BOOK REVIEW: GLORIA VANDERBILT- 'OBSESSION'

At 85, a Brahmin in Blue Jeans Writes of Sex, Masks and Veggies

By CHARLES McGRATH

Gloria Vanderbilt’s new novel, “Obsession: An Erotic Tale,” which comes out next week, may be the steamiest book ever written by an octogenarian. And it’s one of very few volumes to arrive on the sex-book shelf accompanied by a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates, who calls it, “a remarkable tapestry of human passion — an interior world of highly charged erotic mysteries that teasingly suggest, but ever elude, decoding.”

In other words, it’s not always clear what’s going on. “Obsession,” published by Ecco, is the story of Priscilla Bingham, the widow of a Frank Lloyd Wright-like architect who, after his death, discovers a cache of letters, wrapped in magenta grosgrain ribbon, revealing in considerable detail his secret, kinky sex life. The author of these letters is Bee, a mysterious woman who may be a figment of Priscilla’s imagination, or possibly Priscilla is a figment of Bee’s. Either way, the letters don’t leave much out.

“Obsession” is written in stylized literary prose that owes something to Pauline Réage’s “Story of O,” and is set in a world that’s partly fantastical. It’s erotica, not porn. But it nevertheless uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from. There are scenes involving dildos, whips, silken cords and golden nipple clamps, not to mention an ebony, smooth-backed Mason Pearson hairbrush purchased at Harrods. As the book explains, spanking with a Mason-Pearson is a “serious matter,” not the kind of thing that is rewarded with the “luscious afterglow of warm cocoa butter.” Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by “The Joy of Cooking.” And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.

Now 85, Ms. Vanderbilt could easily pass for 25 years younger. She still has the high cheeks and the wide, stretchy smile she flashed back in the ’80s, when she was selling jeans on television. She has a Brahminish, boarding-school accent but a down-to-earth steely determination. On days when she doesn’t write she paints or makes collages and Joseph Cornell-like “dream boxes,” some of which have been featured in literary magazines.

“I’m always in love, that’s one of my secrets,” she said recently, sitting in the living room of her apartment on Beekman Place. “I’m determined to be the best I can be for as long as I can, and when I’m not, I have my plans. I walk a lot and watch my diet. That’s the key of it. I’ve always had a lot of energy.”

Sex, presumably, is something Ms. Vanderbilt knows about, after four marriages, as well as affairs with, among others, Howard Hughes, Gene Kelly, Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. She said she wasn’t at all embarrassed about the explicitness of her book, adding: “I don’t think age has anything to do with what you write about. The only thing that would embarrass me is bad writing, and the only thing that really concerned me was my children. You know how children can be about their parents. But mine are very intelligent and supportive.”

Ms. Vanderbilt’s son Anderson Cooper, the CNN newscaster, who read “Obsession” in manuscript, said: “The six most surprising words a mother can say to her son are: ‘Honey, I’m writing an erotic novel.’ But actually she’s pretty unique, and there’s not much she does that’s surprising anymore. At 85, whatever she wants to write is fine with me.”

Laughing, Ms. Vanderbilt said: “I have two very WASPy friends who are quite disapproving. One of them said, ‘I think it’s going to ruin your reputation.’ ” She went on: “But the book couldn’t have been done any other way, because then it would have been boring. I think that all the very graphic sex is true of self-exploration and true of fantasy. I think it’s poetic.”

The idea for “Obsession” came to her, she said, when she was browsing at the Strand one afternoon and spotted a book with the title “If Ever Two Were One,” which instantly became her first sentence. Her mother was a twin, she explained, and the idea of twinship has always fascinated her. Pairs, doubles, mirrors abound in “Obsession,” and the five-story Brooklyn sex mansion where most of the orgies take place is tellingly named the Janus Club. It’s run by Maja, an elegant madame who keeps up standards around the place by dressing her young ladies in Fortuny tea gowns, without underwear, and blindfolding them with masks of dove and marabou feathers. She also looks after the gilt and lacquered sex toys. If “Obsession” is ever made into a movie, Ms. Vanderbilt said, this is the part she would like to play.

Once she started on the book, Ms. Vanderbilt said, the writing, or the first draft, anyway, went very quickly. “It was as if I were channeling it,” she said, and added: “I do think all art is autobiographical, and I do think I know quite a bit about women. I don’t know anything about men.”

There isn’t much of her in Priscilla, she said, who is sexually timid and frustrated, but Bee, who is highly sensual and an orphan, as Ms. Vanderbilt was in a way after her father died and her mother lost custody of her following a long and scandalous trial, is another story. “Bee is me of course,” Ms. Vanderbilt said. “Absolutely. If you’ve never had a mother or a father, you grow up seeking something you’re never going to find, ever. You seek it in love and in people and in beauty.”

To judge from the book, at least, you can enhance your quest by scrubbing your torso with sea salt, bringing the skin to a glow before applying scented gardenia oil and a smidgen of honey aphrodisiac, so that you “can let loose shaking onto the breasts a goodly amount of chocolate sprinkles, which will adhere prettily.”

Ms. Vanderbilt has already rewritten the ending of “Obsession,” and the new version is available as an audiobook recording. She is also thinking about a sequel. “I can sort of see it, but not clearly yet,” she said, and she added that she thought a second installment would be much harder to write, the sex scenes especially. “I think I’ve already covered just about everything,” she said, and she laughed. “Sometimes I really crack myself up.”