Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

Gladys had to be out of The Breakers by four o’clock.

No one’s identity was as closely entwined with The Breakers as Gladys’s.

The Breakers was a home. Her home.

As children, she and her brother, Paul, had clattered down the sweeping marble staircase on trays borrowed from the kitchen, something her mother had learned as a child from her own father.

The Breakers is the grandest and most opulent of Newport’s Gilded Age mansions, and it remains the most popular tourist attraction in the state of Rhode Island.

thirty-foot-tall wrought-iron gates

Cornelius Vanderbilt II built the house,