Gloria Vanderbilt

Gloria Vanderbilt has been in the public eye since she was ten years old as the "poor little rich girl" who was the prize in a bitter custody battle between her widowed mother and her aunt. The aunt won by proving in court that Gloria's mother had dipped into her daughter's inheritance to finance her own lavish lifestyle. Heiress to a four-million-dollar fortune at age twenty-one, Vanderbilt eventually added to her personal wealth by starting an immensely successful line of clothing and cosmetics bearing her name. Her private life remained tinged with suffering and loss: she married and divorced three times, was later widowed, and then witnessed her 23-year-old son's suicide as he leapt from their fourteenth-floor terrace in front of her. She wrote about that loss in her 1996 book, A Mother's Story. Along the way she has authored several other books, both fiction and nonfiction.