20 February: Gloria Vanderbilt

Gloria Vanderbilt, US fashion designer and heiress, famous for developing designer jeans, was born on this date in 1924. 10 things you might not know about her:

1. She was born into a wealthy family, her grandfather being Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, a railway and shipping tycoon. Her father, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, was also a railway magnate. As soon as she was born, she inherited a trust fund worth $2.5 million dollars ($40 million in today's Money).
2. All that dosh didn't make for a happy childhood, though. Her father was an alcoholic, and died of cirrhosis of the liver when she was a few months old. Her mother, not wanting to give up her lavish lifestyle, dragged the young Gloria to Paris on a regular basis so that she could go on shopping trips and parties with her friends and her identical twin sister, Thelma, who was mistress to the future King Edward VIII.
3. Meanwhile, her paternal aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, watched all this with horror and fearing for young Gloria's welfare, sued for custody. The ensuing trial was a media circus with the press picking up on all manner of inappropriate things Gloria's mother allegedly did, like leaving erotic photos lying around for the girl to find, and teaching her how to mix cocktails. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney won primary custody in the end, possibly as a result of testimonies young Gloria gave to the judge in private. Even so the press managed to learn that Gloria had said that she wished she could live with her aunt as her mother didn't pay her much attention. Later in life, however, Gloria confessed that she remembered her aunt coaching her on what to say. Living with her aunt didn't really work out, either, since Gertrude imposed strict rules and Gloria felt stifled by her stuffiness. At 17, she dropped out of school and left to live with her mother in California.
4. Soon after that, she married for the first time, to Pat Di Cicco, an acting agent. The marriage lasted four years. Gloria confessed in later life that he was violently abusive.
5. Gloria was married four times in all. Her second husband was the conductor Leopold Stokowski, who was 40 years older than she was. That marriage lasted ten years and they had two sons. Vanderbilt’s third marriage was to film director Sidney Lumet – seven years. Her fourth and final marriage was to Wyatt Emory Cooper. She had two more sons with him, and the marriage lasted until he died.
6. One of her sons with Cooper is Anderson Cooper, who is a CNN news anchor. Her other son, Carter, killed himself when he was 23. Gloria saw it happen; she tried, but failed, to stop him.
7. While most famous for her denim jeans with the swan logo (she had spent some time dabbling in acting, and the first play she appeared in was entitled The Swan) she was also an artist and writer. She wrote memoirs, including A Mother’s Tale, about losing her son, and The Rainbow Comes and Goes, a dual memoir with her son Anderson, in 2017. She was in her 80s when she wrote an erotic novel, Obsession: An Erotic Tale, which horrified some of her more straight-laced friends. She once said that when seeking inspiration she would open a dictionary at random and let her creativity take over.
8. She only wore nail polish on one finger: the left ring finger. “In mythology and palmistry, the left hand is called the dreamer because the ring finger on the left hand leads directly to the Heart,” she explained. “I find it a very poetic idea.”
9. It has been said that Truman Capote’s character Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's was based on her.
10. When she was 95, her son Anderson persuaded her to get an Instagram account, and she took to it immediately, quickly gaining more than 200,000 followers. “I have such fun deciding what I am going to post,” she said. She could even have become a victim of social media addiction - “Of course, I am tempted to post all day long, but Anderson warned me I shouldn’t get carried away,” she added.

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