IT SEEMED IMPORTANT AT THE TIME

In a gossipy tribute to romance’s irresistible lure, celebrity heiress Vanderbilt coyly recalls the many loves of her life.

Though Vanderbilt offers a psychological explanation for her constant quest for love, it seems more a perfunctory aside than a major revelation in this paean to the susceptible heart. Some of the material has been covered in her other work (A Mother’s Story, 1996, etc.): her happy but too-short marriage to Wyatt Cooper, who fathered her son, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, Wyatt’s early death, and the suicide of their other son Carter. Other sections are part of the public record concerning someone who’s been a headline-maker since childhood in the 1930s, when Aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney went to court claiming that Gloria’s mother was unfit (there were rumors of lesbian attachments) and won, becoming Gloria’s legal guardian. Her absent mother had a lasting impact, admits Vanderbilt: “The love of my life was my mother. My search for love has and always will be to revive the dream of . . . obtaining the perfect mother to love me unerringly and unceasingly.” And it is this search, always energetic, always optimistic, she now chronicles. The list of men in her life is long and often illustrious. They include husbands Pat DeCicco, Leopold Stokowski, and Sidney Lumet; Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, and Roald Dahl (amusingly misspelled throughout as “Raoul”). Except for the one to Cooper, her marriages proved to be mistakes: DeCicco was abusive; Stokowski was cold and self-absorbed; Lumet wanted children and at the time she didn’t, being too busy with her acting career. Her lovers have also often disappointed, but Vanderbilt is still as dewy-eyed about romance as any dreamy adolescent, asserting that there’s always a chance of meeting someone who will transform her life and that dreams often do come true. They certainly have for Vanderbilt, more often than not.

More surface than substance.