In the private chambers of a New York Supreme Court justice in Manhattan one day last month a thin, nervous little girl of 10 sat swinging her spindly legs from a fat leather swivel chair. She was Gloria Vanderbilt, scion of one of the great socialite families of the U.S. Gently questioning her in clipped accents was a judge whose big body filled his ample chair and whose funny little goatee waggled up and down as he talked. An oldtime Tammany politician from the East Side, Justice John Francis Carew had hitherto known Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Astors, Goulds only as so many shadowy newspaper names which, as flesh & blood, never came into his middleclass world. Now it was his duty to shape the life of this small Vanderbilt by deciding what her surroundings, friends and education should be for the next decade.
The decision had fallen to him because two high-born women were at war over the girl's custody. One was sleek, brittle Mrs. Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, 29. the child's mother. The other was the child's aunt, lean-faced, determined Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, born Gertrude Vanderbilt 57 years ago. For two years Mrs. Whitney had kept her late brother's only daughter on her 3,000-acre estate at Old Westbury, L. I. while his widow occupied herself in smart European resorts. Last September, settled in a house in Manhattan, Mrs. Vanderbilt had little Gloria brought in from the country for a visit. The child became so overwrought at separation from Mrs. Whitney that her nurse whisked her back to her aunt. Thereupon, with a disregard of privacy which shocked her in-laws, Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt practically charged her sister-in-law with kidnapping and instituted habeas corpus proceedings to obtain possession of her daughter (TIME, Oct. 8 et seq).*
When the case was brought before him eight weeks ago Justice Carew ruled at once that it was up to Mrs. Whitney to prove that Mrs. Vanderbilt could not be trusted to rear and educate her daughter properly. Mrs. Whitney promptly set out to besmirch her sister-in-law's reputation, to show that in the years when she was gadding about Paris, Cannes, Biarritz and Deauville with her hard-drinking, hard-living friends she had paid no heed at all to Gloria's upbringing. Mrs. Harry Hays Morgan, Mrs. Vanderbilt's mother, turned up as one of the most damaging witnesses against her own daughter. Mrs. Morgan testified that for four and a half years Mrs. Vanderbilt had callously ignored her child, given her no schooling while she "devoted herself exclusively to her own gay pleasures...cocktail parties, dinners and night clubs." During this period of traipsing around Europe her granddaughter was practically turned over to Mrs. Morgan. Only education Gloria got from her mother, swore the child's garrulous Irish nurse, was in how to mix a cocktail. She might also, suggested a pert French maid, have picked up some of Mrs. Vanderbilt's "very dirty" picture books. The nurse said she and Mrs. Morgan had peeked on Prince Gottfried zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg lying on a bed with Mrs. Vanderbilt. The maid said she had seen Mrs. Vanderbilt and the Marchioness of Milford Haven doing "something very funny." At that, Justice Carew was so shocked that he slammed closed the doors of his courtroom to Press and public.