I can't remember the first time I started to notice boys. I can't recall the exact moment they came into the picture. But when they did, nothing was ever the same again. Boys, boys, boys. Heady stuff, I can tell you. And they liked me. Because I had low self-esteem, it made me think maybe there was something lovable about me after all.

I had flirted with the idea of becoming a nun, but once boys came into the picture, being a nun didn't seem like such a great idea. God was one thing, boys another.

I was strictly chaperoned, of course, though it seems so foreign now. In those days, there were subdeb parties at the Waldorf, and tea-dancing at the Plaza; it was Glenn Miller and moonlight serenades. That was New York just before World War II. When I was 17, I went out to California for what was supposed to be a two-week visit with my mother. It felt like I had arrived in heaven.

In the summer of 1941, my Mummy lived with her twin sister, Thelma, whom I called Aunt Toto, in a house on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills.

What I most wanted to do when I landed in California was to date movie stars. It felt unreal, arriving in Hollywood, basically on my own after the grip my Aunt Gertrude had had on me in Old Westbury, Long Island, where I had lived since the end of the custody battle between my aunt and my mother—strict, you better believe it. Suddenly, the door of the cage was open, and out I flew, into the nights of Beverly Hills.

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HOWARD

Every night, I was dancing at Ciro's with actors all much older than me. Errol Flynn, George Montgomery, or Bruce Cabot, later known to me around the gaming table as Cousin Brucie. I'd dine with one of them at Romanoff's, then be on to Mocambo with someone else.

Then, huffing and puffing one afternoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, along came Pasquale De Cicco; everyone called him Pat. He wasn't an actor, but he looked like one—knock-over handsome, in style and personality very much like the singer-actor Dean Martin. True, he wasn't much in the brain department, but he did have a flair for gin rummy, and he was funny in his way. He'd walk into a room and have everyone laughing at his sophomoric repartee.

He worked for Howard Hughes, whom I hadn't met, doing exactly what, nobody seemed to know. Mostly he hung around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, playing gin rummy with Bruce Cabot, the agent Charlie Feldman, and Joe Schenk, the head of Twentieth Century Fox, whom everybody called Uncle Joe. It was boring beyond belief. I mainly lolled around in the sun, waiting for Pat to pay me some attention.

One day an unexpected call came for my Mummy. She was all a-twitter. Wannsie, her devoted lady's maid, rummaged through her closet, bringing out dresses to help her decide what to wear. Finally one of her velvet tea gowns was selected, a claret-colored one with long sleeves that made her look, with her long waving hair, like a Burne-Jones Pre-Raphaelite heroine. It turned out that all the scurrying around was for Howard Hughes—he was coming for tea. The call had come out of nowhere. They had never met, but he introduced himself on the phone and asked if he could come to see her. There was something he wanted to talk to her about. "I wonder what it can be," she murmured, gazing at herself in the mirror as Wannsie attached her stockings to her garter belt.

I was going out as Hughes was coming in—a tall stranger, handsome as a movie star. Anyway, it turned out it was me, not Mummy, whom he had taken a fancy to. He came to ask her permission to give me a screen test. Me—a movie star! Yes, why not! Maybe that would be the Great Thing.

Mummy wasn't too taken with Howard's proposal, but I was thrilled, and not only thrilled but dead serious, because, while I had wanted to be a nun when I grew up, my alternative plan was to be an actress, a famous movie star.

I agonized over what to wear for the date with Howard, spent endless time preparing; a long soak in Adena Fluffy Bubble Milk Bath, bubbles surging up from the powerful force of the water, foaming into clouds of heavenly white over my gorgeous body, like blobs of whipped egg white on my favorite dessert, floating island—and when I closed my eyes, I dreamed of stardom.

I wanted a family, but I also dreamed of fame and wanted Howard's magic wand to tap me on the shoulder. Not that "fame" hadn't already tapped me, so to speak. I was born into a well-known American family and then, later, at age 10, had survived an infamous custody case. Yes, I already had fame, but was famous for what? Nothing of merit. The only fame that impressed me, the only fame that mattered, was fame for what you achieved by your talents. That's why actors dazzled me. Artists did, too. They were famous for a reason, and therefore worthy. I wasn't worthy, but someday I would be. Quite how I didn't yet know—but I was determined.

For my date with Howard I ended up wearing a Lanz of Salzburg peasant skirt and blouse, and I dabbed tons of Schiaparelli Shocking perfume behind my ears. The blouse was white cotton with a square neck and black velvet ribbon running through its ruffled décolletage, and the skirt was ruffled, too, quite costumey, and the rage that summer. The only thing not good about it was that it made me look too young. I studied myself in the mirror. Yes, definitely, much too young. Maybe put a gray streak in my hair? But it was too late for that, because the doorbell rang and it was he—Howard Hughes—waiting with his magic wand.

Today it's hard to erase the image we have in our minds of what Howard Hughes became at the end of his life—the long unkempt beard, the man in isolation in Las Vegas on the top floor of the Sands hotel, rumors of behavior so bizarre it went way beyond eccentricity. What was he really like? All I can tell you is how he was when I knew him that summer. Beyond that, I can only guess at the strange demons that possessed him, turning him into the paranoiac recluse he apparently became. There was nothing when I knew him to suggest what lay ahead. Wannsie had let him in and there he was, waiting in Mummy's living room as I flew down the stairs and into his life.

In the days that followed I saw a lot of him. Sometimes he would pick me up and we'd just drive toward Malibu; the radio would play soft music, and we talked. I was shy and he was, too. He was also slightly deaf and spoke in a voice so low that sometimes you'd have to lean close to hear him.

Once we stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. Something about the young man was touching as he stood there alone in the road. Howard stopped the car, and we drove to Robinson's, where he bought him an outfit—suit, shoes, and shirt.

"I'm in love with Howard Hughes and he's in love with me," I blurted out to my Aunt Gertrude.

While Howard was paying the bill, the young man, stunned by it all, said to me, "Who is he?"

"Santa Claus," I whispered with a smile.

We met at offbeat times—I'd get a call saying John (an assistant) would pick me up at Maple Drive at 11; John would then drive me in one car to meet Howard in his car, parked on a side road somewhere. Off we'd go to have pancakes at a diner. Other times I found myself at his house, a haphazardly furnished place with dust sheets over most of the furniture, and a recording of the "Moonlight Sonata" playing somewhere. To this day I can never hear it without thinking of him. Some evenings he worked at Lockheed while I watched a movie in his private screening room until he came in, and we'd have dinner right there, as if we were on a picnic. He always ate the same things, whether there or in a restaurant—steak, peas, and a baked potato—so I always had that, too.

Howard was serious, very—unlike anyone I'd ever met. After being with him, suddenly the razzle-dazzle of Hollywood didn't seem important anymore, and the famous actors, too, had lost their glamour. One night he screened Hell's Angels, which he was especially proud of, since it was the first movie he had produced and directed. It starred Jean Harlow; she had been one of his discoveries.

Sometimes we flew to Catalina. "Look down," he said. "See the pattern the lights make on the dark land? That's one way to tell what city you're over." It was like looking at a pattern of stars, only they were below us.

In Catalina, Howard would land the plane and we'd walk along the beach. Once, a woman with a camera recognized him and came up to ask if she could take our picture. He didn't like that idea at all and pulled me away quickly.

I never for a moment thought Howard was eccentric or strange in the way he did things. Quite the contrary: I loved his spontaneity and the surprise of it, and suddenly I didn't feel shy with him anymore. He was very real about everything, and I realized I had lost all my dreams of his making me a famous movie star. All I wanted was for him to love me. But it wasn't to be. Or perhaps it was, but I didn't realize it at the time, and so it never was.

Then word came from Aunt Gertrude: a message from her feared lawyer, the hated Mr. Crocker, demanding that I go back to New York. This time it was a command, backed up by Surrogate James Foley, my legal guardian—a summons that couldn't be ignored.

I was booked on the flight incognito, under the name of Vane, to avoid publicity, and it was a kick when "Miss Vane" was invited up front to meet captain and crew (arranged by Howard), a kick walking into the cockpit, as if I had walked into the intricate insides of a watch. But it was even more of a kick when I found Katharine Hepburn on the same flight. She who had been a shadowy role model seen only on the distant silver screen in Little Women, cavorting around in the snow, confidently throwing snowballs at her chum Laurie, was now present, here on this very plane, breathing the same air I was. Hadn't Howard been in love with her? How could I ever compete with someone like that? I mustered all the courage I could and left Mummy, slipping invisibly into the empty seat facing Hepburn. But instead of getting a good look at her, I was too polite and only stared out the window until I chickened out completely and went back to my seat.

Freddy, Aunt Gertrude's chauffeur, met me at the airport in the familiar gray Rolls-Royce and drove me back to Old Westbury. Only now it wasn't home. "Home," such as it was, was now the elusive Mummy and Maple Drive, was now Mocambo/Romanoff's/Ciro's, where every time I arrived the doorman would say, "Welcome home." "Home" was Pat and Uncle Joe and the damned gin rummy. It was Howard's beat-up Packard and a plane flying to Catalina.

I dreaded seeing Aunt Gertrude again, but her manners, as always, were superb. There was a jigsaw puzzle she'd been working on, and after she embraced me (coolly) she leaned over and put a piece in place. "I have something to suggest," she said. "Why don't you marry Geoff and come back to live here with me?"

Geoff was the young man in New York I had been besotted with. I would have died to hear this before I went to visit Mummy in Hollywood. He was the first boy I loved, and we were crazy to get married after he graduated from Princeton that spring. But now it seemed like baby talk.

"You can have any kind of wedding you'd like," she went on.

"I don't care about him anymore," I told her. "I'm in love with Howard Hughes and he's in love with me," I blurted out. I had already informed my old nanny, Dodo, of this fact, and it knocked her socks off. She had bought a silver medal enameled with a Virgin Mary and had it engraved on the back, "G.V. to H.H. July 1941." She sent it to me to give to him, but I didn't think he was all that religious, so I hadn't.

The next morning I went back to New York, to my mother, who was staying at the St. Regis. There were yellow roses and phone messages waiting for me from Howard, even a letter written on yellow lined paper (I still have it) saying he missed me and spent dinners alone, "pushing the peas around on the plate." When was I coming back? he asked. I didn't know when, or what was going to happen.

And then suddenly, unexpectedly, there was Pat in New York, yakety-yakking away at the King Cole Bar, in the St. Regis, keeping the table in stitches, but cutting me dead when I caught his eye. He was dark as thunder and I longed for him to look at me again and smile and like me and love me. It didn't take long.

The next evening we were dancing the night away at El Morocco with Rita Hayworth and her husband, Eddie Judson, in town for some publicity stuff. She sat there silent and gorgeous as a Barbie doll, never opening her mouth. Just like me, only I didn't think I was gorgeous; I was trying desperately to be grown-up, or if not be, at least look that way.

I was confused, panicked, and uncertain about everything—everything, that is, but one decision. I couldn't go back to living with my mother, and I wasn't going back to live with Aunt Gertrude. Best get married. Quick. And I did—not to Howard, but to Pat. The Big Bad Wolf.

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PAT

It seemed important at the time to appear grown-up, much older than my 17 years. Wouldn't the fact that I was married make it so?

Life with Pat was always nip and tuck, never knowing what would set him off into one of his violent spells, when for no apparent reason he'd turn and vent his anger on his longing-to-please, docile wife, who was living off his smile.

I never told my friends about these episodes. I was too ashamed, too ashamed that I'd married a man who would behave as he did.

One time, going to meet him at the Fort Riley Army Base, in Junction City, Kansas, where he was in officer-training camp, I overheard an older man and his son, who were sitting beside me on the train talking, and suddenly they started gossiping about me and Pat. They did not recognize me, and had no idea that I was listening to their conversation.

To my horror I heard the young man say, "How could she marry that gigolo?"

Why indeed? But I was stung to the quick, sitting silently as they went on and on.

Soon the train arrived at our destination, and they fell in behind me as we filed off. In a few minutes I would disappear into the crowd, the sting mine alone. I took a deep breath, turned, looked them straight in the eyes, and, heart pounding, said, "I'm Gloria Vanderbilt." They were so floored, it was as if I'd socked them in the stomach. I felt the surge of small victory. Alone, I'd stood up for myself. In my secret heart I always knew I could.

LEOPOLD

I met Leopold Stokowski in 1944, when I was a sexy 20-year-old, and I couldn't wait to introduce him to my beautiful Mummy and brought him as the mystery guest to a party she gave for me. Well, I certainly surprised my Mummy. A-twitter with love, we made our entrance, aglitter and aglow, yes—and my Mummy almost fell on the floor. There I stood with Him beside me; not only was he a world-famous orchestra conductor, more controversial than Arturo Toscanini, but, aside from everything else, he'd had an affair with Greta Garbo, whom my Mummy ecstatically admired—that alone would knock her socks off, or so I thought. It seemed to have something to do with my being 20 and he sixty-something, but all great beauties lie about their age, and, anyway, gods don't have ages or birthdays, even though I had one coming up very soon.

A month before my fateful encounter with Leopold, Pat, about to be shipped overseas, had become ill with septicemia, and had been saved by a new drug, penicillin, and discharged from the army. This put him in a cheery mood, free to pursue gin games and nights at El Morocco. It was just like old times in Hollywood, only it was New York, and we were staying at my cousin Sonny Whitney's apartment in the River House, and the cast had changed. It was now gambler Hal Sims, playboy Dan Topping, and so on at the card table, set up permanently in the golden-green library overlooking the East River, where the smoke-filled sessions continued day and night, night and day. Have you any idea the pleasure it was for me to tell him to take his pack of cards and scram—vamoose—out, out, out? Grandmother Naney Morgan pounced in with Dodo, urging that I get an annulment, and I easily could have because we had been married in the Roman Catholic Church and he hadn't told me he couldn't have children. But I didn't give this idea a thought. It would take too long, much too long, and I wanted to marry Leopold right now, today, that minute.

I was about to turn 21 and come into my famous inheritance. But in the never-never land I grew up in at Aunt Gertrude's, there was one and only one f-word (as in "forbidden") and it was money. Neither Aunt Gertrude nor the hated lawyers Gilchrist and Crocker nor anyone else had ever talked to me about how to manage the inheritance I was about to receive. Since I had always felt an impostor while living with my aunt, the inherited money seemed unreal, like something that didn't really belong to me. It was only later that money had reality, because it was money I had earned through my own talent and efforts.

The day I became 21, on the dot, I marched down the long corridor of Bankers Trust flanked by a parade of bankers, on down to the vaults, where a box was opened. There inside were the stocks and bonds that would make me an heiress. I took them out of the box. They were only paper—what did I know about it? All I knew was that suddenly there was money, and I couldn't wait to buy presents for everyone: a mink coat for my grandmother Naney Morgan, one for Dodo too, diamonds for my friend Carol Marcus, and so on. But Mummy—what to give her? Actually, there was something I wanted her to give me, only I couldn't put a name to it. Since the allowance Surrogate Foley had portioned out from my trust fund ended now that I had come of age, Mummy would in the future be depending on me for support.

I tried talking to Stokowski about this, but Leopold was silent, thinking deep thoughts every time I tried. Days went by, but finally he had it figured out: "Your mother never gave you love. Why give her anything? It was your nanny, Dodo, who did—your mother never gave you anything. Let Thelma support her."

It was no surprise that Mummy didn't take to this one bit. She hotfooted it to the press, and suddenly there it was, splashed over the tabloids.

I didn't see my mother again for 17 years. When I finally did see her, she had changed so much I couldn't connect her with the elusive, beautiful woman in the yellow velvet dress I had feared and loved for as long as I could remember. And how I came to see her again had been a long, tortuous route starting with the first words I said to a therapist: "I'm here, but I'm never going to talk about my mother."

A few years later her name came up, and five years after that, following a session with LSD supervised by the same therapist, I finally had the courage to fly out to Los Angeles and knock on the door of the house on Bedford Drive where she lived with Aunt Thelma.

I saw before me a woman so passive, so gentle and tentative, it broke my heart, a woman with hysterical blindness, nonetheless real. "Thelma tells me you have a little gray in your hair," she said wistfully. When I left, Wannsie, her devoted maid, saw me to the door. "Oh, Miss Gloria," she said, "it was just a misunderstanding." Oh, God help me.

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Today, how I wish my mother were living close by. Perhaps around the corner so that I could drop in for a cup of tea now and then and tell her about a new love affair, or talk of things that happened long ago but now don't seem as important as they did then. We could smile over the things we may have cried about back then, as old friends do when they get together once in a while to catch up, to talk about old times and the things that pass.

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In Santa Barbara, California, at the top of a mountain, Leopold built a house he called the Monastery. It was a paradise, and most appropriately named because from the start of our marriage we had lived cloistered, like a sexy monk and nun. Leopold was away now most of the time, conducting in Europe, yes, away more and more, and I no longer traveled with him.

After a while I found myself locked inside a place where I was isolated, suspended in water, water that had frozen.

One evening soon after we were married, he crashed into my secret heart, thrilling me with a thunderous moment of intimacy as we sat in front of the fire. There was a mystery in his life no one knew, a secret so secret he'd never told anyone, but he was going to tell me. It had to do with politics and royalty—had I ever wondered why he had a Hapsburg nose? Actually, that thought had never occurred to me. What did a Hapsburg nose look like? I couldn't wait to hasten to the library and dig up a portrait, a picture, do intense research—anything to get a grip on what he was talking about. When we had first met he showed me a picture of himself as a baby dressed in frills and lace, but, alas, it was all he had left from the family album, which had been stolen. I treasured this picture and put it in a silver frame next to one of my unknown father. (Later I was to wonder if the baby even was Leopold.) Yes, his family was from Krakow, and his mother had died soon after he was born, and he was brought up by a beloved nanny who'd been a mother to him very much the way my nanny Dodo had been to me. But now, with this nose revelation, could it be that his father had been a prince—a king, even? I'd have to brush up on Austrian history. Maybe he was illegitimate—you know, a love child? Was that the secret? Wow!

As he sat holding my hand, telling me this, the only sound to break the silence was the crackling of the fire, but it was nothing to the crickle-crackling in my heart. It was coming, I could feel it—the moment was rolling in like a gigantic wave about to carry me out into a sea of love. I held my breath, waiting, waiting, but then he took his hand away and looked into the fire as if he were coming out of a trance and the trance was me.

"Yes, yes," he said, "and ... someday you will be the only one to know."

It took many winter evenings spent sitting in front of many different fireplaces after many dinners to finally realize that the someday wasn't to be—ever—and that I had only a toehold in his heart, while he had his whole foot in mine.

"You're a fake." I trembled as I thought it, but trembled even more later when I looked him in the eye and said it out loud.

Many years after we separated I discovered the secret, but it had nothing to do with a family of Hapsburgs. It had to do with a family of Cockneys that included two brothers, Leopold and Percifal Stokowski. One brother—Leopold—had kept his name, weaving it into a fantasy to suit a great conductor, while Percifal had changed his name to James Stokes in order to weave around himself the fantasy of an English gentleman. By then Leopold had achieved so much in his long and extraordinary career that he didn't need or care anymore to tend the mysterious facade he had invented about himself. On a trip to Europe he introduced our grown sons to their Uncle Jimmy (Percifal Stokowski) and his wife. Jimmy lived in London and had a successful business selling Rolls-Royces. He also had an uncanny resemblance to Leopold save for his Cockney accent, so unlike the Oxford speech Leopold had mastered. Jimmy's son had been named Leopold after his uncle and had died in the war. And the beloved nanny who had raised Leopold turned out to be his mother, who was living in a nursing home in Bournemouth.

By the time I found this out his deception didn't matter anymore and only saddened me. The truth wouldn't have mattered one whit, but he hadn't trusted me enough to tell me.

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BILL

As I started taking tiny footsteps into the world outside the Monastery, lo and behold, there waiting on the other side of the glass wall I could see a tiny Pied Piper. His name was Truman Capote, and he had just appeared on the scene with his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, written with a literary skill that had captured everyone's imagination.

Ah, True Heart, as Bill Paley, the powerful president of CBS, used to call him—dear True Heart—I see you sitting over your martini at Pavilion, watching me come toward you quite breathless. I'm late, late, for a very important date, a date with True Heart, who has something up his sleeve, something to talk to me about, something very important. That's what he promised on the phone, at least.

I could tell by the look of him, as I settled into the cushy banquette, that he was already on his second martini and that it would be a long lunch with lots of giggles and insights into my secret heart, or so he thought. In truth, he really didn't know that much about my secret heart at all. We were friends, close, but I really never did quite trust him.

"Bill Paley." He said the name slowly, his tongue sucking on each syllable. Bill Paley was his close friend. He was married to the beautiful, kind, loyal Babe. Babe was truly Truman's closest friend. Nevertheless, here Truman was to say that Bill Paley had intimated he was interested in me, and could something be arranged?

"Now, wait, honey, just listen to me," Truman said, placing his tiny hand on my arm. "Now, Babe knows that he has other girlfriends and she handles it beautifully, but sometimes it gets out of hand and it gets complicated and messy; it's upsetting to her, naturally. She likes you, you know, respects you; if he was involved with you it would be fun for you, ease things up for her. It would even in a way be doing everyone a favor—so to speak." Truman had a way of presenting things so you'd see them from another point of view. His point of view.

Now, Babe Paley and I were not close friends. I admired her enormously, but was intimidated by how she had edited herself into a mold of her view of perfection and had certainly achieved it in her style, her houses, her garden, her parties—in everything, really. Around her, I never felt I could quite pass muster.

One time we ran into each other at Kenneth's hair salon, and on the spur of the moment she said, "Are you free for lunch— a sandwich somewhere?" If only that day I had worn the red Adolfo instead of just a sweater and skirt, I would have said yes. "Oh, how I wish I could, but I've got something," I answered. How ridiculous it seems now; had I responded differently I might have discovered a friend.

"Honey, it's going to take a real pro," Truman said, looking around shiftily. Was I interested? Well—maybe. Maybe, I told myself, it would be interesting to get Bill's opinion about a TV show I had recently appeared on. (Oh, Gloria, how could you!) And so, a few days later, there we were, alone in Bill Paley's private projection room at CBS, looking at a tape of a television show I had just done with Art Carney called Very Important People. Clearly, Bill didn't think what was on the screen was very important at all; he was more captivated by my prim performance leaning away from him.

Truman of course expected a full report on what had transpired. And full report he got. A week later it was another lunch—he had news! Not much, as it turned out. He'd spent the weekend at the Paleys' in Manhasset. Babe had appeared rather testy with Bill (nothing that you could really put your finger on but... ), and Bill, when they were alone, wanted to know everything—what I had said about him and so on. Once again Truman said, "Honey—this is going to take a real pro!"

I did meet Bill alone once again, in his and Babe's place at the St. Regis, a corner apartment that Billy Baldwin had decorated with paisley patterns, rich jewel-tone colors, and everywhere objects of ravishing beauty: potpourri in Chinese bowls, sweet peas in Bristol-blue vases, a Fabergé egg casually left on a table. It was pure unadulterated luxury, and I sank into a chair by the fire and thought, Why not? He came back from the kitchen with a split of champagne, popping the cork and bounding around like a kid full of plans, talking of places we'd go and things we would do after he got back from the holidays in Jamaica, where he and Babe were going for Christmas. I got up and went over to the window. Looking down on the traffic, the people walking by on Fifth Avenue, I wanted to get out of there and back down where it was real. No, this just wouldn't do at all. I started to leave, and what was to have been a calm, sane, civilized farewell turned suddenly into a French farce. I found myself chased, in and out, around the sofa, the chairs, into the bedroom, and back again. It really was funny, but at the time it didn't seem so. I just wanted to get the hell out.

Truman called the next day.

"I guess I'm just not a pro," I told him.

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MARLON

I had just seen On the Waterfront and had flipped over Marlon Brando. Who hadn't, really? All that inarticulate sensitivity. So feminine—and yet so masculine. My friend Russell Hurd and I sat in the darkness of the movie theater, looking up at the screen, enthralled. Yes, that's for me, I thought, and I couldn't wait to hotfoot it out of the theater and call Carol on the West Coast. She knew him, dated him even, had ridden around New York on his motorcycle.

But when I called, her line was constantly busy. Finally I got through: "Darling, how amazing, I've just been talking to him on the phone," she said. "I'll be right over," I said.

And over I was, on the next plane to L.A.

She picked me up at the airport and we had dinner at his house that very night! Talk about instant gratification. I had thrown my best Norell dress into the hastily packed suitcase—red, sari-like, gold-embroidered, too dressy for the dinner chez Brando, which turned out to be a small gathering in the kitchen—Marlon's aunt, Carol, him, and me. No matter: with knees shaking, but outwardly calm, cool, and collected, as they say, I stood outside as Carol rang the doorbell.

And there he was—more, more, more everything than even I could have possibly imagined. Of course what I saw really had nothing at all to do with what he was all about. If Leopold was God, here was Zeus. It took all my concentration not to fall down on the stone pavement in a dead faint.

What did we talk about at dinner? I haven't a clue. The only thing I remember is his saying to me over dessert, over the ice cream and cookies, "You have Japanese skin." Yes, yes, Japanese, I wanted to scream—Japanese and it's all for you. But I smiled beguilingly (I hoped) and looked away. Hours trickled by, then the aunt left, Carol left. I stayed. We were alone at last. Sounds like a romance novel, doesn't it? Guess it was, because once we were alone— oh dear, I don't quite know where I'm taking this now, but anyway ... In his bedroom there was a 10-by-12-inch drop-dead-gorgeous photograph (of himself) in a silver frame on the table by his bed, a glossy studio shot taken to publicize Desiree, the movie he was shooting. And next to it a telephone ringing (girlfriends, no doubt), but with the sound switched off so there were only lights twinkling on and off, on and off, all through the night, on and off, glowing like fireflies in the dark.

The next morning Carol came to pick me up.

After I got in the car Marlon pressed his lips against the window between us as I pressed mine in return. But the glass didn't crack; the only thing cracking was my pit-a-pat heart. All day he didn't call. I mooned around Carol's house, waiting for the phone to ring. We talked of nothing else while we made preparations for a party she was giving that night. Should I call him? Should she? No, no, no, definitely not. Wait. He'd show up at the party? Maybe. Would he? No, he wouldn't. Yes, he would. But he didn't. Instead it was Gene Kelly dancing in, singing in the rain of my heart, so to speak, although it perked me up considerably. Once again I was wearing the ill-fated red, sari-like Norell. Gene kept calling me "Persian Princess," and we drifted off into another room and started kissing. During all this, Carol and the other guests were horsing around at the piano. Betty Comden and Adolph Green were there, and when Gene and I went back to join them, Betty Bacall was singing "Little Girl Blue," describing me perfectly as I looked frantically around. He wasn't there. It was getting late and everyone started to leave. I too would be leaving the next day, going back to New York, hollow and empty. Would I ever hear from him again?

It turned out to be sooner than I thought— at the airport before boarding the plane. He'd found out my flight from Carol, and there he was on the airport phone just before I stepped on the plane. "Thank you for tender feelings," he said. "Me too," I answered casually. But I was in a panic.

Back in New York, I not only didn't see him, I didn't hear from him, and I plunged into despair. I spent hours playing Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable." The monotony of it over and over again soothed, comforted me—for God's sake, Gloria, turn it off. But I couldn't stop. I was hooked into a myth and couldn't let the tale of enchantment go.

However, despite the fact that my little trip to L.A. hadn't turned out the way I'd hoped, it gave me courage. I'd never ever again give myself completely, never again give my secret heart to anyone (even Zeus Marlon) the way I'd given myself to Leopold—no, not in that way.

I'd gotten up the moxie to face Leopold head-on, and even though he'd said, "Never, never, I'll never let you go," and even though I still somewhere thought maybe he really was God, and even though I was right back in a cage with the door locked, still believing there was no choice but to remain captive, I thought there might be another way to get through to him. Straight to the scotch bottle I ran, took a couple of swigs to wash down sleeping pills (Seconals, I think), and back I went to where he sat imperiously behind his desk in the library, and I told him that if he didn't let me be free I'd rather die.

Whatever he saw standing in front of him got through to him. It got through and scared him enough to call a doctor, but when the doctor came it wasn't scary enough for me to be sent to the hospital, and still not scary enough for him to let me be free. The only thing free the next day was a hammer bing-banging in my head.

Alone with my bing-banging headache, my thoughts like beans jumping around on a hot skillet—what? where? who? how?— and cut off from life, I got one of those phone calls that can change your life. Ringie-ding-ding, pick it up on the second ting-a-ling—it's Jule Styne, saying Frank Sinatra was in town and wanted to meet me. Yes! Yes! I jumped out of the frying pan like a squirrel running up a tree, and a week later I took my kids and out we went, out of 10 Gracie Square, out and into the Ambassador Hotel.

FRANK

Frank Sinatra exploded into my life like a firecracker. He had come to New York for a stint at the Copacabana, a nightclub next to the Hotel Fourteen, where my grandmother Naney Morgan lived. I thought of her, sleeping in troubled dreams only next door, as I sat listening to Frank's troubling songs: "It's a quarter to three, / There's no one in the place except you and me." For one crazy moment I thought of running to her ... but would she hear me if I knocked on her door?

Having made a great comeback success in the movie From Here to Eternity, Sinatra had also just separated from his wife, actress Ava Gardner, and was hot-hot again, right up there with the shooting stars, and he was taking me right up there with him. Right behind us followed the tabloid press— it was quite a scandal. But I didn't care a fig. Even if I had seen the trashy headlines, it wouldn't have made any difference. Ever since the publicity I'd had as a child, I had rarely read anything written about myself in newspapers, and this was certainly not the time to start.

As I got to know Frank Sinatra, I came to see him in a very different way from the many varied images of him floating around. The composer Harold Arlen, smitten and protective of me, and fearing I might be hurt, told Frank, "Herm, be nice to tender people" (they always called each other "Herm"). And indeed Herm was—not only nice but tender and sweet, showering me with attention, romantic attention, and plans for the future. Plans to go to Bali together, dreams of love, but even better, dreams of working together in the movies, and—best present of all—signing me to a three-picture deal with his production company, one of them to be Ocean's Eleven. There were midnight suppers during which he talked about himself, confiding the split in his mind, like a balance scale, on one side Mafia-dark, on the other side Clark Kent-light, dark and light, up and down, a pull drawing him to the dark, but in the end Clark always triumphing.

We often double-dated with actress Joan Blondell and sports columnist Jimmy Cannon. Frank and Jimmy talked about Frank, while Joan and I listened and smiled a lot. We went to the opening of the musical Pajama Game and were mobbed by the paparazzi, but I didn't care. I was free, alive again. At his Copa opening I was thrilled when he caught my eye while singing "A Foggy Day in London Town"—just for me.

And although he drank Jack Daniel's, I never saw him drink too much or be rude or violent to anyone, as some well-intentioned friends kept warning me he could be. There were presents too. A gold bracelet with a dangling charm reading "From miracle and me" in diamonds. And that's just how it was—a miracle coming at exactly the right moment, for hadn't he rescued me by giving me the power to leave Leopold? I couldn't have done it without him.

Yes, Sinatra ringie-dinged his way, circling around my secret heart, but I didn't let him into the center, to the bull's-eye, so even though he was about to leave town, ringie-dinging off on a tour in Australia, I wasn't too upset.

SIDNEY

While Frank was away, Richard Avedon photographed me for Harper's Bazaar, and he said, "There's someone I'd like you to meet: Sidney Lumet, a director. He's just separated from his actress wife, Rita Gam. I think you'd each have something to give the other." I was intrigued—a director—maybe we would work together (Garbo and Stiller?). Fun to dream, isn't it? Why not?

A week later Avedon and his wife, Evelyn, gave a dance at their house on Beekman Place for Grace Kelly. I had had little sleeveless short dresses made of satin in an array of delicious colors, long-waisted, in an F. Scott Fitzgerald mode, with pumps dyed to match, and that night I picked the framboise to wear. I fluffed up my hair, and out I went alone to the party. And there he was, waiting for me—Sidney Lumet, enfolding me in his arms like a teddy bear. As we danced I could feel the energy of his heart and soul going through me like warm honey. How's that for romance? But then I got panicky because he said he had to leave the party to meet an agent at Sardi's.

I didn't think he'd come back. "Bet a red rose you won't," I told him. I was sure there would be some glamour girl with the agent, and he'd forget all about me. But he did come back; he did; he not only came back, but was holding a red rose (exactly the color of my framboise dress), and together we left the party. From that moment on we were glued each to the other—so glued that our friends found it hard to be around us. But that was O.K., because all we wanted was to be alone together.

Sidney didn't want to be in love ever again with an actress, and he knew I was dead set on being just that. But when I left for L.A. to do the movie with Sinatra and he saw me off at the airport, he knew it didn't matter, because by then I was totally in love and committed to him. He could see that.

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Exhausted from so much love, I fell asleep on the plane. When I awoke, seated beside me wasn't the stranger who had been there when we took off, but instead, through some kind of hocus-pocus, there was someone else there. The director John Huston introduced himself. He was utterly charming throughout the trip, but I was mesmerized by his tongue. It was so ... so pink—pink as a Popsicle, and I couldn't stop looking at it.

Later, back in New York, I was relating my adventures in wonderland to the Tiny Terror, Truman Capote: "His tongue. I've never considered a tongue as a feature of the face, but I couldn't stop looking—it was so so pink!"

"Honey," Truman said, "that's because it's had a lot of practice!" So much for pink tongues.

Frank was to have met me at the airport, but for some reason chose not to (miffed about Sidney?). His car was there, however, and when I got to my bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel there were flowers, champagne, and a message from him in Palm Springs.

We were scheduled to star together in Johnny Concho, but I was dismayed as I settled in to read the script and found a trashy Western, not in the same serious league with High Noon, as I had been led to believe it would be. Frank blamed it all on the director, Don McGuire, saying, "I'll deal with him in my own way." (Oh dear.)

I couldn't wait to call Sidney and tell him I was on my way back home to him.

Sidney was the warmest, most loving person, the most open, unedited person I'd ever met. When we married, a friend of his father's, stunned, said, "The son of Baruch Lumet married a shiksa?" Shiksa though I may be, he was crazy in love with me and I with him. Leopold had accepted the fact that I wasn't going back to him. Finally he moved out and we divorced. Together, Sidney and I made the penthouse at 10 Gracie come alive again. Here legendary parties flourished. When Jule Styne arrived he would always head straight to the piano to play the songs he had composed over the years. It would be Judy Holliday beside him, or Lisa Kirk, or Marilyn Monroe singing as she tried to remember the lyrics to "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." Lena Horne with Harold Arlen at the piano playing his "Over the Rainbow," Adolph Green singing Captain Hook songs from his musical Peter Pan, or he and Betty Comden singing "Just in Time," from Bells Are Ringing, along with Judy Holliday, while Truman Capote spooked around for something to write about.

At one of my birthday parties Steve Sondheim for the first time sang the lyrics of his and Jule Styne's new musical, Gypsy, which hadn't gone into rehearsal yet, while Jule accompanied him on the piano. We gave another party for Truman, to say bon voyage to the Tiny Terror before he headed to Russia to write The Muses Are Heard. This was a report about the American production of Porgy and Bess that traveled by train from East Berlin to Leningrad, where the opera was to have its Russian premiere, an event destined to gain worldwide attention.

Then there was the party for Isak Dinesen, in New York to lecture on her book Out of Africa. She came escorted by Carl Van Vechten, the photographer, who had become a close friend. We ensconced her on a throne (so to speak) in our library, with a little table by her side so she could reach from time to time for the green seedless grapes, oysters on a bed of ice in a golden bowl, and champagne, for she ate nothing else. She sat like a fragile, thin black spider as guests came to pay homage. She adored Sidney, who carried her out to our terrace, with its view of the nighttime skyline and the lights of the city reflected in the river far below.

Marilyn Monroe, who had fled to New York from Hollywood to form her own production company with Milton Green, came to our parties unrecognizable, wearing a baggy army-navy sweater, slacks, and no makeup save a bit of Vaseline on her eyelids. We huddled together one night, separated from the party, while she talked about Joe DiMaggio—how she had been afraid of him, although she didn't know quite why. But I did—both of us were fatherless; therefore, we believed all things possible and nothing safe.

There were these parties, and parties we went to, and openings of plays, but, most of all, there was work. Whenever the opportunity came, Sidney and I worked, whether together or separately, and still I kept putting off having children—that was for later. But the only "later" for Sidney and me came much, much later.

My divorce from Sidney Lumet was hell because not only had he been a wonderful husband and stepfather to my two Stokowski sons, but at times I hadn't been fair to him and sometimes behaved badly.

WYATT

Someday I'll write a memoir about family happiness, but this isn't the place for it. I mention it now so you know my restless search for love didn't remain unanswered. One evening at a dinner party in New York I met Wyatt Cooper, whose eyes were the bluest I'd ever seen, and when they met mine there was the shock of recognition between us and we fell in love. Wyatt was a writer born in Quitman, Mississippi, and later, when I met his large, loving family, I was overwhelmed to see what it must have been like to experience a supportive family behind you. I knew then that I wanted him to be the father of my children. Yes, we both wanted the same thing—to start our own family. And what an extraordinary father he was. He was the most honest person I've ever met and his sense of values taught me what the loving parenting I'd never had could be like.

The dedication of Wyatt's book Families: A Memoir and a Celebration is "To my two families, the one that made me and the one I made." I reread his memoir often, and although death intervened and took him from us, the memory of the life we created together with our two sons, Carter and Anderson, lives on in my secret heart, nourishing and sustaining me through all the days of my life.

ROALD

I've been involved with a few married men in my life. Take it from me, if you are even vaguely tempted, don't!

"So baby Dahl's after you," my snappy Vogue-editor friend said. I smiled at this description of the six-foot-four something whom I was running out to meet at the Central Park Zoo. "That's what they called Roald Dahl when he was in the R.A.F.," she went on as I merrily waved good-bye.

On this lovely day we were to meet where the seals frolicked, and I was afraid he wouldn't wait if I was even a second late, because when he suggested this rendezvous I had been vague about encouraging it, and he might decide I wasn't going to show up. I hastened down the steps at the 66th Street entrance to Central Park, and as I turned the corner, there he was in the distance, with his back toward me, leaning against the railing, looking at the seals as they slithered in and out of the water, in and out and up onto the rocks.

I paused—he hadn't seen me. I could turn, go back up the steps, and never see him again. Better cut out now, quick, I decided, but just as I did, he turned and saw me, and instead of running out I ran into his arms—and into big trouble.

Roald Dahl had recently married the actress Patricia Neal, and she was in Chicago doing a play, The Children's Hour, and as you know I never get involved with married men, so what was I doing with him? Well, nothing. We could be friends, couldn't we?

Yes, but there was something about it that somehow wasn't like that. From the minute I met him at a party, he had singled me out. He was lofty, opinionated, condescending to everyone else, so he considered his attention to me to be quite a favor, as I was soon to discover. He had that attitude so many of the English have toward Americans. I don't think many of them really like us. They're fascinated, but in that love-hate way. Yes, he was full of himself, and ripe with the recent success of his short stories, which had appeared in The New Yorker and were now in a book titled Someone Like You, which everyone in town was talking about.

I took note that someone like him was interested in someone like me. I knew it even more the next day when he called and asked when we could see each other. We'd had an intense discussion at the party about painting, and he was interested in seeing my work, so there he was at my studio having tea and crumpets and more discussions about art with me.

The next day he went on a book tour and didn't call, but then a letter came. My heart went pit-a-pat as soon as I saw my name in the unknown handwriting on the envelope because I knew it was from him. Although we hadn't even kissed yet, in the letter he wrote of walking down a street in Houston, imagining I was with him and stopping under a tree to kiss. I was very taken with the way he put it—well, he was a writer after all—but I started getting scared about how I would feel if I saw him again. There were more letters, and then he was back in New York and I was on my way to the zoo and the seals and the big trouble.

He had very definite opinions about everything, and I'd nod sympathetically, although I didn't agree with most of them. He wasn't crazy about Americans, as I said, but he intimated that his condescending attitude didn't include me. Why did this seem somehow insidiously flattering? He wanted to go to bed, and I did, too, but we didn't. I kept it simmering, like a teenager under a curfew, because I was scared that if we did go to bed I'd really be lost, lost, lost because ... because ...

He surprised me by showing me manuscripts of his stories written in his own sacred hand. "You select the one you like," he suggested.

The one I selected hadn't been published— that impressed him. Maybe he thought I'd be like all the other pushy Americans and choose "Someone Like You" just because it was the famous one and the title story of his book. He took me to the restaurant Marchi's to celebrate, and over a glass of wine handed me the pages. They were held together by a thread, and hanging from the thread was a gold charm—a greyhound, an antique key to wind a fob watch. Oh, the thrill of the loved one's gift. No matter what, big or small, it assumes the magic powers of a relic. (How strange later when unexpectedly I came upon it in a drawer and found it meant nothing at all to me.) It throbbed with signs and portents. What did it mean? Up and down I went, yes-no-yes-no. The bouquet of daisies he sent me— can you believe it?—I went through the lot, plucking off each petal: he loves me, he loves me not.

Just before his wife came back from Chicago, he invited me to the apartment they were living in on the West Side opposite the American Museum of Natural History. I was tempted, but hesitated—don't, don't open that door. But I did and found myself, as I knew I would, an intruder drawn into the intimacy of their life: the wedding picture on a table, a robe just my size hanging on a peg, on another table mail with her name on it, and, in a silver frame, the picture of a woman smiling ... Her mother? His mother? He had talked to me once about his "old mother." Eerie seeing the bed (king-size) with the flowered sheets, but it was even more eerie when he tried to pull me into it, even though he knew I wasn't going to comply.

"Come, there's something I'd like to show you." He sat down behind the desk and took a black leather jewel box out of the drawer, talking, in that slow way he had, about what was inside, how rare and exquisite it was, how he had spotted it in James Robinson's and knew it was exactly what he'd been looking for, on and on, as I sat melting like a piece of butter in the sun, because I knew it was for me. "Open it." He handed me the box, and inside on black velvet sat a plump little enameled Victorian pansy pin, purple and yellow with a twinkly diamond in the center. Breathlessly, I held it in the palm of my hand. "Oh, Roald, I, I ... "

"Do you think Pat will like it?"

I smiled quickly, nodding, Oh yes, yes, and we went out onto the street and walked together for a few minutes. He seemed to be having trouble breathing—well, it is hard to squeeze juice out of a dry lemon: "You're the ... finest ... person I've ever ... known ... but ..."

"She's going to love it," I said again, turning fast, walking away and leaving him on the sidewalk, walking fast across the park toward home.

Many years later, when Pat Neal was in the midst of divorcing Roald Dahl, I invited her to my house in Southampton for a weekend. At dinner on Saturday night she was wearing the pansy pin. I didn't mention I had seen it before. Apparently Roald had told her about me when she got back to New York after the play closed. How I'd pursued him while she was away, but he resisted—you get the gist. I did, too, but I let it go, slip by. As my Irish nanny, Dodo, used to say, "Sometimes it's best to leave it where Jesus flings it."

Excerpted from It Seemed Important at the Time, by Gloria Vanderbilt, to be published in October by Simon & Schuster; © 2004 by the author.