Gloria Vanderbilt doesn’t Twitter. She is, however, so e-mail obsessed that when she forces herself to log off, she starts to wonder what she’s missing. But then, how else does the modern pragmatist function?
When it comes to her work, Vanderbilt is indeed pragmatic, even if that tendency manifests with a girlishness that seems more genuine than calculated. She declines to describe her current paintings because one is better off checking them out at “www dot all-one-word gloriavanderbiltfineart.com. That’s my Web site, and it’s sponsored through the Southern Vermont Arts Center.” A story she wrote 15 years ago about her first love, a Princeton lad, and then recently tweaked and retweaked, was just published in an issue of the literary journal Boulevard. “I’ll get you a copy,” she offers, rushing to retrieve one. And while she avoids reading her own press, including, she promises, this article, she cops to checking out the photos, “the only part I really care about.” Yet she sits willingly for interviews because “well, if you have a career, you do have to.… It’s part of the territory.”
In Vanderbilt’s case, that’s one expansive landscape, as over the years she has traveled far in full public view, an object of journalistic and general prurient fascination since age 10. “Gloria is one of the last bridges between the Gilded Age that’s gone and today,” notes Wendy Goodman, whose photo-based biography, The World of Gloria Vanderbilt, will be published next year. “Certain women have a tremendous mystique you cannot put your finger on. She just radiates something very mysterious.”
For this story we meet in Vanderbilt’s Beekman Place apartment, nestled in one of Manhattan’s rare discreet neighborhoods on a street she likens to a London mew. Dressed in languid collar-to-toe whites, she makes a calm counterpoint to her surroundings. The space bubbles over with visual stimuli 80-plus years in the gathering, each piece somehow referencing that mystique and many—10 collages, two dream boxes, four paintings—of Vanderbilt’s own creation, work ranging from fanciful to disturbing. The effect is part tony elder bohemian, part batty Miss Havisham, even if the latter never shared lodgings with paintings as grand as the pair flanking the fireplace: her 1982 portrait by Aaron Shikler and one of her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, when she was an 18-year-old bride honeymooning at the Ritz in Paris, painted in 1923 by Dana Pond. Between the two is Vanderbilt’s own 1953 still life Objects on Blue and Yellow, purchased by her dear friend Richard Avedon at her one-woman show. “Anderson Cooper bought it back for me at auction,” she says, beaming, referring to her famous son.
Vanderbilt settles into the sofa as comfortably as her regal posture allows to address the topic of the day: her new novel, Obsession, published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. At 160 pages and in easy-to-read print, it could be mistaken for a third-grader’s chapter book but for its telltale subtitle, An Erotic Tale, a handle confirmed by opening randomly to almost any page. The story is about a woman, Priscilla, who thinks her marriage to “America’s most controversial architect,” Talbot Bingham, is blissful, even if when it comes to the joy of sex, she fakes it. When her husband dies suddenly, Priscilla uncovers a series of letters from his lover, Bee, who recounts in vivid blue detail the particulars of their various dalliances, the language not easily quoted here in complete sentences: “I will begin, softly at first so then you can sleep a few more minutes, the long, slow delicious process.…”
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