Atlanta Daily World

Confidential' Mag-Suit Switches To Manhattan

NEW YORK - (ANP) - Waging legal battles on both coasts, lawyers for Confidential magazine switched their legal fire to Manhattan Supreme Court last week, seeking dismissal of a $500,000 damage suit brought by multimillionaire Robert Goelet, Jr. and his attractive wife, Gloria, who the Daily News describes as "an attractive light skinned Negro business woman."

"Confidential's" counsel contended that an article on the couple which it referred to "Bobby's Harlem honey" and "a night-blooming sepia siren whom Bobby introduces as Goelet when he can get away with it," was merely a "sort of contemporary Cinderella story."

Goelet called it "sordid, fictional article." The article which appeared in January 1956, falsely depicted Goelet as "dishonest, criminal, infamous, disgraceful and guilty of dishonorable acts and caused him great pain and humiliation," Irving Erdheim, attorney for the Goelets, informed the court.

In May of 1956, Goelet divorced his first wife and last January 17, he and his second wife, actress Lynn Mer-the former Gloria Carney Green eloped to an upstate town where they were secretly married.

In defending the article, Confidential's lawyers assert that it had dealt with the "then current and always newsworthy fact that Robert Goelet, Jr. a member of one of New York's oldest and most socially prominent families, grandnephew of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the heir to a vast fortune and a figure in the entertainment world in his own right, was seeking to divorce his wife in order to marry Gloria Green, a colored beautician he had found working in a minor Broadway hotel."