Gloria Braggiotti

Gloria Braggiotti Etting (1909–2003) was an American dancer, actress, newspaper columnist, photographer, and writer whose Broadway appearances in 1930 and 1931 marked the beginning of a multifaceted career in the arts. Born in Florence, Italy, the youngest of eight children, she came from a family steeped in musical and artistic tradition. Her father was an Italian tenor born in Smyrna, and her mother was an American mezzo-soprano from Boston. Following her mother's death in 1919, her father relocated the family to Boston to be near her mother's relatives.

Artistic ability emerged early across the Braggiotti siblings. Braggiotti studied modern dance under Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn at their studio in Lee, Massachusetts. St. Denis and Shawn had co-founded the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts in Los Angeles in 1915. Her sisters Francesca and Berthe also pursued dance, and the three sisters established their own dance studio and performed together during the 1920s.

Braggiotti moved to New York City in 1930, initially residing at 444 East 58th Street with her brother Mario, a composer and pianist whom George Gershwin recognized as a peer. That same year she began her Broadway career, appearing in productions of Hamlet and Lysistrata between 1930 and 1931. Finding steady work as a dancer and actress proved difficult during the Depression years, though her brother's social connections brought her into contact with New York's café society circles, including regular evenings at El Morocco and other exclusive Manhattan nightclubs.

Through El Morocco, Braggiotti became acquainted with Maury Paul, the café society columnist who wrote under the pen name Cholly Knickerbocker. Paul helped her assume the Madame Flutterbye column at the New York Post, followed by a regular fashion column. She also formed a friendship with Lucius Beebe, who wrote the weekly column This New York for the New York Herald Tribune. Beebe frequently accompanied her to theater openings, operas, and other events, after which the two would return to El Morocco. Among the regulars at Beebe's and Paul's table were Fred Astaire, Libby Holman, Gloria Swanson, and Clark Gable. Fashion designer Valentina Schlee and her husband, along with Town and Country editor Harry Bull and his wife, were also fixtures nearby, and many in the group were photographed by Jerome Zerbe, with the images appearing in New York newspapers and magazines.

Braggiotti had first met the artist Emlen Etting when both were teenagers, during his time at St. George's School in Middletown, Rhode Island. After years of courtship in New York and Boston, the two married in 1938. Etting's mother and aunt were prominent figures in Philadelphia's Main Line society, and the couple settled in Philadelphia. During the following decades Braggiotti wrote for several Philadelphia publications as well as Town and Country. After Emlen Etting served in World War II, she became an established hostess on the Main Line, and their home served as a gathering place for friends and prominent acquaintances.

In 1957 she published her autobiography Born in a Crowd, which chronicled her upbringing in the large Braggiotti household in Florence. She also took up photography, using it as a creative tool during extensive travels, which she wrote about for various publications. Her 1968 book Philadelphia, The Intimate City, published by Viking Press, offered a social history of the city. Emlen Etting died in 1993, the same year Braggiotti self-published By the Way, a collection of her photographs. She later donated those photographs and others to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1998 she married Alesandro Buonacuore, and the couple moved to Florida before eventually relocating to Syracuse, Sicily, where Braggiotti died on September 3, 2003.