I had read about the custody case over Gloria Vanderbilt in the past, but it was long enough ago that I forgot most of the fine details and felt that I was entering the book with no real allegiances or opinions beyond feeling bad for a child caught up in it. I purchased this copy a while ago and then it sat on my shelf until my recent reading spree focused on mid century society gossip. Once Upon A Time: A True Story is a surprisingly delicate and emotionally focused memoir. She narrates everything from her point of view at the time and the impressions and feelings that she was going through come across very clearly and strongly. The most effective part of the book is the early years, as she has a real gift for conveying the emotions of a sensitive child who doesn’t understand what is going on but is trying to exert some control over a wildly out of control situation. She also is open about events that you do not usually see in a celebrity memoir, including one jarring passage where her beloved nurse takes naked photos of her as a child to give to a doctor as a bribe, as he will then testify about how terrible her mother is. It’s dropped in there and never mentioned again, which was pretty shocking to me, but I think she dealt with a lot of things that happened to her by trying to keep moving. There’s another upsetting scene where a child is tied to a tree by a collar and leash and left to stand in the woods while the whole family is on vacation. You truly feel along with her the terror and confusion that she was going through, and the lack of information about what was happening.
The second half of the book, after the custody battle between her mother and her paternal aunt, is slower and less effective. Her longing for her mother and her inability to connect with her is heart breaking, but the sequences at boarding school and learning about boys didn’t thrill me. This second half also felt more like she was holding things back and not telling everything there was to tell. It strained my credulity that she maintained complete ignorance about any of the facts of the case or about the money she was coming into for so long, although I do understand that she was deliberately trying to avoid things and at the same time a lot was being kept from her. But she portrays herself as a naif for way longer than I would have expected; maybe this is the bias of my own 21st century self who grew up too quickly! The dreamy narration that only deals with the present moment started to grate on me at a certain point because I wanted to see how she came to understand her history and what effect it had on her, but she never really has a section where she gets into it. She sort of floats from house to house and scene to scene, and maybe that was her somewhat dissociative way of dealing with it (she describes a sensation like a cheesecloth descending over her when things get too stressful, which is pretty textbook dissociation). I don’t really know if I’d recommend this to anyone but the super fan of the mid century gossip, and even then the first half of the book is probably all you need to read (excepting the fun scene in the second half where she goes to a premiere party for The Wizard of Oz in Manhattan — the descriptions of the refreshments are amazing!).