Sic Transit Gloria

In the mid-1930s, many a U.S. housewife without so much as a Cadillac to call her own wrung her hands in anguish over the plight of a pathetic, ten-year-old waif named Gloria Vanderbilt. Fatherless at two, Gloria was heir to a trust fund totaling some $3,000,000, and nobody seemed to love her for her wide-eyed, wispy self alone. In one of the most relentlessly publicized custody fights of all time, little Gloria's mother, the gadabout "big Gloria" Morgan Vanderbilt, and her aunt, the redoubtable, socialite art lover, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, traded haymakers of innuendo and insult across the courtroom while character witnesses culled from the bluebooks of two continents spoke up for one claimant or the other. Gloria herself sat through the trial sipping endless glasses of water and watching in bewilderment the storm that blew about her head. "All during that trial," she said later, "I kept saying to myself that when I grow up, I'll marry and have a lot of children and I'll love them so much that they'll never be unhappy."

Despite a petition signed by 300 "East Side Mothers," urging the trial judge to "give this mother back to her child," the court sided with Gloria's aunt. Under her care Gloria did in time grow up and did indeed marry. At the age of 17, a dark-eyed beauty with a sulky mouth in the Katharine Hepburn style, she swept down the aisle of a Santa Barbara church on the arm of an obscure, two-fisted, once-divorced actor's agent and became Mrs.

Pat Di Cicco. "What can one say about a first marriage," gushed Gloria, "except that it's wonderful?" The marriage, so oddly and prophetically labeled "first," lasted nearly three years and three months.

Furtive Publicity. In 1945, at the age of 21, with the ink still wet on her final decree from Di Cicco, Gloria embarked upon her second marriage--this time with Conductor Leopold Stokowski, then 63, a divorced veteran of two previous marriages and of a well-publicized journey (to Tunis, Stockholm, and Ravello's Villa Cimbrone) with Greta Garbo. Like Garbo and Leopold themselves, Gloria had by this time developed a considerable talent for gaining publicity by seeming to avoid it. Her furtive elopement with the famed maestro from the town of Truckee, Calif, was attended by at least one reporter. At her first accouchement she took the precaution of registering at the hospital under a false name, thereby assuring detailed reports of the event in the newspapers.

Nevertheless, during her first few years of marriage as Mme. Stokowska (she was very fussy about the Polish feminine ending), Gloria lived in relative obscurity.

In the small Manhattan apartment where the Stokowskis first set up housekeeping, Leopold busied himself with his music while Gloria flitted happily from one enthusiasm to another. She tried her hand now at painting, now at poetry, now at modeling and even philanthropy, but always kept her own concerns second to those of the maestro. For a while, the care of her two sons, Stanislaus and Christopher, occupied most of her time.

Always Hopeful. About two years ago, Gloria's urge to stand in the spotlight on her own began to get the best of her--and Leopold as well. Last year, having tried a one-man show of her paintings without conspicuous success, she took a fling at acting in summer stock. Stokowski, who failed to attend her premiere, was notably noncommittal. "I am always hopeful." he said, "for the development of new talent." But last month, as Gloria's New York debut with Franchot Tone in a minor role in The Time of Your Life at the City Center theater was announced, Gloria was seen more and more in the company of escorts quite obviously not her husband.

Stokowski friends were frank to predict: "A breakup is inevitable. It's only a question of when and how." Last week they had their answer. Gloria moved out of the twelve-room Stokowski apartment and into the Ambassador Hotel. On the arm of Crooner Frank Sinatra, at the opening of a new Manhattan musical, Mme. Stokowska confirmed the news.

"But," she said, "I don't think I can say any more than that my husband and I have separated." Next day, still escorted by Frankie, and tastefully clad in mink over shocking-pink cotton stockings ("They're divinely warm," she said), Gloria played hide-and-seek with the press, pausing only to insist that "this separation has nothing to do with any third person." Courtly to the last, her abandoned husband took pity on newsmen stamping their feet in the cold outside his Gracie Square home and invited them in for hot coffee, served, a grateful reporter noted, in cups of the finest English bone china.

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