NEW YORK: Haunting Echo

Rockabye baby

Up on a writ,

Monday to Friday, Mother’s unfit.

As the week ends, she rises in virtue;

Saturdays, Sundays,

Mother won’t hurt you.

Thus with a cynic’s lullaby closed the final chapter—just 24 years ago this month—of one of the most tempestuous custody battles ever fought. The baby was eleven-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt, solemn-faced, button-cute heiress to a $4,000,000 trust fund, headlined in that Depression year as the “Poor Little Rich Girl.” Mother was Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, one of the most publicized Continental gadabouts of the day, who lost the fight for her daughter’s custody—except for weekends (with Christmas and July tossed in)—to her sister-in-law, wealthy Art Patroness Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney.

Last week, in New York’s Supreme Court, came a haunting echo of the old refrain. This time Baby Gloria, now thrice wed and svelte at 35, was the mother battling for control of her own children, Stani, 8, and Christi, 7. Against her was arrayed the forbidding personality of husband No. 2 (1945-55),* Orchestra Conductor Leopold Stokowski, famed for the way he overbutters his Bach. This time Mother was the victor.

Dramatic Opulence. That Gloria and “Stoky” could never see eye to eye on the children had been apparent to friends for a long time. After she divorced him (because, as a friend says, “she found she didn’t need a father, and wanted a husband”), she married Stage-TV Director Sidney Lumet, who was her own age, and resumed housekeeping in her ten-room duplex penthouse on Manhattan’s fashionable Gracie Square. There, in the glow of dramatic opulence (red rugs, red chairs, white curtains, a pink passageway, a yellow door), she was transported to the heady world of upper Bohemianism in the company of the eliteniks of the theater. She painted (commendably), wrote poetry (passably), studied acting, and even performed (middling) in a few TV shows and summer-stock plays. Charming in her shyness, stammering ever so slightly (a holdover from her childhood), Gloria was rated a good all-round girl and loving parent.

But Stoky, doting father that he was, could not get enough of his children. The 1955 divorce settlement gave him liberal rights, and he took every advantage of them. He arranged his Fifth Avenue apartment for the boys, gave each his own room and bath (they slept in the same room at Gloria’s), a large playroom, and bikes. He talked of nothing save his boys and his music (“And,” says a friend, “he was a bore about both”). He meticulously arranged their diets (insisting on orange juice freshly squeezed at the table just before drinking, no earlier), evolved a system of having the boys dine at his place every other night; on alternate evenings he sat with the children and their nurse while they ate at Gracie Square. All this Gloria permitted—until Stoky demanded longer summer visits and permission to take them out of the state. She refused. He sued. She countersued.

Neurotic Explosions. During the closed hearings, Stoky accused Gloria of keeping terrible hours, attending too many parties, spending too little time with the boys. Gloria, in turn, charged Stoky with “tyranny,” cattily observed that he is not 72, as he claims, but 85, declared that the Maestro hovered over the boys’ lives like an “overanxious, harassing and harassed great-grandmother, creating neurotic explosions over minutiae.”

When the smoke of accusation cleared last week, Justice Edgar Nathan Jr. gave Gloria fulltime control over the children, restricted Stoky to annual four-week visits with a fifty-fifty share of school holidays and weekends. But the judge did not let either parent go without administering a sharp slap. “It is a sad commentary,” he wrote, “that an entire month of the court’s time and energy has been devoted almost exclusively to the resolution of problems which mature, intelligent parents should be able to work out for themselves for the sake of their children.”

* No. 1 (1941-45): Actor’s Agent Pat Di Cicco.