Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

Only one detail marred the perfect racing afternoon: The race had been won with Hoyt at the helm. Perhaps that’s why, the following day, Harold made a decision that nearly cost sixty-two men their lives.

The red flag’s appearance now suggested that Sopwith believed Harold to have committed a similar foul. It was a shocking allegation.

a haze of dishonor now hung over the proceedings, one that couldn’t be dispelled.

As they sailed over the finish line, past the New York Yacht Club committee boat, both yachts were flying protest flags in the shrouds.

Ultimately, Sopwith withdrew his protest, and Endeavour conceded the loss. The America’s Cup would stay in America.

Rainbow, the magnificent racing machine, the pinnacle of maritime engineering and Vanderbilt money, would be scuttled by 1940.

F. Scott Fitzgerald probably had no idea how deeply the opening lines of his 1925 short story “Rich Boy” would resonate: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

How else are they different? Sometimes the most harrowing, difficult passages of their childhood are dramatized in TV miniseries

No one wants to confess to feeling abandoned, afraid, and alone as a child, especially not to one’s own children.

The only value left in his estate, the sole source of cash that profligate and self-indulgent Reggie had been unable to touch, was the $5 million trust fund that Cornelius II, Reggie’s father, had established for the benefit of Reggie’s children.

Baby Gloria would now share equally in this fortune with Reggie’s daughter Cathleen, who was twenty-one years old by then.

Gloria Morgan was still, legally speaking—and likely emotionally, too—a child herself. 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.

Baby Gloria was now the piggy bank for her entire household, and she couldn’t even talk.

Naney Morgan, together with Dodo, had been scheming for some time already to get Gloria away from her mother. They disapproved of Gloria Morgan’s carefree, gallivanting life.

She and Dodo treated Little Gloria like the American princess she effectively was. Nothing was good enough for their little Vanderbilt,

above all, she must be protected from being spirited away to Germany in the event that her flighty young mother married her broke prince.

in addition to arriving in New York City during the depths of the Great Depression, Gloria disembarked a mere seven days after the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s namesake baby son from the supposed safety of his own crib.

What if someone were to kidnap Little Gloria? How could they keep her safe?

Even late in her life, the word comes up again and again in Gloria’s account of herself and how she felt as a child: scared

Little Gloria was scared of her mother. She was scared of other people. As she grew older, she was possibly even scared of herself and the lack of control she often felt over her life.

Very quickly, Gloria Morgan realized she had made a fatal error. By surrendering her child, she had surrendered her own financial freedom.

The name was given, and the entire courtroom gasped. It was Little Gloria’s grandmother—Gloria Morgan’s own mother, Naney Morgan. She had joined forces with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. They wanted to keep Little Gloria away from her own mother. The trial would electrify the press and dominate their lives that fall.

At all of ten years old, Gloria was now in the bizarre position of being fought over by two women who did not actually know her or how to love her.

Gloria Morgan stood publicly accused of lesbianism at a time when New York was retreating from having been the open city it was in the 1910s. Homosexual behavior was criminalized, and queer spaces were subject to increasing policing and violence.

Seeing this accusation splashed across the newspapers, Little Gloria would discover another fear that would stalk her into adulthood. What if she was like her mother . . . in that way?

The judge released his opinion on November 21, 1934, granting Gloria’s sole custody to her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

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.

longtime gossip columnist Liz Smith reflected on Capote’s unique status and role in the mid-twentieth-century New York social pantheon

before the city was ghostly, it glittered, and in the center of the glitter—knowing everyone, invited everywhere, petted by elegant society women whom he would come to refer to as his “swans”—was a small-statured Southerner who had wanted to be a writer since he was eight and who yearned, deeply, to belong.

Gloria could tell that Truman thirsted for confidences. She could comfortably call Truman a close friend while never entirely trusting him.

Released in 1958, the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s was Truman’s first really major success.

Every society woman wanted to have been the model for Holly Golightly and claimed with authority that she was the inspiration:

(In truth, each swan probably wanted to be Audrey Hepburn more than she wanted to be Holly Golightly.)

With the smash hit of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman’s literary triumph could begin to be tracked alongside his social one, and for the rest of his career, the two would be closely intertwined.

Truman Capote rode high on the twin successes of In Cold Blood and the Black and White Ball as the 1960s drew to a close.

He surfed his fame from one nighttime talk show couch to another, and started talking up the book that was going to leave the towering achievement of In Cold Blood in its dust.

“La Côte Basque, 1965” crash-landed in Esquire magazine in November 1975, and its publication sent an earthquake through Manhattan society. But it was not the earthquake of love and acclaim that Truman had anticipated.

Instead, in thirteen thousand carefully chosen, venomous words, “La Côte Basque” brought both his social and literary careers to a flaming, cataclysmic end.

In Truman’s telling, the elite are revealed to be not just as vulgar as the next person—which would be a humanizing position, bringing his exclusive list of five hundred down to an earthly plane—but the most vulgar.

The story is typically read now from the standpoint of psychobiography, grist for the mill of Truman’s personal viciousness, insecurity, and self-doubt. Disgust for the subjects of his writing morphed quickly and totally into disgust for the writer himself.

The swift and total expulsion of Truman Capote from New York society quickly became a story of its own.

“he has always had a love-hate for all these beautiful women he has been close to . . . Truman would like to be glamorous and beautiful. He has often acted out fantasies of his own by telling his women friends how to act, who to have love affairs with, by manipulating them. Now he has his ultimate revenge, by making them ridiculous in print.”

The doors to New York society slammed shut, and the deadbolt shot behind them. Notably, Truman didn’t just lose the friendships of women. He lost the friendships of their husbands.

The gay society gadfly’s success depends on the support of husbands—he is not a sexual threat, but he must make himself amusing, like Harry Lehr did, in order to be accepted.

As society once was closed to divorced women in the nineteenth century, so it closed to Truman C...

Perhaps the move could be explained as preventive abandonment—he left them so that they could never leave him.

maybe the logic behind his decision was as simple as Truman’s craving the literary attention he had grown accustomed to at a time when his own private demons, drinking and drugs, were making it impossible for him to produce work of the caliber that he used to.

Or, maybe, at root, the glamorous Five Hundred spinning under the Plaza chandeliers at the Black and White Ball never understood Truman Capote at all. They saw in him what they wanted to see, and not what he was.

“I’m a writer,” Truman Capote said, “and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?”