Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

When I was six, my father took me to Grand Central Terminal in New York to see the imposing bronze statue of my great-great-great-grandfather “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt.

When we went to see the statue, my dad told me that the Commodore was a tough businessman and an unforgiving father and that, when he died, he was the richest person in America.

For much of my life, I wanted nothing to do with the Vanderbilts.

But my mom’s death in 2019 and the birth of my son, Wyatt, in 2020 began to change my perspective. In the weeks after she died, I began going through dozens of boxes stored away in her apartment and her art studio.

Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt founded a dynasty that would rule the Gilded Age, and his rise was dizzying. He possessed a genius and a mania for making money, but his obsession with material wealth would border on the pathological, and the pathology born of that wealth would go on to infect each successive generation in different ways. A family story about wealth and triumph becomes, in some respects, a story about sadness and isolation. But it’s also a story of unexpected poignancy and truth that shifts our understanding and expectations about this name “Vanderbilt” that we imagine we already know.

The Vanderbilts were the original new-money arrivistes who burst on the scene, used their wealth to buy prestige and respectability, and churned through their fortune not in the cause of making lasting change, but on massive outlets for conspicuous consumption.

Gladys had to be out of The Breakers by four o’clock. That was the deadline they’d given her. Four p.m., Good Friday. She wasn’t being evicted exactly.

Her great-grandparents, Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife, Alice, built the seventy-room mansion in 1895, and a Vanderbilt had lived there ever since. Gladys would be the last.

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.

When Cornelius Vanderbilt II built the house, he was president and chairman of the New York Central Railroad, the company his grandfather, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, had founded after making his first fortune in shipping.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II had been closely involved with every detail of its construction, but he didn’t get to enjoy The Breakers for very long. He died of a stroke in 1899, just four years after the house was completed. He was fifty-five years old. Alice continued to use the house every summer until she died in 1934,

Gladys Vanderbilt, who had married a Hungarian count, Laszlo Széchényi, in 1908, thereby becoming Countess Gladys Széchényi.

When The Breakers was first built, there was no federal income tax. After the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, the great fortunes of the Gilded Age were exposed for the first time to taxation from the government, and Alice Vanderbilt was no exception. Then there were the property taxes and estate taxes, all of which ate away at the Countess’s inheritance,

she arranged to lease the house for one dollar a year to the Preservation Society of Newport County, which began offering tours to the public. She moved out of the grand rooms on the first and second floors and decamped with her family into third-floor rooms that her brothers had occupied as children.

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,

In its 77 years of existence, The Breakers saw the equivalent of nearly $218 million evaporate into thin air.

Preservation Society’s board of directors promised that one of Countess Széchényi’s daughters, Sylvia Szápáry, could live on the third floor of the house for the rest of her life. Sylvia, who was called Syvie by her intimates, spent every summer at The Breakers along with her children, Gladys, who was named after her grandmother, and Paul.

When Syvie died in 1998, the Preservation Society sent Gladys and Paul a letter allowing them to remain on the third floor, mentioning that “it will be helpful to us to be able to tell our visitors that the original owners’ great-grandchildren continue to live in the house.”

Tensions started to bubble in 2013, when the Society proposed building a new visitor center on The Breakers’s grounds to replace the drafty ticket tent and Porta Potties. Gladys preferred that it be built across the street, so it wouldn’t alter the original Bowditch landscape design or intrude on the fantasy that visiting The Breakers meant stepping into another era.

The Preservation Society got what it wanted. The visitor center would be built on the grounds of The Breakers. It would even sell sandwiches. Gladys was summoned to a meeting at the Preservation Society in October 2017. She was told it was no longer safe for her to live on the third floor.

Gladys was told she could stay until the end of the year. After that, she would be allowed in only to remove family property, accounting carefully for any historical items to prove that they did not belong to the Preservation Society.

The service door was how, at age two, she had first entered the house her great-grandfather built, and it’s how she wanted to leave it.

10 Washington Place, huddled over ash can fires, stamping their boots to keep the blood moving in their feet. They had been out there for months. Inside, a great man—or, certainly, a formidable one—was dying. He was an upstart from Staten Island. He had overseen construction of the town house in 1846, when he was fifty-two years old, rich with an extraordinary fortune made in shipping, but he was only getting started.

he had lived in the double-width town house for more than thirty years, and in that time had made another great fortune, his second, in railroads,

The Knickerbockers and other old-money families of Washington Square shunned him, but he didn’t care. Money was his sole concern: making it, spending it, and making more. New York society could ignor...

“The Commodore,” Cornelius Vanderbilt.

His son William H. Vanderbilt, called Billy

he was grateful to have helped found the university in Tennessee that bore his name.

The statue he had built of himself was eventually moved some two miles north to Grand Central Terminal, where it still stands today.

Frank had married the Commodore eight years earlier, on August 21, 1869, when he was seventy-five years old and she was thirty.

Frank and the Commodore eloped to Canada, a year after his first wife, Sophia, died. The wedding was attended by only a few friends of Frank’s and none of Vanderbilt’s children.

his late-in-life marriage, of which his daughters disapproved,

his son Cornelius stopped by Washington Place expecting to see his father, but was sent away. Despite being the Commodore’s namesake, the younger Cornelius had always been a source of shame.

He was feared also by his children, whose lives he dominated with judgment and control.

he was about to leave behind more money than any American at the time had ever accumulated: $100 million, the equivalent of more than $2 billion today.

Washington Square was the beating heart of New York City society. The Commodore died just off the square, in his fine house nestled cheek by jowl with the social elites who never accepted him.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on May 27, 1794, on Staten Island,

Though only a child, Cornele transported vegetables and passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan, a distance of about five miles, maybe an hour’s sail if the wind and tide cooperated.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was headstrong, stubborn, manipulative, and willing to risk almost anything to make money.

With the money from his mother, at the age of sixteen, he bought his own periauger at Port Richmond, Staten Island, and sailed it home. Within six months, he had run his own father out of the ferry business, putting in at Manhattan, near the Battery, at the same spot where the Staten Island ferry docks today.

The older boatmen nicknamed him “the Commodore” during these years as a joke, but it stuck, and they didn’t laugh for long.

The money Cornelius made playing both sides of the blockade allowed him to invest in two other periaugers. He also had enough money to get married, and in 1813 wed his first cousin Sophia Johnson. He was nineteen years old.

Cornelius and Sophia had thirteen children, of whom twelve survived to adulthood: Phebe Jane (named for his mother), Ethelinda, Eliza Matilda, William Henry (Billy), Emily Almira, Sophia Johnson, Maria Louisa, Frances Lavinia, Cornelius Jeremiah, George Washington (who died at age four, in 1836), Mary Alicia, Catherine Juliette, and the second George Washington. But only three of the children actually mattered to the Commodore: his sons, who would carry the Vanderbilt name. His nine daughters? They would get married and change their names, and, as far as the Commodore was concerned, their children would not be Vanderbilts.

George, the youngest, who was named for the brother who predeceased him, attended West Point but graduated without any distinction and was shunted aside in the army during the Civil War. He died of lung disea...

Cornelius Jeremiah, the second son, proved an embarrassment almost from the beginning, a point the Commodore never let him forget. He suffered from epilepsy, which his father took to be a mental illness and a mark of weakness.

Evidence suggests that he began attending séances as early as 1864, but given the mainstreaming of Spiritualist practices in the 1860s and ’70s,

In August 1869, he and Frank had eloped. She signed a prenuptial agreement first, relinquishing any claim to Vanderbilt’s estate in exchange for half a million dollars in first mortgage bonds in the New York and Harlem Railroad. A Methodist minister presided over the quick ceremony,

Some of the Vanderbilt children, most notably Billy, welcomed Frank with open arms, too, but most of the Commodore’s daughters were aloof.

the stock market was prepared when the end finally came, even if his family wasn’t. It was, as Stiles has noted, his last gift to Billy, into whose hands would pass the Vanderbilt railroad empire.

“Keep the money together.”