Once Upon a Time: A True Story.

VANDERBILT, Gloria.

Item Number: 115081

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

First edition of Gloria Vanderbilt’s autobiography. Octavo, original cloth, pictorial endpapers, illustrated with 32 black and white photographs. Signed by Gloria Vanderbilt on the second free endpaper. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Sara Eisenman.

The object of intense curiosity and speculation since her birth, American heiress and fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt made worldwide front-page news in the 1930s as the prize in a scandal-ridden custody trial in which her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and her paternal aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, each sought custody of her and control over her trust fund. Her memoir, Once Upon a Time, is as riveting and astonishing as a fairy tale; a galvanizing innocent's-eye view of a sophisticated world of privilege, money, power, and outrageous self-indulgence.