If Thelma could have a prince, certainly Gloria deserved one, too. One year after Reggie’s death, Gloria met on shipboard His Serene Highness, Prince Gottfried Hohenlohe-Langenburg—Friedel, Gloria called him. He was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, his mother the sister of Queen Maria of Romania, his father the first cousin of the empress of Germany. Frieders parents were great German landowners. Their medieval castle in Bavaria, Schloss Langenburg, was larger than Buckingham Palace. The only trouble with twenty-nine-year-old Friedel was that until he inherited his parents’ landholdings, he had no money of his own. He served as the secretary to a German industrialist at a salary that was less than what Gloria paid her daughter’s nurse. This did not seem to bother Gloria. In her eyes, a prince was a prince, and a destitute German prince was just as good as a solvent British one.
Two months after they met, Prince Hohenlohe proposed to Gloria.
“I would say yes at once,” she told the prince, “if you and I were the only ones to be considered. It is not going to be easy—we must wait and see.”58
George Wickersham advised Gloria that in his opinion, Surrogate Foley would reduce her income if she married the prince, since it would be assumed that her new husband should provide for her expenses. This was not a happy prospect. By then, Gloria long since had run through the $130,000 she had inherited from Reggie’s estate and was living solely on her allowance from her baby’s trust fund. “I found out,” she commented, “that [an allowance of] $48,000 a year did not go as far as a quarter of a million.”59 “No part of the infant’s income can be used to finance a second marriage,” Surrogate Foley ruled.60 To avoid any reduction in her allowance, Gloria and Prince Friedel did not marry. Instead, the prince began to accompany Gloria on her wanderings, living off her largess. In truth, he was living off the unknowing generosity of Gloria’s three-year-old daughter. And that was when the trouble began.
Gloria’s mother—Laura Morgan, “Grandmother Morgan”—and the nurse Gloria had hired two weeks after giving birth—Emma Sullivan Keislich, “Nurse Keislich”—both of whom traveled with Gloria to take care of her baby, had long been critical of what they considered Gloria’s decadent way of life, of the breathless newspaper coverage of her forays into popular nightclubs, accompanied by photographs of her in low-cut, skin-tight evening gowns on the arm of a wealthy gentleman. Both had long been critical of what they considered her neglect of her child. Gloria’s affair with Prince Hohenlohe united Grandmother Morgan and Nurse Keislich as inseparable allies, and stirred them to action.
It was when Gloria sailed for Europe after Reggie’s death that her mother first accused her of trying to harm the baby. Gloria had wanted to take her child up to the deck to play with the other children, but her mother insisted the seas were too rough. Gloria explained to her mother that it was a beautiful day, that all the children were on the deck playing. “This might be so,” her mother reprimanded her, “but they are not Gloria Vanderbilt “61
Grandmother Morgan and Nurse Keislich began treating the infant like an heiress. They saw it as their duty to serve her and fawn over her and pamper her. Nurse Keislich, for example, believed the food at the Ritz was not good enough for the baby. “Of course Mrs. Vanderbilt does not agree with me,” she informed the doctor who had come to check on baby Gloria and had inquired why the nurse was cooking a chicken on a hot plate resting on the toilet seat in the bathroom, “but I for one am going to see that little Gloria Vanderbilt has the best.”62 Nurse Keislich had no doubt about what her job demanded: “Watch her, guard her—every move she makes—her money, her life!”63 She hovered over her charge like a mother hen. Every little ache or ailment of the baby was treated as a life-threatening crisis. Little Gloria’s tonsils, her sore throats, her “glands,” her bowel movements, were of constant concern to the nurse, even though frequently summoned doctors found nothing to worry about. She repeatedly urged Mrs. Vanderbilt to hire bodyguards for the baby, convinced that kidnappers were lurking everywhere. She never left little Gloria’s side, sleeping in the same room with the child from the day she was hired, even declining to return to the United States when she received word that her own mother was dying.
Grandmother Morgan, a devout Catholic, had always been outspoken in her criticism of her daughter’s loose lifestyle. When mother and daughter were together, the air was heavy with tension, with bickering and angry battles that flared without a moment’s notice. Nurse Keislich had always kept her feelings to herself, letting them boil inside as she watched the baby’s mother come home intoxicated in the early hours of the morning after an all-night party, or set out to a foreign country and leave her child for weeks, for months, at a time. Both Grandmother Morgan and Nurse Keislich, however, hated Prince Hohenlohe and were not reticent in letting their feelings be known.
Grandmother Morgan hated the prince because she was sure that all he wanted was to live off her granddaughter’s inheritance. She convinced herself that he was quite intent on murdering the child to get her money. This she would tell to anyone who would listen—Gloria, Nurse Keislich, little Gloria, and the prince himself. “She objected to my marrying Mrs. Vanderbilt on the ground that I had no fortune to speak of,” Prince Hohenlohe recalled, “and she accused me of all sorts of things, wanting to murder the child and such ridiculous things as that.”64
Nurse Keislich hated Prince Hohenlohe because she was sure that if he married Mrs. Vanderbilt, they would go to live in the family castle in Bavaria and take her precious little one with them, leaving her alone. She told little Gloria about the castle in tales that embodied all of a child’s primal fears—it was set deep in a dark forest, with long winding halls where little children got lost, and all of the servants were horrible dwarfs. If her mother married the prince, she, faithful Dodo, would be sent away and would never see little Gloria again. They would be separated forever. Little Gloria would be sent to a convent where all sorts of unspeakable things would happen.
It was therefore not surprising that little Gloria came to fear her mother’s lover. The prince never spoke to her. He wore a monocle and walked, little Gloria thought, “as though a rod had been rammed up his behind. Every time I saw him was scarier than the time before.”65
On a crisp fall day in Paris in October 1928, four-year-old Gloria was preparing to go outside with her nurse. When her mother saw that she was wearing her new white kid gloves, she asked Nurse Keislich to give her an older pair of gloves for play. Little Gloria started to cry, insisting that she wanted to wear her brand-new gloves.
Hearing little Gloria crying, Grandmother Morgan rushed into the room, picking up her grandchild and putting her on her lap, telling her that she could wear whatever she wanted.
‘Your mother would be in the streets were it not for you, my darling, my poor little orphan,” she cooed to the child. “But I will protect you. As long as I live no one will take a penny of yours.”
Grandmother Morgan, her dyed red curls shaking, her eyes narrow slits under her penciled-in half-moon eyebrows, her mouth spitting venom, turned to her daughter. “I know what you and that Boche are trying to do!” she yelled. “You are trying to kill this poor, unfortunate child! Oh, yes! I know! It will be an accident. A little push down the stairs—seeing that she is left in a draft—a million ways! and you, Gloria, will weep like a Magdalen, but just the same, the Vanderbilt millions will be yours!”66
Gloria was shocked. She told Nurse Keislich to take the little girl out to play, and then cornered her mother, who had thrown herself on a bed, sobbing.
“Mamma, once and for all, I want you to understand that my daughter is not an orphan. I don’t know what you are trying to do. You are doing everything you can to alienate my daughter from me. Your insane idea that I am deliberately planning to murder my child is bad enough. But the inhuman, horrible thing is that you dare to frighten little Gloria with your evil mind. I see you now for the first time. And I realize now that it is not love for what you term ‘that poor, unfortunate orphan,’ but th
e Vanderbilt money which goes with her that is behind all this. You must be sick in your mind.”67
The very next day Gloria rented a house in Paris just big enough for herself and her daughter and Nurse Keislich. She found a room for her mother at a hotel that was close to the house, and she and twin sister Thelma agreed to give Mamma an allowance of $500 a month. All of Grandmother Morgan’s children—Gloria; Thelma; their older sister, Consuelo; and their brother, Harry—gathered to break the news to her, and to warn her that if she did not behave herself, they would have her committed to an asylum. Grandmother Morgan did not take the announcement well. Little Gloria watched the spectacle of her hysterical grandmother wringing her hands as she “ran around the room hitting her head against the walls like a trapped bird.”68
“If you think you can put me out of the house, and that I am never going to live with you,” she swore to Gloria, seething in fury, “I will see you never live with your child either! ΓΙΙ drag you through every hit of mud that lies in the streets!”69
Grandmother Morgan returned to the United States and rented a tiny one-room apartment on the tenth floor of the Hotel Fourteen in New York City.70 The only thing she had to occupy her time was visiting her friend George Wickersham, Gloria’s attorney, and reporting to him about her daughter’s wild escapades in Europe. Her crusade against her daughter became an obsession.
When she ran out of shocking news to tell him, she arranged for more to come to her.
Nurse Keislich told little Gloria that her grandmother wanted her to send a postcard. “This is what your Naney wants you to write her,” she said, leaning over the little girl. “Under ‘Dear Naney,’ write ‘I miss you.’”
Gloria did as she was told.
“Very good darling. Now under that put ‘My Mother is a rare beast.’”71
Gloria did as she was told.
Dear Naney—
My mother said not to write but I am not paying any attention to her. She is a rare bease—. Well, I will be in dear old New York soon. Love and kisses, Naney dear,
Gloria.72
Such postcards as Grandmother Morgan wished to receive began to arrive regularly at her apartment door.
Dear Naney
I love you so much and I am longing to see you. I am very unhappy in England….Momey promised me that she would take me to a pantomime and never did so Dodo took me to see Dick Whittington and his cat….73
Dear Naney
My mother is so bad to me I wish I could run away to New York to you. I am very unlucky girl….74
Dear Naney
I love you so much and I love the cards that you sent me my mother was in Paris enjoying herself while poor me was unhappy in Englan. My cold is better and my temp as gone to normal and the docot let me get up for a little while, good by Naney dear love Gloria75
Naney dear
We are moving again oh what a life. Well I shall soon be in my own country in 20 days and I am thrilled about it…76
Grandmother Morgan immediately brought each postcard to Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft. Look! Look! she said to George Wicker-sham. See what I have been telling you! My poor, poor little granddaughter! What will become of her!
Grandmother Morgan’s campaign against her daughter was successful. Wickersham sent Gloria a letter explaining that Surrogate Foley had remarked to him, after looking over her expense report, that “you were living at a pretty extravagant rate, and that he thought you would be much better off, if you were living in this country.”77 Not willing quite yet to give up the life she was leading, Gloria negotiated a compromise: She would stay in Europe with her child for one more year and then return to the United States, entering her daughter in Miss Chapin’s School.
Having accomplished the first step of her revenge against her daughter by getting her to bring little Gloria back to the United States, Grandmother Morgan began Step Two: to win as an ally Reginald Vanderbilt’s favorite sister, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.
When Harry Whitney, the boy who lived in the mansion across the street from the Cornelius Vanderbilts, had been courting Gertrude Vanderbilt, he had told her, “You will always have a good time because even when your looks give out you will still be a great heiress.”78 He had been right.
The young girl who had written in her diary of her dream of having, when she married, a ‘Very small” house, “homelike in the true sense of the word, with one delightful library with a divan and easy chairs,”79 moved, when she married Harry Whitney, from the block-long mansion in which she had grown up to the Whitney mansion across the street, 871 Fifth Avenue. “The house I have stepped into after my marriage was furnished, complete and full. Beautiful Renaissance tapestries. Furniture of all the Louis. Old French and Italian paintings hung on the walls. It was the very same atmosphere in which I had been brought up, the very same surroundings.” She had moved “some fifty feet from my father’s house into my husband’s….”80
Harry and Gertrude bought a “summer cottage” on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, separated from Alva Belmont’s Marble House only by Mrs. Astor’s Beechwood. And Harry inherited from his father an eighty-five-thousand-acre camp in the Adirondacks, as well as Wheatley Hills, a Venetian palace surrounded by eight hundred acres in Old Westbury, Long Island.
Soon after their marriage, Harry’s father had warned his son to be careful not to become a dilettante. It was a fair warning. “Your fears about my becoming a ‘dilettante,’ “Harry responded, “amuse me. I average about eight miles a day on a bicycle and two hours of golf—running this place, horse back rides, and some law thrown in.”81 Dean Keener of Columbia Law School thought Harry “one of the most brilliant students he had known,”82 but Harry lost all interest in his legal studies, which were cutting into the time he wished to devote to polo and social activities, and he never graduated from Columbia or took the bar examination.83
After several years of marriage, Gertrude analyzed her husband in her journal. “His nature is a strong one and given to many impulses and combined with a brain of unusual activity he might live to do great things. However these very qualities form as well his greatest temptation….Wherever he goes his boyishness, his charm, his brightness, his cleverness insure him a warm reception….His brain is marvelously quick and with discipline could yet do wonders. He has known no discipline. Life has given him all he has asked of it from the beginning. Indulgent parents provided for every wish before it was uttered; it is most wonderful of all that he retains any strength.”84 The same could have been said of Gertrude herself; having been raised as she was, it was a wonder that she retained any strength or discipline. She remained accustomed to having everything done for her. When Gertrude learned she was pregnant, she found herself “not a bit rejoiced as I should be. I don’t want to be tied down but Mama has promised to take care of it, so we will be off again soon, I hope….”85
As Harry devoted himself to business ventures, to horse racing, to polo, to his 175-foot yacht, the Whileaway, to his new hydroplane, to his private railroad car, the Wanderer, Gertrude became increasingly interested in art, in drawing, in clay modeling, in sculpting. Gertrude’s interest in art seemed to Harry nothing more than an engrossing hobby, just like his interests in polo, horses, and hunting. As their interests diverged, so too did their interest in each other.
On December 4, 1913, after three children and seventeen years of marriage, Gertrude carefully composed a letter to Harry:
It seems very obvious that we are drifting further and further apart and that the chances of our coming together are growing remote. I say this for several reasons—there is no inclination on your part to have explanations which might lead to understanding. Also our mutual indifference to the pursuits and pleasure of the other is leading us constantly to have less even to talk of and forms no bond on which we might rely to bridge our difficult moments.
Of course for a very long time we have done absolutely nothing together because we wanted to. You perhaps do not realize this. We eat together as rarely
as possible and from habit. We never go out together—perhaps because I can’t do the things you want to do, perhaps because you don’t want to do those I can. However this is only to show you how completely our lives are separated, not to blame you or myself. Every one of your pleasures (I don’t think I exaggerate when I say this, just think it over) is disconnected from me. Most of mine from you. You are dependent on me for nothing. Our occupations are separate, our pleasures are not the same, all the things I think essential you look down on, I look down on you because you have thrown away most all the things I admired you for. I don’t trust you, you talk to your friends of the things I don’t want talked of. You are a hypocrite, which I don’t admire….
There is one very important phase of it all that I have not yet spoken of: that is, women in your life and men in mine. I suppose that is the hardest thing of all to be honest about or to understand. You have several times behaved pretty rottenly, but I think, at least you have not been terribly open about these matters, so that they were very much discussed. But you are now behaving differently. I object to this. There is no use, I suppose, my objecting to your caring for someone else, it would simply be ludicrous, but I do object to several things which I will state. I have never been seen around all the time with one person. I have never been talked about with one person….
I suppose all this is very badly expressed. It’s hard to put these sort of sentiments into words. I have been really desperately unhappy, it’s not a mood or a passing idea and if you will let yourself face the truth I think you will realize the truth of what I say. It makes me sick, all this superficial sort of game, and I am not going to throw the rest of my life away. I am going to face things and understand as much as I can, and then build on a solid foundation for I am tired of the sand that crumbles and will not hold my poor little house.86
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