Barbara Goldsmith, who has died aged 85, was a writer who specialised in provocative tracts about the corrupting influence of excessive wealth and power, most notably Little Gloria ... Happy at Last (1980), in which she recounted the Matter of Vanderbilt (1934), America’s longest and most sensational child-custody trial, and Johnson v Johnson (1987), an account of the 1983 confrontation over the will of the billionaire J Seward Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune.
Gloria Vanderbilt, the original “poor little rich girl”, is probably best known these days for lending her name to a brand of designer jeans. She did not cooperate in the writing of Barbara Goldsmith’s book, but others did and the transcripts of the infamous custody trial, which Barbara Goldsmith had chanced upon in a Manhattan law library in 1974, provided plenty of material.
Gloria Vanderbilt’s parents, Gloria Morgan and Reggie Vanderbilt, the youngest son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, married in 1923. She was a beautiful 19-year old socialite, he a dissipated 43-year old alcoholic whose passions included gambling. In 1925, a year after the birth of their only daughter Reggie died, vomiting blood from ruptured oesophageal varices. His widow’s only real source of financial support thereafter lay in the income to be derived from a $2.5- million trust established for their infant daughter by Cornelius, the restrictions on which led her to resent and neglect the infant on whom she depended financially.
In 1934 little Gloria’s aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, egged on by the child’s aggressive maternal grandmother, Laura Kilpatrick Morgan, decided to try and claim custody of the child, a move seen by mother Gloria as a Vanderbilt conspiracy to cut off her funds. The ensuing custody battle made national headlines, with sensational allegations of mother Gloria’s debauched lifestyle – including a purported lesbian relationship with Nadezhda de Torby, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, and an affair with a German prince.
Presided over by Supreme Court Justice Carew (who would crack from the pressures of the case and end up in a psychiatric hospital), the custody hearings provided terrific entertainment for a public eager for tales of greed, sex, sadism and selfishness. Little Gloria’s plight had a special poignancy in the Depression. People wanted to be told money could not buy happiness; here was proof.
Public sentiment favoured a reunion between daughter and glamorous mother, but the eventual winner was Aunt Gertrude. It was, however, grandmother Laura, along with a nurse, who actually reared the girl.
If the Vanderbilts were dysfunctional, they appeared positively saintly when set against the main subject of Johnson v Johnson, the billionaire J Seward Johnson, who died in 1983, leaving his $500 million fortune to his former maid and third wife, Basia, a Polish emigrée 42 years his junior, and nothing to the six children of his first two marriages. Convinced that Basia had coerced their father into disinheriting them, they took her to court.
This time Barbara Goldsmith found the protagonists ready to talk and the story she uncovered was a shocking one. The late heir to Johnson & Johnson, she claimed, was a priapic monster who molested his daughter Mary Lea (the first baby pictured on cans of Johnson & Johnson baby powder) from when she was nine years old, and slept with his son’s wife. He also proposed to his wife’s 14-year-old sister, who turned him down. Other interviewees included the homosexual lover of Mary Lea’s first husband, who claimed that the estranged spouse had offered money to have Mary Lea killed.
The case was eventually settled out of court but not before the 210 lawyers involved had raked in more than $24 million in legal fees.
“Here was this paradigm of the American Dream,” Barbara Goldsmith recalled . “Everybody sits at home and thinks, 'My God, if I had a million dollars.’ Well, what about $1.4 billion, a $100 million art collection, a $10 million home? But behind what we dream was such banality – such lack of direction and imagination – and such pain… Everybody I spoke with had the freight of three generations of psychic trauma.”
She was born Barbara Joan Lubin on May 18 1931, in Manhattan. Her father, Joseph, had risen from rags to riches, founding a large firm of accountants and becoming a property investor.
After taking a degree in English and Art History from Wellesley College in 1953 Barbara worked as a critic for an art magazine, then as an editor at Woman’s Home Companion, and later as a writer for The New York Herald Tribune. When the newspaper went out of business in 1966, she lent one of its editors Clay Felker $6,500 to acquire the name of its Sunday supplement, New York, which he transformed into New York magazine, with Barbara Goldsmith as one of the founding editors. Two years later she nearly scuttled the publication with a profile of the Andy Warhol “superstar” Viva, which depicted her as drug-addled, destitute, dissolute and promiscuous, leading to an exodus of advertisers from the magazine.
In the early 1970s she became senior editor at Harper’s Bazaar, but did not enjoy the work and decided to try her hand as a novelist. It was while researching this work, The Straw Man (1975), a tale of skullduggery in the art world, that she came across the Vanderbilt custody case.
Her research into the Vanderbilts also sparked the idea for her third book of social history, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (1998), after she noticed an interview in an 1870 copy of the New York Tribune in which a reporter had asked Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of the family fortune, how he had made his millions. “Consult the spirits,” Vanderbilt told him. “Mrs Woodhull tells me what to do financially when she is in her trance.”
Barbara Goldsmith discovered that Mrs Woodhull, Victoria Woodhull (1838 - 1927), was a prostitute-turned-journalist who, in 1872, became the first woman to run for the US presidency, campaigning against Ulysses S Grant. She lost, having spent election day in jail, charged with libel and obscenity for having published details of an affair between the popular revivalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher with the wife of his best friend. She was also a spiritualist, suffragist, apostle of free love (“If I want sexual intercourse with one hundred men, I shall have it”), a disciple of Marx, a blackmailer and a financial adviser who asked the spirits for investment tips.
Barbara Goldsmith’s last book, Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie, was published in 2005.
As well as her writing, Barbara Goldsmith was a noted philanthropist who, no doubt scarred by her experiences with crumbling newspaper clippings, conducted a long crusade against acidic paper, endowing a New York Public Library laboratory which works to conserve texts and save others on microfilm. For many years she funded the PEN Freedom to Write awards.
Barbara Goldsmith’s marriages to Gerald Goldsmith and the film maker Frank Perry were dissolved. She is survived by two sons and a daughter from her first marriage.
Barbara Goldsmith, born May 18 1931, died June 26 2016
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