The Light of Her Life

The Liz Smith Column | Today 12:00 am

Liz Smith: Gloria Vanderbilt – Obsessed? Erotic? Happy at Last?

"Old age is a shipwreck!" said Charles de Gaulle. Well, not always!

Went down to Diane von Fürstenberg’s big splashy party for the 80-odd-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt’s latest novel, Obsession: An Erotic Tale. There –circulating in a crowd that included Barry Diller, Barbara Walters, Tina Brown, Andre Leon Talley, Harry Evans, Fran Lebowitz, Sheila Nevins and others equally curious – sat Gloria, autographing her books and looking like $10 million. She was as beautiful and serene as she has always been and could easily pass for 40.

Gloria has been in the news since she was a mere child involved in a custody fight between her mother and her aunt. (The Whitneys and the Vanderbilts at their worst and best!)

Then she was the pale, beautiful, glamorous debutante and married a Hollywood agent, Pasquale DiCicco, for a minute. Though Truman Capote wrote years later that on meeting him again, she didn’t remember him – well, we know how Truman loved to stretch the truth.

She then made a much-talked-about marriage to a considerably older famous man, the conductor, Leopold Stokowski. She divorced him finally after two sons and went through her acting and theater phase, going out with Frank Sinatra and eventually marrying the New York movie director Sidney Lumet. At the time, she published poetry of a serene and yet unquiet nature.

At last, she married a young Southern writer named Wyatt Cooper and they had two sons. (How well I recall that marriage! In Wyatt’s Mississippi hometown, the headline over his wedding news read WYATT COOPER MARRIES NEW YORK GIRL. It was the only time he got top billing!)

Gloria embarked on a fashion career and made her mark with blue jeans. She had her ups and downs with trademarks and bad managers who stole from her. Meanwhile, she had lifelong friendships with two other famous women – Oona O’Neill Chaplin and Carol Saroyan Matthau. These loyalties eventually foundered late in life on unfortunate misunderstandings. She embarked on a brief romance with the controversial Hollywood agent, David Begelman.

Now the still-great-looking Gloria, who has literally survived almost everything in a long lifetime (including the death of her son, Carter Cooper) has become a passionate, imaginative and sexy fictionalist. The light of her life, her other son by Wyatt – Anderson Cooper, has made his mark at CNN and is the pride of her very youthful old age.