BDSM RTV NEWS!!!!

13 april 2009


Socialite, 85, shocks New York with sex novel


Source: www.guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk - UK


In a sign that you're never too old to try something new - or something racy - one of the grandes dames of New York society has penned an erotic novel at the age of 85.


Gloria Vanderbilt, whose family name is one of the most famed in Manhattan history, has written Obsession, the story of a woman who becomes entranced by her dead husband's affair with a dominatrix.

The sexually explicit book, which is to be published in June, has already sent shock waves through the reserved upper echelons of New York society after passages were leaked to a New York tabloid. The leaks showed that Vanderbilt's prose spares no one's blushes in its explicit descriptions of kinky sex. Andrea Peyser, a columnist at the New York Post who got hold of the 143-page tome, breathlessly called it "pure, elegant, unadulterated smut" - before reassuring readers that the book was light enough to be "easily read with one hand".

The plot follows the adventures of society beauty Priscilla Bingham, whose husband, Talbot, dies after 10 years of marriage. She then discovers his letters to his dominatrix lover, Bea, and becomes obsessed with exploring his secret world of erotica.

But while the fact that such a book has been written by someone born five years before the Great Depression hit America might shock some, perhaps no one should be surprised as Vanderbilt has been a controversial fixture of New York's high life for many decades. She has been a socialite, actress, fashion designer and artist who married four times.

In 2004 she published a memoir of her love affairs with some of the most famous names in Hollywood, including Marlon Brando, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Howard Hughes. In that book, published when she was a sprightly 80, she confessed: "I find sex endlessly interesting. I suppose I always will."

Vanderbilt is also famous as the mother of Anderson Cooper, a CNN presenter, one of the most famous TV journalists in America. Cooper appeared to take news of the book in his stride. "I'm often surprised by my mom, but am always supportive of anything she does," he said in a statement released by CNN. "She's totally unique and cool. At 85, whatever she wants to write is fine by me."