Gloria Vanderbilt is thought of as an East Coaster, but she spent her early post-school years in California, lured west by the glamour of Hollywood and a desire to spend time with the mother that had lost her in custody battle a decade earlier. It was in Santa Barbara in 1941, just after Pearl Harbor, that she impulsively married her first husband, Pat De Cicco. 

Carol Marcus (later Matthau), Gloria's lifelong best friend, was a bridesmaid, and Hollywood leading man Errol Flynn stood up for the groom. Another of the bridesmaids was Betty Newling, the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles orthodontist. Sixty years later, Gloria reconnected with this bridesmaid when she signed a copy of The World of Gloria Vanderbilt to her. By then, the former Betty Newling was nearly as well known as Gloria herself, albeit under a different name: Betsy Bloomingdale. The copy Gloria signed to her erstwhile bridesmaid is available for purchase via Nick Harvill Libraries.

Image Credit: The World of Gloria Vanderbilt

“It is still a puzzle to me that I ever became a model. I am an excessively private person and I do not have the temperament for fame.”
 
Jean Shrimpton, Jean Shrimpton, An Autobiography

Image Credit: The World of Modelling and The Sixties: A Decade in Vogue

“I got a girl in every port—and a couple of guys in every port, too.”
 
Sal Mineo, Conversations with My Elders

Image Credits: The Way We Lived Then, Double Exposure: Take Two, and Album, The Portraits of Duane Michals, 1958-1988

“There are many kinds of taste. The rules that apply to one person do not hold true for another. There are women who underdress and look well and women who underdress and look terrible. Gloria Guinness can pick a Mexican T-shirt in a market for two dollars and look great.”
 
Oscar de la Renta, The Fashion Makers, An Inside Look at America’s Leading Designers 

​​Despite looking impeccable in even the most casual of attire, Gloria Guinness was not above using one-upmanship tactics to best her fashion rival Babe Paley. According to Babe’s friend Boaz Mazor, Guinness invited the Paleys for a cruise aboard the luxurious Guinness yacht, telling Babe that the itinerary called for casual, simple clothes. Guinness, however, planned formal evenings and wore her finest jewels and gowns.

Via The Sisters, The Life and Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters

Image Credit: The Power of Style

“Everything about her was very precise, and this was reflected in the way we worked together. For instance, when we laid out a room, she had masking tape put down on the floor. She liked to walk around it and sense the way a room was going to work. Joan was used to this from the studio sets, where she would have to rehearse before the furniture arrived.”
 
Carleton Varney, Architectural Digest, Celebrity Homes

Image Credit: Richard Champion, Architectural Digest, Celebrity Interiors

“My family belonged to that stratum of American society best described as ‘well to do.’ I’ve come to understand that to mean not rich enough to evoke envy and just successful enough to demand respect.”
 
Vincent Price, I Like What I Know, A Visual Autobiography

Image Credit: Double Exposure: Take Two

"Somehow I have always found husbands much more satisfactory after marriage than during.” 

Peggy Guggenheim, via Doers & Dowagers

See also: "In Sickness and in Health, In Marriage and in Divorce"

Image Credit: Out of This Century, Confessions of an Art Addict