NEW YORK • She was thrust into the spotlight as a "poor little rich girl" at the centre of a custody battle in the 1930s, before finding fame in her own right for designer blue jeans and It-girl fashion.
On Monday, American heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, a designer and artist who became one of the most-tracked socialites of her era, died from stomach cancer. She was 95.
"Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman, who loved life, and lived it on her own terms," her son, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, said.
"She was a painter, writer and designer but also a remarkable mother, wife and friend. She was 95, but ask anyone close to her, and they'd tell you, she was the youngest person they knew, the coolest, and most modern."
Vanderbilt was well-known for her love life that included four marriages and racy escapades with suitors, including singer Frank Sinatra and actor Marlon Brando.
"It is fantastic how Vanderbilt she looks. See the corners of her eyes, how they turn up?" her father, aristocrat Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, is said to have exclaimed after her birth on Feb 20, 1924.
She was left with a multi-million-dollar trust fund after he drank himself to death slightly more than a year later. Her notoriously unstable mother swept the child away to Paris to be raised by a nanny, while she became a mainstay of the party circuit with her twin sister.
But the kid's philanthropist and artist aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney - founder of New York's famed Whitney Museum of American Art - sued for custody in 1934.
She won after a highly publicised trial that at moments heard the young girl weep and wail, and aired sordid testimony of greed and debauchery as most Americans suffered under the Great Depression.
Back stateside, Vanderbilt grew up pampered by servants, chauffeurs and tutors in her aunt's mansions in New York and Long Island.
The socialite-in-waiting dabbled in art, modelling, poetry and acting in a bid to carve out an identity beyond her lavish inheritance.
Eager to grow up quickly, she married at 17, to an alleged associate of mob boss Charles "Lucky" Luciano.
"As a teenager, she tried to avoid the spotlight, but reporters and cameramen followed her everywhere," Mr Cooper said. "She was determined to make something of her life... and find the love she so desperately needed."
A regular of best-dressed lists and gossip columns, her A-list coterie included funnyman Charlie Chaplin and writer Truman Capote, who is said to have drawn inspiration from the heiress for iconic character Holly Golightly - played in the film version by Audrey Hepburn - of his 1958 novella Breakfast At Tiffany's.
Her myriad creative endeavours led Life magazine in 1968 to dub her "a feminine version of the Renaissance Man". She made fashion waves in the 1970s with a line of designer denim carrying her signature on the back pocket, which she modelled herself and promoted.
Her brand expanded to other apparel, fragrances and linens.
"I'm not knocking inherited money," she told The New York Times in 1985, "but the money I've made has a reality to me that inherited money doesn't have."
After her first failed marriage, she tied the knot three more times, first to conductor Leopold Stokowski, with whom she had two sons, and then to director Sidney Lumet.
Her final marriage to author-actor Wyatt Emory Cooper in 1963 produced two more sons.
Her last husband died during heart surgery in 1978 and she endured the horror of losing one of her sons to suicide 10 years later.
Vanderbilt posted on Instagram on her 95th birthday earlier this year, writing: "So many lives, so much work, so much love. It is incalculable."
She once said: "You must always have great, secret, big fat hopes for yourself in love and in life.
"The bigger, the better."
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
