GLORIA VANDERBILT arrives recently at 22 East 71st Street, New York, the site of this year's Kips Bay Decorator Show House, to check on the room she and a collaborator have just finished decorating.
The house swarms with industry, as workmen in hard hats, decorators and their assistants move back and forth over thresholds, squinting their eyes in repeated efforts to get a fresh look at a room.
Vanderbilt is asked why, given carte blanche wit
h the decor of her room, she has chosen to recreate the bedroom of her adolescence. She makes a face that conveys, as politely as possible, the words: "Well, duh."
"There was never any question for me," she says. "Because how could you ever find another room like this?"
Here is a reproduction – faithful in spirit, if not in every detail – of her living quarters in an aunt's house near Washington Square Park in the 1940s.
The room, which she created with the decorator Matthew Patrick Smyth, is lined with silver leaf wallpaper and furnished with an ornate bed, a painted chest of drawers and a baroquely curvy Swedish grandfather clock, circa 1857. There are period-appropriate moldings and wainscoting, and painted on boards behind the windows, a trompe l'oeil scene of snow falling on Washington Mews.
"I lived in this room when I was 16 years old," says Vanderbilt, who is now 85. "You know, my aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, decorated it for me because I had gone to live with her. She had moved there from Fifth Avenue. She started the Whitney Museum, which in those days was just around the corner from our house at 60 Washington Mews."
Vanderbilt's name is probably best known to those who were young 30 years ago for having graced a lot of posteriors during the first heyday of designer jeans. Members of a much older cohort remember her considerably greater celebrity in the 1930s, when, as the child heiress to the railroad fortune of Reginald Vanderbilt, she was the object of a bitter courtroom trial in which her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, wrested custody of Gloria Vanderbilt from her neglectful mother, Gloria Morgan.
Vanderbilt says she gave up fashion for good "years and years ago" (of the clothing company that bears her name, she says, "I have nothing to do with it".) She lost a home-furnishings business as a result of a fraud case in which her former psychiatrist and former lawyer swindled her out of a large sum of money, according to a 1993 court ruling that awarded her about 1.5 million (which she says she never received). She has also studied painting and written four memoirs and three novels.
Vanderbilt also had four high-profile marriages – to a Hollywood agent named Pat DeCicco, to the conductor Leopold Stokowski, to film director Sidney Lumet and, finally, to Wyatt Cooper, a screenwriter and author who died in 1978. One of their two sons, Carter, committed suicide by jumping from the window of their apartment as she tried to stop him. The other is CNN reporter Anderson Cooper.
All rooms have their histories, Vanderbilt says. "When I first went to live with my Aunt Gertrude, she was living in Old Westbury, Long Island, and I slept in Henry Payne Whitney's room. That was her late husband. It was a man's room. When we moved downtown, I got a room that she decorated especially for me."
She went on: "When I walk by my mother's house on 72nd Street, what happened there is indelible in my mind. I overheard my mother talking to my aunt – another aunt – and saying she was going to take my nurse, Dodo, and replace her with a German fraulein. And I ran to Dodo and she took me down to Aunt Gertrude's. We snuck out like thieves." She adds: "That's when the whole thing started."
The idea of asking Vanderbilt to participate in the show house was hatched by her eventual collaborator, Smyth, a traditionalist decorator with three Kips Bay rooms under his belt. He said that growing up in rural upstate New York in the 1960s and 1970s, Gloria Vanderbilt represented to him "glamour and high fashion and everything that the country wasn't". He was particularly enamoured of her penchant for collage in both clothes and interiors.
Everything about Vanderbilt's appearance suggests high production values and smooth finishes. Her hair is a radiant and burnished shade of mahogany, and this afternoon her patent leather boots and chocolate cardigan are immaculate. A serene smile rarely leaves her face.
She carries a plastic picnic plate covered in primitive, multicoloured paint strokes. It looks like a child's artwork that's come off of a refrigerator, but Vanderbilt says it is her palette. To complete the room, she was about to paint a passage from Once Upon a Time, her 1985 memoir of childhood, on the wall behind the bed.
"I fell in love with this room and forever tried to recapture it, but it was hard to define and has always eluded me," Vanderbilt writes in the book. She details the French doors that looked out on the neighbourhood, the "curtains of taffeta of palest lavender," the silver tea paper covering the walls, the gessoes of waterlilies and butterflies on her daybed, and the "winged creatures" painted on a Venetian chest of drawers.
"I was 16, and exciting things were happening," she says. "I had the feeling that something wonderful was going to happen. I have that now, but it's different at 16." A year after moving into Washington Mews, she embarked on her first marriage.
"We're not just in a time of Gloria's life, it's an hour – dusk is falling," Smyth says. "She's 16. It's debutante ball season. There's anticipation, the anticipation of getting ready for a date."
"At that age, we had sub-deb dances," Vanderbilt clarifies. "The Cosmopolitan and the Mets – the Metropolitan Dances."
Smyth has outfitted the room with some objects not described in the book, including a carved Burmese slipper chair like one Vanderbilt has today in her apartment.
There are books by authors that Vanderbilt remembers reading as girl, including an old edition of the complete works of Edna St Vincent Millay.
After a pause, Vanderbilt returns to the subject of the house on Washington Mews.
"I've been inside the house since then," she says, explaining that a few years back she went to a party given by a filmmaker who lived in the bottom portion of it (the house was long ago divided into apartments).
The apartment she saw "doesn't even have this room – I wouldn't even know it was the same house," she says.
"And it's sometimes better not to go back."
