D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A ‘No,’ she said to her hostess. ‘I want to sit there,’ she declared, pointing in my direction. ‘Next to Luis Estévez.’ And so, of course she did. When she got to my side we kissed and she said: ‘Como te gusto esta entrada?’ (How do you like that entrance?)” Meanwhile back to the Big Town. It’s the middle of the spring social season with galas, dinners, and screenings. One night, I started out over to the Time Warner Center for the New York premiere of a HBO’s Nothing Left Unsaid with Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, Anderson Cooper—a documentary by Liz Garbus. I got there after the cocktail reception was breaking up to go into the screening room so I didn’t see Gloria, although I’ll assume she was there. There were a lot of people attending who are friends and have
known her for a long time. She is a woman who has lots of friends. I’ve known her since the early 90s. I met her when I was working on a project that I interviewed her for. She’s the only very famous person I have met and known who, in personal relationships, continues to have that charisma that gives her such an allure to the world. She’s nice to know. And fun. And gentle. And girlish. And clever, and warm, and well-attached to what is wise. She told me once that, when she was at the height of her business success with the GV Jeans, a woman came out of the crowd at a personal appearance/sales event one day and said to her: “Congratulations on your life!” She was so affected she almost came undone by the acknowledgement. In a very real way, this
documentary, which is shared by her and her son interviewing her, is about that life-long strife. Watch it. You won’t be able to take your eyes off of it. Gloria, who turned 92 last February 24, was the original “Poor Little Rich Girl”—a label assigned to her by the New York tabloids during the Great Depression when there were actually millions of little American girls who were just poor. Gloria’s story was an antidote: similar but different from the Hollywood stories about the very rich. Books have been written about her: most famously Barbara Goldsmith’s 1980 biography, Little Gloria, Happy at Last. Still a great read. Multi-marriages, first to a would-be gangster named Pat DiCicco when she was 17; then to maestro Leopold Stokowski when she was 20 (and he was 63) with whom
she had two sons; and then to stage and film director Sidney Lumet, who was “age appropriate” (he was four months younger than she); and finally to a Southern boy, Wyatt Cooper, who was three years her junior and came to the Big Town from Mississippi to seek his fortune—or his future— and met it when he met her. It was a life created in what we now call the media and what we used to call the press. It was a combination of an innocence and naiveté reacting to the elements in her life, as well as a shrewdness that perhaps can be credited to great-great-grandfather Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who established the family name. Her credentials were that name, established by the man who was the richest man in the world when he died in the last quarter of the 19th century.
G A R D E N C L U B O F A M E R I C A H E L D A P R E V I E W AT T H E D I X O N G A R D E N S I N M E M P H I S
Mary Wilbourn and Cary Brown
Brenda Cain and Jean Coors with Kevin Sharp and Erin Riordan 36 QUEST
Dabney Coors, Seldon Popwell and Miriam Smith
Penn and Gwen Owen
Muffie and Mike Turley
Nancy and Robert Miller with Jackie Congleton
CO U RTE S Y O F DA B N E Y CO O R S
Elizabeth Coors, Carolyne Roehm and Jeff Leatham