It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir - Hardcover

Vanderbilt, Gloria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743264800 ISBN 13: 9780743264808

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004

Synopsis

The personal story of the renowned fashion designer discusses the fierce custody battle between her mother and aunt that marked her childhood, her affairs with such men as Howard Hughes and Frank Sinatra, and her marriages to such figures as Leopold Stokowski and Wyatt Cooper. 75,000 first printing. First serial, Vanity Fair.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: Romance

In romance what do you seek? Something new and Other, although you don't quite know what it is? For me romance is a yearning not fully conscious, but what I find is always the search for something else, a renewal and a hope for transformation. The creative risk-taking of passionate love not only gives you the chance to change the past, it gives the imagination one more chance at an exciting future.

Copyright © 2004 by Gloria Vanderbilt

From Publishers Weekly:

Not surprisingly, it takes an older woman to write a great kiss-and-tell memoir—who else would have enough lovers under her belt? Vanderbilt opens with an appetizer of schoolgirl sex with a chum from Miss Porter's School in the 1930s and then regales readers with a star-studded cast of intimates—Howard Hughes, Leopold Stokowski, Bill Paley, Marlon Brando, Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, among others. Some were one-night-stands, some torrid affairs; three or four she even married. Romance, after all, is "the search for something else, a renewal and a hope for transformation in life." In her less giddy moments, Vanderbilt considers how some of this relentless love-affairing may have been provoked by an unhappy childhood. She was only 10 when her mother lost custody of her in an infamous public trial; young Gloria was sent to live with cold Aunt Gertrude Whitney. When she was 21 and inheriting her fortune, husband Stokowski persuaded her to cut off financial support for her mother, which alienated mother and daughter for another 20 years. While there's a little venting about men who've swindled her, it's the dishy gossip—Paley chasing her around the sofas in his living room, Truman Capote basing Breakfast at Tiffany's on life at her brownstone—that keeps the pages turning. Even in the last chapter, Vanderbilt's going on about some man who's "the Nijinsky of cunnilingus." Ah, toujours l'amour! Photos.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743264800
• ISBN 13: 9780743264808
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176