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As new condition silver gray cloth boards, silver front cover lettering, and silver spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped photographic and illustrated dust jacket. Includes Author Dedication; Preliminary Page Author Note and Picture; Preliminary Page entitled: My Family; Epilogue: July 1941; Illustrations; Acknowledgments and Permissions Acknowledgments. Illustrated with 32 black-and-white photographs and black-and-white photographic front and rear endpapers. "Gloria Vanderbilt has written a memoir like no other - as riveting and astonishing as if a storybook figure were suddenly to speak, to reveal at last her own deepest experience of the dramatic events we have heard about only from others. And Gloria Vanderbilt has indeed been a storybook figure, the object of intense curiosity and speculation since her birth - never more so than when, at the age of ten, she became wordwide front-page news as the prize in a scandal-ridden tug of war between her beautiful and pathetic young mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt (widowed at nineteen after two years of marriage to sportsman Reginald Vanderbilt), and her powerful millionaire aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. But what makes the book unique is this: as Gloria Vanderbilt tells her story, from the moment of her earliest memory through the custody trial to her seventeenth year, she doesn't merely recall her childhood; she summons it back, seems literally to relive it, and gives us, with startling immediacy, the entire experience of the person she was in the days when her young life was an uninterrupted drama of emotional turbulence and suspense. The result is a feat of autobiographical writing, a spectacular rendition of a childhood in crisis, a galvanizing innocent's-eye view of a sophisticated world of privilege, money, power, and outrageous self-indulgence. It carries us from Newport to Paris to Monte Carlo, from Biarritz to London to New York, as Little Gloria is carted around in the wake of her adored and constantly vanishing mother .into the child's terror (has she overheard correctly?) of being separated from her beloved nurse, Dodo, her only safe harbor.into her growing bewilderment at the behavior of the adults around her - her aunt Tamar-Consuelo, who hates her; her grandmother ("the Little Countess"), who seems to think that Gloria's life is in danger; her formidable Aunt Gertrude, who communicates everything important to her through lawyers, even thogh she and the child live in the same house.Until, suddenly, The Trial is upon her, the war between Aunt Gertrude and her mother in which she herself must "go into battle" - and we discover the things she feels, the things she is trying to say.though nobody is bothering to listen. Once Upon a Time is a story of family mysteries. It is the story of a child's confused half-awareness of sexual ambiguities in the lives around her, as well as of her own first experiences of passion and romance. It is the story of a girl's fierce pursuit of emotional sustenance, of her efforts to flesh out the image of the father she never knew, and of her endless search for connection with the elusive mother whom she yearns to know and to love. The people - and the life, and the drama - fascinate. Yet the ultimate power of the book lies in its vice - a vice that binds us to the author as child and young girl, that makes us see and feel all that she saw and felt. Gloria Vanderbilt has brought an extraordinary adriotness, sensitivity, and art to the telling of her remarkable story." - from the inner front and rear jacket flap. Seller Inventory # 008502
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Bibliographic Details
Title: Once Upon a Time: A True Story [FIRST ...
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Publication Date: 1985
Binding: Hardcover
Illustrator: Eisenman, Sara (jacket design)
Condition: As New
Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
Edition: 1st Edition
