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"Monstrous!" cried the Marchioness of Milford Haven, dispatching her solicitor from London to keep an eye on the proceedings. "Abominable!" declared dapper. Prince zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg, rushing from Germany with his wife to defend in person his own and Mrs. Vanderbilt's reputations. Captain Jefferson Davis Cohn, wealthy British sportsman-adventurer, arrived from London to declare of Mrs. Vanderbilt, "A more loving mother I never met!" Also to Mrs. Vanderbilt's side, along with what tabloids called "The European cocktail set," rallied her younger sister Mrs. Benjamin Thaw Jr. from Pittsburgh, her twin sister Lady Furness from London, her brother Harry Hays Morgan Jr. from Paris. Shocked and indignant were they at their mother for siding with Mrs. Whitney. Said Mrs. Thaw, "Mother is storing up a lonely old age for herself."*
With the hearings closed to them, newshawks kept tabs as best they could by peeping through the courtroom's glass-paneled doors, waylaying principals, witnesses, lawyers and Justice Carew outside. Three doctors discussed Gloria's delicate health. Alfred Cleveland ("Blumey") Blumenthal, Broadway character known chiefly as a friend of "Jimmy" Walker, was publicly humiliated by having the fact of his friendship with Mrs. Vanderbilt offered as damaging evidence against her character. Even Mrs. Vanderbilt's cold cream testimonials were raked up. Pale and trembling, she began appearing at the trial in the company of a nurse, was reported to have suffered a heart attack. "Heart attack, eh?" humphed her mother. "She could always dance all night."
As proof that Gloria had been unhappy with her mother, Mrs. Whitney presented letters the child had written to Mrs. Morgan from England, Paris, Berlin, Cannes, Switzerland.† Mrs. Vanderbilt read the letters, fled the witness stand in a burst of tears, consulted with her lawyer, shrewd, hard-boiled Nathan Burkan. Then she charged that erasures, insertions and use of adult words indicated that the letters had been dictated and corrected by an older person. A handwriting expert corroborated the charge. Lawyer Burkan was inspired to recall how the 9-year-old son of Marie Antoinette had been prompted to accuse his mother of incest, thus helping to send her to the guillotine. Throbbed he: "There is more than one parallel between the beautiful, pleasure-loving Queen of France and my client."
Lawyer Burkan found opening for counterattack in the fact that Mrs. Whitney, an able sculptress, has had a studio in Greenwich Village since 1907, that three years ago she founded Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art. At the Whitney Museum, which Gloria had visited twice, he had photographed what Justice Carew described as a nude Hercules, an etching of a man and woman embracing, a mural in which nudes in opera hats were playing leapfrog.* What kind of surroundings were these, bristled Lawyer Burkan, for a child to be reared in? Mrs. Whitney's lawyer countered by bringing to court photographs of nude statues in the staid Metropolitan Museum. The issue petered out in an argument over the purity of The Odyssey and Paradise Lost.