Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

White women got the vote in 1920, and Alva spent the remainder of that decade living principally in Europe, to be closer to her now-divorced daughter, Consuelo. Alva died in France in January 1933, shortly after her eightieth birthday. Her life was celebrated at a lavish funeral in New York City marked with female pallbearers and politically themed eulogies.

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, heir to the greater part of the Vanderbilt fortune.

Alfred found himself most unexpectedly the head of the Vanderbilt family at only twenty-two years old.

When Cornelius II died, he left an estate valued at roughly $70 million, according to the New York Times. That’s about $2.2 billion today. What the papers called his “favored” children—nineteen-year-old Reginald, Gertrude (by then Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney), and Gladys—each came away with an estimated $7.3 million. Neily was “cut off” with only $1.5 million. The vast lion’s share, estimated by the Times at around $35 million, fell to Alfred, who gave a further $6 million to Neily so he would be equal with the other siblings. Alfred also was awarded the gold medal given to the Commodore at the conclusion of the Civil War, with the request that it be passed to his eldest son. A clearer marker of the head of the Vanderbilt family could scarcely be conceived. Upon the reading of his father’s will, Alfred found himself the richest young man in America.

the block between East Thirty-Third and Thirty-Fourth Streets, west of what was then called Fourth Avenue, near the Grand Central railroad depot and just around the corner from the home of J. Pierpont Morgan. In 1867, Billy gave a portion of that parcel to his son Cornelius II, Alfred’s father, who erected a comfortable, elegant house there for his growing family.

Alfred’s mother, Alice, felt the need to outspend and out-consume her sister-in-law Alva, Murray Hill would no longer do. The Vanderbilts went to upper Fifth Avenue

Alfred started buying up the remaining land in the city block adjacent to the house in which he had grown up, finally succeeding, by 1907, in owning the entire block. He erected the twenty-one-story Vanderbilt Hotel on Park Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street and lived there in sumptuous comfort in a fifteen-room penthouse apartment.

In 1901, he’d married his sweetheart from his days at Yale, Ellen French, a dear friend of his sister Gertrude, in Newport. At the end of that year, they had a son, William Henry III. Alfred passed his twenties ably discharging his duties as head of the family, which consisted of living well, marrying well, and spending money beautifully.

Agnes Ruiz accepted many offers from Alfred—so many, in fact, that by 1906 she had separated from her husband, and rumors of marital problems began to circulate around Alfred and Ellen.

Ellen sued Alfred for divorce. From there, the affair went, for lack of a better term, off the rails.

Agnes Ruiz, “the former actress,” whose name was mentioned in connection with Alfred’s divorce, had been found shot to death in bed

if Alfred’s vast fortune hadn’t been enough to guarantee the breathless attention of the public, the spectacular implosion and sordid end of his marriage and his extramarital affair sealed the deal.

Alfred remarried in England, this time to Margaret Emerson McKim.

Ellen Vanderbilt, still moved in their same social circles, passing the holidays in Newport at her estate, Harborview, which had belonged to her moth...

had two children together, Alfred Junior and George Washington III,

Lusitania

February 1915, Germany had declared any vessel within the zone of the blockade between Ireland and France a legitimate target, even a passenger ocean liner.

The Lusitania was in fact officially listed as an auxiliary ship of war,

Alfred Vanderbilt could not have known that his death would play a part in a remaking of the world.

Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, Consuelo’s younger brother by eight years, a great-grandson of the Commodore, stood at the helm of the J-class yacht Rainbow

the whole of Newport was alight with festivities. Harold’s cousin Neily and Neily’s wife, Grace, were hosting a party at their home, Beaulieu, and would give a dinner the following night. Harold’s brother, William K. Vanderbilt II, had arrived in town on his motor yacht, named the Alva for their mother, to watch the festivities. Goelets, Astors, Delanos, and even President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself thronged the parties. The entirety of the American elite in the fields of wealth and government was spending the week in Newport to watch Harold Vanderbilt defend the Auld Mug, as they called the America’s Cup.

In 1930, Harold successfully defended the America’s Cup in the J boat Enterprise, a feat that landed him on the cover of Time magazine.

Harold had married Gertrude Lewis Conaway, a sporty young sailor from Philadelphia, and she went on to compete alongside him in both his 1934 and 1937 America’s Cup campaigns, one of the first women to do so. By the opening race of the 1934 challenge, Gertrude and Harold—formerly considered the “most eligible bachelor” by the press—had been married for exactly a year.

F. Scott Fitzgerald probably had no idea how deeply the opening lines of his 1925 short story “Rich Boy”

The TV version of Little Gloria, Happy at Last, tells the story of my mother, Gloria Vanderbilt,

custody battle between her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt.

Reggie was the baby son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Alice of The Breakers; little brother of Alfred, who died on the Lusitania; great-grandson of the Commodore.

Reggie Vanderbilt did, and his death arguably laid the groundwork for the first “trial of the century,” which would consume the newspapers in the early years of the Depression and leave one small child indelibly marked for the rest of her

Barbara Goldsmith published the book Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last in 1980,

Once Upon a Time

When Howard Hughes came calling, at first Gloria Morgan thought he was calling for her. She’d been just a teenager herself when her famous heiress daughter was born, and by 1941, she was an elegant international socialite widow only in her mid-thirties, eminently pursuable by powerful men. But it was seventeen-year-old Gloria whom Hughes was after, and she leapt at the chance to date such a powerful and distinguished Hollywood change maker.

Reggie, a man who could at one time buy almost anything and who discovered in the winter of 1922 that what he really and truly wanted was his daughter’s seventeen-year-old friend Gloria Morgan.