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Little Gloria Was Happy Here


MEMORIES For Kips Bay, Gloria Vanderbilt, 85, re-created the room she had at 16, with silver paper and a 1940s French mirror that reflects a line she painted on the wall about the original room.

By Eric Konigsberg
Published: April 15, 2009

GLORIA VANDERBILT showed up the other day at 22 East 71st Street, the site of this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House, to check on the room she and a collaborator had just finished decorating.

The house swarmed with industry, as workmen in hard hats, decorators and their subalterns moved back and forth over thresholds, squinting their eyes in repeated efforts to get a fresh look at a room.

Ms. Vanderbilt was asked why, given carte blanche with the décor of her room, she had chosen to recreate the bedroom of her adolescence. She made a face that conveyed, as politely as possible, the words: “Well, duh.”

“There was never any question for me,” she said. “Because how could you ever find another room like this?”

O.K. then.

Here is a reproduction — faithful in spirit, if not in every detail — of her living quarters in an aunt’s house near Washington Square Park in the 1940s.

The room, which she created with the decorator Matthew Patrick Smyth, is lined with silver leaf wallpaper and furnished with an ornate bed, a painted chest of drawers and a baroquely curvy Swedish grandfather clock, circa 1857. There are period-appropriate moldings and wainscoting, and painted on boards behind the windows, a trompe l’oeil scene of snow falling on Washington Mews.

“I lived in this room when I was 16 years old,” said Ms. Vanderbilt, who is 85. “You know, my aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, decorated it for me because I had gone to live with her. She had moved there from Fifth Avenue. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. She started the Whitney Museum, which in those days was just around the corner from our house at 60 Washington Mews.”



ACCENTS Ms. Vanderbilt paints a line from one of her memoirs.

Ms. Vanderbilt’s name is probably best known to Americans who were young 30 years ago for having graced a lot of posteriors during the first heyday of designer jeans. Members of a much older cohort remember her considerably greater celebrity in the 1930s, when, as the child heiress to the railroad fortune of Reginald Vanderbilt, she was the object of a bitter courtroom trial in which her aunt, Mrs. Whitney, wrested custody of Ms. Vanderbilt from her neglectful mother, Gloria Morgan.

Ms. Vanderbilt said she gave up fashion for good “years and years ago.” (The clothing company that bears her name, she said, “I have nothing to do with.”) She lost a home-furnishings business as a result of a fraud case in which her former psychiatrist and her former lawyer bilked her of a large sum of money, according to a 1993 court ruling that awarded her about $1.5 million (which she says she never received). She has also studied painting and written four memoirs and three novels.

Ms. Vanderbilt also had four high-profile marriages — to a Hollywood agent named Pat DeCicco, to the conductor Leopold Stokowski, to the director Sidney Lumet and, finally, to Wyatt Cooper, a screenwriter and author who died in 1978. One of their two sons, Carter, committed suicide by jumping from the window of their apartment as she tried to stop him. The other is Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor.

All rooms have their histories, Ms. Vanderbilt said. “When I first went to live with my Aunt Gertrude, she was living in Old Westbury, Long Island, and I slept in Henry Payne Whitney’s room. That was her late husband. It was a man’s room. When we moved downtown, I got a room that she decorated especially for me.”


She went on: “When I walk by my mother’s house on 72nd Street, what happened there is indelible in my mind. I overheard my mother talking to my aunt — another aunt — and saying she was going to take my nurse, Dodo, and replace her with a German fräulein. And I ran to Dodo and she took me down to Aunt Gertrude’s. We snuck out like thieves.” She added: “That’s when the whole thing started.”

The idea of asking Ms. Vanderbilt to participate in the show house was hatched by her eventual collaborator, Mr. Smyth, a traditionalist decorator with three Kips Bay rooms under his belt. He said that growing up in rural upstate New York in the 1960s and ’70s, Gloria Vanderbilt represented to him “glamour and high fashion and everything that the country wasn’t.” He was particularly enamored of her penchant for collage in both clothes and interiors: “She was doing glue guns before glue guns.”

Everything about Ms. Vanderbilt’s appearance suggests high production values and smooth finishes. Her hair is a radiant and burnished shade of mahogany, and on this afternoon her patent leather boots and chocolate cardigan were immaculate, and a serene smile rarely left her face.

She carried a plastic picnic plate covered in primitive, multicolored paint strokes. It looked like a child’s artwork that had come off of a refrigerator, but Ms. Vanderbilt said it was her palette. To complete the room, she was about to paint a passage from “Once Upon a Time,” her 1985 memoir of her childhood, on the wall behind the bed.

“I fell in love with this room and forever tried to recapture it, but it was hard to define and has always eluded me,” Ms. Vanderbilt writes in the book. She details the French doors that looked out on the neighborhood, the “curtains of taffeta of palest lavender,” the silver tea paper covering the walls, the gessoes of waterlilies and butterflies on her daybed, and the “winged creatures” painted on a Venetian chest of drawers.

“I was 16 and exciting things were happening,” she said. “I had the feeling that something wonderful was going to happen. I have that now, but it’s different at 16.” A year after moving into Washington Mews, she embarked on her first marriage.

“We’re not just in a time of Gloria’s life, it’s an hour — dusk is falling,” Mr. Smyth said, sounding a bit like he was leading a sense-memory exercise. “She’s 16. It’s debutante ball season. There’s anticipation, the anticipation of getting ready for a date.”


LIKE OLD TIMES Gloria Vanderbilt sits on an ornate bed in a replica of the bedroom she had in the ’40s as a 16-year-old. The decorator Matthew Patrick Smyth covered the headboard in moiré faille woven with a leaf-and-vine motif. Other touches include a 19th-century Syrian table of walnut with mother-of-pearl and a 1928 painted-mirror screen.
“At that age, we had sub-deb dances,” Ms. Vanderbilt clarified. “The Cosmopolitan and the Mets — the Metropolitan Dances.”

Mr. Smyth has outfitted the room with some objects not described in the book, including a carved Burmese slipper chair like one that Ms. Vanderbilt has today in her apartment on Beekman Place. Mr. Smyth also had a unicorn painted on the side of the chest of drawers. He covered the headboard of the bed in a silver-blue moiré fabric that he had designed for Schumacher. (Ms. Vanderbilt reported that she had sent a swatch of it to Mr. Cooper, who she said is redoing his apartment. “It’s very subtle,” she added. “Anderson liked it.”)

Finally, there are books by authors Ms. Vanderbilt remembers reading as girl, including an old edition of the complete works of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like Ms. Millay, Ms. Vanderbilt seems to be in possession of a candle that burns at both ends. In June, she will publish a new book, a novella called “Obsession: An Erotic Tale.”

“It’s sensual, poetic, erotic — very,” she said. “It’s about two women who are obsessed with the same man, and then they become obsessed with each other. It’s wild.”

After a pause, Ms. Vanderbilt returned to the subject of the house on Washington Mews. “I’ve been inside the house since then,” she said, explaining that a few years back, she went to a party given by a filmmaker who lived in the bottom portion of it (the house was long ago divided into apartments).

The apartment she saw “doesn’t even have this room — I wouldn’t even know it was the same house,” she said. “And it’s sometimes better not to go back.”