Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

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

By the first decade of the twentieth century, due in part to the hunger for publicity and the manipulation of the press shown by Alva and her contemporaries, society was being made in part by its reporters.

He also gambled, spent, and drank his way through the $7.3 million inheritance he’d received from his father, in addition to half a million dollars that had been left to him by his brother Alfred after the Lusitania went down.

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. She barely had experience running a household. Most of the day-to-day management of her and Reggie’s life had been handled—if you can call it that—by his alcoholic butler, Norton.

It was left to Justice James Aloysius Foley, surrogate of the New York courts, to determine how best to administer the strange arrangement of a minor mother left with nothing of her own, in whose care lay a baby child in sudden possession of $2.5 million.

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

She had initially offered her considerable collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and been politely rebuffed. She wasn’t satisfied with donating art just to see it molder in a basement unappreciated. Instead, she founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first collection of its kind, unique at a time when American art was considered the second-rate, discount version of its more accomplished European equivalent.

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), was unveiled in Washington, DC.

Little Gloria was already paying for their entire household, plus servants and travel and all of Gloria Morgan’s considerable expenses. Why should Little Gloria underwrite a penniless prince, too?

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

namesake baby son from the supposed safety of his own crib. Abduction for ransom had become a moneymaking crime; since 1929, more than two thousand people had been kidnapped in America, resulting in the handing over of millions of dollars in ransom money. “The Lindbergh kidnapping was symbolically perfect for the Depression,” argues Goldsmith, “for it demonstrated that an individual—no matter who he was—could not control his own destiny.”

would beg God for the safe return of Baby Lindbergh. If it could happen to him, a famous and well-loved baby sleeping safe in his crib with his parents downstairs, it could happen to anyone.

She left in April anyway. Who stays in New York City in the summer?

wrote, “alone in the darkness of my room, scared to death.” 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.

By surrendering her child, she had surrendered her own financial freedom. It was like Little Gloria didn’t even belong to her. “She belonged to the Vanderbilt name, and the Vanderbilt money,” Gloria Morgan realized.

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

just like a lover.” Chaos broke out in the courtroom. 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? What would that mean?

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.

If the circumstances of our lives are such that we are more or less public figures, can we treat the press and the public courteously, without arrogance—and also have a real sense of noblesse oblige?

The dress code for the ball was also unique: everyone was to wear only black and white. The host professed to be inspired by the Ascot scene designed by Cecil Beaton for the Audrey Hepburn film My Fair Lady, and had even considered making note on the invitations that ladies were to wear no jewels other than diamonds.

not from what some newspapers were already calling the greatest party of the twentieth century: Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. Truman and his guest of honor, Washington Post and Newsweek owner Katharine Graham, received the stream of guests who started trickling in under the bright Plaza overhang around a quarter past ten, stepping out of taxicabs and limousines and black cars and onto the plush red entryway carpeting, finally giving the hordes of reporters and photographers and security men something to make note of and photograph and secure.

Just as there are no places like La Côte Basque.” La Côte Basque was a Manhattan restaurant—expensive, traditional, formal, and French. It opened on Fifty-Fifth Street in the 1950s and quickly became one of those restaurants where the map of tables in the dining room could function as a simulacrum for the map of social hierarchies among the diners seated at them. The treasured tables were the chilliest ones, by the door, where everyone could be seen. The dining room in the back was more comfortable, but it was social Siberia. For a certain slice of New York society in the 1960s and ’70s, La Côte Basque was one of a tiny handful of places that mattered.

Gloria professed shock at Carol’s lack of caution, but then, divorce will sometimes make people do shocking things. “And Truman, sly puss that he was, lapped it up and wove it into Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Gloria wrote with some satisfaction.

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:

He bought a two-bedroom apartment in “the most important new address,” 870 United Nations Plaza, where Gloria Vanderbilt would also move a few years later. The apartment was on the twenty-second floor, with a panoramic southern view of Lower Manhattan.

But the guests were a different thing altogether. The Times called them “as spectacular a group as has ever been assembled for a private party in New York.”

Competition over invitations was so fierce that Truman joked he might as well have called the party In Bad Blood.

The Black and White Ball was a success. Everyone knew that the event was something special even as it was happening, though no one could quite put their finger on why.

His cousin Gloria Vanderbilt was there, too, with her fourth husband, Wyatt Cooper, whom she had married in 1963. She was nearly three months pregnant with her fourth child, who would be me—though, at the time, she was sure I would be a girl, whom she planned to name Morgan.

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.

Every detail of gruesome human frailty that Truman had absorbed in his years as the petted toy at society dinners and holidays came vomiting up in “La Côte Basque,” at times, veiled in only the lightest gossamer of anonymizing details, and at other times, actually accompanied by names. From the moment the issue of Esquire hit the newsstands, New York’s elites spoke about little else.

The anecdotes are meant not just to entertain, but to obscure the emptiness of the lives doing the telling—like heavy French sauces smothering otherwise bland and simple food.

Instead, reading “La Côte Basque, 1965” is an exercise in pure disgust.

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.

“It’s one thing to tell the nastiest story in the world to all your 50 best friends,” Smith wrote in the resulting article. “It’s another to see it set down in cold Century Expanded type.”

The exchange paints a brutal picture, made even worse by the possibility that it was, in some respect, true. Much else he wrote was.

have never seen it and have heard enough about it to know I don’t want to,” she was quoted as saying

“In the long run, the rich run together, no matter what,” he told Playboy in 1980. “They will cling, until they feel it’s safe to be disloyal, then no one can be more so.”

One question hangs over every evaluation of “La Côte Basque, 1965,” and that is this: Why? Why would Truman Capote deploy his singular literary talents against a group of people who had not only taken him into their confidence, and their homes, and onto their yachts and private planes, but who also had the distinct ability to end his access to the privileged life he yearned to enjoy? And if he was going to do it, why would he release the most vicious and incendiary chapter before finishing and publishing the book?

But 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. He has been called “largely incoherent” from the late 1960s until his death. It’s hard to produce good writing without being able to produce clear thoughts.

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

He had just turned twenty and was playing the Scarecrow in the movie. He was already famous as a singer, but the movie was only going to make him more so.

The younger boy had a mop of brown, adolescent hair that fell sweetly over his forehead, and though he had the slightly upward-tilting eyes of a Vanderbilt, they were the arresting pale blue of a Cooper.

The boy’s father had died during open heart surgery earlier that year, in January, after suffering a heart attack in December. When he died, the boy felt like his own heart had broken, too, a wound that might scar over but would never properly heal.

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. He’d heard the stress in his father’s voice while he was talking over the phone to friends about Gloria’s spending, and his father had explained it to the boy as best he could. The boy wanted to be ready when the ship finally sank.

That’s what Alva remembered. Her memoir doesn’t include her costume ball at all, not even a passing mention of it. The story of one life,

I think of my mother as the last Vanderbilt.

And there are many more descendants who may seem unrelated but are actually deeply entwined with the Vanderbilt story, like me. We stalk around, unnoticed, riding next to you on the subway. But my mother was the last to live what we might think of as a Vanderbilt life.

She was the last child to ride in cars driven by liveried chauffeurs, guarded by private detectives in overcoats and fedoras. She was the last to be born before the Depression, when the Vanderbilt riches seemed as limitless and eternal as the stars in the sky. She knew that vanished world, with all its opulence and uncertainty and coldness. She had lived her entire life in the public eye, and she was the last Vanderbilt whose birth and obituary would make the front page of newspapers around the world. 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.