“Darling,” Gloria whispered, “all this is not necessary. I told you last night I love you. I want to marry you, and I will not hear another depressing word out of you.”
“I’m the proudest and happiest man in the world,” Reggie told Maury Paul, beaming. “What this angel sees in me I will never know. But I still don’t believe Gloria realizes what she might be up against. Good Lord, a Mrs. Vanderbilt without any money!”
Reggie got up as Gloria and Maury laughed.
“I haven’t talked this seriously in years,” Reggie exclaimed. “I need a drink!”23
“I love you,” Gloria told Reggie the next day. “I want to marry you. Nothing else matters to me. You know that. But I will not marry you unless your mother gives her consent.”24
Reggie recalled older brother Neily’s disinheritance because of his marriage to Grace Wilson, and agreed with Gloria that this was a sensible idea.
A week later, he called Gloria to tell her he would stop by to pick her up. He had arranged an audience with his mother and it was to be that afternoon.
Gloria was terrified. She put on her mother’s green taffeta dress with a mink collar, and one of her hats with a cluster of fruit on top. As they were driven to the mansion, Gloria grasped Reggie’s hand.
“Don’t worry, dearest, she’ll love you as much as I do.”
“I’m petrified,” Gloria whispered, almost in tears. “If she doesn’t like me, I will never marry you, Reggie. I really mean it.”25
When a footman opened the massive front door of the Fifth Avenue château, Gloria found that “my heart beat so violently that I could hardly breathe.”26 They were led to a drawing room where seventy-seven-year-old Alice Vanderbilt was enthroned. Gloria was struck by how this tiny woman dressed in black could dominate such an imposing home.27 There in the drawing room, Alice of The Breakers talked with Gloria about everything down to the price of eggs, everything but the subject they had come to see her about: their marriage.
When they were safely back in the automobile, Gloria turned to Reggie.
“Darling, did you tell your mother? I can’t understand. She never mentioned our engagement.”
“Gloria,” Reggie patiently explained, taking her hands in his, “my mother is a very undemonstrative woman and will not permit herself any show of emotion, but you will find out that this reserve covers a sincere nature and a warm heart.”
“But, Reggie, I don’t know where I stand.”
“Don’t worry,” said Reggie. “You’ll be hearing from her.”28
Several weeks after the visit, Gloria still had heard nothing about how she had fared.
“I haven’t heard from your mother,” she would tell Reggie each day.
“All the Vanderbilts move slow but sure,” he laughed.
Gloria felt she knew what the problem was. No doubt the proper Mrs. Vanderbilt viewed her, Glorious Gloria, the Magical Morgan, as a young lady with a past, the same way decades before she had thought of Grace Wilson, whom the Prince of Wales had called his pet. Gloria was not about to let such nonsense interfere with her future. One day she worked up her courage and knocked at the door of the Vanderbilt mansion. Gloria asked the stunned old dowager who her personal physician was, and then left. Within several days, Mrs. Vanderbilt had received a report from her physician verifying that Gloria was a virgin, a report that Maury Paul published in his society column. This certification did the trick, for a letter then arrived from Mrs. Vanderbilt: “Dear Gloria: You will be at my house tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock to meet your future relatives.”29
Again Reggie and Gloria entered the great mansion. This time all the family was there, staring at them in what Gloria perceived as “cold disapproval.” There were Neily and Grace Vanderbilt, and Reggie’s aunts Mrs. Florence Vanderbilt Twombly and Mrs. Emily Vanderbilt White, and Reggie’s sisters, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Gladys Vanderbilt Szechenyi. Alice of The Breakers introduced Gloria to each of the thirty assembled relatives. “Florence, I want you to meet my future daughter-in-law, Gloria.”30 Gloria thought “they might have been painted pictures on canvas for all the movement they made. Behind their acid courtesy was a faint but unmistakable hostility.”31
At last one figure from the group stepped forward. She put her arms around Gloria and kissed her.
“I’m your Aunt Lulu,” Mrs. Frederick Vanderbilt, one of Reggie’s aunts, told her. “I am so glad Reggie is going to marry you.”
This a grateful Gloria remembered as “the one human thing said to me that dreadful afternoon,”32 as she became acquainted with the coldest, most aloof, most distant group of strangers she had ever encountered.
Gloria awoke the morning of her wedding, March 6, 1923, feeling terrible, her throat so sore she could barely swallow, her cheeks burning. She took her temperature. It was 104, but she would not let herself believe anything was wrong. “I defied whatever it was. Nothing was going to prevent my marrying Reggie that day.”33
She went through the wedding ceremony as if in a trance, with what was happening around her out of focus, unreal.
“Why don’t you and Reggie slip out?” Alice of The Breakers asked her during the reception. “It will be all right.”34
They were driven to Grand Central Station and whisked aboard the Vanderbilts’ private car where Gloria sank into a big armchair to rest, as the train rumbled toward Rhode Island and Sandy Point Farm. “The last thing I wanted at this time was to have Reggie know that I was ill. What could be more devastating to a bride, more unromantic and more anticlimactic, than to be ill on her wedding night? But when dinner was served, the cumulative effect of fever, chills, pain, and nausea was too much; nothing I could do could conceal the way I felt.”
“Darling,” Reggie said, “you look really ill. Are you?”
Gloria broke down. ‘Oh, Reggie, dear, I didn’t want you to know, but I really think I’m going to die.”35
At Providence, a car met them to take them through a snowstorm out to Sandy Point Farm. At the front door, Gloria passed out. She had walking diphtheria.
For six weeks Gloria was bedridden, and it was three months more before she could walk.
When she finally recovered, the fun began.
Neither Reggie nor Gloria ever went to bed before five o’clock in the morning, with groups of friends dropping in for drinks beginning at four o’clock each afternoon and staying all night. Gloria soon found that their house “was more like a clubhouse than a private home.”36 “They want the ‘palmam sine pulvere,’ “Reggie would say in describing his friends, quoting a Latin phrase he had learned at Yale: “the palm without the dust,” the good things of life without working for them.37 It was an apt phrase to describe the hedonistic life he and his young wife were living.
After they had been married a year, Alice of The Breakers invited her favorite son and daughter-in-law to the Ambassador Hotel for luncheon. They had just been seated when Alice turned to Reggie.
“Has Gloria received her pearls yet?”
“Now, Mother, you know I would love to give Gloria pearls, but I do not intend buying her a cheap necklace and I cannot afford the kind I would like.”
Mrs. Vanderbilt summoned the maître d’hôtel. “Please bring me a pair of scissors,” she commanded.
When he returned, she took off her rope of pearls, which was so long that it wrapped twice around her neck and hung well below her waist, laid it out on the table, and cut off a third, which she handed to Gloria.
‘There you are, Gloria; all Vanderbilt women have pearls.” She pushed the remaining pearls into her gold mesh bag, resuming the conversation.38
More than anything, Gloria wanted to give Reggie “a son to be called Reginald Vanderbilt, Jr.”39 On February 20, 1924, a little girl was born to Reggie and Gloria. They named her Gloria.
“It is fantastic how Vanderbilt she looks,” Reggie exclaimed in delight. “See the corners of her eyes, how they turn up?”40
Their happiness was to be short-lived. Whi
le in Europe the next spring, Gloria walked into Reggie’s room and saw him with a bloodstained handkerchief by his mouth.
“It’s only a nosebleed, dearest,” he said.41
Gloria was horrified.
“Now, Gloria, dearest, don’t get yourself all upset. I assure you this is absolutely nothing. My doctor’s not worried about it, so why should you be?”42
Gloria insisted on taking her husband to a specialist, who advised him to take the cure at Vichy. Reggie refused. But when Gloria said she would not return to the United States with him unless he did, he gave in.
He hated every moment at the health spa. All he could drink was water, which he said was “only fit to rot your boots,” and the diet he dismissed as “foul.”43 But kept away from alcohol, Reggie showed daily improvement in appearance and health.
The attending physician took Gloria aside one morning when Reggie was at the baths.
“Mrs. Vanderbilt, you must be told the seriousness of Mr. Vanderbilt’s condition. He has sclerosis of the liver and if he wishes to prolong his life it cannot be done but in one way—a moderation of his living.”
“And that?” Gloria asked.
“He must drink very little in the future. In fact, I would suggest not at all.”44
“Can’t he drink anything?” Gloria asked.
“A little champagne or any of the light wines with his meals. I have explained all this to your husband, chère Madame, but he only laughs at me. I feel it my duty to tell you that I fear the consequences if he does not carry out my orders.”45
This, Gloria knew, “was like a sentence for Reggie of almost instant annihilation.”46 Her best bet, she reasoned, was to keep him away from the United States as long as possible, far away from his drinking buddies. Reggie would hear none of that; he insisted on returning to the United States for the Newport Horse Show in August.
On their return from Europe, Alice of The Breakers invited Reggie and Gloria for dinner at 6:30 before they went home to Sandy Point Farm. Reggie, however, stopped first at the Reading Room, Newport’s oldest men’s club, while Gloria went on alone to The Breakers. It was not until after eight o’clock that Reggie finally arrived at The Breakers, obviously inebriated.
Nevertheless, Gloria was confident enough that Reggie had mended his ways to plan a trip in September to Chile to visit her dying grandmother. She set off for New York on September 3, 1925. Reggie would meet her the next day to see her ship off.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Reggie said as he kissed Gloria goodbye.47
On the train ride to New York City, Gloria looked out the window and remarked several times to her traveling companion how the trees were already changing color. Her companion told her that she was repeating herself. Suddenly, Gloria remembered a fortune-teller’s prediction that a repeated conversation about autumn leaves would be an omen that something was about to change her life.48
That evening, when Gloria reached New York City, she called Sandy Point Farm and was told Reggie could not come to the telephone; he had a sore throat and was resting. Obsessed by her premonition that something was wrong, she called again later in the evening.
A stranger’s voice answered the telephone.
“I’m Mrs. Vanderbilt,” Gloria said. “Who are you?”
“I’m Mr. Vanderbilt’s nurse.”
“Oh, my God! What’s happened?”
“Please, Mrs. Vanderbilt, don’t get upset. Mr. Vanderbilt had a slight hemorrhage. I would let you speak to him, but the doctor gave him a sedative and he is now sleeping.”
Gloria told the nurse to have the chauffeur meet the midnight train from New York City. She was leaving at once.
“But, Mrs. Vanderbilt,” the nurse protested, “Mr. Vanderbilt told me that should you phone, I was to tell you not to worry, that he would meet you in New York as planned.”
“Please, nurse, do as I ask.”49
Gloria caught the train for Providence, where the Vanderbilt chauffeur met her. Usually a slow, cautious driver, he sped to Sandy Point Farm.
They reached the estate at five o’clock that morning. The first thing Gloria saw was her mother-in-law’s maroon Rolls-Royce by the front door.
The butler came to the door.
“What is it? What has happened—how is Mr. Vanderbilt?”
“Mr. Vanderbilt died two minutes ago,” the butler said.
Tiny old Alice of The Breakers appeared down the hall.
“You mustn’t go in there,” she whispered to Gloria.50
Reggie had suffered massive hemorrhaging at nine o’clock and then at three o’clock, the veins in his esophagus exploding. There was blood all over the room.
Gloria turned her face to the wall, sobbing hysterically.
“Gloria, dear,” Alice Vanderbilt said to her, “you must really try to pull yourself together.”51
Shocked, Gloria stared at her. What kind of woman was this? Her youngest son, her favorite child, dead. How could Reggie’s mother be so cold, so devoid of emotion, so lacking in compassion? Eighty-year-old Mrs. Vanderbilt—who had taken that lonely ferryboat ride to the Vanderbilt mausoleum on Staten Island so many times, with the Commodore; with her father-in-law, William H. Vanderbilt; with her oldest son, Bill, dead of typhoid at twenty; with her beloved husband, Cornelius, dead of a stroke at fifty-six; for the memorial service for her thirty-eight-year-old son Alfred, lost on the Lusitania—eighty-year-old Mrs. Vanderbilt took her trembling daughter-in-law in her arms and held her. The grand old lady did not say a word or make a sound, but as Gloria looked, she saw great tears streaming down her ancient cheeks.
2.
When Reggie died, his twenty-year-old widow realized suddenly that “I had been living at a rate which was much greater than what I had.”52 That was an understatement. There was nothing left.
The morning after Reggie’s death, Harry Whitney stopped by with a check for $12,000 to help Gloria meet expenses until the estate was settled. She needed every dollar of it. Under Reggie’s will, Gloria was to receive $500,000, but Reggie had died without $500,000 to his name. All of his debts had to be paid: $14,000 to pay the butcher’s bill, $5,344 for fruits and groceries, $269 for newspapers, $436 for ice, $712 to a laundress, $2,100 for gowns, $3,069 to a garage, $8,358 to Tiffany and Company, $3,900 to B. Altman and Company, $225 to an orchestra—a total of $116,671.86 to his creditors, and $106,930 to pay back taxes. Sandy Point Farm, the horses, the stables, had to be sold. The New York town house was sold. Furniture, linens, silverware, kitchen plates, trash baskets, a meat grinder, a wicker baby carriage—everything was sold at auction. When it was over, Gloria received $130,000, all that remained of the assets of the grandson of the richest man in the world.
The $5 million trust fund Reggie’s father, Cornelius, had been far-seeing enough to establish, a fund whose principal could never be touched, was still of course intact, and this passed in equal parts to Reggie’s two daughters: twenty-one-year-old Cathleen and one-year-old Gloria. Since the widow Vanderbilt was still a minor, her baby daughter’s share of the trust fund, $2,500,000, would be administered by Justice James Aloysius Foley, the surrogate of the New York courts.
Reggie’s warning to Gloria before they married had come true. Gloria was “a Mrs. Vanderbilt with no money,” a woman who had “a big name but little money to live up to it.” Her infant daughter was rich enough; she was not. This was a critical distinction Gloria did not yet perceive.
Several months after Reggie’s death in 1925, Gloria’s attorney, an old friend of her family’s, George Wickersham of the prestigious New York City law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft, filed a petition with Surrogate Foley on Gloria’s behalf, requesting an allowance from the child’s trust fund to cover the “monthly expenses necessarily incurred for the maintenance and support of said infant and the maintenance of the home in which said infant resides.” The monthly expenses were estimated as:
Servants $925.00
Food for servants 250.00
Food fo
r infant and mother 400.00
Coal 100.00
Gas 20.00
Laundry 80.00
Garage and automobile accessories 300.00
Physician 50.00
Clothing for infant and mother 1,500.00
Telephones and telegrams 40.00
Incidental 500.00
---------
$4,165.0053
Surrogate Foley readily granted the petition, which allowed Gloria to draw an allowance of $4,000 each month to support herself and her baby.
Within several months of Reggie’s death, Gloria was off again, resuming a life of careless extravagance on those monthly payments, crossing the Atlantic as many as twelve times a year, traveling to Paris, Biarritz, Cannes, and Monte Carlo, to Switzerland, London, New York, and Hollywood, renting a large triplex apartment in Paris in addition to residences in England and Switzerland.
Gloria hopped from country to country, from party to party, from nightclub to nightclub, moving in international high society, a group of European royalty and American millionaires that was called “the Prince of Wales Set,” since it revolved around the popular young heir to the British throne. It was a time when the status of a hostess was measured by whether the prince came to her party, and the success of her party was gauged by how long he stayed.
Twin sister Thelma was at the center of this set. She had divorced her first husband soon after marrying him, and in 1926 married a fifty-five-year-old widower, Duke Furness, an English shipping magnate known as Marmaduke. “We were blissfully happy those first few months,” Thelma remarked. “I had never had so much attention showered on me. I was utterly content in his love and firmly believed it would always be that way.”54 It would not. Marmaduke was soon seen escorting other women around Monte Carlo. It was at that time that Thelma met the son of Queen Mary and King George V, David, Prince of Wales. “The Prince seemed to me to be winsomely handsome. He was the quintessence of charm.”55 As Maury Paul wrote in his society column, Thelma found herself the “fast friend” and “favorite dancing partner” of the Prince of Wales.56 Even though, as Thelma told her close friends, “the Prince of Wales was a most unsatisfactory sexual partner,” whose “primary problem was premature ejaculation,”57 they began a love affair that would last for five years.
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