“No. Never. I always want to live with my aunt.”
“You lived a long while with your mother?”
“Yes, but I have hardly seen her, anything of her. She has never been nice to me.”
“You wrote a lot of letters to her that said you loved her.”
“No, I did not. Never. I used to write letters to her because I was afraid of her—and when she made me a sweater I just thanked her for it—and I hardly ever—”
“Don’t you think you could learn to love her?”
“No.”
“Oh, you could, if you did not make up your mind not to,” the judge told her. “You lived with her for six or seven years over in Paris?”
“But I hardly ever saw anything of her.”
“You used to write letters to her and draw little pictures of dogs and horses?”
“Well, I had to because I was afraid that she would do something to me,” Gloria responded.
“She never did anything to you?”
“Yes, she did.”
“What did she do?”
“Well—she never used to let me have toys, or anything, or have children to come and see me, and sometimes in the daytime she never used to see me at all. She used to just go off with her friends.”
“Why, she took you to nice places, to England, where you had little boys and girls and you had a pony over there?”
“No, I did not. Never.”
“Didn’t you ride a pony over there?”
“No, because I never had riding lessons. Once they got me a riding suit, and I just sat on the pony and walked around.”
“I think she would get you a pony now.”
“No, I never want to go back to her. Do I have to?” she asked, looking at him beseechingly.
“I think you will want to.”
“No,” she whispered, starting to cry.
“It is not that you have to. I think you will begin to love her and want to go back.”
“No, I won’t” Gloria wept.
“My little girl—I used to be away a long time when I was in Washington, I used to be away all week, and I used to come home, and she used to be glad to see me.”
“Yes, but probably you were nice to her.”
“How was it your mother was not nice to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean that she was not nice to you?”
“Once I had a little dog and I loved him very much, and she took him away from me.”
“Maybe the dog had fleas.”
“No. He did not.”
“Was he a bad dog?…A nasty dog?”
“No, he was a lovely little dog.”
“Didn’t Miss Keislich get a little dog for you? Wasn’t she nice to you?”
“Very.”
“Didn’t she take you out to the park and give you a good time in the park over there?”
“She did. But my mother didn’t.”
“But your mother paid her for doing that. Your mother told her to do that.”
“I don’t think she did,” Gloria responded.
“Your mother told her to take good care of you and take you out to the park. All the good things Miss Keislich did for you, she did it because your mother had her there.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Is it because you have a good time in the country that you want to stay down there with your cousins?”
“No, I love Auntie Ger, and I always want to stay with her.”
“Wouldn’t you like to have your mother come to see you once in a while?”
“No.”
“Look at all the years you lived with your mother over in Paris.”
“I don’t care. I don’t like her.”
“You used to like her until you went down in the country?”
“No, I did not.”
The judge leafed through a stack of postcards little Gloria had sent to her mother.
“Look at all the little postal cards you sent to her….”
“Well, I had to, because I was afraid of her.”
“Afraid of what?” the judge asked. “You don’t believe in bugaboos, do you?”
“No.”
“What would you be afraid of?…What are you afraid of?”
“I don’t know. I am just afraid of her.”
“Do you know your two aunts, Lady Furness?”
“Yes.”
“And the other lady—what’s her name?”
“Mrs. Thaw?”
“You like them?”
“No.”
“You used to like them when they were over in France?”
“No, I did not. I used to like…Lord Furness. He was very nice to me.”
“How were they not nice to you?”
“Well, they used to take things away from me. And in the morning she would not let me come in her room. She used to say she is busy.”
“Whom do you mean by this?” Justice Carew inquired.
“My mother.”
“They always bought you nice clothes, toys, dolls and fairy books, fairy tales and things like that, didn’t they?”
“Sometimes. Hardly ever. In England, they hardly ever used to pay any attention to me. They used to go out to parties and things.”
“Well, they were grown-up people, and children ought to go to bed early. ‘Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’ Did you ever hear that?”
“Yes.”
“When you grow up you will be able to go out to parties and dances.”
“She never even kissed me good night….”168
Attorney Burkan entered the fray.
“You have a nurse, don’t you?” he asked little Gloria. “A nurse whose name is Miss Keislich, but whom you call—Dodo, is it?”
“Yes.”
“Has Dodo ever told you to say things or do things that—?”
“Never, never, no she never told me not to, nothing, never!” Gloria protested before the full question was asked.169
Mr. Burkan showed Gloria a photograph of herself smiling at her mother.
“You were smiling at your mommy, weren’t you?”
“Yes, because when I was kneeling there the photographer said to smile. And I did.”
“And at that time you hated your mommy?”
“Yes.”
He showed her a picture of herself as an infant in her mother’s arms.
“You didn’t hate her then, did you?”
“Oh, well, I was a baby then.”
“How old were you when you began to hate your mother?”
“As soon as I could understand things. I mean as soon as I could talk.”
“You began to talk when you were about two years and a half.”
“Yes, it was about then.”
“So when you were about two years and a half, you began to hate your mother?”
“Yes.”
“And when you were two and a half years old, you began to be afraid of your mother?”
“Yes.”
The judge jumped in. “What did your mother do to you that made you feel that way when you were a little bit of a tot like that?”
“Well, for one thing she was mean to me and never used to let me see anything of her. She never used to come into my room to kiss me good night.”170
“You were afraid?” Mr. Burkan continued.
“Yes.”
“What was it? What was the thing that you were really afraid of?”
“Well, I was afraid that she would take me away.”171
“You hate your mother,” Justice Carew stated. “Why do you hate your mother?”
“Afraid.”
“Why are you afraid?”
“Afraid because I don’t want her to take me away. I don’t want her to take me away, I am afraid that she will take me away….”
“Who—who are your afraid of being taken away from?”
What little Gloria wanted to say was Nurse Keislich, Dodo, don Ï let
her take me away from Dodo. But that, she knew, was the incorrect answer. She had been instructed as to the correct answer, and she recited her lines with conviction.
“Yes yes yes, from Aunt Gertrude, don’t let them take me away from Aunt Gertrude, don’t let my mother take me away from Aunt Gertrude, please please, I beg you, I beg you!”
“Now, now, there’s no need for that, no need for that at all.”172
Little Gloria’s two and a half hours of testimony had done nothing to help Justice Carew determine how to decide this impossible case. The easy solution for which he had been searching was nowhere in sight.
On November 21, 1934, he released his opinion. Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was granted custody of the child. As custodian, she was to bring young Gloria to her mother each Saturday morning at 10 A.M., and pick her up at sundown on Sunday. On Christmas Day, young Gloria would be delivered to her mother at 10 A.M. and picked up at 6 P.M. And Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt would have custody of her child during the month of July. The New York Journal American published a jingle about this strange verdict:
Rockahye baby
Up on a writ,
Monday to Friday Mother’s unfit
As the week ends she rises in virtue;
Saturdays, Sundays,
Mother won’t hurt you.173
The court battle, which Maury Paul in his society column called “as disgusting an exhibition of public laundering of soiled family linen as I’ve encountered,”174 had no winners. There were only losers.
Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt had lost her child and she had lost her livelihood. The world she had known as Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt was over forever.175 “They’ve permitted Gertrude Whitney to keep Gloria because I was away from her too much,” she explained in an interview. “Now if that be sound reasoning, then no mother on Park Avenue has any right to have her children. And that applies particularly to Gertrude Whitney. Anybody who knows anything about these things knows mothers and fathers in this position in life see very little of their children. When the babies are young they are taken care of by nurses and governesses. Mothers are busy with the duties that their social lives entail. You will usually find them out to lunch and then on to cocktails somewhere. They rush home to dress for dinner and away they go again. Their mornings are taken up by masseuses, fitters, hairdressers. Often personal financial affairs take them downtown to their bankers, brokers, or attorneys. When the children are old enough they are sent to private schools—often out of town. During the summer holidays they are off at camp. Now that is the life of ninety-nine children out of 100 whose parents are in the Social Register. That is exactly the way Gertrude Whitney raised her children. She saw very little of them and she sees very little of Gloria today. During the five days of the week that my daughter is in her charge down at Old Westbury, Mrs. Whitney is usually in New York. In the fall, winter and spring, she lives at her house on Fifth Avenue. You will find her out to lunch, on to cocktails and at somebody else’s house for dinner day after day. If I am unfit to have custody of my own child for the reasons that the court has given, then Gertrude Whitney is equally unfit. But of course, I have very little and Gertrude Whitney has $78 million. And $78 million couldn’t possibly be wrong.”176
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney had won the court battle, but the winning now meant nothing to her. ‘The irony,” little Gloria stated years later, was “…that as soon as my aunt was allowed to take charge of me, she lost interest….”177
Grandmother Morgan had lost the love of all her children.
And little Gloria, little Gloria had lost her world.
Aunt Gertrude never spoke directly to little Gloria about anything important. Whatever was on her mind was patiently presented to her niece by her lawyers. And so it was that one of Aunt Gertrude’s lawyers was there one fall day when little Gloria came home from school. He told her of Justice Carew’s decision and of his order that she must be freed from the pernicious influence of Nurse Keislich, that Nurse Keislich must leave just before Christmas so that Gloria would have “ample time to adjust, adjust to this little change” before the New Year when a new nurse would take charge. Gloria would not be allowed to visit Nurse Keislich or write to her or even to know where she was. Gloria ran out of the room up to her beloved nurse’s room. “My heart broke and the blood of it gushed from me into the soft sweet love of her, the torrent of it sped and sped on and away, spreading on into her…and from that moment to this,” she wrote fifty-one years later, “nothing has ever been the same again.”178
4.
“In the beginning, 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. Once upon a time,” little Gloria recalled when she was an adult, “it never occurred to me that my situation was in any way singular or different from that of every other child in the world.”179
The first Christmas after the custody trial, Christmas 1934, ten-year-old Gloria was being driven by her chauffeur to visit her mother when he stopped at a red light. Suddenly the car door was opened. “It was a little furry person who kneeled on the steps of the car, leaning in towards me, almost coming in but not daring to. She was grey all over from the matty fur of her squirrely coat to her hair falling out under the grey scarf on her head, right down to the grey wool socks falling down over her grey heelless shoes. The only thing about her that was not grey was the apple she held out to me in her mittened paw. She leaned in closer on her knees and shoved the apple under my face.”
This gray apparition called out, “Little Gloria, help help me please, Little Gloria, please!…Only you, Little Gloria, you can help me help me help me please, please!”
The chauffeur jumped out of the automobile and pulled the woman back onto the street, next to the carton of apples she was selling. Slamming the automobile door shut, he sped off, as the street lady called and called for Gloria to help her.
“How could I help her?” little Gloria wondered. “What could I do? What? What was it about? What was any of it about? The grey bundle of her, stretching towards me with the apple, and on the pavement those other apples in their neat rows. What?”180
The Depression was what it was all about.
The front-page newspaper coverage of the custody battle for the “little heiress,” the “gold girl” as she was called, had captivated the public’s attention month after month in the dark days of the Depression. Here was a little girl, a Vanderbilt, the heir to a trust fund producing income at the unbelievable rate of over $100,000 a year, surrounded by a retinue of nurses, maids, chauffeurs, and bodyguards. And yet, here was a little girl who had nothing at all. We might not have a lot, the families hit by the Depression could reason, but we have more than poor little Gloria Vanderbilt, the proverbial poor little rich girl.
The custody battle over Gloria Vanderbilt was a bewitching reminder of an age that was suddenly over. If ever an era really did end in a day, that era was the Gilded Age, and that day was October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday, the day the stock market crashed. “Wasn’t the Depression terrible?” spoofed humorous billboards that sprang up in New York’s financial district several months after the crash, when the worst seemed over. But the crumbling market presaged a broken economy. Production fell; wages were cut; workers were let go. Savings were lost, bankruptcies declared, mortgages foreclosed, banks closed. The ranks of the unemployed swelled from 3 million in 1930 to 15 million in 1933. Soup kitchens opened; bread lines formed. Hoovervilles sprang up on the outskirts of towns, colonies of tar-paper, scrap-lumber, and flattened-tin-can shacks. Beggars and panhandlers took to the streets. Hitchhikers, vagrants, hobos wandered the highways and railroad yards. Nothing got better, everything got worse, as the Depression continued year after year, day after day of numbing desperation, of disillusionment, of hopelessness and defeat.
Grace and Neily Vanderbilt’s son, Neil Vanderbilt, who had bidden farewell to Fifth Avenue to become a newspaper re
porter, was in a unique position to observe the effects of the Depression on his parents’ wealthy friends.
To be sure, the crash had a devastating effect on their finances. Neil’s father said he had lost $8 million in an hour on Black Tuesday. Taxpayers reporting annual incomes of $1 million or more fell from seventy-five in 1931 to twenty the next year. “Up to a year ago my net income amounted to three million dollars,” a family friend complained to Neil. “I’ll be lucky if I collect eight hundred thousand in dividends next year.”181
“There is no point in dodging facts, Neil,” Willie K., Alva and Willie Vanderbilt’s oldest son, told his cousin. “In another ten years there won’t be a single great fortune left in America. The country will come back—it always does; but we won’t.”
“What do you propose to do about it?” Neil asked him.
“Do? What can we do? Everyone for himself…. I personally shall spend some of the remaining time in cruising aboard my yacht, seeing the world and trying to have a good time. If I were twenty years younger, then perhaps. Oh, well, what’s the use! I am not twenty years younger.”182
The real concern of the rich was not the loss of their income or principal, devastating though that loss may have been. Their real fear was of a coming revolution, a class war, in which they might lose everything, in which they would look outside to see the gates of their mansions being stormed by the rabble.
In 1929, right before the crash, at the height of the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties, only 2 percent of all American families had had incomes of more than $10,000; 60 percent had had incomes of less than $2,000. In the Depression years, the disparity between the haves and the have-nots was magnified. As families slept in tar-paper shacks heated by fires in grease barrels, and fed their children a broth of dandelion greens, the rich worried about their incomes falling from $3 million to $800,000.
One evening in June 1931, Neil Vanderbilt was driving through poverty-stricken Gary, Indiana, on a reporting assignment when a brick crashed through the windshield of his car. As he pulled over to the side of the road, he could see a crowd of men emerging from the shadows, gathering around him.
“What’s the big idea?” he called out.
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