Gloria Vanderbilt Gets Kinky

AP Photo In her new erotic novel, the 85-year-old author (and mom of Anderson Cooper) writes sex scenes—with hairbrushes, masks, and bees?—that would make a Golden Girl blush.

Gloria Vanderbilt's new erotic novel, Obsession, comes with a number of consumer warnings. The book jacket cautions that the tale is "puzzling." Readers can expect a story of erotic possession and revenge that "asks more questions than reveals answers." Then there's Joyce Carol Oates' advance praise, which tells us that the mysteries contained in the book's trim 144 pages "teasingly suggest, but ever elude, decoding."

If there is a man who finds the idea of a honeybee landing on the head of his penis sexually arousing, this is the first I've heard of it.

Such caveats are usually uttered to prepare audiences for a bumpy and confusing night, and in this case, the skittishness is understandable. Today, Gloria Vanderbilt is probably best known for being Anderson Cooper's mother, but her claims to fame span many decades and industries. Before she wrote books, Vanderbilt gave the world designer blue jeans through her eponymous "GV" label in the late 1970s. She has worked as a painter, textile designer, and creates Joseph Cornell-like "Dream Boxes." Her four marriages and high-profile romances have been chronicled in great detail, most explicitly in her 2004 memoir It Seemed Important at the Time. Now a radiant 85 years old, what more does Vanderbilt have to give?

If Obsession is any indication, a mild spanking.

Her latest novel, as they say in pitch meetings, is Bret Easton Ellis meets Arthur Schnitzler meets The Golden Girls. The action opens straightforwardly enough with Priscilla and Talbot Bingham, whose Bold and the Beautiful names signal that they are people of privilege and culture. Talbot is your average Howard Roark type, an architect of indefinable genius with the requisite towering libido. Priscilla is his Miss Porter's-educated wife, and they have what everyone in 2009 New York wants out of life and love: a successful partnership. The Binghams share an "inner standard of excellence." They even share a logo. "Together we were bright and beautiful, rich, envied, successful, structuring our lives as partners in all things," Pris dolefully narrates. "Why wish for more, I asked myself?"

Obsession: An Erotic Tale. By Gloria Vanderbilt.144 pages. Ecco. $16.99. All that glitters is not gold, of course. Pris doesn't much care for the sex. Talbot has skills, but she has daddy issues (her therapist confirms this). Fortunately, by the time we learn of her woes, Talbot's dead. He succumbs to a heart attack on page 2. That Pris' frigidity was no obstacle to her husband's sexual expression becomes clear when Pris stumbles on a trove of letters, all written in magenta ink by someone with eidetic memory and a yen for eye-popping metaphor.

The first letter's addressed to "Master," and it conjures a scene of matchsticks, honeybees, and...Tokyo. The prose is stilted; Pris is riveted. "It's as if that match is a bee that needs to suck your cock so much that it could find it, hidden though it is, in the world's largest city."

If there is a man who finds the idea of a honeybee landing on the head of his penis sexually arousing, this is the first I've heard of it. But the bee is actually Bee, a woman, and in letter after magenta letter, she conjures an intimacy with Talbot that spanned a California estate called Akeru, regular appointments at a brothel/swingers joint called the Janus Club, a ritual evening of pornified Cirque de Soleil—dubbed the Yab-Yum pageant—and friendship with Maja, aka "Mamacita," a madam prone to delivering Eckhart Tolle-isms on personal effectiveness. ("But I cannot warn you strongly enough—you must hold fast onto the deepest part of yourself—this is the essential component of success," she admonishes Bee.)