Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

The Vanderbilt era was long past by 1978, and the eleven-year-old boy knew it, even if he didn’t know he knew it. People looked at him and his brother as heirs to an American dynasty, but the boy knew that such a thing didn’t exist and that no good could come from imagining that it did.

my mother was the last to live what we might think of as a Vanderbilt life. The dynasty ended with Gloria.

She was a symbol of an era, of a set of values or experiences—the way that money can bend and warp relationships, the way that one family’s ambition can either uplift or infect the members of that family, sometimes for good, but more often than we might think, for ill.

“At the very least,” she’d written to me once, “when we die we will be as if asleep, in the same place we were before birth, so why fear death? Scattered on the wind, unaware as we were before we came into this world, with no memory of any of it.”

She had inherited fortunes and lost them and made them again and lost them again.

She knew the value of friends and work and love, but she did not know the actual cost of anything.

No one can make money evaporate into thin air like a Vanderbilt.

a whole generation of Gen X women still thinks of blue jeans before railroads when they hear the name “Vanderbilt”—but

Like so many Vanderbilts before her, she thought there would always be more she could make. And there was—until there wasn’t.

“So many, and then there’s no one left but oneself. Then one knows it’s only the long walk of the blood—one’s children—that endure.”