Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

We somehow, simultaneously, believe that we are all the same, all created equal, and yet we secretly suspect that the rich are somehow more special, that they have something figured out that the rest of us don’t know.

No one could believe that the man who controlled one out of every twenty American dollars in circulation at that time could actually, finally die.

Some thought he was the Commodore’s favorite, but it’s possible he simply died too young to have disappointed his father.

Perhaps, despite all the claims of his newly Christian protestations about acceptance and readiness and God’s will and being saved by Jesus, the Commodore didn’t believe he would ever die.

She said that the Commodore believed the undivided mass of money he was leaving behind would be a monument to his name.

The public demonstration and proof that the Commodore never really loved him came to nothing. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Cornie and his sisters couldn’t break the will.

Epilepsy is a disease. But the money was like a parasite,

Alice was so snobbish and removed that later in her life people would say she’d rather be driven around the city for hours than condescend to speak to her chauffeur to give him the exact address for where she was headed.

After all, marriage was a cover for a great many miseries for women. Alva characterized the institution more than once in the notes for her memoir as legalized prostitution.

she cared deeply for women as a class while nursing venomous contempt for the women she actually knew.

If a woman is natural[,] a man does not want her. This makes of woman a liar and a pretender. A woman is an actress who plays to an audience of men. They know what will be applauded and what will be hissed.”

“Gilded sin is so much more interesting than ragged sin,” she reflected. “Scandal dressed in ermine and purple is much more salacious than scandal in overalls or a kitchen apron.”

In an age when a newspaper cost pennies, he owed $269 to his local newsstand.

She was only twenty when Reggie died, which meant that she could not serve as her own daughter’s legal guardian, and in fact needed a guardian herself.

“The Lindbergh kidnapping was symbolically perfect for the Depression,” argues Goldsmith, “for it demonstrated that an individual—no matter who he was—could not control his own destiny.”

Everyone in this story wants something. Money. Attention. Safety. Security. But most of all, love. The one thing of which, no matter how privileged the surroundings, how polished the chauffeur-driven cars or delicate the crystal sherry glasses, there still never seems to be enough.

“Alexander after the Battle of Issus, Napoleon after Austerlitz could not have been cockier than Truman was after In Cold Blood.

The response by the elites portrayed in the story was not shame for their own behavior, but round condemnation of Truman for his lack of discretion, and for his audacity in using their stories and their names.

Perhaps the move could be explained as preventive abandonment—he left them so that they could never leave him. He guarded against his own victimization—always an unspoken risk for an outsider both small, strange, and queer—by going on the attack and making his domination unmistakable.

But exceptional moments are not often what matter most to us, when we reflect on the lives we have lived. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, for instance, recalled in the notes for her memoir lazy summer afternoons with her children digging in the garden at their summer house on Long Island. They planted flowers and vegetables and kept a little rowboat on the pond nearby, to which was added a small mast and sail when the children were big enough. Harold, her baby son, the great America’s Cup defender, had his first sail with his mother and sister, Consuelo, as a tiny boy on a calm summer pond in a rejiggered rowboat. That’s what Alva remembered. Her memoir doesn’t include her costume ball at all, not even a passing mention of it.

“Well, it’s like that old song, ‘Show me the way to get out of this world, ’cause that’s where everything is.’”

knowing that she was on the cusp of discovering if that was all there was.

She remained open and vulnerable even when it would have been easier not to. At ninety-five she was still the most optimistic, youthful, and modern person I ever met.