Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt - Marriage and Widowhood

Marriage and Widowhood

On 6 March 1923, in New York City, at the townhouse of friends, Gloria Morgan—then believed to be 17 years of age and having received the legal consent of her father to wed—became the second wife of Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, age 42, an heir to the Vanderbilt railroad fortune. On 20 February 1924, their only child, Gloria Laura, was born in New York City.

Reginald Vanderbilt died on 4 September 1925 of what was described in news reports as "a throat infection which had caused internal hemorhages". Following his death, his young widow became the administrator of a $2.5 million trust left to their daughter, Gloria, and spent the better part of the next six years living in Paris, Biarritz, and London, with her mother and child and often in the company of her sisters and brother, all of whom lived in France and England with their respective spouses.

The conditions of Vanderbilt's will and the custody of their child, however, were complicated by the general belief that his widow had not reached the legal age of majority, which meant that she herself required a guardian. Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt believed that she was 20, rather than 21, because her mother had long declared the twins' birth year as 1905 rather than 1904. The discrepancy was discovered upon an examination of the Morgan twins' childhood passports and their birth certificates during the Vanderbilt custody trial in 1934. No reason, however, was given as to the change of birth years. As Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt wrote in her 1936 memoirs, Without Prejudice (E P Dutton), "Had I not thought myself a minor at this time ... there would have been no necessity for a guardian for myself ... for a legal guardian for my child's person .... On this untruth—irrevocable and irremediable—hinged the currents of my child's life and my own."