Little Gloria by Barbara Goldsmith

Author:Barbara Goldsmith [Goldsmith, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80032-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Monday, October 1, 1934: the trial began. The day was unusually warm, sixty-two degrees, fair and clear. The third-floor courtroom, number 355, was a square, wood-paneled room with high, narrow, unwashed windows on two sides. It seated about 150 people, but this day hundreds of spectators jammed the room. Seated in the jury box were members of the press. Photographs were not permitted inside the courtroom, so the newsreel cameramen and still photographers impatiently paced the terazzo floor of the corridor.

At 9:45 a.m. Gloria Vanderbilt walked into the courtroom, followed by Nathan Burkan and Consuelo Thaw; they moved forward and seated themselves at one of the two large rectangular counsel tables. Gertrude Whitney entered the courtroom with her daughter Flora Miller; they were ushered to a roped-off second row of spectator seats. Reporters had hoped that the real news grabber—“the tiny heiress” who “turned her little nose up at her charming mother last Friday” would be on hand. She was not.

A moment later, Gloria’s mother, Mrs. Morgan, entered, a fluff of fox fur setting off her flour-white masklike face. A derby was pulled low on her forehead, tight, dyed red-blond curls corkscrewed out from beneath the hat. At her side marched the balloon shape of Emma Sullivan Keislich, a voluminous black dress and coat falling to the tops of her stolid black lace-up shoes with low wooden heels. Keislich and Mrs. Morgan seated themselves side by side in the last row of spectator seats. Gertrude Whitney turned in her seat and gestured to Mrs. Morgan, who then stood up and moved forward to take her seat next to Gertrude in a physical demonstration of their solidarity.

Justice John Francis Carew entered. The crowd fell silent and rose as he eased himself into a high-backed black leather chair under the foot-high gold letters that spelled out In God We Trust. Carew frowned at the packed courtroom: he disliked crowds and discouraged standees.

Whitney lawyer John Godfrey Saxe stepped to the bar and formally requested that Herbert C. Smyth “relieve me to the extent of taking charge of the examination and cross-examination of the witnesses.” The Whitney side was taking no chances; to face Nathan Burkan in the courtroom, they had added to their team one of the most outstanding trial lawyers in America, Herbert Crommelin Smyth. He too was one of their own; both Smyth’s maternal and paternal family had emigrated from England to the United States in the seventeenth century. His mother was a great-granddaughter of Francis Lewis, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Smyth was born in New York City in 1870, was a graduate of New York Law School, and had been admitted to the bar in 1892. In 1912, he’d become special assistant to George Wickersham, who was then Attorney General of the United States. For many years Smyth had represented Harry Payne Whitney’s street railway companies as well as such other prestigious corporations as Standard Oil of New Jersey.

One of his few forays into the tinsel of

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