Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

I was, after all, only six. I do recall, however, that for weeks after our visit, I was convinced that all grandparents turned into statues when they died.

When someone would find out and ask me, “What was it like to grow up a Vanderbilt?” my response was always the same. “I don’t know,” I’d say. “I’m a Cooper.”

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

But with so many rich new people pouring into the city with each passing year, it was hard to tell who was in and who was out. What they really needed was a list. To that end, in 1872 McAllister founded an organization that he named the Society of Patriarchs. This group instituted a series of Patriarch Balls, designed for introducing young people to society and to one another.

Ward McAllister was the first and greatest of what would later be called a “walker,” a gentleman friend whose special skill lies in escorting society ladies whose husbands have other interests or limited time and yet whose comportment does not leave the ladies vulnerable to intimations of scandal.

At this moment in time, before the advent of culturing, a string of perfectly matched pearls was rarer, and more expensive, than diamonds.

One wonders if she knew she was echoing Marxist organizer Emma Goldman, who wrote in 1911, “The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person, she retains her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.”

The real moneymaker for Cunard and White Star, however, was third class, as the grand ocean liners ferried successive waves of immigrants from Europe to North America. If steerage was often undersubscribed on the passage to Liverpool, the fares in the other direction, to New York, more than made up for it. The Lusitania was especially popular for immigrants to North America, as her steerage accommodation was considered an improvement over most other options available.

The TV version of Little Gloria, Happy at Last, tells the story of my mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, and her sort-of kidnapping and then the ensuing vicious custody battle between her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt.

Some women are bred from the beginning to be perfect specimens for men, like prized orchids that are snipped and cultivated to appeal to the collector of rare plants. Maria Mercedes “Gloria” Morgan was just such a specimen.

“I suspect that being fatherless,” Gordon writes, “leaves a woman with a taste for the fanatical, having grown unsheltered, having never seen in the familiar flesh the embodiment of the ancient image of authority, a fatherless girl can be satisfied only with the heroic, the desperate, the extreme. A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.”

her most important public sculpture, a memorial to the women who died in the Titanic sinking (from which director James Cameron got Rose’s posture of an angel, arms outstretched on the prow of the ship, for his 1997 movie),

Following the story’s publication, a new game bubbled up within New York society, of which we’ve just seen an example: Truman called it “the Holly Golightly Sweepstakes.” Every society woman wanted to have been the model for Holly Golightly and claimed with authority that she was the inspiration: Carol Marcus, Doris Lilly, Phoebe Pierce, Oona Chaplin, Gloria Vanderbilt. This keen competition is perhaps a bit surprising, given that Holly is, for all intents and purposes, a prostitute and was based, in many respects, on Truman himself—the beautiful outsider arriving in New York City and trying to break his way in.

“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.

But any writer faces a challenge if he seeks to force his reader not to identify with anyone. The reader wants to identify with a character, even if that character is an antihero.

“All literature is gossip,” Truman told Playboy