I've just been reading a new book about Gloria Vanderbilt by Wendy Goodman. Beautiful pictures, an intermittently spooky riches to riches fairytale as if written by the Brothers Grimm, and her eerie artworks that Vanderbilt calls 'dream boxes' (see above and within).
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Those dream boxes are like all my nightmares rolled into one - dolls and ringlets and melted wax trapped within suffocating plexiglass. Vanderbilt: another rags to riches story, the best sort. Isn't strange how all the most beloved children's stories have dead mothers and all the great biographies are of people, like Chanel, who have hauled themselves out of the mire and shone.
The dream boxes are very spooky, I agree; whatever happened to baby Gloria? And you're absolutely right about the best stories always beginning with an orphaned child: the Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Pippi Longstocking -- or children whose parents are made absent (Narnia, Five Children and It...) As if we need the space in which to have adventures... but also tapping into the fear of the dangers that lurk when a mother is gone.
There is a lovely little article in American Vogue (November, with Anne Hathaway on the cover) by Anderson Cooper about his famous mother. (It dovetails with another article about the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, mostly an interview with her granddaughter Stella Tennant).
Cooper writes about a 1966 Horst photograph (taken for Vogue, the year before he was born) - he says, "I don't really know who the woman in this photograph is...Every few years she seems to shed her old self, and is born anew...It's a beautiful picture...it says more about the person taking the picture than it says about my mom."
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