to the U.S. and back again. Little Gloria became a piece of human luggage, shuttled from country places to castles, possessed by magical thoughts: "If I stayed still enough, the motor would start. If I held my breath, the front door would not open . . . I made a bargain with myself not to cry, and then the coach would glide away, away from the grey house where nobody lived, away away away."
No amount of wishing could prevent her from becoming the most publicized child of the '30s. Appalled by whispers of Gloria Sr.'s loose life of pornographic orgies and sapphic lovers, Little Gloria's paternal aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sued for custody of the child in 1934 and won. In the best account of this celebrated trial, Little Gloria, Happy at Last (1980), Journalist Barbara Goldsmith argued that a greater anguish lay below the ten-year-old's fear of being torn from her home in some Solomonic decision. "I was afraid she would take me away," Gloria had testified, ". . . do something . . . then IT will happen." Here, Goldsmith theorizes, the girl was subtly conscious of the second most famous child of '30s headlines, the Lindbergh baby, who had been taken from his home and murdered: "IT," writes Goldsmith, "was death."
Although this specific dread is unacknowledged by the autobiographer, it seems to be the subtext of the hearing and all that follows: "I had been led on into a strange country, a country that knew no boundaries and was called Pain." Terrified of strangers, besieged by reporters, taunted in schools, Gloria blinks through a chaos of flashbulbs and interrogations; in a nation wasted by the Depression, she becomes America's real-life Little Orphan Annie.
It is this stuttering, bewildered figure who complies with any request: "That's better that's better, Little Gloria--only smile, please, smile smile smile smile!" Later she becomes pathetically grateful for romantic attention. Some adolescent scenes might have been snipped from a Philip Barry comedy: when 16-year-old Gloria develops a crush on a neighbor, an aunt informs her, "You can't marry him--because if you did, why--well--your name would be--Smith--wouldn't it? You'd be--MRS. SMITH!" The sobbing girl is consoled by her grandmother: "Maybe he could call himself Smythe--wouldn't that be a good idea? Yes, yes--or even better, he could hyphenate his last names--it would be Austin-Smythe."
Far more often, the author evinces a tragic yearning for days that never were. Her obviously neglectful and self-indulgent mother is made into an art nouveau madonna, complete with aura: "I would drift into . . . the sunlight yellow that surrounded her." Reality is hard to hold; at 17, Gloria finds herself staring hard at visitors, "because if I didn't keep my eyes on them they might all disappear in a puff of the . . . cigarette." She imagines a sofa as "a nest on the topmost branch of a tree where I'm safe and nothing can harm me."
Despite the author's early myopia about wealth and poverty, her book is an astonishingly candid war diary of will vs. psychosis and despair. True, the record glistens with names: William Randolph Hearst, Constance Bennett, the Prince of Wales and, of course, a parade of Vanderbilts and Whitneys. But they are the literary equivalent of sequins on an evening dress. Once Upon a Time is no clothbound gossip column, and its heroine is not the triumphant lady of the commercials, with shiny eyes and fixed grin. She is the buried child of long, long ago, still eager to please, still hungry for love, still dreaming of release.