She managed to hold on to the house until she died in 1965, but her children couldn’t afford to keep it for long, and two generations after it was built, it passed out of family hands for good. In 1972 they gave much of the furniture to the Preservation Society as a gift, and sold them the house for $365,000, or about $2.3 million today. By contrast, Cornelius Vanderbilt II spent $7 million building the house in 1895, the equivalent of more than $220 million today. In its 77 years of existence, The Breakers saw the equivalent of nearly $218 million evaporate into thin air.
