Gloria Vanderbilt brought the family name out of the Gilded Age and into the Digital Age, reinventing herself over and over along the way. Hers is a story of charisma, glamour, and heartbreaking loss. The illustrations include portraits of Vanderbilt and her extraordinary homes.

#1 New York Times Bestseller A touching and intimate correspondence between Anderson Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, offering timeless wisdom and a revealing glimpse into their lives The Rainbow Comes and Goes is a charming, intimate and fascinating collection of correspondence between broadcaster and #1 New York Times bestselling author Anderson Cooper and his mother, the celebrated Gloria Vanderbilt. Anderson Cooper’s intensely busy career as a journalist for CNN and CBS’ 60 Minutes affords him little time to spend with his ninety-one year old mother. After she briefly fell ill, he and Gloria began a conversation through e-mail unlike any they had ever had before —a correspondence of surprising honesty and depth in which they discussed their lives, the things that matter to them and what they still want to learn about each other. Both a son’s love letter to his mother in her final years and an unconventional mother’s life lessons for her grown son, The Rainbow Comes and Goes offers a rare window into their close relationship and fascinating lives. In these often hilarious and touching exchanges, they share their most private thoughts and the hard-earned truths they’ve learned along the way. Throughout, their distinctive personalities shine through—Anderson’s darker outlook on the world is a brilliant contrast to his mother’s idealism and unwavering optimism. An appealing blend of memoir and inspirational advice, The Rainbow Comes and Goes is a beautiful and affectionate celebration of the profound and universal bond between a parent and child, and, like Tuesdays with Morrie, a thoughtful reflection on life and love, reminding us of the precious knowledge and insight that remains to be shared, no matter what age we are.

An elegant, witty, frank, touching, and deeply personal account of the loves both great and fleeting in the life of one of America's most celebrated and fabled women. Born to great wealth yet kept a virtual prisoner by the custody battle that raged between her proper aunt and her self-absorbed, beautiful mother, Gloria Vanderbilt grew up in a special world. Stunningly beautiful herself, yet insecure and with a touch of wildness, she set out at a very early age to find romance. And find it she did. There were love affairs with Howard Hughes, Bill Paley, and Frank Sinatra, to name a few, and one-night stands, which she writes about with delicacy and humor, including one with the young Marlon Brando. There were marriages to men as diverse as Pat De Cicco, who abused her; the legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski, who kept his innermost secrets from her; film director Sidney Lumet; and finally writer Wyatt Cooper, the love of her life. Now, in an irresistible memoir that is at once ruthlessly forthright, supremely stylish, full of fascinating details, and deeply touching, Gloria Vanderbilt writes at last about the subject on which she has hitherto been silent: the men in her life, why she loved them, and what each affair or marriage meant to her. This is the candid and captivating account of a life that has kept gossip writers speculating for years, as well as Gloria's own intimate description of growing up, living, marrying, and loving in the glare of the limelight and becoming, despite a family as famous and wealthy as America has ever produced, not only her own person but an artist, a designer, a businesswoman, and a writer of rare distinction.

The celebrity artist and designer recreates the glamour and terror of her childhood when she became a legend as the "poor little rich girl" during a notorious custody trial and vividly depicting the adult who loved and battle over her.

New York Times bestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty—his mother’s family, the Vanderbilts. One of the Washington Post's Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2021 When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father’s small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires—one in shipping and another in railroads—that would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though his son Billy doubled the money left by “the Commodore,” subsequent generations competed to find new and ever more extraordinary ways of spending it. By 2018, when the last Vanderbilt was forced out of The Breakers—the seventy-room summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island, that Cornelius’s grandson and namesake had built—the family would have been unrecognizable to the tycoon who started it all. Now, the Commodore’s great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their outsized influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into the ancestors who built the family’s empire, basked in the Commodore’s wealth, hosted lavish galas, and became synonymous with unfettered American capitalism and high society. Moving from the hardscrabble wharves of old Manhattan to the lavish drawing rooms of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue, from the ornate summer palaces of Newport to the courts of Europe, and all the way to modern-day New York, Cooper and Howe wryly recount the triumphs and tragedies of an American dynasty unlike any other. Written with a unique insider’s viewpoint, this is a rollicking, quintessentially American history as remarkable as the family it so vividly captures.

The marriages of desire . . . From the multitalented and versatile Gloria Vanderbilt comes a passionate, sensual, witty, and puzzling tale of erotic obsession, beauty, and revenge, told in tandem by two women obsessed with the same man—and, ultimately, with each other. Talbot Bingham is a renowned architectural genius who, with his formidable wife, Priscilla, creates an architectural community. When he dies unexpectedly in the middle of their tenth wedding anniversary celebration, the devastated Priscilla is left keeper of the flame of Talbot's genius. Going through her husband's archives, she comes unexpectedly upon a pile of neatly tied letters, and the shocking secret of her husband's intimate life—a discovery that shatters the foundation of her soul and spirit. Obsession explores the mysteries of the human heart and the nature of sexuality and obsession, provoking questions about whom we choose to love, and why. The reader is left to decide if the other woman represents another facet of Priscilla, or if Priscilla her-self has invented the other woman who completed the world her husband so recently inhabited?

“Brimming with scandal and an equal amount of heart…a sweeping yet intimate look at the lives of some of history’s most notorious figures from Vanderbilts to the Prince of Wales… A must-read.”—Chanel Cleeton, New York Times bestselling author of When We Left Cuba and Next Year in Havana “Bryn Turnbull takes a story we think we know and turns it on its head, with captivating results… A beautifully written, meticulously researched and altogether memorable debut.”—Jennifer Robson, USA TODAY bestselling author of The Gown For fans of The Paris Wife and The Crown, this stunning novel tells the true story of the American divorcée who captured Prince Edward’s heart before he abdicated his throne for Wallis Simpson. In the summer of 1926, when Thelma Morgan marries Viscount Duke Furness after a whirlwind romance, she’s immersed in a gilded world of extraordinary wealth and privilege. For Thelma, the daughter of an American diplomat, her new life as a member of the British aristocracy is like a fairy tale—even more so when her husband introduces her to Edward, Prince of Wales. In a twist of fate, her marriage to Duke leads her to fall headlong into a love affair with Edward. But happiness is fleeting, and their love is threatened when Thelma’s sister, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, becomes embroiled in a scandal with far-reaching implications. As Thelma sails to New York to support Gloria, she leaves Edward in the hands of her trusted friend Wallis, never imagining the consequences that will follow. Bryn Turnbull takes readers from the raucous glamour of the Paris Ritz and the French Riviera to the quiet, private corners of St. James’s Palace in this sweeping story of love, loyalty and betrayal. Looking for more sweeping historical fiction? Don't miss Bryn Turnbull's new novel. The Last Grand Duchess takes readers behind palace walls to see the end of Imperial Russia through the eyes of Olga Romanov, the first daughter of the last Tsar.

This is a story of money, glamour, and scandal (on the highest level); a story of American society and of European royalty; a story of family strife exploding into one of the most dramatic and publicized court battles of the century—the battle for a solemn ten-year-old child, “little Gloria” Vanderbilt, who in 1934 was the object of the epic custody suit between her mother, the beautiful and penniless Vanderbilt widow, and her aunt, the famous Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, whose $78 million could buy her anything she wanted. And what she wanted was “little Gloria.” The leading characters: Gloria Morgan, who was one of the fabled Morgan Twins (invented by society reporter “Cholly” Knickerbocker as the quintessential Café Society beauties) and who, as a shy, stammering eighteen-year-old, living on nothing a year, did what she was raised to do, becoming the wife of . . . Reggie Vanderbilt, at forty-three a worn-out alcoholic who had managed to go through almost $25 million in fourteen years and who died only two years after his marriage to Gloria, leaving his beautiful young widow nothing but their baby, their baby’s untouchable trust fund, and the Vanderbilt name . . . Gloria Morgan’s twin, Thelma, who, as Lady Furness, was for years the mistress of the Prince of Wales (until she introduced him to her “best friend” Wallis Simpson) . . . Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Reginald’s sister, a formidable Society woman, a sculptor and the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, a woman who conformed—on the surface—to everything expected of American royalty and yet lived a hidden second life as a passionate bohemian . . . And the child—little Gloria herself—shunted out of her mother’s life, carted around Europe, depending for her existence on her neurotically overprotective nurse, Dodo, who never left her for a single day, and her mad Morgan grandmother, who insisted that her own daughter might murder the child for the Vanderbilt millions. Deserted, “dressed in rags,” neglected, she became an almost mythic incarnation of “the poor little rich girl.” This child, who was to grow up to become a world-famous fashion designer, her name—Gloria Vanderbilt—a household word. We come to understand and care about this child as we observe, close up, the astonishing lives and intrigues surrounding her. We see her at the age of ten brought to the courthouse, rushed through mobs of spectators, reporters, photographers. We follow a courtroom drama of sensation after sensation, the judge ultimately banning both public and press, the final scandalous testimony reaching to the heart of the English royal family. We listen to the parade of witnesses—servants, millionaires, society celebrities, aristocrats, family retainers. We watch the judge himself—a classic Tammany pol—becoming another of the many victims of the case, reviled on all sides. And finally we see little Gloria pushed to choose between her mother and her aunt, making the decision that will affect her whole life—with nobody ever asking her the basic question, “Why are you afraid?” For the first time, the thousands of pages of documents and sealed court testimony have been unearthed and explored. Hundreds of people have been interviewed. And a writer completely knowing about society and the period has used all this material to create a compelling narrative of vitality, resonance, and fascination. Combining her extraordinary abilities as an investigative reporter with the skills and sensitivity of a novelist, Barbara Goldsmith has given us a galvanizing story, a whole world of astonishing emotional and social circumstances, unforgettably revealed.

In 1921 there burst upon the New York social scene the famous Morgan twins, Thelma and Gloria, whose names in the decade that followed came to spell glamour and excitement in that magic world of the “international set.” Two continents thrilled to Thelma Furness’s romances with Richard Bennett, Lord Furness, the Prince of Wales, Aly Khan, and Edmund Lowe. The whole world followed with bated breath the searing custody trial over young Gloria that pitted mother against daughter and shook the Vanderbilts and society. While much has been written from the outside about all of this, the two principals have never before disclosed the real truth behind the rumors and the headlines. And exciting as are their personal adventures and escapades, their story is also a portrait of an era. In every age there have been certain women who through a combination of beauty and personality have attracted the love and admiration of rich or famous men, and who seem to be the embodiments of the feminine charm of the period. The Edwardian era had its Lily Langtry, the Napoleonic its Josephine, the eighteenth century its Du Barry and its Lady Hamilton—and so on back to antiquity. In our time, among those women who have come close to fitting this role are Lady Furness and Gloria Vanderbilt. From childhood each had the elusive qualities that characterize the femme fatale. Both knew the love of many men, both suffered deeply, and now both have happily risen above the vicissitudes of their checkered careers and face the future with gallantry, humor, and without rancor or bitterness over the past. In this spirit, and with all sincerity, they have set down the story of their lives. In Double Exposure, we are given a matchless picture of life among the great—and the near-great—in the now-vanished world between the two wars. Above all, we come to know the minds and hearts and philosophy of life and love of two fascinating women, and something of the nature of fascination itself.