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February 13 - February 15, 2022
After all, take away the Vanderbilt trappings, and we were just a mother and her adult son, finally coming to know one another as human beings. We did a lot of interviews and speaking engagements and publicity around the project, which my mom was very accustomed to, and secretly loved.
suppose all adult children delay for as long as possible the moment when they must step in, take charge, and become the parent. It’s scary to be the one in charge, no matter how responsible and authoritative we are accustomed to being in our regular adult lives.
would be on assignment in some far-flung place, and in my spare time, as “Monica,” I’d be conversing about frame sizes and shipping information with my mom’s customers.
“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.”
It wasn’t until after my brother, Carter, killed himself in 1988 that I spoke to her about it, and as far as I know, she never drank alcohol again. We spent the next two weeks together, and they were among the best times we ever had together.
One night shortly before she died, we had just finished watching a video on YouTube of Peggy Lee singing “Is That All There Is?” We both loved the song and the grainy black-and-white video of Lee’s nightclub performance of it. While it played, I held her hands and we sang the chorus, pretending we were dancing. “It’s so marvelous,” she said, giggling with a sound of delight and mischief, knowing that she was on the cusp of discovering if that was all there was. “I suppose people will think you are inheriting the Vanderbilt millions,” she said. “Boy, won’t they be surprised.”
As with many things surrounding the Vanderbilts, the truth, the reality of her life, was much different from the fantasy created by reporters and gossip columnists and strangers.
“They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing,”
to force herself to love any of them. But she couldn’t. Love was the only thing she cared about and believed in. In our correspondence, she once wrote, “Love Is All,” capitalizing each word to underscore its importance. From her perspective, there had always been money somewhere, and when suddenly it wasn’t there, she was able to make it, or find it, or borrow it, or sell her apartment for a profit. Money bought beautiful things, and those beautiful things made her feel safe, secure, clear . . . until they didn’t and were relegated to the storage vault.
No one can make money evaporate into thin air like a Vanderbilt.
“Remember,” Gloria wrote to me during our year of focused correspondence. “Whenever money is involved it brings out horrific things in people.”
Like her globe-trotting mother, Gloria Morgan, and like Reggie, with his taste for horses and cars, she spent lavishly, almost heedlessly, on anything that might bring pleasure: on houses and furnishings, gifts for friends, charities, and fine clothes. She worked hard, however, she always had, painting and designing fabrics and home furnishings, and by the late 1970s she began to make millions on her own in fashion, with the licensing of those famous jeans—a whole generation of Gen X women still thinks of blue jeans before railroads when they hear the name “Vanderbilt”—but she never thought to
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We pulled open the drawer of the nightstand and found that some previous guest had written “I WAS HERE” inside. A stranger’s voice shouting into the darkness, I exist. I was here. This all really happened. It’s nice, now, stumbling upon her handwriting on the back of those framed photos. Her words feel like surprise messages from her, as if the conversation between us has continued, even now that she is gone.
My dream is for him to feel safe and loved and unafraid. My mother didn’t get to meet him, but she knew that I was planning and hoping for him to happen. Fortune smiled, and he is here, and he amazes me.
As Gloria wrote in her journal in 1971, reflecting on the deaths of people she knew and loved, “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.”
Imagine that job: standing alone in the cold and snow at a mausoleum, making sure no one got in . . . or out. Pacing there, all day, and then all night, at Christmas. A more joyless endeavor would be hard to conceive. “Midst the
Perhaps because the Commodore had only really cared about male heirs who would carry the Vanderbilt name, only those with the name “Vanderbilt” can be interred inside. Everyone else is buried in the ground in the surrounding acres.
This was during the height of Prohibition—death from diseases of despair, we would call them today. Poverty was stalking the streets of New York, as the Depression sank its teeth into lives much more modest than those of the Vanderbilts.
The landscaping would be the purview of Frederick Law Olmsted, who had also designed Central Park. The nineteenth century was a moment for garden cemeteries, like Mount Auburn in Massachusetts or Green-Wood in Brooklyn.
Before cities discovered the necessity of designating public space as parkland for the health and well-being of city residents, cemeteries were often the only green space available for urban dwellers seeking relief from the overcrowding of narrow streets and tenements. At the time the mausoleum was built, it was common, even pleasant, to picnic among the dead.
Trip down the steps of the Plaza Hotel, past the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza, across from where FAO Schwarz used to be, and you will be treading on the site of what was once Alice Vanderbilt’s private, circular driveway, opposite Central Park.
On that spot from 1883 to 1926, filling an entire city block, stood the Cornelius Vanderbilt II house, which still holds the record for the largest private residence ever built in New York City. Stop at the Guerlain counter—the company made perfume in the Gilded Age—and try to imagine a five-story Caen stone entrance hall soaring overhead, opening in turn to a book-lined library, a grand salon, a two-story ballroom, a “Moorish”-style smoking room, and a dining room that also served as the art gallery. Next door, right on Fifth Avenue, the house enjoyed its own stable and a private garden.
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Not all was lost—Alice Vanderbilt’s Augustus Saint-Gaudens mantelpiece now stands in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the gate to her driveway guards the Conservatory Garden in Central Park.
The interior design was all pseudo-eighteenth-century French, a style trend from which elite New York has never entirely recovered. A developer bought this house, too, also in 1926. By 1927, it was dust.
Eagle-eyed viewers can spot Vanderbilt castoffs in film after film in the 1940s and later, as the stuff of an American dynastic fantasy was marshaled to embroider the fantasy lives of Americans all over the country. (The studio, in deep financial straits, auctioned them off again in the 2000s.) Some Herter furniture possibly chucked out of Billy Vanderbilt’s mansion even appears, fleetingly, in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Tool over to Madison
Moving farther downtown, we can duck into the Duane Reade pharmacy at the corner of Park Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street to buy a Vitamin Water and try to imagine when this was the lobby and bar of Alfred’s tony Vanderbilt Hotel, designed for wealthy young playboys like him to live sumptuously and well without all the fuss of keeping a house. Alfred took the top two stories for his own aerie when the hotel opened in 1912, but he barely had any time to enjoy it before he went down on the R.M.S. Lusitania in 1915.
Though Caroline Astor was not a Vanderbilt, she was an important part of the Vanderbilt dynasty, in her way. On Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth, she built her fashionable four-bay brownstone in 1862 next door to the home of her husband’s brother, John Jacob Astor III, when Murray
The original Waldorf-Astoria was razed in 1929 and replaced with the building that stands at that address today—the Empire State Building. The view from the
The Narrows are where, from the Flatlands, the van der Bilts crossed over into Staten Island. The eddies and tides would still be familiar to an eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt if he were again to pilot his periauger, laden with black-market passengers and vegetables, bound for Manhattan and profit. We can see where the Vanderbilt story begins. And on the shores of Staten Island, behind impregnable doors, we can just glimpse where it ends.
All that remains is the original engine of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s wealth and of his own ambition—the keen desire of strangers to come quickly across the waters to arrive in Manhattan, where someday, in some generation yet to come, their fortunes will be made.
