Any adult child who has tackled a house full of old cartons and boxes with an aging parent, knows how daunting, and fraught, that task can be. Consider then the plight of Gloria Vanderbilt’s son Anderson Cooper who — back when his artist mother was 90 and still producing and storing huge canvases — decided they should start to go through the vast storehouses filled with crate-loads of original art, apparel, letters, and all manner of memorabilia from a life jam-packed with decades of living.
The “poor little rich girl” at the center of the notorious 1930s Vanderbilt custody battle, Gloria grew up to become famous and wealthy for her own considerable accomplishments in fashion and art, and for having crossed paths with some of the most important players of the 20th-century. (For a comprehensive list of husbands and lovers go to the NYT obit. It’s much better than my list.) And her old boxes of stuff are way better than the average nonagenarian’s boxes of broken costume jewelry and moldering doodads. (Your old comic books? Long gone . . . had to make space for the used wrapping paper.)
Always with a eye for a good story, Anderson Cooper decided to film this effort, the result being the highly entertaining HBO documentary “Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt & Anderson Cooper” (still available On Demand). The film contains archival footage and previously unseen home videos spanning eight decades.
So what about Wheeler? One surprise for Anderson came when he stumbled upon evidence of her time away at a girls’ boarding school. Clearly he was expecting to hear a miserable tale of woe: a story of how she had been shuffled out of the way by heartless relatives; of a dismal garret in some joyless institution. Instead, her face lit up at the memory! “Oh Wheeler, I was so happy there.” Whether by luck or design, Gloria Vanderbilt had found herself in the most perfect and unlikely of all places: a progressive turn-of-the-century school devoted to art and supporting the ambitions of bold young women.
But Gloria Vanderbilt did not graduate from the Mary C. Wheeler School, and for a pretty damn good reason. The photogenic teen had already caught the attention of the Hollywood community and she was not immune to its allure.
As we wrote when the show first aired,
. . . her high school education was interrupted by a vacation to California where “Errol Flynn dated me” and from which she never returned.
Pity her poor roommate.