Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.
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I am so thrilled to be here doing a very special episode of Noble Blood. It's really a crossover episode with Mira Hayward, who is a former writer researcher on Noble Blood and went off to start her own podcast, which is absolutely brilliant if you haven't listened to it yet, it's called History on Trial and it explores in depth specific trials in American history that define really I was going to say the legal system, but so much more
just to find an aspect of American history. I feel like I learned something new every episode about the foundations of this country.
Thank you so much, Dana.
It's so fun to be back here at Noble Blood where I feel like I got my start in podcasting, back in my Frandsfordnandez and I feel the same way about it. I'm sure you feel it's about doing Noble Blood, but it's really cool to have a job where you get to stuff all of the time.
Absolutely, and I'm excited to learn something today. We're going to be talking about a very very scandalous trial involving American Royalty the Vanderbilt but there's also a connection to the British royal family. Do you want to give us an overview of the case.
Yeah.
So this case is in nineteen thirty four custody battle over a ten year old child named Gloria Vanderbilt, who's actually Anderson Cooper's mother, News Royalty. It's between her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, who's in her late twenties and is like beautiful society woman, and her paternal aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who's one of the most wealthy women in America. She's in her late fifties, patron of the arts, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. And this case is
so scandalous and so shocking for the public. It's the midst of the Great Depression. People are loving seeing that rich people are having a hard time too. But interestingly, one of the things I learned while researching this case was how much royal involvement there was, particularly from the British royal family.
Well, let's start there. Let's start with Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, who's the mother of the child that will eventually be at the center of this custody case. What is Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt's connection to the British royal family.
So, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt has an identical twin who's named Telma. And when Telma and Gloria come out into society in the early nineteen twenties in New York, people call them the Magnificent Morgans. They're extremely beautiful, they're identical twins. They have these cute little accents from growing up all over Europe.
They're super beautiful and glamorous. And Telma, after sort of a disastrous first marriage to an American, gets married to this extremely wealthy English viscount who is named Marmaduke Furness, which is an all time British name, an amazing name. So this marriage unfortunately not super happy, lots of affairs on both sides, and in nineteen twenty nine, Telma meets Edward, the Prince of Wales, and she and Edward start an affair that lasts for five years and it's pretty serious.
During that time, they're basically living as a couple.
And is this the Edward, Prince of Wales who will eventually become king and abdicate his throne for Wallace Simpson.
Yes, exactly, and there's actually an amazing Wallace Simpson connection here.
So Edward we just know already has a weakness for it seems like married socialites.
Yes, it's actually hilarious.
The press starts to have some questions about how much time in Telman and Edward are spending together. So Gloria sort of helps facilitate this affair by getting a country estate that's right next to Edwards so that Telman and
Edward can spend a lot of time together. And the Press is like he's always seen with the glamorous lady furness, and the Prince issues the statement where he's like, I only hang out with married women because it's more respectable that way, and the Press is like, okay, gotcha.
Oh of course, much more respectable.
Yeah, and so is Gloria Morgan also involved with you know, the sort of English court life with her sister.
Yes, very involved.
She actually gets presented at court to King George and Queen Mary at one point in the early thirties. She's hanging out with sort of this whole set that's involved the sort of these glamorous young British nobles centered around the Prince of Wales. Actually it's a little bit crazy. So Talma and the princes are involved, and so the prince also meets little Gloria, the child at the heart of the custody battle. There's lots of pictures of them together when she was a child, because he was sort
of her de facto uncle for a little bit. It's actually through the Morgan's sisters. So Gloria and Talma have an older sister named Kinswlo that Edward meets Wallace Simpson because Consuelo is friends with Wallace, and she tells Gloria and Telma, I've had this amazing friend. You're going to love her. You'll get along so well. Her name is Wallace. They meet, they love her, and Talma says, oh my gosh, Edward,
you would love this woman. And it's actually in nineteen thirty four that Talma goes to America to help her sister Gloria with this custody trial. Things are really ramping up, and before she leaves, she has dinner with Wallace and Wallace who calls Edward little Man, which I guess is endearing says, you know, the little man is going to be so lonely while you're gone, and Telma says, well look after him for me, won't you?
Famous last words.
So, really the casualty of this trial is because Telma had to leave, it pushed Wallace, Simpson and Edward right into each other's arms.
Yes, exactly.
In nineteen thirty seven, Telma is asked if she regrets him, if she could do her life over again, what would she do differently? And she says, I would never introduce Wallace to the Prince of Wales. So that's the Prince of Wales's involvement. There's one other British royal who I want to talk about who is also involved in this trial, and that is the Marchioness of milford Haven.
Before we get to the Marchioness, can we sort of set the scene for the trial. So why is this custody trial even happening at all? Obviously Gloria Morgan married to Vanderbilt, good for her, And what is happening that's causing this trial?
Yeah, it's really interesting. I think it's a classic case of a trial that didn't need to happen, and perhaps because of the money and power involved. These people don't know how to talk to each other in ways that a normal family might, and so it.
Escalates into this custody battle.
Basically, Gloria married a man named Reggie Vanderbilt. Wealth was not good for Reggie. He gambled his entire fortune away, basically almost a billion dollars in fourteen years, and then he dies a year after. They have their first child, Little Gloria, and so Gloria and the other Gloria, because like European royalty, they have a habit of naming all
of their children the same things. Live off of a trust that Little Gloria inherits, but that trust is really highly regulated by administrators, and there are questions amongst other members of the Vanderbilt family if the elder Gloria is using that money responsibly, and there are accusations that she is living this sort of partying lifestyle that is not good for the child, and little Gloria starts to sort of have these hysterical episodes where she says that she's
afraid of her mother. Her paternal aunt, Gertrude Whitney gets involved, She's Gloria's godmother. There's so much to this story and so many sort of complicated women with the different motives. Little Gloria's grandmother, Laura, thinks that she shouldn't be in her mother's custody, so eventually little Gloria goes to live with Gertrude Whitney, and then Gertrud Whitney won't really give her back to the elder Gloria got it.
So it's this complicated situation where both the mom and daughter are living off this wealthy trust and now the late husband's family is trying to I'm putting this in air quote but quote unquote protect the little daughter.
Yes exactly.
Nobody of course asks what the little daughter wants at any point in this, but yeah, that's exactly what's happening.
So okay, let's go back now to this marchiness. How is she involved?
Yes, So this is a woman named Nadezhda Mount Batton. She comes from a wealthy Russian royal family and she marries Prince George of Battenberg, who is British Royalty. That Battenberg gets changed to Mount Batton after World War One because of anti German sentiment, same as like the sax Coburg Gotha Windsor transition. The marchioness who's known as Nada by her friends, which is very cute, is super wealthy,
super beautiful. There's this quote from Little Gloria in her autobiography where she's remembering Nada when she's a child, and she says she has masses of maple sugar hair and light followed her wherever she walked.
And I was like, oh, my gosh, I want to meet her.
She sounds amazing.
Yeah, like the.
Most glamorous woman on earth. And she and Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt are really close, so close that it ends up coming up in the trial.
Good to know, Oh, something to look ahead for. Okay, So let's start the trial October nineteen thirty four.
So the trial begins in the New York State Supreme Court, and the second witness to testify on Gertrude's side. So on the side that is wanting to take Little Gloria out of her mother's custody and put her into her aunt's custody is the elder Gloria's lady's maid, twenty three
year old French woman named Maria Kyo. And Gertrude's side has brought Maria on to sort of talk about Gloria's party lifestyle and how she stayed up all night and drank and had wild parties and her friends were doing who knows what, and so she paints this picture that is not particularly pretty.
Now that it's a partying mom who's not responsible enough to have this little heiress in her custody exactly.
And I mean to go off on a tangent for a little bit. It's pretty ridiculous because the way that Gloria Vanderbilt raises her child is the way that basically all wealthy women at the time were raising their child. Nanny's did most of it, and they had their social responsibilities. So Gertrude Whitney was traveling and hanging out with friends just as much as Gloria Vanderbilt was. But in any case, something really scandalous comes up on the cross of Maria Kyo.
She has all these.
Allegations about Gloria and don Cross. Gloria's lawyer, Nathan Burkin, sort of breaks down Maria's credibility because it's revealed that a lot of the things that she's saying are just assumptions. So, for example, she said oh, you know, Gloria was drunk every night, And Nathan Burken says, well, how did you know that she was drunk? And Maria says, well, she smiled.
A lot, as most drunk people do, of course exactly.
Nathan Burkin's like, I'm smiling right now? Am I drunk?
Burken sort of breaks down her credibility and it's going well, but then he goes too far because he feels like, okay, she hasn't actually seen anything, and so he asks her, well, you actually never saw anything improper, did you?
Oh?
No, and she goes, well, there was one thing he definitely should have stopped there, like left well enough alone.
But he says, oh, what could have been so bad?
And so Maria Coyoe tells this story where it's there in the south of France. She gets Gloria's clothes ready for the day, and she goes into Gloria's bedroom and she says, when I came, Missus Vanderbilt was in bed reading a paper, and there was Lady Milford haven Nada beside the bed with her arm around Missus Vanderbilt's neck and kissing.
Her just like a lover. Oh no, I know the crowd of course goes crazy.
There's like this soap opera moment just to stun silence, and then everyone starts yelling and Gloria Vanderbilt collapses.
Obviously, homosexual behavior would have been so stigmatized at this time. Yes, even possibly criminalized, right.
Yes, it was criminalized in New York State and most other places in the United States and around the world, and just seen as sort of evidence of perversion and moral degeneracy, like so many connotations of it that are extremely damaging to people's reputations at the time.
And also it's these two incredibly beautiful, glamorous, connected, famous women. I can't even imagine the scandal.
Yes, oh my gosh, it's enormous. It makes international headlines although it's interesting. Of course, the British press is much more deferential to royals, and so they don't cover it. They just say, like, there's been some lurid testimony at
this trial. The American press is like, Missus Vanderbilt was in bed with another woman, and she of course immediately denies this story, and Lady Milford Haven does too, and she doesn't say whether she's asked if she'll testify, and she says, well, I'm going to stand by Gloria until the end. This is an untruth, and so people think that she might come and testify. But then the British
royal family sort of goes into reputation management mode. And Lady Milford Haven is very good friends with Queen Mary, and she meets with the King and the Queen allegedly according to reporters, and they tell her you can't testify.
This is a disaster. It's going to make it worse.
Even if she was testifying to deny it, it would just make it everything more scandalous, the coverage would increase.
Exactly. It's good pr advice, you can see. I mean, I think throughout this they do a good job at public relations. They know what they're doing.
But they do allow her, and they do advise her to send a represent to New York to sort of represent her interests and try to keep her name out of.
The trial as much.
So she hires a lawyer named Theobald Matthew to go to New York, which also another amazing name.
What's his deal?
His job is basically just to protect Nada and the reputation of the royals.
Yes, exactly, So he's a top society lawyer at the time, and he goes to New York and he meets with the lawyers on both sides and the judges, and he says to them, look, it would be for everybody's best interests that the British Royals stay out of this, and they all basically agree pretty readily.
Wow, is there a moment in the case where the British Royals would have come up where they sort of move away from him?
Yes, exactly.
We can see this sort of cover up that might be too strong a word play out in real time. So there's a point during Gloria Vanderbilt's cross examination one of the Gertrude Whitney's side's biggest points is that Glory.
Was always traveling and wasn't present for her daughter.
And so Herbert Smith, Gertrude's lawyer, asks Gloria about all the time that she spent in London and in the English countryside in the early nineteen thirties and is pressing her on this and is like, why were you gone from your daughter? Little Gloria's in Paris for some of this time, And Gloria just says personal reasons, which is code for I was helping my twin sister have an affair with the Prince of Wales.
With the Prince of Wales, yeah, as one is doing often when they're in England.
So normally Herbert Smith would be pushing on this, this is a good point for your case, you're leaving your daughter in another country. But because it's about the Prince of Wales, and because Theobald Matthew has said please don't do this, he just drops it. He just drops this line of questioning and moves on.
Which is fascinating because I know that the British press is historically and arguably to the present day very deferential to the British royal family. But it's amazing to imagine that the American legal system but also be sort of obeying those norms.
I know, it's honestly shocking to me. There's even a point shortly after this where Gloria mentions that she borrows four thousand dollars from somebody so that she could sort of have some money of her own that wasn't regulated by the administrators of her daughter's trust. Four thousand dollars in nineteen thirty four, it's like seventy five thousand dollars today. It's a big loan to get from somebody.
Yeah, a good amount of money.
Yeah.
And so of course Herbert Smith says, well who are you getting that money from? And she says, oh, I don't want to say it out loud, can I write it down? And the judge allows it, and she writes it on this piece of paper. She passes it to the judge, he reads it, He passes it to her lawyer. He reads it, and then he passes it to Herbert Smith, who reads it and then sort of melodramatically tears it into tidy little pieces and throws it in the trash.
And the historical record being what it is, we know whose name was on that piece of paper, and it was Edward, Prince of Wales.
That's so funny that they wrote it down to what it wouldn't get written into the court record.
Yes, exactly.
The Prince of Wales's name never is mentioned ever in the court record, even though he plays a substantial part in both Gloria's lives.
So obviously, even though the Prince of Wales was a pretty fundamental piece of this puzzle, it's kind of where Gloria was when she was away from her daughter, whether or not that was worth mentioning in the custody case or not or worth being a factor, and whether she should have custody over her daughter. It's fascinating to me the lengths that the American legal system went to to protect the British royal family.
I know, it's incredible to me, and it's interesting. There's a lot of other royal connections in this case and the legal system, particularly the judge show. In this custody case, there's not a jury, it's just one judge who's hearing all of the evidence. And this guy, Justice John Francis Carew, is pretty self consciously American.
He's born and bred New.
Yorker, middle class and uh doesn't have a lot of respect for royals who are not British. So at one point, to sort of establish that Gloria is of good character and has good friends, her lawyer brings up, okay, well she's friends with all of these titled people, and Gloria's sort of naming them and her brother is naming them, and the judge is like, stop talking about these foreigners. Basically,
he says, let me find the quote. I mean, it's just oh yeah, do not stress too much on that exalted and aristocratic nobility, because this little girl is an American citizen.
Oh that's so funny.
So for these non British royals, he's like, these people mean nothing to me. They're not American, they have bad values. But for the British royal families, he's like, will do anything to keep them out of the case.
Is there any foreign royal who does make a good impression on the judge?
There is one.
So Gloria Vanderbilt, a year and a half after her husband's death, meets a man named Prince Gottfried of hoan Loa Langenburg, who is a German prince.
I know.
His friends call him Friedel, and they are briefly engaged. It doesn't work out because of her crazy mother more or less, but he actually comes to testify in her trial and on her behalf, and the judge really likes him, actually, I think, because he's so honest about how he kind of does nothing.
He didn't like foreigners, he didn't like foreign nobles. He thought they were absurd. The British royals he understood, he got their whole deal. But this is the one foreign noble that he was like Okay, this one's okay.
Yes, And sort of ironically he likes him because Friedel is really upfront about the fact that he does nothing and is like a man of leisure and just hangs out in the south of France in his pajamas all day. And the judge is like, this is an honest, fourth raight young man.
That sounds wonderful.
Yeah, and it's so.
The other really sort of interesting thing is that after his engagement with Gloria Vanderbilt ends, Prince Friedel marries Princess Margarita of Greece and Denmark, and she comes to testify on Gloria's behalf in this custody trial in the America.
Can Press is so baffled by this, They're like, why would you.
Go across the ocean to testify in your husband's exes custody trial for the ex that's yeah, like wow.
What a woman.
What they don't put together, most of them, is that Princess Margarita is Lady Milford Haven's niece.
Oh, so she's also so she's defending her husband's ex fiance, but she's also defending her aunt's.
Honor exactly exactly by saying, this woman who's accused of having an affair with her has an impeccable reputation.
Oh, I love those sneaky. One thing that you learn doing noble blood is everyone has a little connection. All of these nobles have a connection.
I know. And everybody's related to each other.
So so the American newspapers at the time didn't find that branch of the family tree.
No, and they're all sort of curious about it.
But there she is, you say, Greece and Denmark, and I'm just curious, is there if we're talking about secret little links, is there a link to Prince Philip there?
Yes, Princess Margharita is Prince Philip's older sister.
Oh my god, of course, so he's also related to not he was also Nada's nephew.
Yes, So actually Nada and her husband George raise Philip for a little bit in the early They take him in and he they sent him to boarding school. And then Prince George dies and so then Prince Philip goes on to be raised in large part by his brother Lewis Mountbatten. But yeah, they are super closely tied in to that part of the royal family.
Another point for them having to maintain this sort of reputation management. Yes, completely, This is just a fascinating connection. I'm wondering. At the heart of this trial is this ten year old little girl. How is all of this going for her? Do we know?
Yeah, it's a disaster. That's I think, like the true tragedy of this trial is it's extremely traumatizing for her. She has millions of people hearing these horrible things about her family. She has to testify herself. The judge lets her testify in chambers so she doesn't have to do it publicly, but of course her testimony leaks and it
damages her for the rest of her life. She has a strained relationship with both her mother and her aunt after the trial, and members of the family on both sides blame her for being the cause of this trial.
And she was ten.
How is she that she was ten?
It's unbelievable.
Yeah, it's really tragic, and it just makes you think about all the ways that this could have been handled differently.
How does this trial end up?
Yeah, So, I mean I would recommend listening to the full episode. I'll give you the full context in sort of a play by play, but ultimately the judge awards custody.
To her aunt to Gertrude Whitney. Wow.
Yeah, it's pretty shocking, and a large part of that is because of Little Gloria's testimony. She seemed to be really, really frightened of her mother, and nobody understood exactly why. In nineteen eighty five, Gloria Vanderbilt, Little Gloria publishes a memoir called Once Upon a Time where she basically reveals that her grandmother, Laura Morgan, so Gloria's mother.
The mother of these magnificent Morgan twins.
Exactly exactly, and my personal nemesis at this point, basically schemed to have this trial happen and to have her granddaughter removed from her daughter's custody in order for Laura to sort of secure her own place within the Vanderbilt family. She was obsessed with status and with money, and she felt like her daughter wasn't deferring to her interests enough. Her granddaughter was sort of her bargaining ship.
She threw her own daughter under the bus to use her granddaughter as a status symbol.
Yes, she testifies against her daughter at the trial. Oh, it's pretty terrible.
So at the end of this trial, little Gloria goes into the custody of her paternal aunt.
Yes, and unfortunately, tragically it's not any better for her because I mentioned before, most wealthy women at the time raise their children in the same way. So Gertrude is extremely absent. One of her Little Gloria's cousins, Gerda, says later after the trial, no one cared about Gloria. She was left basically alone.
Oh that's heartbreaking.
It's really heartbreaking.
What happens to her mother, Gloria Morgan.
Gloria is such an interesting character. I think the author Barbara Goldsmith, who wrote a great book called Little Gloria Happy at Last, sort of compares her to a figure in a fairy tale. That's how Gloria sees herself. Things happened to her. She doesn't seem to feel she has any agency, and she's always waiting for somebody to solve things for her. She and her twin sister Telma lived together for most of the rest of their lives. She
lives in Los Angeles for a long time. She has a relationship with an actress named Keeddy Kevin for a long time.
I don't mean not to ever speculate on a historical figure sexuality. But do we know or know that she had romantic or sexual relationships with women?
Yes, yes, we do know that.
Her daughter, at least Gloria Vanderbilt, has written about that about her mother's bisexuality. She had relationships with men and with women throughout her life. What's interesting about this case too, because Gloria Vanderbilt's sexuality is used against her, is that Gertrude Whitney was also bisexual and also had relationships with women and men throughout her life. But of course that doesn't come up in the trial.
No, it's just about reputation exactly.
So, yeah, Gloria Morgan has a hard time, and in fairness, I guess to Gertrude Whitney, I do think it's unfair her child was taken from her, But she also is not really present for her daughter in a lot of ways. She doesn't seem to know how to do it. So even when Gloria gets a little older and wants to co live with her mother, the older Gloria will just disappear for weekends at a time and be sort of absent when Gloria, the younger Gloria turns to twenty one
and gets access to her trust. She cuts her mother off and they go through periods of not speaking and reconciling and not speaking and reconciling. Ultimately they do reconcile before the older glorious death in nineteen sixty five, but it's a really fraught relationship.
I mean, it just seems like the real tragedy of this case is the way these adults were using a ten year old child for their own ends.
Yes, exactly, exactly, And I think that for so many of the people involved, money and power and status just warped their ability to sort of see clearly or objectively and to think about, as you said, the child who's at the heart of this.
Well, Mira, this is an absolutely phenomenal case. Anyone who's interested in hearing about it in more details should listen to History on Trial and just go back and listen to pretty much every episode of that podcast because I've learned so much. Are there any other episodes, any other trials that you've highlighted that our particular favorite that you want to highlight now?
Oh? Yes, I mean you sort of fall in love. I'm sure this is the same for you with Noble Blood. With everything you write about you get into the weeds
of it. One of the ones that I've learned the most from is about a woman named Iva Taguri who was known as Tokyo Rose, and she was an American who of Japanese descent, who got stuck in Japan during World War Two, ended up working for a Japanese radio station, and then after the war is accused of treason and it becomes sort of this political cause for the United States government. And the way it was a story I
had never heard before. It made me reflect a lot about how the government uses its power and who it uses that power for and against.
Phenomenal Well, go listen to History on Trial. Mira, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me, Dana. It was so much fun to talk about this case.
Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Nobel Blood is hosted by me Danish Forts, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zewick, Courtney Sender, Julia Milani, and Armand Cassam. The show is edited and produced by Noemy Griffin andrima Il Kaali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. Four more podcasts from iHeartRadio.
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